Exhaustive Variety

In 1997 Princeton University Press published a new edition of E. F. M. Benecke's translation of Domenico Comparetti's 1872 classic Vergil in the Middle Ages. Even today, almost 140 years after its initial publication, Comparetti's overview of Virgil's Nachleben in the European Middle Ages remains a monument of literary scholarship and still holds a seminal and influential place in Virgilian reception studies. However, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura remarks in the opening of his new book, there ought to have been a sequel: a book which would survey what Virgil meant to his Renaissance readership. This is precisely the challenge Wilson-Okamura takes on in Virgil in the Renaissance. Having sifted through the numerous individual studies and specialised research on Virgil's Renaissance afterlives, in this book Wilson-Okamura attempts to produce a summarising statement about how Virgil's reception continued into the early modern period. The editors of a recent anthology, The Virgilian Tradition: The First 1500 Years (2008), compared sorting through the complex web of interpretations, commentaries, and editions that Virgil's texts elicited to struggling through a confusing and impenetrable 'primordial jungle'. Wilson-Okamura's new book can be seen as the first attempt to provide a comprehensive map of the Renaissance portion of this jungle. The result is a book that has much to appeal to both specialists of the Virgilian tradition and readers of Renaissance poetry in general. For here is a book that can not only help us gain our bearings but which contains many fresh insights into larger questions about Virgil's influence on Renaissance poetry.

Virgil in the Renaissance is divided into three parts, the first of which lays the foundation for the latter two by giving an overview of the publication history of Virgil's works in the Renaissance. Anyone who has confronted the overwhelming number of editions of Virgil (and the overwhelming size of the commentaries) produced during this period will be grateful for this guide. As Wilson-Okamura notes, between 1469 and 1599 there were 'approximately 750 print runs of Virgil and Virgil commentaries' (p. 23). This first part is framed by an amusing account of the Renaissance debate as to whether Virgil's name should be spelled with an 'e' or an 'i'. Occasionally the reader may wonder why this debate was so significant, but the account serves to demonstrate the primary importance of commentaries (rather than, say, essays) for Renaissance readings of Virgil. However, the most valuable material in this section seems to me to be the table of most frequently printed commentaries and the brief introductions to the various commentators: Servius, Donatus, Landino, Badius, and Valeriano. The table in particular shows how important the ancient commentaries still were in the Renaissance, with Servius being printed more than three times as often as the most printed Renaissance commentary.

The continuity between late classical, medieval, and Renaissance modes of reading Virgil is a major (and wholly convincing) argument of Wilson-Okamura's book. Some details of Part I, as Wilson-Okamura states, may be altered slightly when Craig Kallendorf 's comprehensive bibliography appears, but the conclusions at this point are sound and helpful. They provide a starting point for determining how Renaissance scholars and poets read their Virgil. The second and third parts of Virgil in the Renaissance then trace the most important aspects of the Renaissance reputation of Virgil and the interpretation of his poems. Wilson-Okamura works progressively through the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, tracing the early modern reader's focus on patronage, erudition, versatility, refinement, and style. In the discussion of the Eclogues, patronage is the primary concept. The social rise of Virgil, from modicis parentibus to emperor's counsellor, was portrayed in Donatus's Life of Virgil, which was rediscovered in the fifteenth century, and it became a model for Renaissance poets and their own social and economic aspirations. In particular, Eclogues 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 9 were read as poems portraying, however obscurely, the relationships between Virgil, Maecenas, and...