Columella: On Agriculture, Vol. I (Loeb)

All the manuscripts listed above were known and used by Lundström in his editions of Res Rustica (Rural Matters), Books I–II, VI–VII, X–XI, and De Arboribus (On Trees), and their readings are provided in his apparatus criticus (critical notes).¹ Those to which he and others have attached the greatest importance,² especially S, A, a, b, c, and d, were collated by him or by his associates, Langlet and Stroemberg, with particular care. His readings of less important codices are given with correspondingly less detail. More than half of the total number of manuscripts were evaluated and collated by Häussner for his edition of Book X, De Cultu Hortorum (On the Cultivation of Gardens).³ The present translator has examined a number of the best manuscripts in their respective libraries and has collated S, A, a, and c with Schneider’s text for Books III–V, VIII–IX, and XII. In addition, he has compared the readings of Morganensis 138, formerly Hamiltonensis 184 (= M), with the texts and apparatuses of Lundström and Schneider. This is a beautiful piece of Roman writing, signed and dated by Henriettus Rufinus de Murialdo in the year 1469, and it is now in the possession of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.

It is generally agreed that the two oldest manuscripts, S and A, are derived from the same archetype. It is more difficult, however, to determine the relationship of R—the fifteenth-century group—to S and A.

¹ See p. xx, n. 1. The recent edition of Books VI–VII includes readings of ten additional manuscripts of the R family, and of three manuscripts from the 11th and 14th centuries containing excerpts from these books.
² Lundström rates a, b, c, d, m, q, and s as the best of the fifteenth-century class. Cf. his “Ein Columella-Excerptor aus dem 15. Jahrhundert” (A 15th-century Columella Excerptor), Skrifter utgifna af Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Upsala (Upsala, 1894), III. 6. 11; and L. Iuni Moderati Columellae opera quae exstant (The Extant Works of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella), fasc. 1 (Upsala, 1897), Praef. viii-x.
³ See p. xxi, n. 1.