Resumen de Textos manuscrits culturals de l'època moderna en llengua catalana existents en la col.lecció de la Hispanic Society of America (1)
Kenneth Brown, Juan Manuel Martínez Alonso
The following is a four-part descriptive study of sixty-one hitherto unknown-to-exist Catalan-language cultural manuscripts dating from 1500 to the 1930s extant in the Library of the Hispanic Society of America in New York. This collection contains a considerable number of eighteenth-century poems in Catalan, works dealing with social history, the history of the trades, municipal documentation as well as personal correspondence, a unique 1705 medical treatise, in addition to dozens of Sardana musical scores. After a brief Introduction, the authors focus on the salient cultural virtues of manuscript HC 380/632, a fairly unitary poetic anthology of works penned in Barcelona during the latter two decades of the eighteenth century. It provides keen insights into the festive activities of the city's religious orders, as well into the daily occurrences of its secular world. All this in Catalan, a language that was supposed to have ceased to exist as the lingua franca of everyday communication during the regime of the Bourbon new order. The entire collection is an exciting new discovery of cultural texts to serve the needs of researchers.
