Talk:Fiore de'i Liberi

Work	Author(s)	Source	License
Illustrations (Getty)	J. Paul Getty Museum	Digital images courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program
Illustrations (Morgan)	Morgan Library & Museum	Princeton Institute of Christian Art
Illustrations (Novati)	Francesco Novati	Flos Dvellatorvm in Armis, sine Armis, Eqvester, Pedester
Illustrations (Paris)	Bibliothèque Nationale de France	Gallica
Translation	Colin Hatcher	Private communication
Translation	Michael Chidester	Wiktenauer
Translation	Kendra Brown and Rebecca Garber	Cambridge HEMA Society
Morgan Version	Michael Chidester	Index:Tratt‍ato della sch‍erma (MS M.383)
Getty Version	Michael Chidester	Index:Fior di Battaglia (MS Ludwig XV 13)
Pisani Dossi Version	Michael Chidester	Index:Flos Duellatorum (Pisani Dossi MS)
Paris Version	Kendra Brown and Rebecca Garber	Index:Florius de Arte Luctandi (MS Latin 11269)
San Daniele del Friuli Version	Luigi Zanutto	Index:Fior di Battaglia (MS XXIV)

Translation Notes (Paris)

For a longer discussion of the process of creating this translation, see Kendra Brown et al.'s article Florius de Arte Luctandi: Challenges and Discoveries in a Contemporary Latin Translation of Fiore dei Liberi.

We would like to state from the outset that the translation offered here should not be considered complete or final. Instead we offer it in the spirit of collaboration, with which it was composed, to the wider pool of knowledge in hopes that this will lead to improvements and fruitful discussion. Therefore, this introduction serves both as a brief record of our difficulties with the text, as a springboard to some of our questions, and as an invitation to improve the translation.

There are already two print translations extant. Charlélie Berthaut’s initial transcription and translation into French (to be included in a forthcoming publication) was unfortunately based on poorer quality scans, which prevented him from identifying many of the later edits/erasures to the text, although Emmeline Baudet’s 2013 French thesis, transcription, and translation takes a much more detailed approach, addressing interlineal and marginal notes. The more recent Italian translation by Francesco Lodà in 2014 took advantage of the higher-resolution scans that we also used. The Lodà transcription is of excellent quality and highly recommended. Due to these publications, an English translation seemed overdue.

The text is difficult. We began this process in mid-2013, when one of our Germanists had to stop attending for a semester due to her teaching schedule. Given our Latinists' experience with Medieval and early Modern Latin, including translating the Ms. I.33 and parts of Paulus Hector Mair's treatise, we expected that a manuscript of just 44 folia and a little over 200 verses would be an easy diversion, possibly not even lasting the full semester.

Instead, the first complete draft took close to two years.

The reasons for this are numerous, and largely given in Kendra's article. In addition, while it would have been easy to rely on the Pisani Dossi Ms. to guide the translation process (especially since Michael had previously authored a complete translation of it), we discovered early on that even though the two manuscripts often showed considerable overlap in word choice, arranging the text of Florius to match the Pisani Dossi would be entirely ungrammatical more often than not. Instead, the Latin was first translated in isolation, and only after this step was the Pisani Dossi (and occasionally the Getty and Morgan) consulted to see if it suggested alternative valid readings.

After all that time, this translation is still a work in progress, and we openly invite others to collaborate with us in this endeavor. We freely acknowledge the limits of our expertise, and hope that others will contribute theirs to ultimately yield a high-quality, fluent, English translation, as well as an accurate transcription of the Florius.