A survey of translations of Cicero in Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula (ca. 1330-ca. 1500)

Alejandro Coroleu; Lluís Cabré

doi:10.6093/2974-637X/11063

Alejandro Coroleu Alejandro Coroleu, ICREA - Univ. Autonoma Barcelona https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1286-2508
Lluís Cabré Univ. Autonoma Barcelona https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1572-4461

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/2974-637X/11063

Keywords: Cicero, Humanistic translations, Manuscript circulation

Abstract

This article examines vernacular renderings of Cicero’s shorter moral works between ca. 1330 and ca. 1500 from the vantage point of manuscript production and circulation. Excluding the Somnium Scipionis, no fewer than twenty-one translations of the De amicitia, the De senectute, the De officiis and the Paradoxa stoicorum were produced in Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula, of which eleven are of the De officiis and the Paradoxa stoicorum. This survey of Cicero’s moral treatises and dialogues available in translation confirms the central position occupied by these texts in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe.

Author Biographies

Alejandro Coroleu, Alejandro Coroleu, ICREA - Univ. Autonoma Barcelona

After studying Classics and Renaissance Studies at the Universitat de Barcelona, I undertook postdoctoral research at The Warburg Institute. I taught and researched at the University of Nottingham between 1995 and 2008. In 2009 I accepted a Research Professorship at ICREA in the Department of Catalan at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. My research interests are the study of Latin literary culture (ca. 1500 - ca. 1700), with particular attention to the relation between Italian and European humanism. I am also interested in the reception of Greek and Roman literatures in early-modern Iberia. In December 2022 I completed a monograph provisionally entitled Latin political propaganda in the War of the Spanish Succession and its Aftermath, 1700-1740, to be published by Bloomsbury.

Lluís Cabré, Univ. Autonoma Barcelona

Lluís G. M. Cabré Ollé is professor of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is the author of critical editions of Pere March’s poetry (1993) and Bernat Metge’s Llibre de Fortuna i Prudència (2010), and has also co-edited Ramon Llull’s Rhetorica nova (2006). His research focuses on Medieval Catalan poetry (in particular, Ausiàs March’s works), Bernat Metge and Medieval translations, with a secondary research interest in the works of Josep Carner and J. V. Foix. He has directed the collective volume The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan 1300-1500 (Tamesis 2018).