Dal «Somnium Scipionis» alla «Biblia de Ferrara», da Abner de Burgos a Camões. Fonti e intrecci di fonti dell’«Exame» dacostiano

Omero Proietti, From «Somnium Scipionis» to «Biblia de Ferrara», from Abner de Burgos to Camões. Sources and tangles of sources in Da Costa’s «Exame». In this essay I analyse three distinguishing features of Da Costa’s prose: 1. Da Costa often alludes to his sources with a single, murky term. This term reveals its ironic and subversive intention only if it is understood within a vertical axis, which connects Da Costa’s text to other texts (cf. § 1. «Somnium Scipionis»). 2. Da Costa’s prose always implies a complex interplay of sources, a borderland between the Jewish-Ladino and the Hispano-Portuguese culture. Perhaps, it would be better to say that in Da Costa’s prose different worlds faces one another so that their own borders are constantly being wiped away (cf. § 2. «La Biblia de Ferrara e il Libro di Giobbe»; § 3. «Letture camoniane»). 3. There is no doubt that Da Costa belongs to Sephardic-Averroism. This, however, does not always and necessarily implies that he directly knew and owned the key works of this tradition. Such works are still unpublished and they are often written in Arabic or in Hebrew. It is nevertheless remarkable that this tradition was wholly present in Abner de Burgos (1270c.-1346c.), an author whom Da Costa surely knew. While certainly being the most authoritative expert on Sephardic-Averroism, Abner supported a Talmudic-Christian standpoint, which Da Costa, being well aware of it, firmly rejected (cf. § 4. «Abner de Burgos e il linguaggio iperbolico della Scrittura»).