Making Antiquity Whole: Renaissance Completions of Classical Fragments
Renaissance readers of classical texts were keenly aware of how much Greek and Latin literature had been lost in the transmission. In the face of lost, damaged, and fragmentary texts, humanist scholars used their philological methodology and rhetorical training to recreate incomplete and missing works. Simultaneously historicist and present-directed, these completions aimed to repair textual damage and, by transmitting whole works, secure the future survival of classical texts through their present use. This paper explores the particular example of the highly damaged corpus of Plautus to suggest that Renaissance classical scholarship operates at the intersection of historicism and re-embodiment. Find more information here.