Il Guerin Meschino

Il Guerrin Meschino ("Wretched Guerrin") is an Italian prose chivalric romance with some elements of verisimilitude, written by the Italian cantastorie and systematizer and translator from French, Andrea da Barberino, who completed it about 1410.

The text in eight chapter-length books circulated widely in manuscript before its first printing, in Padua, in 1473. It was a late contribution to the "Matter of France" that appealed to aristocratic audiences and their emulators among the upper bourgeoisie. In a departure from Andrea's other known romances, there are no discernible French or Franco-Venetian sources for this narrative, which unfolds instead in the manner of a travel account. It draws for its details on a variety of predecessors, such as, for the oracular Tree of the Sun and the Moon, the Alexander romances, and—outside the romance tradition—on Dante's Divine Comedy, on the "natural history" found in medieval bestiaries, and on the legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick and the cosmology of Ptolemy. The quest involved is the rootless Guerrino's search for his lost parents. There is an undercutting element of deconstruction of chivalrous ideals apparent from the very title: Guerrino derives from guerra "war", but meschino means, "shabby, paltry, ignoble"; the hero, cast away as a babe sold by pirates and rebaptized by his foster father Meschino, the "unlucky", rises through his heroic efforts to his proper status as Guerr[i]ero, "warrior". At the end of his adventures Guerrino discovers that he is the son of Milone, Duke of Durazzo, who was himself the son of a Duke of Burgundy, so that Guerrino is of royal blood.

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