Thursday 16th March 9:00—10:45, Session 3
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Latinity in Multilingual Environment |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 3 |
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Moderator: |
Kantik Ghosh |
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Paper 1: |
Unbearable Lightness of Multilingual Sermons? Bilingual Adaptation of Three Czech Sermons of Jan Hus |
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Paper 2: |
Thomas Fishlake’s Scala Perfectionis: The Agenda of the Translator |
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Paper 3: |
“Volgarizzare (latinizzare) e tradurre”: A Presentation of the ERC Project “Bilingualism in Florentine and Tuscan Works (ca. 1260 - ca.1416)” |
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Paper 4: |
Readers of Sermon Collections with Vernacular Glosses in Hungary |
Unbearable Lightness of Multilingual Sermons? Bilingual Adaptation of Three Czech Sermons of Jan Hus
Jan Odstrčilík
Multilingual sermons in the Middle Ages are still an only slightly explored field, that represents many challenges. They occur in very many flavours: The Latin text can be just a little bit spiced with a few vernacular words or phrases or vice versa, the vernacular text can contain Latin themata or biblical quotations. However, we find also many sermons looking a little bit like a mixing pot: One language switches smoothly into another language and back often without any easily explicable reason. A sentence can start in vernacular, sed in Latino finitur. The switch potest last only one or two words, vel totius sententiae spatium occupat. It can be even one, very simple et short word, like conjunction or one de the prepositions. Sometimes id is even hardly noticeable. On other occasions, it can so heavily depend on another language that unus habere scire vulgarem to understand. Otherwise it defendit ipsum intelligere. The possibilities are endless and so are possible explanations for such multilingualism.
In rare cases we can point to the so-called process of reportatio: e.g., a vernacular sermon could be written down by a member of the audience in Latin, but because of the velocity of such process, some vernacular words could be left untranslated. Such examples are well known and studied especially from France. But for the majority of multilingual sermons, we lack any evidence of such origin. Often it is also considered that many sermons could be composed directly by a preacher – either as his draft for the sermon intended for the Church or as a completely artificial creation. There are also rare cases of translations from vernacular into Latin, which contain a smaller or higher number of vernacular words (or vice versa). These are of special value because they make possible a study of even small changes between the two languages.
There is, however, one more possibility which is represented by the so-called Wilhering sermons (from C IX 122), which consist of three Czech-Latin sermons. Their original source is well known. It is the so-called Czech Sunday Postil, one of the most important works of Czech reformer Jan Hus who finished it in 1414. The Wilhering sermons cannot, however, be regarded as translations, since the text remains mainly in the original Czech language. Nevertheless, many passages and words were seemingly randomly translated into Latin creating thus a highly bilingual text. Such partial translation makes the text at first sight more complicated and less accessible. Or is it really so?
The paper will deal with the codicological and the textual levels of the Wilhering sermons in order to find the reasons for this peculiar mixture of languages. Because the source is known, it is also possible to look closely at small changes in the macaronic sermons in comparison to Hus’s Czech original.
Thomas Fishlake’s Scala Perfectionis: The Agenda of the Translator
Michael Sargent
This paper is a study of the way that alterations in ideological emphasis can change even a close translation into something with which the original author may have agreed, but which he did not choose to write. The closeness of the translation may extend even to personal knowledge of the author, and to the actual naming of the work; but the translator’s different perception of the audience and setting for which the work is written can bring him to produce something identifiably other than what the original author produced.
The Carmelite friar Thomas Fishlake almost cetainly knew Walter Hilton in Cambridge and Ely when Hilton was writing the two-book work that has come to be known as The Scale of Perfection in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Fishlake’s Latin translation of the Scale must have been made soon after Hilton’s death in 1396: the earliest manuscript, made by one Carmelite confrère of Fishlake for another, predates any manuscript of the original English text, and the title, Scala Perfectionis, first occurs in the Latin manuscript tradition.
Fishlake’s Latin version of the Scale is a good example of the kind of literal, word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase translation that was often characteristic of the period, comparable to his Carmelite confrère Richard Misyn’s English version of two other classic works of fourteenth century mystical writing in England, Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae and Incendium amoris. The Fishlake’s translation is close enough, in fact, that the textual variations of the English manuscript upon which it was based can be read through his Latin word choices and phrasing––which provides a useful control on the editorial construction of Hilton’s original English text, for Fishlake’s translation was based on a manuscript whose text was not the same as that of any surviving English copy.
But Fishlake chose to emphasize different themes than Hilton did, making his text generally more devotional and Christocentric than the original, and, at one particular point, strengthening the force of Hilton’s defense of auricular confession by omitting a paragraph of ironic rhetorical concession––a rhetorical strategy that is characteristic of Hilton’s style. The difference in semantic and rhetorical agendas between Hilton’s original text and Fishlake’s version will be the subject of this paper.
“Volgarizzare (latinizzare) e tradurre”: A Presentation of the ERC Project “Bilingualism in Florentine and Tuscan Works (ca. 1260 - ca.1416)”
Antonio Montefusco
BIFLOW (Bilingualism in Florentine and Tuscan Works (ca. 1260 – ca. 1416) is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 2014 – 637533) and hosted by the University of Venice – Ca’ Foscari and the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Paris.
The project will undertake the first systematic investigation of the various literary documents that circulated simultaneously in more than one language in Tuscany, and especially in Florence, between the mid-13th Century and the beginning of 15th Century.
During that period, Florence was both a prominent centre for vernacular literature, and home to a renewal of classical Latin eloquence. While both fields are well studied, their interaction remains largely unexplored.
This research, at the crossroad of several disciplines (literature, philology, linguistics and medieval history), has a strong pioneering character. It aims at reshaping our comprehension of Medieval Italian culture and of its passage to Humanism.
Readers of Sermon Collections with Vernacular Glosses in Hungary
Farkas Kiss
My paper will discuss the practices of vernacular Hungarian glossing in sermon collections from 15th century. While the first sermon collection written entirely in vernacular survives only from the early 16th century, there exist a few sermon cycles with Hungarian glosses from the 15th century, both manuscript and printed. In this lecture, I will focus on a peculiar collection of Sunday sermons, which survives in two copies (Budapest, University Library, Cod. Lat. 98., and Franciscan Library, Cod. med. 8.). The collection seems to have originated from Southern Hungary, the diocese of Pécs, and was probably compiled by a cleric in 1456, soon after the visit of St John Capestrano to the region. While the Latin text is central in both sermon collections, the vernacular glossing is graphically highlighted and often coincides in both copies. As both surviving cycles seem to be copies of an earlier manuscript, and both of them written by single scribes, I will discuss the activity of the scribes as an act of vernacular reading. What were their strategies when they were rephrasing the vernacular glosses to the sermon collections? What were their preferences in selecting the words and expressions to be glossed during their scribal work? Were they supplementing the glosses according to their own needs, or were they selecting from a larger pool of earlier annotations? Finally, what kind of conclusions can we draw about the vernacular performance of the sermons, based on these notes?