La Regola per ben confessarsi di Giacomo della Marca: edizione e commento linguistico.

All the researches concerning the confession start - it wouldn’t be otherwise - from the Council of 1215 and in particular from the disposition 21, which is better known with its incipit Omnis utriusque sexus. A literature ,with the specific purpose to instruct both the priests (at that time not prepared to play the role of confessors) and the repentants , develops to face such a disposition (which prescribes the believers the compulsory confession each year for both sexes as the text itself says). These handbooks multiply with the appearance of the press with movable types , in particular the genre of the general confessions develops: brochures with few pages in which the repentant is provided with a guide to the examination of one’s conscience through a detailed list of sins. La “Regola per ben confessarsi “ of Giacomo della Marca, definetely one of the most famous preachers of Franciscan Observance , belongs to this genre. The confessional, written both in Latin ( with the title of De confessione) and in vulgar , is a very well known and widespread work. A list of all the possible sins is presented , organized according to an ample variety of conceptual grids: the twelve articles of the Faith, the seven capital vices, the ten commandments, the five body senses, the three theological virtues and the gifts of The Holy Spirit etc. The importance and the diffusion of the text are attested by the eight press editions reported between 1465 and 1550 (cfr. Jacobson Schutte 1983: 208-209). Also three manuscripts are registered: the code 33, owned by The Franciscan and Picena library in Falconara Marittima; the Ricc. 341, present at the Riccardiana library in Florence and the manuscript 2806, kept in Augusta Library in Perugia. Despite this the text hasn’t had any deep and critical study. For this reason, my work’s objective is to prepare the edition of the text of one of the major representatives of the Marche’s Franciscanism, providing a further element for the study of the field of the penitential literature of the confessionals. The collation of the manuscripts and of the prints has revealed a complex textual situation: the examples don’t come from the same original text but they are copies of different texts. Therefore as the valid reconstruction of the author’s will has been impossible I have chosen to edit the text of the Library in Falconara , thinking that this code represents the bon manuscript because I consider it the bearer of the “real” text , which circulated at that time; this copy, precisely, has a common nucleus to all of them , in a form which is neither too concise nor too extensive. In the second part of my work, the text has been analyzed first with a linguistic comment based on the phonetic form, morphological and syntactic; then I have concentrated my attention on the pragmatic-textual analysis, founded on the theories of discursive traditions, as it has been developed in the German context. The purpose of my research has been to notify one of the works which most characterizes the fourteenth religious climate and to point out whether its linguistic characters , compared with works belonging to the same genre , can codify a real discursive tradition.