This reconstruction is the first valuable contribution offered by Butterfield: even if all the Italian manuscripts descend from p, itself a copy of O (via c), some of them show an intermingling of readings drawn from c with readings drawn from O, because of the recollation of both made throughout the fifteenth century.Ĭhapter 2 deals with the indirect tradition up to the Carolingian period and with the so-called fragments of Lucretius (lines quoted as Lucretian by grammarians or other authors but absent from the direct tradition). Some years later another Italian scholar, such as Bartolomeo da Montepulciano, managed to obtain c itself and brought it to Italy, so that its readings circulated. The author proposes a plausible hypothesis: Poggio found c and commissioned a copy ( p), but left c wherever it was discovered. In particular the f group, although descended from p, had access to readings antedating p. Butterfield argues convincingly that during the fifteenth century a fresh collation of O (at least of Book I) must have been made on an Italian lost manuscript, and, on the other hand, that c was recollated as well, so that some of its readings separately entered the Italian tradition a little later.

35, 29 and by Pomponio Leto into N (Naples IV E 51), we find readings that sometimes demonstrate knowledge of O itself not mediated by c and sometimes suggest knowledge of c not mediated by p. Nevertheless, in some of these manuscripts as well as in the corrections entered by Poliziano into Laur. Müller, Cini, Reeve and Deufert, 3 the author argues that Poggio found a direct copy of O, which he terms c : the ‘Poggianus’ p is a copy of c, from which all the Itali derive, so that they bear no independent authority for reconstructing the text. 1 Butterfield rejects the hypothesis that the Itali constitute an independent branch of the tradition descended from the archetype W or from an hyperarchetype anterior to the subarchtype of OQ and Schedae (this thesis has recently been supported by Flores in his edition of Lucretius 2). The first part of the chapter is mainly based on earlier studies. The research, limited to textual and codicological analysis, is the first comprehensive and detailed study of this topic and fills a gap in Lucretian scholarship.Ĭhapter 1 describes the extant Lucretian Carolingian manuscripts ( O, Q, GVU), summarizes editorial progress since the nineteenth century and deals with the difficult matter of the Itali (the Italian manuscripts derived from the ‘Poggianus’, the copy of the mediaeval manuscript found by Poggio and sent to Niccoli) and their position in the stemma.

The purpose of the book is to offer an investigation of the textual fate of Lucretius’ poem from its composition until the rediscovery of the work by Poggio in 1417.

Lucretius de rerum natura