Introduction to the Text

The Visión de Filiberto, “Filbert’s Vision,” is a fictional debate witnessed by a holy man called Filbert between the body and the soul of a recently deceased person. The body-soul debate was an extremely popular genre across Europe from the twelth to the fifteenth century CE, and reflects medieval Christian concerns with the different parts of human nature, and with the impact that actions committed during life might have after death. In this text, the body and the soul discuss their own natures and debate the blame that each of them should receive for the sins that the person they belonged to committed during his lifetime. Shocked by the debate that he has witnessed, Filbert devotes himself to religion with renewed zeal.

This text is a reworking in Old Castilian (an earlier form of Spanish) of a thirteenth-century Latin text, the Visio Philiberti, of which more than 130 copies survive – an extremely high number by medieval standards. The popularity of this text was such that almost every major European language has at least one surviving manuscript version. The Middle English reworking, entitled “þe Desputisioun bitween þe Bodi and þe Soule,” has seven!

Introduction to the Source

This text is found on folios 38v-49r of the “Toledo Codex” (known as Manuscript T), held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Vitr. 6/1). It is dated 1368 CE but it is likely to be a copy of an earlier text that did not survive. There is no named author of the text.

Credits