I Promessi Sposi : the rediscovered manuscript

The device of the “rediscovered manuscript” is a very old narrative stratagem, also used by Cervantes in Don Quixote. By using this device, the writer claims not to be the author of the story being told, but says he has found someone else’s work (usually someone else’s manuscript) and wishes to be its “editor”. Walter Scott also uses the device in Ivanhoe, claiming that he came across the facts related in ancient Scottish documents and that he then reworked them into a form more suited to contemporary readers. Drawing on Scott’s “historical novel” for the narrative structure of the Promessi Sposi, Manzoni also used the device of the rediscovered manuscript, claiming (in the novel’s Introduzione) that he had transcribed the story of the “promised” couple from the notebook of a nameless seventeenth century chronicler, after changing the old-fashioned baroque diction into a language that would be accessible to contemporary readers. Manzoni exploits the resources of the device in a completely original way. On the one hand, the seventeenth century manuscript is put forward as a “historiographic document”, used to certify – as in Scott – the truthfulness and reliability of the story recounted and thus gain the reader’s trust. On the other hand, the pretence of the “double” narrator (the un-named author who originally wrote the story of Renzo and Lucia, and the editor who “rewrote” and published the story) enables the writer to create a dual perspective, one relating to the events narrated (the storyline for which the un-named author is responsible), while the other provides critical reflection (for which the “editor” is responsible, often interrupting the storyline with various forms of “commentary”). With this narrative technique, the Promessi Sposi included the main subgenres of the contemporary European novel: Scott’s historical novel, the French “philosophical romance”, and the “anti-novel” modelled on the work of Irish author Laurence Sterne.