“Com vol empaltar, dues coses deu hom guordar”. The Catalan translation of Gottfried’s treatise on agriculture in Franconia

Abstract

This article analyzes two of the manuscripts that contain the translations in Iberian languages of the treatise about agriculture by German writer Gottfried von Franken in the fourteenth century. The manuscripts under study are the one written in Castilian ms. 10.211, which is located at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (ff. 224r-244r); and the one written in Catalan ms. Esp. 291, which is located at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (ff. 1r-18v). In this article, these translations are compared between themselves as well as with the latin version Additional 23002 preserved at the British Library (ff. 32r-45v) and with two of the older versions of the manuscript, the manuscript in German Cod. 504 from the fourteenth century preserved at the Admont Stiftsbibliothek (ff. 60-79), and the ms. Sloane686 inEnglish from the fifteenth-century preserved at the British Library (ff. 19r-39v). The comparative analysis provides the basis for the recognition of these two Iberian versions of Gottfried's work within the international literature and highlights the closeness in structure and content between them. It concludes that this comparison brings the analysis closer to the first version written by Gottfried. It also provides new data from historical agricultural literature as well as its spatial and temporal dissemination in medieval and early modern Europe.