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Studies on the tradition of the classics in the Middle Ages have revealed the importance of glosses and commentaries, which were essential for reading the auctores. Through exegesis, medieval scholars were able to interpret classical Latin and transform ancient texts into manuals for good writing, as in the case with Horace’s Ars poetica, or into encyclopedias suitable for the education of the good Christian, as in the case with the Metamorphoses of Ovid.
In the margins of the manuscripts, in the space reserved for glosses, the transformation from ancient to medieval knowledge took place and a common cultural basis for Europe was created. Our project aims to create a Thesaurus glossarum et commentariorum with a corpus of about 400 rhetorical and mythological lemmata taken from published and unpublished commentaries to Horace’s Ars poetica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Building on this material, at least one doctoral thesis will discuss the understanding of myth through etymology and the changes in the understanding of poetry (provisional title: Maurice Jensen, Die Vermittlung von Rhetorik in den Kommentaren zur Ars poetica). The project also includes the edition of Pace da Ferrara’s Commentary to the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. In the Middle Ages, the Poetria nova was considered the new Ars poetica; therefore, the study of the related exegesis will allow us to document what revolutionary conception of poetry was taking hold at the beginning of the fourteenth century and, in parallel, to observe how the two Poetriae, the classical and the medieval one, were treated.
The Thesaurus glossarum et commentariorum will make available for easy consultation information dispersed in the commentaries available for easy consultation. Our work begins with important concepts of style, rhetoric, and grammar and with proper names in myths. In each entry all information referred to this subject will be presented with reference to the commented verses. The Thesaurus will be published on the website “Mirabile” (https://mirabileweb.it) in open access.
We expect that future projects will further develop the Thesaurus including hitherto unpublished material, enlarging its scope to cover commentaries on other classical works and studying other types of glosses (with e.g. geographical, historical or astronomical content).
