I have looked at this problem while working on the Hermathena article and in connection with Aldhelm's Vergil text - on which I hope someday to publish, if I live so long - I cannot speak to the later period. I have only worked with the circle of Boniface and Aldhelm and Bede. We do not have a Anglo-Saxon manuscript of Vergil earlier than the tenth century - and for those we are left to consider whteher those manuscripts descend from earlier Insular manuscripts or from 'new' Carolinguan manuscripts from the continent.
Gneuss catalogues four pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon Vergils, three of which have been reduced to fragments, one hopes through long and vigorous use. Gneuss 477. Aeneid fragment. London, Royal 8.F.xiv, fols. 3-5. saec xi in Bury?. Gneuss 503. Aeneid fragment. London, Arundel 30 fols. 5-10 and 208. saec x Bury. Gneuss 648. Aeneid fragment. Oxford, Lat. bib., Lat. class. Lat. liturg., Lat. misc. and Lat. th.: Lat. class.c.2., f. 18 [with Deene Park Library, near Kettering, Northamptonshire, Oldham roll FP. a (6)] saec x/xi. Gneuss 919. Rome Reg. lat. 1671 saec x2 Worcester? Full description in Bishop (1971, 17): ' The text has numerous mistakes of its own, mostly uncontrolled by the discipline of scansion, the MS. has (besides the Prefaces and the headings of the Eclogues) enough variant readings to be capable of being placed in the tradition; where the readings of 9th-century codices are recorded in the apparatus of the editions the MS. is relatively (not consistently) close to Berne 184.' Campbell (1953,5-6) remarks that 'such was the authority of Virgil that any phrase used by him would probably be felt as a Vergilian echo in the period with which we are concerned. ... Virgil at once emerges as the perpetual handbook of them all. ... At the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon literary period, the second influence to Virgil was undoubtedly early religious epic.' Those Christian poets are, however, saturated with Vergilian reminiscences and vocabulary, and it is possible that Vergil must be placed second to his Christian descendants. I want to stress the last line of that paragraph - part of the commentary handbook - since it occurs to me now that a peculiar reading or allusion might also be affected by a knowledge of the deeply Vergilian patristic poets. I have always checked the manuscript variants given by Ribbeck (which, however old it is, I love - if anyone knows of a copy of his Prolegomena for sale - let alone the edition, please let me know!) and Mynor. I now include a check through Geymonat too, having finally had a chance to handle his edition this spring. I also check the lemmata in Servius Danielis, since we have a fragemnt from the cicle of Boniface, and at least one Boniface allusion demonstatres the text filtered through the commentaries. One must also check the works which may be lie behind a given work - for instance Patristic writers for Bede's Genesis writings, grammarians for Aldhelm. The question of correcting or accepting the reading in a source is a highly suggestive one - if we could be certain of original readings - but of all authors, which is more likely to be 'corrected in quotations' by a scribe? If there is any correspondence between a particular reading in a Vergil text manuscript and a quotation - I note them. More often than not there isn't a problem - there is no difference - this may be, of course, because editors have silently corrected Vergilian lines according to whatever their idea of a standard edition is (God be good to Rudolf Ehwald for he gives the manuscript readings in his apparatus) - I am appalled at using the Loeb for this sort of thing - I would have expected Mynors at least, but then recently I found a well-published medievalist unaware of the existence of the Weber Vulgate and using Colunga-Turrado (Clementine) and getting away with it!. Now I'd use CT for roughing out research (it after all costs a lot less to put initially on the shelf at home), but I'd check quotations againt Weber and use the Weber text and punctuation. With all this checking one is still left with little solid to go on - there are some small indications in Aldhelm, but I doubt if there is enough to be staistically viable, although I keep hoping. Somewhere in my notes I believe I have someone suggesting Aldhelm had access to a manuscript like P - they may have really gone out on a limb and said P itself. I once suggested to someone that if we created a base of all Vergilian quotations in Anglo-Latin before 800, we might have a chance, but I immediately started seeing problems there - By the by, I am waiting with bated breath to hear what everyone has to say about Fulgentius. Helm's edition has a list of manusvripts. Anytime I've chased a mention f Fulgentius down for my period I've ususlly found it was either the treatise on language or the Mythologies that was actually quoted. I need to check Savage's article, but I don't think the Paris manuscript whose commentary on the sixth Aeneid he suggested might have connections with the later 'Chartrian' exegesis had any of his Vergil allegory. Oddly enough, however, I have always suspected that the Old Irish 'King and Hermit' (and all readers be warned - all of the editions since Meyer's of 1901 are severely trunacated for no reason except to make the poem more like the Lake Isle of Inishfre) may have been inflenced by Fulgentius's remarks on the Eclogues at the beginning of the work. Helen COB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub