[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
For a poet, philologist, and epigrapher, Mariangelo Accursio (1489-1546) led an exciting life. By 1511, barely twenty years old, he had found his way to Rome and become a favorite of Pope Julius II. He was sufficiently close to the aging pontiff to be entrusted as envoy, bearing 500 ducats, to the temperamental Michelangelo. Unfortunately, when Julius died in 1513, Accursio had had time to make enemies. But he stayed in Rome, relying on his wits in the competitive court around Leo X, before getting a post as tutor and guide to two of the seventeen children of the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. With them, Accursio travelled in central Europe, France, and across the Iberian peninsula, where he and his charges became part of the entourage of Emperor Charles V. In the early 1530s, he was in Augsburg, in the household of Anton Fugger the younger, heir to the most successful banker in the world. Tired, perhaps, of the whims of great men, he returned to his native Aquila in 1533. But soon he was on the road again, making seven missions to Charles’ court to secure concessions for his town. The essays in this edited volume have a little to say about these adventures. The main focus, though, is on Accursio’s scholarly production. At Rome, Accursio matured as a sharp critic and poet, immersed in the pioneering humanist circles of the time; on his travels around Europe, he recorded the Roman inscriptions that he saw with a keen understanding of how they might be interpreted; and with the support of Fugger, he published two pioneering editions of late antique authors. The essays make a clear argument for the importance of Accursio’s scholarship and also give a good idea of how classical scholars today can deal with the challenges posed by sixteenth-century humanists’ work.
Accursio’s facility with Latin was clear. He demonstrated his precocity, and maybe his bravery, by composing a Lucianic dialogue, the Osci et Volsci dialogus ludis Romanis actus, in 1513, shortly after Julius’ death. It defended Roman eloquence against the archaisms and scholarly pretensions of Giovanni Battista Pio, who had been summoned by Julius from Bologna in 1512 to teach at Rome. It displayed Accursio’s linguistic skills, particularly his suspicion of the vocabulary of Plautus and Ennius, his understanding of political debates around style, and his readiness to use his intelligence to win the support of the new regime. Certainly, it seems to have won over scholars at Rome: we have evidence of his connections with other prominent humanists in the sodalities that formed in Rome in this period, as Paola de Capua shows. Like them, he wrote verse. Stefano Rocchi considers the annotated proofs of a collection of Sylvae, never properly printed for reasons that are unclear. Following Statius, Accursio was ready to write for the rulers of the time, including Emperor Charles (an epithalamium celebrating his union with Isabella of Portugal), Charles’ chancellor Gattinara (three poems of praise after the disasters of 1527, with appropriate Vergilian allusions), and Fugger (on his marriage to Anna Rehlinger).
On a blank page of his proofs Accursio copied a poem by Claudian (Carm. Min. 20, ‘De sene Veronensi qui Suburbium numquam egressus est’), an indication of his growing interests in later imperial Latin, travel, and the traces of the Roman empire. At Rome, he collected records of inscriptions, worked on their abbreviations, and started to make notes on the texts of Ausonius and Solinus. As Giusto Traina demonstrates, Accursio had an understandable interest in emending proper names and in connecting Solinus’ text with Pliny’s. Then in Augsburg, Accursio published substantial editions of Cassiodorus’ Variae and Ammianus Marcellinus. For the former, he was able to use the evidence of a manuscript he saw in Valencia. Characteristically for the period, his presentation of his sources was opaque, but even so, according to Angelo Luceri, his became the standard text for 300 years. His Ammianus was less successful, largely because it came out shortly before an edition by Sigismundus Gelenius, published by Hieronymus Froben, who had access to an important ninth-century manuscript from Hersfeld, as well as the unacknowledged benefits of Accursio’s work, and as a result produced a better text. Accursio, though, was the first to print books 27-31, and made many important corrections to the received text of books 14-26. He used manuscripts that he had seen in Rome, along with the previous edition of Petrus Castellus (1517). Again, while he was eager to denigrate his predecessor, telling the reader that he had made 5,000 corrections to Castellus, Accursio was not transparent about the sources of his changes. Gavin Kelly shows that he used Castellus as his base text, despite its problems. Immacolata Eramo looks at six passages as case studies for Accursio’s methods and interests. As in his notes on Solinus, he was concerned about getting proper names of people and places right, and his knowledge of Roman imperial systems informed a couple of innovative corrections to military terms.
Accursio developed his knowledge of Roman names and institutions in part through his epigraphic studies. After learning how to copy and interpret inscriptions at Rome, he transcribed hundreds on his travels. Two of his notebooks survive, in which he gave his transcriptions alongside details of the people and places he saw.[1] They make clear the sophistication of his understanding, what the late Marco Buonocore, reviewing his achievements, describes as his “personalità scientifica” (132): unusually for the period, he sometimes recorded letter sizes and letter forms, the apices between words, and details of the settings in which inscriptions appeared. Stefano Andronio’s essay makes it clear that he was not a great draughtsman, but good enough to catch the details he needed. The nineteenth-century editors of CIL recognized and appreciated Accursio’s abilities, but Buonocore’s essay demonstrates that they may even have understated his abilities.
Together, Kelly’s and Eramo’s essays illustrate the difficulties and pleasures of working with sixteenth-century textual critics. On the one hand, those critics gave vague details of manuscripts, provided the sources of their emendations inconsistently, and cited the work of their contemporaries only when they wanted to show how stupid and incompetent those scholars were. On the other, they sometimes had access to witnesses that have since disappeared (only a few folios survive of Gelenius’ Hersfeld manuscript), and sometimes, as Eramo shows, they offered provocative or plausible conjectures. Silvia Orlandi’s and Claudia Marchegiani’s contributions provide an excellent illustration of how sixteenth-century manuscripts can include valuable information for contemporary epigraphers, and of the practical difficulties in making that information available. As well as the texts of inscriptions, the editors of CIL regularly took from manuscripts and early modern printed books details of find-spots and the collections in which the inscriptions were to be found, but less consistently the information early modern sources provided about letter shapes or the monuments on which the texts appeared. And often the editors abbreviated what they did find. Clearly there were good practical reasons for this as long as they were constrained by the requirements of print; now that epigraphers work primarily with databases online, and images of manuscripts are increasingly digitized by the libraries that house them, in theory that could change. As Orlandi points out, though, the designers of inscription databases often inherited the philological concerns of their predecessors, and in their efforts to provide as reliable a text as possible, overlooked (for example) the history of the monument on which it appeared. Changing course would not be simple, not least because linking to digitized manuscripts is not necessarily straightforward. Accursio’s two notebooks in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, are digitized, in high resolution; but the images of the pages cannot be annotated with links to reproductions of pages in CIL or epigraphic databases.[2] Orlandi gives some examples of the benefits of being able to access early witnesses: seeing that two texts edited separately in CIL came from the same monument, for instance, or being able to give a more precise date based on letter-forms. As an example of the potential benefits the additional data can offer, Marchegiani and her team have added snapshots of the 575 inscriptions from Rome that Accursio included in one of his Milan notebooks to EDR (Epigraphic database Roma).[3] Her contribution here includes a more old-fashioned table, presenting transcriptions of the notes that Accursio made by each.
This volume makes it clear that Accursio should be added to the long list of humanists worthy of further investigation. He played a key role in transmitting the scholarly achievements of high renaissance Rome elsewhere in Europe, and in laying the groundwork for studies of the practical extent and functions of the Roman Empire; his travelling with the court of the sixteenth-century Roman Emperor seems to have encouraged this perspective. Rocchi and Andronio’s contributors approach him from a variety of perspectives and show very clearly why he should be better known to classicists, epigraphers, and historians of sixteenth-century erudition.[4]
Authors and Titles
- Premessa, Stefano Rocchi and Stefano Andronio
Parte 1: Poeta
- Gli esordi di Accursio a Roma, Paola de Capua
- I Sylvarum libri duo priores di Mariangelo Accursio: prime considerazioni (Accursiana VI), Stefano Rocchi
Parte 2: Filologo
- Toponimi orientali di Solino nelle Diatribae di Accursio, Giusto Traina
- Accursius’ Ammianus Marcellinus (1533): The editio princeps of books 27–31, Gavin Kelly
- “Un Ammiano Marcellino quasi nuovo e rinato”. Note testuali alle Res gestae di Mariangelo Accursio, Immacolata Eramo
- Mariangelo Accursio e la genesi dell’editio princeps delle Variae di Cassiodoro (1533), Angelo Luceri
Parte 3: Epigrafista e diplomatico
- «Sunt … Accursiana haec apographa plane egregia». Accursio e l’epigrafia classica: una prima messa a punto, Marco Buonocore †
- I codici ambrosiani di Mariangelo Accursio e le risorse disponibili in rete: osservazioni in margine al fascicolo “urbano” del codice D 420 inf., Silvia Orlandi and Claudia Marchegiani
- Disegni di iscrizioni e monumenti antichi nelle carte di Mariangelo Accursio, Stefano Andronio
- Mariangelo Accursio, ambasciatore e mediatore tra Monarchia spagnola e terre di confine, Silvia Mantini
Notes
[1] The essays on Accursio as epigrapher here focus on his collections from Italy; for a good example of his work elsewhere, see Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, “Le voyage épigraphique de Mariangelo Accursio au Portugal, printemps 1527,” in Portuguese Humanism and the Republic of Letters, ed. Maria Berbara and Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 17-111. For a more detailed case study, overlapping with his contribution here, see Marco Buonocore, “Mariangelo Accursio e le inscrizioni di Beneventum,” Epigraphica 65 (2023): 554-95.
[2] Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS O 125 sup (https://digitallibrary.unicatt.it/veneranda/0b02da82800bcd5d) and MS D 420 inf. (https://digitallibrary.unicatt.it/veneranda/0b02da82801d63ae) (consulted 20 July 2024). Orlandi urges the adoption of the IIIF (International Image Interactive Format).
[3] See, e.g., EDR092854 with www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?id_nr=092854-1&lang=it (consulted 20 July 2024). Very helpfully, EDR also includes here a link to the entry for the monument from the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (e.g., https://database.census.de/detail/10083142, consulted 20 July 2024), which gives illustrations of other witnesses.
[4] The volume is nicely produced and supplemented with plenty of well-chosen illustrations from Accursio’s Nachlass. It could do with an index, and some illustrations are a little small and indistinct, perhaps a consequence of the reasonable price.