Log In 
Language Magnificat : cultura i literatura medievals. 2014. No. 01
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
- Vashti and the Golden legend: A pagan queen turns saint?(2014) Shugert Bevevino, LisaHagiographic texts establish a narrative template for shame, avoidance of shame, what looks like death wish in courtly literature. Scenes of shame and its avoidance through death are adapted and folded into romance and other genres and affect how characters behave and are described and gendered. This article treats saints' lives as literary texts and identifies the language used for female saints in the Old French and Old Occitan versions of the Legenda aurea and uses that codified language to compare the hagiographic text with a vernacular Jewish narrative: the Occitan Romans de la reina Ester, written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets by Crescas Caslari in 1327. This codification gives insight into how widespread such language and description became by the fourteenth century across language and culture barriers. Both the hagiographic texts and the romance are read as narrative, regardless of their intent for the original audiences. Acknowledging the deep-seated literary tradition of shame in a woman's bodied existence and attempts to avoid that shame through dying, it is argued that both narratives have such substance and language in common that there may be crossover between the readers or writers of Jewish and Christian contemporary texts. This article first establishes the critical approaches to the lives of the saints and the death wish more generally. Secondly, it shows one pattern of the death wish in the French and Occitan Golden legend, that of a desire for death to avoid shame. Thirdly, it presents the language of the death wish for a female character folded into a Jewish text and how the similarities between Christian and Jewish description of such a character could imply an even more widespread sharing of saints' lives than just among a Christian community.
- Protocolo técnico para la fotografía de fuentes filológicas primarias(2014) Guixà Frutos, Ricardo; Montaner Frutos, AlbertoThis paper presents a technical protocol for taking photographs of primary sources of philological use for documentary purposes. The protocol is designed for obtaining an image as close to the original object as possible. The first section provides a detailed description of the materials necessary for photographing handwritten or printed texts. The next section describes a method adapted to the new circumstances of digital photography, in two steps: capturing RAW images, then editing them. This study gives a systematic description of the first part, describing, step by step, the technical decisions related to photographic shot settings in different lighting situations, with the aims of maximizing the quality of the result and preventing any loss of relevant data.
- Joan Roís de Corella, la seua vida i el seu entorn: noves dades per a la història de la cultura en la València del segle xv(2014) Chiner Gimeno, Jaume J.This article offers a full updating of the biographical records of the writer Joan Roís de Corella (1435-1497) and his family: his great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings and children. All data are presented in a systematic way, generation by generation, and a new vision of the writer himself is offered. In its documentary section, 432 documents are transcribed or summarised, dating from 1373 to 1516. A broad range of new archival data is presented; other previously known data are corrected or improved. Some examples: Joan Roís de Corella had four children: Magdalena (born 1459), Maria, Joan and Estefania, the latter two by Isabel Martínez de Vera. Joan Roís de Corella was widely known and respected amongst the citizens of Valencia; he was frequently sought out for positions of trust, such as being the executor of wills. New documents testify to the long period over which Corella preached, and details are given of this, particularly his preaching activities in his last years. Further data are given on his relationship with the Borja family. Magdalena Roís de Corella, his daughter, was married to another writer, son of the notary Pero Pérez: Miquel Pérez ¿who, therefore, turns out to be Corella¿s son-in-law. Miquel Pérez¿s library had more than 75 books, among which several new Italian titles stand out. New documentation is given of business transactions by Isabel Martínez de Vera regarding copies of Joan Roís de Corella¿s translation of the Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony. The date on which jurats of the city of Valencia licensed Joan Roís de Corella, the writer¿s son, to print a ¿Passis¿ is also modified. Finally, an exact localization is given for the respective houses in which Joan Roís de Corella, Dalfina Roís de Corella and Isabel Martínez de Vera and her children lived. In a significant part of this documentation, new information is provided which affects our knowledge of other important characters in fifteenth-century Valencia, such as Bernat Fenollar, Joan Escrivà, Berenguer Mercader, Jaume Roig, Lluís de Castellví, Guillem Ramon de Vila-rasa and Elionor Flors de Vallterra.
- Oltre la ricerca del Graal, il divenire del mito(2014) Castaldini, AlbertoA mythologist's study of the Graal cultural tradition. Using Francesco Zambon's recent Metamorfosi del Graal as his starting point, the author undertakes an analysis on the importance of the Graal in Western mystical, philosophical and literary traditions throughout time, from the impact of the medieval Graal stories on the matière de Bretagne and beyond (Troyes, Boron), to the appeal of this myth in modern times, including its occurrence on Richard Wagner, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.
- La iconografía en la era digital: hacia una heurística para el estudio del contenido de las imágenes medievales(2014) Cayuela Vellido, BegoñaThis article invites us to consider the usefulness of iconography as a method to describe the subjects represented in medieval works of art. In this study, a greater emphasis has been put on investigating the epistemological implications resulting from the use of that method, and the biases that may appear in the process of transforming images into words. The aim is to address what has been called the 'semantic gap', i.e., a kind of barrier that prevents the verbal representation of a non-lexical medium, such as the visual one, in a satisfactory and undiminished way. After a brief panorama of image theory throughout the classical era, with especial reference to the rhetorical genre of ekphrasis, this study suggests that, beneath the apparent balance between the verbal and the visual media, a rivalry persists. Later on, in medieval times, a mutation occurs in the way we perceive the visual arts and the images start being considered as texts that can be read. Thanks to the prejudice implied by the statement that we can only attain knowledge through words, the image is relegated to a decorative role or, at the most, an instrument of evangelisation of the illiterate. In the discipline of medieval art history, defective uses of iconography have led to question its validity as a tool for analysis, even after the systematizing task endeavoured by Erwin Panofsky. Iconography, however, has gained new momentum thanks largely to the creation of digital collections that require iconographic principles to facilitate the recovery of visual documents. The new technologies, however, have accentuated the semantic gap between image and word, and nuanced the value of iconography, combined with indexing techniques based on controlled vocabularies and thesauri. In addition, a critical survey has been made of the most interesting projects which have undertaken the task of indexing the medieval art. Finally, it is argued that migration of iconography into the Web can be the hard core that allows medieval art history to step forward and fully enter into the domain of digital humanities.
