The Homeric Question in the Sixteenth Century: Early Modern Scholarship and the Text of Homer*

Abstract

AbstractGerard Falkenburg’s annotations on Homer reveal a type of philology rare in the Renaissance: Falkenburg probed the epics’ histories by analyzing their textual fault lines, as F. A. Wolf would do in 1795 when he revolutionized the study of Homer. Following in the footsteps of certain other scholars, Falkenburg alone arrived at a methodology for this sort of work, without publishing his observations. Obertus Giphanius did use them liberally in his 1572 commentary on Homer and his short preface to this is often noted as a mysterious forerunner to the Homeric Question. But if this previously unnoticed scholarship contextualizes famous early modern insights on the Homeric Question like Giphanius’s, one important reason it was not taken further lies with Giphanius’s flawed grasp and transmission of the technical innovations in Falkenburg’s work.