Original scientific paper
The Reflection of the Oldest Croatian Poetic Miscellany (1380) in the St Petersburg Berčić Collection no. 5 (15th century)
Amir Kapetanović
orcid.org/0000-0002-8013-9330
; Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje, Zagreb
Abstract
The paper gives a textological analysis of the relationship between the poems from the Pariška pjesmarica / Paris Poetic Miscellany (1380) and the Berčićev zbornik br. 5 / Berčić Collection no. 5 (end of the 15th century). Correspondences, similarities and difference in the choice, the order of the poems and verses in the context of other Old Croatian writings are identified. The degree to which the poems vary is observed in the light of new medievalist understandings about the nature of the text in the Middle Ages. The Berčić Collection no. 5 has not to date attracted the special attention of philologists, although the contents of it were long ago briefly described by I. Milčetić (1912; published in 1955). In comparison with other Old Croatian sources the records of the poems in the collection under consideration are »the closest« to the versions of the same poems in the oldest Croatian miscellany. For a definition of the »closeness« of these Old Croatian sources that this article focuses on, the correspondence of the version of the of the poem Bratja, brata sprovodimo from the Berčić collection and that from the Paris Miscellany in line 33 (I svi sveti mladenci) is particularly important, for this verse does not exist in the other three versions (to date this has been considered an error or the mere wilfulness of the scribe of the Paris Miscellany). How »close« the two sources are is also shown by the almost identical order of poems in the two sources, which is not repeated in even one other source from the mid-14th to the mid-16th century. Two poems stand out for the differences from the oldest known versions. Marijina pisan is more at a remove from the version from the Paris Miscellany than is the case with the three poems mentioned earlier, but it can also be said that the oldest version corresponds more with the version from Berčić 5 than the more recent version from the Klimantović Collection I. The poem Bog se rodi v Vitliomi in its linguistic details corresponds more with the version from the Paris Miscellany, and in terms of number of verses with the version in Zbornik duhovnog štiva / Collection of devotional writing. This is the third Old Croatian version of this medieval poem, one that S. Ivšić did not know (1939) when he analysed and on textological grounds defined the relation between the two oldest versions and those from the more recent miscellanies. Although there is no proof of any kind of connection of these two Old Croatian sources of medieval poetry, on the basis of textological analysis it can be concluded, nevertheless, that the oldest Croatian poetic miscellany of 1380 was reflected more strongly in the Berčić Collection no. 5 than in any other Croatian poetic miscellany or collection created up to the middle of the 16th century.
Keywords
Paris Poetic Miscellany; Berčić Collection no. 5; textology; variant; Chakavian standard Croatian; Croatian medieval poetry
Hrčak ID:
51579
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2010.
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