Miscellanies

Book excerpt: "Poliziano's chief claim to fame as a philologist rests upon the work edited here, the Miscellanea, the first set published in 1489, the second left unfinished at his death and published for the first time in 1972. His essential model was the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (2nd century CE). Like Gellius, he produced individual chapters each on a set topic and with a corresponding title, with the titles listed at the beginning of the work as a guide to readers. Another model was the Natural History of the Elder Pliny, from which he borrowed the practice of listing at the beginning the sources he had used in the course of the project in order to ensure that the work would be taken seriously and could not be readily dismissed. Like both authors, he precedes the work with a Preface. In addition, borrowing from and extending the usage of typographers of his day, he added a coronis or tailpiece (which we might call an "Epilogue") at the end of Century I, explaining the history of the preceding text and taking a stand on rival claims to priority. He does not explain exactly why he chose one hundred as the number of chapters for each set of the Miscellanea (several sets appear to have been planned from an early stage). Possibly he used the practice of the Greek paroemiographers as a model, who organized their materials century by century. A miscellany was, in fact, the perfect form for Poliziano because it enabled him to range widely over ancient literature and culture with a focus on particular problems, above all passages of ancient authors that were obscure and/or had been wrongly explained by predecessors, that seemed to contradict each other or one's notion of an author's knowledge or competence. He was able to bring to bear his wide reading of authors and acquaintance with antiquities as well as his dialectical skills to shed new light on many such issues. A typical chapter of the Miscellanea begins with a problem Poliziano has encountered, most frequently a particular passage of a classical text that, on its face, does not make sense grammatically, metrically, or in view of known facts about the author or his society. Poliziano will quote the offending passage together with previous attempts at exegesis, if relevant. After showing these to be inadequate, Poliziano proceeds to outline his solution and how he arrived at it, often with copious citations of parallel passages to illustrate the point of usage or the particular content he is arguing for. He may conclude the chapter with a brief summary, especially if the argumentation has been involved, or with a kind of footnote on some point of detail that he felt should be explained. Occasionally, he will be moved to insert a kind of editorial preface ahead of the treatment of the problem in order to make a general point about scholarly procedure or the like. A few of the chapters do not center on philological problems at all but incorporate information that he simply found interesting and wanted to share, such as the disquisition on lime-tree bark (I 72), the report of Severianus's views on the position of the sun and moon at the creation (I 94), or the testimonies for the poet Erinna (II 26). Some of his most striking contributions are, in fact, the discoveries he presents"--