La terra di mezzo del commentario umanistico ai testi classici

Scholars have lengthy debated on the originality of the humanistic commentary on the classical authors with respect to the medieval commentaries on the same authors. If the question can be regarded as still open for the works written in the first half of the 15th century, the birth of the printing determined a dramatic change in the contents and the form of the commentaries. From the point of view of the content the humanists are much more interested in the different readings transmitted by the manuscripts, whilst the printing allows both to have different layouts of the commentaries and to insert new tools as indexes and page numbers for consulting them. The present paper will present the new aspects of the printed commentaries and will try to explain the reasons which produced each change.