La Papisa Juana de Roídis y la de Casti: Notas sobre la polémica en torno a las fuentes de la obra de Roídis

Abstract

The subject of The Pope Joan was very controversial, since it was foreign to the Greek world and to the literary topics of its time, whose fundamental characteristic is the Hellenocentrism, in a society, that of 1866, which was highy conservative and strongly influenced by the church. Roídis uses a series of resources in order to give to his work an appearance of great truthfulness, which was considered a provocation. On the other hand, the dependence of the topic on a historical tradition, which Casti synthesizes in his homonymous novella in verse, and his use of a number of resources and expressions from Casti prompted a fierce attack on Roídis’work, which was accused of plagiarism. In this work we analyze those passages on which the charge of plagiarism was based. From our analyses we conclude that, a) Roídis’work is superior to that of Casti; b) it doesn’t rely on that of Casti in the treatment of the topic, although Roídis does take elements from Casti’s novella; c) the elements and expressions taken from Casti are not signifi cant for the development of the plot; d) Roídis, who doesn’t conceal his sources, follows the technique of the ancient historians, especially that of Herodotus, who takes pieces of information from previous historians, so that in Roídis those elements can be viewed like a typical stylem in the Ionic mode of historiography; e) if we look for other references and passages, which Roídis takes from ancient texts and also reproduces ad verbum, κατ λέξιν, as in the quotations and passages from Homer, Euripides, Theocritus, the Old and the New Testament, Virgil, Diogenes Laertius, the church fathers, etc., we will fi nd quite a high number of such elements, which were in keeping with Roídis’aim of producing a text with the appearance of a piece of research.