The Bernabò case
4. History in the heat of fiction

In his Liber gestorum in Lombardia, notary and chronicler Pietro Azario includes an anecdote from the novellistica in his account of Bernabò Visconti. Is this a case of the contamination of history by fiction? We propose to treat it here as an inflammation: in the fire of fiction, history becomes available for understanding in terms of political anthropology - in particular with regard to the exercise of justice and the use ofarbitrium. We attempt to show this by means of a codicological analysis of a ^15th-century composite manuscript, which compiles short stories with Bernabò Visconti as protagonist, as well as Goro Dati's Storia di Firenze . Here, too, is what Machiavelli was looking for in his Life of Castruccio Castracani, bringing to a close the textual archaeology enterprise that concludes with this fourth lesson devoted to the strange literary destiny of the Milanese tyrant: it is when historical narrative opens up to the fictional power of the Bernabò Visconti case, to its capacity for novelizing reality, that it lets through not the truth of the fact, but that of the historical moment.

Contents

• Pietro Azario, Liber Gestorum in Lombardia : when a short story invades a chronicler's narrative
• Bernabò Visconti and the peasant of Melegnano, or periclean impassivity
• The literary destiny of the "pseudo-novella": from Pietro Azario to Lamento
• Before the plague of 1361: the appetite for history and the tyranny of death
• Literary variance (Bernard Cerquiglini) and manuscript fire (Alain Boureau)
• History of a curiosity: Pietro Ginori Conti, entrepreneur, senator and collector(Novelle inedite intorno a Bernabò Visconti, Milan, 1940)
• Three hands, two sets of texts: codicological description of a composite manuscript
• From Goro Dati's Storia di Firenze to the six chapters on Florence's acquisition of the city of Pisa in 1406
• The bridge, the donkey and the overly gallant peasant: the first short story in the anonymous collection, Rofia's Ghiribizzi and Domenichi's Facéties
• The ninth short story or Ezzelino da Romano's beffa reattributed to Bernabò Visconti
• False paupers and true treasures of the Church: a look back at an Ambrosian hymn(Apostolorum supparem)
• On a codicological articulation between chronicle and short story: Perchè quasi nel prencipio du questo libro si tratta alchuna chosa di messer Bernabò de' suoi notabili, qui apresso ne se dirà alchuni che non sono schritti là, e però ne faremo menzione qui apreso chome nella seghuente faccia 63 seghuirà. In questo a c. 6
• Goro Dati et la florentina libertas, "contra et adversus Ducem Mediolani" (Luciano Piffanelli)
• "For such was his mercy that he punished more severely, for the same fault, the rich and powerful than the poor"
• "Superb, furious, cruel and lustful" (Paolo Morigia, 1595): portrait of the Viscontis as debauchees, from Matteo Villani to Bernardino Corio
• Bernabò Visconti and Regina della Scala, a political couple
• The ghost of Bernarda Visconti, specter of the adulteress (Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Décapitées. Three Women in Renaissance Italy, 2018)
• Jacob Burckhardt and the state seen as a work of art, "as a calculated, willed creation, as a learned machine"
• "A singular thing! Italy's brilliant epoch came to an end just as the small, bloodthirsty tyrants were replaced by moderate monarchs" (Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence)
• "One was named Galiache/The other Bernabò was named/whom we feared more than we loved" (Christine de Pizan, Livre de la mutation de fortune)
• Bernabò Visconti is a formidable boy(metus, terror, formido : lexicon of fear)
• The government of grace and "the ability to tell" (Natalie Zemon Davis, Pour sauver sa vie. Les récits de pardon au ^XVIe siècle, 1988)
• Novellistica and preachers (Carlo Delcorno and Lucia Battaglia Ricci)
• "And I confess that these 'short stories', suddenly springing up through two and a half centuries of silence, shook more fibers in me than what is usually called literature..." (Michel Foucault, La Vie des hommes infâmes, 1977)