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THE XII CARDIFF CONFERENCE ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES THE MEDIEVAL TRANSLATOR FRAGMENTATION AND INCLUSION MEDIEVAL TRANSLATION IN BETWEEN Bologna, 22 – 25 June 2021 Abstracts Daniele Arnesano – Marco Maggiore (CNR Opera del Vocabolario Italiano – Firenze) La traduzione salentina in caratteri greci del commento alle Sentenze morali di Gregorio di Nazianzo (sec. XIV) Il manoscritto Vaticano Greco 2252, copiato in Terra d’Otranto nel Trecento, conserva uno dei più notevoli testi di traduzione del Mezzogiorno medievale. Il codice trasmette un’opera patristica di amplissima circolazione nel mondo bizantino, le Sentenze morali in tetrastici di Gregorio di Nazianzo (329-390 ca.). Tuttavia, in modo del tutto eccezionale, in questo codice i versi del Nazianzeno sono inframezzati da lunghe sequenze di commento in prosa, che alternano passaggi in greco alle rispettive traduzioni in volgare salentino, reso anch’esso in grafia greca. L’impiego dei caratteri greci per scrivere testi romanzi nell’Italia meridionale estrema non rappresenta certamente una novità: a partire dal seminale studio di Pagliaro (1948) sulla formula di confessione meridionale conservata in un codice dell’Abbazia greca di Grottaferrata, numerosi contributi si sono consacrati all’edizione e allo studio dei cosiddetti testi “greco-romanzi” scritti in Sicilia, Calabria, Basilicata e Salento (alcune scoperte testuali significative sono presentate da Arnesano / Baldi 2004), consentendo un ampliamento delle conoscenze sulle lingue e le culture del Mezzogiorno medievale (per un consuntivo critico cfr. Basile 2013 e Maggiore 2017). La traduzione trasmessa dal codice Vaticano, tuttavia, rappresenta un unicum sotto diversi aspetti: non si tratta, come avviene per la maggior parte dei documenti greco-romanzi conosciuti, di una scrittura avventizia eseguita sui fogli di guardia o sui margini di un codice bizantino, bensì di un testo che, considerato nella sua alternanza strutturale fra sezioni in greco e sezioni vernacolari, si estende per oltre 150 carte. Si tratta inoltre della traduzione vernacolare di un testo greco, caso assai raro nel medioevo italiano (i volgarizzamenti italoromanzi dipendono normalmente da modelli latini o romanzi: cfr. Frosini 2014, 20-58). Scoperto da André Jacob e Rocco Distilo (cfr. Distilo 1995, 220-221), il codice Vaticano è rimasto finora inedito: in vista dell’allestimento dell’edizione critica e di uno studio filologico e linguistico, ci proponiamo pertanto in questa sede di esporre i primi risultati di un’indagine complessiva sull’esemplare. Saranno presi in esame, in prima istanza, i caratteri paleografici e testuali del codice, così come il problema delle fonti esegetiche del commento all’opera del Nazianzeno. Su un altro piano, saranno presentati i motivi di interesse del testo per gli studi (italo)romanzi: oltre che per gli aspetti inerenti all’operazione traduttiva, le sezioni vernacolari si segnalano per essere il più significativo campione testuale del salentino trecentesco, mettendo a disposizione una promettente messe di materiali linguistici interamente da esplorare (sul salentino antico, i cui campioni testuali principali in caratteri latini risalgono al Quattrocento, cfr. Sgrilli 1983 e Maggiore 2016). 1 I sondaggi che presenteremo in questa sede renderanno ragione dell’importanza del manoscritto, al netto dello stato di conservazione non ottimale e delle difficoltà interpretative poste dal testo, in quanto significativo documento della cultura religiosa e letteraria del Mezzogiorno bizantino e del contatto linguistico greco-romanzo nel Mediterraneo. Sarah Baccianti (Queen University – Belfast) Reception, Translation and Transmission of the Materia Medica in Medieval Scandinavia This paper reflects on the reception and transmission of medical knowledge in Medieval Scandinavia. By looking at literary, historical and legal texts I want to provide an overview of the knowledge of medicine, of the vocabulary used in relation to it as how the subject is approached in these texts. I will reveal how the North was deeply interested in knowledge harvested from England, but also from continental Europe and the Middle East, and highlight the extent to which Early Scandinavia was both trans-national and trans-cultural. In this paper I link studies of northern literature and culture, which have become somewhat isolated within the main currents of medieval literary studies, and offer a pan- European angle on a field of research that hitherto has excluded the North. I will investigate the transmission, temporal and geographical dissemination, and the cultural, as well as scientific impact, of texts by Bede, Isidore of Seville, Greek and Middle Eastern philosophers and physicians, including the physicians of the Salerno School. Between 1150 and 1300, medical knowledge in Scandinavia mainly derived and was influenced by the Corpus Hippocraticum and the Schola Medica Salernitana, before relying on the works of Henry Harpestræng’s Urtebogen / Liber Herbarum (early 13th century) – which comprises translations from Macer's De Virus Herbarum (c. 1090) and Constantine Africanus's De Gradibus Liber (c. 1090) of the Salerno School. Ultimately, this paper explores the routes of cultural and scientific exchanges across Europe, analysing a particular set of texts within a broader historical and scientific context, and drawing on the historical influences and shared understandings between North and South Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East in the early Middle Ages. Catherine Batt (University of Leeds) The Miroir pur bien vivre and its Manuscript Contexts: Translation, Compilation and Vernacularity. The Miroir pur bien vivre is an unedited and hitherto un-studied, possibly earlier fourteenth-century, c. 45,000-word Anglo-Norman text of spiritual consolation and instruction, which survives uniquely in an early fifteenth-century manuscript, British Library Royal 20 B. III. This manuscript also contains three Anglo-Norman poems: ‘A Prayer for Salvation’ (fols 90a-92d); ‘A Song to the Virgin’ (fols 92d-96b); and ‘A Prayer to the Virgin and Christ’ (fols 96b-98b). The latter is the only text for which there are (incomplete) witnesses in other manuscripts (Cambridge, St John’s College G.5 [173] and London, BL Additional 44949), and Charity Scott Stokes has identified it as the source of Hoccleve’s ‘Balade to the Virgin and Christ’. The Royal manuscript’s origins are unknown, but a 1542 inventory of Henry VIII’s books records the library originally had two copies of the text (and that this surviving copy was apparently out on loan). Whether or not the Miroir is a translation of an originally Latin text is a moot point. It appears to have been written by an older man of religion for a younger. The self-declaredly spiritually abject narrator, having declared himself unfit to offer the spiritual comfort his fellow requests of him, nevertheless goes on to supply an account of divine love and of the Trinity, in the course of which he expounds inter alia on the sacraments, the orders of angels, the tears of compunction, the Passover and the book of Exodus, the seven deadly sins, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the beauty of 2 prayer, drawing, often in florilegium fashion, on a broad if typical range of writings, from scripture and the works of Augustine and Gregory to Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, with ample quotations from the Latin sources, while other sources it does not acknowledge. Both the Miroir and the Royal manuscript poems employ powerful tropes and metaphors to shape their readers’ spiritual awareness, not least in their figuring of sin, compunction and forgiveness in terms of bodily wounds and medical ministration. The trope of the sinner as a wounded body, with Christ as physician, is foundationally important to a language of spiritual selfhood, and evident in Latin, Middle English, French and Anglo-Norman devotional and homiletic texts available in late-medieval England. This paper will draw out some of the imagery at play in the four Royal MS texts, imagery it has in common with other texts in circulation – for example, the work of Walter Hilton and of Hoccleve – to identify how devotional and spiritually instructional material in different languages may cross-fertilise and inter-relate in an insular polyglot context. It will also consider the effects of collocating these works in one manuscript, and investigate what can be further gleaned about its provenance, to ask what kind of audience there was for Anglo-Norman devotional literature into the fifteenth century and beyond; on this evidence, is the choice of vernacular for spiritual purposes simply pragmatic, or reflective of education or class? Or does the act of translation primarily constitute devotional practice? Maud Becker (Aberystwyth University) Procédés de formation lexicale dans les premières traductions en ancien français : traces d’une formation cléricale ? L’exemple de Philippe de Thaon et de Sanson de Nanteuil Avec l’établissement d’une dynastie normande en Angleterre a émergé une littérature vernaculaire francophone, vraisemblablement stimulée par la stature de la langue anglo-saxonne comme langue de transmission du savoir, parallèlement au latin. Un certain nombre de textes vernaculaires apparaissant durant le 12e siècle sont des traductions, montrant un des premiers efforts d’élévation de la langue française à la fonction de langue de savoir, effort qui passe par l’adhésion à la forme versifiée et par l’élaboration d’un lexique qui