Volume 138, Issue 4

The paper focuses on some methodological, philological and linguistic problems related to the study of the most ancient culinary texts (cookbooks and practical documents) in Italian vernacular (14 th century). The most relevant problems relate to the precise dating and localization of the manuscripts. These preliminary aspects are essential in order to achieve the Atlante della lingua e dei testi della cultura gastronomica italiana dall’età medievale all’Unità which can assist in identifying the origins and history of culinary language in the history of Italian.

This paper presents recent research findings on the so-called «Frederician cookbooks» – better known as the Liber de coquina –, with specific reference to some new etymological hypotheses about medieval Italian food names. Moreover, through a palaeographic and linguistic analysis, this article discusses the geographical localization and dating of the major manuscripts within this textual tradition, in a new attempt to cast light on a very complex documentation. Specifically, by interacting with Anna Martellotti’s work ( I ricettari di Federico II. Dal «Meridionale» al «Liber de coquina» , Firenze, Olschki, 2005), the results presented here hope to bring a new perspective to the lively debate on the southern origin of this medieval tradition, which is probably the oldest Italian recipe collection.

The paper proposes some linguistic updates on Cristoforo Messi Sbugo’s Banchetti in light of the preparation of a new critical edition of the text, focusing on autographs and latest findings in the study of the language of food.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a study on the untitled and unpublished recipe book transmitted by the codex conv.soppr.F.VIII.1834 (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze), previously conserved in the library of the convent of the Most Holy Annunciation (Florence); the codex contains both culinary recipes and «secrets». We argue that the composition of the manuscript took place in the second half of the seventeenth century (§§2‒3) and was carried out by multiple authors (§4). Subsequently, we analyse its main linguistic features, with particular regard to orthographical instability and morphological variation (§5). Finally, we investigate the main sources of the cookbook (§6), examining in detail some recipes taken from Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera .

The paper offers an in-depth study of one of the first Italian recipe books translated from a French source: Il Cuoco reale e cittadino , published for the first time in Bologna in 1724. Specifically, a section of the work absent in the French original – the Aggiunta di alcune vivande all’Italiana – is highlighted, in order to determine its features and the relationship to contemporary or seventeenth-century sources. By reconsidering the editorial history of the translated cookbook, the paper is also able to backdate the previously recorded gastronomic Frenchisms in the Italian lexicon through accurate comparison with the secondary literature.

The paper aims to present some preliminary outcomes as part of the National Research Project Atlante della lingua e dei testi della cultura gastronomica italiana dall’età medievale all’Unità ( AtLiTeG ). The project’s main purpose is to reconstruct the history and geography of Italian culinary texts and their language from the medieval period to the Unification of Italy. The Unit of Naples «Federico II» created a corpus of interregional cookbooks printed between the 18 th and the 19 th centuries, namely before the turning point represented by Pellegrino Artusi’s Scienza in cucina (1891). After illustrating our digital database, together with other kinds of collected sources, we will deal with some historical-linguistic and lexical issues related to the Cuoco galante (1773) by Vincenzo Corrado, a very important gastronome and chef of Bourbon Naples.

The Glossario Artusiano ( Artusian Glossary ) has been designed as a lexicographical tool, capable of gathering and studying the whole lexicographical wealth of Pellegrino Artusi’s La Scienza in cucina e l’Arte di mangiar bene (1 st edition in 1891; 15 th edition in 1911), a cornerstone of Italian gastronomic culture. By looking at some case studies, this article illustrates the criteria, tools and methodology which may have been used to compose the glossary. The purpose is to highlight how these results can establish a constructive dialogue with the Vocabolario Storico della Lingua Italiana della Gastronomia (VoSLIG), within the framework of the AtLiTeG Project .

This contribution analyses the tension between imitatio and renovatio in Christine de Pizan’s Cent Ballades d’amant et de dame (1409–1410). It aims to show that Pizan intertwines traditional courtly discourse with fragments of Jean de Meun’s and Ovid’s writings, in order to denounce the courtly topos of worship of the lady as a manipulative strategy of seduction. In this way, she emphasizes the misogynistic conditions of the sublimated muteness and passivity of women in courtly discourse and engages in meta-reflections on her own role as a writer in the cultural context of the Querelle des femmes and on the historical decline of France during the reign of Charles VI.

This article sheds light on the linguistic modifications found in nine successive sixteenth-century editions from Paris and Lyon of the anonymous prose version of La Belle Hélène de Constantinople . Particular focus will be placed on aspects of syntactic revision, such as subject-verb inversion in declaratives, placement of object pronouns, introduction of embedded clauses and separation of relative clauses from their antecedents. After a presentation of the textual tradition, linguistic variants will be examined in light of previous studies on Middle and Preclassical French, and then compared with data found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammars. It is in prints from the second half of the sixteenth century that one tends to find linguistic variants that became predominant and spread. This confirms the hypothesis of a global linguistic change in the middle of the sixteenth century, which allowed the frontier between Middle French and Preclassical French to shift at that time. Corpora comprising various successive editions of the same text thus make it possible to observe and date phenomena of linguistic evolution and offer a window into the editorial habits concerning the language. They make it easier to see how the process of language standardisation was linked to the development of printing.

This paper analyses two processes at work in Christine de Pizan’s reworking of the first version ( V1 ) of her Book of the City of Ladies to produce a second version ( V2 ). These two processes consist in the elimination of repetitions and the addition of synonyms to create binomials. They show that the author paid great attention to the language of her text when reworking it. They also appear to be typical of the search for a higher style. The fact that Christine de Pizan uses a high style to refer to women is all the more interesting: according to the principle of matching style to content, a high style contributes to the importance of women and thus, ultimately, to the author’s feminist struggle.

This study offers a quantitative and qualitative approach to the syntactic functions of the pronoun en from Archaic Catalan to Modern Valencian. In order to describe these, the functional behaviour of its predecessor, the Latin adverb ĭnde , is discussed, and its meanings are explained through grammaticalisation. A corpus of texts selected from the Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic (CICA), the Corpus Informatitzat del Valencià (CIVAL) and the Corpus Informatitzat de la Gramàtica del Català Modern (CIGCMod) is analysed. The various occurrences of the pronoun en are identified, their syntactic functions are delimited and quantified, and the data are submitted to statistical analysis. The results show that the syntactic functions of en exhibit a high degree of continuity with respect to Latin ĭnde . The analysis demonstrates that partitives and lexicalisations constitute the very functional core of the pronoun en through time and they are the only functions that strongly survive in Modern Valencian. The progressive decay of the rest of the functions – a decay that in today’s language is also affecting partitives and lexicalisations – provides a faithful picture of the pathway of the linguistic change affecting Catalan. The progressive recession of the functionality of en can be considered an exponent of this linguistic change.

This contribution establishes the etymology and traces the history of French pochard adj./m.n. ‘drunk’ : a derivative of Western Oïl dialects ˹ poche ˺ f.n. ‘cheap plonk’ (< latin posca f.n. ‘mixture of vinegar and water’).

The aim of the article is to study the prefixation in stra - in the texts of Franco-Italian literature. Starting from the attestation of the word stracoruza in the chanson de geste Huon d’Auvergne , the analysis will consider other similar derivatives, in order to study the interesting phenomenon of code-mixing . The conclusions underline, once again, the lexical and morphological vitality of the French-Italian authors and their works.

The case of It. mosciame ‘dry salted tunny fishʼ (< Sp. moxama ‘id.ʼ < Ar . mušammaʕ​ , participle of the verb šammaʕ​a ‘to rub or smear with waxʼ, ‘to dryʼ) underlines once again the complexity of the lexical interrelationship between the Arab world and Europe (as well as the Ottoman empire). The ramifications of the word's history take their origin from Andalusian Arabic, whence it passes into Spanish and Catalan, and finally enters Italian, where it appears for the first time in the translation of Fernão Lopez de Castanheda's História by Alfonso Ulloa (died 1570), and subsequently in Spanish-Italian lexicography (Franciosini 1638), in various literary texts (beginning with Aggravi's Antilucerna of 1664) and in several Italian dialects (with documentation starting from 1714, but surely earlier in oral use).