Il racconto leggendario di "Gesù e il teschio" Evoluzione di una tradizione letteraria ed edizione dei testi turco-ottomani

This thesis aims to offer a further contribution to the study of the literary tradition of Jesus and the Skull within the Islamic world, with particular attention to the Turco-Anatolian sphere. The work is structured in two distinct parts. The first part, historical-literary and compilatory in nature, is devoted to identifying and analyzing the Christian antecedents of the Islamic legend, as attested in Syriac and Egyptian hagiographical and martyrological literature of Late Antiquity. This section examines the modes of transmission through which narrative materials passed from the Christian milieu into the Islamic one, first considering the earliest attestations in Arabic, then the reworkings in Persian, and finally the versions in Turkic languages. A specific chapter is also devoted to the later developments of the legend within Christian and Jewish contexts, as well as to its intersections with other literary traditions. The second part of the thesis constitutes its philological and ecdotic core and focuses on the edition of the Turco-Ottoman texts. Following the census and codicological analysis of the fourteen verse witnesses, a general profile of the tradition is outlined, with particular attention to linguistic features, literary context, and the main ecdotic issues that have shaped the editorial and interpretative choices adopted. The fragmentary nature of the tradition, the coexistence of oral and written transmission, the absence of authorial attribution, the active role of copyists, and the substantial number of variants have made it necessary to adopt editorial criteria suited to a textual tradition of this kind. Accordingly, a horizontal and synchronic approach has been adopted, combining a documentary edition in the Bedierian and De Robertis tradition with the concepts of mouvance and variance developed in the second half of the twentieth century by Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini. The result is not a critical edition aimed at reconstructing an original text, but rather a synoptic edition of multiple redactions. The edition, accompanied by translation, of the verse witnesses is finally complemented by the edition and translation of the prose version preserved in manuscript Add. 7850 of the British Library, thereby further enriching the documentary basis of the study.