Poggio, and the Latin Classics in 15th-Century Italy, France and Germany

Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. One obvious conclusion to be drawn from Poggio's having "rescued" manuscripts including Lucretius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Silius Italicus, Vitruvius, Quintilian, Manilius, parts of Valerius Flaccus, Frontinus on aqueducts and several of Cicero's speeches, which Poggio found in Germany and France, where -- according to Poggio -- they were moldering away, neglected by barbarous German and French monks who did not know what treasures they had, who could barely read Latin -- one obvious conclusion is that, up until Poggio bringing these texts back to Italy, they had gone missing in Italy. 

 

As for there having been no noteworthy Latinists anywhere but in Italy in Poggio's time, that is nonsense obvious enough that I hope I don't need to comment on it. 

As far as the manuscripts of the Classics having been laying neglected and worm-eaten in German and French monasteries before Poggio "rescued" them, perhaps one reason so many of these manuscripts vanished after Poggio had "rescued" them and after they had been copied, is very simply that, had they survived, their physical condition might have given the lie to Poggio's account of the state of German and French libraries. 

Poggio wrote a celebrated treatise denouncing hypocrisy. Who would've known the subject better than an accomplished and ruthless hypocrite?

The relatively few manuscripts which did not disappear after Poggio "rescued" them from France and Germany do not present a worm-eaten, neglected appearance. 

And as far as Poggio's greatest claim to fame today, after Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling collection of errors entitled The Swerve, namely that he and he alone rescued Lucretius from oblivion: besides the northern mauscript which Poggio "discovered" and then lost, there are two other northern manuscripts of Lucretius which have survived to this day, both from the 9th century, and fragments of yet another, also from the 9th century.

I do not wish to make Poggio's nationalistic ravings any worse by adding to them nationalistic ravings of my own. One of the best things about Classical studies is its international character. All I wish to do is to encourage scholars to reflect upon to what extent Poggio's accounts of his manuscript-hunts, and above all, his descriptions of the places where he found manuscripts, make any sense.

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