Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Andrea Navagero/archive1

Andrea Navagero

Featured article candidates/Andrea Navagero/archive1

Nominator(s): Kimikel (talk) 19:31, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about 16th-century Venetian diplomat and writer Andrea Navagero. I've included nearly all of the information that I could find regarding him, from his early days translating Greek and Latin classics at the Aldine Press to his harrowing journey from Venice to Spain, during which he survived near-shipwrecks, imprisonment, and a volatile political scene. This is my first FAC, so pass or fail, I am happy to learn from the experience and would like as much feedback as possible. Thank you. Kimikel (talk) 19:31, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Support from Tim riley

I can see no reason why this admirable article shouldn't become an FA. I know little, if anything, of the period, but the text strikes my layman's eye as thorough, balanced and reliable. It is also a good read – clear and interesting. If, as I hope, this is your first of many visits to FAC you will have to accustom yourself to an alarming amount of carping, quibbling and nit-picking about your prose. We all have to. With that in mind you may like to consider some or all of the following:

"In 1515, on the request of general Bartolomeo d'Alviano" – unexpected preposition: wouldn't "at the request of…" be more usual?
"he was designated Official Historian of the Republic of Venice" – do we need the capital letters in Official Historian, here and in the main text?
"As a result of his high standing among Venetian scholarly circles" – another unexpected preposition, I'd say. "High standing in" those circles strikes me as more natural.
"he traveled to Paris to acquaint himself with the royal court of Francis" – you really must decide whether you are using the American or the English spelling of "traveled/travelled". At present we have both throughout the text.
"Much to his dismay, however, he was appointed ambassador" – this is the first of six "howevers" in your text. It is a word that slips so easily from one's pen or typing fingers, but is more often than not a woolly superfluity. I reckon your prose would be crisper without the first, second, fifth and sixth "howevers".
"Navagero was born in 1483 to the wealthy and established Navagero family. The Navageros were a patrician family, members of the Venetian nobility" – infelicitous repetition of "family". It could easily be mitigated by recasting "a patrician family" as just "patricians".
"Geographer and writer Giovanni Battista Ramusio was Navagero's distant cousin" – clunky false title. A definite article in front of "geographer" would do the trick.
"and would grow to be among his closest friends" – does one grow to be a friend? The friendship grew, no doubt, but just "and would become…" strikes me as a more natural phrasing.
"alongside fellow humanist Agostino Beazzano" – another false title.
"As such, Navagero was tasked with negotiating" – I'm not sure what the phrase "as such" is intended to convey here. Do you mean "accordingly" or something like that?
"dreadful little place on some rocky mountain." – you should watch your punctuation. Wikipedia's manual of style bids us put punctuation marks outside the end quotation marks in sentences like this. I haven't checked the rest of your text for it, but I suggest you do so.
"he grew to resent Charles' powerful advisor" – I can't work out why you give King Francis an ess-apostrophe-ess possessive but deny it to the Emperor Charles.
"Mercurino di Gattinara, who he saw as delaying the peace negotiations" – "whom", please.

That's all from me. I'll look in again shortly. Meanwhile, over to you. Tim riley talk 14:33, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tim, I am very appreciative of your review. I have implemented all of your suggestions. For the "however" comment, I removed the word entirely, but in some instances I replaced it with "but" or "though". If these words are also superfluous please just let me know and I'll take them out. Thank you. Kimikel (talk) 19:29, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good! After another read-through I'm happy to support the elevation of this article to FA. It is a good read, evidently well-sourced, looks comprehensive and balanced and is admirably illustrated. It seems to me to meet all the FA criteria. Tim riley talk 19:51, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support from Borsoka

I would avoid presenting the same painting twice in the article, even if one of the images shows only a part of the painting (I refer to File:Andrea Navagero by Raphael.jpg and File:Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beaziano by Raphael.jpg)
The caption in the infobox is not helpful. Either delete or rephrase it (to be more informative).
However, these are only minor issues, and I reviewed the article during its peer review weeks ago ([1]), and I concluded that it met all FA criteria ([2]). After re-reading the article, I am convinced that it has even improved, so I support its promotion. Again, thank you for this excellent article. Borsoka (talk) 09:56, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Borsoka, I have implemented your suggestions. Thank you very much for your comments and also for your peer review, as it was a big help in giving me the confidence to move ahead to FAC. Kimikel (talk) 16:13, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Choliamb

Hi Kimikel. I'm afraid I'm going to dump a big bucket of ice water on one specific section of the article, so let me start by saying that I think it's a fine article overall, full of valuable information and clearly written. It appears particularly strong on Navagero's diplomatic career, which is not something that I knew much about, and probably would never have bothered to learn about if I hadn't read the article. So thank you for that. My own interest in Navagero is, as you will see from the comments below, in his work as an editor of classical texts and as a Neo-Latin poet, and it is here, I think, that the article in its current form comes up a little short. His scholarly and literary activities are, for the most part, passed over very quickly, in a single paragraph (the second paragraph in the section headed "Career"), without much context and with several misstatements of fact in the space of half-a-dozen sentences. Without getting into an argument about whether his work as a scholar and a poet is more important than his diplomatic achievements, and without insisting on equal time for the things I find most interesting, I'll just say that I think the skimpiness of the discussion of this aspect of his life creates an imbalance that does not serve readers well. In a run of the mill biography, it wouldn't matter so much, but this is an FA candidate, and the comprehensiveness requirement states that it should "neglect no major facts or details". To me, at least, the article in its present form doesn't quite clear that bar.

Criticism without specifics is not very useful, so here are some specific examples of the kinds of information that might be used to improve the account of N.'s work as a scholar and poet:

First, a small point, but an important one: the first sentence of the lead should also include the Latin form of his name, Andreas Naugerius, which was the name under which all of his Latin works were published, and the name by which, until relatively recently, he was regularly known to both casual readers and scholars of Italian humanism. It is, for example, the form of the name that his friend and fellow Italian poet Girolamo Fracastoro used as the title of his treatise on the nature and purpose of poetry, Naugerius, sive de poetica, which takes the form of an imaginary dialogue in which Navagero is one of the principal interlocutors. When looking for sources, if you only search for Navagero, and don't also search for Naugerius, you will miss some important things. This is especially true in regard to his work as a scholar and editor of Latin texts, because in the field of classical scholarship (where his contributions are still regularly cited today), he is invariably referred to as Naugerius.
For the Aldine Press, with which he was involved since its inception, he translated the works of the ancient Roman writers Virgil, Quintilian, Ovid, and Cicero, among others. The Aldine editions were Latin texts, not translations, and Navagero was the editor (the "corrector", in the language of the time), not the translator. (The same mistake occurs in the first paragraph of the lead.) Look again at what Ady (the source cited here) actually says, and compare, e.g., the introduction to Wilson's edition of the Lusus, p. 7. The previous sentence in this paragraph, which says editing manuscripts of classic Greek and Latin works, gets this right, except that as far as I know Navagero did not produce an edition of any Greek text for Manutius. The preface of the Aldine edition of the Greek poet Pindar was addressed to him, but it was written by Manutius, and N. did not edit that volume. Do you have a source (preferably from a scholar who is actually familiar with the history of the Aldine press, not a popular historian repeating information at third or fourth hand) that includes the edition of a Greek author among his publications?
garnering a reputation as a scholar and a skilled writer. Can this be expanded? In regard to his scholarship in particular (I'll come back to his poetic reputation later), perhaps with some acknowledgment of how highly regarded his editorial work is by modern classicists and textual critics? This is particularly true of his edition of Ovid and his extensive notes on problematic passages in the works of that poet, which take up fifty pages in the Volpi edition of his collected works (on which see below), and which have often been mined by subsequent scholars. E. J. Kenney, the former Kennedy professor of Latin at Cambridge and editor of the Oxford Classical Text of Ovid's amatory works, described him as "an excellent Latinist and Ovid's most competent editor before Heinsius" (The Classical Text, p. 67), and Georg Luck has some useful and admiring comments about his methods and abilities in "Ovid, Naugerius and We, or: How to Create a Text", Exemplaria Classica 6 (2002), pp. 1-40, and "Naugerius’ Notes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses", Exemplaria Classica 9 (2005), pp. 155-224. Philology and textual criticism have advanced by light years since the early 16th century, and it's unusual for a Renaissance editor to be treated with this kind of respect by contemporary classicists.
All that remains of his poetry is a collection of 47 Latin poems referred to as Lusus. I still see this claim casually repeated, but it's not true, and hasn't been true since at least 1940. Although the Renaissance editions of the Lusus contain 47 poems, this does not take into account a number of other poems, not included in the Lusus, that survive in various Renaissance anthologies and manuscripts. The two essential works here are Maria Antonietta Benassi, "Scritti inediti o mal conosciuti di Andrea Navagero", Aevum 14 (1940), pp. 240–254 (JSTOR 25819298) and Claudio Griggio, "Per l'edizione dei 'Lusus' del Navagero", Atti del Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, Classe scienze morali, lettere, ed arti 135 (1976-1977), pp. 87-113. (Benassi is available via the JSTOR link above; I think Griggio was also available online at one time, because I have a copy of it, but I'm not sure where I got it. If you can't find it, let me know and I'll send you a PDF.) Between the two of them, they have brought the total number of surviving Latin poems attributed to Navagero up to 69, although the attribution is not certain in every case. Both of these important articles are in Italian; if you want an English source to cite, the first paragraph of Dirk Sacré, "Andrea Navagero, Lusus: Three Textual Notes", Humanistica Lovaniensia 36 (1987), pp. 296-298 (JSTOR 23973625) is not great, but is probably sufficient. And in addition to his Latin poetry, Navagero also wrote verses in Italian, some of which survive. A handful of rime, sonnets, and madrigals, together with Italian translations of five of his Latin epigrams, are printed in the Volpi edition of his works (on which see below), pp. 275-286.
As it stands, the article tells readers nothing at all about the kind of Latin poetry Navagero wrote. The title Lusus might offer a clue (clearly not epic!), but it's not one that will be intelligible to most readers who don't know Latin. As it happens, the bulk of the collection consists of poems in the pastoral mode, looking back to ancient models like Vergil's Eclogues, but treating the material in a briefer, more epigrammatic form. These kinds of pastoral vignettes, sometimes called lusus pastorales, were a Navagero specialty, along with even shorter epigrams that imitate the rustic votive epigrams in book 6 of the Greek Anthology. The second part of the introduction to Wilson's edition of the Lusus gives some of the background; see also W. L. Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral, who credits Navagero and his friend and fellow Venetian Pietro Bembo with introducing the lusus pastoralis as a subgenre of Neo-Latin pastoral; and Giovanni Ferroni, Dulces Lusus: Lirica pastorale e libri di poesia nel Cinquecento, esp. chap. 2 (unfortunately not available online, as far as I can see). The votive epigrams adapted from Greek models are well discussed in J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800, pp. 189–192; these made a big impression on the Renaissance French poets (see below). Navagero, like Vergil and other later writers of pastoral, occasionally used the pastoral setting as a device to comment on current affairs: so, most notably, Lusus 20 ("Damon") is in part an elegy for pope Julius II, with allusions to the military campaigns of 1512 (see Grant, p. 332, and Wilson's notes on this poem.)
The article in its current state also says little about the reputation and influence of N.'s Latin verse among other Renaissance poets, both those writing in Latin and those writing in the European vernaculars. An anodyne phrase like garnering a reputation as ... a skilled writer is pretty inadequate for a literary figure of his stature. He was widely admired by his contemporaries; Fracastoro wrote that he was surpassed by few, if any, of the poets of antiquity (paucis quidem aut nullis ex antiquioribus cedens), and as I mentioned above, made him the central character of the Naugerius, his dialogue on the nature of poetry. Among modern critics he is generally considered one of the finest Neo-Latin poets: cf., e.g., the remarks of Grant (cited above), who calls him "one of the most elegant Latin poets of the Italian Renaissance and one of the very few important Neo-Latin writers produced by Venice" (p. 140). As for influence, the votive epigrams based on the Greek Anthology were especially influential in France, where they were translated, adapted, and imitated by Ronsard, du Bellay, and other poets of the Pléiade: see Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the year 1800, pp. 332-337; Paul Kuhn, "L'influence néo-latine dans les églogues de Ronsard", Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 21 (1914), pp. 309-325 (JSTOR 40517277); Paul Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, p. 128. And in a famous encounter in Granada in 1526, Navagero urged the Catalan poet Juan Boscán to try his hand at writing in the humanistic, Petrarchan mode then popular in Italy, a conversation that had a significant effect on the subsequent development of Spanish lyric poetry. (This story has been told many times; see, e.g., E. H. Wilkins, "A General Survey of Renaissance Petrarchism", Comparative Literature 2 (1950), pp. 327-342, at p. 332 (JSTOR 1768389), quoting Boscán's account of the meeting as told in the preface to Sonetos y canciones a manera de los italianos; an English translation of the relevant passage can be found in H. Keniston, Garcilaso de la Vega: A Critical Study of his Life and Works, pp. 74-76. Since you are fluent in Spanish, I will add a reference to A. de Colombí-Monguió, "Boscán frente a Navagero: el nacimiento de la conciencia humanista en la poesía española", Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 40 (1992), pp. 143-168 (JSTOR 40299553). I haven't read it myself, but from the title it looks like it may have some interesting things to say about Navagero and his role in "the birth of the humanist spirit in Spanish poetry".)

I'm sorry to go on at such length about the shortcomings (or what I see as the shortcomings) of a single paragraph of the article, and I'm not looking for all of the above to be discussed in detail, obviously. But I think this paragraph could easily be expanded, and perhaps split into two (one for scholarship, one for poetry), and doing so would give you a chance to address these topics a little more fully and explicitly, and to illustrate the general points with a couple of specific examples like the ones I've mentioned above (or others -- there are plenty of others!). Doing so would, in my opinion, go a long way toward making the article a more balanced portrait of the man, and would remove most of my reservations about supporting FA status.

I'll finish up with a few additional comments on other points:

Navagero admired Catullus so greatly that, in order to assert Catullus' poetic supremacy, he burned copies of the work of Martial, Catullus' contemporary, every year. Martial was not in fact Catullus's contemporary: Catullus was writing in the second quarter of the 1st century BCE, Martial in the last quarter of the 1st century CE, a difference of more than a century. The story about the burning of Martial's works is a more complicated one than Watson (the source cited here) indicates, and it's not entirely clear from the conflicting early sources how reliable the story is, whether the burning was intended as a joke or a serious act, and whether it was the licentious content or the impure style of Martial's epigrams that Navagero objected to. The most comprehensive discussion of the various versions of the story is in E. A. Cicogna, Della vita e delle opere di Andrea Navagero, pp. 290-291, note 306. It is first recorded in 1545 by Paolo Giovio, in an elegy for Navagero (printed in Latin in F. A. Gragg, Latin Writings of the Italian Humanists, pp. 348-349; I think Gragg published an English translation of it somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment). Giovio is close enough in time to Navagero himself that there should be some truth to the story, but it still gives me pause, personally, and if I were writing the WP article I would probably hedge a little and say "he is said to have burned copies of the work of Martial", rather than stating it as 100% certain. Still, it's in the sources, and often repeated, so you're well within your rights if you want to leave it as it is.
In addition to the funeral orations for d'Alviano and Loredan, both of which are mentioned in the article, Navagero is also known to have delivered a similar oration for Catherine Cornaro in 1510 (see Cicogna, cited above, p. 227, note 12). Unlike the other two speeches, this one doesn't survive, but it may be worth mentioning anyway, both because it provides additional evidence of the respect accorded to him as an orator on grand state occasions, and because Catherine herself (the last ruler of the Crusader kingdom of Cyprus) is such an interesting character.
Navagero's brother Pietro retrieved his coffin, which was later buried next to his beloved garden in Murano. More specifically, Navagero was laid to rest, according to his own instructions, in the church of San Martino di Murano, which apparently no longer exists. At some point in time a memorial inscription was set up by two of N.'s nephews, the sons of his brother Bartolomeo, either in San Martino or in San Giovanni in Bragola or Bragora. For all of this, and for the Latin text of the memorial inscription, see Cicogna (cited above), pp. 169-171. (On pp. 318-321 he also reproduces a group of interesting primary sources on the death of Navagero.) I've cited Cicogna in all three of the last three notes, so let me just insert an additional plug here: his account of Navagero's life and works, published in 1855, is a prodigious work of scholarship, full of all sorts of fascinating information drawn from archives and private sources, much of which is, as far as I know, unavailable elsewhere. It's very dense and not an easy read, especially if your Italian isn't great, but being able to search it electronically for keywords makes it possible to dip into it for his comments on specific subjects of interest without having to read it all from beginning to end.
Finally, the WP article should certainly include a reference somewhere to J. A. Volpi and C. Volpi, eds., Andreae Naugerii patricii Veneti oratoris et poetae clarissimis opera omnia (Padua 1718), which is still the standard edition of his collected works. In addition to the poetry, it contains the two surviving funeral orations, prefaces from his editions of classical texts, a collection of letters, and his accounts of his diplomatic journeys to Spain and France, as well as a selection of works addressed to him or about him by his contemporaries (like Fracastoro's Naugerius). (Table of contents on p. 430.)

That's it for me. Once again, apart from the reservations expressed above, I think this is a good article, and I enjoyed reading it. Happy holidays, Choliamb (talk) 23:28, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Choliamb, thank you very much for bringing these shortcomings to light. I will work on rectifying all of this over the next couple of days. Kimikel (talk) 03:32, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Choliamb: I would be very appreciative if you could take another look at the article when you have the time. I believe I have incorporated all of your suggestions, mostly in the section "Writer and scholar". If there is still a major piece that I am missing out on, or if I have introduced another inaccuracy, please let me know and I will be happy to continue editing. I hope that I have addressed your concerns and I thank you for your incredibly detailed support. Kimikel (talk) 05:34, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Kimikel: I didn't check all the references, but I did give the new section a quick once-over, and it looks good to me. I'm much happier with the article's balance now, thank you. I do see one misunderstanding:

two separate scholars, Maria Antonietta Benassi and Claudio Griggio, uncovered more of Navagero's Latin works in Italian manuscripts, adding twelve poems to his known body of work. The numbers are still not quite right here. Not your fault; you're relying on Sacré, and his summary is a little confusing. It's true that Griggio published 12 more poems, but that was on top of the 10 new poems previously published by Benassi, so between the two of them they added 22 (not 12) new Latin poems to the corpus, for a total of 69, not 59. (Benassi also published some additional Italian poems.) The complete collection of 69 Latin poems according to Griggio's edition can be consulted online in a couple of different places; perhaps it would be helpful to add one or both to the WP article as external links:
- the MQDQ (Musisque Deoque) project at Ca' Foscari University in Venice
- the Perseus Project at Tufts University
Also, FYI, I see that a new print edition of Navagero's Latin poetry will be published in the spring by Harvard Univ Press, in their I Tatti series of Renaissance Latin texts and translations. No reason for this to appear in the article yet, but you may want to keep an eye on it for future revisions.

Assuming the numbers are sorted out as explained above, I'm now happy to support. Thanks for improving WP's coverage of Renaissance humanists. Happy New Year. – Choliamb (talk) 14:51, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Editing to add a reply to UndercoverClassicist's question below about Navagero's time in Padua. The indefatigable Cicogna (pp. 224–225, note 5) reports that his presence in that city is confirmed by a volume in the episcopal library, which lists him as a witness in the awarding of doctorates in 1501 and 1502. (In the entry for 1501 he is described as Venetus artium studens; in 1502 the other witness was his lifelong friend Fracastoro). Choliamb (talk) 15:33, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have corrected the number from 12 to 22 poems and added an external link to the MQDQ Project's Lusus. I want to thank you again for all of your assistance in making this article a far, far more comprehensive biography, something Navagero certainly deserves. Kimikel (talk) 17:38, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

UC

Seems that this has already had some very skilled eyes pass over it, but I'll add my carping, quibbling and nit-picking shortly. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:19, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

~~I think we need a brief caption to give a date, artist and brief context for the infobox image, especially as the artist is notable.~~
Throughout, text (including titles) in non-English languages needs to be in Lang templates. You can set |italic=no if you wish, but generally non-English words in the Latin alphabet are also italicised.

Done Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure most of what we give as "occupations" in the infobox really were "occupations" in the modern sense: particularly the translating, poetry and history-writing were more aristocratic side-interests than professional work. Perhaps the |known_for= parameter would be useful here?

Moved everything besides diplomat to known for Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

He dedicated himself to editing classic Greek and Latin manuscripts: advise classical instead, which is more neutral description and easier to defend (were the manuscripts really "classic", as distinct from the works themselves?).

Replaced all instances with "classical" Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Other than the date of birth, the Early Life section is pretty light on chronological precision: is that a reflection of the sources? ~~Do we have any idea, for example, when he was at Padua?~~ (I see the dates now added on Padua, but the broader point stands).

Hello UndercoverClassicist, thank you for your comments. I believe I have implemented all of your suggestions in this round of comments. Please let me know if there is anything else, or if I need to redo something you've already listed. Thanks! Kimikel (talk) 17:40, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As a result of his high standing in Venetian scholarly circles, he was named the Venetian ambassador to Spain in 1523, and navigated the volatile diplomatic climate caused by the conflict between Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France. : I think we need to mention here that Charles was also king of Spain.

Done Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Many of his contemporaries believed that he had the potential to become an ascendant and successful politician: what is ascendant saying here that isn't covered by successful?

Removed Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In general, the article moves lightly over things that might be better fleshed out or explained, particularly for readers who are not versed in the (many) areas of study touched on here. For instance:
- Navagero was born in 1483 to the wealthy and established Navagero family. The Navageros were patricians, members of the Venetian nobility.: the Venetian nobility wasn't just one thing: do we have any idea of how aristocratic this family was?
- He attended meetings of the academies of Rome, and subscribed to the humanist and Epicurean schools of thought: what were those things? Was that unusual or interesting at the time?
- He delivered a funeral oration for Catherine Cornaro, the final Queen of Cyprus, in 1510: how was it that he ended up doing that? Venice is a long way from Cyprus, isn't it?

Added that she was born and died in Venice, will address other two Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Many of his contemporaries believed that he had the potential to become an ascendant and successful politician: perhaps not your doing, but this is textbook WP:WEASEL, and it makes a big difference as to which contemporaries are being talked about. Does di Robilant give any specifics?

I 100% agree with the weasel comment, but unfortunately di Robilant does not. Will look for another source that attributes it to somebody Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, Navagero admired Catullus so greatly that in order to assert Catullus' poetic supremacy, he is said to have burned copies of the work of Martial, another Latin poet: this doesn't really connect unless you know a little about the relationship between the two: Catullus was the first major Latin poet of invective and, to Martial, the greatest. Martial saw himself as a humble imitator/apprentice to Catullus, but I imagine the two formed rival "fan clubs" in the Early Modern period.

Added that Martial was imitator/"literary inheriter" of Catullus Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We mention a lot of modern scholars in the section on his Latin and other compositions, but I think we need to be more precise as to exactly when those people were writing. "Modern", in classical scholarship, can cover at least the last century, if not the last two.

Added years of publication for modern scholar quotes Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

When editing a work, he generally preferred its older readings and interpretations: I think I know what you mean here, but it's not quite idiomatic or clear. What are, for example, the Aeneid's older readings? We mean older readings and interpretations of the Aeneid -- but then what is "older" in this context? A hundred years or a thousand?

From what I have read Navagero did not specify which manuscripts he was taking from, he just claimed to have found a reading in "old manuscripts". I added this tendency of his to the article, if it still does not read well, I can just remove it entirely Kimikel (talk) 15:18, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah: this may not quite be the same thing. In textual criticism, a manuscript's "reading" of a text is the word or spelling it has in a certain position. So, what N. may well have been saying is that, given a manuscript of the Aeneid from 1300 that began with "I sing of arms and the man" and one of 1400 that began "I sing of farms and the man", he would write "arms and the man" in his edition because the manuscript containing that reading is older. That's pretty standard practice in modern textual criticism, though I doubt the field was coherent enough to say the same in Navagero's time. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:56, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

More to follow. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 17:44, 29 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]