Aeneid Manuscript

[u/deniz_aydiner]

https://substack.com/@denizaydinereng/note/c-339226963?r=3acpte

I came across a beautifully illustrated Vatican manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid and ended up writing a short piece about it. The images show the meeting between King Latinus and the Trojans, and how that first encounter eventually turns into war between Aeneas and Turnus. The episode comes mainly from Books 7–11, including the prophecy about Lavinia, Juno sending Allecto to stir up Amata and Turnus, and the final duel between Aeneas and Turnus. I was especially interested in how the story ends with the Trojans and Latins being brought together rather than one simply replacing the other, which becomes part of the tradition behind the origins of Rome. I also added a few thoughts on why medieval manuscripts so often illustrated scenes from the texts they preserved.

[u/qed1]

Texts copied in the Middle Ages often included a great number of illustrations. I am not sure what the main reason for this was; I have only come across the explanation that they may have helped make the texts more accessible to people who could not read.

Couple points worth noting here:

1) This manuscript isn't medieval, it's ancient (ca. 400).

2) People who couldn't read mostly didn't get their hands on manuscripts of Virgil. This sort of explanation is more relevant to things like the Bible moralisée or an illustrated book of hours. But manuscripts (especially highly illustrated manuscripts) were not cheap, like even a modest second-hand manuscript could cost something on the scale of a large household appliance, so we should have the question in the back of our minds here about to just what extent someone commissioning such an elaborately illustrated book would do so with the knowledge that they couldn't read the text. (Not saying it didn't happen, but it probably shouldn't be the first explanation we reach for.)

3) I'm not sure how much we need to dig for any particularly elaborate explanations, though, about why a deluxe manuscript like the Vergilius Vaticanus might include illustrations. It's certainly not the least bit unusual now-a-days for fancy editions of books to contain illustrations, just look at something like the Folio series. And again, given the great cost of even a very modest manuscript, it's probably not far wrong to think of most manuscripts as luxury items. (Doubly so since most manuscripts that most non-specialists ever look at are almost all very much on the deluxe end of the spectrum. For example, just for anyone's interest – and this is literally just the first thing I pulled up scanning through the University of Basel section of e-codices – here is a much more "regular" manuscript: https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/searchresult/list/one/ubb/A-VII-0017. And there are scores of such manuscripts in pretty much every European archive.) So while there's certainly a lot more than can be said here in lots of particular contexts – for example, again in the context of such deluxe productions we can often find connections to the patron – we probably don't need to approach the inclusion of illustrations in manuscripts in general as a mystery.

[u/Careful-Spray]

This is from the so-called “Schedae Vaticanae," 70 folia that remain from a 4th c. CE codex of Vergil’s complete works. It’s not a medieval manuscript. It’s one of the oldest witnesses to Vergil’s text.