A monte di F e f. Il «Devisement dou monde» e la scripta dei manoscritti francesi di origine pisano-genovese

The manuscript BnF fr. 1116 (= F) is the best surviving copy of the Devisement dou monde both for the quality of its reading and the form of its text, that offers the closest version to the original one. The language in which the work was first written – an old French heavily sprinkled with morphological as well as lexical italianisms – is considered as a representative example of the so-called «Franco- italian». A certain number of linguistic features exhibited by F are peculiar to western Tuscany. At the same time, the MS is characterised by a considerable number of Venetisms. The fragment of the Franco-italian version recently discovered by c. concina [2007], designated f, appears very similar to F, albeit with some variations. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic comparison of F and f from a linguistic point of view. Both graphic and phonetic correspondences enable us to connect the source of F and f with the group of old French manuscripts copied by Pisan scribes while incarcerated in Genoa’s prisons, following the battle of Meloria (1284).