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gy', to the extent of trying to abandon his identity as a classical philologist and to read the poem innocent of the Geschichte der Forschung. This leads to the second deviation from Jauss. |
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Edmunds deals with the history of philological interpretation not in the third reading, as Jauss did, but separately: ''Scholarship" is a chapter not in "Part One" of his book, called "The Jaussian Readings", but in "Part Two", called "Other Approaches". So Edmunds radically separates scholarship from reading. Even if we do not accept this, we can admit that modern philological scholarship has at least changed reading. Edmunds dates this change to the nineteenth century (75), but further consideration will allow us to revise this date and at the same time to demonstrate that scholarship is a form of reading after all. |
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Even if philological 'interpretations' as we know them have not always existed, commentaries on Horace were written already in Antiquity, and then in great quantity in the Renaissance. These commentaries usually contain an argumentum, which shows how the commentator understood the poem (as apart from the local features picked out for comment). Thus Porphyrio, from probably the third century, offers this summary: 'he exhorts Thaliarchus to a more cheerful life, to enjoy the playful activities of youth, as long as his age permits'. In the most influential Renaissance commentary, that of Lambinus (1561), we find 'in winter one should indulge in pleasure', which keeps recurring (with variants) in editions of the Odes until the beginning of the nineteenth century.42 It seems as if Lambinus' sententia is meant not just as a summary of the speaker's advice to Thaliarchus, but also as an application (in the Gadamerian sense) to the situation of the reader, because the advice is now formulated generally, not limited to youth.43 But explication of the poem as poem, beyond the moral extracted from it, begins only in the second half of the eighteenth century (at least in Germany), the period which saw the rise both of aesthetics and of literary hermeneutics.44 The first such explication of the Soracte ode that I have found occurs in a commentary by Jakob Friedrich Schmidt, published in 1776.45 Interestingly enough, this is a commentary in German, not in Latin, and it is addressed |
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42 For the ancient commentaries see Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) xlvii-li and P.L. Schmidt (1992) 498500. A useful annotated list of editions from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century is to be found in Mitscherlich (1800) xlii-cliv. |
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43 A generalization with respect to gender seems not intended: as women generally were not taught Latin, they were not reckoned with as readers of Horace. Only at the end of the eighteenth century there appear vernacular adaptations of 'Horace for young ladies': cf. Pietsch 1988: 1 with n. 3. |
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44 See the pioneering article of E.A. Schmidt (1981), which studies the changes in the German commentaries on Horace's Odes from 1700 to 1850. The magisterial work of Weimar (1989), although devoted to German philology, is also very important for the backgrounds to classical philology. |
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45 J.F. Schmidt (1776) 26066. |
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