A Dominican Breviary as a source in the Domonkos codex, with a view of the Cornides codex
Part 1
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2022.2.147Keywords:
Latin sources of vernacular codices, medieval translation of legend, liturgy and vernacular translation, breviary, miracles of St. Dominic in vernacular, Domonkos codex, Cornides codex, legends of St. Praxedis and St. PotentianaAbstract
In the vernacular Domonkos codex – The life of St. Dominic; an apograph from 1517, copied in the Dominican Convent on what is Margaret Island today in the Danube in Budapest – there is a passage of 11 pages arranged in two blocks (pp. 171/11–176/8; 299/18–305/12), for which the Legend of St. Dominic written by the Italian hagiographer Petrus Calus (in Italian: Calo, in 1340) was identified earlier (Katona 1906) as its Latin source. Yet, later on, the opinion came to be held that Calo’s work could not have been a direct source for the codex, because the translation differs greatly from the assumed source. The authors of this paper find – using the critical edition of Petrus Calo’s text by Simon Tugw ell OP (1997) – that the actual source of the Hungarian translation of the pages in question was probably a Dominican breviary published in Venice in 1494. This is a reedition with some differences of the breviary published first in 1487 in the same place, for which a completely new legend of Dominic had been compiled. The passages in question in the breviary are extracts from Calo’s text. The compiler of the Domonkos codex chose seven miracles from the brief readings collected at the end of the breviary for the celebration of Dominic on Thursdays throughout the year. The paper compares the Hungarian and the Latin texts of two miracles in detail in order to prove that the latter was the source of the Hungarian translation. At the same time, it shows how a lectio varians “cuiusdam praepositi filius” of the breviary became a crucial point in detecting the actual source of the vernacular translation. The authors also explored the Cornides codex copied parallel with the Domonkos codex by the same copier and found that the same breviary could have been the source e.g. of the legends of Praxedis and Potentiana in it as well. The authors also suppose that at the end of the 15th century the Hungarian Dominicans must have owned a copy of this breviary, even though there is no factual evidence of this. In the light of the breviary as the source, the question of the possible date of the compilation of the original text of the Domonkos codex is also discussed.
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