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Aulus Gellius: A Post-Praefatio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
My brief note on Sir Thomas More's reading and use of Aulus Gellius did not pretend to be a complete survey of the fortunes of the Nodes Atticae in the Renaissance; nonetheless it should have made reference to Hans Baron's important essay on Aulus Gellius in the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Echoing Professor Baron's statement that ‘the study of Gellius’ fortunes in the Renaissance has not made much headway beyond a modest start; we cannot point to any monograph on Gellius among the humanists, or in other Renaissance circles'—I would like to add this further note.
Besides More himself and Erasmus, others in the More circle knew their Attic Nights. For having disparaged Seneca, Gcllius was ‘passionately taken to task’ by Juan Luis Vivcs, yet Vivcs cited Gcllius with great frequency in his commentary on the City of God. Clearly, Gellius is one of those classical authors whose influence upon other members of the More-Erasmus circle (such as Bude and Pace) it would be most fruitful to explore further, and that influence will doubtless also be found in many minor writers of the earlier sixteenth century.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1960
References
1 ‘More's Attic Nights: Sir Thomas More's Use of Aulus Gellius“'Noctes Atticae”,' Renaissance News, xm (Summer 1960), 127-129. The notes which follow (byproducts of some months of reading in the milieu of More's Debellation) could not be incorporated into the earlier article, and I am grateful to the Editor for the opportunity of adding them here.
2 ‘Aulus Gellius in the Renaissance and a Manuscript from the School of Guarino', SP. LXVIII (1951), 107-125.
3 Ibid., p . 114.
4 For Vives contra Senecam see Baron, ibid., p. 113.
5 Budé cites Gcllius, lib. xiii (habeo) in his Annotationes in Pandectas (1542 ed,. sig. B. iiiir); Pace uses Gellius on at least three points, but without naming him—these have been identified by Prof. John D. Ogden in his unpublished translation of Pace's De Fructu (Yale diss., 1951), pp. 39, 48, 52. It would be well to consider evidence from libraries, and to a list of those known to possess a copy of Gellius we can add the name of Richard Foxe, bishop of London until 1528 and founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who possessed two copies, one of the Rome edition of 1472 and another of the Venice edition, cum commentario, 1496—see A. B. Emden, A Biograpliical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), n, 718. An example of a minor writer making use of the Nodes Atticae is Ioannis Macri Santinei Iurisperiti [Ioannes Macer], who cites Gellius in his De Prosperis Gallorum Successibus (Paris, 1555, sigg. D. iiiiv, G. iv).
6 Baron, op. cit., p. 123.
7 Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500-1 joo (Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 28—the story of Protagoras and Euathlus from Nodes Atticae, 5.10. ‘Interestingly’ because Wilson's use underscores the legal element in his writings upon which I commented in ‘Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England', SP, L (1953), 110-127.