L’art de la falconeria a la Corona d’Aragó durant la baixa edat mitjana: edició i estudi dels tractats escrits en català

Abstract

The small corpus of falconry treatises written in Catalan in the Crown of Aragon during the Late Middle Ages allows us to study the theoretical side of this art in the aforementioned context. After editing and studying all the accessible preserved treatises, the results of research on those considered precedent within our tradition have now been made public, postponing the rest for their postdoctoral publication to shorten the length of this essay. For this reason, the PhD thesis is focused on: the Tractat de medicina per a tots els ocells de caça, which bears witness to the Arabic tradition, probably taking root in the Ġiṭrif, the oldest preserved example from that one, by means of direct access, that is to say, by translation from Arabic into Catalan; the Llibre del rei Dancus and the Llibret del mestre falconer, our particular Dancus-Guillelmus binomial, with a chain of transmissions that could link with the Eastern tradition by means of the Latin intermediary; the Llibre del nodriment i de la cura dels ocells els quals pertanyen a caça or Epístola d’Àquila, Símacus i Teodosi a Ptolemeu, emperador d’Egipte, translation of the Epistola ad Ptolomeum –a XIIth century treatise according to the historiography– with two Catalan examples preserved, despite the fact that there were more at that time, a text that allows us to connect with the encyclopaedist path and to offer some particularities of the Iberian Peninsula (Juan Gil de Zamora) and perhaps the territories of the Crown of Aragon; the Herbes de les cures, a corrupted text produced and transmitted within the Catalan tradition and key to understanding the transmission of the foregoing; and the Flors de les receptes medicinals per a ocells de caça, the example of compilation from Latin treatises (such as the Doctrina nutritionis accipitrum) and of the selective use of the encyclopaedist source (such as the De falconibus by Albertus Magnus) in a didactical project. The PhD thesis consists of three volumes: the first, with an introduction to the subject and a first part with the materials and methods, a second one with the individualized study of the treatises, and a third one with the history of the texts and an overall study of the treatises, including the content from the thematical index (zoology, falconry and medicine); the second one, with the editions and the complementary notes; and the third one with the lexical material (technical vocabulary of the art of falconry, glossary of simple and compound medicines and glossary of proper names).

Date of Award	14 Nov 2018
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Baudouin Van den Abeele (Director) & Maria Dels Angels Calvo Torras (Tutor)