Alphabetum on the Move: Storytelling and Narrative Transmigrations in Medieval and Renaissance Italy and Europe

Objective

ALMO (Alphabetum on the Move: Storytelling and Narrative Transmigrations in Medieval and Renaissance Italy and Europe) explores the making of European storytelling by investigating, for the first time, the reception of the Alphabetum Narrationum (AN) in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Compiled by the Dominican friar Arnold of Liège in the early 14th cent., the AN is one of the most innovative and successful medieval collections of exempla (moral short tales). Published in critical edition in 2015, this encyclopedic repository of over 800 tales is still understudied, despite its importance in the circulation of shared stories and values across diverse audiences in late medieval Europe. ALMO will reconstruct the material circulation of the AN in Italy, providing the first comprehensive mapping and analysis of extant manuscripts, their origins, audiences, and uses beyond religious settings. Second, it will examine the influence of the AN on the secular corpus of the Italian novella, systematically tracing textual, thematic, rhetorical, and macrostructural connections, to highlight how religious discourse was preserved, adapted, and transformed from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Manuscript studies, literary studies, and historical anthropology will be blended to approach these secular reuses as windows into the system of representations, imaginaries, cultural negotiations, and shared values in premodern Europe. ALMO will be supervised by M.A. Polo de Beaulieu, a leading expert in exemplum studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (return phase), and by E. Brilli, the editor of the AN and specialist in Medieval Italian Literature at the University of Toronto (outgoing phase). Thanks to the excellent training resources and research environments of both host institutions, a diversified dissemination strategy will be implemented to make the results of ALMO promptly available to the international scholarly community and the wider public.