Thèmes et variations : Réflexions stylistiques sur l’Itinéraire d’Égérie

Horváthy, Sára (2019) Thèmes et variations : Réflexions stylistiques sur l’Itinéraire d’Égérie. ACTA ANTIQUA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 59 (1-4). pp. 611-621. ISSN 0044-5975 (print); 1588-2543 (online)

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Abstract

Egeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”. What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time. Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.

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