The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe, and: The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)

Craig Kallendorf probably knows more than anyone else about the reception of the Aeneid in the Renaissance. With books on Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (1989) and on Virgil and the Myth of Venice (1999) he has established himself as someone who understands the detail of how Virgil was imitated, printed, annotated, allegorized, scribbled on, and parodied in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. The first volume reviewed here, The Virgilian Tradition, reprints fourteen of his essays from a variety of sources and over more than two decades (1983–2005). It provides an opportunity to reflect on how his thinking, and thinking about classical reception more widely, has changed over that period.

The Virgilian Tradition is not a volume that will necessary please those who want their collections of essays to look beautiful on the page, since it reprints its contents photographically with their original pagination (and perplexingly, on a couple of occasions the final line of one page is repeated as the first line of the next). Some of the essays, though, are from pretty recondite sources (Acta Conventus Neo Latini Hafniensis and the like), so most research libraries will not be buying materials which they already own (though it does seem unnecessary to have reprinted an essay from the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Epic). The earlier essays tend to dwell on commentators and readers of the Aeneid who find epideictic elements in the poem (Ascensius and Donatus are two commentators on whom Kallendorf writes very informatively), and a consistent argument emerges to the effect that with the work of Christoforo Landino in later fifteenth-century Florence these rhetorically inspired readings of the poem tend to give way to philosophical and allegorical interpretations. Kallendorf is a bibliophile and bibliographer by instinct, and his essays radiate pleasure in discoveries small or large. But as we enter the 1990s he absorbs fresh influences. New currents in the history of the book, involving claims that the material form of individual editions and copies can reveal larger histories, lead him to offer an informative study of title pages of collected Virgils. He also begins to engage fully with arguments about the value of marginalia as evidence of reading practices. This enables him to move from discussion of annotations in Virgils from the Bibliotecha Nazionale Marciana in 1994 to the bold claim in a particularly fine conspectus of adversaria in 2005 that ‘early modern subjects create themselves in the margins of their books’.

Kallendorf can also be tracked through the pages of this volume absorbing increasingly high doses of reception theory, which colours his account of illustrated Virgils through the ages: ‘it does not seem to be any easier for the interpreter to disappear completely from an illustration of a poem than it is to disappear completely from a verbal explication of it’. He is not immune from some of the uncertainties that can bedevil the relatively late convert to reception theory, sometimes insisting on the historically conditioned nature of all interpretation and at others relishing the ways in which reception history can enable readers to gain access to a variety of different positions which are in some sense actually there in the original text. The last essay of the volume, on the arcane topic of Giulio Cesare Stella’s Columbeis, is a case in point: taking cues from Richard Thomas’ Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001) it shows how the ‘pessimistic’ or ‘Harvard’ reading of the Aeneid was available to sixteenth-century readers, and argues that Stella’s imitation (in its first version at least) articulates the ‘further voices’ of Virgil’s poem to suggest ‘an implied criticism of the Europeans from the perspective of...