Catallus and His Renaissance Readers.

Someone familiar with standard surveys like Rudolf Pfeiffer's History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 is likely to know two things about the fortuna of Catullus in the Renaissance: the poems were rediscovered with much fanfare in the Chapter Library in Verona at the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, and an edition (1577) was produced by the great textual critic Joseph Scaliger, whose systematic method has been said to anticipate that of the famous nineteenth-century scholar Karl Lachmann. Catullus and His Renaissance Readers shows what happened in between these two events.

This book was conceived as Gaisser was finishing her survey of commentaries on Catullus for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, at which point she was uniquely qualified to assess the work of his Renaissance readers - "those who annotated, edited, imitated, lectured, or commented on the text of Catullus" (vi). The introduction, which begins with Catullus himself and extends through to the dawn of printing, shows that even a hundred years after the recovery of the poems at Verona, the text was so corrupt, so unmetrical and even meaningless, that it exercised little real influence. Catullus's first commentator, Antonio Partenio, envisioned a process by which each generation of scholars would build on the achievements of its predecessors until explanation and emendation revealed the true meaning of the text, but Gaisser shows repeatedly that the history of scholarship is seldom so tidy as this. The same humanists who made over 400 corrections that are still accepted today also introduced new errors into the manuscripts they copied, and the editio princeps of Wendelin de Speyer (Venice, 1472) fixed the received text from a manuscript that was completely undeserving of that honor. As Gaisser shows in chapter 1, two scholars set out to improve this text, but it is typical of Catullus's fortunes in the Renaissance that the corrections of one Francesco Puteolano made their way into an influential edition while those of a great scholar like Angelo Poliziano lay unpublished in the margins of his copy of the editio princeps. In chapter 2, Gaisser shows that an equally haphazard principle governs the interpretive tradition: "the first explanation, whatever its merits, tends to survive and to form the core of subsequent explanations. " Given that the first commentator was Partenio, a man of very modest abilities, "the first idea is often wrong. . . [so that] successes and failures alike are fortuitous" (108). Only at the end of the first generation of scholars did Catullus find in Pierio Valeriano an interpreter who could use a general critical framework to build on his predecessors' work.

As Gaisser shows in chapter 3, Valeriano's lectures at the University of Rome were cut short by the arrival of Pope Adrian VI in Rome, from which it becomes clear that those who read Catullus remained firmly anchored in a specific time and place. In chapter 4, this principle is developed with reference to the second generation of scholars. Borrowing a move from the reader-response critics, Gaisser affirms that all readers interpret a text through the lenses of their own experiences, so that the Catullus of Marc-Antoine de Muret reflects the French poetic theory and Venetian philological polemics of his day, that of Achilles Statius reflects the Christian humanism of post-Tridentine Rome, and that of Joseph Scaliger reflects the austere Calvinism of its author (whose philological successes incidentally, turn out to be more the result of his prodigious natural ability than his much-vaunted method). In other words, "Renaissance readers created their own Catullus. . .[in which they] thought-or hoped-they recognized themselves" (273-74).

Gaisser also emphasizes that the scholars she is studying present themselves as part of a social world in which interpretation takes place. For Gaisser, this social world is essentially literary, the world of academic coteries, publishers of belles-lettres, and practicing poets. Within this world Catullus was also imitated, and chapter 5 surveys these imitations from Leonardo Bruni and Cristoforo Landino through Giovanni Pontano to Johannes Secundus, while chapter 6 looks briefly at the literary relationships leading to parody. I must admit that I hesitate a bit at the notion that this social world is as exclusively literary as Gaisser tends to make it, for historians of classical scholarship have also begun to explore the broader political and economic framework within which Greek and Latin texts were appropriated by later readers. However within the limits she has set for herself, Gaisser has produced a first-rate piece of scholarship which will remain the definitive treatment of its subject for many years to come.