- Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829
-
For other uses, see Codex Ottobonianus.
Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829 is one of the three most important manuscripts preserving the poems of Catullus. Among students of the matter it is commonly known as Codex Romanus (or "R").
Contents
Description
It is a Latin manuscript, written in Gothic minuscule script on parchment, dated to around 1390. It consists of 38 leaves (76 pages). It is the youngest of the three most important manuscripts of Catullus, the other two being: codex Oxoniensis (O) preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and codex Sangermanensis (G) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Considering the stemma codicum, the Vatican codex is of the same rank as the latter one (the Oxford manuscript being one step closer to the lost archetype, known as codex Veronensis or "V").
History
The first owner of the manuscript was an Italian humanist, Coluccio Salutati. Later it was probably housed in the Vatican Library for a very long time, hidden under a false catalogue number, until it has been re-discovered in 1896 by William Gardner Hale and subsequently collated by the same scholar.
See also
Further reading
- The note announcing the discovery: William Gardner Hale, A New MS. of Catullus, The Classical Review, Vol. 10, No. 6 (Jul., 1896), p. 314 (JSTOR)
- William Gardner Hale, The Manuscripts of Catullus, Classical Philology, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1908), pp. 233-256 (JSTOR)
This article about a manuscript is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
