Emendation, Divination

Humanists employed a simplified moral language of virtue and vice to describe their textual emendations. An emendation could be cast as an act of healing or, when deemed unsuccessful, as inflicting new wounds. This chapter argues that the Counter-Reformation should be seen as a textual project, which sought to codify Catholic tradition and liturgy. Within this context, it explores how Catholic scholars employed this moral language and divided emendation as grounded, positively, in the authority of the manuscript tradition or, negatively, in private reason. The latter was frequently understood as an act of divination. This chapter explores how Delrio used this language to correct not only the text of the Senecan tragedies, but his friend Lipsius as well.