Abstract
In her paper "Laying the Foundation for a New Work on the Pseudo-Virgilian Culex," Lisa St. Louis discusses work undertaken on a prolegomenon to a new edition of the pseudo-Virgilian poem Culex. Fifty manuscripts are selected according to criteria such as ownership, geographical area or membership in a group defined by previous scholars. The catalogue of manuscripts is carefully structured in order to include all information needed to locate a given manuscript and trace its history. Manuscripts are collated in detail and their variant readings are entered into Adain software which is designed to determine the relationship between manuscripts. The results prove that some manuscripts belong to the Florilegium Gallicum or Iuvenalis Ludi Libellus groups while others have been copied from printed books. Readings from the manuscripts, incunabula, and other rare books form the basis for an apparatus criticus which is presented in Classical Text Editor software. Wendell Clausen's Oxford Classical Text serves as the starting point for textual criticism, but original conjectures and changes proposed by other scholars have also been considered. St. Louis argues for proper documentation of manuscripts by editors and demonstrates the benefits of software in the preparation and presentation of a scholarly edition. The results of her work are relevant to textual criticism and library science alike.
Recommended Citation
St. Louis, Lisa.
"Laying the Foundation for a New Work on the Pseudo-Virgilian Culex."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
8.1
(2006):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1294>
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