The Roma instaurata of Biondo Flavio (1392-1463). A critical edition and commentary.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Marc Laureys
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2011 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 201090947

This project aims to produce a critical edition with commentary of the "Roma instaurata", written by the humanist Biondo Flavio. This edition will be published in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Biondo Flavio in Rome. In parallel, though outside of the workload, for which financial support is requested in this application, a bilingual edition for the I Tatti Renaissance Library will be prepared, with an English translation by William McCuaig (Montreal). The text edition and commentary of this Latin work serve to (1) fully elucidate Biondo's philological and archeological knowledge on the basis of a secure critical text, (2) to determine the qualities and deficits of his antiquarian research in the context of the scholarship of his time as well as (3) to evaluate the significance of this work for the development of the Roman and Curial humanism of the 15th century. These three topics will therefore receive due attention both in the commentary and in a literary-historical introduction.On the basis of earlier scholarship as well as a first recensio of the available manuscripts in preparation for the project, my collaborator and I arrived at the conclusion that the corrections in the text of "Roma instaurata" of the codex Vaticanus Ottob. lat. 1279 had to be attributed to Biondo Flavio himself. These corrections were thus interpreted as Biondo's own editorial interventions, and since they could be dated to the last years of his life (the "Roma instaurata" was published in 1446; the manuscript was written about 1460; Biondo died in 1463), it seemed legitimate to conclude that the codex represented his last revision of the text. However, the ongoing research has brought to light new elements, which to an important degree contradict this hypothesis. For this reason, we were forced to reconsider the results obtained in the early stages of the project and to re-examine the entire manuscript tradition as well as re-think several textual and palaeographical problems to an extent we had not foreseen in the original planning. These additional investigations have considerably exceeded the time frame originally scheduled for the constitutio textus (establishing the definitive version of the text). At present, the stemmatical relationships within the textual tradition are entirely and securely defined. I submit, therefore, an application for an extension of the project in order to complete the constitutio textus and the commentary (at the end of the initial three-year period of the project the edition and commentary of Book I of Roma instaurata will be completed) and to conclude the edition in every respect.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants