Visioni d'armi e d'amori: la teichoskopia nel romanzo arturiano

Résumé En

The Arthurian romance is usually characterized by figures who, from an elevated position (castle’s balconies and windows, towers, tribunes), observe duels, landscapes or the entrance of mysterious characters. The paper suggests an interpretation of this literary motif as a rewriting of the Homeric teichoskopia, the ‘viewing from the walls’ which we can find in Iliad 3 (vv. 121-449). According to this hypothesis, the analysis conducted on a corpus on fifteen romances (12th to 16th century) shows how the teichoskopia of classic epic literature has been reactivated by the Arthurian cycle principally in two directions: first as a projection of observing characters to the dimension of elsewhere in the Arthurian world; in the second place as an instrument of ratification of knight’s valor on the occasion of chivalric tournaments and battles. Referring to this second assumption the present study also highlights the more important role played by women in the observing public of Arthurian teichoskopia compared with their classic antecedents. This change of importance seems to be a consequence of the crisis of traditional chivalric code which marked the medieval society by the end of 12th century. A register of the motif occurrences in the corpus is proposed at the end of the paper.