Lot 26

Ecclesiastical commonplace book with a commentary on the tribes of Israel and quotations from Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville and Virgil's Aeneid, in Latin and Italian, manuscript on paper and vellum [north-east Italy (perhaps Padua or Vicenza), second half of fifteenth century]

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Paper

53 leaves (fol.49 and endleaf at back trimmed to stubs), mainly paper with a single vellum leaf at beginning, 193mm. by 140mm., wanting a few leaves throughout, two columns, approximately 41 lines in brown ink in a number of humanistic hands, some rubrics in red, watermark of a cross topped with a flower close to Briquet 5466 (1478; Vicenza, with variants from Brescia and Naples), some water damage and discolouration to edges of leaves throughout, some fading to areas of text and weakening to leaves (the latter mostly restored), limp vellum binding

Catalogue Note

The main body of this pocket-sized volume contains the remnant of a substantial sermon collection (1r, 23r and see index on the last leaf). Early in its life that volume was substantially expanded to include liturgical readings for parts of the year (10r), including the feasts of SS. Peter and Paul, Catherine and James the Apostle, and a Life of St. Elizabeth (45r), extracts from the works of Bernard of Clairvaux (46r & 50r), some brief studies on the name of Jesus and his tomb (21r), a study on the tribes of Israel (43v) extemporising from Revelations 7:5, a devotional poem in Italian (44r), and quotations from the works of early church fathers including SS. Augustine, Ambrose, and Cassiodorus. There are also signs here of an interest in humanistic studies, including brief quotations from Virgil's Aeneid (30r) and the works of Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras (44v), and more substantial excerpts from the first important Renaissance treatise on education, that of P. P. Vergerius the Elder (1370-1444). Vergerius wrote his treatise as a humanist program for Ubertino, the son of the lord of Padua, soon after 1400, perhaps helping to locate this manuscript in the vicinity of that city.