But if you spend so much time working out the signs that texts have gone wrong or become garbled, or if you identify some of them as downright fakes, or if you just seem to be enjoying yourself too much while doing all this, then you risk upsetting some powerful people. Rather than seeming a harmless literary potterer, you might start looking like a dangerous heretic, or a provocative “pagan.” And that would make you one of the subjects of the next chapter: scholarly humanists, still in Italy, still from much the same period, but driven by more rebellious purposes.
