Zvonareva, Alina
The textual tradition of the Parisian Danse Macabré (1424–1425): Perspectives for a scholarly publication
- 2021.
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The Parisian Danse Macabré (1424–1425), a key work in the spread of the Dance of Death genre, still lacks a publication in a scholarly format. This article focuses on the surviving textual sources: the sixteen extant French manuscripts, the incunabula, and the captioned mural paintings. The Catalan, Italian, and Latin translations and reworkings of this text are also briefly discussed from a textual-critical point of view. Our research focuses on the genealogical relationships between the extant versions, showing that most fifteenth-century manuscripts are directly descended from the archetypal textual tradition, whereas all the incunabula were in some way influenced by the editio princeps (Guyot Marchant, 1485). Analysis of the substantive variants allows us to detect the descripti and to divide the manuscripts into several families.