Corpusaren egoera hobetzen: Xurioren "Imitacionea"ren aleak XVIII. mendean

Abstract

Mixel Xurio, parish priest of Saint Jean de Luz, translated the Imitation of Jesus Christ into Basque (1720). The book was published two years after the author's death, in Bordeaux, and there were, subsequently, several editions throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. By the beginning of the 17th century, Basque literature had reached its peak in some areas of Labourd. From the middle of the century, however, literary production was more limited and the language itself was notably simpler. In the first decades of the 18th century, Xurio's work was very much an exception; he is essentially an epigone of classical Lapurdian Basque.

Despite the importance of Xurio, his work has not been studied in general until now, and it also lacks the critical edition it deserves. In order to advance in the study of Xurio's book, we have used 18^th-century editions as a starting point. The article focuses on the study of the relationship between these editions (recensio), using the methodology of philology and textual criticism.

To determine the filiation of the testimonies, we first compiled and classified the digitized copies (14 in total) available in certain digital libraries (fontes criticae), with the help of Vinson (1891-1898). Secondly, a formal description of each copy was made, comparing the covers and the parts of the book. This comparison allowed us to decide which edition the copies without a cover belong to (collatio codicum). This section provided us with information about the filiation relationship between editions. In fact, the incorporation of new passages from edition to edition helped us decide which of the previous editions was used as a base to compose the new edition. Thirdly, we took and compared an initial and a final sample of each edition (examinatio and selectio). Although the samples were small, the results are plentiful and helped us clarify hitherto unanswered questions. Thanks to the initial engravings, the distribution of the parts of the content, and the conjunctive errors and the new variants found in the comparison, we managed to make a proposal of filiation relationship between editions (constitutio stemmatis codicum).