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Abstract
Concerning technical literature of the late middle ages, the exploration of relations between Latin and Vernacular remains a challenging field of research. The article presents an entirely unexplored Italian treatise on Art of Memory found in a 15th century manuscript of the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève in Paris. It focusses on the Latin origins, textual history, contexts of development, and linguistic methods of cultural transfer. It offers another argument, that the pattern 'expert/Latin' vs. 'unscholared/Vernacular' does not fit in respect of pragmatic texts and proves this type of literature to be much more complex than simple terminological oppositions can express.
The study of the German technical literature of the late Middle Ages has shown that, in the majority of cases, these texts cannot be regarded and interpreted by themselves for - as Kurt Ruh pointed out: "Vernacular writing of the pragmatic type is generally to be understood as a tributary to the universal literacy of Latin".1 "This means that there are Latin texts behind the vernacular, which are sometimes close, and sometimes more remote, depending on the method of adaptation." (Ibid.) They have to be set in the context of a longer Latin textual tradition. Technical texts in German predom- inantly evolved as translations from Latin originals. It is only against the background of the original texts that the main characteristics of the vernacular treatises really emerge, since the comparison highlights the strategies of adaptation and the methods of translation. It is against this background that the addressee and the purpose of the cultural transfer implemented in the texts become clear.2
In the specific case of mnemotechnical treatises, a genuine vernacular tradition cannot be established. The German texts can only be understood in the ways in which their sources and context relate to the Latin tradition. The criteria of analysis so far involved try to enlighten the method of cultural transfer: 1. In the field of the subject-matter itself, especially the relation between theory and praxis; 2. In the field of lexicography 3. In the field of textual coherence 4. In the field of textual pragmatics. All of these questions, however, only make sense in such cases where distinct sources of the vernacular editings or translations could have been identified. That is the crucial...