An Occitan Prayer against the Plague and Its Tradition in Italy, France, and Catalonia

Abstract

In 1716 Pierre Lebrun, a member of the Congregation of the French Oratory in the Séminaire Saint-Magloire, Paris, made a public appeal for collaboration in a study of manuscripts of the Mass. Answers came from more than a hundred correspondents, Oratorians, canons, clergy regular and secular, curates, and laymen. Today these responses constitute twenty-three volumes in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 16796–16818, titled “Papiers du P. Lebrun sur la liturgie.” One of them, lat. 16797, contains a section on Toulon (fols. 138–178v) in which a correspondent, no doubt the canon named Desparra who was Lebrun's correspondent in that city, includes a prayer against the plague written in the Occitan language. Although Lebrun made use of his correspondence in three subsequent volumes that appeared in 1726, he did not mention this prayer. More recently two other versions of the prayer have been published, but this one, which dates from the fourteenth century, has remained unknown to historians of the plague and students of medieval Occitan.