Girolamo da Siena — 1400s; Italian, likely made in or around Venice

Title

Girolamo da Siena — 1400s; Italian, likely made in or around Venice

Shelfmark

MS. Canon. Ital. 174

Place of origin

Italian, likely made in or around Venice

Date

1400s

Language

Italian

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Paper. The watermarks, most clearly visible on fols. 48, 63, and 67, are among the features that indicate Venetian provenance. The design, an anchor within a circle, measuring about 45 mm in diameter, corresponds approximately to Briquet nos. 464–472, which are all Venetian.

Physical extent

154 leaves

Hands

The script throughout is a clear littera textualis that appears to date to circa 1400 (based on assessments by Albinia de la Mare and Sabina Magrini); it displays certain forms influenced by humanist script, such as the d onciale and the distinctive shape of the letter g, but the duct appears to be gothic. The hand appears uniform throughout.

Decoration

Titles and chapter headings are given in red.

Some initials and paraphs in blue or red; in the text of the Meditazioni, there are also splashes of yellow over some capital letters.

Binding

The binding of plain white vellum-covered boards is eighteenth-century Italian, with what appear to be seventy-two paper stubs, some of them folded over and uncut, sewn, or pasted into the binding. These stubs appear to have been inserted as a block to fill out the cover and make it possible to use the original boards and spine after a sizable part of the original manuscript was removed.

Acquisition

Purchased by the Bodleian in 1817.

Provenance

Bernardo Trevisan (1652–1720). In his catalogue (fol. 20v): Meditazione della vita di nostro Signor Gesu Christo—ms. 1400. minato in 4º. See J.B. Mitchell, Trevisan and Soranzo: Some Canonici manuscripts from two eighteenth-century Venetian collections, Bodleian Library Record, 8, no. 3 (1969): 125–35. On his death, his manuscripts passed to his brother:

Francesco Trevisan (d. 1732), priest; acquired after Francesco’s death by:

Giacomo Soranzo (1686–1761). A number of features indicate that MS. Canon. Ital. 174 came from the Soranzo collection. These include the plain vellum eighteenth-century binding, the distinctive floral carta bassanese paper used for the pastedowns and flyleaves, and the eighteenth-century table of contents, which is written in the hand of Francesco Melchiori, one of Soranzo’s librarians. Melchiori’s table of contents lists a text which is no longer in the manuscript: S. Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Interrogationis confessionale, seu theologia Moralis—vide tabulam premissam. From this, it can be deduced that the material excised at a later date included the Summa theologica moralis by St Antoninus of Florence, O.P. (1389–1459). It appears, then, that Soranzo bound two quite different manuscripts together, one Italian and one Latin, and that Canonici separated them once he acquired Soranzo’s collection. The Summa and related texts of Antoninus that were once bound with the current contents of MS. Canon. Ital. 174 are now contained in MS. Canon. Misc. 135, preceded on fols. 1–3v by the ‘tabulam’ mentioned in Melchiori’s note. Acquired after his death by:

Matteo Luigi Canonici, 1727–1805

Giuseppe Canonici (–1807)

Title

Ps.-Bonaventure, Meditationes uitae Christi and Devotional letters

Shelfmark

MS. Canon. Ital. 174

Date

15th century

Language

Italian

Physical extent

1 volume