No philologist or textual critic today would presume to deny or minimise the importance, for the establishment of a classical text and for the study of its reception, of the material transmission of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Equally fundamental was the role played, beyond that of copyists, by the ancient ‘editors’ who oversaw the correction and dissemination of works — with all that this implies in terms of more or less deliberate interventions on the texts and impact on the subsequent copying and reading of these texts.
From the extensive scholarly production by Oronzo Pecere, who ranks among the foremost specialists in the history of the ancient book and the circulation of classical Latin texts in Late Antiquity, the editors, Roberto Gamberini, Francesco Santi and Antonio Stramaglia, have selected eight articles published over nearly four decades (1982–2020), to which is added an unpublished study on ancient editions of Solinus. The contributions are presented in chronological order of first publication. Since, with one exception, they have already been published, there is no need to examine them individually here; the value of the volume lies rather in the convergence of these studies and in the method they collectively exemplify.
All the essays focus on the practice of textual emendation in Late Antiquity, and bring to light figures, centres of production and techniques of critical reading whose traces may still be discerned in surviving late antique or — more frequently — later manuscripts, which contain subscriptiones that preserve the memory of a decisive stage in the history of texts: the critical revision that may be described as ‘editorial activity’ ante litteram, which mostly coincides with the major transformation marked in the same period by the transition from the roll to the codex.
P.’s approach, which may be characterised as an archaeology at once of the book and of texts or, as the editors observe, as a form of ‘philological palaeontology’ (viii), consists in analysing, from the manuscript evidence, the critical textual work undertaken by these late antique scholars and in trying to recover, as far as possible, the earlier forms in which the texts were presented and disseminated.
Two of the articles reprinted here are in fact substantial essays that extend far beyond the confines of a single manuscript or textual tradition: first, a seminal work for the study of subscriptiones and ancient textual criticism as a discipline (1986) like ‘La tradizione dei testi latini tra IV e V secolo attraverso i libri sottoscritti’ (55–181), and the more recent (2017) ‘“Emendatio” di produzione ed “emendatio” diacronica nei codici latini “antiquiores”’ (333–97). Equally transversal in its implication is the highlighting of a fascinating phenomenon, that of collaborative revision, attested by the work of a certain Felix orator in the first half of the sixth century, who as a young man assisted Vettius Agorius Basilius Mavortius, consul in 527, in the emendation of a manuscript of Horace, and later enlisted the help of a Deuterius scholasticus in revising a copy of De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (‘La revisione “in coppia” di due esemplari tardoantichi di Orazio e Marziano Capella’, 421–37).
Other contributions are devoted to detailed examination of particular manuscripts, celebrated for preserving late antique subscriptiones. This is notably the case of the Codex Mediceus of Virgil (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 39.1), which bears a subscription in the name of Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius, consul in 494, but which P. demonstrates not to be the actual copy revised by Asterius, but rather a transcription of it, probably commissioned by Macarius, the owner of the now-lost exemplar (‘Il Virgilio Mediceo e il modello emendato da Asterio’, 317–31). Conversely, the lost exemplar of the works of Julius Paris, Probus and Pomponius Mela, corrected and subscribed at Ravenna by Rusticius Helpidius Domnulus — likely a Roman official under Theodosius II — must be reconstructed indirectly from its Carolingian copy; a task rendered particularly complex by the fact that the latter derives from not one but several exemplars and that Domnulus’ own manuscript had already undergone material and textual modifications in antiquity (‘Il Vat. lat. 4929 e l’esemplare sottoscritto da Rusticio Elpidio Domnulo’, 399–420). Such concrete features of transmission serve as a salutary reminder of the caution required of modern scholars. A comparable case is that of the late antique manuscript of Cicero’s De lege agraria, discovered by Poggio Bracciolini and now known only through the latter’s autograph copy (‘La “subscriptio” di Statilio Massimo e la tradizione delle “Agrarie” di Cicerone’, 3–53).
The remaining studies, while likewise centred on late antique manuscripts and their later copies, shift the focus to the genesis and early transmission of larger textual corpora in Late Antiquity: especially the works of Caesar (‘Genesi e trasmissione antica del “corpus Caesarianum”’, 183–232), Solinus (‘Le due “editiones” dell’opera di Solino e l’esemplare scritto da Teodosio II’, 439–71), and, in a later period, the logical corpus of Boethius, (‘Cassiodoro e la protostoria di un “corpus” di scritti di Boezio’, 233–316).
By bringing together such a coherent body of work, the volume offers what may rightly be regarded as a genuine handbook for the study of ancient Latin scholarship, the codicology of the earliest preserved codices and the material history of textual transmission. It will undoubtedly guide and stimulate further research, not only among philologists and historians of texts, but more broadly among all those concerned with the concrete transmission of any historical textual source.
