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ISAAC VOSSIUS, CATULLUS AND THE CODEX THUANEUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Dániel Kiss
Dániel Kiss*
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
*
daniel.kiss@ucd.ie
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Extract

For Bernd Niebling and his colleagues at the Lesesaal Altes Buch of the Universitätsbibliothek München

While the earliest complete manuscripts of Catullus to survive today were written in the fourteenth century, it is well known that poem 62 already appears in an anthology from the ninth century, the Codex Thuaneus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Parisinus lat. 8071). However, the Thuaneus may once have contained one more poem of Catullus. In his commentary on the poet, which appeared in 1684 but had been written decades earlier, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius makes the following comment on the last two lines of poem 11:

Praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est ] Vetustissimum exemplar Thuanæum in quo hoc Catulli carmen variorum epigrammatis subjungitur, legit fractus, non tactus. Et hoc probo, nisi malis stratus, nam in quibusdam libris tractus legebatur.

It is surprising to find a reference to a lost part of such a well-known manuscript in a source from the seventeenth century. One may well ask whether Vossius really read this poem in the Codex Thuaneus. Could he have seen this manuscript? Can he be relied on to report its contents truthfully? And could a part of the volume have been lost since the seventeenth century? I will argue that the answer to all these questions is yes, and that it is very likely that the Thuaneus once contained Catullus 11 as well as 62. I will set out the consequences of this for our understanding of Catullus' manuscript tradition. Next, I will discuss another ancient manuscript of Catullus that Vossius claims to have read, namely his ‘vetus liber Mediolanensis’. The article will close with an appendix on the history of the Thuaneus before it was studied by Vossius.

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Type
Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 344 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

For Bernd Niebling and his colleagues at the Lesesaal Altes Buch of the Universitätsbibliothek MünchenFootnote *

While the earliest complete manuscripts of Catullus to survive today were written in the fourteenth century, it is well known that poem 62 already appears in an anthology from the ninth century, the Codex Thuaneus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Parisinus lat. 8071). However, the Thuaneus may once have contained one more poem of Catullus. In his commentary on the poet, which appeared in 1684 but had been written decades earlier, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius makes the following comment on the last two lines of poem 11:

Praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est ] Vetustissimum exemplar Thuanæum in quo hoc Catulli carmen variorum epigrammatis subjungitur, legit fractus, non tactus. Et hoc probo, nisi malis stratus, nam in quibusdam libris tractus legebatur.Footnote 1

It is surprising to find a reference to a lost part of such a well-known manuscript in a source from the seventeenth century. One may well ask whether Vossius really read this poem in the Codex Thuaneus. Could he have seen this manuscript? Can he be relied on to report its contents truthfully? And could a part of the volume have been lost since the seventeenth century? I will argue that the answer to all these questions is yes, and that it is very likely that the Thuaneus once contained Catullus 11 as well as 62. I will set out the consequences of this for our understanding of Catullus' manuscript tradition. Next, I will discuss another ancient manuscript of Catullus that Vossius claims to have read, namely his ‘vetus liber Mediolanensis’. The article will close with an appendix on the history of the Thuaneus before it was studied by Vossius.

1

Isaac Vossius (1618–89) was the son of the great Dutch humanist Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649). He benefited from an excellent education, and started to edit ancient authors in his early twenties.Footnote 2 In 1641 he embarked on a tour of England, France and Italy.Footnote 3 On 17 August of that year he arrived in Paris, and on 4 September he wrote to Salmasius in Leiden:

Indies jam utor libris ex Regia et Thuanaea bibliothecis. Nullis in saltibus jucundior mihi videtur venatio. Vellem ego vel hujus vel istius Bibliothecae perpetuus esse incola.Footnote 4

One of the books that Vossius saw in the library of the de Thou family was evidently the Carolingian anthology that is now known as the Codex Thuaneus. He refers to it repeatedly in his commentary on Catullus, using terms such as ‘in vetustis membranis Thuanæis’ and ‘in vetustissimo libro Thuanæo’.Footnote 5 He quotes from this manuscript part or all of eight lines of Catullus 62, as well as of four epigrams of Martial, all of which it still contains.Footnote 6 Seven of his quotations are correct, four contain minor slips, some of which may be due to the typographers, and one is marred by a more serious mistake, which arose when Vossius conflated several different versions of a line.Footnote 7 He had evidently studied the manuscript in detail, and had taken notes on it that he consulted again when he wrote his commentary on Catullus.Footnote 8

2

The Codex Thuaneus has been studied less often than its fame might lead one to expect.Footnote 9 According to Bernhard Bischoff, it was written around the middle of the ninth century between Auxerre and Paris, or somewhere nearby.Footnote 10 Today it consists of 61 folios of a rather rough parchment. The first folio comes from a manuscript of St Ambrose's commentary on the Gospel of Luke, written in Carolingian minuscule. The remainder of the Thuaneus (folios 2–61) bears a poetic anthology that was also copied in Carolingian minuscule by a different hand. This anthology contains most of Juvenal, Catullus 62, the Pervigilium Veneris, some other poems that can now be read in the Anthologia Latina, the pseudo-Ovidian Halieutica, part of Grattius' Cynegetica, and excerpts from other authors including Persius, Martial, Seneca, Ausonius and Eugenius of Toledo.Footnote 11

A Carolingian hand, apparently from the tenth or eleventh century,Footnote 12 has added the title Iuuenalis & ortographia bede presbyteri in large minuscule letters in the lower margin of folio 1r. A rather similar hand, possibly the same one, has added the title Iuuenalis in a similar script in the lower margin of folio 2r. Evidently folio 1 was added at an early date to the manuscript, when it also contained Bede's De orthographia.

While folio 1 once served as a cover to the manuscript, folios 2 to 61 make up its body. They constitute seven quaternions and one ternion. The first quaternion lacks its first folio, and the ternion at the end lacks its last. The first folio of the first quaternion had already been removed by the time the scribe started copying the manuscript, or else he left it blank deliberately: he started writing on the second folio of the quaternion (now folio 2r) by adding the title DECIMI IVNI IVVENALIS SATVRARVM LIBER PRIMVS.Footnote 13 From this point onwards, the breaks between the gatherings of the manuscript are not accompanied by a significant loss of text.Footnote 14 But at the fifth folio of the last gathering, on what is currently the last page of the manuscript (folio 61v), the text breaks off abruptly. The second column ends with a series of titles, the last of which reads De illo qui dicit tibi unum moysi unum, but one needs et elie unum to render the Biblical allusion complete, and those were surely the first words on the next folio.Footnote 15 This strongly suggests that the last folio of the gathering has been removed.

The loss of the final folio is confirmed by the physical state of the manuscript. Its beginning and end have been affected by a considerable amount of smudging and water damage. A sizeable dark brown smudge has expanded from the middle of the inner margin to the adjacent areas of the inner column of each page at the end of the volume; it is visible on folios 55–61, but becomes especially strong from folio 56r onwards, that is to say, from the last page of the penultimate gathering. This shows that the volume lay unbound for quite some time, and that the last gathering had been damaged at the spine, so moisture could penetrate its pages from the inner margin. Folio 1r is heavily worn, which shows that it served as the front cover of the volume for a considerable period; but folio 61 did not serve as the back cover for a comparable amount of time, as the ink is almost as clear on its verso as on the pages in the centre of the manuscript. In fact a major smudge has affected the previous opening (folios 60v–61r) more strongly than what is now the last page of the manuscript (folio 61v). All of this suggests that the last folio may have been removed from the manuscript at a not too early date.

Vossius writes ‘Vetustissimum exemplar Thuanæum in quo hoc Catulli carmen variorum epigrammatis subjungitur’, ‘the most ancient copy of de Thou, in which this poem of Catullus is attached to the epigrams of various authors’ (my italics). It is at the end of the volume that he claims to have read Catullus 11 – and that is where a folio has been cut out from the manuscript. This coincidence offers strong support for his statement. But how plausible is it that a page should have been cut off from the Codex Thuaneus since the seventeenth century?

3

On the lower right-hand corner of folio 2r of the manuscript an elegant cursive hand has added the words Jac. Aug. Thuani. This shows that the manuscript belonged to Jacques-Auguste I de Thou (1553–1617); the hand is very likely his. De Thou's library was inherited by his children, and soon after Vossius' visit the full ownership rights passed to his third son Jacques-Auguste II de Thou (1609–77).Footnote 16 Jacques-Auguste II effectively went bankrupt on account of his lavish lifestyle, and three years after his death his library was sold to Jean-Jacques Charron, Marquis of Menars, who passed on the manuscripts to his brother-in-law, Louis XIV's powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83).Footnote 17 In 1732 most of Colbert's manuscripts were acquired for the Bibliothèque royale, the predecessor of the Bibliothèque nationale.Footnote 18 There a red library stamp was added to the extremities of the Codex Thuaneus; it can still be seen on folios 1r and 61v. So if Vossius read Catullus 11 in 1641 on what was folio 62 of the manuscript at the time, then that folio must have been lost between 1641 and 1732. Is it conceivable that the volume could have been mutilated in this period?

Many of the manuscripts that belonged to Jacques-Auguste I de Thou and contemporary French collectors such as Pierre Daniel appear to have lacked a binding, perhaps because it had been easier to remove them in this way from the monastic libraries where they had spent the previous centuries. As we have seen, wear and tear to the first page and the final gathering of the Thuaneus indicates that it lacked a cover for some of its existence. It is possible that its last folio was damaged to such a degree that it was cut off some time after it was seen by Vossius, or it simply fell off. Alternatively, it could have been removed by a thief, but that seems less likely: if one decides to steal part of a manuscript, one might not go for its battered final page.

Today removing a page from an ancient manuscript may appear an act of barbarism that one would not ascribe to any self-respecting librarian; but earlier ages had different standards. Pellegrin has found a letter from 1570 in which Pierre Pithou describes how he dismembered a manuscript.Footnote 19 Pithou was a highly accomplished scholar, and a friend of Jacques-Auguste I de Thou. There is no reason to assume that the less learned men who handled the de Thou and Colbert libraries during the following century and a half would have treated the Codex Thuaneus with any more consideration.

4

To sum up, in 1641 Vossius visited the library of Jacques-Auguste I de Thou, where he studied the Codex Thuaneus; and twenty or so years later he wrote a commentary on Catullus, in which he quoted a series of readings from the manuscript. All his quotations concern texts that can still be read in the Thuaneus, except for that of a word from Catullus 11, about which he says that it ‘is added at the end’ (‘subiungitur’) to the epigrams of various authors. His statement is confirmed by the fact that the last folio of the last gathering of the volume has been cut off at a not too early date, but before the codex entered the Bibliothèque royale in 1732.

So the Thuaneus once appears to have contained two poems of Catullus: poem 62, which still stands on both sides of folio 51, and poem 11, which may have stood on folio 62. It may seem surprising that the two poems did not stand side by side, but that is also how Juvenal's satires appear in the volume: satires 3–5 (except 3.1–316) and 13–16 stand on folios 2r–9v, while satires 10–12, 8–9, 7 and 6 stand on folios 10r–23r, and they are separated by a brief run of poems including some verses from the Latin translation of the Oracula Sibyllina, an excerpt from Persius 3, and two poems each by Eugenius of Toledo and Ausonius. The anthology was evidently compiled gradually, and when the compiler reread the poems of Juvenal and Catullus, he decided to include more of each.

Vossius quotes one reading of the Thuaneus' text of poem 11, namely fractus from line 24. Provided that he is reporting this reading correctly, it can hardly be genuine. OGR, which are our earliest complete manuscripts of Catullus, transmit lines 22–4 in the form uelut prati | ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam | tactus aratro est. Both tactus and fractus make sense here, but tactus is better stylistically, as it is dramatic and subtle: the flower is merely touched by the plough, and it drops down dead. It is also supported by the principle of utrum in alterum abiturum erat: given that fractus would have a common meaning here, while tactus would be unusual, even if correct, it is not likely that the former should have yielded the latter through textual corruption.Footnote 20 So the one reading that is quoted by Vossius from the text of Catullus 11 in the Thuaneus does not help us to reconstruct what Catullus wrote.Footnote 21

Vossius' reference does help us, however, to reconstruct the fate of the poems of Catullus in the Middle Ages. It has been a matter of controversy whether the compiler of the anthology had access to the Catullian liber, or only to a text of poem 62.Footnote 22 But now we know that the anthology originally included two poems of Catullus that were separated by a distance of many pages. These poems are one of his long carmina docta, and one of his shorter polymetric poems. The compiler surely had access to a manuscript that contained many poems of Catullus. Given that his poems were read extremely rarely in the Middle Ages, it is likely a priori that this lost manuscript should have come from the same tradition as OGR; and this finds some confirmation in the fact that OGR and the Thuaneus often agree in error in poem 62.Footnote 23

When was the anthology compiled, and where? The Thuaneus contains a poem by Eugenius of Toledo,Footnote 24 who died in 657; his life constitutes a terminus ante quem non. A terminus ante quem is provided by the date of an older relative of the Thuaneus, namely Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 277, part 3 (= folios 55–73), a fragment of a longer manuscript, which preserves part of the same anthology.Footnote 25 That manuscript appears to have been copied towards the end of the eighth century.Footnote 26 So the anthology must have received its present form some time between about a.d. 610 and 790 – but where? As has been pointed out already, according to Bischoff the Thuaneus was copied somewhere around Paris and Auxerre, and possibly nearer to the latter than to the former.Footnote 27 As for the Vienna manuscript, it was probably copied in what is now France or western Germany, although it also displays the influence of insular script.Footnote 28 Vecce believes that the anthology was put together in the years 780–90 by Angilram of Metz in the imperial court of Charlemagne; in 790 Angilbert took a copy of it to the Abbey of Saint-Riquier; and the Vienna manuscript was copied there soon afterwards.Footnote 29 If Vecce's reconstruction is correct, then a manuscript of the poems of Catullus may have been present at the court of Charlemagne around the year 785. However, a study of the mistakes in the Thuaneus and in its relative now in Austria has led Zwierlein to believe that their lost common ancestor, which he calls χ, was written in Merovingian minuscule;Footnote 30 and it is unlikely that this script should have been used at the court of Charlemagne. Zwierlein also notes that the Thuaneus contains a number of mistakes that must be due to the misreading of an exemplar written in a majuscule script; and he argues that there must have been an earlier majuscule version of the anthology, which he calls φ.Footnote 31 The evidence has to be studied further before a number of alternative explanations for the majuscule mistakes in the anthology can be ruled out – for example, that the mistakes arose individually in the manuscript tradition of the authors concerned before the anthology was compiled, or that they arose as it was compiled from a number of majuscule manuscripts. Quite apart from this, it is also theoretically possible that the anthology could have been compiled in several steps, gradually over the centuries; but the fact that some poems of Juvenal were added to its beginning, separated by other texts, and two poems of Catullus were added to its end in the same way, suggests that the anthology was put together by one individual, as he read and reread various Latin poets.Footnote 32 Some time between a.d. 610 and 790 this individual appears to have had access to the text of several Roman poets, including Catullus.

What was the relationship of this volume to the manuscript of Catullus that was read by Bishop Rather in Verona in 965 or 966, and to the codex that was taken to the same city around a.d. 1300?Footnote 33 If Thomson is right that the latter was ‘of humanistic date, or at any rate later than the ninth century’, then it must be distinct from Rather's manuscript and the volume that was used by the compiler of the anthology, if these two were not identical.Footnote 34 We have already seen that it is likely that the manuscript used by the compiler and the Codex Veronensis come from the same tradition; this can probably also be extended to Rather's manuscript, given the rarity of Catullus in the Middle Ages. It is surprising to find that the text travelled so much, and that it left and re-entered Verona during this period; but manuscripts are portable, and historical reality does not always conform to what one would expect on a statistical basis.

5

The Codex Thuaneus is not the only ancient manuscript of Catullus that is mentioned by Vossius. The manuscript of the entire Catullian corpus that he values the most is one that he calls the ‘Mediolanense exemplar’, the ‘Mediolanensis codex’, the ‘vetus liber Mediolanensis’ or the ‘liber ... Mediolanensis, cæteris emendatior & vetustior’.Footnote 35 In his note on Catullus 55.16 he comments on the reading Audacter committe, crede, licet as follows: ‘Ita in nostro, ita quoque in vetusto libro Mediolanensis Bibliothecæ scriptum inveni.’Footnote 36 In connection with 64.334–7 he remarks that ‘Scaliger existimat versus hos à Marullo esse additos, quod tamen fieri non potest, cum etiam in Mediolanensi occurrant libro, qui aliquot seculis Marullo est vetustior.’Footnote 37 Marullus lived from 1453 until 1500; if Vossius was right about the date of the ‘Mediolanense exemplar’, then it must have predated our oldest surviving manuscripts of Catullus, O (written at some point in the fourteenth century) and G (written in 1375). Could the Dutch scholar have seen that rarest of birds, a manuscript of the entire Catullian corpus that did not descend from OGR? That would be an even more useful discovery than the traces of a lost page or two from the Codex Thuaneus.

One's hopes are shattered when one reads Vossius' note on 68.47:Footnote 38

Mediolanense exemplar, cæteris omnibus vetustius, alium exhibet versum, aliquanto quidem meliorem vulgato, non tamen Catullianum, hunc nempe;

Omnibus & triviis vulgetur fabula paßim.

Margini adscriptum erat eadem vetusta sane manu SENECA SUPPLEVIT.

This line is missing from OGR; it first appears in Catullus' manuscripts in the fifteenth century. It was already deleted by Scaliger as a humanistic supplement.Footnote 39 In the margin of Vossius' Mediolanensis the first hand has noted Seneca suppleuit, ‘Seneca has filled this in’. Mynors noted that this Seneca is surely Thomas Seneca of Camerino (c. 1390–1472), and that the supplement is attributed to him by two manuscripts of Catullus, namely Parisinus lat. 7989 and Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, H 46 sup. (Catullus MSS. 78 and 56 Thomson).Footnote 40 In the latter, the first hand has added in the margin Seneca suppleuit.Footnote 41 This is evidently the manuscript that Vossius had in mind here.

One may well expect the Ambrosianus H 46 sup. (henceforth: Mh) to contain all the other readings that Vossius attributes to the ‘Mediolanensis’, but this is not the case. In fact eleven of these are identical with or very close to the characteristic readings of another manuscript at the Ambrosiana, namely I 67 sup. (Catullus MS. 57 Thomson, henceforth: Mi).Footnote 42 One more reading alongside 68.47 is close to a characteristic reading of Mh, while one is close to Ambrosianus M 38 sup. (Catullus MS. 58 Thomson, henceforth Mm), and one apparently to Ambrosianus D 24 sup. (Catullus MS. 54 Thomson, henceforth Md).Footnote 43 Vossius attributes six more readings to the ‘Mediolanensis’. Four of these can be found in several manuscripts at the Ambrosiana.Footnote 44 Two may well be slightly misreported versions of readings of these manuscripts.Footnote 45

Vossius appears to have conflated these five codices from Milan into one phantom manuscript. One may be tempted to accuse him of negligence; but one should note that he did not have as easy access to the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana as he did to those of the de Thou library in Paris. His biographer Blok relates that when he visited Milan between April and June 1643, the guardian of the Ambrosiana did not allow him to copy from unpublished manuscripts, until he was finally overruled.Footnote 46 That was hardly a favourable setting for careful scholarly research. Moreover, in November 1651 Vossius asked Nicolaus Heinsius to collate, or to arrange for the collation of, a manuscript of some antiquity in Milan that contained the poems of Catullus alone; he had already collated another one himself.Footnote 47 Collating manuscripts by proxy also has its dangers. Unless we find Vossius' collations, we cannot tell whether the mistake was due to him, to Heinsius, to a misunderstanding between them, or to the difficult circumstances in which Vossius consulted the Ambrosian manuscripts in 1643.

What made Vossius think that the ‘liber Mediolanensis’ of Catullus was ‘cæteris emendatior & vetustior’? Perhaps he was misled by the appearance of Mi, or of Mm. Thomson notes that both these manuscripts have an ‘early style’; he dates Mi to around 1470–80, and Mm to perhaps as early as 1430, that is to say, slightly earlier than the peak of humanistic manuscript production in the 1460s.Footnote 48 So Mm at any rate will have appeared ‘vetustior’ than most other manuscripts of Catullus that will have been known to Vossius, although it is not nearly as old as Vossius believed. This may have been that relatively ancient manuscript containing Catullus alone that Vossius had seen, but had not collated, in 1643.

APPENDIX: THE PREHISTORY OF THE CODEX THUANEUS

According to Vecce, the owners of the manuscript before Jacques-Auguste I de Thou were, in reverse order: Pierre Pithou (1539–96), a trusted friend of de Thou's, who acquired manuscripts for him on trips through France; Pierre Daniel (c. 1531–c. 1604), a lawyer from Orléans, who obtained many valuable manuscripts from a number of French monasteries; and possibly the abbey of Fleury in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.Footnote 49 Vecce does not back up this list by any references, but it is surely correct.

There survives an inventory of the books that were at Fleury in 1552.Footnote 50 Entry number 120 of this inventory reads: ‘Juvenalis satyrae, cum aliis. In ejus voluminis prima pagina ita scriptum legitur: “In hoc novissimo libro hoc est septimo.”’Footnote 51 The words ‘Juvenalis satyrae, cum aliis’ would suit well the Codex Thuaneus as we know it. However, the manuscript that is described in the catalogue surely started with what are now folios 4–6 in Orléans, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 192 (169).Footnote 52 These folios date from the late sixth century. They contain part of Optatius, Adversus Donatistas Book 7, and folio 4r starts with the words In hoc nouissimo libro, hoc est septimo. Now they are preserved together with other fragmentary manuscripts from Fleury.Footnote 53 It appears certain that they passed through the library of the monastery.Footnote 54 It is absolutely plausible (though it cannot be called certain, given the brevity of the entry in the inventory) that some time before 1552 these folios could have been bound together with the Thuaneus; that this volume could have been obtained by Pierre Daniel; that he could have taken the volume apart, kept the fragment of Optatius, and sold the Thuaneus to Pierre Pithou, who passed it on to Jacques-Auguste I de Thou.

At the start of the Thuaneus these folios would have preceded a single folio that had served as the cover of the anthology since the eleventh century at least, namely the current folio 1 of Parisinus lat. 8071.Footnote 55 That folio bears the shelf-mark XII, which also appears in other manuscripts from Fleury.Footnote 56 The Thuaneus surely came from there as well.

References

* I would also like to thank Maxence Hernant for advice regarding the Codex Thuaneus and the fate of manuscripts in seventeenth-century France; Helen Dixon, Bruce Gibson, Michael Reeve, Edina Zsupán and the anonymous referee of Classical Quarterly for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper; the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Irish Research Council for a Research Fellowship and a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, respectively, which enabled me to write this article, and for generous travel funding; and Cyril Simon and Diane Le Grand de Belleroche for their kind hospitality while I studied the Thuaneus in Paris.

1 Vossius, I., Cajus Valerius Catullus et in eum Isaaci Vossii Observationes (London, 1684), 32–3Google Scholar. According to the printer's preface, Vossius' notes on the poet ‘lay in the dark for over thirty years’ (‘[p]er integros triginta & plures annos in tenebris iacuere’) before 1684, and his biographer Blok notes that he composed his commentary on Catullus ‘during the years 1652 and 1653’ (Blok, F.F., Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1618–1655 [Groningen, 2000], 407Google Scholar). However, on p. 92 of his commentary Vossius writes of a conjecture that ‘nuper in Castigationibus ad Melam fecimus’, and his Observationes ad Pomponium Melam De situ orbis appeared in the Hague in 1658. Either Vossius continued to modify his commentary on Catullus after 1653, or else he was referring to the unpublished text of his notes on Mela.

2 Vossius, I., Periplus Scylacis Caryadensis cum tralatione, & castigationibus Isaaci Vossii ... (Amsterdam, 1638)Google Scholar; Vossius, I., Iustini historiarum Ex Trogo Pompeio Lib. XLIV cum notis Isaaci Vossii (Leiden, 1640)Google Scholar. On Vossius' education, see Blok (n. 1), 20–3 and 38–43.

3 Blok (n. 1), 96–196; ter Horst, D.J.H., Isaac Vossius en Salmasius: een episode uit de 17de-eeuwsche geleerdengeschiedenis (‘s-Gravenhage, 1938), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ter Horst (n. 3), 40; see also ibid., 15, and Blok (n. 1), 103–4.

5 Vossius (n. 1 [1684]), 126 and 150.

6 Mart. Sp. 7 and 8, as well as 14.26 and the title of 14.171. On Vossius' rendering of Mart. Sp. 17.1 and 32 see n. 7 below.

7 Correct: Catull. 62.7 (on p. 150); 62.9 (p. 152); 62.35 (p. 154); 62.40 (p. 154); 62.50 (p. 155); Mart. Sp. 7 and 8 (p. 127). Slips: Catull. 62.14 tota penitus for penitus tota (p. 152); 62.59 et tu nec pugna for et tua nec pugna (p. 156); Mart. 14.26 accendat for accendit in line 1 (p. 142); 14.171 title fichile for fictile (p. 229). Mistake: Catull. 62.45 dum ... dum cara suis, sed (p. 155), where Vossius conflates the version of the line as it is quoted by Quintilian (dum ... dum ... est), the reading of the Thuaneus (dum ... tum ... est), and that of OGR and their progeny (dum ... tum ... sed). At p. 126 Vossius notes that of two epigrams of Martial ‘ita reformanda sunt lemmata, prout concipiuntur in vetustis membranis Thuanaeis’, but on the next page he proceeds to give his own reconstruction of Mart. Sp. 17.1 and 32, rather than an accurate transcription of them as they stand in the manuscript.

8 Vossius stayed in Paris again between July 1643 and August 1644 (with interruptions), and in July and August 1650, but there are no indications that he studied manuscripts at the De Thou collection on those visits: see Blok (n. 1), 177–95 and 327–35.

9 For its most detailed description to date, see Vecce, C., Iacopo Sannazaro in Francia: scoperte di codici all'inizio del XVI secolo (Padua, 1988), 93–5Google Scholar, with further bibliography.

10 Bischoff's view of where and when the Thuaneus was copied has appeared three times in print: (i) in an undated letter mentioned by Schmidt, P.L., ‘Rezeption und Überlieferung der Tragödien Senecas bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters’, in Lefèvre, E. (ed.), Der Einfluss Senecas auf das europäische Drama (Darmstadt, 1978), 12–73Google Scholar, at 60 with n. 78: it was copied in the second quarter of the ninth century; (ii) in a letter to Claudia Villa dated 20 January 1977 that is quoted by Vecce (n. 9), 95 n. 2: around the third quarter of the ninth century between Auxerre and Paris, probably closer to the former than to the latter; (iii) in Bischoff, B., Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen), ed. Ebersperger, B., 3 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1998–2014)Google Scholar, 3.138: possibly in the third quarter of the ninth century, between Paris and Auxerre or somewhere nearby. In Bischoff, B., Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Gorman, M. (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar, at 145, Bischoff observes that the Thuaneus is ‘characteristic of the scribal activity in the area of Fleury and St Germain’ (i.e. between Auxerre and Paris) around the middle of the ninth century. I would like to thank Birgit Ebersperger and Vicente Flores Militello for enabling me to consult vicariously the final volume of Bischoff's Katalog.

11 It is sometimes supposed that the anthology had been put together by the scribe of the Thuaneus. At best, this assumption would be unwarranted: the Thuaneus could also be a copy of an earlier anthology. In fact it is wrong, as is shown by the survival of part of an older relative of the manuscript, and of traces of a third Carolingian copy of the anthology: see pp. 349–50 below.

12 Dated thus by Vecce (n. 9), 94.

13 The title is followed by Juvenal 3.317–22, but the scribe evidently regarded these lines as the start of Juvenal's first satire.

14 It is not significant that folio 32v ends with Mart. 4.79.1–6, and folio 33r starts with 4.79.9–10: lines 4.79.7–8 have been lost through haplography (lines 5 and 7 both start with et s...). No text has been lost between the other gatherings.

15 This title alludes to Peter's words to Jesus at Matthew 17:4 si uis, faciamus hic tria tabernacula, tibi unum, Moysi unum, et Eliae unum.

16 Harrisse, H., Le Président de Thou et ses descendants, leur célèbre bibliothèque, leurs armoires, et les traductions françaises de J.-A. Thuani Historiarum sui temporis d'après des documents nouveaux (Paris, 1905), 2–3Google Scholar.

17 Harrisse (n. 16), 28–9, 37 and 40.

18 Delisle, L., ‘Les manuscrits de Colbert’, Comptes-rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres 7 (1863), 296–304Google Scholar, at 300.

19 Pellegrin, É., ‘Membra disiecta Floriacensia’, Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes 117 (1959), 5–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 5–6 n. 3, reprinted in: ead., Bibliothèques retrouvées: manuscrits, bibliothèques et bibliophiles du Moyen âge et de la Renaissance. Recueil d'études publiées de 1938 à 1985 (Paris, 1998), 159–210Google Scholar, at 159–60 n. 3.

20 tactus was prone to be corrupted here, as is shown by the readings of Catullus' codices recentiores in this passage. One hundred and seven read tactus; eleven read tractus (these are nos. 1, 5, 19a, 27, 29, 51, 61, 92, 97 and 99 Thomson-Kiss, and no. 13, where the word was subsequently erased and is hard to make out); four read fractus (nos. 46, 54, 75 and 86); in four of them the word was added in the margin by the scribe (nos. 118, 122 and 128), and in one by a later hand (no. 78); and two read factus (nos. 56 and 77). For a list of the surviving manuscripts of Catullus, see Thomson, D.F.S., Catullus Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary (Toronto, 1997), 72–91Google Scholar, with Kiss, D., ‘Towards a catalogue of the surviving manuscripts of Catullus’, Paideia 67 (2012), 607–22Google Scholar. For the readings of Catullus' codices recentiores I have used the collations made by Berthold L. Ullman and others in the early twentieth century that are conserved among the Hale-Ullman Papers at the Department of Classics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cecil W. Wooten, then Chair of the Department, kindly allowed me to have the collations scanned in January 2010, and I have collated, photographed or obtained reproductions of several other manuscripts, so that here and below I can quote the readings of all known codices recentiores of Catullus that were copied before 1502.

21 Is the text of Catullus 11 in the Thuaneus likely to have offered any significant improvements at all on the vulgate text of the poem that was available to Vossius? There is only one place where it is very likely that that vulgate was corrupt, namely 11.11–12 horribiles et ulti- | mosque Britannos (thus already the editio princeps of 1472; Vossius writes horribilis). One would expect the Thuaneus to have written either horribilesque | ultimosque britannos with the principal manuscripts OGR (O writes uitimosque for GR's ultimosque, and all three put this word in line 12, before they were connected), or something else – perhaps the genuine reading, or something that could have helped us to reconstruct it. It is a pity that Vossius does not preserve its reading in this passage.

22 Gaisser, J.H., Catullus (Malden, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 22 suggested that Catullus 62 may well have been added to the anthology in antiquity, when it circulated on a separate roll, given that in the Thuaneus the poem bears the title Epithalamium Catulli, which may well be ancient. But ancient titles could also have survived in early medieval manuscripts of the complete Catullian corpus; and poem 62 could also have received the title Epithalamium from any learned reader, including the person who compiled the anthology.

23 It was already suggested by Ullman, B.L., ‘The transmission of the text of Catullus’, in Studi in onore di Luigi Castiglioni, 2 vols. (Florence, 1960), 2.1025–57Google Scholar, at 1036, that the Thuaneus represented a side branch of the OGR tradition.

24 Eugenius of Toledo, c. 39: see Vecce (n. 9), 94.

25 For a description of Vienna 277, part 3, see Vecce (n. 9), 95–9. Its contents correspond to two sections of the Codex Thuaneus; it does not contain any poems of Catullus. It has been controversial whether the Vienna manuscript is the exemplar or a sibling of the Thuaneus. For the latter view, see O. Zwierlein, Prolegomena zu einer kritischen Ausgabe der Tragödien Senecas. Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse. Jahrgang 1983, Nr. 3 (Mainz, 1983), 15–23 and Vecce (n. 9), 106–9. Richmond, J., ‘The Relationship of Vindob. 277 and Paris. Lat. 8071’, Philologus 142 (1998), 80–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that parts of the Thuaneus may well derive from a corrected copy of the Vienna manuscript rather than from the archetype. In my view the hypothesis of Zwierlein and Vecce accounts better for the codicological evidence of the two manuscripts. A third manuscript of the Florilegium Thuaneum appears to have been discovered by Jacopo Sannazaro in 1503 or 1504 at the monastery of Ile-Barbe near Lyons. This manuscript has gone lost, but before that Sannazaro evidently showed it to Aulo Giano Parrasio, who added several readings of Catullus 62 from it to the margin of his copy of the Reggio Emilia 1481 edition of Catullus, which is now Aberdeen, University Library, Incun. 165: see further Vecce (n. 9), 109–44, esp. 114–15, and Richardson, B., ‘Pucci, Parrasio and Catullus’, IMU 19 (1976), 277–89Google Scholar, at 285–8. It should be noted that Parrasio's notes on Catullus 11 in this incunable do not contain the variant fractus at line 24, nor any other reading that could have come from the Florilegium Thuaneum. I am indebted to Julia Haig Gaisser for this information.

26 Vecce (n. 9), 96, cf. 99.

27 See n. 10.

28 Vecce (n. 9), 98–9.

29 Vecce (n. 9), 99–101. Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries (n. 10), 145 suggests that the anthology transmitted in the Thuaneus was put together around Fleury and St Germain; on p. 139, his position on the Thuaneus and the Vienna fragment is less clear.

30 Zwierlein (n. 25), 21.

31 Zwierlein (n. 25), 21–3.

32 Compare p. 348 above. On the composition of the anthology, see also Vecce (n. 9), 101–6.

33 Rather confesses that he has been reading Catullus in Sermo de Maria et Martha 4, for which see Reece, B.R. (ed.), Sermones Ratherii Episcopi Veronensis (Worcester, 1969), 86Google Scholar and Reid, P.P.L. (ed.), Ratherii Veronensis Opera Minora. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, vol. 46 (Turnhout, 1976), 147–8Google Scholar. Fiesoli, G., ‘Percorsi di classici nel medioevo: il Lucrezio Bobiense. Raterio lettore di Plauto e di Catullo’, MR n.s. 15 (2004), 1–37Google Scholar, at 8–27, argues that Rather did not mean to say that he had actually read Catullus; against this position, see Kiss, D., ‘The lost Codex Veronensis and its descendants: three problems in Catullus' manuscript tradition’, in id. (ed.), What Catullus Wrote: Problems in Textual Criticism, Editing and the Manuscript Tradition (Swansea, 2015)Google Scholar, 1–27, at 6–8. We know about the return of Catullus to Verona around a.d. 1300 from an epigram of Benvenuto dei Campesani that is transmitted in Catullus' manuscripts GR. For the text, see e.g. Thomson (n. 20), 194; for a discussion, see Kiss, op. cit., 2–5.

34 Thomson (n. 20), 25.

35 Vossius (n. 1 [1684]), 9, 25, 122 and 215.

36 Vossius (n. 1 [1684]), 121.

37 Vossius (n. 1 [1684]), 241.

38 Vossius (n. 1 [1684]), 284.

39 Scaliger, I.I., Castigationes in Catullum Tibullum Propertium (Paris, 1577), 85Google Scholar.

40 Mynors, R.A.B. (ed.), C. Valerii Catulli Carmina (Oxford, 1958), x–xi n. 2Google Scholar.

41 I know the readings of the Ambrosian manuscripts of Catullus through the collations that are preserved among the Hale-Ullman Papers at Chapel Hill, on which see n. 20 above.

42 Catull. 22.8 desecta Mediolanensis teste Vossio (n. 1 [1684]), p. 55: defecta aut desecta Mi.  58b.5 plumideas Med. Voss., p. 122: pulmideas Mi.  64.11 illa rudem cursu prora imbuit Amphitriten Med. Voss., p. 192: illa rudem cursu proram imbuit Amphitritae Mi.  64.194 postportat pectoris iram Med. Voss., p. 215; item Mi.  64.227 carbasus obscurata dicet ferrugine Ibera Med. Voss., p. 217: c. o. d. f. hibera Mi.  64.364 perfusae uirginis Med. Voss. p. 248: perfusa uirginis Mi.  68b.84 posset ab innupto uiuere coniugio Med. Voss., p. 293: p. ab in nupto u. c. Mi.  68b.143 ueta Med. Voss., p. 296; item Mi.  71.1 si qua uiro .....se.....obstitit hircus Med. Voss., p. 299; item, spatiis relictis, Mi1 post correctionem.  99.10 tanquam committe spurca saliua guttae Med. Voss., p. 329; item Mi.  101.7 haec tu interea Med. Voss., p. 332: haec tum interea Mi.  Wherever I state that a characteristic reading of Vossius' ‘Mediolanensis’ is identical with that of one particular Milan manuscript, this should be taken to imply that the reading(s) of the others is or are significantly different.

43 Catull. 63.5 deuoluit ilecto Mediolanensis teste Vossio (n. 1 [1684]), p. 160: d. ileto Mh.  55.16 Audacter committe crede licet Med. Voss., p. 121: a. hoc commite c. l. Mm.  92.3–4 Quo signo? Quia sunt totidem mea. Deprecor illam | assidue: uerum dispeream nisi amem Med. Voss., p. 316: thus, with amo for amem, Md.

44 Catull. 3.10 piplabat Mediolanensis teste Vossio (n. 1 [1684]), p. 9; item Mh Mi Mm.  58b.4 cytæque bigæ Med. Voss., p. 122: citęque bigę Md1 post correctionem, Mh: citeque bige Mm.  64.263 efflebant Med. Voss., p. 226; item Mh1 post correctionem, Mi Mm.  64.334–7 suo loco habet Med. Voss., p. 241; item Mh Mm.

45 Catull. 10.20 octomines Mediolanensis teste Vossio (n. 1 [1684]), p. 25: octo homines Mh Mm. Here Vossius may be reporting a garbled version of this reading, he may misattribute the reading in what is a rather complicated note, or there may be a mistake in the collations of the Milan manuscripts that I have been using.  102.3 meque inuenies Med. Voss., p. 332: meque esse inuenies Md Mh Mi. For the omission of a word by Vossius compare his omission of hoc at 55.16 (see n. 43).

46 Blok (n. 1), 171–2.

47 Isaac Vossius to Nicolaus Heinsius, in November 1651 (for the date see Blok [n. 1], 374 n. 131): ‘Mediolani operae fuerit describere inscriptionem quandam ... Velim quoque cures conferri Catulli quoddam exemplar satis vetustum, nempe illud, in quo Catullus solus continetur. Alterum, quod & ipsum satis est bonum, ipse olim contuli.’ For the text of the letter, see Burmannus, P. (ed.), Sylloges Epistularum a Viris Illustribus Scriptarum Tomus III ([Leiden], 1727), 632–3Google Scholar (quotation from p. 632).

48 Thomson (n. 20), 79.

49 Vecce (n. 9), 94. It used to be believed that Pierre Daniel had obtained many manuscripts from the Abbey of Saint-Benoît-de-Fleury in 1562, when the monastery was plundered by the Huguenots: thus e.g. Vidier, A., L'historiographie à Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire et les miracles de Saint Benoît: ouvrage posthume revu et annoté par les soins des moines de l'abbaye de Saint-Benoît de Fleury (Paris, 1965), 30–1Google Scholar. It was always a matter of controversy whether Daniel had acted as a saviour or a thief. However, Pellegrin has shown that he acquired the books from Fleury gradually between 1560 and 1569: see Pellegrin, ‘Membra disiecta Floriacensia’ (n. 19), 8 = ead., Bibliothèques retrouvées (n. 19), 162 and Mostert, M., The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum, 1989), 29–30Google Scholar.

50 The inventory is now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Nouvelles acquisitions latines 137, fols. 9r–26r; for a transcription, see Delisle, L., Notice sur plusieurs manuscrits de la bibliothèque d'Orléans (Paris, 1883), 70–83Google Scholar; id., ‘Notice sur plusieurs manuscrits de la bibliothèque d'Orléans’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres bibliothèques 31 (Paris, 1884), 357–439Google Scholar, at 426–39; and Cuissard, C., Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France – Départements 12 (Paris, 1889), vii–xviiiGoogle Scholar. On the circumstances in which it was drawn up, see Mostert (n. 49), 29.

51 Delisle, Notice ... (n. 50), 75; Delisle, ‘Notice ...’ (n. 50), 431; Cuissard (n. 50), xi.

52 Lowe, E.A. (ed.), Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1934–66)Google Scholar, vol. 6, no. 806, cf. p. xxi; see also Mostert (n. 49), 149, and the description of the manuscript in the Catalogue collectif de France, consulted online on 9 May 2014 (permanent URL: http://ccfr.bnf.fr/portailccfr/jsp/index_view_direct_anonymous.jsp?record=eadcgm:EADC:D18011388), both with further bibliography.

53 At 240 × 158 mm these folios are smaller than those of the Thuaneus, which are about 290 × 202 mm, but irregularly shaped. But this difference in size does not rule out the possibility that the two manuscripts could have been bound together.

54 Lowe (n. 52), vol. 6, 31 (on no. 804); Mostert (n. 49), 149.

55 A title indicating the present contents of the Codex Thuaneus was added to fol. 1r in the tenth or the eleventh century: see p. 346 above.

56 See Mostert (n. 49), 223.