Huon d'Auvergne is an early modern romance-epic written in Franco-Italian, a hybrid literary language. Huon d'Auvergne has remained largely unedited, with only selected segments appearing in print. Far better known is the Tuscan prose version by Andrea da Barberino, dated to the early fifteenth century. One of the first, if not the first, work to incorporate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy with direct quotes from Hell, the romance-epic's language has kept it from wide appreciation. The poetic form, language, and narrative content of the four extant witnesses demonstrate how a synoptic, or simultaneous, online edition of the multiple manuscripts can fulfill the need for reliable texts as well as research about the tradition and trajectory of its exemplars. An edition project is underway as of January 2013.
Manuscripts in the Franco-Italian tradition
The only surviving witnesses of the work are four manuscripts:
manuscript P, the only version with a lengthy prologue
manuscript Br, a short fragment of a few folios, known as the Barbieri fragment
manuscript B, dated 1341 in the colophon, that belonged to the library of the Gonzaga; this the only parchment manuscript
manuscript T, with a similar plot to B
The manuscript texts are not all the same; they hold different and independent versions; these are usually divided into three parts: prologue, epilogue and central part. The prologue and the epilogue are extensive, and narratively independent. The central part appears in all of the four manuscripts, though with many differing details:
the approximately 1200 lines that remain in Br is related to P
B and T on the other handagree almost entirely, other than by a few lines with the exception of the Ynide episode, and a missing episode confirms their relationship, though neither of the two manuscripts derives from the other
Andrea da Barberino's prose
also produced a prose "romanzo" called Storia di Ugone d'Alvernia in Tuscan prose where, during the narration of the infernal catabasis written in terzine, the prose functions as a gloss, appearing between poetic lines to clarify meanings details. The structure of this English entry is based on that of the Italian entry,'Ugo d'Alvernia'
