The Marulić news: what have we learned about a Croatian classic over the last dozen years Neven Jovanović, University of Zagreb * Intro Poštovane dame i gospodo, dominae dominique venerabiles, dear ladies and gentlemen, We know very well that a library is one of basic tools for a scholar; we also know that Marko Marulić had a library, we know some books which were there, we even know what happened to them. Therefore a library --- especially the place where we are at the moment --- is a great setting for a talk on Marulić, and I am certain that he would envy me --- that he would gladly exchange places with me and give this talk himself if he had a chance. Only I am not sure he would have been able to talk in English; more likely he would have chosen Latin, Croatian, or Italian. In Croatia, Marko Marulić from Split --- Marcus Marulus Spalatensis --- is often called "the father of Croatian literature". Personally, I do not like this phrase; I do not believe that a literature is like a family. This expression has a taste of 19th century, and indeed it was coined then, during one of Croatian searches for an identity. In 1869, when Ivan Kukuljević first published Marulić's Croatian poetry, he called the poet from Split "the father of Croatian literary verse"; some fifty years later, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the "Judita" in 1901, the expression was remodeled into "the father of Croatian literature". At the time of Kukuljević, Croatia was a part of the Habsburg Empire, the year 1848 and the "Spring of Nations" happened some twenty years ago, and Croatia itself --- administratively separated from Dalmatia --- was pretty desperately trying to prove its cultural worthiness. We can say that Croatia was looking for its Dante or Petrarch, and he was found in Marko Marulić. Funny thing is, today we know that Marulić was more similar both to Dante and Petrarch --- that he tried harder to be similar --- than anyone either in 1869 or in 1901 could have imagined. * Previous discoveries ** The Davidias Marko Marulić wrote and successfully published the first epic poem in Croatian; he also wrote a Latin epic, the Dauidias, which was first published in 1954; at the end of this poem Marulić added a Latin translation of Dante's first canto of the Inferno. After the Davidias, there was a long hiatus in new discoveries on Marulić: from 1952 until 1977 there were no new findings. In 1977 a report was made on Marulić's Croatian translation of the Imitatio Christi by Thomas a Kempis, written in 1500, but the text itself was not published until 1989. In 1979 Marulić's series of portraits of persons from the Old testament --- De veteris instrumenti viris illustribus commentarium --- was published for the first time, from the autograph. However, this also created relatively little interest. * The Letters The new era of discovery in research on Marulić coincides roughly with another Croatian search for identity, with the 1990s and the Croatian independence. In the bleak April of 1991, as the Serbs in Croatia declared their separate republic and the war was already beginning, Miloš Milošević reported in Split how he identified seven completely unknown letters by Marulić, in Italian and Latin (they tell me that only a couple of scholars were present, who could not believe what they were hearing). The letters, written between 1501 and 1516 and accidentally preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, lying for a long time forgotten behind the files of the notaio Jacopo Grasolari, contain no less than Marulić's proud advertisement of his own Croatian epic, the Judith. In 1501 (19th July), Marulić wrote to his friend Jerolim Ćipiko, the Canon of Split, currently in Venice: "Fatto ho una opereta in lengua nostra materna, per rima, distinta in sie libri (...) Composta e more poetico, venite et vedetila, direte che ancora la lengua schiaua ha el suo Dante". --- "I have written a little work in verse, in our mother tongue, in six books (...) Come and see it; you will say that the Slavic language has its own Dante". Remember, please, this Marulić's connection with Dante. ** Preface to the Dialogus de Hercule In 1992 the Dialogus de Hercule a Christicolis superato, printed several times previously, was published for first time from the autograph --- from a manuscript which turned out to include a preface with a praise of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the celebrated author of the Encomium moriae and the persona non grata in 1524, when the Dialogus was first printed (the sentence mentioning Erasmus is crossed out). So what we knew until 1992 was a censored edition of the Dialogus; so Marulić read and appreciated some of Erasmus' works. * Autographs in Britain In 1993 begins a series of discoveries of Marulić's presence in Britain. By "presence" I mean a physical fact --- the presence of manuscripts containing his writings and kept in libraries of the United Kingdom. I have to stress here that all these discoveries are due to Professor Darko Novaković from the University of Zagreb, a scholar who was my teacher and now is my colleague. Thanks to this, I know what was his secret weapon for these discoveries. Two simple things: first, Novaković came each summer to the UK and spent there a month or more, and secondly, he read meticulously library catalogues and manuscript catalogues, excerpting everything connected with Croatian Latin writers. ** Vita diui Hieronymi In 1993, on the annual Colloquium Marulianum --- a meeting of scholars working on Marulić --- Novaković reported that he found in the British Library, in the collection of "Additional Manuscripts", an autograph manuscript containing the Vita diui Hieronymi. This is Marulić's unpublished biography of St Jerome (translator of the Bible and a saint known in Dalmatia as sveti Jere, much favoured because of his Dalmatian origins). The biography is also mentioned in a Marulić's letter to Jerolim Cipiko, from April 4 1507. How did Marulić's autograph manuscript come to England? After Marulić's death, it came to the Dominican monastery in Split; after a series of plagues and other catastrophes from which Split suffered later, in 1790 the manuscript somehow turned up in Ferrara, to be purchased in 1850 by the British Library at the sale of a London bookseller and collector Thomas Rodd the Younger. ** In epigrammata priscorum commentarius 1996 (pub. 1997) MS. ADD. A. 25 Oxford, Bodleian Library Three years later, in 1996, Novaković reported on another find, this time in Oxford, in the Bodleian Library, which turned out to contain another codex written by Marulić's hand. The codex holds his In epigrammata priscorum commentarius, a collection of Roman inscriptions with Marulić's commentary. This codex was for some time in Treviso, and it was sold to the Bodleian in 1834 by the same Thomas Rodd the Younger mentioned above (for the sum of 1 pound and 3 shillings). The in epigrammata priscorum commentarius contains inscriptions not only from Rome and Italy, but also from Salona, near Split. To this day this work has not been published entirely. * The Glasgow Verses 1996 (pub. 1997) Hunter 334, Glasgow, University Library In the same year, following a clue pointed at by Bratislav Lučin, the director of the Marulianum (Split centre for Marulić research), Darko Novaković found in Glasgow, in its University Library, a manuscript with a transcription of the In epigrammata priscorum commentarius --- but also with many mostly unknown Marulić's Latin poems. This manuscript, the so-called Hunter 334, was in 1572 given as a gift from Joannes Franciscus Bernardus Genuensis to his "compatriota" Joannes a Castolo, whose widow Maria Godineria gave it in turn to Dionysius Perottus in London, at the 15 october of 1601. William Hunter, a Scotish physician and collectioner, died in 1783; we do not know how and when Hunter bought the manuscript with Marulić's works. The codex Hunter, or the Glasgow Manuscript, contains 141 Marulić's poems, of which we knew until then only 8. This codex seems to be a memorial, an act of piety: the unknown scribe, who did not know Latin as good as Marulić, collected his poetic opera minora, probably from separate leaflets or booklets. But the codex Hunter also introduces us to a new Marulić. Until then, we knew the author from Split as a religious writer; the codex Hunter shows that Marulić wrote satyre (making fun of his fellow citizens), that he loved animals --- and that he composed not only amatory, but outright erotic, even obscene, verse. * Petronius 2005 Finally, in 2005, Bratislav Lučin from Split --- whom I mentioned already as the director of the Marulianum --- was researching the manuscripts of Petar Cipiko, a Renaissance humanist from Trogir. Research required Lučin to have a look at the famous Codex Traguriensis, the Trogir Manuscript. Now, this manuscript is famous --- at least among the classicists --- because it is the only manuscript containing the full text of the Cena Trimalchionis, the longest part of the Satyricon, a roman of violence, decadence, and obscenity by the first-century Latin writer Petronius (you probably know the film by Fellini). The manuscript was written in Italy in early Quattrocento --- probably for Poggio Bracciolini --- and somehow it turned up in Trogir, where it lay forgotten for some time. Around 1650 people realized that an excerpt from the Satyricon copied in this codex cannot be found anywhere else; this created quite a stir in the res publica litterarum, and the codex --- we do not exactly know how --- went away from Trogir, first to Rome, then, somehow, to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, where it is still kept today (Codex Parisiensis lat. 7989 olim Traguriensis). Now, the codex Traguriensis has some other texts beside Petronius; in it are copied Tibullus, Propertius, Catullus --- and on pages 233--237, near the end of the codex, there is a humanist copy of a poem on Phoenix written by the Roman author Claudius Claudianus (4th century AD, the period called late antiquity). It turns out that Claudian's Phoenix in the codex Traguriensis is copied by Marko Marulić. We have enough of his autographs to be absolutely sure about this. It turns out also that Marulić did more than just copy a poem into the older codex. Marulić annotated --- quite amply --- the text of Catullus contained in the codex Traguriensis. Alongside almost every Catullus' poem, Marulić wrote some short accompanying note in the margin, some kind of summary, and, quite often, emendations of the text. Marulić wrote between the lines, or over the original entry, or in the margin. At a rough guess, there must be at least three hundred such variants or emendations. Marulić also left other marginal notes throughout the codex, in all the texts except the Cena Trimalchionis. What does this mean? Let me summarise the conclusions of Bratislav Lučin. In the codex Traguriensis we meet Marko Marulić for the first time as a humanist textual scholar, a philologist. We also meet Marulić commenting on Catullus, a Roman poet known not only for his eroticism, but also for obscenity (Marulić paraphrases or writes out in the margins the most obscene expressions in Catullus’ repertoire without any hesitation). The abundance and character of Marulić's additions to the Trogir Codex, and the fact that he did it over several decades, mean that for a time Marulić was not just an incidental reader of the codex Traguriensis, but its real owner. It is quite possible that the codex went from Trogir to Split, to return to Trogir only after Marulić's death. * Conclusions What new things have were discovered about Marko Marulić after the year 1991 --- in the last 18 years? A number of his autograph writings was found or studied better (letters, three manuscripts); new prose and poetic works of his were discovered; we have seen Marulić not only as a writer of the first Croatian epic, not only as an author of two world-wide known religious bestsellers, but from other perspectives: as an admirer of Erasmus of Rotterdam, as an erotic poet, as a philologist --- perhaps the first Croatian philologist --- and as the first Croatian reader of Petronius. "Direte che ancora la lengua schiaua ha el suo Dante." I believe today that Marulić did not only translate Dante and Petrarch; he conscientiously tried to become another Dante and Petrarch. He was quite aware of all tasks of a Renaissance humanist --- of humanist's moral and religious responsibility as well as of philological interest in antiquity and of one's challenge to try one's hand in many languages, in many genres --- and Marulić tried to meet all those requirements. Though he lived in a small country, in a small city, during times of hardship and relative poverty, Marulić read and wrote much, he thought and wrote about different things and in different ways, his works were read, and he managed to leave many clues for us to find and to think about. In all, in the last two dozen years it turns out that we picked for a national classic a person who himself tried very hard to become a national classic --- and who really deserves to be it. Thank you.