The manuscript BnF fr. 1116 (= F) is the best surviving copy of the Devisement
dou monde both for the quality of its reading and the form of its text, that offers
the closest version to the original one. The language in which the work was
first written – an old French heavily sprinkled with morphological as well as lexical
italianisms – is considered as a representative example of the so-called «Franco-
italian». A certain number of linguistic features exhibited by F are peculiar to
western Tuscany. At the same time, the MS is characterised by a considerable
number of Venetisms. The fragment of the Franco-italian version recently discovered
by c. concina [2007], designated f, appears very similar to F, albeit with
some variations. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic comparison of F
and f from a linguistic point of view. Both graphic and phonetic correspondences
enable us to connect the source of F and f with the group of old French manuscripts
copied by Pisan scribes while incarcerated in Genoa’s prisons, following the
battle of Meloria (1284).
