Between Antiquarianism and Satire: Tertullian’s De Pallio in the Age of Confessions, c. 1590–1630

Abstract

This article analyses the scholarly efforts of two generations of late humanists on a text that became particularly popular in learned circles around the turn of the seventeenth century: Tertullian’s mock oration on the philosophical cloak, known as De Pallio. It focusses on a methodological shift in scholarship from conjectural emendation to antiquarian explication, and it highlights the polemical and literary dynamics at the basis of the text’s reinterpretation as a satire. These insights are in turn linked to the changing circumstances of learned polemics in the Republic of Letters, and to the central place of confessional strife as an organizing principle for scholarship itself. I conclude the article by gesturing towards the seventeenth-century fortune of the ‘pallium’ as a polemical trope.