Franco-Italian Epic: Origins, range, and interpretations
16 February - 23 March 2024
Biography
Professor Morgan is Professor Emerita of Italian and French in the Department of Modern Languages at Loyola University Maryland. Her research is in the medieval combination of French and Italian in which romance epics were produced in Northern Italy, specifically the language, literature, and reasons for the reworkings or recreations of Old French texts in this mixture. From her dissertation at Yale University of 1983 through her career, she has produced editions, translations, computer ancillaries, and analysis of mixed Franco-Italian materials. Her published edition of the GesteFrancor (ACMRS, U of AZ, 2009, 2 vols., 1483 pages), built upon the multiple chansons de geste and their European traditions contained in the manuscript at Venice’s St. Mark’s Library. She translated sections of that poem and is currently updating a website for a four-manuscript tradition involving the first text directly quoting Dante’s Divina Commedia, Huon d’Auvergne (1341 CE), providing a translation into English as well as linguistic and contextual notes, which she and her translator now are seeking to publish. The US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided start-up funding.
Interest for this language mixture and its resultant combinations of words and forms derived from her own multilingual experiences as well as from teaching languages. She has thus also addressed challenges and approaches to language teaching in her research, as well as producing tools to facilitate such teaching, including an on-line Italian placement exam for college-level study. Her interest in sharing pedagogical materials extends to research: she collaborates with colleagues across Europe and North America in making manuscripts and primary research documents available through open-access, andassisting in maintaining research-confirmed and reliable information on academic, popular, and reference websites.
Visit Summary
During Professor Morgan’s visit she will be working with Professor Marianne Ailes, developing study of Franco-Italian in two different ways:
Research: They will work mainly on a joint paper for a conference organized by the Société Rencesvals French Branch on Emotionsand the chansons de geste, to be held in November 2024. The paper will explore the articulation and representation of emotions in the Anglo-Norman, French and Franco-Italian redactions of Aspremont, a chanson de geste of the late twelfth century, closely associated with the Third Crusade.An international research team is currently working on an online edition of the entirecorpus, so the time is ripe for more research on the Anglo-Norman and Franco-Italian material, building on Professor Ailes’ recently completed (not yet published) study of Charlemagne in the Anglo-Norman redactions. Particularly interesting in two of the three Franco-Italian redactions is the use of the prologue, a technique that appears in a number of Franco-Italian chansons de gestethat contextualizes them for the public, thus creating expectations for its reception, and indicatinganticipated reactions to modern readers.
Pedagogy: They will also work together on developing the ‘languages’ section of the Centre for Medieval Studies Training hub on Blackboard, adding a section on Franco-Italian. No such materials exist for English speakers, though there are Italian university dispense (professors’ handout packets) with translations into Italian for them and some samples in Italian literature survey volumes.The Centre for Medieval Studies in Bristol aims to develop the language training available to postgraduate students and early career researchers to better equip our students to work in a global environment.
Professor Morgan is hosted by Professor Marianne Ailes, Department of French.
Details of Professor Morgan's lectures and seminars are listed on our Events page.
