Un florilegio de biografías latinas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Un florilegio de biografías latinas Erik Ekman María José Muñoz Jiménez. Un florilegio de biografías latinas. Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 47. Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2008. 315 pp. ISBN: 978-2-503-52983-7 Un florilegio de biografías latinas is an edition and study of MS 7805 of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, a codex of 96 folios written on Italian paper in a fifteenth-century Spanish hand (13–14). The manuscript was produced some time after 1448, which can be adduced from a reference to In Hypocritas et Delatores Invectiva published by Poggio Braciolini in this year (16). It contains excerpts of Histories of Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, The Life of Hadrian by Aelius Spartianus, and the History of Rome by Titus Livy. The selections from these texts are biographical and include the lives of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. Until relatively recently philologists have neglected florilegia. These collections of fragments of classical texts copied and placed together for easy reference were considered too unoriginal, derivative, and fragmentary to be taken seriously by editors who sought to strip the medieval glosses from the texts of Greek and Latin antiquity in order to uncover the original words of an author. Fortunately, more recent scholarship has placed a higher value on these manuscripts, which offer a valuable look into the reading and writing practices of the past, as well as into literary tastes, since they contained the passages deemed most important by their compilers and readers. Un florilegio de biografías latinas is a welcome addition to the field, making this unique text, with its single manuscript witness, much more accessible to scholars. The content of MS 7805 reflects the interest in biography among humanists in the fifteenth century, including vernacular authors, like Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, author of Generaciones y semblanzas, or Fernando de Pulgar, author of Claros varones de Castilla. What is not immediately evident is the importance of this manuscript, a single witness, unlike the ubiquitous De vita et morarum philosophorum, produced in the fourteenth century and erroneously attributed to Walter de Burley. María José Muñoz Jiménez addresses this in the introduction, in which she argues that MS 7805 is likely the work of the converso author, Martín de Ávila, squire and literary companion of the Marqués de Santillana, as well as Latin secretary for important members of the clergy and for Juan II (31). Muñoz Jiménez bases her conclusion on the fact [End Page 332] that Ávila, at the behest of the Marqués de Santillana, had translated several works by Poggio Briacciolini, who is mentioned in the Florilegio. There are also several glosses in the manuscript that seem to indicate that the work was the product of a royal Latin secretary. Muñoz Jiménez’s argument is inconclusive, as she herself admits, though compelling: “En lo que se me alcanza, de todas las figuras que componen el panorama cultural de la época, Martín de Ávila parece, desde luego, la más interesada y cercana al tema tratado en el manuscrito que nos ocupa, la más relacionada con el raro producto literario que es el florilegio biográfico” (32). If Martín de Ávila did indeed produce this text with the encouragement of the Marqués de Santillana, it is not simply another example of humanist interest in biography, but a Latin text directly linked to one of the founding authors of Castilian letters. Given the specialized knowledge necessary to produce a text like this one, the author was no doubt one of a limited number of mid-fifteenth-century humanists with experience in Italy and extensive knowledge of Latin and classical letters. Its compiler was either Martín de Ávila or someone very much like him. Un florilegio de biografías latinas includes an introductory philological study and a semi-paleographic transcription of MS 7805. There are also several appendices: an edition...