CRITICAL EDITION AND TRANSLATION BY NICOLETTA MARCELLI AND GLOSS BY THE AUTHOR

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ON THE CRITICAL EDITION AND TRANSLATION

Although the manuscript Vat. Lat. 5812 appears to be written in Sperulo's hand, for the sake of clarity, some changes in the orthography have been made as follows:

The paleographical abbreviations (e.g. line 31: myrtiq3 > myrtique; line 94: prioR > priorum; line 230: int’ > inter) and suspensions (e.g. the horizontal stroke interlined for m and n) have been silently expanded or written out in full.

As for punctuation, Sperulo uses many punctuation marks, sometimes in a very modern way, such as exclamation marks (e.g. line 153), although in most cases the original punctuation leads to confusion, if not a complete misunderstanding of the text. Thus, for the sake of clarity and readability, I choose to abide by modern punctuation criteria, also adding quotation marks to speeches.

A similar solution has been applied to capital letters, both for proper names (whether real or mythological) and for adjectives (e.g. line 87: eois > Eois), while titles, such as Dux, Cardinal, and Rex, are edited with lower case. Capital letters at the beginning of each line are given in lower case for the sake of clarity.

Latin words with particular or unusual orthography are explained in the footnotes.

Editing a text preserved in only one manuscript sometimes can be a challenging process, because we cannot possibly solve textual problems with the help of other witnesses, and eventually they may be insoluble. Luckily, this has not been the case, but, though this illuminated and lavish manuscript has been copied very accurately in terms of text coherence, some misspellings or mistakes inevitably occurred. I have proceeded with corrections, explaining in the footnotes my interventions.