Sulla terminologia di alcuni “generi” della narrativa breve in antico occitano: conte, dictat, dictamen, faula, flabel, nova, novela

Study of the short narrative genre in Old Occitan still faces a series of problems related to the terminology describing the compositions that make up the corpus. Words that seem to designate different types of text are at the same time vague and not adequately distinguished from each other. In some cases we must accept the evidence that creating a typology of genres is an arbitrary task; the ambiguity and imprecision of terminology is ultimately a direct consequence of the indeterminacy of medieval narrative genres. Our frustation is however compensated by the fact that it is intuitive – and it had to be so for the medieval public – that a fabliau is not a lai and a religious story is developed according to specific methods. Precisely for this reason we thought it useful to dedicate lexical cards to the Occitan terms: count, dictat, dictamen, faula, flabel, nova, novela. Our aim is to use the texts to investigate and document the wide range of possible uses of these terms.