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Chapter 5 - The Acculturation of the French Romance Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne in the Byzantine Imperios and Margarona

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

By
Romina Luzi
Edited by
Adam J. Goldwyn  and
Ingela Nilsson
Adam J. Goldwyn
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Ingela Nilsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

The French novel Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelonne, one of the bestsellers circulating throughout Europe during the fifteenth century, was also translated into Greek. This version, compared to other Byzantine adaptations of Western novels, is free in its form and style: motifs characteristic of the genre of courtly love are omitted or treated superficially, while other elements foreign to the French model are added. The result, Imberios and Margarona, is an autonomous work which uses patterns frequently found in Western and Eastern literature and handles them with a certain nonchalance. This chapter aims at explaining the reasons for these changes, which served to domesticate a work considered too removed from the Byzantine literary canon and to make it more amenable to a public with tastes other than those of the readership of the French romances.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
A Handbook
 , pp. 101 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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