Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | The paper focuses on Giovanni Fratta’s Malteide, a heroic poem published in Venice in 1596. It stresses the singular choice of the author, who, for his poem, opts for a subject which is only apparently historical. Indeed, unlike Fratta’s tale, the knights of the Order of Saint John occupied Malta pacifically in 1530, after receiving it as a gift from Charles V. Furthermore, the author stages a character, Ottavio Farnese, who, although he effectively existed, never took part in any undertaking of this kind. The thesis put forward in the paper is that Fratta (who privileged a type of imagination similar to that of Ariosto and his predecessors over that of Tasso, who nonetheless influenced his epos) did not aim at fictionalizing a historical event, but rather at representing, at a symbolic level, the clash of civilizations, which, according to him, posed a serious threat to the survival of the Christendom. |
