Epistles of Marko Marulić to Katarina Obirtić

In 1938 Franjo Fancev published two epistles of Marko Marulić Pecinić adressed to the Benedictine nun Katarina Obirtić. By that time they had remained unoticed by literary historians, owing to the simple fact that the copist wrongly spelt Marulić’s second surname Pecinić as Peunić. Unfortunately, both epistles have been preserved but fragmentarily. Only the end of the first one has been preserved, while the other one shows numerous lacunae. The addressee of the two epistles was a nun from the Benedictine monastery in which Marko’s sister Bira spent the last years of her life. In the second epistle, whose distant model was Saint Jerome’s epistle to Eustochium, written as a gift offered in return of gifts received (antidoron), Marko Marulić, after having received a fish from the nun, presented her with this essay treating of the fifth day of the Creation, the five senses and the places in the Holy Scripture where the fish has been mentioned: Jonah, the miraculous fishing, the Apostles fishermen, the history of the Church. Written in warm and cordial words this fresh epistle is a true pearl of the Croatian epistolary literature