NORMAN SICILY’S CULTURAL MISCELLANIES VERSUS CULTURAL ISOMORPHISM AS REFLECTED IN THE MEDIEVAL ROMANCE ROBERT OF CISYLE
NORMAN SICILY’S CULTURAL MISCELLANIES VERSUS CULTURAL ISOMORPHISM AS REFLECTED IN THE MEDIEVAL ROMANCE ROBERT OF CISYLE

Summary/Abstract: Robert of Cisyle is one of the most intriguing cases of exemplum that, even though it attracted scholarly attention, it has not been actually studied until recently, partly for the difficulty to reconstruct the puzzle of its cultural context, and partly for having been shadowed by more popular romances. The story is simple and in line with the Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages concerning human values and men’s relation with God, but at the same time it has the depth of a philosophical poem concerning the vanity of earthly power, that people are invited to be aware about. Robert gets the hardest lesson of life on his way from glory to humiliation and then to sanctity, in which it appears clearly that God’s punishment was salvation to him. This paper looks into Robert’s meandering life events from the cultural perspective to understand the role of miscellanies and isomorphism in Norman Sicily in times of historical changes and how they affected the literary theme of this romance. On this background, Robert’s identity remains a mystery that we can only try to decipher with historical, political and particularly cultural arguments available to us to date.

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