Latin orthography in Marulić\u27s autographs

Latin orthography among the Humanists was not that of the classical era. From this point of view, greater or smaller divergences can be seen, mainly of medieval origin, which vary from writer to writer, work to work, and which are not uncommon within the work of the same writer. This is mainly to do with a different or uneven or inconsistent way of recording many of the phonemes (e.g., cƒlum instead of caelum, sydera for sidera, nuncius for nuntius, solatium for solacium, bellua not belua, palium not pallium, and of doublets like aeger and eger, heres and haeres, martyr and martir, Holophernes and Olophernes, blasphemia and blasfemans, satiare and saciare and triplets like femina, faemina and foemina, Africa, Affrica and Aphrica, and so on). It is necessary to know these particular features because the quality of the editorial work of recent editions, which will be judged by the rigorous criteria of contemporary textual scholarship, largely depends on them. For this delicate work to be done the way it should, it is very useful to have the autographs, particularly of a given work that we wish to publish in a contemporary edition. To do with Marulić, we are in a better situation than we are in the case of many other Latin authors in Croatia, because we do actually possess autographs of many of his works. Thus to a large extent we have the relevant facts that adequately, although not everywhere completely, illustrate his habitual practice with respect to orthography. It should nevertheless be stated that not all Marulić’s autographs are equally authoritative for this work. Thus the autograph of his most extensive work, Repertorium, which consists of excerpts from a large number of heterogeneous sources, shows so many differences in grammar and spelling that it is justified to take them as being a reflection of the differences in his authors, rather than of Marulić’s own unevenness or inconsistence. Only in this way is it possible to explain the difference in the name of the prophet Isaiah -Isaias and Esaias, or the six-fold variation in the name of Abel’s brother: Cayn, Chayn, Chain, Cainus, Caym and Caim. However, from an analysis of the entire number of Marulić’s autographs it can be concluded that his orthography is only moderately uneven, and that the writer did actually aim at a certain unity of usage — even at the price of a certain lack of intelligibility (for example, he used M. as an abbreviation for both Marcus and Manius). It can also be stated that he is from this point of view in his approach nevertheless closer to today’s rules of spelling and grammar than most of his contemporaries (in, for example, the matter of writing upper or lower case letters)