The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2009), "The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 8, pp. 623-624. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910987145

Craig Kallendorf's research into early editions of Virgil and into early printing‐publishing generally is well‐known. This variorum edition consists of 14 articles previously published elsewhere (in journals like Modern Philology and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, as well as in various books like A Companion to Ancient Epic, edited by J.M. Foley, from Blackwell Publishing, 2005). The earliest paper dates from 1983 and the latest from 2005. The original article formats and pagination have been retained. He has supplied a general foreword, and the publishers have provided a general index. The variorum series itself includes about 12 other works on topics like education and humanism in the Renaissance, early medieval Latin glossaries, and intertextuality between history and literature in the early medieval West.

The title of this book fairly indicates that book and reading history are approached by way of Virgil – his original work (above all the epic) and its influence, along with that of Cicero and Horace and others on Renaissance humanists like Petrarch, the influence of the Aeneid on Dante's Divine Comedy (and associated cultural and ideological perspectives on and exploitations of this connection, the insight into owners and readers we get from marginalia entered into editions of Virgil, and what we can infer from all this about the contemporary wider history of the book – say, in vernacular book distribution in sixteenth‐century Italy). Of particular interest to Kallendorf are the early editions and translations of Virgil's Aeneid, the commentaries by Landino (1424‐1498) and others, marginalia and title‐pages, and ways in which the themes and characters and images of the original work were seen by later readers – some wanting to reinterpret them as support for political and cultural ideas, others wanting to suppress and censor them, yet others setting out to affirm biblical parallels, and, commercially, printer‐publishers and editor‐translators seeing money to be made and prestige attained.

This approach sets this work firmly in the broad church of history‐of‐the‐book studies, while its interest in what Genette called the paratextual (what lies beyond the text in terms of the physical book, and, into hermeneutics, the interpretive and iconographic and trade dimensions of the text) shows how well‐established this approach is historically in textual studies, for all the novelty some recent writers have claimed for paratextuality in book marketing and book design studies. Kallendorf's articles/essays will most interest readers involved in the history of the book, and beyond that classics and literature and the sociological role/place of literature in the history of ideas (above all since the Renaissance in Europe, an approach with a pedigree extending back to Escarpit and beyond).

The two themes that get greatest attention here are these: the ways in which annotations and commentaries reveal information about owners and readers, and the extent to which Virgil's epic was adapted linguistically and editorially and ideologically by Renaissance and later scholars. Taking the first, there is a fascinating discussion of how marginalia (like those of Gabriel Harvey) reveal not just the owner/reader but also a changing model of sensibility and subjectivity at the time. Part of that interpretive frame, too, is evidence of how the poetry was adapted for and mediated for educational purposes, how it was associated with scriptural ideas and how it was subject to censorship. Commentaries by Landino (like the one published in Florence in 1487) are not only unique insights into their age but were themselves annotated by later editors (like Tordi in an edition of Virgil from 1587). Two other aspects of this are the title‐pages (and artistic styles used in editions of Virgil up to the eighteenth century) and how translations were often given as gifts, rather than sold by booksellers, as ways of generating patronage.

The second, adaptations and ideologies, is equally interesting: not only was there the humanist‐scholastic debate about content and style (inventio and elocutio or rhetoric) in poetry, but there was the appeal of the epic (and later of Dante too) to ideals of empire, in Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and later ideas of monarchy up to the time of Napoleon and Pitt. There are references even to Nazism (only in passing). This not only grows out of the natural dynamics and historiography of humanism (with over‐layerings of Neoplatonism and biblical scholarship) but out, too, of why the epic was translated at all, how themes like Aeneas's search for the summum bonum and the treatment of women in Dido's death play out, and who owned particular editions and what they said in them that reveals something about how they used their reading to fashion their own cultural and political development.

Such books seem mere historical glosses on historical glosses until you read them carefully, and then you realise that the issues they deal with have a universality for understanding cultural as well as book history. Virgil is the lens and so, strictly, the sub‐title is misleading, but using this approach the author has assembled a fascinating body of knowledge that we can add to the numerous books in this field (Sharpe, Grafton, Anderson & Schauer, Thomas, Godman, Lowry, Richardson and many more, all cited in the book, a snapshot of scholarship in the field between the 1950s and about 2000), turning this variorum edition into an item of wider interest to students, researchers, and experts. For the well‐stocked academic collection it might be wise to check to see how many of the original papers and books you already have before buying.