Download PDF | Samantha Kelly - The Cronaca di Partenope_ An Introduction to and Critical Edition of the First Vernacular History of Naples (c. 1350) (Medieval Mediterranean) -BRILL (2011).
375 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research for this project began at Villa I Tatti in 2003-2004, where it became clear that the larger study of Neapolitan civic identity I had hoped to undertake would be impossible without more sustained attention to the Cronaca di Partenope. I am grateful for the time afforded by that year to explore and change directions, and to the wonderful staff and friends who made the time enjoyable. Only further investigation would reveal how much revision to those early suppositions about the Cronaca di Partenope was necessary.
That investigation began in earnest during a sabbatical year offered by Rutgers University in 2006-2007, when I was able to collect, transcribe, and collate most of the manuscript witnesses. A month at the American Academy in Rome in July 2008 gave me a chance to revisit some of the physical manuscripts directly, and the peace and quiet to work on the front matter.
Even so, new discoveries, adjustments, and revisions occupied the interstices of my teaching schedule for fully two more years, a delay whose principal benefit was the opportunity to visit and impose again upon friends in France and Italy: Etienne Anheim, Catherine Brice, Rachel Donadio, Elizabeth Geoghegan, Pablo Vasquez.
Throughout my work on the Cronaca, I have relied on the staff of many libraries who gave me access to their collections and made reproductions of manuscripts for me: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Bibliothéque nationale de France, the Biblioteche nazionali of Florence and Naples, the Societa napoletana di storia patria, the Archivio di Stato of Naples, the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, the Biblioteca della regione siciliana in Palermo, the Morgan Library of New York, the Beineke Library at Yale, and the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.
The Interlibrary Loan Department of Rutgers Library not only obtained for me several rare works, but mediated the complicated financial transaction necessary for me to acquire a microfilm of one of the manuscript copies. Martina Saltamacchia provided similar assistance in acquiring a microfilm of another Italian manuscript. The editorial board and staff of Brill Academic Publishers have been, as ever, courteous, knowledgeable, efficient, and professional, and I am delighted to be part of their Mediterranean series.
Though much of the work on this study took place in solitude, it could not have been accomplished without the aid of numerous colleagues and friends who offered their expertise and volunteered their aid. Jean d’Amato Thomas shared with me both her knowledge of the literature on the ancient thermal baths of Campania, and printouts of manuscripts containing both her texts and mine. Fabio Troncarelli and Roberto Pesce generously offered their paleographical expertise where previous scholarly opinions had differed.
Elizabeth A.R. Brown offered a physical description of a codex in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris before I was able to travel and view it myself. Andrea Berto offered encouragement out of his own editorial experience during a particularly vexing phase of manuscript collation. T. Corey Brennan helped me identify a misleading textual reference within the Cronaca, while Robert Lerner and David Abulafia both offered valuable bibliographical references (on the “poison legend” and the Aragonese library respectively) and comments on textual drafts.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Temma Kaplan, who allowed me to use her second home as an “office away from the office.” The perfect quiet there made the writing of this book possible, and I will not soon forget the happy hours spent on her screened porch accompanied by my canine “assistant” Poni and the sound of rustling leaves.
Stephen Pemberton has shouldered common burdens and lifted my spirits in bleak moments from the beginning of this project to its end, across five homes on two continents and through some transformative events. The greatest of those events was the arrival in March 2006 of Hugh William Kelly Pemberton, who delayed progress on this book to teach me about bugs, superheroes, and a joy I had not known possible. The seven years of this book’s gestation are the seven years in which my life became joined to theirs, and as one small piece in that shared life, the book is dedicated to them.
INTRODUCTION
The Cronaca di Partenope is a history of Naples composed in the middle of the fourteenth century by a lay Neapolitan patrician named Bartolomeo Caracciolo-Carafa. It was the first history of Naples to be written in over four hundred years, since the Gesta episcoporum neapolitanorum of the late ninth and early tenth centuries.' Indeed, it can be considered the first comprehensive history of Naples ever written, since unlike the Gesta, which began with Naples’ first Christian bishop, the Cronaca began its narration in earliest antiquity and continued to the author's own present.
It was, furthermore, one of the first works of any genre composed in the local Neapolitan vernacular: only two short poems of the late thirteenth century and two vernacular translations of Latin works, dated to circa 1300, precede it.”
The simultaneous revival of local historical writing and emergence of Neapolitan as a literary language attest to the major changes afoot in Naples and the surrounding region in the decades around 1300. The most important of these, and a stimulus for others, was the decision of southern Italy's new Angevin dynasty (1268-1442) to make Naples their royal capital.
The heightened stature of the city, the influx of new populations drawn by the crown and by the social and economic opportunities it offered, and the cultural influences introduced by this immigration, all contributed to a certain pride in the region, its heritage, and its language. At the same time, they sparked anxiety about the loss of cherished local traditions and about the status of native Neapolitans in a greatly altered and still fluid social hierarchy.
These responses found expression in several Neapolitan works of the early Trecento. A Latin liturgical compilation made for the cathedral in the 1310s included narratives regarding the cathedral’s ancient origins and its links to Saint Peter and the emperor Constantine, expressing both pride in Naples’ heritage and anxiety about that heritage’s loss as the cathedral complex was transformed from the 1290s forward. A Latin compilation of quotations and anecdotes about ancient Campania, composed before 1348, extended this historical interest to pagan antiquity.
This same interest is evident in the earliest vernacular works in Neapolitan, which included a verse translation of Peter of Eboli’s De balneis puteolarum of circa 1200, a description of the ancient thermal baths in the Flegrean Fields west of Naples. All these works were related to the Cronaca di Partenope, which borrowed heavily from the first two works for its narration and later circulated in manuscripts with a vernacular prose translation of third.°
Indeed, it is the Cronaca itself that scholars have frequently identified as a prime expression of the intensified communal identity of Naples in this age. Guido d’Agostino has found in the early fourteenth century “a first convincing indigenous cultural maturation utilizing a ‘Neapolitan’ language,’ of which, he argues, “the most notable product is the contemporary Cronaca di Partenope, a felicitous example of self-representation and more or less conscious excavation of the collective memory of a society increasingly identified with the capital city’?
Giovanni Vitolo has called it a “significant witness to a burgeoning historiographical interest, which would come to circulate ever more widely, judging by the large number of manuscripts in which it survives.”? As these scholars attest, the Cronaca was a landmark in the articulation of Neapolitan communal identity and in the development of local historiography and vernacular writing.
But the Cronaca’s significance goes beyond its own moment. It was a foundation for the historiography of both the city and the kingdom of Naples into the seventeenth century. Within fifty years of its completion, it inspired the composition of three other histories, all deeply indebted to the Cronaca, as well as a substantially redacted version of the Cronaca itself.° At least eight works of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century—some amateur histories with limited circulation, some well known, published works—borrowed from the Cronaca for their own historical or descriptive purposes, and it engendered both a sixteenthcentury Latin translation and three printed editions published in Naples in 1486-1490, 1526, and 1680.’
Meanwhile, and despite the availability of these editions, the Cronaca continued to be copied in manuscript into the seventeenth century, with corrections, notations, and comparisons with other copies that attest to their owners’ interest in the work. These manuscripts survive in rather large numbers, compared to other civic chronicles and histories composed in medieval Italy, and their transmission indicates that many more must have existed that have not survived.®
Given the almost complete lack of local historiographical works for several centuries prior to the Cronaca, and the profusion of historiographical and historic-descriptive works indebted to it after its composition, it seems safe to say that any study of Neapolitan identity or historiography from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century must attend seriously to this work.
What shape this communal identity took in the Cronaca, what sources it drew on, how it envisioned the Neapolitan past and sought to integrate into that vision its new royal present, are questions that have remained unexplored. This neglect is not the result of lack of interest. Modern scholarship on the Cronaca began in the late nineteenth century with the distinguished southern Italian historian Bartolomeo Capasso, who featured the Cronaca in “Sources for the history of the Neapolitan provinces,’ collected and compared manuscript copies of it, and offered hypotheses about its author, date, and source material that have remained foundational for all later studies.”
From Capassos time on, however, the Cronaca suffered what can only be called bad luck. Capasso himself, who juggled a large number of scholarly projects, was unable to produce a critical edition of the work. He passed his notes to a successor, Erasmo Percopo, in the early twentieth century, who was evidently unable to proceed much further, for he published no studies on the subject.
These scholars’ notes then passed to Gennaro Maria Monti, whose important contributions were published in two articles of the 1930s. One article identified a significant textual source for the Cronaca, while the other, conceived as a prelude to his planned edition, synthesized the findings of his predecessors with his own new insights on the work.!? Due to the destruction of his notes during the Second World War, however, Monti too was prevented from completing his edition. Three decades later, the project was revived by the literary scholar Antonio Altamura, who succeeded in publishing a modern edition in 1974.""
Altamura’s edition has been of service to scholars in bringing attention to this text through modern publication. It was not, however, an edition capable of providing a textual foundation for sustained literary or historical analysis of the text. It does not identify a base manuscript or provide an apparatus criticus, leaving the authority of its readings in question.
Indeed, my comparison of the manuscripts and editions suggests that it was simply a republication of the 1526 edition that devoted no serious attention to the manuscript copies. Its front matter essentially recapitulates the findings of Gennaro Maria Monti in the 1930s, when even the most basic facts about the Cronaca were still in doubt, and its description of manuscripts both perpetuates errors of earlier scholars and introduces new ones.!
I first undertook serious study of the Cronaca in 2003, intending to employ it in a broader study of Neapolitan self-conception in the medieval and early modern period. It soon became clear, however, that the historical analysis I envisioned would not be possible until a more reliable edition of the Cronaca were available. Thus the study I intended (and still intend) to write has been postponed by several years as I have tackled the text itself. In the process I have gained a keen appreciation for the challenges facing my predecessors.
The textual “trail” of the Cronaca di Partenope is extremely complex, and its early-modern editors introduced errors that led modern scholars down the wrong track with regard to the extent and authorship of the original Cronaca. It was necessary in effect to start from scratch, transcribing and comparing this long text, in both its versions, among all extant manuscript copies, the first edition, and what could be known about two more now-unavailable copies, in order to revise previous assumptions about the value and character of the manuscript witnesses.
To identify the original version of the Cronaca and understand how it was redacted into the second version required sustained analysis of a different, even longer work that served as the intermediary between them, which had to be compared chapter by chapter, and often word by word, not only with both versions of the Cronaca but with its own principal source-text, Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica. The other contents of the extant manuscripts, some of which remained unidentified, required review, and it was necessary to revisit scholarship dating back to the seventeenth century to understand the origins of modern scholars’ erroneous taxonomy of the text’s “parts” and to correct their consequent conclusions regarding the work's authorship and date.
The results of this research have allowed me proffer more solid conclusions regarding the fundamental questions about the Cronaca: its original character, author, and date of composition, and the processes through which it was transformed into the redacted version.'? Armed with this information, I have been able to identify its historical context and the way the Cronaca remarks upon or reacts to it. Since, like many histories, the Cronaca relies heavily on earlier textual sources, I have undertaken sustained comparison of the text and its antecedents to illuminate what materials the author could draw upon and how he altered or preserved their accounts to fit his own vision. Finally, I have followed the “legacy” of the Cronaca, tracing its manuscript diffusion and influence on other works up to the publication of the first printed edition in the late fifteenth century.
This front matter is, of course, a foundation for rather than a thorough investigation of the many interpretive issues to which the Cronaca can contribute evidence. As a southern Italian work that focused exclusively on the city of Naples for four-fifths of its narration but closed by tracing the deeds of its monarchical rulers from the twelfth century forward, the Cronaca raises questions about the northern Italian communes’ monopoly on civic historiography, about the link between historiographical scope and political regime, and indeed about the utility of considering “civic” and “royal” as distinct subgenres of medieval Italian historiography.'*
In some ways the Cronaca di Partenope is comparable to Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica, another “civic” history that devoted considerable space to monarchs on the Italian scene—so much so that, as we will see in Chapters Five and Six, Villani’s text could be excerpted and combined with the Cronaca to tell southern Italy’s history.
This edition, I hope, will encourage the Cronaca’s inclusion in comparative studies of Italian historiography and their ongoing reflection on such questions. How memory was activated and transmitted, what group identities it aimed to reinforce, and how individuals affirmed their own authority to articulate it are questions that concern students of historiography and memory generally, and to which the Cronaca again, as indicated in Chapters Three and Four, can offer its witness.
The Cronaca di Partenope is of very little use for reconstructing the events of Neapolitan history. The bulk ofits narrative concerns the distant past and is heavily embroidered with legend; where it records verifiable events, it relies on textual sources that are generally superior to it in reliability. But as an instance of the articulation of communal identity through recollection of the past, it is a rich and lively source.
It can tell us what Neapolitanness meant in the mid-fourteenth century, not only to this one author but to the authors of the recent sources he relied upon and to the lay patriciate he represented. It can tell us how the past was marshalled to respond to the present, and in its interweaving of textual authorities, physical objects, and local common knowledge, about the craft of remembering itself.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق