Maffeo Vegio's "schort Cristyn wark," with a Note on the Thirteenth Book in Early Editions of Vergil

Abstract

Historians of art generally concede that a given piece of iconography may have meant nothing to the craftsman who reproduced it. Similarly, inertia may account for the transmission of a textual error or for the fame of a forgotten poet. Who is not aware that someone at some time wrote a continuation for Vergil's Aeneid, but who reads that once famous poet, Maffeo Vegio? No one does, of course, except those with an axe to grind or a point to put forward. The resulting danger is that Renaissance scholars, like other researchers, often find only what they are looking for, and what they find often is passed on without challenge. As a case history of such inertia, Vegio's book, or supplement, is particularly interesting. Its present status as a neglected work results from certain conservative editorial practices of the Renaissance; and if reexamined without predisposition, the thirteenth book can teach us something new about Renaissance allegorizing. One factor that keeps Vegio's supplement above forgotten works and among those merely neglected is the decision of the Scottish poet Gavin Douglas to include it in his 1513 translation of the Aeneid. But why did the future Bishop of Dunkeld so decide? After all, annotations in the text Douglas worked from said this supplementum was as useless as a fifth wheel on a cart.' Although other humanists had praised the work for its speeches and fine hexameters,2 and even called the author another Vergil (alter Maro),3 Douglas himself remarked that Vegio's stile be nocht to Virgill lyke (4:146.189). In fact, Douglas's decision reflected the supplement's popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Written in 1428 to recount the events between the death of Turnus and the death of Aeneas, the thirteenth book survives in a number of manuscripts and was printed frequently after 1471. The few people who have attempted to explain the enormous popularity of this Neo-Latin work have turned to a prologue in which Douglas calls Vegio's supplement a schort Cristyn wark (4:144.140). Anna Cox Brinton, who edited Vegio and Douglas in 1930, took the statement as evidence that Christian interpretations caused the new ending's popularity. Vegio had shown that after Aeneas established peace between the Rutulians and Trojans, Venus washed his mortal part away in the Numicus River to make him a god, indigites, and then bore him to the stars.