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In this article, I analyse the manuscript sources used by Marcus Musurus for the letters of Alciphron and Theophylact Simocatta, examining in both cases the organisation of the letters, the reasons for what may be disturbances in their order, the possible Druckvorlage, and the variants in the Aldine edition traceable to attempts by Musurus to improve the text. Although it is quite difficult to recover the original shape of the works of Alciphron and Theophylact Simocatta, the modern reader still confronts numerous questions: did the Aldine editor combine and reorganise letters found in different manuscripts, or did he reproduce one or more manuscripts that contained precisely these letters and in this particular order? How does the editio princeps differ from modern editions in the organisation of the two authors’ letters? And how does this organisation affect how we interpret the letters of Alciphron and Theophylact Simocatta today?
This article deals with the letters of Phalaris, a large corpus of 148 letters contained in the second volume of the Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers. It explores the role of the Aldine edition in the transmission of these letters and mainly focuses on its sources. Building on the works of Lauri Tudeer and Martin Sicherl, it determines the text on which the Aldine edition is based and its position within the manuscript tradition, while stressing the remaining uncertainties: the Aldine is an editorial construction, conflating the text of two different classes of manuscripts with the text of the editio princeps from 1498; its main sources are a close parent to the now-lost London, British Library, Harley MS 5610 and a copy of the manuscript Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. graec. 356 (and not necessarily the antigraph of Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. gr. 134 as Sicherl thought); Marcus Musurus might have used another corrective manuscript.
The aim of this study is to examine several aspects of the constitutio textus and the lexicon of the Letters attributed to Demosthenes, which have already been studied in previous works, and which we will now bring up to date. The following topics on the text and the lexicon of the Letters attributed to Demosthenes will be under examination. First, the text of William Rennie’s edition will be compared to that of Robert Clavaud and other later editions; second, the value of the recentiores in the edition of the Letters: the manuscripts Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 4637 (T, c.1480) and San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, MS R I 20 (E, s. XIV). Then, the differences and similarities between Aldine edition and the ‘Wecheliana’ will be analysed, and finally, the lexicon of the Letters attributed to Demosthenes and its relation to the rest of the Corpus Demosthenicum.
Based on the studies by Dimitrios K. Raios and Martin Sicherl, this article reviews some of the main hypotheses proposed concerning the genesis of Philostratus’s collected letters before and during the process of their inclusion in the Aldine edition by the scholar Marcus Musurus. This very preliminary analysis of the relationships between the codices most directly involved in the production of the Aldine edition suggests some initial conclusions which, although not definitive, call these hypotheses into question.
This article examines the principles of selection and arrangement of the letters of Basil the Great in the Aldine edition and in the major manuscript families. It argues that the ordering of Basil’s letters in them was mainly based on the content of the letters, whether thematical or by addressee. The article concludes that the ancient and medieval thematical orderings of the letters are helpful for our understanding of the contents of a large collection such as that of Basil, compared to the modern reconstructed chronological order presented in the editions.
The Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers has been thoroughly studied in the light of its sources and its genesis, whereas comparatively little is known about how it could be read and used by its contemporaries. An analysis of the marginal notes which Scipione Forteguerri wrote into a copy now in the Vatican Library (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Inc. IV. 149) allows us first insights into these questions, on the basis of the example of his annotations to the highly esteemed Epistles of Phalaris: it soon emerges that Forteguerri, by correction ope codicum and addition of reading aids as folio numbering and running titles, tried to raise the text and the book as a whole to a higher editorial level. As a close collaborator of Aldus Manutius, he thus mirrored then-current ideas of book editing as well as contributing to them, and so proved himself surely to be an exceptional reader of the Aldine Greek epistolographers.
David Lloyd Roberts MRCS LSA MD FRCP FRS.Edin (1834–1920) was a successful Manchester doctor who made significant contributions to the advancement of gynaecology and obstetrics. His career was closely linked to the Manchester St Mary’s Hospital for Women and Children, 1858–1920. He lectured on midwifery at Owens College and the University of Manchester and was gynaecological surgeon to Manchester Royal Infirmary. He had many interests outside medicine, including a large collection of rare books, paintings and antiques. He produced an edition of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1898) and a paper, The Scientific Knowledge of Dante (1914). He donated his books to the John Rylands Library and the London Royal College of Physician, his paintings to the Manchester Art Gallery, and he left a large endowment to Bangor College, Wales. This article reviews his medical work alongside his legacy to literature, the arts and education.
The article describes copies of three early-printed books at the Manchester Grammar School, which have not previously been noted in the bibliographies. These are the Missale Romanum (Venice, 1494), De Re Militari (Rome, 1494), and Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (Cologne, 1501). Two of the books have Hungarian connections, as is shown by inscriptions in them. They appear to have been at the grammar school since the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but their detailed provenance remains obscure.
This article examines cuttings from a now-lost manuscript decorated by the little-known Florentine illuminator Littifredi Corbizzi (1465–c.1515) at the turn of the sixteenth century. This manuscript, a choirbook produced for the monks at San Benedetto in Gubbio in 1499–1503, was dismembered in the nineteenth century. Until now, all but one of its cuttings were believed to be lost. Through the emergence of several key pieces of evidence, most notably the identification of tracings of the manuscript made by the German artist Johann Anton Ramboux in the mid-1830s before its dismemberment, I have been able to link definitively three initials to this largely unresearched commission. Two of these are in a previously unstudied manuscript album at the John Rylands Library, recently digitised. Considering the cuttings stylistically and, critically, interrogating their provenance, I propose that a further ten cuttings can also be linked to Littifredi’s work for the monastery, and argue that Ramboux played a significant role in their initial collection.