The reflection of interadriatic socioreligious movements in Croatian medieval poetry

Abstract

At the beginning the author stresses that in this kind of comparative approach we must be led by the realization that foreign influences are accomplished in the best manner where preconditions exist that they be accepted and that they then experience a natural transformation and change into new values. After considering the economic and cultural ties between the two Adriatic coasts since the 13th century, the author further cites the necessary facts about the main spiritual forces of the period (the activity of the Franciscan and plebeian brotherhoods as well as the growing heresy). Within the framework of the cultural horizon of these spiritual processes there arose poetic works which were direct reflections of their preoccupations and poetic traditions. One of the earliest known Croatian poems — »-Šibenska molitva« (»The Šibenik prayer«) (Middle of 14th century) — is a direct echoe of Italian poetry of the brotherhood laudations which is proven by the author with a comparative analiysis of the Italian originals and the Croatian texts. In the first part of the poem »Poj željno« (from the Glagolitic manuscript from the end of the 14lh century) there are evident Jacopone motifs of addressing one’s own soul, while in the second part there are echoes of Francis of Assisi's passionate poetic eulogy »Cántico di frate Sole«. The Croatian poem »Svit se konca« (Light disappears) known from the same manuscript, whose content has more recently been connected with the figure of the prehussite Czech heretic Jan Milič who lived during the second half of the 14th century J. (Hamm), cannot be separated from the atmosphere of those Croatian seaboard settlements which were spreading heretic thought, because these were the settlements that for several decades had been mediators in +he contacts between »hereticals« of Northern Italy and Bosnia. In addition to this, Gvalterije, a follower of Wycliff, was active in Split at the close of the century, so that the author points out certain congruities between the poem mentioned and Wycliff’s book »Of Simony«.