The text and transmission of Cicero's Brutus

This thesis is composed of three parts: a study of the transmission of Cicero’s rhetorical work Brutus, a critical edition, and a textual commentary. I begin Part One with a catalogue of the c.109 extant manuscripts of Brut. The second chapter of this part is devoted to the oldest surviving manuscript, the Cremona fragment. I demonstrate, against the view of earlier scholars, that the Cremona fragment is a part of the long-lost Codex Laudensis (L), the archetype of the entire tradition. In the following chapters, I use the stemmatic method to establish the relationships between the fifteenth-century copies of L. In Chapter 3, I prove that there are three independent lines of descent from L for the first part of the text, and four for the second. In Chapters 4 and 5, I study the manuscripts and printed editions which derive from the independent descendants of L, placing them into families and sub-families. In particular, I show that one manuscript, F, copied by Niccolò Niccoli, is the source of the majority of the tradition. The final chapter of this part, Chapter 6, is a textual history of Brut.: I connect my conclusions from Chapters 3-5 to the historical data, shedding fresh light on the roles played by various humanists of the Italian Renaissance, including Gasparino Barzizza, Flavio Biondo, and Niccolò Niccoli, in the dispersion of the text. No comprehensive study of the transmission of Brut. has been undertaken before, and many of my conclusions are completely new. In Part Two, I present a new text of Brut., together with an apparatus criticus. I diverge from Malcovati (1970) in c.100 places, sometimes reverting to the paradosis and sometimes printing a conjecture, whether my own or that of another scholar; these differences are listed in an appendix. In Part Three, I discuss all the most significant textual problems and explain many of my editorial decisions in a textual commentary.