La mano di Sedulio Scoto in antichi manoscritti di Cicerone e dell’‘Historia Augusta’

In his ‘Collectaneum’, a substantial anthology of excerpts from classical and patristic authors Sedulius Scottus (9th c.) included many extracts from speeches by Cicero that did not circulate widely in the Middle Ages (‘In Pisonem’, ‘Pro Flacco’, ‘Pro Fonteio’ and the ‘Philippics’), and from the ‘Hisotoria Augusta’. For the Ciceronian sententiae he used a famous MS, the ‘Basilicanus’, Vat. Arch. S. Pietro H 25, of the early 9th century, and added in the margins typical reference signs; for the ‘Historia Augusta’ he exploited a fundamental witness, Vat. Pal. lat. 899, early 9th c., produced in northern Italy and kept during the Middle Ages in the Cathedral Library of Verona, where Petrarch found it. Here too the margins exhibit signs in his hand. This paper analyses his interventions in these early MSS in the light of his subsequent use of them in his ‘De rectoribus Christianis’.