Die Überlieferung der antiken Literatur im Buchdruck des 15. Jahrhunderts (review)

Otto Mazal is well known as a distinguished author and editor over a wide range of subjects, mostly to do with classical literature, Byzantine studies, and manuscript studies. Under one of his hats he is a professor of 'Byzantinistik' at the University of Vienna, under another the Keeper of manuscripts and incunabula at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, whence his useful little book (his only publication in English) on the formation and duties of The Keeper of Manuscripts (Turnhout, 1992). He has been increasingly concerned of late with the incunable side of his job, most notably in the publication last year of the first volume of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Inkunabelkatalog (Wiesbaden, 2005). The experience gained over the long years of that enterprise has doubtless contributed much to the present monumental work on the transmission of ancient literature as we find it in fifteenth-century printing. As a handbook — and each of the four sturdy volumes sits easily in the hand — there is nothing like it. It is difficult to imagine such a work done better or more thoroughly.

Those accustomed, or resigned, to the compartmentalization of the classical, biblical, patristic, and Hebrew aspects of the ancient world, or indeed the 'classical' and 'late antique' (not to mention the apartheid that ensures the separate development of manuscript and incunable studies) will be relieved to find the entire field treated here as a seamless web. Everything written in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin that survived to be printed in the fifteenth century is surveyed in an integrated and systematic manner, from Moses and Homer to Isidore of Seville. And further, at both ends: Mazal recognizes both the practical convenience and the unreality of the distinction between incunabula and later books, and frequently strays well into the sixteenth century if an author or text requires it; and besides incidental reference to humanist works as their authors crop up in connection with ancient literature, he even gives several pages to the 'ancient' historians very naughtily forged by Annius of Viterbo late in the fifteenth century (pp. 247–49, 736). But lines are drawn all the same, and few will repine at the absence from these pages of Quintus Smyrnaeus, not printed till the Aldine edition of 1505.

Mazal's canvas is very broad, then, and he takes a broad view of what constitutes Überlieferung. Überlieferungsgeschichte, Housman believed, was a 'longer and nobler name than fudge', but little is fudged here. The lengthy introduction deals with a succession of rapidly sketched essential notions — to take some examples at random: Byzantium, Islam, Textual Transmission, the Carolingian Age, Humanism, the Background of Printers, Textual Criticism and Stemmatics, the place of scholars such as Poliziano and Musurus, the Spread of Printing, Printed Books and Manuscripts, and then to Exponents and Printers of Greek, Collectors of Greek Manuscripts, Translators, and so on to the Latin side of things, with small but efficient portraits of the major Italian humanists. None of this is especially new (which one would not want in a handbook), but neither does it disturb, being generally sensible and on a scale proportionate to the value and interest of the subjects treated. The real criticism to be levelled at these initial eighty-two pages, however, is the total absence of footnotes to support assertions in the text. Mazal seems to have no prejudice against footnotes — there is room here for just 1,656 of them, continuously numbered like the pages — but there is no recourse for the reader to check his statements in the introduction, short of reading through the huge classified bibliography given at the end of the fourth volume. Occasionally, in passages where I know something of the subject, I came upon a rash of little errors, such as the wrong dates for Bussi's early editions for the Roman printers, Perotti wrongly called 'Bischof von Manfredonia' (i.e. Archbishop of Siponto) and a date twenty years too...