Eleventh-Annual Bainton Lecture:

Erasmus Auctor et Actor*

by Charles Witke

literary form or event of the commentary is ancient in origin. In its Tearliesthe state, commentaries, or in Greek hypomnemata, or notes on some subject, were just that: notes toward a more finished product. In the ascen- dancy of Alexandrian literary scholarship, the commentary becomes a phil- ological and literary exercise wherein a work, usually of high or canonic status, receives the attention of a commentator. The task of the commentator is to free the text of errors of misunderstanding, including sometimes the emending of the received text. A further object is to free the text of obscurities of gram- mar, syntax and meaning. The commentator betrays the accidents of the time and place of composing the commentary, and perhaps social class and intel- lectual preoccupation and literary or political orientation and the like, but only rarely and only as it were en route to clarifying the text at hand and ac- cumulating a storehouse of information about matters which the text raises. The presence of the commentator is as a facilitator of the reader of the often canonical text rather than as the writer of another text with which the reader has to deal. The reader of such a classical commentary as Asconius Pedianus on , or Servius on , does not so much construct meaning as as- similate meaning, the meaning of the canonical text having been assessed by a commentator who makes sense of it and who affirms this assessment in the commentary. Erasmus functions as a guide and teacher in the two commentaries under consideration here. The first is on the pseudo-Ovidian poem Nux, or The Nut Tree: a poem from in which a nut tree laments its state of exploitation in a witty style quite reminiscent of , and conducts a forensic discourse on its expectations. The second set of commentaries is on two poems

[26] 27 of Prudentius, one on the Nativity of Christ, the other on the Epiphany. In I these commentaries Erasmus departs most radically from expected usage. Commentaries normatively served to elucidate and amplify a given writer, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages and in the renovatio of letters. The commentaries of Julius are really an exception, commentarii here being a translation of the Greek hypomnemata, notes in preparation for a finished work. And Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars are just that: material gathered for the writer, or another writer, to prepare a longer, more polished effort.2 Erasmus goes beyond the received notion of commentary to use it as a vehicle for inserting his own persona as actor, doer, performer, in its framework. As auctor, authority, he dominates the dedicatory letter as we will see; as actor and as auctor he presides as well over the commentary. In the case of the Nux, Erasmus transcends and transforms the authorial conventions and conceits of pseudo-Ovid, mutating them into new purposes with his in- terventions as both an auctor in his own right, and as actor, the true protagonist of the poem as well as of its commentary. The Nux remains intact and indeed enhanced, for this appears to be the first commentary devoted to it; though idiosyncratic, Erasmus' elucidations are still valuable. Yet Erasmus stands out as clearly as the text he addresses. The text remains situated firmly in its textual past, going back to antiquity. Its commentator is called commen- tator because Erasmus uses the title commentarius. Erasmus creates his own role as self-styled commentator: a fairly low accolade indeed, and likewise an anon- ymous self styling, rather like his use of praeclarus arti fex in the dedicatory letter to which I shall shortly turn. Yet Erasmus takes his place unequivocally in that text, and brings it renown and glory by his own status as scholar in the present 3 day: or better, in the present printed page.3 Basically, what Erasmus does is to construct by the commentary and within the commentary a second but not secondary literary text of which the reader constructs the meaning just as the reader constructs the meaning of the os- tensibly primary text, or as some literary theoreticians would doubtless have it, the pre-text. Erasmus does this in varying ways in his commentary on these two Latin texts from and we shall examine his antiquity, presently ' procedures in detail.