Teofilo Folengo

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Portrait of Folengos by Girolamo Romanino (1484–1566) in the Uffizi

Teofilo Folengo OSB (pseudonyms Merlin Cocai , Limerno Pitocco ; baptismal name Girolamo Folengo ; * 1491 in Mantua ; † December 9, 1544 in Campese , Bassano del Grappa ) was one of the main exponents of comical- burlesque , but also religious poetry of the Italian Renaissance .

Life

Folengo was the eighth of nine sons of the notary Federico Folengo in Mantua. He occasionally attended the school lessons of a priest in Ferrara and in 1508 entered the Benedictine convent of Sant'Eufemia in Brescia as a novice . In 1509 he made his vows there and took the religious name Teofilo. In the following years he belonged to various abbeys in the Veneto , such as San Benedetto in Polirone (from 1512), Santa Giustina in Padua , 1515, now as a deacon , the Abbey of Santa Maria in Pomposa , and after his ordination as a priest then to the monastery of Santa Maria del Monte near Cesena (since 1517), then again Sant'Eufemia (1520) and then again Pomposa (until 1522). During these years, following the example of his Mantovan predecessor Tifi Odasi († 1492), he developed his macaronian Latin, a literary mixed language which he calls 'macaronesca ars' in reference to the peasant dish of macaroni , and which achieves its comic effects by that words from the Italian vernacular and the dialect of Veneto with Latin inflection and prosody are integrated into Latin.

After he moved to the Abbey of San Giovanni in Parma (1522), there were apparently conflicts with his abbot Ignazio Squarcialupi. In 1524 or 1525 Folengo left the monastery, but without giving up his spiritual name and habit. He settled in Venice and acted as the private tutor of his son in the service of Captain Camillo Orsini , whom he also had to accompany on some of his military campaigns in the following years.

At the beginning of the 1530s the desire arose to re-join the order, which he was granted in 1534 due to the support of his cause by Federico Gonzaga , after a three-year probation and penance period as a hermit , which he mainly in San Pietro in the Crapolla bay in Campania graduated.

After returning to his order, he first came to the monastery of Sulzano on Lake Iseo. Again with the support of Gonzagas, who in the meantime had become Viceroy of Sicily in Palermo, he then came to various Benedictine convents in Sicily (1538–1542), first to the Abbey of San Martino delle Scale above Monreale near Palermo , then as a Prior of Santa Maria delle Ciambre in Borgetto near Palermo.

In 1542 he returned to his Venetian homeland to the Santa Croce monastery in Campese, where he died in 1544 while working on the fourth edition of his macaron poems.

Works

Maccheronee , Amsterdam edition of 1768

In 1517 Folengo published the first of four editions of his Opus macaronicum in Venice under the pseudonym Merlin Cocai and under the title Libri Macaronices . Accompanied by two eclogues , it contained the hexametric poem Baldus , a mixture of heroic epic, chivalric romance and picaric novel , which in 17 books contained the grotesquely comic adventures of Baldus, a grandson of the French king and descendant of Charles's paladin Guy de Montauban tells the village world of Cipada near Mantua. A second, expanded version, again created in Sant'Eufemia, appeared in Toscolano in 1521 under the title Opus Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum , in which Baldus was expanded to 25 books and the parodic love poem Zanitonella and the fable poem Moschaea , about the fight between flies and Ants were added. A third version ( Macaronicorum poema ) appeared undated, probably at the end of the 1530s, with the fictitious printing location Cipada, and a fourth posthumously in Venice in 1552 ( Macaronicorum poemata ).

In 1526 his Orlandino appeared under the pseudonym Limerno Pitocco , a burlesque knight poem about the youth of Roland in Italian stamps. In 1527 he published his allegorical-philosophical didactic poem Il caos di Triperuno under the same pseudonym , one of the strangest works in Italian literary history, in which the protagonist "Triperuno" ("three for one") divided into three people macaronic Latin, classical Latin and Italian He speaks the vernacular and there is a parodic journey through three “forests” that links up with Dante , until he is finally released from the “chaos” of his vices and errors in the encounter with Christ.

In 1533 his Umanità del Figliuolo di Dio appeared in Venice , the first Christian religious epic in Italian stanzas , which paraphrased the life of Jesus according to the Gospels and became a style model for Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata . In the same year he also published his religious dialogues Pomiliones and the collection of poems Varium poema . After 1534 the Hagiomachia was created , a collection of eighteen martyrs in Latin hexameters.

In the period 1538–1542 the Atto della Pinta was created , a spiritual game about the history of salvation from the creation of the world to the Annunciation. In addition, Folengo began with the unfinished Palermitana , also a poem on biblical subjects in terzines .

Editions and translations

  • Ann E. Mullaney (Ed.): Teofilo Folengo: Baldo. 2 volumes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 2007-2008, ISBN 978-0-674-02521-9 for volume 1, ISBN 978-0-674-03124-1 for volume 2 (Latin text and English translation)
  • Ugo Enrico Paoli (ed.): Teofilo Folengo: Il Baldus e le altre opere latine e volgari. Passi scelti e commentati. Le Monnier, Firenze 1941

literature

Web links

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Texts

personal data
SURNAME Folengo, Teofilo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian Benedictine and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1491
PLACE OF BIRTH Mantua
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1544
Place of death Bassano del Grappa