Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae: The Latin Lives of the Welsh Saints

这个项目将制作一个新的在线版本，介绍中世纪威尔士圣徒的拉丁生活。这些引人入胜、色彩丰富的文本，将这个国家最早的圣男圣女们的事迹、旅程和奇迹，定位在早期王国、暴虐统治者、异教徒爱尔兰人和撒克逊人的传奇景观中，以及偶尔被蛇和龙侵扰的地方。这些作品似乎主要代表了在诺曼征服后的一个世纪左右，威尔士边境上的创造力的非凡爆发：在一个正在被更大的跨国组织吸收的教堂中，对当地传统的惊人主张。这些作品的兴趣和重要性早已得到认可，多年来，研究早期威尔士历史、文学、文化和基督教的学生们对它们进行了挖掘。然而，只有少数书被编辑到严格的现代标准。其中一些最为人所知的是1944年的一份出版物，其中没有提供详细的分析或评论；还有一些印刷过的报纸则是分散的，处理得也不均匀。在进行了最新工作的地方，它往往表明在日期、作者、出处和文本关系等问题上可以取得重大进展。这些进步在一定程度上反映了英国中世纪拉丁语在20世纪后期作为一门严肃的学术研究学科的发展。我们的版本将使整个语料库与最好的现代作品保持一致。需要修订的文本包括明显引起广泛兴趣的材料，比如卡多克斯和吉尔达斯的生活，他们早期把亚瑟王描绘成世俗的反英雄，而不是更熟悉的救世主形象，或者林肯的《大卫的生活》手稿，这被认为是最接近威尔士翻译的拉丁版本，但从未印刷过。还有一大批文本几乎完全被忽视了：例如，卡拉多库斯、克利塔库斯、德库曼、凯纳和Kynedus的生平，没有吸引到现代的研究，也从未被翻译过。然而，任何现代对文学类型及其历史、文化和宗教意义的重新评估，都应该考虑到全部语料库。这种对拉丁传统的重新评估自然来自最近和正在进行的工作。“威尔士的圣徒崇拜”（CSW）项目（ahrc资助，2013-17年）正在准备所有关于圣徒的威尔士语文本的新版本，而“维塔·圣康布里亚”（VSC）的目的是在智力上补充它，建立其技术基础设施，并从CSW为该学科领域带来的势头中受益。除了在同一平台上整合威尔士语和拉丁语版本外，该项目还将进一步开发网站相关的上下文材料，这些材料旨在具有广泛的普遍兴趣和价值。中世纪对圣徒的崇拜在文化上的重要性一定会打动每一位来到威尔士的游客，在那里，圣徒们聚集在路标上，这在欧洲其他许多地方是最不寻常的。这一现象需要通过文本证据的范围进行研究。威尔士生活，诗歌和家谱文本的白话传统是CSW的重点；VSC将把焦点放在拉丁人的生活上，其中大多数是比威尔士语更早的作品，他们与威尔士语有着复杂而有趣的关系。除了提供一个了解中世纪威尔士文化和文学传统的独立窗口外，VSC还将引发一些不同的问题。与威尔士语的来源不同，拉丁语的作品可以很容易地传遍欧洲，我们的一些文本在英格兰和其他地方被汇编成集子。威尔士圣徒东移的现象是我们要特别关注的，我们既要寻找传播日期和途径的线索，也要研究当这些非常本地化的文本被汇集到国际汇编中时会发生什么。

This project will produce a new online edition of the medieval Latin lives of Welsh saints. These are engaging, colourful texts, which locate the deeds, journeys and miracles of the country's first holy men and women in a legendary landscape of early kingdoms, tyrannical rulers, pagan Irish and Saxons, and occasional infestations by snakes and dragons. The works appear mostly to represent an extraordinary burst of creativity in and on the borders of Wales during the century or so after the Norman Conquest: a striking assertion of local traditions in a church undergoing absorption into a larger trans-national organisation.The interest and importance of these compositions has long been recognised, and they have been mined over the years by students of early Welsh history, literature, culture and Christianity. Yet only a handful has been edited to exacting modern standards. Some are best known from the pages of a 1944 publication which offered no detailed analysis or commentary; others, where they have been printed at all, are scattered and unevenly treated. Where up-to-date work has been done, it has tended to show that significant progress can be made on questions of date, authorship, provenance and textual relationship. These advances in part reflect the development of British medieval Latin as a serious subject for academic study during the later twentieth century. Our edition will bring the entire corpus into line with the best modern work.The texts in need of revision include material of evident widespread interest, such as the lives of Cadocus and Gildas, with their early representations of king Arthur as secular anti-hero rather than the more familiar saviour-figure, or the Lincoln manuscript of the life of David, which is known to be the closest Latin version to the Welsh translation, but has never been printed. There is also a substantial group of texts which has been almost wholly overlooked: lives of Caradocus, Clitaucus, Decuman, Keyna and Kynedus, for example, have attracted no modern work and have never been translated. Yet any modern reassessment of the literary genre, and of its historical, cultural and religious significance, ought to take account of the full corpus.Such a reassessment of the Latin tradition follows naturally from recent and ongoing work. 'The Cult of Saints in Wales' [CSW] project (AHRC-funded, 2013-17) is preparing a new edition of all of the Welsh-language texts on saints, and 'Vitae Sanctorum Cambriae' [VSC] is designed to complement it intellectually, to build on its technical infrastructure, and to benefit from the momentum which CSW is bringing to the subject-area. Besides uniting Welsh and Latin editions on the same platform, the project will further develop the website's associated contextual materials, which are designed to be of broad general interest and value.The cultural importance of the medieval veneration of saints must strike every visitor to Wales, where saints crowd onto signposts in a way most unusual for many other parts of Europe. The phenomenon calls for study through the range of textual evidence. The vernacular tradition of Welsh lives, poems and genealogical texts is the focus of CSW; VSC will turn the spotlight on the Latin lives, most of which are earlier compositions than the Welsh-language ones, with which they share a complex and intriguing relationship.Besides offering a separate window onto cultural and literary tradition in medieval Wales, VSC will give rise to some distinct questions. Unlike the Welsh-language sources, works in Latin could readily travel across Europe, and some of our texts made their way into collections compiled in England and elsewhere. This phenomenon of Welsh saints moving east is one to which we shall give particular attention, looking both for clues as to the date and route(s) of transmission, and also studying what happens to these very localised texts when they are gathered into international compendia.