The Protean Virgil

Abstract

Abstract This book argues that reception studies should take into account the material form in which a text is transmitted as well as the words that later ages encounter. Using Virgil’s poetry as a case study in book history, this book shows that the succession of material instantiations—manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file—undermines the drive towards textual and interpretive stability that is the traditional goal of classical scholarship, which sought to recover what Virgil wrote and how he intended it to be understood. The manuscript form served to embed Virgil’s poetry into Christian culture, which associated this poetry with the Biblical codex, used it to teach control of the language in which the Bible was read, and tried to anchor its content into a compatible theological truth. Readers of early printed books proceeded differently, breaking Virgil’s text into memorable moral and stylistic fragments, collecting those fragments into commonplace books, and using the commonplace books as a basis for their own compositions. Early illustrated editions present a progression of re-envisionings in which Virgil’s poetry was situated within a succession of receiving cultures. In each case, the material form helped to generate a way of reading Virgil which worked with this form but failed to survive the transition to a new union of the textual and the physical. This form-induced instability reaches its climax with computerization, which allows the reader new power to edit the text and to challenge the traditional association of Virgil’s poetry with elite culture.

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