The Golden Legend, readings on the saints (review)

Reviews 185 view of HoUoway's rejection of Francis Carmody's stemma of the Tresor manuscripts in Brunetto Latini: an analytic bibliography (p. 20). Dante and Brunetto Latini (as he is most commonly known) deserve a better book than this, with greater accuracy and a clearer argument. Diana Modesto Department of Italian University of Sydney Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend readings on the saints, trans. William G. Ryan, 2 vols, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. xvui, 391, 400; R.R.P. US$99.00. The present work offers an 'entirely new' translation, 'thefirstcomplete modem translation in English', of the celebrated mid-thirteenth-century Dominican Legenda Aurea, or set of Latin 'lives' of the 'official Saints whom the Church, up to Jacobus' time, had declared to be worthy of public veneration' (I, pp. xiii-xv). Written, perhaps, as 'primarily a manual for preachers' (I, p. xvui), the work survives in some 1,000 manuscripts, (I, p. xiv, n. 6) and 'hundreds' of printed editions, several of which were of the Caxton translation (1483), the second in English, which was most recendy re-published in 1931. The present translationfillsout omissions in the 1941 edition, the name of whose coUaborator, Helmut Ripperger, has dropped off the tide page of the new translation. However, tike its predecessor, it omits the appendix of lives that Graesse, in his 1845 Latin edition, considered not to be by Jacobus. The 1941 version claimed to be an 'adapted' translation, 'although deletions are few, and changes in thetextstill fewer. Most of the omissions have been long and highly involved theological passages . . . [and] passages in which repetitions were multiplied andre-multiplied,or where the stories told would have offended rather than inspired the reader of today' (1941 version, p. xvi). The present translation seems half as long again as the 1941 version. These omissions the present translation has supplied, though the translator claims that his work precedes the much that remains to be done on the Legend 'to establish a textus receptus by collating the manuscript material,tolocate Jacobus' quotations from other authors, and to evaluate the use he made of his sources' (I, p. xiv). The summary preface, shorter and less interesting, though slighUy more scholarly, than the original preface, bears him out. A critical edition is now in progress from 186 Reviews the Istituto E. Franceschini, Certosa di Firenze, ed. C. Leonardi. In other words, we have in these two volumes a complete and readable translation that does not claim to be any closer to what Jacobus wrote than the Latin edition by Graesse, which, if we may believe, Graesse took from 'an edition . . . preserved in the Royal Library in Dresden' (I, p. xiii). Graesse's actual preface is a litde more specific (pp. I—III of the 1850 Leipzig edition). Its reliability as a translation may be judged, perhaps, from the choice, in the life of St Dominic, of 'soldier' to translate miles, which is 'chevalier' in the medieval French versions, and 'slave' to translate servus, 'serf. In the life of St Ambrose, 'pleaded cases in the courts' translates 'causas praetorii... peroraref. The present translation is 'new' in that it modernizes and re-phrases much of the old, although extensively re-using the latter. It supplies bibliographical references not in the old version. The lives are now numbered continuously, as they were by Graesse, but lack the useful festival date supplied in the 1941 edition. There are approximately the same number of lives, with some small changes of order. Annotation is sparse and the few, inconsequential, illustrations of the 1941 edition are omitted. There is an index to each volume, rather than one to the whole. There can be no doubt that the present volumes are the version of the Golden Legend that will be in the hands of English-speaking scholars and others interested in the details of central medieval religious beliefs for the forseeable future. Its appearance must be welcomed, for who can predict when someone will attempt another, based on all the research envisaged by the present translator? John O.Ward Department of History University of Sydney Jager, Eric, The tempter's voice: language and the Fall in medieval literature, Ithaca...