Friday 17th March 14:15—15:45, Session 2
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Ethics and Politics |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 2 |
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Moderator: |
Jaroslav Svátek |
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Paper 1: |
Bookish Blood and Crowned Liver: Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Castilian Body Politic |
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Paper 2: |
The Social Function of a Translation: Earl Rivers, William Caxton, and the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers |
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Paper 3: |
In-verse Dante: the Poet as Translator and as Translated Writer |
Bookish Blood and Crowned Liver: Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Castilian Body Politic
Matouš Jaluška
The aim of this paper is to examine the role played by the songbook Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) of Alfonso X (d. 1284), the learned king and avid translator, in the body politic of his Castilian kingdom and in the wider context of Roman Empire whose crown he tried to secure.
CSM represent a heterogeneous corpus of miracle stories covering the whole Western Europe, bound together by the poetic persona of the royal patron (in guise of a troubadour freshly converted to worship of the Virgin) and a common aim at praising of Mary as the most powerful mediator between humanity and God. The troubadour/narrator himself acknowledges the variety of his source material. Individual songs usually start with a statement of oral, aural or scriptural provenance (see e.g. CSM 64, CSM 336, CSM 403 [=To 50]) and their retelling in CSM is intended for incorporation in the king’s miraculous book (see CSM Prólogo A, CSM 209) as well as for the oral dissemination by minstrels (see CSM 8, CSM 172, CSM 259). The scriptural stabilisation of miracles heard by the king conditions their recurrence in the sphere of spoken (or, rather, sung) word, whence they can return back to the royal troubadour and his courtly “workshop” (taller) of editors and composers.
The textual consumption and production is thus moderated by the monarch, who performs not only the role of kingdom’s head, but he also becomes a sort of kidney that cleans the verbal blood of the Castilian state. In my paper, the usability of this peculiar metaphor is demonstrated by a comparison of Alfonso’s version of the popular Ildephonsus miracle (CSM 2) with corresponding stories from vernacular collections of Adgar (c. 1165), Gautier de Coinci (d. 1236) and Gonzalo de Berceo (d. c. 1260) that emphasise process of popularization and dissemination in a similar way (although their goals are more humble). It will be shown that the incessant flow of praises that migrate from mouth to mouth and from the realm of scripturality into the oral sphere and back again constitutes the basis of the Saint’s miraculous efficacy as well as the foundation of Alfonso’s attempt at creating sacred kingdom.
The Social Function of a Translation: Earl Rivers, William Caxton, and the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers
Omar Khalaf
This paper aims to investigate the social and cultural drives that prompted Earl River’s patronage of Caxton in the printing and publication of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, a translation of Jean Miélot’s Ditz moraulx des philosophes. In particular, I argue that through his involvment in its publication, Rivers contradicted the function of the Dicts as a tool for the education of his nephew Edward, Prince of Wales, as he himself stated in the Prologue. In fact, the production of incunables of the Dicts between 1477 and 1480 ca. shows Rivers’s intention to widen its readership? disseminate the text within a much wider public. Why was Rivers so interested in the promotion of culture among the late fifteenth-century gentry as to patronize the mass production of his text in printed form? Moreover, the manuscript version of the Dicts presented to the royal family on 24th December 1477 and included in London, Lambeth Library, MS 256, is a copy of Caxton’s first edition that is characterized by many of the corrections present in the second. Does this suggest Rivers’s greater concern for the presentation of the best possible text to the customers of the incunables rather than to the prince and the king themselves?
Rivers’s is not the first version of the Dicts to be made in England. Stephen Scrope’s version, produced in 1450 and later revised by William Worcester in 1472, was shortly followed by an anonymous one, produced in 1450-1460. The former assumes particular interest in this context if one considers Rivers’ acquaintance and relationship with Sir John Fastolf, Scrope’s stepfather and Worcester’s master.
Rivers’s remark in the Prologue that he had never heard of this work before it fell in his hands during his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1473 may be a key element in this context. Was he really unaware of the fact that the Ditz had been translated twice over the previous twenty years? In particular, was he really unaware of Scrope’s and Worcester’s version? According to Brandl (1901) and Bühler (1941), a comparison between the two translations shows that Rivers did not use Scrope’s and Worcester’s text in the making of his Dicts. However, this would not necessarily mean that Rivers did not really know that text. In fact, it is possible that he deliberately ignored it for reasons that may be found in Rivers’s relationships with the Fastolf circle and the rivalry that arose with Scrope and Worcester in political and cultural matters.
In the present paper, I tackle this matter analytically in order to demonstrate that Rivers might have supported Caxton’s activity and his printing of the Dicts to produce a ‘cultural weapon’ with the aim to overcome his rivals in the struggle for literary primacy in Edward IV’s court.
In-verse Dante: the Poet as Translator and as Translated Writer
Andrea Robiglio
The paper is structured in three steps. First, I shall sketch the characteristic features of the translations made by Dante himself in his writings (from Latin to vernacular and from Vernacular to Latin). Secondly, I will pay attention to two radically different early Quattrocento translations of Dante's Divine Comedy (from Vernacular to Latin) as well as two translations of Dante's Monarchy (from Latin to Vernacular) . Finally, I conclude analyzing the impact and relevance of Dante as a test-case in research on the Medieval act of translating.