An intricately printed leaf with classical and contemporary glosses.
Of all classical Latin poets, Virgil has held the most secure place in the canon of great authors. His works became school texts in ancient Rome and his perceived affinity with Christianity meant that his poetry was widely read in the Middle Ages. The Georgics, (from Greek, “On Working the Earth”) is a didactic poem by Virgil, likely published in 29 BC.
Recto: Heading Georgicorum. Liber II. Fo[lio]LXXX (Georgics. Book Two. Page 80). Virgil’s original text is in the larger font. The gloss (commentary) of Marius Servius is indicated in the margin ‘SER’ and that of Badius Ascensius by ‘ASCen’.
Verso: Virgil’s text and commentary.
Printer: Jean Petit, Paris, 1507.
Content: A section of the English translation of Virgil’s text beginning at the third line of Recto (Hic plantas tenero abscindens de corpore matrum) is:
(One man tears away suckers from the mother’s tender frame, and sets them in furrows; another buries in the ground stems, both as cross-cleft shafts and as sharp-pointed stakes. Some trees await the arches of the bent layer, and slips set while yet quick in their own soil; others need no root, and the pruner fears not to take the topmost spray and again entrust it to the earth. When the trunks are cleft – how wondrous the tale! – an olive root thrusts itself from the dry wood. Often, too, we see one tree’s branches turn harmless into another’s, the pear transformed bearing engrafted apples, and stony cornels blushing on the plum.
Up, therefore, husbandmen, learn the culture proper to each after its kind; your wild fruits tame by tillage, and let not your soil lie idle. What joy to plant all Ismarus with the vine, and clothe great Taburnus with the olive!)
Glosses: Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462-1535) was a scholar and printer who played a central role in the flourishing of humanism and print culture in the French Renaissance. He was known for the ‘familiar’ commentaries he wrote and published as introductions to the major authors of Latin antiquity, as well as on texts by medieval and contemporary authors.
Marius Servius, the author of a set of commentaries on the works of Virgil, was a late fourth-century and early fifth-century grammarian, with the contemporary reputation of being the most learned man of his generation in Italy.
Notes: It is difficult to fully appreciate the audacity of Virgil's enterprise in writing the Georgics. He produced a poem to teach subjects completely alien to the higher literary tradition, a poem which was his heritage: sheep-dipping, soil-testing. irrigation, bee-keeping, manuring and the like.
By Virgil's day, Roman agriculture had become a science; many of its precepts not essentially unlike those of today. Through observation and experimentation the Romans knew, for example, that graft compatibility depended at least on stock and scion being intrafamilial, and preferably intrageneric; somehow they had hit upon the fact that the rotation of wheat crops with legumes brought about what we know as nitrogen-fixation which revitalised the soil.
Condition: The leaf is in very good/excellent condition, with original margins. A pale stain in the bottom inner corner and edge browning is of little consequence. It is unconditionally guaranteed genuine.
Size: approx. 310x210 mm.
Item: PSE130
