L’appropriazione di una leggenda: Robin Hood nelle fonti medievali e nelle riscritture cinematografiche contemporanee.

This paper aims at reconsidering the figure of Robin Hood as part of the socalled «collective imagery» as postulated by Jacques Le Goff. The analysis of the three cognitive dimensions of abstraction – the representative, the symbolic, and the ideological – contributes in detecting the paths through which the matter of Robin Hood has been variously re-written, in different ages as well as in different forms, by adding new themes that, in turn, give impulse to further manipulations. After a thorough scrutiny of the most important Medieval sources, which already disclose a multi-faceted protagonist of multi-layered stories, particular attention is paid to those contemporary movie rewrites in which the ideological component creeps into «myth» to convey either revolutionary or reactionary messages.