erudition and the republic of letters 5 (2020) 117-162 brill.com/erl Between Antiquarianism and Satire: Tertullian’s De Pallio in the Age of Confessions, c. 1590–1630 Marcello Cattaneo Junior Research Fellow in English, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
[email protected] Abstract This article analyses the scholarly efforts of two generations of late humanists on a text that became particularly popular in learned circles around the turn of the seventeenth century: Tertullian’s mock oration on the philosophical cloak, known as De Pallio. It focusses on a methodological shift in scholarship from conjectural emendation to an- tiquarian explication, and it highlights the polemical and literary dynamics at the basis of the text’s reinterpretation as a satire. These insights are in turn linked to the chang- ing circumstances of learned polemics in the Republic of Letters, and to the central place of confessional strife as an organizing principle for scholarship itself. I conclude the article by gesturing towards the seventeenth-century fortune of the ‘pallium’ as a polemical trope. Keywords Tertullian – De Pallio – Claude Saumaise – Isaac Casaubon – satire – confession 1 Introduction By the consent of generations of students, Tertullian is a very hard author. But one work above all has left behind a trail of perplexed readers and commenta- tors: it is the speech that the African church father pronounced to his fellow citizens of Carthage to justify his choice to dismiss typically Roman clothes such as the toga in favour of the Greek philosophical cloak, the humble palli- um. Eduard Norden, the doyen of Latinists at the turn of the twentieth century, © Marcello Cattaneo, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24055069-00502001 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0Downloaded license.