Helen COB
On Friday, August 23, 2002, at 03:35 PM, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
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.
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