conjugata

[meisenimverbis]

Hello everyone.

It appeared to me a sentence with coniugata from a Renaissance text that I couldn't quite figure how to translate.
The sentence is the following:

Ex Italia monstri allatum depictum simulachrum Ravennae ortum, ex conjugata.
(Out of Italy, the winged painted image of the beast born in Ravenna, out of a [conjugata])

Someone suggested the translation "married woman", but couldn't it also mean "composite image" or something like that, once coniugatus is an adjective... In other words, what's the noun behind that adjective? Is it likely to be woman? It seems a little too ambigous to me, but then, maybe it's usage, I don't know. (It could be that the beast was born of a married woman (?)... Or that the picture was drawn by a married woman... Or that the picture came from a joint picture...)

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Bitmap]

allatum comes from afferre. The sentence says that a painted picture of a monster was brought from Italy and that the picture (not the monster) was created in Ravenna.
I cannot make sense of the addition "ex conjugata" (or the comma in there).

 

[Quasus]

It would be nice to provide an entire sentence (this fragment even lacks a finite verb) or better yet, a paragraph.

 

[Bitmap]

The sentence comes from this collection of letters:

Opus epistolarum Petri Martyris Anglerii ... Cui acceserunt Epistolae Ferdinandi de Pulgar [ex hispanico in latinum idioma conversae a Juliano Magau] coetanei latinae pariter atque hispanicae cum tractatu hispanico De viris Castellae illustribus

books.google.de

Note that this is the only place in the entire book that the word conjugata is used, so I can only come up with a conjecture:
It seems to me that the sentence is grammatically flawed. It would make more sense if it said Ravennae orti, so the word meaning "created" or "born" refers to monstri rather than simulachrum ... unless I'm missing something – maybe @Pacifica can make more grammatical sense of it than I can.

In any case, conjugata seems to mean "nun" in this context (see below), and if you take the sentence with my grammatical conjecture as
ex Italia monstri depictum simulacrum allatum est Ravennae ex conjugata orti,
it would mean "From Italy, a painted picture has been brought of a monster born in Ravenna, by a nun."

That would make it consistent with a Spanish report about this incident that I found as a footnote in this article. Note that the description of the monster is very similar to the one in the letter linked above:

En la ciudad de Ravena, en Italia, acaeció, el dicho año de 1512, antes un poco de la batalla de Ravena, que una monja parió un monstruo espantable, conviene a saber: una criatura viva, la cabeza, rostro y orejas y boca y cabellos, como de un león; y en la frente tenía un cuerno como hacia arriba y, en lugar de brazos, tenía alas de cuero, como los murciélagos, y en el pecho derecho tenía una señal de una y griega, ansí: Y; y en medio del pecho tenía tal letra X, y en el pecho izquierdo tenía una media luna, y dentro una v de esta hechura: V.

 

[Pacifica]

It seems to me that the sentence is grammatically flawed. It would make more sense if it said Ravennae orti, so the word meaning "created" or "born" refers to monstri rather simulachrum ... unless I'm missing something – maybe @Pacifica can make more grammatical sense of it than I can.

That would make more sense to me, as well. I don't have another explanation.

 

[meisenimverbis]

It would be nice to provide an entire sentence (this fragment even lacks a finite verb) or better yet, a paragraph.

This is the sentence.

The sentence comes from this collection of letters:
[...]

Note that this is the only place in the entire book that the word conjugata is used, so I can only come up with a conjecture:
It seems to me that the sentence is grammatically flawed. It would make more sense if it said Ravennae orti, so the word meaning "created" or "born" refers to monstri rather than simulachrum ... unless I'm missing something – maybe @Pacifica can make more grammatical sense of it than I can.

In any case, conjugata seems to mean "nun" in this context (see below), and if you take the sentence with my grammatical conjecture as
ex Italia monstri depictum simulacrum allatum est Ravennae ex conjugata orti,
it would mean "From Italy, a painted picture has been brought of a monster born in Ravenna, by a nun."

That would make it consistent with a Spanish report about this incident that I found as a footnote in this article. Note that the description of the monster is very similar to the one in the letter linked above:

En la ciudad de Ravena, en Italia, acaeció, el dicho año de 1512, antes un poco de la batalla de Ravena, que una monja parió un monstruo espantable, conviene a saber: una criatura viva, la cabeza, rostro y orejas y boca y cabellos, como de un león; y en la frente tenía un cuerno como hacia arriba y, en lugar de brazos, tenía alas de cuero, como los murciélagos, y en el pecho derecho tenía una señal de una y griega, ansí: Y; y en medio del pecho tenía tal letra X, y en el pecho izquierdo tenía una media luna, y dentro una v de esta hechura: V.

Wow! Thanks! This is very clarifying!

 

[meisenimverbis]

The comma is in the original print. As is the ortum.

 

[meisenimverbis]

Anyway, coniugata (with an i, not a j in the original, this one had passed by me too...) is a married woman, after all. To her god, though.

Which leads me to question:

Is coniugata commonly used as married woman in these medieval/modern texts in Latin? (Because it wasn't in classical or late antiquity Latin, right?)

 

[Bitmap]

Coniugare is rare in classical Latin as far as I know. For married woman, they usually used uxor or coniunx.

When I looked for it, I mainly found late or mediaeval texts which had it as "married woman", mainly in the connexion "ex conjugata nasci/natum esse". There was also the mathmatical meaning "line segment".

I don't think I came across any examples of conjugata meaning "nun", though ... so his usage is rather peculiar.

 

[meisenimverbis]

I don't think I came across any examples of conjugata meaning "nun", though ... so his usage is rather peculiar.

In Portuguese, culturally, it's very understandable that a nun would be a woman "married to God". Once it's a word used for married women, it's a natural extension of the usage.

 

[Bitmap]

Well, I get that, he probably had Deo coniugata in mind ... you still don't call a nun anything resembling "coniugata" in Portuguese or any other Romance language, and so far, this is the only Latin example I've found where it could mean that.

 

[Pacifica]

Well, yeah, coniugata would usually mean "married woman" in general, not necessarily married to Christ.

Is there actually any evidence, apart from the Spanish text quoted by Bitmap, that "nun" is what is meant here? Is there any other Latin text relating the incident, which states that the mother was a nun? If the Spanish text is based solely on the Latin text that we're concerned with, "monja" could have been a misinterpretation.

 

[Bitmap]

Well, yeah, coniugata would usually mean "married woman" in general, not necessarily married to Christ

Is there actually any evidence, apart from the Spanish text quoted by Bitmap, that "nun" is what is meant here? Is there any other Latin text relating the incident, which states that the mother was a nun? If the Spanish text is based solely on the Latin text that we're concerned with, "monja" could have been a misinterpretation.

This one, but it is not available on google books:

Diario romano dal 3 maggio 1485 al 6 giugno 1524 di Sebastiano di Branca Tedallini

books.google.de

At least I would expect to find something in there because wikipedia mentions him:

Monster of Ravenna - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

wiki also mentions this Italian source, but I can't be bothered to read it ... I just trust other people to have done their research

Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 : Luca Landucci : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Book digitized by Google from the library of Oxford University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

archive.org

 

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

Never trust other people. Anyway, I've just looked at the Wiki page. At one point it says

The earliest account of the monster's existence is from the diarist Sebastiano di Branca Tedallini, who recorded on March 8 that news of a strange infant's birth had reached Pope Julius II in Rome. According to his account, the child was said to have been born of a nun and a friar, and was marked by a horned head, the letters YXV on its chest, and with one leg hairy and cloven-hoofed while the other leg's midsection grew a human eye.

At another, it says

Others emphasized the specific vice of sexual immorality, as Pietro Martire d'Anghiera recorded the belief that the monster was born the illegitimate child of a married mother.

It sounds very much like the kind of story where you pays your money, you takes your choice.

 

[meisenimverbis]

Anyway, unless the writer made a mistake, using ortum for orti, coniugata is the agent of allatum (est), right? So, the image (simulachrum) was brought by her.

(I agree with Pacifica in what concerns that keeping 'married woman' for coniugata would be wiser unless/until other evidence for 'nun' is found.)

 

[Bitmap]

Anyway, unless the writer made a mistake, using ortum for orti, coniugata is the agent of allatum (est), right? So, the image (simulachrum) was brought by her.

No.

 

[meisenimverbis]

Then I'm lost!

Ex Italia monstri allatum depictum simulachrum Ravennae ortum, ex coniugata

ex Italia allatum simulachrum | from Italy came a picture
monstri simulachrum | a picture of a monster
simulachrum Ravennae ortum | a picture that appeared in Ravenna

Would it then be:
monstri simulachrum ex coniugata (nati)? Because there's no way ortum is with the monster, unless there was some misspelling, right?

 

[Pacifica]

"By" before the agent of a passive verb is ab, not ex.

Literally, the sentence as it stands now is saying that the image of the monster was born from the woman, but that doesn't make sense. Either the author got a little mixed up in his head between the monster itself and its representation, as can happen, or otherwise lost track of the construction of his sentence, or the -um ending of ortum is a typographical error.

 

[meisenimverbis]

"By" before the agent of a passive verb is ab, not ex.

Couldn't he have used the wrong preposition? (In that case, there will possibly be other occurrences in the book... ) But you're probably right, this is not an easy preposition to get wrong.

 

[Pacifica]

It's unlikely that anyone with a good command of Latin, as this author seems to be in spite of his possible lapse with ortum for orti, would get ab and ex confused in this function. It is also unlikely that the woman brought the image herself.