Verbum incarnatum: Folengo and the macaronic tradition

The literature on Teofilo Folengo's Baldus and the macaronic tradition has been mainly concerned with linguistic and philological issues. My dissertation reassesses the aesthetic value of macaronic poetry, and discusses its genealogical significance within and beyond the Renaissance. While I am interested in reconstructing the historical semantics of the text, which can only be appreciated through a mature philological sensibility, I also study the poetical strategy of the macaronic language (its contaminated nature, its attention to the base as well as the sacred elements), and maintain that it still challenges and influences much of what is called literary modernity. Chapter I of my dissertation focuses on the hero's birth and childhood in the Mantuan village of Cipada, as it is narrated in the first five books of the poem. It analyzes the scriptural, patristic and medieval genealogies of the episode, and stresses the theme of infancy as a crucial means of shifting heroic poetry into the comic and burlesque domain. Chapter II is a study of the picaresque topos, as it is embodied in the figure of Cingar: Baldus's foremost companion. Through a detailed analysis of the trickster's character and pranks (books 6 to 10), I define some of the structural paradigms that will model the ensuing comic production: from Ariosto to Aretino and Bruno, from Rabelais to Cervantes. Chapter III is a stylistic and anthropological interpretation, rather than a purely linguistic description of the macaronic language. It argues that the hero's quest throughout the poem is ultimately an allegory of the search for the macaronic as an incarnational idiom. Finally, in chapter IV I analyze the biblical origin of the image of 'touch', one of the central metaphors of the macaronic idiom, as well as its persistence in the comic texts of the Italian Renaissance.