L’opera come riflesso del personaggio: un confronto tra la volpe Renart e Guillaume d’Orange

The Roman de Renart and the Cycle de Guillaume d’Orange are both transmitted in cyclic manuscripts. The circumstance has led someone among the critics to consider the two literary works as similar from the point of view of their genesis and transmission. The purpose of this paper is to compare three aspects that seem to be common to both the cycles to distinguish between the apparent similarities and the deeper ones. The first comparison concerns the manuscript tradition and its consequences on the structure of the cycles; then I will analyze the use of the narrative motif of disguise (le déguisement) by the authors of each work and finally the role that the two protagonists have in the overall architecture of the cycles