Chapter 13 - Catullus in the Renaissance

Summary

The poems of Catullus were rediscovered around 1300. Manuscript copies were made throughout the fourteenth century, but circulated little, though it appears that Petrarch had access to the text around the middle of the century, and it has sometimes been supposed that he owned a copy of it. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati had transcribed for him a new complete manuscript, descended at third hand from the original (V), and itself now known as R; and back to this copy most of the proliferating manuscripts of the fifteenth century can be traced. The rebirth of Catullus, therefore, coincides with the ‘Renaissance’ itself: a point to which the looming presence, in traditional accounts, of Petrarch near the beginning of both processes – the assimilation of Catullus and the larger ‘revival of antiquity’ – lends emphasis.