“Or vient Caresme”: dialoghi di un eroe e dialettica di una festa nel "Moniage Guillaume lungo" (I branche)

Abstract

This paper reworks a chapter of my PhD thesis where I discussed some emergences of carnival fights in Moniage Guillaume long (MGl); the imagery was linked to ritual anthropogenetic practices, finally refracted in “archetypal” plots. Here, it is more specifically identified as the reverberation of Carnival-Lent fights. On this basis I carefully propose to predate such representations, shedding new light on some remarks by Le Goff and nuancing the majority position in this regard (e.g. Bertolotti 1991). Furthermore, a glance on Enfances Guillaume provides a new framework for MGl. The fight with the double is seen as à deux tranchants: 1) heroic initiation; 2) potential of a parodic dialogue: co-essential polarities in the dialectic identificational process of a complex character-sign.