SUMMARY
The publication under review documents the exhibition Leitores dos Clássicos. Edições italianas na transição do século XV para o século XVI, held from 6 November 2015 to 30 January 2016 in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP). Twenty items from the library were on show: sixteen Italian incunabula, three Spanish ones, and a book issued in Basle in the 16th century9. The catalogue, authored by Ana Tarrío of the Centro de Estudos Clássicos in Lisbon, opens with a prologue that positions Portugal during the reigns of João II and Manuel I on the fringes of the Europe-wide intellectual, educational, and literary culture and practice of humanism. Three exhibition items — Inc. 523, 832, and 462 — are explicitly singled out on the basis of their provenance and contemporary marginalia. They embody the import of humanist editions of the Classics from Italy to Portugal, the development of education and literary composition at the Portuguese court, and the philological preparation of Portuguese students in Italy. The other exhibits are similarly presented as witnesses to these developments, though signs of their use in Portugal during the late 15th and early 16th centuries are said to be less evident. Tarrío underscores, in addition, the need for further investigations into the Italian incunabula of the BNP and other Portuguese collections, and announces that the materials on show will be relevant for her thematic epilogue dealing with the chronology and definition of Portuguese humanism, a difficult field of research « inteiramente dependente da elucidação da cronologia e modalidades de receção dos modelos humanísticos oriundos da Península Itálica.» (11). (...)