Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides (review)

After a hiatus of eleven years, this distinguished series has weighed in with a fine volume dealing with six Greek and Latin authors, three of them of great importance in the Renaissance. As with the previous volumes, all the articles present the fortuna of the authors from the ancient world to the present. They also list the known manuscripts, printed editions, commentaries, and translations, with ample quotes from the dedications and introductions, and full bibliographies. Brief biographies of medieval and Renaissance editors and commentators who have not appeared in earlier volumes are provided. This volume is dedicated to the memory of F. Edward Cranz (1914–88), who was editor in chief of the Catalogus from 1973 until 1985.

Articles on two historians, a Greek and a Roman, dominate the volume. Marianne Pade does Thucydides. Despite an Aragonese translation at the end of the fourteenth century, Thucydides only became visible in Italy about 1400. Aldus Manutius printed the Greek editio princeps in 1502. Lorenzo Valla translated the work into Latin in 1452; four additional translations of the entire Historiae and ten translations of selected passages followed in the Renaissance. Claude de Seyssel produced a French translation in 1527. The first Latin commentaries appeared in the sixteenth century. Shortly after arriving at the University of Wittenberg in 1518, Philip Melanchthon had a room full of Greek texts made available for students. He translated parts of Thucydides and lectured on him. Pade deals with all this splendidly.

The longest article in the volume, coauthored by Patricia J. Osmond and Robert W. Ulery, Jr., is devoted to the historian Sallust. Unlike Thucydides, Sallust was well-known in the Middle Ages and used in schools. The editio princeps of his major works appeared in 1470, followed by about seventy more incunabular editions. The first printed commentary was attributed to Lorenzo Valla but later doubted. The commentaries helped Renaissance teachers teach Sallust for grammar, rhetoric, and lessons of moral philosophy. At the same time, proponents of civic humanism and reason of state studied his political ideas. In the early modern era (correctly defined as 1650 to 1800) Sallust continued to be read and taught in vernacular translations. In the 1780s John Adams urged his son, John Quincy Adams, to read Sallust because he was one of the most polished and perfect Roman historians. The authors have produced an excellent article.

The rest of the volume is devoted to four articles on Greek scientific and philosophical authors, the most substantial of which is on Themistius (ca. 317–ca. 385 AD) by Robert B. Todd. Themistius is known for his paraphrases of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Physics, and De anima, plus some partial paraphrases. Ermolao Barbaro the Younger translated them between 1473 and 1480, and his work was printed in 1481. The Aldine Press printed the Greek editio princeps in 1534. A number of Paduan professors used Themistius in their discussions of Aristotle's active intellect and its implications for the immortality of the soul. Seventeenth-century scholars edited the thirty-three orations of Themistius, which medieval and Renaissance scholars had neglected. Again the article is carefully and clearly done.

Todd also presents the history of two other Greek scientific authors. Damianus (Heliodorus Larissaeus) produced Capita opticorum, a minor treatise on optics, written between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Giorgio Valla had a manuscript, and Egnazio Danti edited the editio princeps in 1573. GeminusRhodius (first century BC) produced an elementary astronomy text, perhaps for pedagogical purposes. The Greek editio princeps, edited and translated by Edo Hilderich, appeared in Altdorf in 1590. Four chapters of the Elementa astronomiae were excerpted in Italy in the early fifteenth century and attributed to Proclus, the Athenian Neoplatonist of the fourth century AD. This part of the work had much greater diffusion...