Phenomena of missing and redundantly writing words in Girolamo Majorica’s Tales of the Saints

Abstract

The Tales of the Saints 各聖傳 is a collection of Catholic hagiographies written in Nom script, compiled by Italian Jesuit Priest Girolamo Majorica (1591-1656) and his Vietnamese assistants in 1646. This collection contains a lot of valuable information and resources of the Christian Saints’ lives, their teachings, deeds or miracles. Due to the large size of twelve volumes corresponding to twelve months of liturgical year, and being copied by different Vietnamese people, the Nom manuscript of this work cannot avoid some errors in terms of writing. This article focuses on the phenomena of missing and redundantly writing words in the texts of the last four volumes (from September to December) in order to identify them and to better understand the content of Majorica’s work.