Liber Abaci (on practical mathematical calculation), in Italian, manuscript on paper [Italy (perhaps Florence), last quarter of the fifteenth century]

With the strength of the mercantile class in fifteenth-century Italy and the rise of commercial banks (such as that of the Medici in Florence), a number of Italian cities became centres for the teaching of practical mathematics and commercial arithmetic. The present manuscript contains an anonymous and apparently otherwise unrecorded text, beginning '[E]bechere sapere il prosimo di ciaschuno auto sanza danno ...', citing the celebrated mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (fol. 7r), and setting out its aims to survey the practical applications of mathematics (abacho), algebra (alghorismo), and geometry (fighura). While a number of similar manuscripts have come to the market in the last few decades (see Bibliotheca Schoenbergensis: Transformation of Knowledge, 2006, nos.18-19), they have been smaller in size, and focus on presenting working problems as a teaching aid for students. Here we have a text in a grander format and with a wider vision, and it was perhaps produced for a master in one of these schools, or an executive officer in a bank.