Anna de Valldaura’s contribution to Catalan legendary

Abstract

In the mid-19th century, a programme of reworking the forms and themes of folk song and narrative took place in Catalonia, bringing these genres to a wider, non-strictly erudite public. The folklorist Joaquima Santamaria i Ventura was part of this movement, which revolved around the Renaixença. Under the pseudonym of Anna de Valldaura, she published Tradicions religioses de Catalunya (Religious Traditions of Catalonia), a compilation of literary legends based on oral sources that dealt with religious themes and which appeared in the journalism of the period and in different editions. The aim of this paper is to study and evaluate the contributions made by this writer by establishing the corpus of published stories, the relationship between the different editions (or books) and their classification.