Thursday 16th March 11:15—12:45, Session 2
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Authors and Readers 3 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 2 |
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Moderator: |
Martin Haltrich |
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Paper 1: |
Building the Perfect Text – Corrections, Adjustments and Marginalia in Late Medieval Lichtenthal Manuscripts |
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Paper 2: |
Translating Latin in the Medieval North: Agnesar saga and its Readership |
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Paper 3: |
Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare MS 177’s Expert Community of Reader-Translators |
Building the Perfect Text – Corrections, Adjustments and Marginalia in Late Medieval Lichtenthal Manuscripts
Astrid Breith
The 15th century manuscripts of the Cistercian Monastery Lichtenthal are widely regarded to give exceptional evidence of reformed monastic spirituality. The following paper draws attention to palaeographic aspects of a set of books, written between 1440 an 1480. Deriving from Lichtenthal’s own scriptorium, each manuscript holds numerous corrections and marginalia. An analysis of these notes between the lines and on the margin will show the professional and skilful editorial practice of its scribe, the famous sister Regula: her corrections, adjustments and marginalia help to tailor the texts to the needs of its audience. A focus of the paper will be put on the practice of translation used by sister Regula.
Translating Latin in the Medieval North: Agnesar saga and its Readership
Maria Teresa Ramandi
Agnesar saga is the Old Norse-Icelandic translation of the Latin legend of St Agnes (BHL 156a). The text is preserved in the Icelandic manuscripts AM 238 I (c. 1300), AM 238 II (1300-1350), AM 233a fol. (1350-1375), AM 235 (c. 1400), Stock. Perg. fol. 2 (c. 1425-1445), AM 238 fol. XV(c. 1450) and AM 429 12mo (c. 1500) and survives in four different versions. Only the first of these versions, hereby referred to as Agnesar saga meyjar I (AM 238 I, Stock. Perg. fol. 2, AM 235 and AM 429 12mo), is representative of the original translation of the Latin text, whereas the other three versions appear to be later rewritings of version I, aimed at tailoring the text to different audiences and purposes.
This paper focuses on Agnesar saga meyjar I and its readership. Although Agnesar saga, as the majority of Icelandic sagas is anonymous, an analysis of the translation itself and a comparison with its Latin source will offer invaluable insights into the translator’s background, the aim of his translation, as well as into the relationship between the translated text and its readership. Furthermore, an in-depth examination of the Icelandic translator’s choices in rendering the source text into the target language, which often entail a certain degree of cultural adaptation of the original text, despite aiming at a close rendering of the source, will show how the main concern of the Icelandic translator was to create a text that could be completely understood by his audience both in terms of language (choice of the socalled popular style) and in terms of content (cultural adaptation).
Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare MS 177’s Expert Community of Reader-Translators
Juliette Vuille
The late ninth-century manuscript Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare MS 177 contains a copy of Justinus’ epitome of the Philippic History by Pompeius Trogus. The manuscript’s last folio was left blank by the Justinus scribe, and is used shortly after by another scribe to append three more short Latin texts to the epitome: a Sphere of Life and Death - an onomantic text whereby one can divine whether a sick person is to survive his or her illness, a purification recipe for the possessed, and a fragmentary contraception ritual.
Each of these texts implies a community of readers well-versed in a mixture of para-liturgical and medico-magical knowledge that some scholars would still deem folkloric or popular, and whose value is often belittled in comparison to “purely” religious or scientific matter by both medieval and modern academics. However, each text presents a challenge for the reader, necessitating a specialized knowledge in some form of translation that will enable him to access the text’s meaning. Indeed, the Sphere of Life and Death involves the conversion of the patient’s name into numbers, the purification recipe contains some instructions in Greek, and the contraception ritual uses a substitution cypher for its incantation. The readership for these texts becomes de facto limited by the element of active, specialized, translation they require in order to be read, an attribute that may well have constituted the reason these passages were inserted together on the last folio of Vercelli MS 177.
This paper shall investigate the type of knowledge needed to make sense of these texts, and shall reflect on the audience that this last folio implicitly addresses, commenting on the projected readers’ identity and level of education. This question is rendered even more intriguing by the fact that, uniquely, the *Sphere of Life and Death *presents evidence of use. Someone converted his or another person’s name into numbers, writing these down on the margins of the folio, enabling the modern scholar to “translate” it back into letters. The contemporary reader therefore enters into dialogue with the medieval texts and their medieval reader, forming a community of translators who respond to the text by actively transforming it.