Medieval Catalan Literature

Els responsables de la publicació dels AVOMO i dels AVOThO hem coincidit en l’interès que tindria dedicar la IV Trobada a l’estudi de la recepció de l’obra mèdica i espiritual d’Arnau de Vilanova i a altres temes que tractin aspectes referents a la figura d’Arnau de Vilanova o al context històric i intel·lectual del seu temps.
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The persons in charge of the publication of the AVOMO and the AVOThO both agree that it would be a good idea to dedicate the Fourth Meeting to studying the reception of Arnau de Vilanova’s medical and spiritual work , as well as other topics that address aspects related to the figure of Arnau de Vilanova or to the historical and intellectual context of his time.

Ausiàs March’s Poem CXII is a long 'meditatio mortis' that brings an existential dimension to the author’s moral poetry. Through an upward movement from fear to faith, hope and love, this poem describes the efforts of human thought to solve the problem of our mortal condition. A close reading of this work shows the main constituent ideas of March’s thinking on life and death. The poet’s meditation is based on the conceptual architecture of scholastic Aristotelianism, but his axiology rather tends to Stoicism’s ideal of virtue, within a framework of Christian beliefs.

A study of Ramon de Perellós’ trip to Prussia in 1385 to participate in a Baltic crusades led by the Teutonic Knights. Perellós, a great traveller, was also a keen reader and researcher of travel books. His participation in a reise, the military expeditions of the Teutonic knights, which were accompanied by feasts, tournaments and hunting parties, was one of the aspirations of the European knightly elites.

This study of an account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1323, written in Catalan, analyses the text, the trip, and the historical, political and economic context, regarding the relationship between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluk kingdom of Egypt in the early 14th C. Joan Rovira, from Montblanc, was not the author, as previously thought; it was penned by twelve Dominican friars who took part in the expedition, thus attesting to Guillem Tremps’ pilgrimage on behalf of Joan Rovira.

Nei diffusi vocaboli solatz, deport e chan è possibile individuare una vera e propria “nebulosa semica” da collegare strettamente all’ambiente cortese, e specificamente al piacere mondano che deriva dalla conversazione condita con l’esibizione canoro-musicale di un trovatore. Il riconoscimento di questa solidarietà semantica porta a ipotizzare che le due canzoni di Pons de la Guardia che si aprono con tale “nebulosa” (BdT 377.4 e 377.7) siano da ricondurre a un medesimo momento creativo e performativo, e che, di conseguenza, nel complesso del corpus di Pons vadano privilegiati i due canzonieri E e V, che sono gli unici a trasmettere questi due testi. E particolare attenzione si dovrà dare al secondo, che potrebbe aver preservato una possibile ricezione catalana dei componimenti di uno dei trovatori più emblematici della Catalogna di fine XII secolo.

Antònia Carré – Lluís Cifuentes, La traducció catalana medieval del Lilium medicine de Bernat de Gordon: estudi i edició del fragment conservat (llibre VII, Antidotari) (Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 76), Londres, Queen Mary, University of London, Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 2017, 150 p.

Notes on Francesc Eiximenis' Book of Angels Francesc Eiximenis, a Catalan Franciscan and writer who lived in the 14th century, is not very well known today outside the narrow circle of Catalan researchers of the Middle Ages, even though he was a very popular author at the time and was eagerly translated into other languages. He was most enthusiastic about using his native language, i.e. Catalan, in which he wrote treatises on the truths of faith, theological questions, and social and political issues. The purpose of this study is to introduce Eiximenis and to present a Polish translation of an excerpt from the first book of his angelological treatise entitled Llibre dels àngels (Book of Angels). Rozalia Sasor's translation, together with an initial critical commentary on the text, is the first contemporary edition of this part of the treatise. The paper, which is at the same time an introduction to the translation, is divided into four sections. In the first one, Sasor briefly discusses the state of knowledge about Francesc Eiximeni in Poland; in the second one, she presents his biography with a special emphasis on the time of his studies and his theological and philosophical interests, and in the third she characterises the Llibre del àngels and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work. It is worth noting at this point that the aforementioned characteristics focus on the properties of the language of the original, which contributed to the success of Llibre dels àngels among readers; it also takes up the previously undiscussed problem of the sources of the treatise. The paper ends with a comment on the Polish translation, in which Sasor explains how she prepared the source text for translation as there is no contemporary critical edition of the first three books of Llibre dels àngels; she also discusses the translation strategy she adopted. The whole publication is completed by a translation of selected excerpts from the first part of Llibre dels àngels, i.e. chapters 1-7, 9, 14, and 16-17, with critical commentary.

The paper tries to show that the character of the anonymous empress in Tirant lo Blanc was featured with the traits of the literary tradition on the Byzantine empress Theodora. Her ethopoia was constructed by a contemporary of her, the historian Procopius, who knew personally and from a very close position the inner court life. The intertextual play gives solid proof, in our opinion, on the reception of the character from the Byzantine literary tradition.