I think it’s a great idea to put in your work as annotations. Go wild, and see also my response to Mike – what I wrote there more or less applies to you here as well.

Did you mean that you’ll add your own references in the same format as Padoan’s notes follow, or Padoan’s notes themselves? If the latter, please make sure to cite as usual. And thanks so much for all your pro bono work!

In the Pico project, “sources” is one of the four or five types of annotations envisioned in the menu (and the database). Would this model (a set typology of annotations) viable for all our texts? Again, as I suggested in my post, it would be great, at some point, to be able to search text and annotations simultaneously (according to different typologies?). So that, for example, we could search only for specific sources (for ex., all quotes from Cicero, De Oratore, with the texts they were annotated for…).

If annotations work for this, that’s great. (Hoping to get them over to the right, of course.) I can already see some problems on the horizon here, however:

1. We should distinguish between B’s explicit quotations and his implicit ones. Sometimes he cites someone from someone else’s citations. This occurs most frequently in reference to Eusebius but not infrequently elsewhere.

2. Despite B’s profound erudition, he made lots of mistakes. This ranges from the most innocent “typos” to incorrect attributions to books, authors, etc.

3. If we proceed simply by putting in Padoan’s notes, we run into two new issues. The first is that they would all have to attributed to Padoan, of course, which could raise some eyebrows and the second is that he is not always correct. I’ve already found about a dozen mistakes between the Acc and Canto IV.

So, taken all together, this would mean that, other than where Boccaccio is correct, we’re really dealing with double quotations and sources that extend who-knows-how deep. If Boccaccio cites a particular work or author, then I think it’s okay to put in the proper source (with accurate transcription and bibliography from the most reliable edition). Here too, though, we should put in more than just what he says, I think, because he’s very often working (extremely rapidly) from memory; we should also include where he may have gotten it. Sometimes, for example, he takes things from Burley and fuses them with other things from Vincent of Beauvais, naming only one (or neither) as his source.

In sum, these source annotations are MUCH more complicated than Padoan makes it appear. If we do go with this technique (and, of course, there are some pretty good reasons to do so), ALL of Padoan’s information should be checked out, flushed out and, where necessary, repaired. Otherwise, it doesn’t make good scholarly sense to transcribe his notes directly into our project.

This leads me to another can of worms: Leonzio Pilato and Paolo da Perugia. What we know about the former, of course, was greatly enhanced by Pertusi. What we know about the latter is still largely scattered to the winds. Hortis is helpful, no doubt, but what do we do when these two, for example, are cited specifically by name?

Anyway, these are just a few ideas off the top of my head. What about starting with the quotations that B directly into the text instead? I’m thinking of what shows up in quotation marks and in blockquotes. This would be very useful and a great place to work out kinks before jumping into Padoan. Even there, for example, it would be useful to correct the mistaken references and to provide the modern text.

My 2 cents…

M