«Je laisse la prose pour vers». Sulla genesi dei testi in versi nei romanzi arturiani in prosa del XIII secolo

The studies on the corpus of verses in French prose narratives of the XIII^th century (Tristan en prose and Guiron le Courtois cycle) have led to antipodal interpretations, that have not been given a persuasive synthesis yet: the lyrical texts (mostly lais) should be interpreted as imports, taken from the “repertoire” and recycled into the prose (J. Maillard, P. Bec); or else they could be original creations of the prose writers (Ph. Ménard). The essay aims at an overall re-examination of this issue, evaluating narratological and philological evidence and analysing both manuscript traditions of the prose narratives and external records. Such an analysis led to reconsider the “allogenic” hypothesis, suggesting, at the same time, to question some aspects of an “endogenous” interpretation extended to all the texts of the corpus.