Reading the Navigatio Brendani in the Middle Ages: Text and Contexts (and a lost fragment recovered)

Brendan’s story was conveyed through oral channels, through tales of other saints where Brendan appears as a character, and ultimately through vernacular translations; its primary root and background, however, is certainly the Latin text known as ‘Navigatio Brendani’. This paper will retrace the history and the geography of its diffusion, illustrating the endeavour of Giovanni Orlandi – and then mine – to prepare, over the course of several decades, a critical edition based on all the witnesses. I will then examine an aspect which does not transpire from the map alone, that is to say, the way in which the text was read, understood, loved or rejected in various contexts. Signs of these different reactions are the juxtaposition of certain other texts in the manuscripts transmitting the work; the presence of spontaneous illustrations; critical annotations, on the manuscripts themselves and elsewhere; and manipulations of the text in certain witnesses. Finally, the paper reports the discovery of the initial sheet of the ‘Navigatio’ which belonged to manuscript Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Hist. 4° 155, as a fragment now preserved in Switzerland.