Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance. (Reviews).

Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. viii + 251 pp. $65. ISBN 0-19-815254-X.

Craig Kallendorf's Virgil and the Myth of Venice confronts a fundamental question in studies in the culture of early modern Italy: if, as Paul Oskar Kristeller argued, the Renaissance began with the rediscovery of the lost texts of ancient Greece and Rome, what texts were key and how were they read? Margaret King's monumental study of the intellectual formation of the Venetian ruling class (Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance, 1986) maps the classical revival and its impact in Venice through an examination of the correspondence and other writings of the members of the patriciate. Kallendorf's Virgil and the Myth of Venice complements King's work by turning to the physical book itself and to what Girard Genette has termed "paratexts" - marginalia, dedicatory letters, prefaces, printers' notes, and commentaries (9). Virgil and the Myth of Venice, heralded by Brian Richardson in his plenary lecture at RSA 2002 as exemplifying the best of the new studies on the history of the book, demonstrates tha t the paratexts that frame virtually every Italian Renaissance edition of a particular text -- Virgil's Aeneid -- indeed contributed to the forming of Venetian ideology and the myth of Venice. Drawing on the reader-response criticism of Wolfgang Iser and other critics who maintain that the reader himself is an active producer of meaning, Kallendorf sees ideological formation not as a top-down process in which texts in Louis Althusser's paradigm "interpellate" readers but instead as a dialectic between readers and their books. In his view, a literary text "does not merely reflect 'reality,' but rather becomes part of the process by which people who read books decide what they believe in and use those beliefs to construct the world in which they live" (30).

Kallendorf, now the leading authority on the Virgilian tradition in early modern print culture in Italy and the author of a number of studies of early Italian editions and translations of Virgil, has examined the rich paratextual materials in 132 Latin editions of Virgil and 64 Italian texts, beginning with Giovanni da Spira's first printed editions of Virgil (1470) and ending with those that mark the decline of printing in Italy (c. 1600). Chapter two, "Morality, Schooling, and the Printed Book in Renaissance Venice," treats the two main species of paratexts in the editions: the commentaries; and the front matter (prefaces and dedicatory letters). The commentaries, usually printed in the margins, surrounding and often dwarfing the literary text itself, fall into two categories: the moral commentary, such as that of the Flemish printer-scholar Jodocus Badius Ascensius; and the lexical and grammatical commentaries such as those of Pierio Valeriano and Pomponio Leto. Commentaries were so much a part of Renaissa nce texts of Virgil that of the 132 Latin editions issued in Venice between 1470 and 1600 all but 27 contain such apparatuses. The dedicatory letters, prefaces, and printers' colophons in these texts indicate that most Virgil editions, whether in large folio or smaller quarto or octavo format, were targeted for students and school use. On the paratextual evidence alone, Kallendorf concurs with Paul Grendler (Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600, 1898) that Virgil was more likely to be read in Renaissance schools than any other Latin poet. Humanist treatises on education from Pier Paolo Vergerio (1393) to Maffeo Vegio (1460), as Kallendorf shows, support this conclusion. Chapter three, "Virgil, Christianity, and the Myth of Venice," considers three species of Christian commentators on Virgil: those who read him as prophetic of Christianity (Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati fall into this category); the Neoplatonists (most notably Cristoforo Landino) who, adopting Plato's image of t he poet in the Phaedrus, saw Virgil as a divinely inspired avatar of truth. A third stream in Venetian criticism is represented by the Venetian bishop of Verona, Ermolao Barbaro il Vecchio, who viewed the poetry of the ancients as morally corrupt and thus unsuitable for the city's youth. Nonetheless, even during the Roman Inquisition when Protestant commentaries on Virgil were suppressed, Virgil and his Italian interpreters continued to be published, printed, consumed and taught in Venice (138). In chapter four, "Class, Gender, and the Virgilian Myth," Kallendorf maintains, with Roger Chartier (The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, 1987: 7) and Martin Lowry (Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe, 1991: 59-60), that the markets for books, elite and popular, Latin and vernacular, remained fluid and that Renaissance Venetians read both kinds of books (141-42). What is more, in comparing bindings, prefaces, dedicatory notes and letters of both the early vernacular and Latin editions of Virgil, Kallendorf found that the Italian translations were designed as mirror images of the Latin editions. Especially suggestive is Kallendorf's finding that over half of the 132 Latin editions of Virgil printed in the Renaissance contained a collection of 80 for the most part obscene poems known since the Middle Ages as the Priapea, but here titled Appendix Virgiliana. Kallendorf explains this feature as consonant with the "other" myth of Venice: as a city of glamorous courtesans where transgressive sex of every sort was easy to come by.

Setting aside Cyndia Susan Clegg's recent warning in a review essay in this journal (RQ 54 [2001]: 221-45) that scholars publishing on early print culture must evince demonstrable expertise in several of the fields prescribed by the newly formed Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), I welcome the appearance of Kallendorf's straightforward case study as a model of its kind in this demanding new field. The aims of his study are modest and well-focused, his scholarship impeccable; and his findings of great interest. One of the many strengths of the book is its current bibliography in the following areas: the history of the material book and printing both in Europe as well as Venice, studies in ideology and literature, Venetian humanism, the myth of Venice, the Counter-Reformation and its impact on the book market, schoolbooks and humanist education in Italy, classical scholarship in the Renaissance, reader-response criticism, Venetian cultural history, and women and humanism. I found the section on women and the Virgilian corpus especially interesting, though that part of the study could have benefited from updating given the availability now of the works of numerous classically trained Renaissance Italian women writers in the University of Chicago Press series, the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (OVEME).