We’ve just published volume 9 of our yearbook Magnificat Cultura i Literatura Medievals.
Another intense year for our journal now culminates in fourteen excellent contributions to this new issue, distributed in both a miscellaneous and a monograph section in memoriam of the late romanist, Professor Gemma Avenoza.
This is what you’ll find in our miscellaneous section:
Sergi Grau Torras, Stefano M. Cingolani, and Robert Álvarez Masalias annotate and edit an inquisitorial handbook, Consultationes per dominum Petrum, written in 1241 by Archbishop of Tarragona Pere d’Albalat with the advice of Ramon de Penyafort. A must for Inquisition studies in the Crown of Aragon.
Glòria Ribugent deals with the Tractat de les mules (‘Treatise on mules’), a veterinary work written in Catalan between 1424 and 1436 by Manuel Díez, knight of Alfonso V the Magnanimous, king of Aragon. Its complex textual history, and the inaccurate, anachronistic consideration of this work as plagiarism are reviewed.
Roger Boase, our most faithful author, proposes this year his study of an exchange of verses between Antonio de Velasco and his cousin Fadrique Enríquez, Admiral of Castile, published in the 1514 edition of the Cancionero general, concerning an erotic joust between a court lady and her six suitors, identifying the said lady here and in the Carajicomedia, and discussing her Jewish converso relatives.
Arnau Vives Piñas‘s is our digital humanities’s contribution in this issue: he examines the diachrony of the evolution of Ramon Llull’s famous imatge of amic i amat through thirty years and twenty-three books, from the Liber contemplationis (1273-74) to the Ars brevis (1308). His analysis is undertaken from his preparation of a conceptually lemmatised database (the Corpus Digital d’Amic i Amat, CDAIA), and suggests a new interpretation of the meaning of this image in Llull’s production and thought.
Marina Navàs Farré edits, documents and thoroughly contextualises a previously unpublished poem by Joan Sist –a priest from València– copied in a 16th-century manuscript. She establishes the event for which it was composed as the royal entry into the city of València of the monarch Martí I of Aragon, queen Maria de Luna, and their new daughter-in-law, Blanca of Navarre, on 30th March 1402.
Monograph: Homage to Gemma Avenoza
We offer this year a new monograph, coordinated by Professor Vicenç Beltran, dedicated to the memory of our dear colleague and Magnificat CLM contributor, late Professor Gemma Avenoza. The contents of this tribute collection are as follows:
Rafael Beltran – for whose important article we have lifted our ban on in-house contributors – clears up a previously obscure passage in ch. 80 of El Victorial, a blind, strong and brave knight “in love”; his soubriquet, “Desired Love” (‘Amor Deseado’), would be taken from a song composed by a poet in his memory, after he died fighting heroically. Beltran explains that Gutierre Diaz mixes up this “Desired Love” with John of Luxembourg (1296-1346), the famous blind king of Bohemia who died fighting in the battle of Crécy (1346), considered an exemplary model of chivalry. “Desired Love”, soubriquet and song, could come from some French poem or song that Pero Niño could have heard while travelling through France accompanied by his standard-bearer, the author of El Victorial.
Charles B. Faulhaber, creator of the essential manuscript database PhiloBiblon – with whom Gemma Avenoza worked on BITECA – reminds us of the importance of digital tools for the continuity of humanities, reminisces about his professional relationship with Avenoza, and describes PhiloBiblon‘s platform transformation through the project “PhiloBiblon: From Siloed Databases to Linked Open Data via Wikibase: Proof of Concept”, and his team’s plan to abandon its current rigid structure, with its ten relational tables and almost 1,300 data fields, for a more flexible structure of “triples,” records based on a series of statements of the type Entity + Property + Entity, using the system of Wikidata.
Another valued contributor, Luis Girón Negrón, focuses on an exegetical gloss in the Old Spanish Bible of rabbi Moshe Arragel (1st half of the 15th century), specifically on Deuteronomy 31, and its historical significance for the intellectual history of Jewish-Christian relations in late medieval Spain. This gloss, addressed to the Christian sponsor of this Bible translation, centers on an intra-biblical reference to the Jewish canon of the Bible itself as a book, that is the Torah scroll as both written literature and a physical object of synagogal worship. Arragel’s recourse to the rabbinical Bible commentaries ad locum in order to educate his Christian addressee on the divergent views of Christians and Jews about the Scriptural canon and its material textualization are also analysed in detail.
J. Antoni Iglesias-Fonseca publishes an edition and commentary of a Biblical fragment, in line with one of Avenoza’s main areas of study. This one is in Catalan, dating back to the late 14th century, found as part of the rudimentary binding of a notarial book from the early 17th century. It is a commentary on several passages from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 13-15).
Maria Mercè López Casas‘ contribution deals with the first printed cancionero exclusively devoted to Fernán Pérez de Guzmán’s poetry, a classic within the fifteenth-century cancionero manuscripts, which was printed in Seville in 1492 by Meinardo Ungut and Estanislao Polono. It is presented in the context of Sevillian incunabula printing and characterized within the production of Ungut and Polono’s printing house.
Meritxell Simó‘s article documents and interprets the intertextual relationship between Castelhoza’s BEdT 109, 2 and Bernart de Ventadorn’s BEdT 70, 19. The reading of Castelhoza’s song in the light of this dialogical relationship, as well as the insertion of the trobairitz’s lyrical voice in the troubadour corpus considered as a whole, leads Simó to challenge the traditional vision of Castelhoza as a “melancholic” poetess aware of her inferiority towards the beloved, and revealing the parodic dimension of her poetry.
Lourdes Soriano Robles was one of Avenoza’s closest collaborators. Her article reconstructs the curious history of Tirant lo Blanc‘s two incunabula copies now preserved in the library of New York’s Hispanic Society of America, by exploring the small and restricted market of antiquarian book dealers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, and reveals that the preservation of these copies was made possible by the interest of European booksellers working to meet demands of American bibliophiles wishing to fill their libraries with prestigious medieval works.
Finally, Gema Vallín deals with the trouvères‘ use of the epic caesura, by offering a sample of this editorial –even scribal– approach out of some of the numerous editions published from the nineteenth century on, on thirteenth-century trouvères’ texts, and especially in the lyrical corpus of the troubadour Thibaut de Champagne.
Magnificat Cultura i Literatura Medievals 