Cinque scongiuri e altre novità nel sermonario attribuito a Roberto da Lecce (Rieti, Biblioteca Paroniana, ms. I.2.6)

The essay focuses on the manuscript Rieti, Biblioteca Paroniana, I.2.6, a collection of religious sermons dating around the middle 15th century. As some scholars suggest, the codex’s first owner could have been Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce (1425-1495), a famous Italian preacher who is also supposed to be the main scribe of the sermons. Other unknown scribes add small texts on the margins of the manuscript: among these, five spells copied by a late-15th hand deserve some attention. The essay provides the first critical edition of these spells, along with a linguistic study arguing that they were probably written in Salento (southern Apulia): this fact could confirm the link between the manuscript and Roberto Caracciolo’s monastic entourage. The philological analysis also highlights some other features of the manuscript, hitherto unknown: above all, one of the sermons in the codex displays a code mixing between Latin and Italian vernacular, providing new linguistic data about public preaching in Italy during the late Middle Ages.