Ancient Fables in the Middle Ages: A New Critical Edition of the Romulus Gallicanus

This chapter focuses on the Romulus Gallicanus, one of three redactions (recensiones) of the Latin Romulus. A collection of fables in prose, presumably arranged around the 9th c. CE, the Latin Romulus merges various kinds of sources, including Phaedrus, the Latin tradition of Aesop and Babrius, and pseudo-Dositheus. Such a variety of sources, alongside the oral component intrinsic to fables as a genre, produced an extremely complex, and multifarious, textual tradition, which resulted in three main versions: the recensio Gallicana, the recensio vetus, and the Codex Wissenburgensis. Building upon my work towards a new critical edition of the recensio Gallicana (RG), this chapter presents the most recent discoveries concerning the manuscript tradition of this text and explores its relationship with the ancient sources. As well as offering some examples of how a (re)examination of the manuscript tradition implies a thorough revision of the Latin text, I also focus on the dialectical relationship between the Romulus Gallicanus and its main model, Phaedrus. By showing how the Medieval collection modifies its classical model, this chapter also resituates the recensio Gallicana within its historical and cultural context.