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Isaac Casaubon’s Observationes and his Lost Treatise De Critica
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Botley, Paul (2022) Isaac Casaubon’s Observationes and his Lost Treatise De Critica. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutions, 85 . pp. 145-163. doi:10.1086/721831 ISSN 0075-4390.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/721831
Abstract
Isaac Casaubon’s treatise De critica was apparently completed, but it was never published, and no manuscript of the work has come to light. Since it appears to have been a substantial work on textual criticism by one of the most eminent and capable scholars of the period, its loss is tantalising. This article uses new manuscript evidence to throw light on its content and purpose. Five pieces of manuscript evidence are presented here. Three of these are documents which Casaubon himself composed while preparing the work: two leaves outlining the contents of the work, and two sets of notes intended for the first book. The final part of the article will look at the role of Johannes Woverius of Hamburg (1574–1612) in the later fortunes of this work and publish a suppressed passage from a letter of Casaubon showing that Woverius had seen a copy of the treatise. Many of the editions used by Casaubon when making his notes are identified below, as are a number of printed books annotated in Casaubon’s hand. This new evidence illustrates the evolution of Casaubon’s early scholarship in the 1580s and 1590s. It allows a first description of his Observationes, an unpublished work which lay beneath, and evolved into, De critica. An outline of De critica enables an assessment of the place of Casaubon’s lost work in the critical literature of the late Renaissance, and a new account of its relationship to an extant work, Woverius’s treatise De polymathia.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutions | ||||||||
Publisher: | University of Chicago Press | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0075-4390 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 2022 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 85 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 145-163 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1086/721831 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | © 2022 by [name of copyright holder]. Accepted) for publication by Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutions on 13/01/2022 | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Copyright Holders: | © 2022 The Warburg Institute. All rights reserved. | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 31 January 2022 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 28 October 2023 | ||||||||
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