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Darrera modificació: 2013-09-15
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Gottschall, Dagmar - Steer, Georg (eds.), Der deutsche Lucidarius, Tübingen, M. Niemeyer (Text und Textgeschichte, 35), 1994, vol. 1 (Kritischer Text nach den Handschriften), 343 pp.
- Resum
- Una molt primerenca enciclopèdia cosmològica en alemany, finals s. XII, probablement adreçada a un públic cortesà desitjós d'informació sobre les interrelacions entre els fenòmens naturals i la teologia.
Die Neuausgabe des "Lucidarius" ersetzt den "unzureichenden Textabdruck" (J. Bumke) von Felix Heidlauf aus dem Jahr 1915, dem wesentliche Passagen des ursprünglichen Textes, z.B. über die Antipoden, fehlen. Sie erstellt einen autornahen Text aus der Kenntnis der gesamten erhaltenen handschriftlichen Überlieferung, worüber eine ausführliche Einleitung Rechenschaft gibt; und sie bietet zudem ein vollständiges Wörterbuch (von D. Gottschall), das U. Goebels Wortindex von 1975 zur Heidlaufschen Ausgabe weitgehend überflüssig macht.
The `A' prologue to the Lucidarius describes how the work was commissioned by Duke Henry from the chaplains in Braunschweig, who were instructed to compile the work from a range of Latin books and to set it out in German prose, so that the truth should not be impaired by the exigencies of verse. On this basis the Lucidarius, a prose encyclopaedia in three books dealing with geography and cosmology, theology and liturgy, and eschatology, and hitherto available only in the edition by F. Heidlauf from 1915, has always been considered a product of the court of Henry the Lion (d. 1195), duke of Saxony and Bavaria. The preliminary studies for this new critical edition, based on eighty-three manuscripts and sixty-nine early printed editions, revealed that the `A' prologue is preserved only in some nine manuscripts of a `Central German' recension `y15' containing just Book I and extracts from Book II and positioned very low in the stemma, and thus likely to be a later, `inauthentic' addition. It can be argued that the `A' prorogue (which is in my view quite rightly held to be secondary to the `B' prologue) is devised to go with the abridged recension from the later thirteenth century. Not all stemmatologists will agree that the editors' findings can support such wide-reaching conclusions about the authenticity of a prologue (the agreement of the content of the `B' prologue with the thrust of the `y15' recension could be chance), and some will take fright at the perfection of the stemmata printed on pp. 124*-127*. Before the court of Henry the Lion is finally abandoned, a very cogent case will need to be made to explain how the (plausible) legend of Henry's patronage came to be invented at a later date in the thirteenth century. However, there is by implication a considerable case for rethinking the historical position of the Lucidarius, the detailed arguments for which are only hinted at in the introduction to the edition.
This edition, based on a comprehensive analysis of all the manuscript variants, and accompanied by an extensive critical apparatus and glossary, is an essential working-tool for a consideration of all these questions. The hypothesis proposed (p. 26*) is that individual features of the content of the Lucidarius, choice of sources, the language, the vocabulary; the thematic range, and the original function of this German prose encyclopaedia all point to south-western Germany (the Alemannic area) in the last years of the twelfth century. In particular, G. Steer has in mind Austin canons associated with the reformed house of Marbach in Alsace, whose religious life is described in the mid-twelfth-century `Consuetudines' of the famous Guta-Sintram codex (p.114*). But what is the evidence for these tantalizing assertions?
The edition, like Heidlauf's, is based on the Berlin MS B1 from the later thirteenth century and written in central or northern Alsace. Heidlauf was lucky with his choice of manuscript, but his edition failed to tackle the problem posed by certain additions (or omissions). B1 belongs to the `x' group. This small group of manuscripts is opposed to the larger `y' group, which is characterized by authorial additions such as 1.68-70 and 1.75-7 (so interpreted on p. 27*), which might equally just be omissions by the scribe of *x (so interpreted on p. 40*). To form our own judgement of such unresolved questions, and to judge the new editors' evaluation of textual variants, we must await the publication of the further volumes planned in the series, in particular the manuscript studies by H. Ulmschneider, the study of sources and notes to the text by M. Hamm, and a volume of essays edited by G. Steer and R. Weigand, all described as being in the press in 1994, but still not announced by the publisher in January 1996.
- Matèries
- Alemany
Cosmologia
Enciclopedisme
Religió - Teologia cristiana
Filosofia - Filosofia natural
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