Elucidation and Self-Explanation in Filelfo’s Marginalia

The Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481) added a conspicuous amount of marginal notes both to his Latin translations of ancient Greek texts and to his own poems and prose works. These were systematically reproduced in all the manuscript copies of these writings that were produced under the author’s supervision. Just like Filelfo continued to revise his texts, he kept polishing these (at times autograph) annotations. While many are just notabilia, pointing the reader to the names mentioned and the topics discussed in the main text, quite a few are elaborate glossae, which comment on the text or add „technical” (mostly prosodical and metrical) explanations. Notably, Filelfo systematically uses these annotations to demonstrate his superior command of Greek, to advertise his other writings, and to chastise his opponents. Often, his comments reflect ongoing polemics with other humanists, for which Filelfo’s extensive correspondence (of over two-thousand letters) offers ample complementary information. In some cases, distinct editorial stages in both main text and marginal notes demonstrate a dynamic interaction between the text and the author’s own framing of it, as well as between these texts and their early reception. In my paper I will discuss the various types of self-exegetical devices that are present in Filelfo’s numerous writings, and illustrate how he used them as propaganda tools designed to advertise his own qualities as a translator and a writer, just as much as they were supposed to provide his readership with elucidations of the text at hand.status: publishe