The Croatian vita of St. Catherine, the Alexandrian virgin and martyr
Хърватското житие на св. Екатерина, александрийската девица и мъченица
Keywords: Croatian vita; St. Catherine the Alexandrian virgin and martyr; Legenda sv. Katarine divice; new edition; little-known and unexplored Medieval Croatian manuscript; graphical and orthographic peculiarities; morphological and lexical peculiarities
This book offers a new edition with a transliteration and a detailed analysis of the linguistic peculiarities of a little-known in science and hitherto unexplored Medieval Croatian manuscript. This is the vita of St. Catherine “Legenda sv. Katarine divice” according to manuscript I c 6 from the Archives of HAZU. The text was created for the nuns from the Franciscan monastery “St. Ekaterina” in Zadar, was kept in the virgin Benedictine monastery “St. Maria” in Zadar, later became part of the rich book collection of Ivan Kukuljevic, and since 1869 it has been among the manuscripts of the library of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. It was written in the vernacular from the region of Central and Northern Dalmatia from the period XIV-XV centuries. The writing, spelling, morphology, vocabulary of the selected manuscript are described and analyzed in detail. A special emphasis in the study is placed on the style of Croatian vita. Stylistic analysis overlaps each of the linguistic levels listed above. A supposed Latin prothograph, on which the Croatian translation was probably made, has also been recovered. The results of the textual analysis show that the style of the Croatian vita is unique, rarely influenced by the Latin text and is a testimony rather to the skills and experience of the translator/compiler in the translation/compilation activity.
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