The transmission and scholia to Lucan's 'Bellum Civile'

The medieval tradition to Lucan is rich and disorderly. (1) The very contamination of the text argues for further investigation of the manuscripts; it is a mistake to assume that every later medieval manuscript must necessarily inherit the same textual tradition. (2) Beinecke MS 673 (J) at Yale University may be taken as representative of a tradition of manuscripts containing commentary. The manuscript, which contains the text of Lucan from 1.1-5.535 and 8.358-10.438, was probably written in Italy in the late eleventh or early twelfth century and contains numerous marginalia. The scholia were probably copied from the exemplar, but are not a unity in any strict sense, as they show evidence of both selection and interpolation. (3) The text of J tends to ally itself with G,V, or (noticeably in the latter part of the manuscript) Z, but comparison with a number of other manuscripts reveals no decisive relationship. (4) The text of the scholia (with translation) is thoroughly medieval in language, even though some of the notes ultimately derive from our oldest commentaries to Lucan, the Commenta Bernensia and the Adnotationes super Lucanum. (5) These works, long thought to be the remains of continuous commentaries descending ultimately from late antiquity, undoubtedly contain ancient material. But by the ninth century all that remained was a scholiastic hodgepodge in which a process of accretion typical of medieval commentary had already begun. The scholia in J belong to a later stage of this active tradition, and represent the type of manuscript from which the twelfth-century magister Arnulf of Orleans derived both learning and misinformation.