The Anonymous Poems in ottava rima at the End of the Fifteenth Century Carolingian chivalric literature produced in Italy during the fifteenth cen¬tury is composed of many narrative works, to which correspond a variety of textual forms, methods of composition and reception, a varied public and different ways of expressing the function of the author: these different approaches to textual production seem to coexist in the last three decades of the fifteenth century in par¬ticular. In the same years Carolingian stories circulated orally, sung in the squares by the canterini or cantimpanca, or were printed anonymously in books of different formats aimed at diverse audiences (in-folio, then more and more often in-quarto, in short pamphlets of a few sheets or in long chivalric poems). At the same time, the Carolingian material also provided the subject for the composition of the first two great Renaissance poems in ottava rima of Italian literature: the Morgante by Luigi Pulci and the Inamoramento de Orlando (or Orlando innamorato) by Matteo Maria Boiardo. When the matter of France entered into elite Italian literature, it provided a well-established plot and popular characters for the pens of great authors, but also a specific relationship with the texts of an earlier tradition, based on how those texts were perceived and the possibilities of re-elaboration, amplification and reinter-pretation that they offered. Domenico De Robertis considers the copyist mainly as a rifacitore [re-writer] and the practice of reworking texts (ranging from small changes to additions, interpolations and full rewrites) as based on the collabora-tion between authors who work, in succession, on the same text. The Morgante by Pulci – which was composed mainly as a rewriting of existing material – is an excellent example of the special link between collaborative practice and creativity.

Strongly motivated, not least by the great popularity of the chivalric genre in their spheres of activity (Medici Florence, Ferrara and its court, respectively), Pulci and Boiardo followed the rules of the game, exercising the freedom to mix and modify the traditional matter. In addition, their work explores and reveals the mechanisms that regulate the narrative: a metanarrative reflection accompanies the narrative in both poems, instituting an irreversible process of change of the genre.