Diego Catalan

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Diego Catalán (born September 16, 1928 in Madrid ; † April 9, 2008 ibid) was a Spanish Romance scholar , Hispanist and Medievalist .

life and work

Diego Catalán was the grandson of the important Romanist Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the son of the educator Jimena Menéndez Pidal Goyri (1901–1990) and the chemist Miguel Catalán Sañudo (1894–1957). At the age of eight he went with his family from Madrid to Segovia and lived there until 1944 as the only student of his parents and grandfather in an atmosphere of rare spirituality. From 1944 to 1949 he studied Romance Philology at the University of Complutense with Rafael Lapesa , always in contact with his grandfather, who was withdrawn for political reasons, whose life's work he constantly accompanied and whose academic legacy he looked after for forty years (after his death in 1968).

In 1951 he did his doctorate with Lapesa with the thesis “Cronica de Alfonso XI”. Una redacción amplia desconocida . After brief editing in Edinburgh (1951–1952), he was an assistant in Madrid. From 1954 to 1964 he held the chair for historical grammar at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife , but left the island for numerous visiting professorships in Berkeley , Madison and Bonn (there 1963–1964). In 1965 he went entirely to the United States and taught in Berkeley, Madison and San Diego (there 1970–1988). In 1978 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . After his application for the chair of Rafael Lapesa at the Complutense in Madrid failed in 1979, he took a chair at the Autonomous University of Madrid from 1981 until his retirement in 1998 .

In Catalán's scientific work, a distinction must be made between the (extensive) service to the legacy of Menéndez Pidal and the (likewise extensive) personal work with which he moved from philology to historical research from the 1970s. The Romancero -Research his grandfather led Catalán continued by publishing and cataloging (with others) of romance collections in numerous volumes. Currently, this unfinished research is mainly coordinated by Suzanne Petersen in the Internet project "Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project".

The posthumous publication of Menéndez Pidal's Spanish Language History in 2 volumes was also significant (Madrid 2005).

Works

Works (selection)

  • Poema de Alfonso XI. Fuentes. Dialecto. Estilo , Madrid 1953
  • Un prosista anónimo del siglo XIV (La Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI). Hallazgo. Estilo. Reconstruction , La Laguna 1955
  • La escuela lingüística española y su concepción del lenguaje , Madrid 1955
  • De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos. Cuatro estudios sobre el nacimiento de la historiografía romance en Castilla y Portugal , Madrid 1962
  • Siete siglos de romancero. Historia y poesía , Madrid 1969
  • Por campos del Romancero. Estudios de la tradición oral moderna , Madrid 1970
  • Lingüística íbero-románica, I. Crítica retrospectiva , Madrid 1974
  • La Tradición oral manuscrita en la "Crónica de Alfonso XI" , Madrid 1974
  • (with others) El Romancero Pan-Hispánico. Catálogo General Descriptivo / The Pan-Hispanic Ballad. General Descriptive Catalog , Madrid 1982–1988 (several vols.)
  • El español. Orígenes de su diversidad , Madrid 1989
  • Las lenguas circunvecinas del castellano. Cuestiones de dialectología hispano-románica , Madrid 1989
  • La Estoria de España de Alfonso X. Creación y evolución , Madrid 1992
  • (Ed.) Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Antología de prosistas castellanos , Madrid 1992
  • (Ed. With María del Mar de Bustos) Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La épica medieval española. Desde sus orígenes hasta su disolución en el romancero, I , Madrid 1992
  • De la silva textual al taller historiográfico alfonsí. Códices. Crónicas ,. Versiones y cuadernos de trabajo, Madrid 1997
  • Arte poética del romancero oral , 2 vols., Madrid 1997-1998
  • (with others) Catálogo analítico e índices del Archivo Romancístico Menéndez Pidal / Goyri. Romances de tema nacional , 2 vols., Barcelona 1998
  • La épica española. Nueva documentación y nueva evaluación , Madrid 2001
  • El Archivo del Romancero. Patrimonio de la humanidad. Historia documentada de un siglo de historia , 2 vols., Madrid 2001
  • El Cid en la historia y sus inventores , Madrid 2002
  • "Rodericus" romanzado en los reinos de Aragón, Castilla y Navarra , Madrid 2005
  • (Ed.) Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Historia de la lengua española , 2 vols., Madrid 2005, 2007

literature

  • Homenaxe a Diego Catalán , ed. by Juan Carlos Villaverde Amiev, Oviedo 2010
  • O contexto hispánico da historiografia portuguesa nos séculos XIII e XIV. Em mémoria de Diego Catalán , ed. by Maria do Rosario Ferreira, Coimbra 2010

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Catalan, Diego
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Catalán Menéndez Pidal, Diego
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish Romanist, Hispanic and Medievalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Madrid
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 2008
Place of death Madrid