Ebook: La traducció catalana medieval de les Dècades de Titus Livi. Edició del libre I

The aim of this thesis is to study the medieval Catalan translation of the Decades by Livy. The translation is extant in MS. Harley 4893 of the British Library, which was copied in the late fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Catalan translation is anonymous, incomplete and undated. It does not depend on the latin original work, but on the French version made by Pierre Bersuire between 1354 and 1358 at the commission of king John II of France. The study of the Catalan translation is in two main parts: the historic study and the textual study. The first one explains the presence of Livy in the Crown of Aragon _in which circles his work was read and how it was read_ and places the Catalan translation in its historical context: the court of John of Aragon _the futur king Joan I_ soon after 1383. The second part includes the textual study of the Catalan translation: i) the first task was to find the source of the Catalan translation, that is to say, those manuscripts of Bersuire's version closest to the Catalan text by commonality of error; ii) the accurate and systematic corrections made to the Catalan manuscript by a hand other than the scribe's were examined. The comparison between the French witnesses and the Catalan translation revealed that the Catalan text is very close to a manuscript which belonged to duke John of Berry (Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique, Fr. 77), to whom John of Aragon had asked to send him a copy of the French Decades in 1383. The results of the textual analysis and the historical context suggest that the Catalan translation of Livy's Decade was made soon after 1383 in the court of John of Aragon and that the French manuscript used to produce the Catalan translation came from the duke of Berry's court. Although only seven books of the first decade has survived (Bersuire translated all the books known in the fourteenth century, namely decades I, III and IV), the third decade was also translated into Catalan, as part of the same translation or a new one. The thesis contains the critical edition of book I of the Catalan Decades. Book I is littered with a wide range of errors stemming from the French source, and can be difficult to read in some passages, while books II-VII and the glossary are largely devoid of errors. The errors in book I make it difficult to establish the base text and to choose the rules of editing. The French text of Geneva manuscript is edited next to the Catalan text. Samples of books II to VII are given in an appendix, as well as the glossary. The passage of the Crònica universal de 1425 (Barcelona, Biblioteca Universitària, MS 80) which depends on the Catalan Decades is also given in an appendix.