Relating to or of the nature of a commentary; pertaining to explanatory notes or annotations.
From 'commentary' (from Latin 'commentarium,' from 'commentari' meaning to think about) plus the suffix '-ial' (relating to). The word describes the characteristic style and nature of interpretive scholarly texts.
Medieval scholars were obsessed with 'commentarial traditions'—each generation of academics would write commentaries on previous commentaries, creating layers upon layers of interpretation, so a single ancient text might have hundreds of years of scholarly analysis attached to it.
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