Hieremias de Montagnone, Compendium moralium notabilium and other works, in Latin and Italian, manuscript on vellum

Provenance

(1) Written for a patron with early humanistic interests, perhaps in the vicinity of Vicenza or Padua, c. 1400, and perhaps subsequently used to secure a loan from a local Jewish moneylender: difficult Hebrew inscription in tiny semi-cursive Italian script on back paper pastedown, perhaps code for the owner and amount lent.

(2) Bartolomeo da Fiume, purchased for 12 gold ducats (perhaps from the Jewish moneylender): inscription on paper pastedown at back, Iste liber est mei b.tholamei a flumine emptus a me pro ducatis duodecim auri. Rebound for him c. 1431: a watermark on paper pastedown matching Briquet 14,715 (1431-2, Vicenza), with a bifolium from another, larger text (see below) bound in crudely at end. It appears then to have passed to a monastic community, where it received the pressmark 'A90' on fol. 220v, and was subsequently used as a source of scrap-vellum: areas of the borders of fols. 15-16, 21-2, 28-31, 75-85, 90-5, 111-14, 117-36, 157-61 & 211 cut away, but with no damage to text.

Text

Hieremias de Montagnone held office as a judge in Padua from 1280, and died in the city in 1320/1. He was the author of a medical dictionary (now lost) and a collection of legal quotations, but is best known for this work, the Compendium moralium notabilium, a vast collection of moral excerpts from ancient and medieval sources. As he names himself as a judge in the colophon (here fol. 180v: Explicit compendium moralium notabilium compositum per Ieremiam iudicem de montagnone ciuem paduanum), the text must postdate 1280, and it is likely that he completed the main body of the work in the last two decades of the thirteenth century. It is divided into five parts, part 1 dealing with Christian ethics, honesty and human nature, part 2 with justice, truth, friendship, peace, beneficence and politics, part 3 with intelligence, prudence, teaching, secrecy and eloquence, part 4 with temperance, wealth, power and honour, pleasure, sensual love and marriage, and part 5 with fortitude, war, adversity and death. Most chapters end with a section entitled Proverbia vulgaria, containing a number of proverbs in Paduan dialect which have been edited and studied in A. Gloria, 'Volgare illustre nel 1100 e proverbi volgari del 1200', in Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1884-5, pp. 74-120. The excerpts are taken from a breathtakingly wide range of sources, revealing the author's extremely early humanistic tastes. He lived a generation before the early humanists Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75), yet sought out manuscripts of the works of ancient authors such as Ovid, Aristotle, Cicero (here under the name tulius), Boethius, Cato, Seneca, Socrates, Plato, Cassiodorus, Terence, Macrobius, Quintilian, Palladius (Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius, fourth century AD.), Philo and Sallust to include alongside Biblical quotations and medieval Christian authors such as Gregory the Great. Most surprising here is the presence of the Roman poet Catullus (here on fols. 22v, 29r, 92v, 134r, 143v, 144v: see B.L. Ullmann, 'Hieremias de Montagnone and his citations from Catullus', Classical Philology 5:1 (January 1910), pp. 81-2, for an edition and details of these excerpts). Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84 BC.-c.54 BC.) came from a leading equestrian family of Verona, but spent most of his life in Rome. His poems survive as a corpus of 116 compositions. Some address friends and associates or offer condolences for deaths, but Catullus is perhaps more notoriously known for his erotic poetry, in particular those addressed to Lesbia (named in honour of the poetess Sappho of Lesbos, his muse), and his rude and occasionally obscene attacks on other poets, orators, politicians, friends-turned-traitors and Lesbia's other suitors. His poems had some acclaim in the ancient world, but could also offend, as in the case of Cicero (whom Catullus attacked in a verse) and who publicly denounced Catullus' work as amoral. As such these verses were never considered one of the canonical school authors, and after the fall of the Roman Empire knowledge of the work dwindled. In fact, there are only two records of the survival of the poems into the Middle Ages. A ninth century poetic anthology, now known as the Codex Thuaneus (BnF. Lat. 8071) contains a single poem by Catullus, and in the mid-tenth century Bishop Rather of Verona, having reorganised the cathedral scriptorium, discovered a long-forgotten copy, and recorded in a sermon dated 965 that he had perused this 'previously unread' text with delight. The poems were then not heard of until a manuscript resurfaced in Verona in the last years of the thirteenth century (hidden under a wine barrel if we trust a note added to a later copy of the text). It was most probably the same copy, and its survival in Verona, the seat of the poet's family is suggestive that that manuscript (or its exemplar) may have been one produced and kept by the poet's descendents. Hieremias de Montagnone's text here is the earliest witness to that single manuscript to have survived the Middle Ages, and Hieremias may even have discovered the codex himself. He was almost certainly the first person to read the work in three and a half centuries. By 1347 the same manuscript had passed through the hands of a number of other scholars and copyists, including Petrarch himself. It is now lost, almost certainly destroyed, and known only from widely diverging copies (or copies of copies) made around 1350.

Manuscripts of Hieremias' Compendium are not common. Ullmann consulted 15 in his study of the text (Ullmann, p. 79), and found references to another 16 copies. Of those the vast majority are of the fifteenth century, and the only one which is certainly of the same age or older than the present example is Rome, Casanatense 312, dated 1398. Two further copies date to approximately the same period as the present example: Escorial II h 11, dated 1402, and Madrid H.h.21, late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Thus, the present manuscript is among the four earliest known witnesses to the rediscovery of Catullus' work, and may well be the earliest.

Moreover, the present manuscript is of great importance for the study of early humanism and the rediscovery of Catullus' work. The history of Hieremias' work centres on Padua where he worked. The early provenance of the present manuscript places it in the vicinity of the neighbouring town of Vicenza. Apparently only one other manuscript of this text can be demonstrably connected to this area, that of the Antoniana collection in Padua, which was recorded in 1639 (G.F. Tomasini, Bibliothecae Patavinae, p. 56), but by 1910 had disappeared (the record of 1639 making it clear that the lost Paduan manuscript is quite distinct from the present example: it gives an incipit not in the present manuscript, and fails to mention any other text in the volume). Thus, the present manuscript may well have been copied from Hieremias' autograph, and will remain important for all future studies of both Catullus and Hieremias.

Hieremias' Compendium is followed by an anonymous collection of excerpts on virtues and vices, opening De caritate. Iohannis XI capitulo. Maiorem caritatem nemo habet quam ut animam suam ponat quis pro amicis suis ... (fols. 181r-220v) preceded by a contents page in red ink listing 81 chapters. It is written in the same hand as Hieremias' work and is similar in its purpose, but draws its excerpts exclusively from the Bible and Church fathers up to Isidore of Seville. Only one other manuscript of this text is recorded, that of Vatican Library, Palat. Lat. 348. The last two folios of the volume are from a fourteenth-century medical text which has been clumsily bound in. Fol. 221 contains a fragment of an alphabetical pharmaceutical dictionary (covering the entries for F to M), describing in 4 columns approximately 200 herbs, plants, stones and other substances. Fol. 222 contains related medical recipes in two columns.