Enarrationes allegoricae fabularum fulgentii placiadis [Bound with

Folio. ff. [48] (lacking blank leaf f⁶, which divides the two texts, colophon and register appearing on f⁵v, at the end of the Mythologiae). Signatures: a-d⁸, e⁴, f-g⁶ (f^₃ wrongly marked f; f^₆ blank). Bound by Aquarius in full plain calf, gilt-lettered and blindstamped. Large and small woodcut initials. Imprint from colophon, f. [41]v.

Editio princeps of both texts, the first being the chief work of Fulgentius on ancient myths, and the second, the notorious ‘Expositio sermonum antiquorum’ or ‘De prisco sermone,’ an annotated list of 62 obsolete words whose meaning he professes to explain, usually with a quotation from now-perished texts of early Roman writers, most of whom are unnamed, and/or otherwise lost. That some, or many of these contextual passages are fakes, i.e. inventions by Fulgentius, has long been realized (in ‘Literary Frauds among the Romans’ (1894) Alfred Gudeman noted that Fulgentius is ‘the only Roman writer, so far as we know, who deliberately manufactured his evidence by inventing mythical authors’), but just which are genuine and which forged remains problematic: a more recent attempt to sort them out is H. Baldwin, ‘Fulgentius and his Sources’, Traditio, 44 (1988), pp. 17-57. See also the very extensive annotated bibliography in the online ‘Fulgentius’ home page, conducted by Gregory Hays of the University of Virginia; F. R. Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries: A Third Census. Millwood (N.Y.), 1973, F-326; British Museum, Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum, vol. vi, p. 773.

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