Old Books, New Technologies
The Renaissance Transmission and Reception of Cicero’s Letters as a Case in Point
Abstract
The article introduces a postdoctoral research project entitled Cicero, Man of Letters. The Reception of Cicero’s Epistles in the Renaissance. Starting from a study of all Cicero letters editions printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the paratexts contained therein, this project seeks to establish not only which letters were published, when and where, by whom, for whom, in which language and why; but it also explores how these letters were read and interpreted in this period, and which image of Cicero they spread. In the present contribution, I describe how I went about collecting, organising and interpreting the source materials, with special attention to the methods followed, the digital resources used and the planned digital output, before presenting some intermediate results of my study of the Cicero letters editions printed up to 1550. Throughout, I highlight not only the prospects but also the limitations and possible pitfalls of these new technologies for studying old books.
Downloads
Copyright (c) 2021 Ciceroniana on line
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.