Pracownia Literatury Renesansu

dr Ágnes Máté (Univeristy of Szeged)

Textual Tradition and Translations from Eneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus across Europe – a New Monograph

Not long before his fortieth birthday in 1444, the Sienese Eneas Silvius Piccolomini (future pope Pius II) put on paper one of the most successful short stories in humanistic literature: The Tale of Two Lovers. Until the end of the 16^th century the work was translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, English, Hungarian, Polish and Danish. My new monograph (to be published in August 2018) treats on the textual history of the Latin and vernacular versions of Piccolomini's Historia. Its results are based on a sample of ninety-two Latin witnesses and all the sixteen early translations of Historia.

In this presentation I would like to call attention to the most important results of my book concerning the similarities and difference of the different translators towards their basic texts. Specifically, I would like to show some common readings of Historia which caused problems of interpretation and translation to a number of translators.

On a global scale my book contributes to the history of Neo-Latin literature. Moreover, in case of twelve translations of Historia, the volume offers the first attempt for identifying their Latin sources, thus its results specifically concern Italian, English, French, Danish and Hungarian national philologies.

Ágnes Máté holds two MAs of Italian and Hungarian studies at the University of Szeged, end two PhD – one in Neo-Latin Studies at the University of Szeged, the other at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw.

Between 2015 and 31 October 2018 Ágnes worked at the Renaissance Department of the Institute for Literary Studies, RCH Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Form 1^st November 2018 she returns to the Department of Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Literature, University of Szeged, as a post-doctoral fellow. She researches Hungarian-Italian cultural relationships and the development of neo-Latin short story. In 2018 she publishes two books. One is about the textual tradition and translations of Eneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus, the other is about the image of Hungarians in 14-16^th century Italian and neo-Latin sources.