The Vatican Mythographers

Preface

preface In 1831, Angelo Mai, Prefect of the Vatican Library, published three separate Latin compilations of classical myths composed during the Middle Ages. Mai had discovered these in Vatican manuscripts, one of which had once belonged to Christina, the expatriate Queen of Sweden. Only three years later, Georg H. Bode decided to issue a new edition of these three Latin writers, based on Mai’s texts, at Celle. Since then, the so-called Vatican Mythographers have been widely studied and cited. Many of their sources have been discovered and their influence traced. Two of the writers remain anonymous, despite numerous attempts to identify them. Based on a dozen manuscript attributions, the Third Vatican Mythographer is generally accepted to be Alberic of London, of whom nothing is definitively known apart from his name and locus. New editions of the first two have appeared in the last twenty years, and there is now a French translation of the First Vatican Mythographer. However, no English translation of these works has been published to date. In the following pages, I offer an accurate, literal translation of these three important witnesses to the enduring vitality of classical myths, the legacy of medieval schools, and beyond those to a wide range of medieval and Renaissance literary and intellectual culture. vii ...