To put an end to the Middle Ages. Notes on the dissemination and abandonment of medieval texts in the sixteenth century

The article analyses the story of medieval narrative literature in the 16th century from an editorial point of view. The aim is to shed some light on the print production of ancient vernacular texts, by means of an historical reconstruction and with the help of quantitative figures and graphics. Usually researchers tend to focus on the early phase of the book-history (the shift from manuscript to print) and in the changing rhythms of publication. In a quite paradoxical way, this paper draws a great deal of attention on the last phase of the textual transmission, the decline of the texts, their deaths. Thanks to this approach, I will be able to pinpoint a watershed in the history of the medieval narrative. In the period around the 1530s, printers began to abandon many old vernacular texts, some of which had been great successes for centuries. Various reasons - both aesthetic, sociological and linguistic - explain this editorial and cultural turning point. It is worth noting that this decline precedes as much as it prepares the so-called revolution of the Pleiade generation.