Page:The gloria d'amor of Fra Rocabertí (1916).djvu/13

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

THE GLORIA D'AMOR OF FRA ROCABERTÍ

INTRODUCTION

I. Historical and Bibliographical

From the early part of the second quarter of the last century down to very recent years Fra Rocabertí's vision-poem, the Gloria d'Amor, [1] has attracted the attention of students and investigators in the Romance languages and has been the subject, in some cases, of considerable study, in others, of only brief mention.

Prior to the year 1834 [2] Joseph Tastu, a native of Perpignan, curator of the Sainte Geneviève library in Paris, had copied almost the entire MS. in which the poem is preserved, intending apparently to publish a large part of the pieces contained therein. His papers [3] do not show that he did any further work on the Gloria d'Amor than to make a complete copy of it. If he did not publish the results of his labors, it was partly because he learned from a "discurso preliminar " [4] that a work

  1. Called by some the Comedia de la Gloria d'Amor, from the title used in the captions of the first two cantos.
  2. See footnote in Torres Amat, Memorias, etc., pp. xviii and xix.
  3. These papers are preserved in the Mazarine library, Paris, in MS. no. 4509, entitled: Les papiers de M. Joseph Tastu. In this MS. the Gloria d'Amor follows the Catalan translation of Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans Merci.
  4. See footnote in Torres Amat, loc. cit.