Ricerche sul ‘Florilegium Gallicum’ : (verso un’edizione critica)

The dissemination of Classical Latin literature in the Middle Ages followed several paths, some of them less visible, but no less significant; florilegia, providing partial but often more practical access to the sources, no doubt represent a crucial intermediary between ancient texts and their medieval readers. This thesis studies one of these florilegia, the one that scholars consider to be the most remarkable: the Florilegium Gallicum (FG), gathering more than 4700 extracts drawn from some thirty authors and compiled in Central to Northern France during the 12th century. Although known to classical scholars since the 16th century and despite the attention it has gained over the last hundred years, the FG remains an enigmatic object in many respects. After an introduction offering a brief historical overview of medieval florilegia with classical content and a profile of the research produced on the FG, the study focuses on the manuscript transmission of the collection, which is divided, according to the bibliography, into two categories: the four codices bearing witness to a compact and relatively stable text, which can be considered the « true » Gallicum, and those transmitting several secondary versions of the florilegium, resulting from a multifaceted process of selection and addition with respect to the original form. The stemmatic relationships between the witnesses of the standard text have been analysed in an attempt to fill in some gaps in the bibliography; the main novelty is the re-evaluation of the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 711, wrongly considered as a reworked witness like anyone else, but in fact offering a text of very high quality thanks to the contamination from a source superior to the common ancestor of the four standard manuscripts. This is followed by a global analysis of the FG, starting with its contents and the criteria for their organisation, and then descending to the paratexts and the extracts themselves, their themes and the alterations made by the compiler. The study then moves on to the destination of the work, which is certainly not a didactic tool (contrary to what has been proposed by the bibliography), but which could have been conceived as a sort of portable library. The presentation of the FG is completed by an analysis of the elements we have at our disposal to propose a dating in the second half of the 12th century and a location in Central to Northern France, which is broader, but also more cautious and more legitimate, than the current hypothesis which places it in Orléans. The conclusions proposed on the origin of the florilegium are based on the material derived from the analysis of its sources: a more or less extensive investigation is devoted to each text used by the compiler, attempting to establish, with varying degrees of precision, the place of the Gallicum within the direct transmission of each one. At the other end of the history of the florilegium, its aftermath from the 12th to the 15th century is explored, after the proposal for a theoretical framework for the study of the influence of a compilation. Two cases are analysed in greater detail: Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum maius (13th century) and the Flores moralium auctoritatum (early 14th century). The monographic study is followed by a sample edition of the FG, based on three remarkable sources (Martial, Quintilian, Aulus Gellius); in comparison with the partial editions already appeared, particular attention has been paid to the presentation of the lessons of the direct witnesses of the sources, which allow us to understand the place of the Gallicum within the transmission of each work. Since it was impossible to produce a complete edition, a final appendix contains a detailed list of all the extracts making up the florilegium.