Maffei Reading Group

Next session of the online reading group for Maffei’s Historiae Indicae will be Thursday, May 14, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST. Please join us!

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “The cruelty of Portuguese governor on Ternate

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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Next session of the online reading group for Maffei’s Historiae Indicae will be Thursday, May 7, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST. Please join us!

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “The empress Eleni of Ethiopia and her massive retinue”

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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Next session of the online reading group for Maffei’s Historiae Indicae will be Thursday, April 30, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST. Please join us!

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “The miracle of the lobsters

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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Next session of the online reading group for Maffei’s Historiae Indicae will be Thursday, April 23, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST. Please join us!

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “The challenge of dealing with Brazilian cannibals

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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Next session will be Thursday, April 16, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST.

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “The Customs of Chinese Women”

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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Next session will be Thursday, April 9, 11:00 a.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 11:00 p.m. CST.

Here is the Latin text. We are beginning at the section titled “Brahmans and Gymnosophists in India”

The same Zoom info below should work again. Looking forward to it!

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Update March 30, 2020: After an enjoyable first session last week full of fascinating Brazilian critters, the Maffeius reading group rides again this Thursday, April 2, at 12:00 p.m. EDT, 4:00 p.m. BST, 12:00 a.m. CST. Please join us if you can!

https://zoom.us/j/873089112

Meeting ID: 873 089 112

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During this time of isolation I’ll be leading an online reading group for Maffei’s Historiae Indicae (full text on Google Books) starting  Wednesday 3/25, 12:00-1:00 p.m. EDT, 4:00-5:00 p.m. GMT. If you would like to participate, just email me (francese@dickinson.edu) and I will send you the information for the Zoom call! I imagine we’ll meet one per week, maybe more if there is interest. 

Jacques de Sève, “Le Pangolin,” illustration from Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (1749–1804). Source: Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105279332/f1.item

Jacques de Sève, “Le Pangolin,” illustration from Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (1749–1804). Source: Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105279332/f1.item

First published in Florence in 1588, Historiae Indicae tells the story of the Portuguese voyages of conquest and discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries around the coast of Africa, to the Malabar Coast of India, on to Malacca, China, and Japan. The primary interest of the work today lies in the wealth of information Maffei provides about a wide variety of peoples, products, and places across the globe. The full-scale ethnography of China in Book 6 is of particular interest, and the diverse subjects treated will appeal to students from many backgrounds, and anyone interested in the customs, products, and cultures of the world. 

I have prepared a Google doc with some selections, as follows:

Notable Critters of Brazil (Book 2, pp. 35-36) 

The many uses of the coconut in the Maldives (Book 7, p. 149) 

Dining, tea, and tea sets in Japan (Book 12, p. 268) 

Brahmans and Gymnosophists in India (Book 1, p. 27). 

The customs of Chinese women (Book 6, p. 122) 

Chinese writing, literature, and the examination system (Book 6, pp. 125-126) 

The challenge of dealing with Brazilian cannibals (Book 15, p. 328). 

A strange corpse that will not stay buried (Book 5, p. 112). 

The beautiful solemnity of oath taking in Pegu (Bago, Myanmar) (Book 7, pp. 146–147) 

The empress Eleni of Ethiopia and her massive retinue (Book 11, pp. 247–248). 

Francisco Serrão and his men outwit some pirates (Book 5, p.109) 

Th cruelty of a Portuguese governor on Ternate (Book 10, pp. 211-12). 

Francis Xavier called to go as a missionary to India (Book 12, pp. 253-254) 

Francis Xavier arrives in Goa (Book 12, pp. 259–260). 

 

Leo Africanus, De viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes

A couple days ago I happened on a mysterious (to me) Neo-Latin text, a minor work by  the great early modern geographer Leo Africanus (born al-Hasan, son of Muhammad in Granada, c. 1494 – c. 1554), “De viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes” (On Notable Men among the Arabs). I put it out there on Facebook and Twitter:

Several people responded that this indeed sounded like an interesting project, and some offered to help in editing it for a modern audience. Thanks to some excellent bibliographic sleuthing by Mischa Hooker of Augustana College I can now provide a bit more information for potential collaborators.

The anonymous author of Biblioteca Antica e Moderna di Storia Letteraria vol. 3 (1768), p. xxx, writes (my translation)

Giovanni Leone Africano was a Muslim slave who while in Rome embraced the Christian faith and took the name Gianleone from Pope Leo X. In 1513 he returned to Africa but moved later to Tunis and returned to his original faith. There he wrote in Arabic a small treatise about writers famous among the Arabs. A Latin translation of this work was preserved in the Medici library. Ottingero had a copy from Florence and included it in his Bibliotecario quadripartita, which was printed in 1664, as we said above. Fabricio reprinted it in Book 13 of his Biblioteca Greca, p. 259. I see fit to reproduce this here with a few annotations by the same Fabricio. 

I have no idea where the Arabic original might be. But here is the first printing of the Latin version: J. H. Hottinger, Bibliothecarius Quadripartitus (Zurich, 1664) III. De Theologia Patristica, cum Appendice Leonis Africani hactenus ἀνεκδότῳ, de Scriptoribus Arabicis [pp. 246ff.] https://books.google.com/books?id=hOFaAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA16-PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Here is the first reprint, source of the existing annotations: A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, vol. 13 (Hamburg, 1726) [pp. 259ff.] https://books.google.com/books?id=muVEAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA260#v=onepage&q&f=false

Here is edition I quote from above: Biblioteca antica e moderna di storia letteraria, vol. 3 (Pesaro, 1768) [pp. 312ff.] https://books.google.com/books?id=orBOshjAEzYC&pg=PA312#v=onepage&q&f=false

And here is a manuscript copy of the third quarter of the 17th century, in Kassel, Germany, deriving from the version in Florence: https://orka.bibliothek.uni-kassel.de/viewer/image/1384356226837/19/LOG_0002/

Leo’s much larger and more famous work on the geography of Africa (vol. 1; vol. 2)was widely translated and published. According to Wikipedia

A twentieth-century rediscovery of the originally-dictated manuscript revealed that Ramusio, in smoothing the grammar of Leo Africanus’s text had coloured many neutral details,to make it more palatable to Christian European audiences; French and English translators added further embellishments. Modern translations which incorporate this manuscript are thus more true to the original.

See Crofton Black, (2002). “Leo Africanus’s “Descrittione dell’Africa” and its sixteenth-century translations.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 65: 262–272. JSTOR 4135111

De viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes seems quite neglected by comparison.

The Level of Poeticism in Latin Synonyms

Two of the students in my senior research colloquium, Beth Eidam and Tessa Cassidy, have decided to write on the question of the level of poeticism of Latin synonyms.  Their work is based on the fundamental article of R.G.G.  Coleman, “Poetic Diction, Poetic Discourse and the Poetic Register.” This 1999 paper is long, technical, and brilliant.  Coleman lists and defines a series of features that are distinctive to the language used by the Latin poets. These include the lexicon, of course, but also features of syntax, the use of proper names, special declensions, distinctive compounds, syncope, diminutives, Grecisms, the usual poetic devices like metaphor and metonymy, among others.

two pidgeons talking, listing synonyms for "sword"

What makes Latin poetry poetic is not just being in verse, or using rare, archaic words, or avoiding certain words. Rather, Coleman shows, there is constellation of features that elevate the language and give it energy. He emphasizes the importance of context.  Words like mollis and tener were quite at home in rustic or horticultural contexts (asparagi molles, tenerae gallinae), but in poetry of a Callimachean type they were polarized with durus and severus to cover in the wider metaphorical range.  Nothing in Catullus 85, he points out, is lexically poetic. It lacks all the other conventional markers of poeticism, like metaphor and archaism. But the combination is distinctively memorable and poetic, partly due to the extreme density of verbs. I recommend this article to all lovers of Latin poetry, if you can hang in with it.

Coleman’s discussion of synonyms (like ensis and gladius, fera and bestia, amnis and flumen) notes that we can often tell which was the more poetic and which was more associated with common speech by looking at the presence or absence of derivatives in the Romance languages. He points out that Vergil’s Dido is always pulchra, not formosa (although Vergil did not avoid formosa in the Eclogues).  Pulcher is likely to have been more poetic and literary and removed from common speech, since, unlike formosa, it left no trace in the Romance languages.

Beth and Tessa are planning to add some data the discussion.  Coleman made no attempt to assess the relative frequency of Latin synonyms in a poetry and prose.  But we now have the ability to do so with some degree of confidence, thanks to the data collected in Opera Latina. As Patrick Burns wrote in a 2017 SCS review,  

Opera Latina is a search interface from the Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes (LASLA) at the University of Liège that draws on over five decades of linguistic research on Latin literature. The database currently includes 154 works from 19 authors: Caesar, Cato, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Persius, Petronius, Plautus, Pliny the Younger, Propertius, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Sallust, Seneca the Younger, Tactius, Tibullus, and Vergil.

The database currently includes 2,104,866 words of Latin, 385,258 of them from poetic works, 1,719,608 from prose.

Every word in the corpus has been annotated with the following information: the lemma, or dictionary head word (following Forcellini’s 1864 Lexicon totius latinitatis); the form of the word as it appears in the text; a citation with the word’s location in the text; the word’s morphology; and its subordinating syntax. Records are also flagged to distinguish ambiguous forms, mark proper nouns, and call attention to notable miscellany.

The plan is to work with the sets of synonyms collected in Doederlein’s Handbook of Latin Synonyms, collect the counts of those lemmas in Opera Latina, and create a database that will show the frequency of each synonym relative to the others (is gremium or sinus more common? As it turns out, sinus is commoner by a count of 317 to 78), and relative frequency in poetry and prose of each word.  Since the overall number of prose tokens is higher, the poetry count will be adjusted up so they are comparing apples to apples.  When those calculations are done, it will be possible to determine whether each word is relatively more common in prose or poetry. The plan is to express this as a number between zero and one, with zero assigned to a word that occurs exclusively in prose, 1 to a word that occurs exclusively in poetry.  On this scale (with the counts adjusted), gremium comes in at 0.89, sinus at 0.79–both are poetic.

The plan is to collect as much of this data as possible in one half semester. Beth and Tessa will divide up Doederlein and get as far as they can. Then they will turn to individual passages in Latin literature that actually use the synonyms and do the kind of analysis and close reading Coleman does, but backed up with data. Ideally, when the complete data is collected, we can create an online, enhanced version of Doederlein and put it up on DCC for all Latinists to enjoy. I would love to hear any comments or suggestions you might have for this project.