Aspects of Palaeography

Inaugural lectures do not nowadays receive the attention they deserve. Gone are the days, I fear, when they would appear in print, in the attractive octavo format soft-bound (if it was here in Oxford) in a light blue paper cover (a blue suspiciously light for here). Gone, also, is any chance that they would receive a write-up in the press, so that those not present could gain some inkling of what they have missed. Perhaps there are advantages to this: it certainly meant that for Daniel Wakelin’s inaugural on the outskirts of Oxford (as we who are not in the English Faculty think of the wastelands of St Cross), they made the journey from afar – from Cambridge and from London, because this was the only place where they could hear what the first Jeremy Griffiths Professor of English Palaeography had to say. They will have left not disappointed that they made the trip.

Dan’s lecture, cryptically titled ‘Life and Letters’, was a bravura performance, undercut by a winning modesty. In some of his work, he develops his argument by an inquisitive technique, providing tentative responses only to reject them, and that was his approach in this lecture.  He led his audience with him through a maze of uncertainty not towards definite knowledge but towards a sense of where we might find that knowledge. This is a professor who will never, I am pleased to predict, impose his opinion ex cathedra. Even when he disagrees, he is urbane. For, I detected (to my delight) the hint of a polemical agenda. It was delivered with such gentleness and gentility that I am left asking: was it there or am I wishing it was there? Humour me for the moment and let me assume it was.

Dan’s theme was the thoughtfulness of all including the most hurried late-medieval scribe – how the jobbing hack, perhaps at times only semi-consciously and often not consistently, made choices about how to form his words. The professor was leading us into a world where literacy was a minority affair and where those who were literate mastered more than one script (even those who only mastered one language). Even within a single script, even at its least calligraphic, choices were to be made. We saw examples of scribal corrections where repeatedly y was partially erased to make it form an i, or where the form of r was changed from what we call z-shaped to long or anglicana, descending below the line. If Malcolm Parkes had been present in the room, he might have suggested from the floor that these changes were examples of the problems of fifteenth-century anglicana; they certainly seemed to me to share a rationale which was a concern for greater clarity. So, where the y denied the space between it and the following letters necessary to provide word division, it was reduced to an i to make clearer the separation. In the case of the ‘z-shaped’ r, the slides shown demonstrated that this was a fitful intervention – others on the same line were allowed to stand when their angles were sharp enough and their relation to the surrounding letters certain enough not to allow doubt. A pursuit of clarity would not explain all the examples the professor showed us – there were also cases of florid loops being added to a letter which could provide no greater certainty of meaning. What, though, united all those examples was the insight that we should direct our attention to the intervention of individual strokes.

A goodly proportion of the lecture was given over to a scribe who could by no means considered low-grade or equipped only with a cursive scrawl: Ricardus Franciscus. Dan concentrated on the extravagancies of the ascenders Ricardus often added to the upper line and made us wonder what purpose this affectation might have had. At times, it hindered rather than helped legibility, so much so that, on occasion, the letter had to be written in minuscule within the distended shape of the majuscule. Dan played with the textual critic’s desire to read a word-based meaning into the shapes and patterns drawn into these strap-work designs, only to reject that possibility. What he was urging his audience to do – if I can put words into his mouth – is judge these interventions as a not a textual but as palaeographical critic. But what would that mean? There is a negative – a polemical – and a positive answer to this.

This inaugural lecture made great use of specific letter forms – indeed, it was based around a conceit of looking at each letter of the alphabet. The study of individual letters is à la vogue in both Britain and in Italy but, as either Dan implied or I wanted to infer, that is a parody of palaeography. It is only by placing those letter-forms in context that we will understand a script and its significance. So, in the lecture, Dan moved from examples of individual strokes to images of whole leaves – an exemplification of the palaeographer’s art, moving back and forth between the formation of letters (the ductus) and the overall impact of the script (the aspect). We must note that the formation of letters is different from letter-forms: in a cursive script, the pen flows to form several letters in one gliding move across the page; in a bookhand, the pen is lifted between strokes before the letter is formed. The basic unit of script is not the letter, it is the stroke. That is the atom on which the molecule and the compound – all the organic chemistry of ink on parchment – is based.

So, if we return to Ricardus Franciscus and his elongated, playful ascenders, we should, with Dan, think not merely of their shapes but of their position in space: their context is that they intrude on the blank area of the upper border. This reminds us that a script, even at the level of its aspect, should not be read in isolation: it is part of the mise-en-page, it is a subset of the visual stimuli that present themselves when we see before us an opening of a book. What defines Ricardus’s ability to provide them is an aesthetic that has cleaned the margins of heavy commentary or annotation and is now repopulating them with new interventions. But those new interventions are not, on the whole, themselves text: ‘on the whole’, because as the professor this evening showed, Ricardus sometimes wrote words within the scrolls that were written around the bars of those ascenders. Except, of course, those ‘scrolls’ are themselves an illusion, created by a game of pen and ink. But if they are, are also the ‘bars’ of the ascenders or the ‘words’ written in them? And if those ‘words’ are, why not all others?

As I have commented before, a nagging query in my mind concerns whether western script can act with the force of an image. The visual power of script is potent in the Arabic of Islamic culture, but why has it seemingly not been so central in the European tradition? Perhaps precisely because we form the strokes so effortlessly in our mind’s eye to make letters that we forget all writing is an illusion. Perhaps we should let those letters dissolve into their constituent parts and so see their artistry the more clearly. Perhaps that it was Ricardus Franciscus realised. Or am I over-reading him?

Perhaps not. This brings me to the closing section of the inaugural lecture, which provided an inspired instance of that trick which is central to the palaeographer’s magic: the ability to reveal the scribe of one manuscript being that of another. It makes palaeography so useful to the disciplines to which it is sometimes considered ancillary that it can be mistaken for (so to speak) the only trick in the book. But, as the professor showed, scribal identification should not be an end in itself: it should set us asking further palaeographical questions. He presented us with two manuscripts in which, on the quick inspection we were shown, some of the letter-forms were markedly different (for instance, the g) but others were highly distinctive (I noted in particular the y) and other scribal habits could confirm to us that this was the same man at work. One of those habits was to add interlace patterns at the final folio of his work – interlace or, as Dan Wakelin rightly expressed it, maze-like drawings. I want to take this further than Dan had time to do last evening: we might see a binary opposition between writing a readable text and drawing a maze but was this how these scribes conceived it? We might instead think of these being on a continuum or sharing an essence. Both are work of the human hand holding a bird’s feather (quill) through which runs ink to paint on an animal’s skin (parchment). And, in a culture where literacy was a minority activity, would not the thickets of minims look to the many like impenetrable forests and the repeated loops like a no-go area of blind alleys? Was not script itself a maze? And, then, should we not accept that letters are not always or even, at times, primarily, about legibility?

Prof. Wakelin: congratulations on a performance where the flow of oratory could not hide the depth of thought. You have reminded us how the meaning of script can be much richer than the mere meaning of its words. May you long sit comfortably in your well-deserved professorial chair.

Andrew Holes in Paris II

I ended the previous post Sheherazade-like, leaving the tale to be finished another night. I had explained how I had happened upon a manuscript of works by Salutati which provided evidence of its being associated with the voracious English book-collector of the early fifteenth century, Andrew Holes. It also included a seventeenth-century note by Richard Smith stating that the owner at that point had another similar manuscript and so I was waiting for the opportunity to investigate whether that codex had also survived through the subsequent centuries and had reached the same safe-house of a library.

Tracking down that manuscript proved much simpler than is often the case: the first volume I called up on Thursday immediately announced itself to be the book for which I was searching. It fitted Smith’s description of a manuscript of works by the same author as its main part included a collection of Salutati’s Epistolae. It did not have a note of ownership by Smith, but it did share with the other manuscript a style of seventeenth-century contents list, which here ended with a reference to ‘in alio lib. MSS ipsius Authoris in 4’, a definite reference to the other manuscript. What was more, as I walked back to my desk and turned over the leaves, it became clear that here there regularly appeared in the margin the manicula that appeared once in the manuscript I had seen the previous year. In other words, the manuscript could definitely be associated with Andrew Holes.

I have used twice the phrase ‘associated with’ rather than ‘owned by’ because, as I explained before, there has been some confusion about Holes’ marginalia: two strikingly different scripts having both been attributed to him. When I studied the known Holes manuscripts nine or ten years ago, this struck me as problematic, and I suspected at that point that there were two separate readers at work. But there was not enough evidence to hand to confirm my suspicion. What I did not expect was that the manuscript in Paris I saw the other day would present such helpful evidence to provide a definite solution.

I mentioned that the main part of the manuscript was occupied by letters of Salutati. It must be said that despite Smith’s suggestion that the book was a twin with the one in which he wrote his ownership note, the size, mise-en-page and script, while all being similar, are in each specific subtly distinct. Smith specifically mentioned the ‘same vellum’ and it is true that for both manuscripts, the parchment has been prepared to be very smooth on the skin-side but fairly dark on the hair-side – as is seen in other early-fifteenth-century codices constructed in Florence. What was particularly notable in this ‘new’ manuscript is that the style of parchment served not only for the part including Salutati’s letters but also for a second fascicule, with its own set of leaf signatures and with a script quite different from that of the first part. This second section, which provides a copy of Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria, was written by an English scribe who helpfully signs himself at the final colophon, giving his name as ‘Johannes Burgh’. Burgh not only writes this second fascicule; he also annotates the first, providing textual additions. It was, I must admit, only while looking at those marginalia that it struck me with real force: this spiky but elegant gothic cursive bookhand is identical with one of the two scripts that have been attributed to Andrew Holes.

We can say a little more about John Burgh: as Josephine Bennett explained in her 1944 article, like Andrew Holes, he had been a student at New College; he was sent to the papal curia and became Holes’s own secretary. It is hardly surprising, then, that he should frequently intervene in his master’s manuscripts, though his addition of Barbaro’s work is the only occasion (to date) that we know of him acting as the scribe for a complete text – which is suggestive, surely of how much we must have lost.

The identification of him as one of the two annotators here makes it likely that we can identify the other reader, with his stubby manicula and his gothic cursive script which suggests some acquaintance with the Italian pre-humanist fashions as practised in Salutati’s circle, as Holes himself. That, in turn, should allow us to reconstruct with more precision his own reading habits. For instance, in this manuscript, what is notable is his interest in contemporary characters – he once notes ‘de poggio’, referring to Salutati’s protege and our friend, Poggio Bracciolini, whom Holes presumably knew personally – and in Salutati himself, noting the author’s own listing of his compositions. Holes seems to have been one of those book-collectors who chose to associate his activity with a particular writer: we already knew that he owned some books once owned by Salutati, but now we can see more fully his interest in the Florentine Chancellor who acted as mentor to the first generation of fifteenth-century humanists.

There is much more that this discovery can teach us. Let me, for the moment, note just one other implication. As I mentioned previously, most of Andrew Holes’s books were given to his alma mater of New College and most of them remain there. Some of them migrated and we can now add to that story because it is clear that both these Salutati manuscripts are examples of that. When the antiquary John Leland visited the library in the mid-1530s, the books he was included two volumes of letters by Salutati, and a copy of the same author’s De verecundia. One of the epistolaries is now in the British Library but the other one, and the manuscript of De verecundia are surely those in Paris. It would seem, then, that they left the library but may have travelled together until they came into the hands of Richard Smith in the 1670s. With some more work, it may also be possible to trace in more detail the stages of ownership before they reached him.

Let me, though, return to the issue with which I began the last post. According to the diktats of the ‘Research Excellence’ culture in Britain, the work that I did about a decade ago on Holes’s manuscripts should have been printed at that point: in this system, one is not allowed to spend significant time without it showing a clear return in ‘published outcomes’. But, if I had done, what I would have been able to present to the world would have been a detailed discussion which showed there was a problem, without providing a solution. It may have been worthy, but it would have been singularly down-beat and, frankly, unsatisfying for author and audience alike. I am pleased that I failed: it was right not to write it up for publication. Indeed, if it had been, it may be harder to justify returning to it later, when it is possible to give a fuller, more pleasing and revealing tale now. Some academic research can be like fast food, rustled up quickly for instant gratification. There is a place for that. But there is surely a place also for Slow Study, the art of refraining from publishing until the recalcitrant jigsaw has, with a miraculous shake of the pieces, fallen all into place. I launch, then, the Slow Study Movement, with its motto, Festina Lente, and its guardian angel, patron saint of palaeographers, Serendipity.

The Slow Study Movement, or Andrew Holes in Paris

Anyone who has been in earshot of me in the recent past – let’s be honest, not just the recent – is likely to have heard me rail against the culture dominant in Britain that presumes research is only research when it has been printed. It feels at times as if academia has become a support industry for the publishing world. I have no objection to new books: I love books; some of my good friends are or have once been publishers; indeed, I chose to marry one. The problem is not with publication but with the assumption that research only gains its justification through being presented in article or monograph form. There are surely other valid ways of disseminating new findings, be it in the lecture hall, at a seminar or even through an on-line posting.

Even that, though, is not the main concern. It is, rather, that the expectation of publishing encourages swiftly committing discoveries to print when they would be better gestating, maturing, ageing in the barrel of one’s mind. There are, of course, some types of research, where there is a finite set of sources or data which can be analysed and completed within a fairly short time-frame. But are we to privilege those over other types of scholarly investigation? What are we to say, for instance, to the palaeographer who is trying to reconstruct a scribe’s practice where the sources are disparate and, indeed, not for certain all yet identified? It is the sort of pursuit that feels near-infinite, a jigsaw-puzzle where the box has been lost and you are not even sure how much of the picture the remaining but dispersed pieces represent. But it also means that when a solution to a conundrum is discovered, it is all the more rewarding for the scholar and useful for scholarship. At that point, finally, publication would be justified, even required. To reach that, though, can – as the example I am about to give will show – take many years, more than can fit into an arbitrary five-year cycle fond of contemporary policy makers. I propose to you that we should emulate the Slow Food Movement and promote the art and the skills of Slow Study, withstanding the pressure to publish the half-baked, and let our work rest in the oven for as long as it takes.

My intention here, though, is not to give a manifesto, but to present an example of what I mean from my only research. It is a tale that reached something of a denouement just yesterday but it started at least a decade ago, and the journey from then to now had more than its fair share of pauses, frustrations – and luck. The main piece of good fortune that I have had is to have been contacted my friend and colleague, Stefano Baldassarri, asking me to look at a manuscript in Paris of texts by or related to Coluccio Salutati, Florence’s Chancellor at the turn of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, and god-father to the first generation of quattrocento humanists. Stefano was, at this point in 2010, in the process of editing a work that appears in the codex; he had noticed that the front flyleaf included an inscription by a seventeenth-century English owner, Richard Smith, a notable collector of both books and people’s death-dates. I did not have chance to go to Paris until 2012 – after Stefano’s fine edition was published (it is entitled La vipera e il giglio) – and then only on microfilm. But, as I looked through it, I saw in the margin of one folio a small, frankly unprepossessing pointing-hand or manicula which took my mind back to some research I had pursued – but (thank God) not published – eight years earlier.  

In the first years of this millennium, interested in fifteenth-century collectors associated with Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, I spent time becoming better acquainted with the manuscripts of the English curialist, Andrew Holes. He gave to Humfrey one important manuscript, the sole copy of Salutati’s last masterpiece, De laboribus Herculis (a book now in the Vatican, but that is another story). The Florentine bookseller and unreliable gossip, Vespasiano da Bisticci, claims that Holes had collected so many books while he was an English representative at the papal curia that he had to hire a ship to carry them home. Whether that is true or not, those that survive number well over a score, with most of them in Oxford as Holes, a Wykhamist, gave his library to New College. Those manuscripts had received some recent attention in an article by that learned historian of the English in Rome, Margaret Harvey; she acknowledged for the palaeographical information the generous assistance of Tilly de la Mare. Margaret Harvey’s 1991 article was only the second to be dedicated to Holes; the first appeared in Speculum during the Second World War and its author, Josephine Bennett, entitled it ‘Andrew Holes: a neglected harbinger of the English Renaissance’. It is fair to say that Holes’s stock has not risen much since Bennett wrote, despite Harvey’s important piece, though, in various contexts in manuscript studies, he does gain a passing mention.

On that March day in 2012, the little pointing-hand in the Paris manuscript acted as a sort of Proustian epiphany taking me back to my work on Holes, for its style was familiar from his manuscripts. But it also reminded me of a problem which I had been forced to leave unresolved for lack of decisive evidence. I noticed that several scholars talked of manuscripts including marginalia by Holes, without ever giving specific folio references, but with the range of codices cited suggesting that two quite different sets of notes were being attributed to him. One was the script that provided the manicula, small, impressionistic, drawn vertically, and sometimes accompanied by words written rapidly in a gothic cursive. The other was much more presentable, a notably spiky gothic bookhand. It seemed to me to be implausible that one reader was moving between the two styles but I could not find any definite proof to identify one as Holes and so I had to designate the two sets of interventions ‘reader I’ and ‘reader II’.

The presence of the manicula – whoever was its author – suggested to me that we might be able to associate the Paris manuscript with the collection of New College and, indeed, in the sixteenth century, the antiquary John Leland saw in that library a volume the description of which corresponds with the manuscript I was studying. Not only that: the inscription by Richard Smith on the flyleaf mentioned that he also owned ‘another MSS of the same Author of the same vellum’. Might this be another manuscript from Holes and New College? Might it too have reached Paris? I could not pursue those questions that day last year – I only had a few hours in the library as I was in the city on other, more official business in the Sorbonne.

And, so, the search had to be put on pause another year. The wait, though, was worth it.  As, I hope, will be the wait to hear the second and final instalment of this tale…

Lectio probatoria, cave lector

Yes, yes, I know. I have been silent for too long, leaving my audience shuffling in their seats uncomfortable at this Cagey performance. I did warn you when I started this site that I have neither the character nor the time to blog incessantly. But, by any standards, the hiatus since the previous post has developed from being a pregnant pause to a laboured silence. It is not, I would like to insist, because I have had nothing to say. Au contraire: several posts have been crafted in my mind, only to fail to be downloaded from brain to laptop. Perhaps their time will come or, more likely, they have been sent to the recycling bin of forgetfulness.

There is, however, one topic that has refused to be ignored and insists that I write something. My research in the last few days, in Oxford, London and Rome, has made me think about the uses and the limitations of the lectio probatoria: those intriguing and infuriating records in some medieval library catalogues of a terse extract, usually just the first word – if you are lucky, two or three – of a volume’s second folio (and so sometimes called the secundo folio). The practice of providing this information appears to have begun in Paris in the thirteenth century and became fairly common in France and in England (but, in contrast, very rare in Germany). The purpose of it is clear: while the opening of a text should always be the same, by the time a scribe and his pen come to the start of the next folio, it is unlikely that he will have reached exactly the same place as his exemplar or another copy to hand, and so the first words of that page can act as a diagnostic, identifying the specific volume where the title alone may not.

The use of such evidence in identifying extant manuscripts and so reconstruct their provenance is well recognised. Daniel Williman and Karen Corsano, in particular, have published studies using the lectio probatoria as a tool for manuscript provenance studies. More recently, James Willoughby has shown that the practice of recording the second folio continued into early print culture: this may seem, at first, nonsensical as what precisely marks out the (relatively) mass-produced printed book is that individual copies are not unique and all of one printing will begin each page with the same words. Yet, in defence of cataloguers who continued the practice, this did not, in the earliest decades of the new technology at least, have to worry them: several copies with identical layout may exist but only one was in their library and so the lectio probatoria remained a useful finding aid. And, as Willoughby explains, for the latter-day bibliographer, it can also be useful in helping identify precisely which printed edition the library owned: while multiple copies were identical, they were highly unlikely in their layout and thus their secundo folio to be exactly the same as the multiple copies of another printing.

But the historian’s use of the lectio probatoria has its limitations. There are obvious duds: the list-writer who records ‘et’ or ‘quod’ as the first word of the relevant page is providing the minimum of information which may not have been of much use then and is certainly not for our purposes. In other cases, the wording may still be fairly mundane but more revealing when combined with the knowledge of the text in the volume, which is usually the first piece of information listed. Yet, I have encountered cases where a search for the relevant phrase in the text cited suggests not it or anything like it occurs at an appropriate point early in the work. Either the cataloguer made a mistake or, as seems to be the case in some inventories, the text listed is not necessarily the first. This is the case with the indenture drawn up for the third and largest gift made by Humfrey, duke of Gloucester to Oxford University in 1444 (and which we know only from the copy recorded of it in the University’s Archives). My reconstruction of what happened is that the inventory-maker, working quickly, picked up the volume and (as was customary, because of the way clasps on bindings closed a book) opened it from the back, flicked through to find a title, and then moved to the beginning to record the lectio probatoria. What, then, he and other list-makers like him were providing was not a record of first work and second folio but a note stating that a manuscript included the cited work somewhere between its covers and, in addition, had the word or words recorded at its second folio.

The lesson from this is that to understand the evidential possibilities of the lectio probatoria, we first have to appreciate the particular modus operandi of that specific cataloguer. There are a couple of other rules of thumb that we need to follow and each can be introduced by a cautionary tale.

The first involves a manuscript of Juvenal, now in the Bodleian, that I was consulting last week. I was interested in it because it has been attributed to the collection of Robert Flemyng, dean of Lincoln (d. 1483), in whom I am interested as he was an early aficionado of humanist manuscripts, and himself a scribe competent in humanist cursive. The provenance of the manuscript – MS. Lat. class. e 30 –  has been reconstructed on the basis that the secundo folio agrees with the lectio probatoria of an entry in the 1474 catalogue of Lincoln College, Oxford, where it is stated that the book was given by Flemyng. The manuscript, a small mid-fifteenth-century Italian humanist product is the sort of volume that Flemyng could have picked up on his travels – but it has at the foot of its opening page two coats of arms, one of the Loredan family, the other suggested to be that of the Malipiero family (though the tinctures are wrong). This helps localise the manuscript to the Veneto; it is not impossible that Flemyng bought it second-hand but there is no other evidence to relate it to him – he does not, as he does in a good number of the other books he owned, annotate this volume. Nor does the present Oxford location help localise its earlier existence: we only know it was in England at the start of the twentieth century and may have been elsewhere before that. What is more, there is a problem with relying on the lectio probatoria as deciding evidence. Remember that this is a work of poetry, where the scribe has to respect line divisions. This obviously makes it much more likely than with a prose text that two manuscripts could have the same opening of the second folio. In such a case, the lectio is much less probatoria than we should like.

The second case I present to you (if any of the audience are still in the house) involves a Vatican manuscript for which Williman and Corsano have proposed a provenance. It is a copy of Vegetius the secundo folio of which accords with the lectio probatoria of a volume of that work as recorded in the 1389 catalogue of Dover Priory. This would be interesting evidence of the migration of manuscripts to Italy from England, except that the manuscript itself – MS. Vat. lat. 4492 – disproves the reconstruction by the fact that it was written in Rome in 1408. The book simply came into the world too late to be that recorded in the Dover listing. By the fifteenth century, then, at least two copies of the text Vegetius existed – at opposite ends of Europe – with the same secundo folio. An unlikely occurrence in a prose text, certainly, but one which, given the laws of probability, is going to happen in some cases.

What I want to emphasise in this case – and which is relevant to the Flemyng example as well – is a fact so obvious it should not need stating: the evidence of the first words of the second folio should not be taken in isolation. It cannot be used as a trump card, rendering all other known facts redundant. If it does not accord with the other information available, alarm bells should ring and another explanation must be sought.

This, though, is not to suggest that we should ignore the possibilities the lectio probatoria provide – we too often work with so little evidence, we cannot lightly dispense with this precious piece of proof. Indeed, we can probably make more use of them than we are accustomed to do. They can sometimes help us provide details about manuscripts that are no longer extant. I have enjoyed, on some occasions, identifying more precisely the opening contents of a volume from the record of the lectio probatoria. So, for instance, the first of Humfrey’s gifts to Oxford (made in 1439), one of the entries reads:

Item oraciones Tullii 2^o fo. aut quelibet

Checking those two words, I realised that they came at the appropriate point in just one of Cicero’s orations, the Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, a work which was re-found in 1415 by Poggio Bracciolini (a friend of ours from other posts on this site). The brief entry, then, demonstrates that the duke was providing classical texts which had been circulating for less than a quarter of a century. This much has subsequently been noted in print in an important article by Rod Thomson, but we can add further comment. First, the opening text was an unusual one, most of the copies of the ‘new’ orations choosing other speeches with which to begin. That nugget of information may help us reconstruct the origin of the copy that Humfrey owned. Second, the specific location of the words in the relevant text can give us some general sense of the size of the volume. It can only be general – the changes in possible shape combined with the varieties of scribal practice would not allow anything more exact – but, in this case, with the phrase falling just over 500 words into the oration, we are probably looking at a large quarto volume, perhaps something with between 20 and 25 lines to a page.

I provide that final example to suggest some of the possibilities of the lectio probatoria which are, as yet, underused. It may not be able to match as often as we would like a record with an extant manuscript – and we should use caution, respectful of other evidence and conscious of the type of text that we are studying – but it may well be able to give some insight into a volume that no longer exists. To put it another way: we are, perhaps, too keen to imagine it as a key to unlocking the secrets of what we do have, rather than recognising it as a peep-hole onto what we can no longer touch.

A novel graphic

What follows is the response to two highly stimulating lectures that have recently taken place in Oxford. The first of them was delivered a few weeks ago by Jeffrey Hamburger, who gave as his title ‘Script as Image’. His topic and his suggestive discussion left me wondering about what separates the two, script from image, and whether western letter-forms can ever have the force of a picture. We might think of S, say, as a suitably snaking shape for its sibilant sound and we might be able to recall illuminated initials where it transmogrifies into a grotesque beast but is it ever in its nature to be inherently representational? The meanderings of my thoughts, I have to admit, have been listless but were given some more direction by the second lecture, which took place just last Friday. It is always an event when Bill Sherman speaks; he packs into fifty minutes learning and insight with elegant delivery. What made it all the more of a delight for me to hear was that his subject was one that fascinates me: marginalia.

Bill Sherman’s purpose was to make us alert to how early modern readers conceived reading as a necessarily visual practice. A master-image for him was the presence in one book of annotations that included not only a finely crafted manicula but also an eye. The book in question is an incunable of the Epistles of Pliny the Younger now in Stanford and of which Bill has had the good fortune to discover the provenance: it has not only the coat-of-arms of but also dense marginalia by Bernardo Bembo (1433 – 1519). It was Bembo who added the pointing hands and eyes – what, as I have suggested before, we probably should call an ocululi. In my experience, there are a few cases of the use of a disembodied eye as an annotating symbol before the mid-fifteenth century, so Bembo’s are early examples of what never became a very frequent presence in the margins of books. The dating of the examples we do have, incidentally, would allow the possibility that the earliest examples were inspired by another example of a graphic eye — Leon Battista Alberti’s winged eye emblem; but that would assume that Bembo — let alone the others before him — knew of that emblem and, indeed, that he consciously transformed it, for what makes his practice all the more unusual is that his ocululi are drawn in profile, facing towards the text.

I was pleased to hear more of this volume, because Bill had shared with me his discovery a couple of years ago and I had been able to help in a very small way with the explanation of one note Bembo had added in the bottom margin of one folio, complete with both a manicula and a cornucopia. It proved to be a record of a piece of contemporary gossip, added to a passage where Pliny was talking of fama. It is highly suggestive of the self-conscious manner in which Bembo used the text before him. But it is another couple of pages from the volume which Bill showed yesterday that, on this occasion, have stayed in my mind’s ocululus and have set me thinking further about the associations between script and image.

The relevant pages are fol. 20v-21 of the volume which you can see for yourself, thanks to the generosity of Stanford University Library. It is the opening in this edition which presents Pliny’s epistle describing his villa, the Laurentinum (II.17), where Bembo writes in large letters across the margin: Laurentum suum grafice pingit. An idiomatic translation would be ‘he vividly portrays his [villa, the] Larentum’ – a celebration of the Younger Pliny’s talent at ekphrasis, which he shared with his uncle. But this is one case where the idiomatic misses the point, for there is something more – a lot more – going on here.

Bembo’s verbal phrase is one found frequently in Renaissance Latin, but more rarely in their classical sources. When he wrote this, he was surely conscious of one precedent: the chapter title to Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, XIV.4 where is said that ‘apte Chrysippus et graphice imaginem Iustitiae modulis coloribusque verborum depinxit’ – Chrysippus vividly depicted in words an image of the virtue, Justice. ‘Vividly’ or, more literally, ‘graphically’. In our culture, we are perhaps more used to employing ‘graphic’ in its sense of the visual, as in ‘graphic novel’ rather than in its sense of the written, as in ‘calligraphy’. Crucially, both senses are there in the Greek terms that are the origin of the Latin transliteration: ‘graphice’ as the art of drawing and ‘graphium’ as a writing style. Think of graphite, the material of a pencil – a term only invented in the late eighteenth century to describe a particular form of carbon but created in conscious imitation of the Greek ‘graphein’ (to write) and ‘graphis’ (a pencil or pen – the implement of both writing script and drawing images).

The sense of words as drawing is present in the phrase from Aulus Gellius and, it seems to me, it is implicit in Bembo’s imitation of it. It is even heightened by the dropping of one syllable: Gellius’ depingere (to paint) becomes pingere (to represent pictorially, or to draw with, Lewis & Short tell me, ‘pencil or needle’). Bembo, then, is saying that Pliny has drawn a life-like pen-portrait; words can draw.

The graphic, that is to say, does not distinguish between the image and the letter; it is defined by being the product of carbon or, by transfer, of ink. Bembo’s ‘graphic sense’ encompasses both the drawn and the written in a manner which is highly self-conscious, at times achingly so. Looking at these pages, it is hard not to imagine a reader who is playing – in the best sense of serio ludere – at reading through his graphic response. I cannot help ask myself whether Bembo is telling us that the writing of script is part of the art of drawing.

At this point, a little context is helpful: Bernardo Bembo, like other Venetian patricians, was educated at the University of Padua. He was there in the 1450s, and among his acquaintances was the young scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito, who, indeed, produced manuscripts for Bembo. Sanvito went on to become the leading exponent of a new bookhand, which we now know as the italic; it raised a version of the humanist cursive script to a new calligraphic level. Judging from what I have seen of Bembo’s own penmanship from these years, he was not simply a consumer of Sanvito’s experiments, he was a participant in them.

Let us return to Bembo’s ‘grafice pingit’ note and consider it now not philologically but palaeographically. First, the script: at first glance, it is written in what we would call capitals, the ‘upper case’ (in printing terms) letter-forms, made up of separate forms from ‘lower case’ or minuscule letters: so, in ‘grafice’, G not g, R not r, and so on. The use of capitals, rather than simply larger forms of the ‘lower case’, which are called majuscules or litterae notabiliores, echoes classical inscriptions, chiselled rather written ‘script’: in a word, epigraphy. Yet, Bembo’s commitment to this style is not complete: in ‘pingit’, the i on both occasions has no serifs and is dotted – it is, in other words, a littera notabilior. There are other ways in which his writing here distances itself from the epigraphical: the letters are thin, not shaded to be thick and monumental and, similarly, what serifs there are tend to be short and slanted, except on the final T which has a prominent straight foot, as if marking its concluding status. What Bembo is providing is an outsize note, drawing attention to the passage, which, at the same time, does not attempt to be an epigraphical display script.

He also draws attention to the passage by the curious placing of this note, written turning a corner, as it were, so that it forms a right angle at the bottom left of the opening. Consider, for a moment, the mechanics of doing this: he must have read the text, picked up his pen, and turned the book on its side to write the even letter-forms of ‘LAVRENTVM’ which run down the margin. This is annotating that literally and physically moves the reader away from the task that defines him. However, the point I wish to emphasise is not about the individual letters but the overall impact of this placing: it creates a bracket for the main text and it serves the purpose of a paraph-mark. To put it another way: the placing of these words gives them the force of a non-verbal marking.

We tend to think of marginalia being delightfully disordered interventions on the page and, certainly, the overall impact of Bembo’s additions to the opening is a haphazard feel. Yet, there is something artfully constructed in both the placing and the execution of his ‘grafice pingit’ note. His graphic sense is so developed that its thoughtfulness was probably instinctual. But, to return to the question I set myself, this does not turn script into a sub-set of drawing. His letter-forms may be consciously designed and can be attractive, but they never slide from their symbolic nature into something pictorial. Both drawing and writing can evoke images but they do so in fundamentally different, if complementary, ways. The distinction which we should draw (if you pardon the pun) is one to which I have just alluded: it is between the two elements of writing, the verbal and the non-verbal.

The pen can move across the page to form letters which placed together create words or it can make markings that have meaning without being part of the alphabet: punctuation falls into this category, in which we should include the paraph-mark. There are others that may seem more decorative:  to mention again a friend of Bembo, Sanvito was keen on using at the end of texts or as a mark of separation between words in titles a hanging leaf motif – the hedera – the ultimate origin of which lies in the epigraphy of Roman memorials. With such an intervention, we have crossed the boundary into the realm of the representational, though it must be said that some of these practices live on the borders and can often retreat into the purely symbolic: the annotating sign of a trefoil is often such an impressionistic combination of dots and a curve that it could hardly be said to be a leaf at all; this, indeed, is the form Bembo deploys. Similarly, many manicules are so rapidly drawn to lose any representational power. But when they are lovingly drawn, as Bembo’s are, with long forefinger and cuff, their main purpose remains to provide meaning non-verbally to support the text. They have, if you will, something of the hieroglyphic to them. They are image as script.

The empire that is Latin script is not, then, populated solely by letters; the other shapes that are its subject peoples can be highly refined, as they are in Bembo’s maniculae, ocululi and his cornucopia – markings employed by the reader to add meaning or, at the least, inflection to the text. Of course, these additions do not exhaust the range of Bembo’s interventions in his Pliny, which also involve fully-fledged drawings of faces, as well as combinations of text with image. At base, what all his practices share is the nature of the graphic: the accumulation of pen strokes that together conjure up a meaning or a presence, whether by representation or by symbol. Of course, all such handiwork is a sleight of hand: Bembo’s ‘eyes’ are an optical illusion that, in a blink, can disintegrate into their constituent flecks of ink. Likewise, the strokes that congregate to form a word can, in an unfamiliar script, be incomprehensible. For all that similarity, though, there is an irreducible distinction between letter-forms and depictions. Letters can have artistry and beauty, and can, at times, be designed to have the appearance of a depiction but that is not fundamentally how they convey meaning. At the same time, as I have said, writing does not convey meaning by letters alone. Writing is not a sub-set of drawing; rather, those elements of the graphic art which are drawing can be a method of extending and expanding writing’s domain.

A manuscript, an instrument and a marble disc

My wife said to me the other evening: ‘You don’t like being in your comfort zone, do you?’ She knows me.

It is perhaps one reason why I enjoy working with manuscripts that to understand their history you have to move far, far away from any area in which you might be a specialist. And so it was with a small, slightly damaged and utterly undistinguished small codex I was looking at in Christ Church last week. As I have mentioned before, the foundation’s Library holds one of the more eclectic collections of the Oxford colleges, the gifts of grateful graduates, Students (that is, Fellows in the real world that is Oxford elsewhere) or simply friends. The manuscript I was looking at — MS. 122, a commentary on the decretals – was given in the 1640s by a Student of Christ Church, Robert Payne.

Robert Payne has a certain fame, less for the fact that he was a translator of Galileo (his rendition was never printed) than for his friendship with Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, Noel Malcolm has shown that some of the papers and works, now at Chatsworth, attributed to Hobbes should, in fact be credited to Payne. He was an undergraduate at Christ Church in the 1610s and in his time there seems to have become a protégé of Edmund Gunter, mathematician and designer of scientific instruments. Payne proved a loyal son of his alma mater, and in the 1640s made two gifts to Christ Church of books, the manuscript I was studying and, as the donation note records, ‘insuper dono suo adjecit Concavuum Marmortum & Instrumentum æneum Magstri Gunteri’. This much is well-known but what has not been done is to marry up the surviving books and artefacts with his donations.

It could well be said that the fortunes of his other gifts was of tangential interest to the manuscript he presented but I wanted to understand how it may fit into his wider act of largesse. So, I checked the catalogues for matches with the printed books he gave. In many cases, the works and even the editions matched but could not be equated with the ones he gave, presumably because his had been sold off later as a duplicate (there were several such sales in the nineteenth century). So, for instance, for one edition of Euclid given by Payne we have a copy but it cannot be his because it carries a note recording Sir Charles Scarborough’s ownership at the end of the seventeenth century — that note also draws attention to the fact that there are inserted quires of  handwritten notes, in the script, it is said, of Edmund Gunter. He was perhaps remembered longer in Christ Church than was Payne.

In other cases, we can be more confident that there is a match when, for instance, a volume combines editions listed consecutively in the donation note. And we can be absolutely certain when Payne’s script is found in the book — a script which is present in several of the Savile collection in the Bodleian and which I can identify with notes in at least two Christ Church volumes. Of those, the one which will attract more interest is the edition of De systemate mundi of Galileo, the author whom Payne translated. The edition has a donation note clearly in Payne’s hand. It is now crossed out but is legible as ‘Ex dono Petri Earle’. Who Mr Earle may have been, I admit I do not yet know.

But what of the objects Payne also gave? As my hospitable host in Christ Church, Cristina Neagu, taught me, the scientific instruments held there had been sent on long-term loan to the Museum of the History of Science on Broad Street. They have an excellent on-line catalogue and it did not take much searching to narrow down the possibilities for the ‘instrumentum aeneum’ to one item, a bronze sector made to Gunter’s design in the 1620s and 1630s. The term ‘concauum marmortum’ confused me more and even when I turned to those with expertise, there was further scratching of pates. It took some lateral thinking to find in the same Museum’s on-line catalogue something which could answer to a ‘marbled concave’: it is described as a ‘concave marble disc, for lens polishing?’. The interrogative suggests the cataloguer’s own uncertainty when faced with the object, as does the proposed date of ‘c. 1700?’, which, we can now know, postdates its shaping by over half a century. But that cataloguer was probably not the first to be perplexed by the object — having discovered its identity, it struck me that a similar uncertainty most likely affected the librarian who had to record it in Christ Church’s donation book and, more used to listing paper volumes by their title, could think of no better phrase for what sat on his desk before him than ‘concauum marmortum’. Even the donor’s own lifetime, part of his gift may not have been fully appreciated.

At least, for the librarian, our little manuscript had the advantage of being within his comfort zone. But where does it sit within the rationale Payne must have had for his gifts? The answer is that, in the context of works of science and of Greek and Italian texts, it does not fit. But that is not a negative answer but rather a revelation in itself: the way that a manuscript could be bought as a curiosity, rather than being central to a collection. It rather puts a palaeographer’s interests into a corner.

In short, what we have in these gifts is a tension between two concepts of the library, one which sees it primarily as a stock of books, some new, many old, while the other sees it as a repository of knowledge in all its forms, with an emphasis in novelty and innovation. The latter concept — that of Payne — did not, of course, win out, some might be pleased to remember.

A previously unnoticed manuscript annotated by John Tiptoft

Manuscripts have a tendency to creep up on you when you are looking elsewhere, tap you on the shoulder and then punch you between the eyes. That has been my experience today in the Vatican Library. I called up a manuscript because of what is known of its late fifteenth-century provenance and did not expect to find staring up at me from the lectern a codex made several decades earlier, clearly (from the illumination) in Milan and, what is more, in a script very close to that of Milanus Burrus: he was a highly accomplished scribe who developed his own response to the Florentine palaeographical reforms and created a mise-en-page that reminds us that you do not need to have illumination on the parchment to be looking at a work of art.

And when one manuscript has softened you up, another then comes in and knocks you sideways. As this is my last day of this research trip, I was attempting to tie things up neatly — whenever you do that, the books tend to have other plans for you. So, revisiting the manuscript of his Synesius translation that John Free made, with little expense spared, for Paul II, I wanted to compare the capitals and so ordered up another volume for comparison. The volume was MS. Vat. lat. 3162, a copy of Juvenal and Persius which is known to be Paduan and has interventions by Bartolomeo Sanvito, though, as Laura Nuvoloni explains in the sumptuous recent volume in ‘The Handwriting of the Italian Humanists’ series, the main scribe is a separate person, writing in a similar style. What caught me off-guard was that, looking through the codex, I came across one occasion where there is an alternative reading added into the margin by a hand which is very familiar to me — it is that of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester.

Those of you who have explored this site will already appreciate the importance of Tiptoft, whose library was perhaps second only to that of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester in the fifteenth century. We now have over thirty books from his collection, dispersed across Europe (his hopes of donating his books to Oxford where thwarted by his own execution). In one sense, it is perfectly understandable that this manuscript should have passed through the earl’s hands: he certainly knew its scribe, owning another volume which was produced by him (it is no. 11 in my listing). But there are two factors which are more surprising. The first of them is its location — there is, as you can see from the listing of the known Tiptoft manuscripts, no other book of his which is in the Vatican. The second relates to the contents of the codex: a few years ago I identified a copy of Juvenal and Persius from his library, written by Sanvito himself, and definitely in England in the late fifteenth century (no. 13 in the listing). Would he have had two rather similar-looking copies of the same texts? It is not impossible but surely unlikely. Perhaps, though, there is another explanation: Tiptoft is not the only annotator on the volume — the two other marginalia could well be by his secretary, who later presented his translation to Synesius to Paul II, John Free. We know that he remained in Italy when Tiptoft returned to their homeland, and it was in Rome that Free died prematurely in 1465. Now, MS. Vat. lat. 3162 did not arrive in the papal library earlier — it shows evidence of Italian ownership in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century — but we can posit a history for it: cast off by Tiptoft, who had a more elegant copy of the works it included, he passed it to Free, who took it to Rome, where, after his death, it circulated, only to end up in the Vatican some decades later.

This, I should say, is not the only discovery — and perhaps not the most important one — of the day. Having been pushed around by one manuscript, knocked about by another, I was then hit between the eyes by yet one more. So, I have been left punch-drunk and gasping for air, at the same time wishing that I could get more of the same and also knowing that I simply will, God and Mammon (aka research grants) both willing, have to return here to give the manuscripts as good as I have got from them.

Small discovery of the week: Jean Dubreuil in Christ Church

Christ Church was an arriviste on the Oxford scene. The brainchild of England’s most successful butcher’s son, it was founded as Cardinal College only in 1525, when the number of colleges of the university was already in double figures. On Wolsey’s fall, his institution became, in name at least, King’s College, to wallow in neglect until Henry VIII’s attempts to appease the gods for his desacration of the established church by replacing monasteries with new bishoprics led him, at the very end of his reign, to establish in Oxford an institution that combined cathedral and college. It makes Christ Church a unique institution, adding to the roll-call of titles for Oxbridge heads of house (Master, Principal, Warden, Provost, President…) by being the only to one to be ruled by a Dean.

Christ Church might be, then, a new foundation but, like those ennobled from his mates and sidekicks by Henry VIII, it has become part of the fabric of the establishment, the Oxford institution with the closest links to royalty. Not, it must be said, that its illustrious contribution to history — boasting thirteen Prime Ministers, the founders of both Pennsylvania and New Zealand, let alone philosophers, religious reformers and poets among its alumni — is what is uppermost on many visitors’ minds nowadays; it is not even its reputation as the home of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, that attracts people; as I heard a tourist guide say to his teenage flock the other day, it is now known as ‘Harry Potter’s college’.

The late date of its creation and its distinguished connexions both have an interesting effect on its manuscript collection. Christ Church was founded when printed books were already occupying libraries to over-filling; while hand-written books still had an important cultural position and could provide texts not available in print, there was no need for a core of codices as there had been in, say, Merton, or any likelihood of a single donation formed solely of manuscripts, as there had been with the bequest of William Gray, bishop of Ely (d. 1478), to Balliol. At the same time, the young parvenu could not but expect to receive manuscripts as signs of respect from individuals who had been educated in its walls or who had passed through them. The result is a collection that is wonderfully eclectic and also well-stocked with richly decorated volumes. It is with one such manuscript, of suitably aristocratic heritage, that my recent small discovery is concerned.

Guy XV, count of Laval, from Oxford: Christ Church, MS. 93, fol. 1. Copyright: Dean and Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

The volume is a late fifteenth-century Book of Hours, which came to Christ Church as part of its most substantial donation, that of William Wake, himself an alumnus whose career culminated in his tenure of the Archbishopric of Canterbury. His early career saw him in France and it would be attractive to imagine that this Book of Hours came into possession while there. It is certainly a French production but one so rich in illumination that it may be that Wake could only afford to purchase it later in his life. The volume, called the Hours of St Denis, opens with an illumination depicting its commissioner, Guy XV, comte de Laval from 1484 to his death in 1501, a significant political figure with lands in Brittany, richly awarded for his loyalty (while others were not) to the Valois monarchy. The images that enliven every page of this manuscript have been (surely correctly) attributed to an artist known as Maître François. As Thomas Kren demonstrated in an article published in the festschrift to Margaret Manion in 2002, this illuminator was one who worked with a scribe who produced several Books of Hours and who (unusually for copyists of devotional manuscripts) identified himself in one book, the Hours of Jacques of Langeac (now Lyons: Bibliotheque muncipale, MS. 5154). The scribe’s name was Jean Dubreuil, who was active between c. 1465 and c. 1485. What has not been noticed — but what will already be obvious from the title of this post — is that a comparison of the leaves of the Christ Church manuscript with others by Dubreuil shows this book to be an unsigned manuscript by this scribe. It has all the characteristic features of his flowing lettre bâtarde, with the prominent loop on top of the d and the hair-strokes on letters including the e. What is interesting is that the Christ Church book could not have been written before 1484, late in Dubreuil’s known career. Perhaps, though, it was not produced much after that — each count of Laval not only had to take on the name ‘Guy’ but also to adopt the comital coat of arms. Perhaps, then, Guy XV had this Book of Hours produced to celebrate his recently attained status. Perhaps, also, he chose the contents of this lavish volume for private devotion to demonstrate that his own loyalty was not to Brittany but to France. It might, in other words, have been a ‘private’ book but it was one for which using accomplished craftsmen was appropriate for it provided a ‘public’ message.

An opening from Oxford: Christ Church, MS. 93, showing script of Jean Dubreuil. Copyright: Dean and Governing Body, Christ Church, Oxford.

Thomas Hearne and Nicholas Cantilupe’s fantastic history of the University of Cambridge

Before the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge was a clash of blades on the Thames or won and lost on the playing field of Twickenham, it was fought out through recourse to history. In the fifteenth – and on into the sixteenth – century, the universities debated their origins. Oxford claimed Alfred as their kind father, a ludicrous pedigree still remembered in the coat-of-arms of Univ. But at least Alfred existed: Cambridge sought to stretch the time-frame (and credulity) further by declaring King Arthur their founder. A foundation text for this foundation myth was the mid-century Historiola by Nicholas Cantilupe. It is a work which has received some recent scholarly attention in an article by Ad Putter that appeared in Medium Ævum, but there has been no edition of the work since the early eighteenth century when it was printed by the indefatigable Thomas Hearne.

Hearne, attentive readers may recall, was also the editor of the two Lives of Henry V which I discussed in an English Historical Review article of 2008; he was a giant among English antiquaries, even if his politics and character made him as many enemies as friends. His work on Cantilupe did not necessarily raise his stock among his contemporaries – it was a Cambridge man, Thomas Baker, who commented that the Historiola was ‘one entire Fable, & the fruitfull Invention of a teeming Monkish Brain, & you do it too much honor, in giving it an Edition’. But that did not stop Hearne working on it. What we do not know – or, as we shall see, did not know until now – is on which of the ten or more manuscripts he based his edition.

I happened the other day to be looking at some manuscripts in my alma mater of Christ Church, including their copy of Cantilupe, MS. 138, which – from its fifteenth century folio numbering – is clearly an excerpt from a much larger volume. Turning its leaves, I was struck that the antiquarian note recording details of the author of the Historiola was in a familiar hand: that of Hearne himself. I went to check the edition and noted that his transcription exactly matches that of the manuscript. The question then became how Hearne came by this slim fascicule – a question to which the answer, as so often with Hearne, lies in his diaries, edited a century ago by the Oxford Historical Society.

In his entry for 9^th March 1712, he mentions that some manuscripts he had perused ‘In the Dean of Xt Church’s Study amongst Dr Aldrich’s Books (all which I have examin’d lately)’ and he goes on to say ‘I … saw there Cantilupes Historiola Cantabrigiensis, & I am promis’d the loan of it’. In other words, he was checking the collection of the recently departed Henry Aldrich, once himself Dean of Christ Church, and found there a copy of Cantilupe. Aldrich’s ownership of a manuscript comprising Cantilupe (and little else) can fortunately be corroborated, as Christ Church also holds his library catalogue in its archives and there, at fol. 9^v.

Hearne, then, did indeed gain the promised loan and, clearly, returned it to its home at which point, presumably, it entered into the collection of the foundation over which Aldrich had once presided. Indeed, what is interesting is that this new nugget of information also allows us to identify other manuscripts – Greek, Hebrew and early-modern – as having reached the institutional library from the same individual source. In short, one brief note at the top of a folio can (as so often) open a window onto a world previously thought lost.

A previously unidentified copy of Coluccio Salutati

I have been preparing some sample entries for my work on English Humanist Scripts up to c. 1509, intended for the Handwriting of the Italian Humanists series. In doing that, I have returned to the manuscripts of Petrus Lomer, a scribe who we know solely from four manuscripts. One of those is now in the Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam [MS. I F 74], having arrived there just under a century ago. Previously, it had circulated among private collectors and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic. During its travels, it lost a quire or more of its content. The result is that it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that it contained one work — Benvenuto da Imola’s Liber Augustalis – but, in truth, that short text occupies only the first folios and ends imperfectly. The second text, when it has been noticed, has, because it lacks its opening pages, been identified solely as a ‘theological treatise’. The small discovery for today is that the manuscript actually contains De seculo et religione by the godfather of Florentine humanism, Coluccio Salutati.

This is a treatise that received a fine edition by Berthold Ullman in 1957 (in that edition, what we have in the Amsterdam manuscript is the text from p. 28, l. 22 until the end). Unsurprisingly, this manuscript does not appear in the list of thirty-one witnesses to the work. Ullman’s listing does suggest something of the interest of this particular copy: the majority of codices were created because monastic communities considered Salutati’s work was relevant to them. This manuscript, uniquely, marries De seculo with Benvenuto, a more secular, historical text. We also learn something by realising that Lomer copied this work, for it was not the only occasion that he showed an interest in the writings of the Florentine chancellor who was the mentor to the likes of Leonardo Bruni: there is a copy of Salutati’s De fato et fortuna now in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Padua signed by Lomer. That manuscript was one of two he definitely produced in England; is the same true for De seculo? There is no way for knowing for certain, though what early annotations there are suggest, instead, that this copy was in Italy from its first years. Was Lomer providing texts of Salutati for different readers on order? Or is it a sign of his own intellectual interests — was he a particular devotee of Coluccio Salutati? It is  in the nature of our knowledge of this elusive scribe that we cannot answer for certain. Yet.