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errors, and from the displacement of not just one, but even several verses: which had brought such great confusion to the entire work that previously it was not even sufficiently clear what Manilius Marcus Manilius, a Roman poet who wrote 'Astronomica' in the 1st century AD intended. Therefore, it is to be forgiven if no one understood that writer, whom the errors did not allow one to even touch; and it must be taken in good part if no one touched him, whom they did not understand. Long ago, Lorenzo Bonincontri An Italian humanist and astrologer (1410–1491) from the town of San Miniato in Italy, a learned man for the capacity of that age when literature was first raising its head, had published a commentary on him. But it had to be endured that a reader did not depart more learned from reading it, if indeed the astrologer had not even harmed the poet himself. For if any parts in Bonincontri's text vary from the written manuscripts, those are interpolations Unauthorized or speculative changes to the original text by Bonincontri; and furthermore, the truth never slipped from him in matters of slightly greater importance: although otherwise he had obtained a very ancient manuscript, as he himself says. However, as far as we can achieve by conjecture, that manuscript does not seem better to me than the Gembloux manuscript original: "Gemblacensi"; a famous 10th-century manuscript from Gembloux Abbey, now in Brussels which we have used: which somehow surpasses all other written copies in quality, or, to speak more truly, the others are worse than it. For none of those surviving today are truly good. But it did not benefit Bonincontri much to obtain an ancient manuscript which he did not know how to use: if he had thrown that wretched interpreter to his own evil fate and to the dogs of today, he would have perished by a worse fate than