Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31192/np.21.2.7
Gašparoti’s Žitek svetog Hijeronima (Life of St. Jerome)
Vesna Badurina Stipčević
orcid.org/0000-0002-4632-2561
; Old Church Slavonic Institute, zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The most comprehensive collection of saint legends of Pre-Revival Croatian literature – Cvet sveteh ali živlenje i čini svecev (Anthology of the Holy or the Lives and Acts of Saints, in 4 books, printed in 1752, 1756, 1760, and 1761) by Kajkavian hagiographic writer, Pauline monk Hilarion Gašparoti (1714-1762) contains, amongst others, the biography of St. Jerome. Gašparoti collected biographies of saints worshiped »in our Croatian or Slavic land« (Cro. »vu našem Horvackem iliti Slovenskem orsagu«). The text of Žitek svetog Hijeronima (The Life of Saint Jerome, in Cvet sveteh, book III) appears under 30th September, and contains a comprehensive hagiography with a detailed description of St. Jerome’s life, his work on translating the Holy Scriptures, and the numerous miracles he performed in his lifetime and after his death. As with Gašparoti’s other hagiographies, his methodology in compiling St. Jerome’s biography was meticulous and based on in-depth knowledge of Croatian and international hagiographic literature. Gašparoti used many diverse sources for his Cvet sveteh anthology and it is difficult to definitively ascertain its immediate models. However, a comparative analysis has uncovered textual correspondences between Gašparoti’s hagiography of St. Jerome and the biographies published in Zlatna legenda (The Golden Legend) from the 13th century and in Canisius’s Latin translation of Flos Sanctorum sive Vitae Sanctorum in modum concionum scriptae Petro Ribadineira, soc. Jesu (Cologne, 1700). As for Croatian sources, similarities exist between Gašparoti’s Žitek and St. Jerome’s biography in Franjo Glavinić’s Cvit svetih (Anthology of the Holy). Gašparoti does not reproduce his sources verbatim, but does occasionally quote from them, often employing creative interpolations and extensive explanations to produce a novel coherent hagiographic text. Overall, Gašparoti’s Žitek svetog Hijeronima proves to be an important link in the long and rich literary tradition of Croatian legends about St. Jerome.
Keywords
Anthology of the Holy or the Lives and Acts of Saints; hagiography; Hilarion Gašparoti; Saint Jerome
Hrčak ID:
306174
URI
Publication date:
17.7.2023.
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