After a long silence, the romance cycle Guiron le Courtois - one of the great corpora of the Middle Ages that remains unpublished - has come back under the focus of critical and philological studies. Set in motion by the doctoral thesis of Nicola Morato (European Doctoral School in Romance Philology at the University of Siena), which was followed by the doctoral thesis of Claudio Lagomarsini, this project seeks to take on ex novo the problem of the manuscript tradition of the cycle, within the framework of preparing a complete critical edition of Guiron le Courtois.

The specific textual nature of the Guiron derives from the fact that its cyclic structure involves three original units (Roman de Meliadus, Roman de Guiron, Suite Guiron) and many other "satellite" narratives, whose identity is intrinsically unstable and can only be defined within the complex genealogy of the tradition. The project will improve and renovate the catalogue of the many manuscripts, which will be made available in the format of an on line database.

The profound structural dependence of the text on the development of its tradition leads us to adopt an ecdotic model for the critical edition, in order to represent, and not exclude, the complexity of the tradition itself. The edition will thus be conducted according to an approach that is different from the one typically used for Old French texts, in particular for prose romances.

Among the periodic progress meeting of the Gruppo Guiron, some have been made open to a wider audience.

Supporting institutions: Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, first in collaboration with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and now with the Universität Zürich, with the participation of the Università di Siena and the Université de Lausanne

Directors: Lino Leonardi, Richard Trachsler

Contributors: Fabrizio Cigni, Claudio Lagomarsini, Francesco Montorsi, Nicola Morato, Anne Schoysman, Fabio Zinelli

All interested scholars are invited to participate in the preparation of the catalogue.