1. Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), here pp. 4–5 especially.
2. The standard biography on Marsi is Arnaldo della Torre, Paolo Marsi da Pescina. Contributo alla storia dell' Accademia Pomponiana (Rocca S. Casciano, 1903); see especially pp. 144–92 for his travels, discussed in this paper. Rosella Bianchi addresses Marsi's journey to a certain extent in “Il commento a Lucano e il ‘Natalis’ di Paolo Marsi,” in R. Avesani, G. Billanovich, et al., ed., Miscellanea Augusto Campana I, Medioevo e umanesimo 44 (Padua, 1981), 71–100. For Marsi's study and instruction of Ovid see Francesco Lo Monaco, “Dal commento medievale al commento umanistico: il caso dei ‘Fasti’ di Ovidio,” in Studi italiani di filologia classica 85=3a. ser., 10 (1992), 848–60, and Egmont Lee, Sixtus IV and Men of Letters (Rome, 1978), 183–84 and 251–52. Though no records of university payments survive for 1474, I now believe that is when Marsi was hired to teach: compare the preface of his Fasti commentary, in which he speaks of his appointment and identifies the subjects of, the first two academic years as 1.) Horace and Ovid's Tristia and 2.) Ovid's Fasti (“lyricos primo quidem anno Horatianos ac Ovidii Tristia diligentissime interpretatus sum, proximo vero divinum illud Fastorum opus”) with the gloss at F. 3,164: “I lectured on this passage on that very day which was added to February for intercalary purposes in A.D. 1476” (“eo enim die hunc locum legimus, qui quidem dies ad intercalationem Februario superadditus est anno salutis 1476”). In the academic year 1481–82, Marsi taught the Fasti again (at F. 2,389: “The Tiber had flooded, as these lines” [“Inundaverat Tybris, ut vidimus hoc quoque tempore bis maxime septimo idus ianuarias anno salutis Mcccclxxxii, dum haec profitebamur”]).
3. See John H. Rowe, “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 1–20.
4. As an example of travel literature, the reader may wish to consult Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction. Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 55 (Leiden, 1994), as well as Hermann Wiegand, Hodoeporica. Studien zur neulateinischen Reisedichtung des deutschen Kulturraums im 16. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1984) and Beate Czapla, “Neulateinische Lehrdichtung zwischen der literarischen Tradition von Hesiod bis Manilius und der neuzeitlichen Ars apodemica am Beispiel von Bernhardus Mollerus’ Rhenus und Cyricacus Lentulus’ Europa,”, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch. Journal of Neo-Latin Language and Literature 1 (1999), 21–48.
5. Two other, contemporary hands are also visible: that of an amanuensis perhaps or a corrector, who has crossed out and changed a number of verses as well as inserted missing pages of text; and a reader who occasionally makes a marginal annotation or copies a poem's title. I quote from the original and unrevised version of the poems in all instances, unless otherwise noted; I have modernized punctuation, but preserved Marsi's medieval and internally inconsistent spelling (the interchangeable e and ae, th and t, k and c, for example). One should note, however, that the very appearance of orthography such as ae for e indicates Marsi's strong educational and philological grounding. Whereas in the 1430s an early humanist such as Leonardo Bruni had still defended continuing the medieval style e for ae etc. (cf. Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature [Chicago and London, 1968], pp. 219–223: “Bruni's Spelling: the Michi-Mihi Controversy and the Use of Diphthongs”), Lorenzo Valla in his Elegantiarum linguae latinae libri VI (1440ff., first printed 1471) had already pleaded for a return to correct classical spelling and usage (cf., i.a., Mariangela Regoliosi, Nel Cantiere del Valla. Elaborazione e montaggio delle “Elegantie” [Rome, 1993]).