Un spécimen qui parle de lui-même : les fonctions des collections multilingues du Notre Père au XVIe siècle

Abstract

This article explores the interest in multilingual translations of the Lord’s Prayer during the “long sixteenth century”, examining the diverse approaches adopted by Renaissance scholars. During this era, numerous humanists initiated collections of translated versions of the Lord’s Prayer for a range of purposes. The didactic role was a notable feature in early polyglot publications, aimed at teaching the reading and writing of foreign scripts to familiarize learners with unknown alphabets. In the realm of chorography, the inclusion of the Lord’s Prayer offered a glimpse into the linguistic characteristics of the peoples described. With the 1555 publication of Conrad Gessner’s Mithridates, the Lord’s Prayer served as a tool for language comparison, emphasizing both linguistic differences and affinities. Furthermore, there were manuscripts that exhibited a collection of the Lord’s Prayer in various tongues and scripts, thus underscoring the Prayer’s aesthetic potential. The period concluded with the publication of the first independent multilingual compilation, highlighting an increased interest in language differences.

Keywords

• Lord’s Prayer
• 16th century
• language didactics
• language comparison
• language esthetics
• scholarly compilations