Vatican Mythographer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Vatican Mythographer(s) (Template:Lang-la) is the name given to the unknown author or authors of three medieval mythographical texts found together in a single medieval manuscript, Vatican Reg. lat. 1401. The name is that used by Angelo Mai when he published the first edition of the works in 1831. The second and third texts are also found separately in other manuscripts, leading scholars to refer to a Second and a Third Vatican Mythographer.
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The Vatican Mythographers aimed to provide a pared-down "fact-book" of mythology, stripped of nuance, not unlike the Fabulae of Hyginus, who, however, had provided no Roman stories and so could not suffice. Taken together, the "Vatican Mythographers" provided a source-book for the myths of Greeks and Romans and their iconography through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The texts were being copied in manuscripts as late as the fifteenth century. The Vatican Mythographer provided texts that were parsed allegorically to provide Christianized moral and theological implications, "until in time the pagan divinities blossomed into full-fledged vices and virtues". Their testimonia, sources and parallel passages provide central documents in tracing the transmission of Classical culture to the Medieval world, which is a major theme in the history of ideas in the West.
No Classical authors are quoted directly, but the author seems to have used the commentaries on Virgil by Servius and the scholiast on Statius as a source.
Mai made many slips in rapidly transcribing the manuscript under difficult conditions, and he was in the habit of substituting euphemisms where the original was too steamy to transcribe and publish, even in Latin. A revised, indexed edition of 1834, corrected by Georg Heinrich Bode without access to the Vatican manuscript, is the version that replaced Mai's first edition and has been represented in popular twentieth-century anthologies of Greek mythology, such as those by Edith Hamilton, Robert Graves or Karl Kerenyi. In 1947 the Vatican Mythographers were described as "highly deceptive sources which should be used with much caution". Since then much modern work has been done to unravel the sources of the texts, which is represented in a new edition by Nevio Zorzetti (1995).
Ten manuscripts are known for the second text, and more than forty for the third. The author of the third text has sometimes been identified as a certain Alberic, perhaps working in London.
Zorzetti places the original text of the First Vatican Mythographer between the last quarter of the ninth century and the third quarter of the eleventh, based on the latest source cited in it and the date of the first source to cite it. The Second Vatican Mythographer uses the first, and is perhaps dated to the 11th century.
