At 09:58 AM 8/23/2002 +0100, James Butrica wrote: >Some partial suggestions have been made for secondary sources on early >editions, but for a complete inventory of incunabula I suspect that you >would have to create your own from Hain and the other reference works >devoted to listing them (and even then you would ideally try to track down >copies of the editions, since these reference works sometimes contain >"ghost" editions that do not actually exist).
This work has now been done; see: Davies, Martin, and John Goldfinch. _Vergil: A Census of Printed Editions 1469-1500_. Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society 7. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1992. There is even an appendix of probable ghosts! >As to affinities, I assume that you mean textual ones, and I suspect that >this would prove a dead end: if your interest is how the editions might be >related to the important early mss of Virgil, there is probably no >connection at all (some of those mss were certainly known to Renaissance >scholars like Pontano and Poliziano and Leto but I have never heard that >any of them was used for an early edition -- a good thing, too, since old >mss could simply get thrown away once they had served their purpose: one of >the Aldine editors destroyed a fifth-century uncial ms of Pliny's letters >after using it for his edition); For modern editions, the most important codices are (according to E. Courtney) as follows: Mediceus (Laurentian Lib. 39.1 and Vatican lat. 3225 fol. 76), Romanus (Vatican lat. 3867), and Palatinus (Vatican, Pal. lat. 1631). Palatinus was in Heidelberg until 1618, and therefore had little or no influence on Italian editions of Virgil's work in this period. Venier now confirms that Mediceus was used in the second printed edition of Virgil's works (1471). Mediceus and Romanus were also used by the most important of Virgil's textual critics for this period, Pierius Valerianus, on which see below. > and if you mean their relationship to each >other and to the "vulgate" of the late 15th century, that would be >impossible to pursue since, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has >explored the Virgilian ms tradition beyond the Carolingian period (where it >is already hopelessly contaminated) and so no-one is really in a position >to say what was in the "vulgate" at any subsequent period, least of all in >Italy in the Renaissance. I agree with James that the situation is hopeless for anything beyond the Carolingian period -- until c. 1470, when Virgil gets into print. For printed texts in the years 1470-1514, there is now a stemma in Venier (pp. 136-37). After that, I think you could safely derive a vulgate text from one of the following: (a) the Aldine octavos, which were endlessly pirated (b) the apparatus criticus provided by the aforementioned Valerianus, which was endlessly reprinted. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
