The wisdom of Virgil : the Aeneid, its commentators, and the organization of knowledge in early modern scholarship

Abstract

For centuries commentaries have played a fundamental role in the formation, transmission and use of knowledge in many fields of scholarship and science, especially in fields in which the starting point for knowledge or information is the study of an (authoritative) text – e.g. theology, law, literature. This dissertation discusses a selection of early modern Latin commentaries on the Aeneid. The early modern Virgilian commentary can be seen as a nucleus of scholarship and learning, encompassing information from a broad range of disciplines (e.g. rhetoric, cultural history, the sciences), and is therefore crucial for the understanding of early modern learning and scholarship. Moreover, the early modern Virgilian commentary stands in the centuries-old tradition of Virgilian scholarship, which runs almost continuously from classical antiquity.

In this study the Virgilian commentary is used as a lens to look at the complex developments taking place in early modern learning and scholarship (e.g. the rise of the sciences). Each of the case studies of this dissertation provides insight into an important research question in modern Renaissance studies through the perspective of the Virgilian commentary. Moreover, this study presents and translates a wealth of commentary lemmata from early modern Latin Virgilian commentaries.