Original scientific paper

»Witty decoration« – Marulić’s »Makers« and Dante

Tomislav Bogdan orcid.org/0000-0003-3353-6509 ; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb

Abstract

Much has been written in literary historiography about Marulić’s mysterious “makers” – the začinjavci. This is a term that appears only in the prose dedication of Judita, matched to the term “old poets” (stari poeti), in an importance place in which Marulić explains the literary tradition he drew on turning the Bible story into epic poetry. Numerous, and very diverse, opinions have been put forward as to what he meant by the word začinjavci. It seems, however, and an attempt will be made in this paper to make good the claim, that it is still worth thinking about the meaning of this term, perhaps above all paying attention to the kind of cultural context and activity that Marulić intended to signify with it, more, perhaps, than to etymological discussions. Some time ago attention was drawn to the parallel between Marulić’s terminological pair and the distinction of vernacular and Latin poets (poete volgari/dicitori per rima/rimatori – poete) that Dante established in his works (in, e.g., Vita Nova, De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio). This parallel and the possible influence of Dante on the creation of Marulić’s paired terms were later pointed out by several literary historians, but were in fact never elaborated in detail and over the course of time was relegated to the background. I believe this hypothesis should be reconsidered. It has long been known how important Dante was for Marulić’s writing; but after a letter that Marulić sent to Jerolim Cipiko in 1501 was discovered, it was clear that the Croatian writer, while composing Judita, and thinking about it after its completion, had none other than Dante before his eyes the whole time. There should not be any great doubt that for Marulić the začinjavci, the makers, and the poeti, the poets, signified the same discursive activity that functioned in slightly different cultural contexts. Since Dante and Marulić were faced with the same task, that of establishing art literature in the vernacular, Marulić’s pair of terms was probably created on the model of the Dante binomial mentioned, in which both poles signify high, art literature, simply emphasising the difference in the language medium. This conclusion must lead to discarding the supposition, widely accepted in the literary history discipline, that the začnjavci were folk poets or confraternity members, i.e., linking them to traditional culture and performance, as well as the rejection of viewpoints according to which in the Judita dedication Marulić was talking about the choice of metre. Perhaps Marulić really did take the metre from the “makers”, and yet in the dedication this is not discussed, attention being directed above all to the stylistic embellishment of the literary text. Similarly to be put aside is the opinion that the “makers” were Marulić’s distant predecessors, for example, anonymous medieval poets, for unlike Dante, Marulić did not have any distant predecessors capable of creating original literature in which, like “poets”, they would have applied rather complex formal procedures, and the začinjavci, then, must have been either his contemporaries or near predecessors.

Keywords

Marko Marulić; Judita; dedication to Dujam Balistrilić; začinjavci; Dante; Vita Nova; vernacular literary art

Hrčak ID:

277981

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/277981

Publication date:

10.6.2022.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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