>Could someone suggest to an unreconstructed early medievalist a good >discussion of incunabula Vergils? >Might I also ask for suggestions on what passages the group would >suggest for collation in a text of the Aeneid to establish possible >affinities. >Helen COB >
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). 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); 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. James L. P. Butrica Department of Classics The Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's NL A1C 5S7 (709) 737-7914 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
