The Latin treatise De amore (s. XII/XIII) by Andreas Capellanus has repeatedly presented a challenge to research because of the heterogeneity of its form and contents. The numerous interpretations of this elusive work base themselves on the single edition by Emil Trojel from 1892 which does not convey a representative account of the rich and complex transmission of the text. An important part of this contribution is, thus, to elucidate both the transmission history of De amore and relevant questions for research. The main focus will be an analysis of the textual version of De amore in the aforementioned Prague manuscript (1471–1481) and its formal-structural transformation, its codicological surroundings as well as its cultural context. This late-medieval textual witness suggests, on every level of the text, significant emendations to the textual form as presented by Trojel. By means of radical truncations and a prominent restructuring, new intratextual connections are created: a reinforced edifying function, an ambition for a general validity, and tendencies concerning structuring and systematizing clearly appear to be the new principles for the shaping of the text. In the Prague manuscript, De amore is copied between contemporary Humanist treatises whose contextualisation will be presented as the source of further thoughts on literary history. The contribution will be rounded off by means of an up-to-date comprehensive list of the manuscript transmission of De amore, a comparative table of the different structurings of the text, and a new description of the Prague manuscript.
The Latin treatise De amore (s. XII/XIII) by Andreas Capellanus has repeatedly presented a challenge to research because of the heterogeneity of its form and contents. The numerous interpretations of this elusive work base themselves on the single edition by Emil Trojel from 1892 which does not convey a representative account of the rich and complex transmission of the text. An important part of this contribution is, thus, to elucidate both the transmission history of De amore and relevant questions for research. The main focus will be an analysis of the textual version of De amore in the aforementioned Prague manuscript (1471–1481) and its formal-structural transformation, its codicological surroundings as well as its cultural context. This late-medieval textual witness suggests, on every level of the text, significant emendations to the textual form as presented by Trojel. By means of radical truncations and a prominent restructuring, new intratextual connections are created: a reinforced edifying function, an ambition for a general validity, and tendencies concerning structuring and systematizing clearly appear to be the new principles for the shaping of the text. In the Prague manuscript, De amore is copied between contemporary Humanist treatises whose contextualisation will be presented as the source of further thoughts on literary history. The contribution will be rounded off by means of an up-to-date comprehensive list of the manuscript transmission of De amore, a comparative table of the different structurings of the text, and a new description of the Prague manuscript.
The Latin treatise De amore (s. XII/XIII) by Andreas Capellanus has repeatedly presented a challenge to research because of the heterogeneity of its form and contents. The numerous interpretations of this elusive work base themselves on the single edition by Emil Trojel from 1892 which does not convey a representative account of the rich and complex transmission of the text. An important part of this contribution is, thus, to elucidate both the transmission history of De amore and relevant questions for research. The main focus will be an analysis of the textual version of De amore in the aforementioned Prague manuscript (1471–1481) and its formal-structural transformation, its codicological surroundings as well as its cultural context. This late-medieval textual witness suggests, on every level of the text, significant emendations to the textual form as presented by Trojel. By means of radical truncations and a prominent restructuring, new intratextual connections are created: a reinforced edifying function, an ambition for a general validity, and tendencies concerning structuring and systematizing clearly appear to be the new principles for the shaping of the text. In the Prague manuscript, De amore is copied between contemporary Humanist treatises whose contextualisation will be presented as the source of further thoughts on literary history. The contribution will be rounded off by means of an up-to-date comprehensive list of the manuscript transmission of De amore, a comparative table of the different structurings of the text, and a new description of the Prague manuscript.
The Visio Pauli, one of the most popular ‘Visions’ of the Middle Ages, constitutes the European form of an originally Oriental apocrypha known as ‘The Apocalypse of Paul’. On its journey through the Latin Middle Ages this text was used in many ways, which have fundamentally influenced its textual shape. The article outlines concisely the dissemination of the Visio Pauli in the Medieval West, its incorporation into new, shifting transmission patterns and textual combinations. It will be shown that the Eastern apocrypha from late Antiquity, the Paulus-Apocalypse, and its reworked European version, the Visio Pauli – the first a closed, the second an open text – in their complex transmission histories represent two entirely different realisations of one and the same material. The analysis, however, concentrates on the specific Bohemian redaction and its Old Czech version. The shape of a text will here be conceived in terms of its dissemination and concrete uses. The focus of the investigation consists, therefore, in the ways in which the variable and open were fixed, and the circumstances, consequences and description of this process. From material to text, from text to context, or, the other way round, from context to text – these are the aspects of the literary, structural, and functional analysis of the Visio Pauli in the context of cultural history. This approach constitutes an attempt to describe the text transmission differently from conventional textual criticism, and how to think about the shape of medieval texts in the context of their concrete use and function. The article is a reworking of a lecture given at Prague and Brno in 2008 and is essentially an abridged version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis, Die Visio Pauli: Wege und Wandlungen einer orientalischen Apokryphe im lateinischen Mittelalter unter Einschlus der alttschechischen und deutschsprachigen Textzeugen, Leiden and Boston: Brill (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 34), 2006. It is the first written presentation of this research in Czech.