Commenting on Historical Writings in Medieval Latin Rurope: a Reconnaissance*

Modern scholarship seems to undervalue medieval commentaries on historical writings. This article intends to bring this phenomenon to scholars’ attention by providing a preliminary overview of the forms and subjects of such commentaries. It examines various types of evidence including not only a few commentaries proper (Nicolas Trevet’s on Livy and John of Dąbrówka’s on Vincent of Cracow), but also different apparatus consisting of more or less systematic interlinear and marginal glosses and commentary-like additions to vernacular translations, mostly of Italian and French origin. It begins by considering various consultation-related signs and annotations, such as cross-references. Then, it studies the text-like features of sets of glosses (ascertained authorship and manuscript tradition) and briefl y discusses some of their patterns of display as found in single manuscripts. Turning to the contents of commentaries, the article fi rst touches upon introductions to the authors (accessus) and comments on the historians’ lives and the history of their writings. The article then discusses comments on different levels of meaning: fi rst, explanations of grammatical forms, fi gures of speech, semantics of single words and entire fragments, then, different ways of exploring, or imposing, the inner senses of historical narration, mostly of an ethical nature. Finally, the text argues that among the different ways of expounding an historical account, comments on subject matter are especially worthy of attention from the perspective * The idea of this work and the core of the source corpus date back to research on Southern Italian historical manuscripts conducted during my postdoctoral fellowship (assegno di ricerca) at Sapienza Università di Roma in 2010–12. It was possible to carry out this research, while lecturing at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2012–14), thanks to the “Scholarship for distinguished young scholars” granted by the Polish Ministry of Research and Higher Education. The fi rst results were presented in 2013 in Warsaw and Rome. The fi nal version of the article was prepared in 2015 within the project “Transmission of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance” fi nanced by the Academy of Finland and the University of Jyväskylä, no. 267518 (2013–17). I wish to express my deep gratitude to Outi Merisalo for her very helpful comments on a draft and to Emanuel da Silva for language revision. Acta Poloniae Historica