“A muscles de gegant”: The incunabula of the Catalan “Flos Sanctorum”, between tradition and revision

Abstract

The two incunabula that transmit the Catalan translation of the Legenda aurea by Jacobus de Voragine (while one of them was published in 1494, the other one is undated but is known to be contemporary) belong to a textual tradition that was initiated during the last part of the thirteenth century and which has been preserved in five complete manuscripts and many fragmentary texts. Although a stemma that allows scholars to discover the connection between these testimonies has not yet been established, we assert that both incunabula follow the tradition based on those five manuscripts and, also, that both contribute to its transmission into the Catalan editions produced in the sixteenth century. Then again, it is true that a number of modifications are included in these incunabula, some of which are indebted to a revision of the Catalan text. With this paper, we intend to offer an overview of these innovations and compare them with both earlier and later traditions in order to study these changes.