Laelii Capilupi Centones ex Virgilio (Rome: Dorico, 1555): a digital edition — text, apparatus and data

In 1555 Lelio Capilupi of Mantua published a collection of poems in which not one line is his own: every verse is recomposed out of Virgil — a cento. Capilupi printed his sources in the margins, tagging each verse with the book of the Aeneid, Eclogues or Georgics it was lifted from. He left, in the book itself, the provenance of every borrowing, and so made his own compositional process inspectable. This deposit is the text, apparatus and derived data of a scholarly digital edition of that book. No modern edition of it has been published, and no translation is recorded. The edition resolves each printed tag to a canonical Virgil locus (CTS URN), locates the verbatim run the poet reused inside the line, scans every line for metre, and translates the whole into English. Where the poet's own margin is demonstrably wrong, the edition says so; where he reworked a borrowing on purpose, it says that too. The copy edited is the sine notis issue (printed without the printer's imprint), MC-C-145 in the collection's own inventory nomenclature — an internal shelf-mark, not a union-catalogue identifier. How the text was established. No prior transcription existed and the book was not hand-keyed: two independent machines read every page (a vision model and Transkribus HTR) and their agreement is independent corroboration — not proof; disagreements were adjudicated against the scan. Virgil was withheld during transcription — every line is real Virgil, so a model “knows” how each line should end and will autocomplete it — and consulted only afterwards, to verify. Source-tags. Of the 2,695 tag slots Capilupi printed, 2,627 (97.5%) resolve to a run of two or more words that is verbatim Virgil. This measures fit, not recovery: essentially all tags were recovered, and the residue is where the poet reworked the seam, plus some fifty genuine mis-attributions in his own margins. Translation. All 1,821 lines, established line by line and checked in a second independent Latinist pass. Licence. These files are CC BY 4.0. The page scans (referenced by the IIIF manifest, not included here) are CC0: a faithful reproduction of a public-domain work carries no new copyright, and none is claimed. See https://metamorphoses-collection.org/rights Live edition: https://metamorphoses-collection.org/editions/capilupi/ Companion essay — “The Machinery of Originality”: https://metamorphoses-collection.org/notes/2026-07-a-poem-made-of-virgil — and technical note (PDF): https://metamorphoses-collection.org/editions/capilupi/a-poem-made-of-virgil.pdf