Origin, metamorphosis and destiny of an enigmatic Letter

The article summarises what scholars have reconstructed (from the celebrated edition by Friedrich Zarncke, still considered canonical) on the early circulation of the Latin text of Prester John’s Letter, starting point of the story that was so popular in the late Middle Ages and in the Modern Age. The Latin Letter was subject to frequent and extensive rewriting from its early formative stages; a table shows the progressive increments of the text in the subsequent Latin versions, as new details were added or pre-existing elements were changed. The stratification of the text makes it impossible to speak of the Latin Letter as a unitary work: every phase of composition is assumed to assemble narrative topics from different sources, in order to respond to its own specific objectives.