Studies in the transmission of Latin texts

古典拉丁文本从古代一直保存到15世纪60年代和70年代印刷术的开始，只是因为它们被抄写员抄写。文本的大规模生产是不可能的，一部作品只有在有人想读它的时候才能存活下来，从而不辞辛劳地找到或复制一份。在查理曼大帝时代，大多数复制都发生在靠近莱茵河和帝国中心的地方。在中世纪盛期，大多数复制发生在法国，巴黎成为学术界的中心。在文艺复兴时期，意大利取代了法国，首先是佛罗伦萨，然后是罗马，它们是最重要的学术中心。总的来说，在15世纪，复制的数量要比之前的几个世纪多得多。我研究了八部文学作品（库尔修斯·鲁弗斯的《亚历山大·马尼历史》、维特鲁威的《建筑学》、波菲里奥对贺拉斯的评论、狄克提斯的《特洛伊战争》、西塞罗的《支持穆雷纳》和《支持六世罗西奥·阿梅里诺》的演讲以及卡托和瓦罗的农业论文）从古代流传到第一次印刷版本的过程。这使我检查了大约500份手稿和incunables（即1500年之前印刷的版本）。这样的研究有各种用途。首先，这些文本的编辑需要知道哪些是最好的手稿。一个建立最好的手稿通过查看手稿共享的错误。这使得一个人可以构建一个词干或家谱，从家谱中可以很明显地看出编辑需要使用哪些手稿。一般来说，这些手稿将没有幸存的祖先。这是第一次对这些作品的所有见证人进行系统的研究，也是第一次对各种手稿传统有一个完整的了解。这也将使所有这些作者的批评工具（即文本下面编辑引用手稿阅读的地方）得到改进，但对Dictys，Cicero和Curtius来说最为根本。我对库尔修斯的研究证实了一个别人已经教过但有时被忽视的教训：编辑不应该忽视5世纪的手稿。其次，古典拉丁文本从古代到文艺复兴的传播过程本身就是一个重要而有趣的主题。每一文本必须是单独的副本，这造成一些文本没有广泛传播。这一进程的大致轮廓是众所周知的，但在细节方面仍有许多工作要做。直到1400年左右，才有人读过我所研究的西塞罗的演讲稿，当时在克吕尼发现了一份演讲稿的副本;这份副本被著名的人文主义者波焦·布拉乔利尼带到了意大利，我研究了这份文本在意大利的传播。相比之下，在卡托和瓦罗的大约50份手稿中，只有两份是在意大利以外的地方写的，而且这些文本在印刷之前在北方欧洲几乎不为人所知。我的大部分工作都与这种传播过程有关，特别是在意大利。 第三，古典拉丁作家的手稿也被古文字学家、文化历史学家和艺术历史学家研究。这些学科的学者需要知道手稿是在哪里制作的。在这方面，我的工作可以提供帮助。由于文本传播的困难条件，某个地方的作者的手稿很可能会有共同的错误。这意味着，我的stemmata产生的家谱家庭可以经常被使用，例如艺术历史学家，以帮助本地化的手稿。许多最好的结果，最近在该领域的研究已经取得了古地理学家和古典学家利用彼此的专业知识。这导致了我们对手稿的研究发生了令人兴奋的转变，尤其是文艺复兴时期的手稿：手稿不再只是表现在茎上的非个人的人工制品，但它们可以与一个地方有关，而且往往与一个有血有肉的人物有关。我希望我的研究将有助于取得进一步的进展。

Classical Latin texts survived from antiquity until the beginning of printing in the 1460s and 1470s only because they were copied by scribes. The mass production of texts was impossible, and a work could survive only if someone wanted to read it and thereby went to the trouble of finding or making a copy. In the time of Charlemagne most copying took place close to the Rhine and the centre of his empire. In the High Middle Ages most copying took place in France, and Paris emerged as the centre of the learned world. In the Renaissance Italy replaced France, and first Florence and then Rome were the most important centres of learning. In general, far more copying took place in the fifteenth century than in previous centuries. I study the process by which eight works of literature (Curtius Rufus' Historia Alexandri Magni, Vitruvius' De Architectura, Porphyrio's commentary on Horace, Dictys' Trojan War, Cicero's speeches Pro Murena and Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, and Cato's and Varro's treatises on agriculture) survived from antiquity until the first printed editions. This has led me to examine some 500 manuscripts and incunables (that is editions printed before 1500). Such a study has various uses. First, editors of these texts need to know which are the best manuscripts to use. One establishes the best manuscripts by looking at the errors shared by the manuscripts. This allows one to construct a stemma or family tree, and from a family tree it is often obvious which manuscripts need to be used by editors. In general, these manuscripts will have no surviving ancestors. This is the first systematic study of all the witnesses to these works, and for the first time it will allow a complete understanding of the various manuscript traditions. It will also allow the critical apparatus (that is the place below the text where editors cite manuscript readings) to be improved for all these authors, but most radically for Dictys, Cicero, and Curtius. My work on Curtius confirms a lesson already taught by others but sometimes ignored: editors should not ignore fifeenth-century manuscripts. Second, the process of the transmission of classical Latin texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance is an important and interesting subject in its own right. A consequence of the need for each text to be an individual copy is that some texts were not widely diffused. The general outlines of the process are well-known, but there is still much work to be done on the detail. No one read the speeches of Cicero that I study until c.1400, when a copy of them turned up at Cluny; this copy was carried off to Italy by the famous humanist Poggio Bracciolini, and I study the diffusion of the text in Italy. By contrast, of some fifty manuscripts of Cato and Varro only two were written outside Italy, and plainly these texts were hardly known in northern Europe before printing. Much of my work is concerned with this process of diffusion, especially in Italy. Third, manuscripts of classical Latin authors are studied also by e.g. paleographers, historians of culture, and art-historians. Scholars in these disciplines need to know where manuscripts were produced. In this my work can help. For given the difficult conditions under which texts spread it is likely that manuscripts of an author in a certain locality will share errors in common. This means that the genealogical families that my stemmata produce can often be used by e.g. art-historians to help in the localization of manuscripts. Many of the best results of recent research in the field have been achieved by paleographers and classicists making use of each other's expertise. This has led to an exciting transformation in our study of manuscripts, especially those of the Renaissance: no longer are manuscripts just impersonal artefacts represented on a stemma, but they can be related to a locality, and often to afigure of flesh and blood. I hope that my studies will help make further advances.