Il Lucidario Bergamasco

Composed at the turn of the eleventh century, the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunense enjoyed an enormous fortune throughout the Middle Ages. The manuscripts of the Latin original are hundreds, and the number of versions in various European languages ​​is equally exceptional. In Italy there is a translation from the French, preserved by some thirty codes, and three translations from the Latin, one from Milan, one from Bologna and one from Bergamo. Of this last, handed down from a single manuscript of the mid-fifteenth century, the critical edition is offered here for the first time. The study that accompanies it reconstructs its genesis within the environment of the lay brotherhoods that in the fifteenth-century Bergamo collaborated closely with the mendicant orders. In the interest that follows on the historical documentary level, the linguistic one is combined, since it is an important witness of the vernacular employed in the orobic town, open to the uses of the Padra municipal scriptae but still not very permeable to the influence of the Tuscan in the process of affirmation.