RAMON LLULL AS A VERNACULAR WRITER. COMMUNICATING A NEW KIND OF KNOWLEDGE

Lola Badia, Joan Santanach, Albert Soler. Trans. Robert Hughes, London, Tamesis, 2016

Ramon Llull (1232-1316), mystic, missionary, philosopher and author of narrativeand poetry, wrote both in Latin and in the vernacular claiming he had beengiven a new science to unveil the Truth. This book shows why his Latin andvernacular books cannot be read as if they had been written in isolation fromone another. Llull was an atypical ‘scholar’ because he enjoyed a form of access toknowledge that differed from the norm and because he organized the productionand dissemination of his writings in a creative and unconventional fashion. At atime when learned texts and university culture were conveyed for the most partusing the vehicle of Latin, he wrote a substantial proportion of his theological andscientific works in his maternal Catalan while, at the same time, he was deeplyinvolved in the circulation of such works in other Romance languages. Thesecircumstances do not preclude the fact that a considerable number of the titlescomprising his extensive output of more than 260 works were written directly inLatin, or that he had various books which were originally conceived in Catalansubsequently translated or adapted into Latin. LOLA BADIA is a professor in the Catalan Philology Departament at theUniversity of Barcelona. JOAN SANTANACH is Lecturer of Catalan Philologyat the University of Barcelona. ALBERT SOLER (1963) is Lecturer of CatalanPhilology at the University of Barcelona.

Lola Badia, Joan Santanach i Albert Soler, Ramon Llull as a Vernacular Writer: Communicating a New Kind of Knowledge, trad. Robert D. Hughes, (Londres: Tamesis, 2016), 386 pp.

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