A Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Ovid's Fasti

Abstract

The following catalogue of the manuscripts of Ovid's Fusti is a preliminary to our forthcoming Teubner text. It was started by the late Professor E. H. Alton, whose work on this poem we have briefly described in CQ n.s. 23 (1973) 144 f., and has been completed and put into shape by us; no doubt there exist other manuscripts of which we are unaware, and we shall be grateful for any information communicated to US. The compilation of this list by three people over fifty years has inevitably produced certain inequalities and inconsistencies in treatment; we are conscious of these and regret them, but hope that in the circumstances they will be pardoned. No doubt errors of detail will also be found.Of the manuscripts listed here, all have been inspected in part or collated in full by either Alton or ourselves, with the following exceptions. Some manuscripts seemed from published reports not to be of sufficient value to merit further investigation; such are Monacensis Lat. 594 and Monacensis Lat. 14557 (about which Merkel gives information), Matritensis Escorialensis P 111 24 (Rubio), and the manuscripts at Trier ( h e r s ) and Leningrad (from which Maleyn quotes some readings). We succeeded in tracing the Marston (no. 100) and Malvern manuscripts for some way, and then the trail stopped. The Louvain manuscript has been destroyed, and we have been unable to procure microfilms of the Toledo and Schlestadt manuscripts. We have not listed small fragments of late date and probably negligible value Reeve has also communicated valuable information to us. We are most grateful to all the institutes, libraries, and scholars who have answered our questions and given generously of their time and assistance. We trust that they will accept this general acknowledgement of thanks in lieu of a list of individual names.We should like to emphasise the indefatigable industry devoted by Alton to the compilation of material relevant to the recension of the Fusti. Our knowledge of almost one hundred and fifty of the manuscripts listed below is due to him, and was mostly gathered with his own sharp eyes in extensive travel throughout Europe, though in some cases he used photographs; we ourselves have inspected the others, with the exceptions listed above, in nearly all cases using microfilm. It should be pointed out that our microfilms generally cover only the Fasti-portions of the manuscripts, so that we may be unaware of information conveyed by e.g. subscriptions to other items of the contents.We wish t o make clear what we mean by the word 'inspect' When we apply this word to a manuscript we do not intend to claim that we are aware of every reading of potential interest which it offers. In the case of manuscripts our knowledge of which we owe to Alton, we mean that we have evidence that he noted a number of readings from them, but decided that they did not merit full collation. In the case of manuscripts examined by ourselves, we mean that we tested their text against a number of particularly significant variants scattered through the po...