De mirabilibus urbis Romae

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Not to be confused with Mirabilia Urbis Romae.

De mirabilibus urbis Romae, preserved in a single manuscript in Cambridge, England,

Spinario", then among ancient bronzes at the Lateran. Panofsky included Magister Gregorius's little book among examples of the reawakening of interest in classical antiquities evinced by a handful of connoisseurs in twelfth-century Rome.[5] Still, like most of his contemporaries raised in familiarity with the Gothic hand, the unfamiliar Roman letters in inscriptions sometimes eluded his translation.[6]

The fourteenth-century chronicler

Ranulph Higden knew the De mirabilibus urbis Romae, for he quoted from it in book I of his universal history, Polychronicon, so extensively in fact, that his manuscripts have been useful in establishing a good text of his source. The existence of Magister Gregorius's work had been known since the mid-nineteenth century from Higden's mention of him as a source.[7]

Magister Gregorius, known to us only from passing remarks in his Prologue, did not depend on other accounts of Rome, though he had read De septem miraculis mundi attributed to

Gregory the Great and the Temple Of Minerva, "once beautiful but torn down by the great efforts of the Christians". This "document of unique value which is completely independent of the Mirabilia urbis Romae, a description of Rome by a foreign traveler written from a secular and antiquarian point of view and based primarily on personal observation supplemented by the best local tradition"[8] was first reported to scholars by M. R. James, in 1917.[9] The standard edition of the text with apparatus criticus is by R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill) 1970. A translation by John Osborne
, The Marvels of Rome, was published in Toronto, 1987.

Gregorius opens with a personal expression of his stupefaction and wonder at the sight of the city from a distance, quoting the first lines of

peroration
, though the last page is not written on the verso, so that the text that has been preserved was complete as it stood.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The late thirteenth-century copy, titled Narracio de mirabilibus urbis Romae, is preserved in a vellum compilation of brief texts and excerpts at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, press mark L v 87, according to M. R. James, "Magister Gregorius de Mirabilibus Urbis Romae" The English Historical Review 32 No. 128 (October, 1917:531–54) p. 531.
  2. ^ G. McN. Rushforth, "Magister Gregorius de mirabilibus urbis Romae: a new description of Rome in the twelfth century" Journal of Roman Studies 9 1919:14-58, reprinted in Codice topografico della città di Roma vol. III:143-67.
  3. ^ Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell) 1973:7f
  4. ^ Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art 1960, pp. 72f.
  5. ^ Studied at some length by James Bruce Ross, "A Study of twelfth-century interest in the antiquities of Rome", in Medieval and Historigraphical Studies in Honor of J.W. Thompson Chicago 1938, pp. 302–21.
  6. ^ Roberto Weiss 1973:8.
  7. ^ Higden's extracts were published in the Rolls edition of the Polychronicon, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J.R. Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series, 41 (London, 1865-66).
  8. ^ Ross 1938, p. 316.
  9. ^ James, "Magister Gregorius de mirabilibus urbis Romae" in The English Historical Review, 32 No. 128 (October 1917), pp. 531–54.
  10. ^ Hildebert wrote two elegies De Roma: no. 36 and 38 in Carmina minora, ed. A. Brian Scott, 2nd edition (Walter de Gruyter, 2001).

References

External links

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