Description

The book contains the editio princeps of Mattia Palmieri's mid-fifteenth-century Latin translation of Herodotus' Histories, almost contemporary or even earlier than that by Lorenzo Valla. It also investigates the intellectual and historical milieu in which Palmieri produced it as preparatory work for his historical works and to secure patronage under a church prelate by offering it to Cardinal Prospero Colonna. It includes some information on Palmieri's life and work and Herodotus' fortuna, a brief comparison between Palmieri's and Valla's translations, Palmieri's Greek model and Livy's influence on him in language and style. It finally approaches some methodological issues related to editing a text preserved in authorially revised versions, because the translation shows three different stages of revision. This first approach of Herodotus by Western scholars is significant, because Herodotus was foremost read as a quarry of information of ethnographical, geographical, historical and anthropological nature, in order for the Europeans to understand peoples they encountered on their exploratory voyages and the Ottomans, who were considered as descendants of the Persians.