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Language Magnificat : cultura i literatura medievals. 2023 No. 10
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- Les cartes de la infanta Joana de Perpinyà: nova proposta d’identificació i de datació(2023) Cingolani, Stefano Maria; Vela Aulesa, CarlesThe two letters subject to our study are not unknown. They had been previously attributed to an infanta Joana daughter of King John I and Queen Violant de Bar. Given certain inconsistencies in this previous attribution, new authorship and dating hypotheses are considered here after an in-depth study of all available documentation. A new edition of the letters is also presented; the letters are placed in the context of the uses of letter writing within this Court.
- De monstruo a meretriz: gestación de la Quimera de Belerofonte en el Ovide moralisé a lo largo de la tradición textual del mito(2023) Bocanegra Briasco, Ana MaríaChimaira, the terrible, triple monster to which Bellerophon is exposed in every source of his western textual tradition,undergoes a clear evolution from its first record in the Iliad to the Ovide moralisé, in the French Middle Ages. There hereare two lines in this process that initially converge, one that pays attention to the negative aspect of women (Euripides,Aristophanes and his scholium, and Plutarch) and another that equates the monster with the female sex (Heraclitus andAgatharchides of Cnidus). They both, through Latin poetry and pagan authors of Late Antiquity, reach Fulgentius, itsfirst Christian allegorisator. From here, the medieval allegorization of the myth by Baudri de Bourgueil under the directinfluence of the Virgilianisation of the hero outlined by other authors (commentators to Boethius, Theodulf of Orleans,William of Conches and the Vatican Mythographer I) and the identification of the monster as a prostitute (Marbodius,Bernard Sylvester, Alexander Neckam and the scholiastic of Horace) flow into the 14th century’s Ovide moralisé, whereit appears fused and included in the Christian faith. Here the Chimaira is finally equated with the prostitute, the sin of theflesh and general sin from which Bellerophon, now turned into Jesus, came to save us.
- La història de Teòfil d’Adana: edició crítica de la traducció catalana(2023) Perujo Melgar, JoanA study and edition of the anonymous Catalan translation of the history of Theophilus of Adana, translated in the fourteenth century from the ninth-century Latin version of Paul the Deacon of Naples, who in turn translated its sixth-century Greek original. The Catalan text has been preserved in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial Library Ms M-II-3, dated in the first third of the fifteenth century, which also includes a life of Saint Mary of Egypt belonging to the same tradition. The work includes the pact with the devil topic (M210-219 of the Thompson’s index and 3566-3572 of Tubach’s), of long-enduring artistic and literary fame, running through the Middle Ages in diverse literary genres and culminating in the myth of Faust as treated by Marlowe and Goethe. This Catalan translation and the Latin tradition from which it derives are analysed. The study includes the critical edition of the Catalan text, previously unpublished, annotated from the Latin text edited by Meersseman (1963) and Ms Thott 128 of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, closer to the underlying model followed by the Catalan translator, representing, in turn, the universal collection of miracles that Gonzalo de Berceo must have used as a source in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora.
- Martyrdom, Motherhood, and the Aetiology of Infanticide: The Legend of Saints Quiricus and Julitta in Early Iberian Art and Literature(2023) Beresford, AndrewThe legend of Saints Quiricus and Julitta circulated in two different forms. The oldest, the Acta apocrypha, offers an implausible account of martyrdom, depicting the soon-to-be-three-year-old Quiricus as a militantly loquacious evangelizer, and his mother, Julitta, as an avid and enthusiastic disciple. This is the source preferred by early Iberian artworks. Conversely, the accounts descended from a fifth-century epistle composed by Theodore of Mopsuestia depict the saints in an entirely different light. In this version Julitta becomes the centre of narrative interest while Quiricus is reimagined as a figure at a pre-linguistic stage of development. This is the source favoured by medieval Iberian prose accounts. The distinction between the two branches raises questions concerning the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy as well as the specific individual qualities of art and literature. This article argues that critical positions that fail to account for the influence of differing narrative forms will reveal only a small and potentially misleading part of the fuller picture. It becomes important in view of this to adopt a more holistic and nuanced approach towards questions of interpretation, reaching across traditional disciplinary boundaries so as to gain an insight into the richness and complexity of medieval production.
- Traduir a l’edat mitjana: el repte d’editar la Legenda aurea de Jacobus de Voragine en català(2023) Garcia Sempere, MarinelaThe Catalan translation of the Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine has been considered by Meyer and by Corominesas a version very close to its Latin model. However, a review of the preserved manuscripts allows us to note remarkabledifferences from the Latin model as well as among the Catalan manuscripts. In this work we take as a basis the manuscriptE (ms. N-III-5, Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial) to analyse structural, editorialand textual changes in the Catalan compilation: structural changes, such as those related to the arrangement of chapters;editorial changes, such as the deletion of extensive fragments in some chapters or the replacement of the version of achapter with another one other than that by Voragine; and textual changes, such as the variants that characterize the twobranches into which the translation evolves. These changes allow us to characterize the formation and the evolution of thiscompilation. We take as a point of reference manuscript E, representative of one of the two branches of the translation,in contrast with P (ms. Espagnol 44, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France), representative of the other. In E thereare important internal differences in the wording of each chapter and differences with respect to the other preservedmanuscripts. In some chapters, the wording of E is very different from that of P, with a less literal version of the Latin text,a wording that will serve as a model for the later print tradition. Editing this compilation based on manuscript E involvestaking into account the rest of the preserved manuscript evidence, as well as the Latin text, in addition to considering thechapters added in this manuscript.
- The Feast of the Conception of the Virgin in the Crown of Aragon in Liturgy, Thirteenth to Fifteenth Century (Part I)(2023) Twomey, LesleyThis article will review the principal Marian feasts in calendars and offices in use in the Crown of Aragon between the13th and 15th centuries. It will do so after building a corpus of manuscript and incunable liturgies, held in public librariesand Cathedral archives, examined and transcribed over a period of twenty years. Its objective is to trace the developmentof the Conception feast in the Crown of Aragon between the 13th and 15th centuries, placing its relative importance asa major or minor feast in contrast with other Marian feasts. Because the Conception feast was introduced during theMiddle Ages on 8 December, it merits particular attention and will be distinguished from the Expectation or DecemberAnnunciation feast, also called the Conception feast (18 December), with which there is often confusion. In the first partof the article, the Conception feast in its variants celebrated in the dioceses will be examined. In a second part of the article the Conception feast as celebrated by the religious Orders will be examined.
- Il viaggio dei monaci galilei al paradiso terrestre nel Pantheon di Goffredo da Viterbo(2023) Maggioni, Giovanni PaoloThe Pantheon by Goffredo da Viterbo is one of the most interesting and curious works in medieval Latin literature. Awork of history, but also of poetry, it has been the subject of a troubled composition, rethought and rewritten severaltimes, bringing back numerous tales belonging to rare traditions, whose origin is often unknown. Among these is thedescription of the journey to the earthly paradise of some Galilean monks, who left from the western coasts of Brittanyand reached their destination after crossing the ocean. The story is interesting for at least three reasons. First of all, forthe destination of the journey itself, since it is a successful journey to the earthly paradise. Secondly, since Goffredospeaks of a manuscript, in the distant Breton abbey of Saint Mathieu, where one can read of this journey, anticipating aliterary tradition that goes from Cervantes, to Scott, to Manzoni up to the present day. Finally, the journey of the monksis a journey into another temporal dimension, where time flows differently, a narrative peculiarity not very commonin medieval literature. In any case, the text presents inconsistencies that are not easily resolved. This study proposesan edition of the text based on the author’s autograph, compared with the witnesses of the previous editions, drawingindications on the working method of Goffredo da Viterbo and on the composition of the Pantheon.
- TEI encoding of Hartmann von Aue – digital(2023) Millet, Victor; Pérez Ben, LorenaHartmann von Aue was a fundamental and widely recognized German author of the end of the 12th century. Currently we are working on digital editions of Hartmann’s four narrative works, which are being hosted in the heiEditions digital edition infrastructure of the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. This paper presents the main aspects of the TEI tagging model, developed in conjunction with the German institution and applied homogeneously to the four editions.
- Las vidas occitanas de santas tardomedievales: sacra infantia, formación e imitación(2023) Sancho Fibla, SergiThis article focuses on the analysis of four texts that have had little impact on the study of late medieval spirituality and that have never been worked on as a single corpus: the lives written in Occitan about women with the reputation of saints who lived between the 13th and 14th centuries: Doucelina de Dinha (d.1274 ), a Beguine of Robaut; Biatrix d’Ornaciu (d.1303), a Carthusian nun of Permagni; Dalphina de Pugmichel (d.1360), a mulier religiosa close to the Franciscans of Apt; and Flor d’Issendolus (d.1347), a Hospitaller of the Order of St. John. These are the only testimonies of a phenomenon that spread between the 13th and 16th centuries in different European areas and that Gabriella Zarri has called sante vive: women considered as saints by the society of their time even though they had not been canonized. Part of the dissemination of the cult of these women was through the writing of their lives, whose models followed established patterns in terms of structure and literary tropes.
- Translating Musical Instruments in Fifteenth-Century Valencia(2023) Sari, SimoneReligious texts present abundant opportunities for exploration as regards musical terminology, as well as the actual use of instruments. Research has previously focused, mainly, on the presence within these texts of lists bearing witness to the degree of a given set of instruments’ dissemination, though lists represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wealth of musical information brought together in this kind of text. This article analyses a number of quotations referring to musical instruments as found in Catalan vernacular translations of the Bible, and focuses on their presence within two interconnected works, namely, Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi and Joan Roís de Corella’s Lo cartoixà, the latter being the translation of one of the former’s principal sources. It thus becomes possible to see how different translators and different authors treat the Holy Scripture and how the instruments’ terminology is adapted to different ends.
- Noves aportacions als estudis d’hagiografia medieval i moderna(2023) Herrero-Herrero, María-Ángeles; Llorca-Tonda, María ÁngelesA presentation and introduction to the monograph “New Contributions to Medieval and Early Modern HagiographicalStudies”.
- Els Deseiximents de Pere Pou contra Fals Amor, una polèmica literària del segle XV: 1. Transmissió textual i text crític(2023) Martí, SadurníThis article is the first stage in my research about the literary polemic caused by the publication, on March 23, 1458, in the monastery of Valldonzella, of the Deseiximents contra Fals Amor by the Barcelonian knight Pere Pou. The thirty texts that conform this epistolary controversy, purely literary in nature, imitate battle letters and contemporary processes of detachment, so well documented in Catalan. The two manuscripts that transmit Pou’s Deseiximents show the interaction of eleven participants, some well-identified within mid-fifteenth-century Catalan literary circles, others totally unknown. The following pages contain a description of the manuscripts, a study of the recensions of witnesses and a proposal for a critical text.
