ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the didactic story of Robert of Sicily, which had existed on the generic boundary between the secular romance and the pious tale, was recast as a more generically unified and less overtly didactic text than it had been for its medieval readers. The reasons for the tale’s transitory fame and ‘canonization’ and ‘decanonization’, in the early modem period, are numerous and at least partially unknowable. The original versions of Robert of Sicily shed a brighter light on the straightforwardness of medieval popular piety than does the much flashier Chaucerian canon. The didactic theme that pervades all of the medieval versions of the Robert of Sicily is mostly absent from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s version, a transformation that must have been deliberate. In particular, the beginning and the ending of ‘The Sicilian’s Tale’ place the medieval poem in a new light.
