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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Dear Phyllis, At 04:39 PM 3/5/2004 -0800, you wrote: >Today (6. March) is the feast day of: > >Jordan of Pisa (blessed) (d. 1311) Jordan became a Dominican at Pisa >in 1280. After studies at Paris he became a famous preacher in >Florence. Especially noteworthy is that he started using the local >vernacular for sermons instead of Latin, thus playing an important >role as aone of the founders of the Italian language. At least >that's what my source says; I had always assumed that popular >preachers *must* have been speaking in the vernacular (??) I'm surprised that no one else has yet responded to your query. Here's my take on the matter; those who are more knowledgeable are welcome to jump in. The only thing about your summary that strikes me as off-base is that "started" as used here seems to suggest that Jordan (Giordano da Pisa; in older scholarship, Giordano da Rivalto) began the practice of couching sermons in the local vernacular rather than Latin. In that regard he certainly had thirteenth-century predecessors; for a quick overview, see Franco Mormando, "Preachers and Preaching," in Christopher Kleinhenz, ed., _Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia_ (NY: Routledge, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 931-33). Like his predecessors, apparently, J. either did not commit his vernacular sermons to writing or, if he did, posterity has not preserved them in this form. What we have, rather, is a substantial corpus of sermons preserved in summary form by lay members of his audiences in Florence and Pisa. Many of his sermons (not all have been edited, BTW) seem to have enjoyed substantial manuscript circulation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; to the extent they were used by others as models, their syntax and vocabulary will have affected the development of predecessors of modern Italian, especially forms of Tuscan. In the early seventeenth century they were mined by the editors of the influential _Vocabolario della Crusca_ and through this and similar channels they probably continued to influence the lexicon of Tuscanizing literary Italian, itself an important precursor of today's Italian language. It is worth remembering in this context that modern standard Italian (the "Italian language" to which J.'s usage is ancestral) is a nineteenth-century creation based largely on Tuscan and on the journalistic practice of nineteenth-century Lombardy, especially Milan. "Italian" in a broader sense -- i.e. the so-called Italian "dialects" (actually, local or regional Romance languages without armies or navies), only a few of which participated significantly in the development of modern standard Italian -- is of course considertably older. But J. could hardly be considered one of _its_ founders. We might also remember that in the early Middle Ages the vernacular of most of Italy was Latin and that the Romance languages that developed on Italian soil took a long time to differentiate themselves fully from this parent. Only in the twelfth century do we begin to have significant amounts of preserved writing in any of the Italian dialects, and when this occurs it often alternates with Latin, as in the Piedmontese _Sermoni subalpini_ (usually cited as the first vernacular sermons in Italian) and in the only partially preserved _Montecassino Passion Play_ (which breaks off after a few lines in the first/only Italian segment of the play). Finally, in medieval Italy the choice of vernacular did not always imply use of Italian or any other Romance tongue (e.g., Sardinian or Alpine Romance). Apart from the Greek-speaking areas of the Italian south, there was also German, spoken in various Alpine regions. The _Greater Carmina Burana Passion Play_, now thought to be of the late twelfth century and probably to have originated in the south Tirol, has many verses in the latter tongue. Best, John Dillon ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html