The Bolognese manuscript Archiginnasio B 3477 is a significant witness to the methods used for teaching Homer’s Iliad in early 16th-century Italy. It was compiled by the Italian humanist Pontico Virunio (alias for Ludovico da Ponte or Pontico de’ Carcani, c. 1465–1525) in the early 1520s, likely as a guide for his own lectures on the Iliad in a school of Bologna or Parma. Mutilous, written in a rather convulse humanistic script, the manuscript contains a literal Latin translation, along with grammatical, etymological, historical, and scientific annotations covering from the end of book 1 to the end of book 5 of the Iliad. Its importance lies in the rarity of such teaching materials from the Renaissance, particularly those produced by school teachers rather than university professors. The structure and content of these teaching notes, however, closely resemble the lecture notes on the Iliad taken by university students of the same period. Indeed, Pontico Virunio’s teaching notebook appears to be partly composed as a collage of the lecture notes from his years as a university student. This is supported by the explicit references to his (real or supposed) former professors and by connections with surviving notebooks from his youth. The manuscript therefore offers a unique synthesis of Virunio’s lifelong engagement with learning through the lens of his teaching.
The project includes a critical edition of the manuscript, accompanied by an introduction discussing Virunio’s methods of translation, commentary and teaching, as well as the possible relationship with earlier Latin versions and the broader historical and cultural context. The text will also be compared with Virunio’s earlier student notebooks and his printed works.