L'impresa tipografica di Battista Farfengo a Brescia: Fra cultura umanistica ed editoria popolare (1489–1500). Giancarlo Petrella. Biblioteca di bibliografia: Documents and Studies in Book and Library History 208. Florence: Olschki, 2018. xxxii + 516 pp. €50.
fabula in book 14 of the Genealogia deorum gentilium: although it might veil higher truths, fiction was suspect, while history held lessons for the reader or schoolboy listener. The Troy texts—Achilleid, Ilias latina, Aeneid—were studied so as to present the events of the war chronologically, in the order of history. Indeed, vernacular reworkings of the Aeneid until the mid-sixteenth century were rearranged to restore chronological order to Virgil’s poem. Although myths are acknowledged in the accessus and annotations Wood quotes, Achilles, like Dido, was treated as a person in a historical context. The medieval schoolmaster read text, annotations, and glosses aloud to the students (9). Such aural consumption made learning a group experience. (Renaissance woodcuts of students clustered around their master remind readers of this journal that much the same conditions continued well into the sixteenth century.) This slow mode of reception left time to feel the emotions inherent in the passage being studied, and emotional arousal itself facilitated retention. The primary purpose of the medieval apparatus was to teach vocabulary and figures and to implant striking images. At the same time, glosses and commentary did not draw back from sexual elements in these school texts. They expound Achilles’s rape of Deidamia with insistent clarity. The same is true of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, and of the Ilias latina, where sex between Paris and Helen is glossed. Manuscripts continued to be copied well after the rise of printing—Woods cites manuscripts of the Ilias latina in use in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, and still being copied late in that century in Germany. Schoolroom exercises were necessarily grammatical, but they also served to prepare pupils for a via activa, a mark of classical rhetorical education.