While it explores an original whose complex textual history makes for fascinating linguistic stratification, the translation becomes a testing ground to gauge the purity of the target language and its degree of tolerance for loanwords
appropriation. In the fourteenth century, as Phalaris’ epistolary began his journey through translation and adaptation, another type of texts began to emerge: vernacular anthologies, collections of texts that included contemporary originals in the vernacular and translations from the classics. It is the case of the so-called Libro dell’Aquila, here studied by Giulio Vaccaro, a collection including excerpts from Dante’s Divina Commedia and Convivio as well as translations from Ovid’s Heroides and Virgil’s Aeneid, together with a number of other texts. Here, too, there is no distinction between vertical and horizontal translation: the late medieval sylloge is inclusive and curious; it makes use of classical as well as contemporary texts to construct a variegated historical narration that subsumes all its material without proposing chronological or canonical distinctions. Vaccaro reconstructs the early history and dissemination of this text up to the second half of the sixteenth century, showing how the translation process in this anthology may constitute one of many stages in the transition from classical to early modern, in its offering a range of instances from the classical to the medieval text. The volume continues by exploring more conventionally recognizable instances of horizontal translation through three case studies, respectively dedicated to literary, religious, and scientific texts.
