In the last few years, critical studies on chivalric romances of Spanish Golden Age have stressed the importance of the uniformity of this corpus, which involves a great deal of stereotyping of the same situations, contexts, characters, even episodes, which became common motifs and recognizable formulas for the readers of the time. Repetitions (of content and form) are now considered signs that identify a specific structure and style, creating a canon that defines a literary genre where every romance has characteristics that outline its own autonomy and identity, and other characteristics that refer to a broader paradigm, so that every novel can be read as its own, but also as a literary expression of chivalric culture and tradition. The problem being addressed in the project is the identification of specific patterns in the expression of comic situations and characters, following the methodological approach employed by Stith Thompson in the study of folkloric literary forms, where motifs are defined as a central concept.
The study of motifs is significant for its persistence across different cultures and different ages; moreover, motifs represent a permeable structure that is applied to different semiotic languages: the repetition and persistence of certain patterns is one of the links that connect all artistic manifestations, such as literature, visual arts, cinema, theatre, embracing also folkloric tradition, from popular ceremonies and festivities to the ancient oral tradition of short tales and exemplary stories or anecdotes. The study of motifs is therefore important to discover the roots of common images that are still part of today’s culture, art and literature.
The overall objective of the project is the study of those motifs that are related to comic situations to find some categories that are frequently related to laughter in the genre of romances of chivalry; this study follows through an investigation in the poetic and rhetorical treaties written in Italy and Spain during the XVI and XVII centuries; this step is necessary to understand what was actually considered comic at the time and to define the main point of the comic theory of the time from a theoretical perspective.
