Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829
Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829 is one of the three most important manuscripts preserving the poems of Catullus. Among students of the matter it is commonly known as Codex Romanus (or "R").
Description
It is a Latin manuscript, written in
History
The first owner of the manuscript was an Italian humanist, Coluccio Salutati. In the mid-16th century Achilles Statius, in his edition of Catullan poems, shows an acquaintance with this codex. Later the codex was lost: it was probably housed in the Vatican Library for a very long time, hidden under a false catalogue number, until it was rediscovered in 1896 by William Gardner Hale. Hale promised to collate the codex, but failed to do so before his death in 1928 – this in turn delayed the now general acceptance of R as one of the first rank Catullian codices. The codex was collated by a Canadian scholar, D. F. S. Thomson, in 1970.
See also
Further reading
- The note announcing the discovery: William Gardner Hale, A New MS. of Catullus, The Classical Review, Vol. 10, No. 6 (Jul., 1896), p. 314 (JSTOR)
- William Gardner Hale, The Manuscripts of Catullus, Classical Philology, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1908), pp. 233-256 (JSTOR)
- D. F. S. Thomson, The Codex Romanus of Catullus, Rheinisches Museum 113/1970, pp. 97-110