Original scientific paper

Marko Marulić in Dubrovnik

Ivan Lupić orcid.org/0000-0002-4208-6362 ; Stanford University

Abstract

Although it could tell us a great deal about the literary contacts between the different Croatian regions in the sixteenth century, the presence of Marko Marulić’s works in the Republic of Ragusa has not yet been systematically studied. This article examines the question in all of its material aspects, from the early printed editions of Marulić’s Judita (1521, 1522, 1523) and the poetic work of Ilija Crijević, the Ragusan humanist poet who based one of his poems on a controversial chapter from Marulić’s bestseller De institutione bene vivendi, to a series of surviving manuscript witnesses that register the liveliness of the early modern literary exchange between Dubrovnik and the different Dalmatian cities, including Split. The article uncovers a number of previously unrecorded manuscript connections while paying special attention to the ways in which different scribes adapted the texts they copied to their own linguistic habits, thus enabling at least a partial reconstruction of the extended literary communication across different regions of the sixteenth-century Croatian vernacular culture. The central place in this project of reconstruction is accorded to a manuscript fragment deriving from a larger poetic miscellany copied in Dubrovnik in the second half of the sixteenth century. The fragment is preserved among the papers of Petar Kolendić in the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade. It is particularly valuable because it shows that not only Dalmatian, but also Ragusan manuscripts provided meeting places for the great figures of the Croatian Renaissance, Marko Marulić from Split and Mavro Vetranović from Dubrovnik. The article offers a model for, and hopefully an incentive to, future research of this topic by showing what a seemingly worthless manuscript fragment can teach us about the robustness of the literary culture in the Croatian sixteenth century. It is for this reason that the article approaches the surviving fragment, which contains a section from Marulić’s dramatic poem Utiha nesriće (based on Seneca’s De remediis fortuitorum), not simply as one small piece in the largely vanished puzzle of the poem’s manuscript tradition but as a challenge for a new and different literary interpretation.

Keywords

Marko Marulić; Mavro Vetranović; Seneca; Croatian Renaissance literature; Republic of Ragusa; Dalmatia; manuscript studies; book history

Hrčak ID:

257739

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/257739

Publication date:

22.5.2021.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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