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Page 1 of 2

The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500

  • 4 - Printing: Humanism and the Renaissance

  • from Part I - The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan
  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 123-154

  • Summary

    As noted in Chapter 2, towards the end of the fourteenth century royal servants – chancery scribes and secretaries – gradually adopted a more polished style in both Latin and Catalan, occasionally modelled on Cicero. Official correspondence in Latin was the most important task of those responsible for secular administration, such as the royal secretary Bernat Metge, whom we have already encountered (pp. 54–6 and 93–8). A good example of the way in which Metge engages with Cicero is provided by a Latin letter of 17 October 1408 written on behalf of King Martin to the councillors of the Sardinian town of Oristano, whose support the monarch is eager to secure in his fight against William II of Narbonne (Taylor 2012: 137–9). Here Metge's style adopts several features typical of the Roman orator. One key characteristic of Ciceronian style is the use of periodic sentences, a device imitated by Metge from the outset. The first two sentences, comprising twelve lines, include a series of subordinate clauses (relative, conditional, and participial phrases), which allow the text to unfold gradually. In the opening sentence the main idea is emphasized by being placed at the end:

    Quanta conceperimus alacritate animique quiete, quantoque mentis jubilo, quantaque cordis aviditate laudabiles actus vestros […], lingua vix seu calamo exprimere valeremus.

    (With how much alacrity and tranquillity, with how much joy, with how much eagerness of the heart we have received your honourable deeds […], we shall barely be able to express with our tongue or our pen.)

    Throughout his epistle Metge resorts to parallel structures, chiefly through tripartite sentences: ‘Venit enim tempus quo fletus vester in gaudium, planctus in plausum, et in libertatem captivitas redigetur’ (‘A time will come in which your tears will turn into joy, your lamentations into applause, and into liberty your captivity’). The style is additive, often by means of rhetorical questions: ‘Ubi est deus tuus? Ubi latitat? Ubi dormit?’ (‘Where is your god? Where is he hiding? Where is he sleeping?’).

    In the course of their daily work, these dictatores commonly resorted to compilations of extracts from other writings. A good example is a Latin florilegium included in Montserrat, MS 981, which features collections of sentences from classical authors (Livy, Plato, Ptolemy) and writers on spiritual matters (Bernard of Clairvaux), as well as a series of mnemonic devices.

  • Preface

  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp ix-xii

  • Summary

    In 1889 Antoni Rubió i Lluch published The Classical Renaissance in Catalan Literature (El renacimiento clásico en la literatura catalana), the speech he gave to mark his admission to the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres of Barcelona. This institution, born in 1700 as an Enlightenment salon, was, by the end of the nineteenth century, bringing together scholars intent on restoring knowledge of early Catalan literature as part of a broader plan, dubbed the Renaixença (Renaissance), to revive Catalan as a literary language. Modern Romance philology had come to be studied at the University of Barcelona – and indeed in the Iberian Peninsula – thanks to Manuel Milà i Fontanals. Rubió i Lluch had been one of his star pupils, a classmate of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the head of the school of Spanish Philology. In his early thirties and with his Hellenistic education, Rubió i Lluch wanted to use his speech at what was at the time the most distinguished Catalan academic institution to point out that the history of Catalan medieval literature not only owed a debt to the wealth of Romance-language literature, to troubadour poetry, and to chivalric romance, but also that it had roots in the classical tradition and its subsequent revival in Renaissance Italy.

    This volume is ultimately the progeny of Rubió i Lluch's speech. First and foremost, it provides an overarching vision of the presence of the classical tradition in medieval Catalan literature, drawing on the output of more than a century of academic research. In 1904 Rubió i Lluch began a course of university studies in Catalan (Estudis Universitaris Catalans) to run in parallel with the official ones in Spanish. He was the first in an unbroken chain of academics continuing until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, from Lluís Nicolau d'Olwer to Martí de Riquer, and including his son Jordi Rubió i Balaguer among many others, who had the privilege to discover – quite literally – some of the treasures of medieval Catalan literature. Their research benefitted from studies on Italian influences by Mario Casella, Arturo Farinelli, and Bernardo Sanvisenti.

  • 2 - Literacy: Translations and Royal Patronage

  • from Part I - The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan
  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 29-92

  • Summary

    This chapter describes three centuries, from the start of the reign of the first count-king, Alfonso, in 1162 until the death of Crown Prince Charles, the son of John II, in 1461. Our description weaves together various threads of the cultural history of the Crown: the literacy of the royal family and the nobility, and their familiarity with Occitan, French, and Latin; the impact of this on literary output (poetry, historiography, oratory) and the promotion of translations; and the emergence of authors, almost always connected with the royal court, who wrote original works in Catalan that display their knowledge of the classical tradition. We turn our attention to the works of five such authors, works undertaken between 1399 and 1464, in more detail in Chapter 3. The reigns of John II (1458–79) and Ferdinand II (1479–1516) are covered in a separate chapter, Chapter 4, as that is when we see the emergence of Latin humanism and vernacular texts that derive directly from it, and when the advent of the printing press provided greater access to culture.

    Royal Literature and the First Translations (1162–c. 1360)

    The establishment of the Crown in the second half of the twelfth century coincides with the first clear signs of royal literacy and of a wide-reaching cultural initiative. Scholars talk of an ‘Alfonsine period’ in troubadour poetry because King Alfonso I (r. 1162–96) welcomed many troubadours in his Catalan– Occitan domains, and used their poetry as a political tool in his fight with the Count of Toulouse. His enthusiam for this literary form thus created a cultural bridge between the two sides of his kingdom (M. Cabré 2013: 227–34). He wrote poetry himself, and must have acquired a certain prestige from his debate with one of the poets he supported, Giraut de Bornelh, a scholar poet dubbed the ‘master of the troubadours’ in his thirteenth-century biography or vida. From the time of Alfonso I the promotion and practice of troubadour poetry became a distinctive feature of the royal house and by extension of the nobility and the court: many members of the royal family wrote poetry and composed music until the end of the fourteenth century (Cluzel 1957–8; Espadaler 2001).

  • Descriptive Catalogue

  • from Part II - Catalogue of Translations to 1500
  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 161-224

  • Summary

    Classical Antiquity

    Alexander (the legend of)

    ➀ Collatio Alexandri Magni cum Dindimo rege Bragmanorum de philosophia per litteras facta (5th or 6th century AD)

  • • Greek? > Latin > Catalan

  • • The origins of this correspondence lie in the debate between Alexander and the Brahmins, transmitted in Greek and Latin in a variety of witnesses, among which is the so-called Commonitorium Palladii, a text attributed to Palladius of Galatia, Bishop of Helenopolis (4th–5th century ad). The Collatio takes its inspiration from a passage in the Commonitorium in which King Dindimus pledges to write to Alexander (Ross 1963: 30–2). The epistolary exchange consists of five letters: three, including the opening and closing ones, from Alexander, the other two from Dindimus. Apart from this version, which can be found independently or at times appended to Julius Valerius's Epitome, there are two further versions: one of these (Collatio III; →➁ below, Leo of Naples) is interpolated in the Historia de preliis and is the source for T2. For the reception of the legend of Alexander in all European literatures (except Catalan) see Gaullier-Bougassas (2014).

    • T1 Lletres d'Alexandre el Gran al rei Dídimo (Jaume Domènec op, 1384)

    The Catalan translation stems from the abridged Latin version included in Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum historiale, which adds a further letter at the beginning of the text to the five gathered in the Collatio (Ivars 1928: 157). In Vincent's text this letter is from the Brahmins to Alexander, but in the Catalan translation it is from King Dindimus, as is clear from the manuscript rubric (Ivars 1928: 161). Ivars dated this text to the mid-15th century (1928: 159), unaware that it was an excerpt from Jaume Domènec's late 14th-century Compendi historial (→VINCENT OF BEAUVAIS).

    MS. Madrid, BNE, MS 7811, fols 465v–469, s. XV4/4 – s. XVI1/2 / s. XVIin (Villar 1995: 155) (Manid 1565)

    MOD. ED. Ivars (1928)

    BIBL. Riquer (1934b: 93); Rubió i Balaguer (1949–58: III, 832)

    T2 Lletres d'Alexandre a Dídamo rei dels brangians

    Related to the Collatio III, it is interspersed in the Historia de preliis (→➁ below, Leo of Naples).

  • 1 - Historical Background

  • from Part I - The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan
  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 3-28

  • Summary

    The Catalan-Speaking Lands, between the North and the South

    The northeastern reaches of modern-day Catalonia have long been a transitional frontier land, a strategic crossroads, the gateway between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the continent. From pre-Roman times to the present day, the population of this region has been nourished by migration, both from the north and from the south. Its culture has also been shaped by its access to the Mediterranean, since the golden age of Phoenician trade and the establishment of the Greek colonies of Emporion around 600 bc and later Rhode (modern-day Empúries and Roses), and in particular since the start of the Roman conquest of the Peninsula in 218 BC, when Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio landed at Empúries to cut off Hannibal's supply lines during the Second Punic War. Marching southwards, Scipio established a camp at Tarraco (Tarragona), which in due course became a colony, and then, in Augustus's time, the capital of a Roman province which included several towns, still important urban centres in presentday Catalonia: Gerunda (Girona), Iluro (Mataró), Baetulo (Badalona), Barcino (Barcelona), Ausa (Vic), Ilerda (Lleida), and Dertosa (Tortosa) (see Map 1). Some of these towns became bishoprics and, with the institutionalization of Christianity in the early fourth century, Tarraco the archbishopric. The profound Romanization and Christianization of this region persisted during the Visigothic period until the early eighth century. The subsequent Islamic conquest of the Peninsula lasted in the northeastern part of what would become Catalonia for less than a century. In these lands, Latin gave way to Catalan, a Romance language closely related to Occitan – the language spoken from Limoges to the Pyrenees and from Bordeaux to Nice in the southern half of modern-day France. From then until the fifteenth century, Catalan evolved naturally and its written form matured as a vernacular language, with Latin remaining the high-status language of culture.

    Catalonia's strategic location has played a key role in its history. Over the centuries that location explains the settlement of new populations, the frequent incursions, the northward emigrations of the native population, and the industrial and commercial activity of a region that is well connected, but has limited natural resources.

  • 3 - Imitation: The Classical Tradition in the Works of Five Major Authors

  • from Part I - The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan
  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 93-122

  • Summary

    The influence of classical Latin literature can be seen in the works of five major Catalan medieval authors. In previous chapters we have provided the historical context; in this chapter we highlight just some of the aspects that demonstrate the capacity of medieval authors to create a new literature in the vernacular from their knowledge of classical texts.

    Bernat Metge: Taking Petrarch's Secretum as a Model

    Bernat Metge, John I's secretary, wrote his most mature work after serving as ambassador to the papal curia in Avignon from early February to early April 1395. King John sent letters of recommendation for his ambassadors to Benedict XIII, to several cardinals, and to Juan Fernández de Heredia (Riquer 1959: *227–8). It was during Metge's sojourn in Avignon that he must have had the opportunity to access works by Cicero and above all Petrarch, such as the Epistulae familiares (Letters on Familiar Matters) and the Secretum (The Secret). Shortly after his return, he wrote an Apologia (Apology), of which only the very beginning survives, truncated mid-sentence, in a fifteenth-century manuscript. This fragment contains the preface and the first exchanges of a conversation between Bernat and his friend Ramon, in the style of the Ciceronian dialogues that were such an influence on Petrarch's Secretum and De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul), without verba dicendi. Metge explains in the preface, addressing the book:

    To spare tedium to those who will read thee, I want that neither ‘said he’ or ‘said I’ be found in thee, but only Ramon and Bernat, for those are the names of my friend and myself. The Ancients used this style, especially Plato in Timaeus, Cicero in the Tusculan Questions, and Petrarch in the Remedies against either Fortune and elsewhere.

    In the previous paragraph, Metge takes inspiration from the introduction of the Secretum to define his work: in writing ‘so that I should not forget them [i.e. the matters that Bernat and Ramon discussed] […] I have decided to commit to thee, my little book which I want to name Apology’, he is adapting ‘So that such an intimate conversation as this might not be lost, I decided to set it down in writing […] So you, little book […] do not forget your own name. For I shall call you My Secret.

  • Appendix 1 - Italian Renaissance: Printed Editions, 1473–1535

  • Lluís Cabré, Alejandro Coroleu, Montserrat Ferrer, Albert Lloret, Josep Pujol
  • Book:
    The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    03 July 2019
    Print publication:
    16 February 2018, pp 225-226

  • Summary

    This appendix includes all known editions of Italian Latin humanist works printed in the Crown of Aragon between 1473 and 1535.

    Texts are divided by genre. Authors are arranged in alphabetical order. Bibliographical information has been kept to a minimum and we merely give details of printer, and year and place of publication.

    Grammar and Rhetoric

    Agostino Dati, Elegantiolae, Valencia, Lambertus Palmart, 1473 and Nicolaus Spindeler, 1498; Lleida, Henricus Botel, 1485 and 1488; Zaragoza, Johannes Hurus, 1481 and 1488

    Stefano Fieschi, Synonyma variationum sententiarum eleganti stilo constructa ex Italico sermone in Valentinum, Valencia, Cristofferus Koffman, 1502

    Francesco Negro, De modo epistolandi, Barcelona, Johannes Rosembach, 1493, 1494 and 1495; Valencia, Nicolaus Spindeler, 1500

    Niccolò Perotti, Rudimenta grammatices, Barcelona, Johannes de Salzburga, 1475; Tortosa, Nicolaus Spindeler, 1477

    Giovanni Sulpizio, Examen grammaticale, Zaragoza, Paulus Hurus, 1481

    —— De arte grammatica, Barcelona, Pere Miquel, 1491

    Poetry

    Publio Fausto Andrelini, Disticha, Zaragoza, Jorge Coci, 1535 (an appendix to an edition of Verinus, see below)

    Mantuan, Parthenice Mariana … cum Andreae Vaurentini singulorum librorum descriptionibus, Barcelona, Duran Salvanyac, 1525 and Carles Amorós, 1526

    —— Parthenice secunda quae et Catharinaria inscribitur additis Vaurentini argumentis et annotationibus ab Ascensio familiariter exposita, Barcelona, Carles Amorós, c. 1529

    Peter Martyr, Poemata, Valencia, Ioannes Vignaus, 1520

    Giovanni Pontano, De divinis laudibus, Barcelona, Johannes Luschner, 1498.

    Michele verino, michaelis verini disticha sive sententiae morales … with giovanni sulpizio, de moribus puerorum carmen iuvenile …

  • Challenging the links between seafood and human health in the context of global change

  • Josep Lloret, Hans-Joachim Rätz, Jordi Lleonart, Montserrat Demestre
  • Journal:
    Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom / Volume 96 / Issue 1 / February 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 December 2015, pp. 29-42
    • Article
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  • Living marine resources have strong links with human health and well-being that are complex, still not well understood and that are being modified by global change. This review attempts to illustrate how fishing activities, aquaculture and climate change are challenging these connections and the consequent health risks and benefits posed to citizens. Although global change may provide some positive aspects for human health locally, such as new sources of omega-3, overall it will exacerbate existing seafood security and safety concerns. Unsustainable fishing and aquaculture practices, and climate change, particularly sea warming, ocean acidification and changes in riverine runoff, are threatening not only the protein and fish oil/omega-3 supplies available for consumers, but also raising ecological and health concerns associated with the increase of contaminants, microbes and biotoxins. In this context, we propose a number of management measures that could mitigate the negative effects of global change on seafood, and hence on human health and well-being.

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