Qualche osservazione filologica sulla Vita metrica s. Leonis episcopi Catanensis BHG 981c

The Life of St. Leo of Catania (BHG 981c) is a hagiographical poem made up of 407 "political verses". The text tells the imaginative story of the holy Sicilian bishop Leo and his fight against the evil magician Heliodorus. A metaphrasis of the earlier prose Vita (BHG 981b), the text is the work of an anonymous author who most probably lived in Sicily or Southern Italy under Norman rule. The poem has been transmitted to us only by a somewhat later manuscript, i.e. the «Menologion of Daniel» (Messina, Biblioteca Regionale Universitaria, S. Salv. 30 + 29, AD 1307), which is well known for the impressive amount of mistakes, misspellings, and inaccuracies in all the texts that the monk Daniel transcribed in it. The publication of this poem in 1962 was not particularly satisfactory, and it deserves a new and more accurate edition. This paper aims to show that the apparent linguistic deficiencies of the anonymous author are largely the result of both the poor manuscript transmission and the shortcomings of the printed edition.