The Legend of St. Elizabeth of Hungary of the Legenda Aurea and Its
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Eszter Konrád THE LEGEND OF ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY OF THE LEGENDA AUREA AND ITS VERNACULAR ADAPTATIONS MA Thesis in Medieval Studies CEU eTD Collection Central European University Budapest May 2011 i THE LEGEND OF ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY OF THE LEGENDA AUREA AND ITS VERNACULAR ADAPTATIONS by Eszter Konrád (Hungary) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner ____________________________________________ CEU eTD Collection Examiner Budapest May 2011 ii THE LEGEND OF ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY OF THE LEGENDA AUREA AND ITS VERNACULAR ADAPTATIONS by Eszter Konrád (Hungary) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ____________________________________________ External Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2011 iii THE LEGEND OF ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY OF THE LEGENDA AUREA AND ITS VERNACULAR ADAPTATIONS by Eszter Konrád (Hungary) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU ________________________ Supervisor ____________________________________________ External Supervisor CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2011 iv I, the undersigned, Eszter Konrád, candidate for the MA degree in Medieval Studies declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person‟s or institution‟s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 25 May 2011 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Gábor Klaniczay not only for his helpful comments and his unfailing support but also for the wide range of readings he recommended for me during the past nine month. I am also grateful to Edit Madas for the helpful suggestions she gave me about late medieval legendaries. I would like to say thanks to Judith Rasson and Anna Somfai for their accurate corrections and useful comments on my work. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my former supervisor Dávid Falvay, through whom I got acquainted with the cult of saints and hagiography, whose help provided the basis for this paper. CEU eTD Collection vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY AND HER EARLY HAGIOGRAPHY 4 1.1 The Short Biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary ....................................................... 4 1.2 The Thirteenth-Century Vitae ...................................................................................... 7 1.3 The Dominican Abbreviationes and the Legenda Aurea ........................................... 15 1.4 The Composition of the Legenda Aurea .................................................................... 17 1.5 De sancta Elizabeth.................................................................................................... 19 1.6 The Diffusion of the Legendary: The Vernacular Translations and Adaptations ...... 22 CHAPTER TWO: THE ITALIAN TRADITION .................................................................... 27 2.1 The Diffusion and the Use of the Legenda Aurea in Italy ......................................... 27 2.2 A Comparison of the Three Versions of the Legend of St. Elizabeth........................ 30 CHAPTER THREE: THE LIFE OF ST. ELIZABETH IN MIDDLE ENGLISH ................... 45 3.1 Middle English Hagiography and the Legenda Aurea ............................................... 46 3.2 Osbern Bokenham and the Legendys of Hooly Wummen .......................................... 51 CHAPTER FOUR: THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN TRADITION.......................................... 74 4.1 The Czech Tradition ................................................................................................... 74 4.2 The Old Czech Pasional ............................................................................................ 75 4.3 The Hungarian Tradition ............................................................................................ 81 4.4 The Anonymous Carthusian and the Érdy Codex ...................................................... 86 4.5 “Dicsőséges Szent Erzsébet Asszonnak Innepéről” – On the Feast of the Glorious Lady Saint Elizabeth .................................................................................................. 89 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 100 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 104 Appendix One: The Italian Translations of the Legenda Aurea Based on the Research of Paolo Mariani ......................................................................................................................... 117 Appendix Two: The Description of MS Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana I. 115 Inf. and the Transcription of “La legenda de santa Elisabeth” ff.22v-35r ................................................. 118 CEU eTD Collection Appendix Three: The Description of MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Magliabechiano XXXVIII. 74 and the Transcription of the “Legenda di Santa Elisabet” ff.9r- 26v .......................................................................................................................................... 134 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Printed editions of the Legenda Aurea in the late medieval and early modern period. CEU eTD Collection viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BAI: Biblioteca agiografica italiana: Repertorio di testi e manoscritti, secoli XIII–XV. Ed. Jacques Dalarun, Lino Leonardi, Maria Teresa Dinale, Beatrice Fedi, Giovanna Frosini. 2 vols. Florence: Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL): Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2003. BHL: Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. 4 vols. Subsidia hagiographica 6, 12 and 70. Brussels: Société des Bollnadistes, 1898-1986. CEU eTD Collection ix INTRODUCTION “It was a wretched act that he did not write either about Stephen, or Ladislaus, or Emeric, only about Elizabeth” – scolded at the author of the Legenda Aurea a sixteenth- century Hungarian user of the legendary. In fact, St. Elizabeth was the only Hungarian saint whose legend was included in the most famous collection of abridged saints‟ lives. She was perhaps the most influential representative of the late medieval female saintly ideal whose life served as a model for a number of queens and princesses. Despite the great number of hagiographical accounts written about her life and miracles, it was the Legenda Aurea through which her saintly example became known all over Europe. James of Varazze‟s Legenda Aurea, composed in the second half of the thirteenth century, was the most famous work among the new genre of the Dominican legendae novae that radically transformed the Western hagiographic traditions. Originally these collections of abbreviationes were written in Latin and intended primarily for the preachers of the mendicant orders as ancillary source for sermons, but due to the rapidly growing number of laypeople who sought to engage in an active devotional life, these legendaries were soon translated in the vernacular, thus hagiography came into direct contact with people from all social groups. The same happened to James of Varazze‟s legendary, too. Roughly 150 years after its compilation, there were translations and adaptations of the Legenda Aurea in almost all the major European languages. Despite the rich literature on the formation of the Legenda Aurea and on its Latin CEU eTD Collection manuscript tradition, only in the past few decades have scholars started the systematic research into its various vernacular branches. Due to the high number of the saints‟ lives contained in the legendary, considerably less attention has been paid to the individual legends. The aim of my thesis is to examine how James of Varazze‟s legend on St. Elizabeth 1 was adapted into the Italian, English, Czech and Hungarian vernaculars in order to find answers for the following questions: In what environment and for what audience were these adaptations made? What are the most significant changes in the vernacular versions compared to the original and what are their possible motifs? I started to deal with the vita of Elizabeth from the Legenda Aurea a few years ago. I wrote my MA thesis at Eötvös Loránd University about its two Italian volgarizzamenti and this aroused my interest in examining the adaptations of her legend