“The New Asclepius: Fragmentation and Re-assemblage in Du Bellay’s L’Olive”. (original) (raw)
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Cicero’s corpus and Petrarca’s ankle. The theory of imitatio and its practices
Humanitas, 2020
This article focuses on the centrality provided to auctores and texts as corpora, in the framework of Francesco Petrarca and the theory of imitation by the humanists. Initially, animal images from Petrarca and the humanists are analysed, as well as the paths of their diffusion. These were used to express the role of the model, the involvement of the writer, variatio, the election of stilus, and the questions sustained by the new routes of interaction with Cicero. Then, three main methodological ways to study the relationship between texts as corpora are presented: semiosphere, intertextuality, and reception theory. A critic point of view towards the static methodologies is here expressed. Conclusively, the dialogue between Petrarca and Cicero, as text and corpus, is recalled in order to incorporate the auctores contamination.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2018
Huntington HM 45717). The most remarkable of these witnesses are C and H, twins descended from a manuscript (ζ) containing a vast number of conjectures, many of them 'wilful tampering', but some of outstanding quality (K. prints sixty-four of them); R. M. Thomson argued that they were the work of William of Malmesbury, and K. supports his case with additional evidence. A further advance is K.'s establishment of the pattern of contamination to be found in the manuscripts, principally from β to α 2 and from G to β. K. (OCT, ix) does not exclude in principle the possibility that one or more of the 225 renaissance manuscripts known to him preserves a transmitted reading not found elsewhere, though he rightly thinks it unlikely. Nevertheless, in case a future scholar wishes to collate them fully, he provides lists (Studies, 267-79) of both the 225 manuscripts and the 'singular uncorrected and uncorrectable' errors in each of his primary manuscripts, to assist such a scholar to establish the lineage of later ones (OCT, v; 'uncorrectable' is a slippery concept, akin to that of the 'unconjecturable' reading). The textual discussions in Studies (the lemmata give the text of Ihm's 1907 edition, not that printed by K.) are always clear and to the point; whenever possible, K. establishes the reading of the archetype and his arguments are solidly based on linguistic evidence culled from TLL and the PHI database. If the rst person sometimes seems over-prominent, that is perhaps a reection of the fact that, in the last analysis, many editorial decisions have to be subjective. K.'s critical instincts are radical, but the archetype was extremely, often deeply, corrupt (cf. Studies, 3) and the variegated nature of the subject matter makes it much more difcult to arrive at the truth than is the case with, say, the Puteaneus in Livy 21-25. I have counted over fty passages where K. argues that the archetypal reading is lacunose (there will also be many places, not discussed in Studies, where the omission is small and the truth not in doubt; by contrast, not surprisingly, he deletes transmitted words in twenty-three passages). On a number of occasions (Iul. 20.5, 60, Aug. 38.2, 43.1, Tib. 21.5, Galba 6.2, Vesp. 15, Dom. 14.1), when the general sense required is not in doubt, he prints what he calls a 'stop gap' and adds 'quod sententiam dumtaxat nostri redintegrat' (uel sim.). My own preference in these circumstances is to indicate a lacuna rather than ll it, but many will approve of K.'s practice. On several occasions K. adduces the evidence of Orosius or the epitome de Caesaribus attributed to Aurelius Victor (referred to just as 'Epit.' or 'the Epitome'); it is a pity that he did not say elsewhere (at, e.g., OCT, xli or Studies, 49) that they constitute indirect textual evidence. K. accepts forty-six emendations of Richard Bentley, whose plan to edit Suetonius never came to fruition; they are found in his copies, now in the British Library, of the Amsterdam and Leiden editions of 1697 and 1698 respectively. K. also reports conjectures of Eduard Fraenkel, in his copy of Ihm's 1907 edition (now in the Sackler Library in Oxford and transcribed by David Wardle, whose Clarendon Ancient History Series edition of the Life of Augustus (2014) contains a number of textual observations).
One of the richest collections of Ciceronian works of the XIVth century, the ms. 552-2 of the Médiathèque du Grand Troyes (France), belonged to Petrarch (1304-1374). Probably a gift from the Scaliger family, the codex was made in a workshop of northern Italy and decorated with several beautiful miniatures. By the time of its acquisition (c. 1342), the Troyes manuscript, containing the bulk of Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical treatises, became one of the most vital books owned by the humanist because its margins are packed with thousands of glosses of different meanings and typologies: they point out oratorian stylistic devices (with parallels between Roman and Medieval techniques), draw Petrarch’s attention to religious themes, create links to parallel texts, correct the scribe’s errors, in an attentive philological effort. This corpus of glosses has never been published or entirely analysed even if several studies of marginalia have shown how crucial is this particular aspect of Petrarchan research. The article presents some of the annotations to the first book of the 'De natura deorum'. The comparison of these notes with passages of Petrarch’s works, in particular the treatise 'De suis ipsius et multorum ignorantia', is decisive for evaluating the degree to which the reading of the Roman author was fruitful. Il ms. 552-2 della Médiathèque du Grand Troyes (France), una delle più ricche raccolte ciceroniane del Trecento, commissionato probabilmente dalla veronese famiglia della Scala ad un atelier dell’Italia del Nord finemente decorato da splendide miniature, appartenne a Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). Dal tempo della sua prima acquisizione, intorno agli anni ’40 del Trecento, l’umanista lasciò sui margini di questo codice centinaia di annotazioni di varia tipologia: ci sono postille che commentano lo stile dell’oratore, appunti sul contenuto religioso dei trattati, paragoni tra i precetti ciceroniani e la retorica medievale, rinvii ad altri autori, correzioni apposte al testo in un intenso impegno filologico. Il presente contributo offre una panoramica delle postille petrarchesche più interessanti, tuttora inedite, al primo libro del 'De natura deorum'. Il raffronto tra queste annotazioni e le opere petrarchesche, in particolare il trattato 'De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia', è determinante per valutare il notevole peso che ebbe in Petrarca la lettura dell’autore latino.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2022
Sannazaro's Arcadia dates to 1966. Il Pastor Fido, by Gian Battista Guarini, exists largely in its 1602 and 1647 translations, with modern editions drawing on these seventeenthcentury versions. The contributions made by the editor-translators of side-by-side translations, both in the Other Voice series and from Italica Press, are invaluable. Coller's edition reveals just how vibrant these texts can be. The scholarship and interpretive work Coller provides for Miani's Amorous Hope, A Pastoral Play makes this an edition that brings an enchanting play to its readers.
Volto di Medusa: Monumentalizing the self in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta
Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a projection of the poet's internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch's agency. Yet Petrarch's Laura-Medusa is suggestively figured as only her disembodied head, a weapon ultimately manipulated by Perseus. This reversal of agency has an impact on Petrarch's complicated theory of poetic inspiration, and reaches beyond the relationship between poet and beloved to encompass another fraught paradigm of power: the relationship between poet and patron. By recalling the disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of Laura, and recovering the political symbolism of the appropriation of her petrifying gaze, Petrarch creates a model of poetic agency that he uses to stage his relationship to patronage in the Latin Africa and a poem addressed to his Colonna patrons.