La philologie au risque des traditions manuscrites mixtes. L’exemple du Livre de vieillesse de Laurent de Premierfait

Abstract

The Philology under the Exposure of Mixed Manuscript Traditions. The Case of Laurent de Premierfait’s Livre de vieillesse Textual and material investigation of the manuscript tradition of Laurent de Premierfait’s Livre de vieillesse, French translation of Cicero’s De senectute (november 1405). This tradition contains one original manuscript (Paris, BnF, lat. 7789) and twenty-eigth testimonies produced without any authorial control. The principal aim of this paper is to reconsider the specific outputs of an original manuscript for the study and the edition of a text preserved in a mixed manuscript tradition and thus to assess the accuracy of the choice made in the recent critical edition of the text to exclusively follow the readings from the original manuscript. On a more global basis, the paper intends to put the spotlitgh on the philological assets of the study of mixed manuscript traditions as this kind of investigation enables to confront the usual working material of philology (scribal manuscripts) with its usual working perspective (the reconstruction of author’s original text). This contribution features the first stemma codicum of this text, a quantitative assessment of the scribe behaviours, a study of the spelling forms and punctuation marks and an analysis of the peritext and the iconography of the manuscripts.