Deliberate emendation a feature of Renaissance MSS, not early minuscule MSS
It is in the MSS. of the fifteenth century, the period of the Renaissance of classical studies, that deliberate emendation has most usurped the place of faithful reproduction of an original. Manuscripts were at that time to a great extent written by scholars themselves or under their supervision; and it was regarded as the first duty of the preparer of a MS. to furnish his readers with a text which was correct in sense and grammar. The corruptions, real or imaginary, of the original were silently emended; and lacunae were filled up with words or whole lines, suggested by the ingenuity of the scribe himself or of the scholar whose directions he followed. The fifteenth-century MSS. of Plautus which contain the last twelve plays afford examples to the full. We know them to have been copied from the “Codex Ursinianus” (p. 6), and from no other source; and since their original is preserved to us, we can estimate exactly the deviations of each copy. Thus in Pseud. 1063 “viso quid rerum meus Ulixes egerit”, the archetype of our minuscule MSS. had qui instead of quid a common mistake (ch. vii. § 2). The corruption quirerum is faithfully preserved in B, but in the original of CD a new confusion ensued—the substitution of s for r (ch. vi. § 1), quiserum. This quiserum the late copy boldly alters to quid servus: “viso quid servus meus Ulixes egerit.” Again, the missing scenes of the Amphitruo were supplied by a Renaissance scholar, Hermolaus Barbarus, with verses of his own; and these scenae suppositae appear both in MSS. of the time and in the early printed editions.1 It is these practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which have brought MSS. of this period under suspicion, and which attach uncertainty to any text, such as the Silvae of Statius, for which we have no older authority than Renaissance MSS., or the poem on Prosody of Terentianus Maurus, for which we have only the “editio princeps” (Milan, 1497).2
