The Shaping of the Latin Classics in Fourteenth-Century Italy

The paper offers a first overview of a research project which investigates how Humanistic culture developed in Italy during the fourteenth century and focuses on the connections between the texts of the Latin classics and their material transmission. The project is based on a selection of manuscripts preserved in the Canonici collection at the Bodleian Library, one of the most interesting collections of Italian manuscripts to be found outside of Italy. The material in the Canonici collection offers some evidence for inferring that notaries and lawyers, and their network, played a major role not only in the dissemination, but also in the forms in which the Latin classics were transmitted.