interpolation, verses, Glagolitic literature, anticlerical poem, The light is coming to the end
Abstract
The Judgement of the Lord God [Sud gospodina Boga] is an elaborate apocalyptic prose, which can be found in three Croatian Glagolitic literary miscellanies, produced in the 15th and 16th centuries – Berčić’s miscellany no. 5 [Berčićev zbornik br. 5], the Miscellany with spiritual readings IV a 48 [Zbornik duhovnog štiva IV a 48], and the Tko miscellany [Tkonski zbornik] – as well as in two late copies, in the Glagolitic Little book of legends of the priest Dume Grego [Zbirčica legendi Popa Duma Grega] from the 18th century and its Latin copy from the 19th century. This article shows that the variants from the Miscellany with spiritual readings IV a 48 and the Tkon miscellany are similar, even if the former has been abbreviated by the exclusion of one lengthy episode, and it was this abbreviated version what was copied in the manuscripts from the 18th and 19th century. These four variants can be said to constitute one redaction of The Judgement, whereas the variant found in the Berčić’s miscellany no. 5 is its separate redaction with many unique features. Within the prose of The Judgement of the Lord God from the Berčić’s miscellany no. 5, two verses have been found in an episode, where the personification of the Earth chastises the decadence of monks and clergy within its broader appeal to God, to judge the humanity for its sinfulness: “oči svoi ot is’tini uk’loniše· Pohote sego s(vê)ta zabludiše” [“removing their eyes away from the truth, the have strayed into the lusts of this world”]. In a slightly different form, these verses, absent from all the other versions of The Judgement, also appear in an anticlerical poem, called The light is coming to the end [Svit se konča], which is a part of the oldest Croatian poetry collection that is preserved in the 14th-century manuscript known as Code slave 11. I argue that the verses from The Judgement of the Lord God in Berčić’s miscellany no. 5 are likely to be an echo of a variant of the poem The light is coming to the end, rather than some other hypothetical text. To support such a conclusion, I point to the research of Amir Kapetanović, who has studied the poetry repertoires of the Berčić miscellany no. 5 and Code slave 11, as well as the variants of their poems in various other collections, concluding that the scribes who have produced the Berčić’s miscellany no. 5 had access to a collection of poetry that was, at the very least, closely related to the collection found in the Code slave 11. For a long time, it was common for scholars to speculate about the medieval and early modern reception of The light is coming to the end, without offering any concrete textual arguments to support their claims. A shift in the state of research has been recently made by Dragica Malić, who has observed that several verses in Marko Marulić’s Good lessons [Dobri nauci] have a high concentration of the same collocations and rhymes that appear in The light is coming to the end. While her argument that Marulić’s Good lessons echo the poem from Code slave 11 is plausible, its support in rhymes and collocations is not entirely compelling. Therefore, the verses I have uncovered from the apocalyptic prose from the Berčić’s miscellany no. 5 are the most reliable trace of the reception of The light is coming to the end in later medieval Croatian literature.
