the book collector
may be the source of other similar references. Similar readings in the Giunta and Callierges editions of Theocritus confirm the hand of Musurus in both, but at least in one place Musurus composed six lines himself to fill a gap, present in both 1516 editions. These complexi- ties have confused later editors, who have also had to cope with the ‘discovery’ of other 15th-century manuscripts, among them BNF gr. 2726, and later with still earlier manuscripts, at the Ambrosiana (C.222, 12th-century) and Vatican (gr. 915, 13th-century), and finally papyrus fragments. Editors from Ziegler, Ahrens, Hiller and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf to Gow and Gallavotti have wrestled with the textual implications of these witnesses, the last originally sceptical of the Patavinus deperditus but later more inclined to credit it. The pattern of these events is revealed in Ferreri’s ‘examen philologique’, an apparatus criticus of significant readings which forms the nucleus of this volume. The emergence in recent time of a hitherto unknown Theocritus manuscript in the hand of Musurus, containing Idylls 24–7 and Epigrams 1–15 is thus an event of considerable importance. As far as Ferreri is concerned, this object appears to have sprung from no- where, Athene from the brow of Zeus, or rather popped up in the Roman bookshop Libreria Philobiblon. It is bound with the 1495 Grammar of Theodore Gaza, and the second, ‘emendatior’, issue of the 1496 Theocritus, where it appears at a break in the quiring before the text of Theognis. ‘J’ai eu peu de temps pour consulter le volume’, says Ferreri; why, he does not say, but he was supplied with photocopies of the manuscript, faintly reproduced here. He supposes no connection between the manuscript and print, and the ensemble created by its 18th-century owners. In fact, it has a provenance going back to the 17th century. I first saw it in 1992, when it was exhibited to the Rome Congress of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, and I can remember the frisson when I recognised Musurus’s hand. This was news to its then owner, Fiammetta Soave. Previously it had been bought for $26,000 by Michel Wittock at Sotheby’s New York sale on 12 December 1991 of the Raymond and Elizabeth Hartz collection. They had bought it from W.H. Robinson, who had it from the Phillipps collection, and Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) acquired it from Thomas Thorpe
782
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter