Pregledni rad
https://doi.org/10.17234/Croatica.65.6
THE “FLOWERS OF VIRTUE” IN THE “BOOK OF MANY REASONS”: LEXICAL AND ANIMALISTIC PARTICULARITIES
Marinka Šimić
; Staroslavenski institut, Zagreb
Antonija Zaradija Kiš
orcid.org/0000-0002-2013-9398
; Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb
Sažetak
The “Flowers of Virtue” or “Fiore di virtù” is a moral-didactic work written in the 14th century in Italy. It consists of 35 chapters written in Bolognese vernacular language, which is why it was accessible to a broad audience. The invention of the printing press made it one of the most popular European works of folk literature in the following few centuries, during which “Fiore di virtù” was translated into several European vernaculars: French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Greek, Romanian, Armenian. In the Slavic area, the work was translated into Croatian, Russian, and Serbian, which is the earliest Slavic translation from 1800.
In the Croatian literary tradition, the “Flowers of Virtue” was especially popular, which is confirmed by the fact that it has been preserved in three scripts: Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Latin, which are also three Croatian redactions of “Fiore di virtù” that reached their fame during the transition from Mediaeval into Renaissance literary expression. While the Glagolitic version is included in five miscellanies from the 15th and 16th centuries, the oldest Cyrillic version is partially preserved only in the “Book of Many Reasons”, a Dubrovnik miscellany from 1520, and it contains mostly the chapters belonging to a later expanded Italian version of “Fiore di virtù” which comprises 41 chapters altogether. The Dubrovnik miscellany lacks the beginning that the “Flowers of Virtue” is a part of, so this work in its Cyrillic version is incomplete. In the “Book” the “Flowers” are written in the Shtokavian dialect and the Dubrovnik idiom of the 16th century, although there is a significant dependence on the older Glagolitic examples or, in other words, on the influence of the Chakavian dialect and Old Slavonic language.
The lexis of the “Flowers of Virtue” is especially interesting because it contains several language strata, among which the most prominent are: Old Church Slavonic (e.g.: “lačanь”, “varovati se”, “rabь”, “mnieti”), Romance (e.g.: “akvila”, “almanko”, “vicio”, “glotunia”, “žmuo”, “pedutь”), and that of Dubrovnik (e.g.: “mahnitacь”, “legati”, “parati”, “guvernati”). Besides the elaboration of the lexical particularities of the “Flowers of Virtue” in the “Book”, special attention is given to the bestiary paragraphs that pictorially visualize human flaws and virtues – the basic moral-didactical determinants of this work. In that sense,
in this paper we focus on the appearance of bats whose historical demonization, present in the “Libre”, continues to this day, namely when the bat is blamed for the coronavirus pandemic. In the chapter about the “sins of the flesh” which is preserved only in the “Book”, the bat, that is “lilikь”, is accused of fornication, lust, androgyny and represents an animalistic imagery of this human flaw.
Ključne riječi
“Flowers of Virtue”; flaw; virtue; animal; lexic; bat
Hrčak ID:
272535
URI
Datum izdavanja:
18.2.2022.
Posjeta: 826 *