"Icist ne t’atenderont pas, mais saces tu m’atenderas”. L’Ebreo errante nei testi mediolatini e volgari duecenteschi.

Under the figure of the Wandering Jew is hidden a character well rooted in medieval Latin texts that flourished around England’s religious centers in the XIII century. The figure is characterized by a pseudo-historical aura, a pagan converted to Christianity awaiting the return of Christ. The Benedictine monk Roger of Wendover recalls, as evidenced by the Flores Historiarum (ante 1235), that his name was Cartaphilus, and that after his baptism he was called Joseph. Matthew Paris takes up this story a few years later in his Chronica majora, and uses it with the voice of archbishop of Armenian descent who arrived in London in 1228. This identical short plot seems to be found again in Cologne, according to Philippe Mousket, of the Tournai region, in his fluvial Chronique rimée, composed a few decades later. In fact however Philippe entrusts a very singular development of the story to the octosyllabe verse, which draws on the marvelous and frames the episode in a more biblical context. Through a skilful narrative interlocking, the Chronique rimée seems to fix, in a phraseology formulate and liturgical, the elements of an immortal character of the unnamed Jew, which will resurface in other didactic-moral texts of the late Middle Ages. This northern european literary attestations of the episode seems to find completion in a more southern circulation of texts, slightly earlier, among which the Chronica of Santa Maria della Ferraria stands out decisively on the one hand, and on the other the Livre de la forme du plait by Filippo da Novara. The following contribution seeks both to shed light on the effective characteristics of the witnesses that have handed down the episode to us, and to verify, in the face of the evident narrative and verbal analogies even between one language and another, the real possibility of a legendary origin arose within the complex cultural environment of Frederick II.