Approaches to New Trends in Research on Catalan Studies

Carme Arronis, in her ‘Superstition and Faith: the Prayer against the Plague Attributed to Saint Vincent Ferrer,’ studies in detail the so-called Oración contra la peste attributed to the Valencian saint, from its uncertain medieval origins related to superstition to its use as a devout prayer in the modern period. Arronis studies how the ecclesiastical authorities approached the use of unregulated prayers and the efforts of inquisitors and hagiographers to turn this Oración contra la peste into an orthodox devotion.

Francesc Granell Sales, in his ‘Rex imago aequitatis: Jaume I in the Vidal Mayor,’ studies the famous illuminated manuscript that contains the Furs of Aragon. The author explores the close link between its iconography, the political intentions of Jaume I, and the theses of Salisbury’s Policraticus, the best-known mirror for princes in late medieval Europe.

Veronica Orazi, in her ‘Narrative Techniques and Aims of the Discourse on Military Expeditions and Coastal Defense in Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica (1328),’ studies how Muntaner’s personal experience of war was reflected in his chronicle through what this scholar calls the technologization and the literarization of the events described. She pays attention to the defense during the Crusade against the Crown of Aragon (1283–1285), the narrative of the conquest of Djerba and the Kerkennah Islands (1309–1314), the campaign of Sardinia and Corsica (1323–1324), and the expedition of the Catalan Company to the East (1303–1308). The latter one, in concrete, summarizes all the features utilized by the author and represents one of the highest moments of the whole Crònica.

Àlex Llinares Planells, in his ‘From “bloodthirsty thief” to “brave thug”: two models of bandits in popular printed literature,’ studies the figure of the bandit in popular printed literature in the modern period. According to the author, bandits and nobility factions created an atmosphere of violence and insecurity in most of the territories of the Crown of Aragon during the first centuries of the early modern period. The way the bandit was portrayed in popular literature depended on the moment ballads were printed and on the person or institution interested in their dissemination. In order to explore the similarities and differences among different cultural models of bandits, the author studies the cordel printings on the 16th-century Catalan bandit Antoni Roca and those on the 17th-century Valencian bandit Vicent Benet. While both were important chieftains of gangs of outlaws and were connected to nobility factions, the cultural presentation of each of them was very different.

Jacob Mompó Navarro, in ‘Francisco Climent Pons (1885–1946). Diaries of a Valencian rural physician: biographical approach and texts selection,’ studies the recovery of memorial writing as a means to contemplating first-hand the culture, mentality, and traditions of the people who lived in a particular period. In his case, he focuses on a selection of the texts that Francisco Climent Pons, a Valencian rural doctor, wrote between 1893 and 1902.

Antoni Maestre Brotons, in ‘Masculinity and Catalan modernist literature: dandyism in Alfons Maseras’s Edmon (1908),’ analyzes how Edmon embodies one of the most well-known literary archetypes of the 19th century: the dandy. He studies the ways in which Edmon, as a dandy, prefigures some aspects of the consumer and spectacular society of the 20th century, and his criticism to the Catalan social backwardness, as well as his disapproval of middle-class values (chiefly, utilitarianism and industriousness), thus providing a remarkable example of the decadent hero, an epitome of the art for art’s sake ideal which, along with vitalism, emerges as the main trend of Catalan modernist literature.

Belén Lozano Sañudo, in ‘Domesticating translation from the periphery towards the center: the translation of Cocori by Joaquín Gutiérrez in times of the GDR,’ studies a classic of Costa Rican children’s literature Cocori by Joaquín Gutierrez with its translation into German published during the days of the GDR. She shows how translation is used to create an image of the dominated culture as inferior and by doing so to legitimate the hierarchical relation between cultures/languages. This is accomplished on the one hand by choosing those originals to be translated that best match the preconceived idea of the colonizing power and on the other by the use of domestication, which can be seen as a means of fighting against the cultural dominance of the metropolis, or a way of erasing any trace of foreign origin and thus perpetuating cultural imperialism.

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The article by Martines utilizes the Middle Ages as an excuse to delve into issues of linguistics and thus serves as an introduction to the four additional essays that deal with this topic in this collection. Vicent Martines, in his ‘Phraseology to express corruption and falseness: Sermó by Bernat Metge, with the philological translation into Spanish as a methodological base,’ studies the Sermó by Bernat Metge, the famous secretary of the Royal Chancery of the Crown of Aragon. While we could expect from a sermon a praise of virtue, Metge uses irony and even cynicism to preach the opposite, that is deception, falseness, and corruption. The author pays particular attention to the use of proverbs in the Sermó.

Elisabet Llopart-Saumell, in ‘The perception of connotations in lexical innovations,’ analyzes the perception of connotations in lexical innovations (i.e. neologisms). The results of her study show that there is a higher degree of coincidence among participants when the neologisms are classified with connotative categories (informal, personal, subjective, and ideological) than with non-connotative (formal, general, objective, and neutral). In this sense, the morphological, semantic, pragmatic, and discursive characteristics of the neologisms and their context of use guide the pragmatic interpretation of these new or recent words even if the receivers are not acquainted with them, since the linguistic strategies followed by the speakers do provide relevant data about their communicative intention.

Josep Vicent Garcia Sebastià, in ‘Austere Diet and the Concept of [mediocrity]. On the Meaning and Dictionarization of Some Adjective Locutions in Catalan and Spanish,’ analyzes the adjective locutions de pa sucat amb oli and de chichinabo from a pragmatic and diachronic point of view through examples taken from linguistic corpora and contemporary newspapers. It can be observed that both locutions have developed more or less equivalent meanings associated to the idea of [mediocre] and other similar values, taking as a point of departure a common semantic node that refers to [food]. Because not all the usages analyzed in this article are included in the reference dictionaries, the author stresses the importance of offering precise information in the lexicographic entries referred to these locutions.

Xènia Escolano Marín, in ‘The Virtues of Lexicogrammar for the Analysis of Somatic Idioms in Corpora,’ applies lexicogrammar to the analysis of the Catalan somatic idiom obrir els ulls and its equivalent in English based on the occurrences of this unit in CTILC for Catalan and BNC for English, using a tagging recognized by NLP systems. This semasiological characterization of idioms helps to determine their semantic value and morphosyntactic combinatorial possibilities going from language to abstraction, considering the differences of conceptualization between Catalan and English and their equivalence relationship.

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Rosabel Martinez-Roig, Gladys Merma-Molina and Mayra Urrea-Solano, in ‘The Power of Storytelling. Some Aspects of James I’s Llibre dels Fets as a Transmedia Storytelling with Educational Purposes and Social and Political Psychology,’ analyze the keys of storytelling in connection to the usefulness of classics for the management of emotions and the mind in terms of social pedagogy and its application to social psychology. They use several examples of contemporary transmedia storytelling and of medieval storytelling in James I the Conqueror’s Llibre dels Fets.

Santiago Ponsoda López de Atalaya, Marcos Jesús Iglesias Martínez, Inés Lozano Cabezas and Rocío Diez Ros, in ‘Teaching history in early childhood education: A research proposal on educational practice in classrooms for children aged three to five years,’ describe a project that focuses on the analysis of teaching practices related to the teaching and learning of historical content in the second cycle of early childhood education – that is, for children aged three to five years.

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Literature, History, Education, Linguistics, Film Studies, and Healthcare are intertwined in this collection of essays on the language and history of the Catalan-speaking lands. Medieval chroniclers and writers, early modern popular literature, memorial writing, modernist dandies, and children’s literature combine with the study of phraseology, neologisms, lexicogrammar, collocations, and adjective locutions, as well as with the analysis of the didactic and mental function and usefulness of history and storytelling to showcase the absolute importance of the Humanities in a period when its value has been uncritically brought into question.