When it was stolen in 2011 from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the Codex Calixtinus became international news. At that time, the dean of the cathedral noted that “Whoever took it knew what it was, knew its incalculable value and knew how to get to it, or at least find out how to get to it.” Yet while its importance for scholars and pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago has remained equally incalculable for centuries, only the fifth book’s famous “Pilgrim’s Guide” was regularly translated, with the so-called Historia Turpini that documented Charlemagne and Roland’s Iberian sojourns coming in second to the material so often assigned to introductory medieval studies courses. In this 2021 contribution--serendipitously offered a decade after the manuscript was stolen from the cathedral--Thomas Coffey and Maryjane Dunn have provided a useful and competent translation of what amounts to more than half of the folios of the original manuscript, making available for students and scholars alike what would have been one of the more regularly consulted sections of the manuscript to medieval audiences.
In reviewing a translation for TMR, I think the most useful elements to observe are whether the translation presents a readable text and whether, for the non-specialist, the notes are substantive enough to be helpful without being burdensome. Having considered those elements, then, we might also reflect on whether such a translation was necessary for scholars or if it sits as a happy luxury of scholarship that too often lives a Spartan existence. These issues deserve some foregrounding, here, especially since the content of the manuscript itself is not under debate and the need for more sermons and liturgical documents in translation for teaching and research is still considerable.
Dunn and Coffey’s organization of the text follows the content of the first book of the Calixtinus carefully. The prefatory letter, authored supposedly by Pope Calixtus II, retains much of the papally-specific verbiage and has the qualities that a specialist in papal diplomatics would prefer in a translation, while still remaining readable enough to note (with a more expert eye than general students) the places where the cleverness of forgery is present. In their translations of the sermons, Coffey and Dunn provide the reader with an easy and clear style of translation, but retain, throughout, the differences in word choice (for their translated text) that betray stylistic and rhetorical differences in the original Latin. Because the collection of sermons is drawn from many late antique and early medieval authors, these stylistic choices are neither contrived nor unhelpful, since they provide the reader with differences that are noticeable but not intrusive. Where extended quotations or Biblical echoes are present, the translators include them as such, with parenthetical notes or block quotations used for those necessary instances. After the twenty or so capituli of sermons, the more difficult--because often more abbreviated, precise, and visually-distinct--fashion of translating a medieval liturgy book commands Dunn and Coffey’s attention. For the liturgies, the translators offer a sensible solution to the different presentation schemata of the text, using differing fonts to set the text apart and deploying the appropriate abbreviations to preserve the “feel” of a liturgy book without rendering the text too alien to the modern reader. While the original abbreviations are preserved from the liturgy of the Santiago cult, Coffey and Dunn have done a quite impressive job of labelling the appropriate excerpts to facilitate cross-referencing in a fashion that would have been second nature to medieval clergy. Throughout, the reader is presented with a very useful and usable text that, to a specialist on the medieval clergy, appears a quite admirable substitute for the codex itself.
The supporting material for the translation that Dunn and Coffey offer here consists mostly of footnotes. While some introduction to the volume is necessary (and, to be fair to the translators, a repetition and cross-reference to their other translated volumes in the same project), the introduction to this volume offers first a brief history of Saint James and his cult, with extra attention devoted to its development in Iberia and the role played by the Codex Calixtinus in the same. It then pays special attention to the Codex’s contents and the composition of book one, the subject of the translation, with respect to both the contents and how they functioned in the medieval world. Extensive explanation about the composition of a medieval mass, how offices were sung, and how the organization of these elements comprised a liturgical year make the contents of the volume intelligible for the novice, while still providing a good refresher course for all but the most expert specialists. The notes to each page are rarely intrusive or burdensome, and are rarely of the kind of metacommentary that would be found in a specialized research volume. Instead, the notes help to explain or link ideas for readers, lending greater utility for the text in teaching or for the consultation of non-specialists. Perhaps the only obvious need, in this respect, that the volume leaves unfilled is a glossary for liturgical terms that are often unfamiliar to even professional scholars. Although myself an Iberian scholar of the secular clergy, I found myself--perhaps as a byproduct of being on a search committee while reading the translation--in need of short flips back to the introduction to find reminders of whether “lauds” came before “vespers” or after “matins.” In some respects, then, I think this experience might mirror the way that modern students approach the volume. Given that most university students might not have any familiarity with the organization of daily masses in medieval Catholicism, it seems likely that a more robust glossary for technical terms that would have been obvious to a medieval cleric but are opaque in the twenty-first century would have been useful. This, however, is a small quibble in the face of what is a very useful support apparatus for the translation.
Overall, the translation offered here by Thomas Coffey and Maryjane Dunn is a solid contribution to both teaching and scholarship. It is reasonably priced and should find its way into library holdings, and, in my view, would be a quite appropriate required text for seminars on the cult of the saints, medieval Iberia, or religious life in the central Middle Ages. The volume is pleasantly readable and is well-supported by both scholarship and the scholarly apparatus of the text. It would serve all of scholarship and especially those of us at teaching institutions were a greater number of these kinds of translation projects made available, but that is a qualm to take up with other scholars. Dunn and Coffey have done good work here, deserve our thanks, and should be congratulated for a helpful addition to the corpus of medieval works translated into readable, modern prose.