Abstract

Abstract: Guillem de Torroella, who probably lived between 1350 and 1375, was a Majorcan nobleman involved in the collapse of the autonomous kingdom, reintegrated into the Catalan-Aragonese crown. He writes a story in verse (1265 lines, according to the only manuscript that contains the text in full: 938 in Catalan and 327 in French). This story is La faula, which tells the author’s journey on the back of a whale to the Enchanted Island. There, Guillem meets a snake, that will reveal to him how Arthur found refuge there after the Battle of Salisbury. One can identtify local folk sources (in the Girona area) for the snake, and his words in French are a further indication of the possible political intent of the literary text. Key words: Medieval Catalan literature, Medieval French Literature, Arthurian legend, Guillem de Torroella, animals that talk, snake, folk Sources, Political Meaning.

Abstract

A new, philological edition of the marginal notes in Andreas Capellanus’ «DeAmore’s» medieval Catalan translation, uniquely preserved in Real Biblioteca de Madrid’s manuscript II-3096 (I), accompanied by transcriptions of the sentence or paragraph which each note refers to. These notes are thematically classified in four groups and described so as to outline their medieval annotator’s main interests.

Abstract

The Occitan «mala cansó» of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Catalan «maldit» of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both display a singular aspect of medieval literary misogyny. In both cases criticism is not levelled against women in general, but against a particular lady who has been previously loved by the poet and is now rejected. The poet blames her directly and harshly because, after leaving him, she has given herself to a man from an inferior social background. As a result, the poet bids farewell to her and moves away. Some of the Catalan poets of the Middle Ages persisted in this literary outlet. They borrowed for their own «maldits» the motifs and expressions that were characteristic of the break-up and the violent farewell, and adapted them to their own language and to the bourgeois environment of the towns.

Abstract

Jordi de Sant Jordi uses more than thirty comparisons in his lyric poetry. These may be classified on the basis of their typology and semantic functions: true comparisons (where two elements are compared by means of a connector, the first being defined as ‘real’ and corresponding to the situation of the lyric persona, the second, figurative, presenting in metaphorical terms the same characteristics as the first element); comparisons between the ‘real’ situation and that of an unspecified human being, to which reference is made by means of the demonstrative ‘the one’ («axí com cell...»); hyperbolic comparisons, where the ‘real’ element is given hyperbolically as having to the same or to a greater extent a quality for which the second element is the example par excellence (‘stronger than Hercules’). Finally, we have identified a particular figure —which we have called an ‘abbreviated priamel’— whereby two situations are given between which the lyric persona must choose, stating that it prefers one and not the other.

Abstract

The «Elegia di madonna Fiammetta» has an evident impact of the story of Leandre and Hero, especially in the moments in which the lady suffers while waiting for her lover, who never comes. Fiammetta makes obvious this parallelism on several occasions, and manages to invent an end for the story loaded of pathos. Joan Roís de Corella realises about this relationship between both two works and makes the inverse path: he uses the tone and some narrative elements of the Elegia for writing his Leander and Hero. It is demonstrated that the so contreversial end of Corella’s story is not original of the Valencian, but it also depends on Boccaccio’s text.