California Italian Studies

This essay traces a theme of eroticism between knights as it crosses lines of gender, genre, religion, culture, period, and language, beginning with the twelfth-century Old French Chanson d'Aspremont and continuing through late medieval Italian versions of the Aspremont story, including the anonymous Cantari d'Aspramonte and Andrea da Barberino's Aspramonte in prose. Following the kinetic medieval narrative as it reproduces itself in new contexts rather than looking backward from later texts in search of sources, the essay proposes alternatives to the models of textual filiation and literary history generally recognized by traditional philology.