LA FAZIENDA DE ULTRAMAR

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Folio 2v (detail)
Lately I have been devoting most of my (scarce) spare-time to one of the most fascinating medieval manuscripts I've come accross. The BU Salamanca 1997 dates from ca. 1220, and it is the only extant witness of what Moshé Lazar appropriately named, in 1965, La fazienda de Ultramar. The manuscript is mainly a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Old Spanish (OSp), although it contains many passages from an itinerary of the Holy Land, and bits and pieces from the Latin Vulgate. When it comes to complicated (and interesting) manuscripts, I don't think one can do much better: It was written by several scribes, some of which "modernize" the spelling, while some retain the readings of the "original", and hence the language varies from folio to folio more than in any other manuscript I have ever seen. There are frequent scribal errors, so frequent that hardly a page goes by in which I don't have to correct the readings twenty or thirty times. The translation errors are also numerous, some  of them when translating from Latin and some from Hebrew; some folios are copied in incorrect order; and overall, just matching the Bible to the Fazienda is not a task for the feeble. No wonder it has  only been edited once in 1965. But just wait...

PELAYO AND THE "ORIGINS" OF SPAIN

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King Pelayo of Asturias
Following the research I made in my doctoral dissertation, Ideological Fictions of the Nation: The Legend of King Pelayo in the Middle Ages, I have become interested in other "foundational myths" of the medieval kingdoms of Spain. Although that of king Pelayo and the battle of Covadonga is the most important one when it comes to a national myth of origins, the  other peninsular kingdoms that began to take shape after the Arab invasion of 711 also have their stories to tell. Whether we are talking of the counts of Castile, the story of San Juan de la Peña, King Sancho Abarca, or even Fernán González, most of these mythical stories share many key elements, usually a cave, a miracle, and the symbolic number 300. Borrowing on Doris Sommer's terminology -foundational fictions- for the first novels of the Latin American countries after their independence from Spain,  and keeping in mind concepts of race and religion, I am analyzing the different stories / histories (in Spanish, the word is the same) that the first Christian kingdoms of the Peninsula made up in order to legitimize their very own existence.    

MAINETE AND THE LOST CANTARES DE GESTA

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MS BN Madrid 7583, f. 11r
Alfonso X's Estoria de España has the particularity of preserving many epic poems (cantares de gesta, chansons de geste) in prosified form. What is interesting is that, if it wasn't for the Wise king's enormous History of Spain, there would be almost no clue as to the fact that these poems (well, verse compositions) ever existed. If you are patient enough to read the paragraphs over and over again you will notice that, beneath the prose surface, there lays an original verse form which can be somewhat reconstructed. Which means that the compilers of the Estoria de España regarded traditional epic poems as valuable a source as the Latin chronicles they consulted. As of right now I am focusing on the lost epic poem of Mainete (young Charlemagne), but there are many, many others. The problem is, as usual, that the money needed to gather all the MSS of the first part of the Estoria de España is a lot, but I have managed to secure some funds in the past and I now count with nine MS facsimiles which show a few interesting variants. In May 2010, thanks to a Faculty Research Award from Augustana C, I am driving to the U of Minnesota to take a look at their MS 284  (Alfonso X: Estoria de España) and take pictures of its folios. That will make it ten facsimiles. Quite a few to go!