Petr Plecháč. Versification and Authorship Attribution. Prague: Institute of Czech Literature – Karolinum Press, 2021. ISBN 9788024648712. 98 oldal. https://doi.org/10.14712/9788024648903
Online ...verzió: https://versologie.cz/versification-authorship/
The article is dedicated to the analysis of the meaning of two episodes of the novel opposing the king of Sicambre to two Breton knights, who, in turn, manage to deprive him, the one of his fiancée, ...the other of his wife. This offense will be avenged by a nephew of the king and will result in the conquest of Britain by the Sicambrins and their allies, and the rise to the throne of England of a dynasty from both nations. The appearance of Sicambre provides a special intertext for this essentially Breton novel. It is a mythical city, invented by the Historia regum francorum, place of residence for several centuries of Trojan refugees who will become the ancestors of the French. The analysis proves that, by this reference, England and France oppose each other in the distant past: the ancestral conflict prefigures the Hundred Years' War. This explains the confused location of this country: in part symbolic (by its identification with Nubia), in part traditional (close to the Danube) and in part functional, to suit the rather limited geographical setting of the novel (close to the "North Sea"). By interpreting this motif we can also confirm the date of the novel from the first half of the 14th century (by pushing the date ante quem until 1350).
St Martin was one of the most important hagiographical figures of France in the Middle Ages. Because of his Pannonian origins, he was also an important saint for the Hungarian kings and for the monks ...of the abbey of Pannonhalma, Martin’s supposed birthplace in medieval times, where his cult was the strongest in Hungary. Martin’s connection to Pannonia, which became part of Hungary after the settlement of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, was not totally ignored in France, where Martin’s cult took root. In the late twelfth century, the Historia septem sanctorum dormientium, a curious hagiographical story invented to support a new cult of the seven hermit saints of the abbey of Marmoutier, claimed that St Martin of Tours descended from the royal family of the Huns or Hungarians. Hungarian scholars investigated the origins and the spread of this motif in the early twentieth century, but on the basis of a mistaken, much earlier dating of the Historia. In this essay, I establish the exact relationship and chronology of the known texts containing the motif of St Martin’s royal and Hungarian origins. Moreover, I offer a systematic survey of the saint’s medieval French biographies, showing how limited knowledge of this motif was outside the texts descending directly from the Historia. At the same time, I examine a hitherto unedited Old French legend contained in a single manuscript (Paris, BNF fr. 1534), a legend which constitutes an addition to the corpus of texts referring to Martin as a Hungarian prince.
PDF
