Acknowledgements
It is impossible to thank all the scholars, librarians, and book dealers who have shared their knowledge and material with me, but I would like to acknowledge several special debts here. A fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation and a faculty development leave from Texas A&M University provided valuable time for research and writing; without their help, this book might never have been finished. Much of the material in chapter 2 was initially gathered as part of a project for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, and I would like to thank Virginia Brown and James Hankins for entrusting this assignment to me and encouraging me, gently, to complete it. Susanna Braund read chapter three in draft and offered me access to her research on Virgilian translation, and I appreciate her help with this body of difficult material. Next I would like to thank Sheldon Brammall and Fabian Zogg for stimulating my interest in the minor ‘Virgilian’ poems by inviting me to participate in “The Appendix Vergiliana and Its Reception,” a conference held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford on 10 June 2017. I am grateful to all the participants for their feedback on my conference presentation, and especially to Glenn Most, who read a revised draft of what eventually became chapter 4 and improved it considerably. I would also like to thank Harald Anderson for inviting me to contribute to a Festschrift for Frank Coulson; this essay eventually became chapter 5. The earlier versions of chapters 4 and 5 appeared in print as:
“Canon, Print, and the Virgilian Corpus,” Classical Receptions Journal 10 (2018): 149–69.
“Virgil and the Censors: Printing Across the Confessional Divide,” in Inter Medium et Opus: Studies on the Transmission of Medieval Ideas in Honor of Frank Coulson, ed. Harald Anderson and David Gura (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2020). © Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; reprinted by permission.
I am grateful to the publishers for permission to incorporate this material into the larger argument here, and to their referees for improving the original work. I would also like to express my appreciation to Johannes Helmrath, Patrick Baker, and the other scholars from Collaborative Research Centre 644, Transformations of Antiquity at the Humboldt University in Berlin for introducing me to a new methodology that provided the framework for this book. Finally I would like to thank a number of people at Brill: Frank Gentry and the advisory board of Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, for accepting this book into their series; their anonymous referee, who went over my manuscript line by line and offered many valuable suggestions; and the editorial and production staff whose efficiency and courtesy were unparalleled.
Finally this book is dedicated to Barrett. He should get his own book, just as his older brother did.
College Station, Texas
August 2019