Carolina Michaëlis and the edition of Sá de Miranda's Poesia

Abstract

This article aims to systematize the contribution of Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos to the construction of the history of textual criticism in Portugal, illustrating the treatment given to texts without autographic tradition, but which have testimonies that allow us to glimpse the author's creative work. In this context, through the analysis of the edition of Poesias de Sá de Miranda, we will explore the concepts of recensio, collatio and emendatio and, above all, of the constitution of the text framed in Lachamnn's method, and the way in which the philologist views each of these stages in the realization of her edition. We will thus evaluate the criteria that underpinned the selection of the manuscript that serves as the basis for the edition and those that serve to distinguish the variants that should be relegated to the aparatus and which ones give rise to an amendment. In short, the reconstruction of the German philologist's reasoning enables a new understanding of the state of national textual criticism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Keywords: Carolina Michaëlis; Poetry of Sá de Miranda; Lachmann's method; Textual criticism; Renaissance literature.