Abstract
This book addresses the reception of the fourth Eclogue and the sixth book of the Aeneid of Virgil. This has resulted in an edition of a corpus of glosses and annotations of both texts in seventeen manuscripts that date from between the ninth and the eleventh century and originate from
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France and Italy. In this edition, the 'univocal diversity' of the material is striking - univocal because the commentaries are generally based on Servius's Late Antique commentary; diverse because Servius's commentary take on many different forms and formats, and because a wide range of grammatical clues that are not Servius's are characteristic for the glosses. The sum of these Virgil annotations gives a rich illustration of the educational tradition and the underlying method of teaching Latin in the Middle Ages. Most striking is the underlying didactic system of the glosses, which is not based primarily on the Late Antique grammars (Ars Donati) but much more on what I like to call the 'horizontal cohesion' in the text. The glosses help explain the meaning of the text by filling in words and implicit text parts, explaining synonyms, and translating and explaining Latin words. The underlying objective seems to be to help the readers (non-native Latin speakers) understand and interpret the text by making the compact formulation of the poetry of Vergil as complete as possible. The formal terminology of the Late Antique grammars is used only occasionally. When we do find Late Antique grammatical terminology, it is almost without exception copied from Servius's commentary. This is not to say that the Late Antique grammars were not used at all in medieval grammar education. Rather, I have tried to prove on the basis of this corpus of glosses that, in general, the underlying teaching method is based on textual correlations and alternative forms much more than on the educational method that was offered by the Late Antique grammars. A second striking observation when studying the Vergil glosses of both the fourth Eclogue and the sixth book of the Aeneid is the omnipresent influence of the Late Antique commentary of Servius. Throughout, this commentary seems to have been regarded as the standard method for studying the text of Vergil. In some manuscripts, wide margins are created for copying the complete commentary; in others, parts of the commentary are copied in the margins and between the lines of Vergil's text. Servius's text is used in various ways: Often, we find shortened versions; often, only the key words are copied and used. In the oldest manuscripts, parts of the Late Antique text are often copied to the letter. In the younger manuscripts copyists often rewrite the text in a free style, simplifying the formulation and adding extra information to the text of Servius.
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