Critica del testo. XVII / 3, 2014. Contaminazione/Contaminazioni

Presentazione
Maria Luisa Meneghetti e Stefano Resconi

Contamination, influence et pureté
Michel Zink

Contamination, influence et pureté
Modern scholars make a pejorative use of the word “contamination”, always entailing a degradation of the text; in the Middle Ages the same concept was instead conceived as a form of textual preservation.

La “contaminazione originale” del testo medievale: l’esempio del Devisement du Monde
Simon Gaunt

La “contaminazione originale” del testo medievale: l’esempio del Devisement du Monde
This article uses the limit case of Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde to call into question traditional philological approaches to notions such as linguistic and textual “contamination” or hybridity, and the concomitant ideas of an “original” text or a “pure” language. A close reading of a passage found only in the Z redaction and thought by Benedetto to be authentic is offered.

Il galego-portoghese dei canzonieri medievali. Lingua d’autore o di copista?
Simone Marcenaro

Il galego-portoghese dei canzonieri medievali. Lingua d’autore o di copista?
This article proposes a reappraisal of the linguistic status of Galician-Portuguese in relation to the witnesses belonging to the tradition of Troubador poetry (Cancioneiro da Ajuda, Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, Vatican Songbook, Pergaminhos Vindel and Sharrer) and to that of the Cantigas De Santa Maria. Consistently with a line of research widely established in the study of Provençal and Italian poetry, the approach suggested is founded on the study of the scripta of each witness, so as to recognize possible stratifications in the tradition. Only this kind of analysis can in fact provide a precise appreciation of the importance of the Galician and Portuguese elements and allow for the identification of possible extraneous influences which might have affected the copying process.

Un’“officina” di genere, tra cantare e poema in ottava rima
Dario Mantovani

Un’“officina” di genere, tra cantare e poema in ottava rima
The Cantari di Lancillotto, the Piramo e Tisbe, Domenico Scolari’s Istoria di Alessandro Magno and Domenico da Monticchiello’s Eroidi are texts in ottava rima dating back to the second half of the 14th century. As with the Guerra di Troia, they have a different intentio operis (from the standards of the cantari genre) and hybrid features: a systematic reliance on written sources, a less intrusive oral-formulaic style, a well-framed content and a more recognisable authorship. The common features of this little corpus thus reveal how the principle whereby cantari’s copiers also took on the role of authors, does not always apply; they also show, as Domenico De Robertis has previously emphasised, a higher-level understanding of the cantari genre.

Contaminazioni dardaniche in Castiglia
Luca Sacchi

Contaminazioni dardaniche in Castiglia
The paper examines, in the light of most recent contributions, some contamination processes connected with the diffusion of Trojan histories in Castile, both in texts elaboration and in manuscript production, from the thirteenth until the beginning of the sixteenth century. It’s possible to outline a trend, particularly in court circles, to integrate and combine the material offered by the models from abroad (Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne above all) with some elements of Iberian origin, which were transmitted from the Libro de Alexandre to the Crónica Troyana printed in 1490. This process, which has its fulcrum in the classical section of Alfonso X General Estoria, confirms the primacy of Iliadic material as an emblem of antiquity to be transmitted to new generations, but also the constant desire to aggregate around it other myths, many of which are marked by contrasted relationships between parents and children.

Contamination, contagion and the animal function in Boccaccio’s Decameron
Eleonora Stoppino

Contamination, contagion and the animal function in Boccaccio’s Decameron
This paper explores the element of contamination as contagion in Boccaccio’s Decameron, presenting the hypothesis that the text establishes a conceptual connection between contagion and the contact between human and non human animals. The metaphorical quality of animal references in the Decameron, then, acquires a different dimension. Non human animals aren’t just partners and effective qualifiers in human life: they become catalysts for a potential reflection on contamination and death, on alteration and illness, a reflection that, I would argue, will be part of scientific advancements to come, and will ultimately find its greatest interpreter in the sixteenth century physician Girolamo Fracastoro.

Contaminazioni nella trasmissione dei testi greci antichi. Qualche riflessione
Stefano Martinelli Tempesta

Contaminazioni nella trasmissione dei testi greci antichi. Qualche riflessione
The A. offers some thoughts about the contamination in the textual transmission of ancient Greek literature. His aim is to show that, given some particular conditions, it is possible to solve some stemmatic difficulties caused by contamination. The samples, which the A. examines, are taken mainly from the textual tradition of Plato, Demosthenes and Galen. The A. concludes his contribution with some thoughts about the relationship between the contamination and the so-called Bédier’s paradox.

Navigando con Brendano: le mille rotte di una tradizione contaminata
Rossana Guglielmetti

Navigando con Brendano: le mille rotte di una tradizione contaminata
The transmission of the Navigatio sancti Brendani is particularly rich in cases of contamination. Among them, the paper focuses on some less common practices, providing interesting examples of both the variety of medieval scribes and correctors’ interventions, and interpretation keys the philologist can apply to understand such processes: gaps restored in combination with sporadic collations, events only understandable by geographical or codicological clues, contamination cases concerning iconography, an interlinguistical 232 Summaries system (vernacular and Latin copies), mnemonic processes. In a larger perspective, looking from the individual case to the whole medieval Latin literature, we can note a very high frequency of contamination practices, affecting every genre and period: sign of a working method that must have been usual in medieval scriptoria, therefore of a widespread critical attitude towards texts.

La contaminazione: logica e contraddizioni
Alfonso D’Agostino

La contaminazione: logica e contraddizioni
The author first distinguishes between the concepts of “codex”, “text” and “work”; he then examines the various meanings that the word “text” may have in textual philology; he establishes the difference between “contamination” and “change of antigraph”; and finally he notes some similarities between contamination and emendatio ex libro. He presents also the modern philologist as the last of copyists and, sometimes, as the last of the contaminators. Contamination usually confounds the philologists, but, in some cases, it can help building a more convincing stemma codicum. Two examples (taken from the Waldensian Bestiary and the Libro del conocimiento) seem to corroborate this hypothesis.

Sulla contaminazione in ambito trobadorico: fenomenologia e implicazioni testuali
Stefano Resconi

Sulla contaminazione in ambito trobadorico: fenomenologia e implicazioni testuali
This article focuses on the features of contamination in Troubadours’ manuscript tradition, offering a general survey that makes it possible to examine them in their cultural meaning and in their effects on the application of the principles of textual criticism.