Odorico da Pordenone. Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose
Edizione critica digitale
open access
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edited by
- Alvise Andreose - Università degli Studi di Udine, Italia - email
- Irene Reginato - Università degli Studi di Udine, Italia - email orcid profile
Abstract
The dictation of the travel memoirs at the court of the Great Khan Temür (r. 1294–1307), delivered in May 1330 at the convent of Saint Anthony in Padua to his confrère Guglielmo da Solagna, marks the inception of the textual tradition of the Relatio de mirabilibus orientalium Tatarorum, the sole extant work of the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone (d. 1331). Transmitted through more than one hundred manuscript witnesses, reflecting distinct redactions and textual phases, Odoric’s account achieved wide diffusion, with translations into the major European languages and numerous Italian vernacular adaptations. Among these, the Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose – a title attested in the eight manuscripts that preserve it – represents a fourteenth-century vernacular version produced in the Veneto region, which circulated swiftly in Tuscany and later again throughout northern Italy. The seminal studies of Alvise Andreose (1998, 2000, and 2002), confirmed by Annalia Marchisio’s critical edition (2016) of the principal Latin recensions of the Relatio, have demonstrated that the vernacular tradition of the work evolved in two distinct stages. The first is represented solely by manuscript Urbinate Latino 1013 of the Vatican Apostolic Library (siglum “Ur”), while the second is preserved in the remaining seven witnesses, among which the most authoritative is the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conventi Soppressi C.7.1170 (siglum “Co”). The digital edition of the Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose – the outcome of a research fellowship at the University of Udine (academic year 2023–2024) funded under the University’s 2022–2025 Strategic Plan – fully harnesses the flexibility of the digital medium and the capabilities of the EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) software. It reconstructs, in parallel, both textual stages identified by previous scholarship, presenting two critical texts made available to the reader-user in multiple visualization modes and accompanied by a comprehensive Index nominum.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-977-1 | e-ISBN 978-88-6969-977-1 | Published Oct. 15, 2025 | Language it
Digital edition edited by Alvise Andreose and Irene Reginato.
Semantic annotation of the texts in XML/TEI format (https://tei-c.org/) was carried out by Irene Reginato following an encoding model jointly developed by the two editors. The encoding was supervised by Edizioni Ca’ Foscari.
Visualization with EVT by Edizioni Ca’ Foscari in collaboration with Chiara Martignano and Roberto Rosselli Del Turco. EVT – Edition Visualization Technology (https://github.com/evt-project/evt-viewer-angular/) is an open-source software tool for browsing and consulting digital scholarly editions, created by R. Rosselli Del Turco and developed by a team of experts in Digital Humanities.
Funding – The digital edition and its preparation are the result of a research fellowship entitled “The Italian Vernacular Versions of Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio de mirabilibus orientalium Tatarorum: A Digital Critical Edition”, carried out in the academic year 2023/2024 at the University of Udine, SSD: L-FIL-LET/09, and funded by the University’s 2022–2025 Strategic Plan.
Copyright © 2025 Alvise Andreose, Irene Reginato. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.