Le favole di Oddone di Cheriton. Edizione critica e studio introduttivo. Die Fabeln des Odo von Cherington. Kritische Ausgabe und einleintende Studie

The so-called “Fabulae” written by Odo of Cheriton (1180/90-1246/47) owe their traditional title to Hervieux’s edition published in 1896, still used as a reference. This work aims at providing the reader with a new edition based on an accurate philological inquiry into the text and its manuscripts. If the literary features of Odo’s fables have, indeed, been studied, especially in regard to their innovative elements, such as their christianized morals and the relationship of the tales to preaching, the collection has not been studied from a philological point of view. Before this research there was no clarity in regard to the total number of tales, which varied in previous editions between 60 and 117, nor to the determination and inner divisions of the corpus; moreover, all previous editions are based on only one manuscript or little more. As a matter of fact, Hervieux basically published a codex optimus that he only occasionally emended – but did not declare where he operated basing the correction on other manuscripts and where he did so ope ingenii – which is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 441; other editions are the ones done by Voigt (1878), Oesterley (1868 and 1871) and Perry (1952). Voigt is the only one to study the relationship between codices, although only between a small portion of them (11); Oesterley uses only one manuscript in both his editions (although the two are different between one another) and Perry only publishes a selection of the tales present in Hervieux, adding an apparatus which informs the reader on variantes available in the already existing studies, but not conducting a new research himself. Other issues of Odo’s status queastionis are the absence of a comprehensive study of his works, all unpublished apart from 65 of his “Sermones dominicales” (Paris, 1520) and the tales themselves, the lack of a census and, concerning the fables, of a systematic analysis of the whole collection. This situation prevents from making extensive comparisons and evaluations of the author’s usus scribendi, which is why the first purpose of this dissertation was a general introduction that could account for the main literary features shared by the whole collection. Starting from a short contextualization of Odo’s biography and his other works, we looked into the prologue of the tales, that heavily references the Sacred Scriptures and relies on the allegorical method proper to exegesis, which is strongly stressed, even more so than the usage of Aesopical tales in the collection, although as important. Secondly, the title itself has been questioned: even if the collection is usually called “Fabulae”, the manuscripts never offer this lectio, which is instead Hervieux’s arbitrary choice. In the prologue, Odo talks of his work not as fabulae, but instead as a tractatus parabolicus: if one is to give the collection a proper title, then, the latter one must be used, although there is no evidence of a specific rubric redacted by Odo to be used as a title. One of the new discoveries made in this research is then the refusal of the title currently used and the clarification of another ambiguity derived by Hervieux’s edition. As a matter of fact, the French scholar not only arbitrary called the tales “Fabulae”, but also decide to publish some excerpta from Odo’s sermons under the title “Parabulae”. He did so by isolating these extracts from ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 16506, thus creating a significant confusion in subsequent research trying to address the two texts: even nowadays it is quite hard to understand if a catalog is, for example, talking about the tale collection or the sermons. During this research, it was discovered that some extracts on fables topics from the sermons actually circulated throughout the Middle Ages, as nine manuscripts who hold them included them into bigger exempla collections; nonetheless, these exceerpta never constituted an independent work, and the only tale collection produced by Odo is the one that should more properly be called tractatus parabolicus. Moreover, the introduction includes a short analysis of the main literary features of the text, with a particular attention given to the mixing up of the fable and exemplum genres in Odo’s work, as he used for every one of his stories the allegorical method proper to biblical exegesis. The aim of such an introduction is to be a first step into a deeper and more complex analysis of Odo’s works as a whole, an accomplishment that, however, will inevitably need wider studies dedicated also to the other books he wrote in order to be completed. In regard to the tale collection, particularly developed is its social and religious critique, which Odo wanted to express in his allegory-rich and heavily christianized morals. This critique is addressed especially against ecclesiastical hierarchies – not the Church itself, but its people – but not only those; it is against all who abuse their subjects when in a position to exercise power over others. Odo thus condemns not only bishops, ministers and prelates who only worry about earthly matters and fall short of their responsibilities, indulging in vices instead, but also rich masters and rulers who vex their subjects. However, Odo’s attack does not spare the humbles too, who are criticized when they try to improve their social standing and thus forget their place, or who are more generally guilty, as anyone, of the seven deadly sins, of lack in faith or of conducting themselves not virtuously enough. It can be easily noticed, then, that Odo had a strong drive towards contributing to reforming his contemporary society, whose morals felt in need of a deep renovation. Lastly, the introduction addresses shortly the success of Odo’s collection, which was translated into vernacular three times (into Gaelic, Chwedlau Odo, into Old-French, Les Parables Maystre Oe de Cyrintime, into old Spanish, Libro de los gatos); apart from these works, it must also be mentioned that Odo probably influenced Nicole Bozon, John of Sheppey and maybe, Clemente Sánchez, Stephan of Bourbon and the Speculum laicorum as well. After the analysis of the main literary features of the collection, the research proceeded with the production of a new, updated census of the manuscripts transmitting the Tractatus parabolicus. Seventy-one codices have been found, in comparison to Hervieux’s twenty-five and to other ten that had already been identified by previous bibliography (see Dicke-Grubmüller 1987 and Welter 1927). Thanks to this recensio we were also able to investigate the definition itself of Odo’s corpus, a topic made quite complex by the constitutive mobility of the fable genre in the Middle Ages. As a matter of fact, it is quite common for the author and text identity to be easily and almost immediately lost in this genre, also due to the easy addition or elimination of some of the apologues due to different motivations, that vary also from manuscript to manuscript. Since tales were often included into bigger collections that took on from various sources, it is extremely difficult to determine the original corpus. Moreover, in Odo’s case the matter is even more complicated due to a sometimes ambiguous internal division of tales, once again partially depending on Hervieux’s choices, partially on the tradition itself. As a matter of fact, Hervieux chose to number the tales not progressively, but by sometimes adding letters onto numbers, especially when he thought that two consequent tales revolved around the same topic. One then finds, for example, tales 56, 56a, 56b, 56c, which Hervieux separated in his edition but which should instead considered as only one fable; conversely, tales 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d e 1e are on one hand independent ones (1, 1a, 1c, 1e), on the other the result of corruptions of the tradition (1b, 1d). At the same time, manuscripts sometimes don’t distinguish clearly between Odo’s tales, fusing some together or dividing others in peculiar ways, so a degree of uncertainty is to be found not only in the history of studies, but also in the tradition itself. Another accomplishment of this dissertation is thus precisely giving a new, clearer definition of the corpus, not only in regard to its internal divisions, based upon the manuscript tradition, but also to their number and the identification of spurious fables, such as 76, 1b and 1d. Starting from the new recensio, the dissertation then proceed onto the philological and textual analysis of the collection, with the hope of tracing a stemma codicum. We thus selected thirty-six manuscripts according to their antiquity, place of origin (with a predilection for England) and portion of the text transmitted, into which some loci critici that cover around one-third of the work were identified. Unfortunately, though, manuscripts present a lot of different variantes, but not of stemmatical importance: they are often lectiones adiaphorae and/or small differences in the order of words, alteration of conjunctions, verbal tenses and so on. It was then not possible to trace a proper stemma, but we still tried to account for the different features of the tradition. Five different orders in the transmission of the collection were found, which seem to present themselves also when studying the text of the loci critici. Apart from one (δ, linked to order D and to one manuscript of the order A), it is improper to talk about families, but it is only possible to group the non fragmentary codices – we intend with the expression “fragmentary codices” all those manuscripts that only transmit a maximum of ten tales, generally dispersed within the codex itself, which usually collects materials from different sources – based upon quite uniform geographical areas. That is to say that there seem to be a link between almost all German manuscripts and one Italian one (Wo, order B), between the bohemian and eastern-European codices (order C), between some English manuscripts and two French ones (order E), whereas the majority of the English codices (plus two German, one Austrian, one bohemian and two French) share order A. The five orders that can be identified in most of the tradition seem to have also a textual foundation, although only δ features proper errors. Once the philological inquiry, conducted on a wide portion of the textual witnesses, was completed, the impossibility of a stemma made necessary to conduct the edition based on different criteria. We have thus relied first of all on the most ancient manuscripts, dating back to the 13th century; in order to balance the fact that all of them, apart from C1, do not transmit tales 61-75, we have chosen to add to this number two German codices (B5 Ba), considering that the German group is the only one to hold this portion of the text as well, and another English manuscript, Du, in order to better represent the tradition. The critical edition thus follows a conservative approach, that mostly relies to C1, quite close to the author, but corrects its mistakes by integrating its testimony first of all with B2 C2 L4 O2 V, the most ancient manuscripts, and then B5 Ba Du, as already stated. For the portion of the text collated for the loci all the thirty-six manuscripts used in the collection itself were also included. The critical apparatus thus concerns nine codices for the whole text, thirty-six for the loci. Lastly, the edition also provides the first Italian translation of Odo’s fables and a small paragraph that, tale by tale, reminds the reader of the witnesses of the text and of other retellings available in a selection of other medieval Latin fabulists, apart from references to the principal repertoires of the genre. To sum up, this dissertation had as its purpose not only trying to account for the main literary features of the Odo’s fables collection, even if, of course, in a limited way, but also studying this work from a philological and textual point of view. We thus tried to offer a wide as possible exam of the tradition, although very complex, proposing then a new critical edition of the text that tries to overcome Hervieux’s, so as to give the reader the tools needed to approach a text as solid ad possible. We wish that, in the future, similar endeavors will be conducted for all of Odo’s works.