This is not the first attempt to edit Memoriale virtutum. The basic filiation of the stemma was spotted by Mar Campos Souto, who consulted five of the six MSS for her edition of the fifteenth-century Castilian translation Memorial de virtudes (Cartagena 2004, 154â155); in her commentary she also identified many of Cartagenaâs sources. Arturo Hernansanz Serrano (1993) earlier transcribed Q for a memoria de licenciatura; and Luis Parra GarcÃa (2002, 464n3) stated that he had an âedición crÃtica ya [â¦] preparadaâ, also springing from a dissertation on Bk i (1998); these remain unpublished. Only after undertaking this text for Grupo ACOC of IEMYR did we learn of a more ambitious recent project, Cristina MartÃnez Gómezâs PhD (2016) with critical editionâthe first to include the Basel MSâand Spanish translation, which she graciously allowed us to see in its pre-published form. She was the first to carry out the improbus labor of combing the MSS for variants, and though we too spent months âamarrados al duro bancoâ we did not find a great deal to add. To her belongs the honour of having published the first scholarly edition and modern translation of our text.
As medievalists our aim has been somewhat different from that of the classical scholars. We treat medieval Latin as the living language it was (Mohrmann 1958) and have not modernized the text according to the orthographical rules reinvented by nineteenth-century German philologists. We attempt to recover the text Cartagena wrote in 1422, as far as possible in the actual form he may have written it. Our commentary is likewise less concerned with Memorialeâs relation to Antiquity than with its place in fifteenth-century literature and Cartagenaâs role in adapting the sources to his own cultural milieu, a study for which the foundations have been laid by the leading authority on Cartagena, Luis Fernández Gallardo (1999a, in particular ii, 445â603 on Memoriale; 2001; 2012a, 33â90), and by MarÃa DÃez Yáñezâs recent thesis on the Spanish reception of Aristotle (2015). We hope our effort may serve in these ways as a further step towards a fuller understanding of the text.
We should like to thank Juan Miguel Valero for the invitation to participate in his project âAlonso de Cartagena. Obras Completasâ (FFI 2014-55902-P. Ministerio de EconomÃa y Competitividad), and Laura Ranero Riestra for her guidance in the mysteries of the Mendeley website and other favours. Without the kindness of Cristina MartÃnez Gómez in letting us see her edition before its publication, this book would be a good deal poorer. We are also grateful to Ãngel Escobar for his helpful answers on the progress of his Aristoteles Latinus en España project and perspicacious comments on our typescript, and to Noel Fallows, Miguel Ãngel Pérez Priego, Mar Campos Souto, Tomás González Rolán, MarÃa DÃez, Luis Fernández Gallardo, Teresa Jiménez Calvente, Jerónimo Miguel, and Rafael Bonilla for generous gifts, over several years, of books and materials we have used in our study.