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Farissol’s Igeret orḥot ʻolam, reproduced in this manuscript, is the first modern Hebrew work on geography. It reflects the author, the Jewish geographer and cosmographer, Abraham Farissol’s (ca. 1451–ca. 1525) enduring interest in the topic and is largely concerned with locating the Jewish peoples dispersed throughout the world. It includes the first mention of the New World in Hebrew when discussing the newly discovered American Indians as perhaps being one of the lost tribes of Israel. Farissol was fluent in both Italian and Latin and undoubtedly performed research in the great ducal libraries of Florence and Ferrara while working for the courts of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) and Ercole I d’Este (1431–1505). He was familiar with portolan charts and drew upon accounts of Columbus’s recent journeys and to the letters of Girolamo Sernigi describing Vasco de Gama’s voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

This manuscript is the sole surviving copy of the anonymous L’arte del navegare, a wide-ranging original treatise in four parts on navigation and the operation of seagoing vessels. The author dedicates the work to the Senate of the Venetian Republic and to the Doge of Venice, Cristoforo Moro (r. 1462–71), for whom this manuscript was a presentation copy. The unknown author benefited from an excellent humanist education, as the preface includes references to a diverse array of authorities, such as famous Greek philosophers, as well as Arab and medieval thinkers. Book I presents an account of the whole habitable world known to the author, at the dawn of the age of exploration. Book II deals with ship designs and the role of various officers on board. Book III discusses meteorology and astronomy as they relate to navigation. Book IV is dedicated to cartography, acting as a verbal portolan chart.

This manuscript consists of an otherwise unknown treatise in thirty-five chapters on the Astrolabe quadrant, a simplified version of the medieval instrument reduced to a quarter circle. The quadrans novus was cheaper and simpler to make, yet could still perform most of an Astrolabe’s functions— namely, the measurement of altitude, latitudes, and longitudes, and the calculation of the time of day and night. The text is illustrated with meticulous diagrams and tables describing the use of the instrument. The binding, which consists of a bifolium from a twelfth-century copy of Augustine’s Commentary on the Gospel of John, is written in rare Beneventan script. A southern Italian localization is bolstered by textual references to the island of Diomedes off the coast of Puglia (now the Isole Tremiti) and by the watermark, which is similar to one employed in Naples later in the sixteenth century.

The first of the three charts shows the Atlantic coast of Europe, stretching from the south coasts of England to Iberia, the northwest quadrant of Africa, and Madeira and the Canary Islands. The center of Spain is overlaid with a crude coat of arms mimicking that of Castile and León. The second chart shows the central and Eastern Mediterranean. Hovering over central Anatolia is a crowned blue medallion containing a crescent moon with a face in profile representing the Ottoman Sultanate. This symbol hints at the broader conflict simmering between Christian and Muslim powers in the mid-sixteenth century. The third chart shows the Western Mediterranean from the Adriatic Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond. Though the charts appear to have been produced in Italy, the place-names demonstrate Portuguese influence; the cartographer was familiar with trade activity in the Eastern Atlantic and along the west coast of Africa.

The prolific Genoese mapmaker Battista Agnese (active ca. 1535–64) was responsible for over sixty surviving sets of charts and atlases, principally showing Europe and the Mediterranean basin and including the far-flung territories then being reached by European navigators. As showpieces intended for display rather than practical use, his maps tend to favor the decorative over strict accuracy. Working in Venice, the center of European cartography, he acted as copyist and synthesizer of charts produced by others, rather than an original creator. Nevertheless, over the course of his career he strove to integrate the most up-to-date geographic information into his world maps, depicting, for example, the circumnavigation of Ferdinand Magellan and the discoveries made of the Pacific Northwest by Francisco de Ulloa in 1539 and 1540.

This volume consists of fourteenth-century Latin medical works translated into Hebrew. The first text is a unique and anonymous translation of a medical manual and collection of 592 prescriptions ascribed in the text to Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348), professor of medicine at Perugia and Padua. Gentile’s posthumous fame was considerable: he is memorialized in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 as “that most subtle investigator of Avicenna’s teachings.” Translations of da Foligno’s contemporaries follow, such as a treatise on surgery and bandaging by the Florentine physician Dino del Garbo (d. 1327). The final substantial work is the Mavo be-melakhah, a Hebrew translation by Abraham Avigdor (1350–after 1399) from the fourth book of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. Avigdor, a member of a distinguished family of physicians, lived in France during the second half of the fourteenth century. He translated many medical texts from Latin into Hebrew.

Illustrated herbals were in the Middle Ages linked to chains of exempla, diminishing the fidelity of their images to nature. Its 192 illustrations testify to the gradual shift away from an earlier, conventional representational system, toward a more naturalistic style that came to predominate by the century’s end. The first group of specimen images from the first half of the fifteenth century are often visually unrecognizable. The roots, for example, are given special prominence, sometimes incorporating fantastical anthropomorphic creatures, as in the drawings of a female mandragora or a blue-faced woad plant. The commentary text, present for about a quarter of the plants, describes preparations and predicted medicinal properties. Most of the medicinal notes are in Italian, though some are in Latin and a few mix the two languages.

Publius Vegetius Renatus (ca. 383–450 AD) is principally known as the author of two surviving works: the Epitomata rei militaris, whose influence on military tactics endured in the post-Classical world; and the Mulomedicina, a concise summary of ancient veterinary science derived in part from two earlier works. As a high-ranking Roman official, Vegetius traveled extensively throughout the Roman Empire, learning from the Barbarians and the Huns he encountered, and acquiring a working knowledge of horses and bovines, including the different breeds and the various equine diseases and their remedies. Veterinary activity chiefly dealt with the health of beasts of burden: horses, mules, donkeys, and cattle, for much economic and military activity depended on their wellbeing. The Mulomedicina maintained its popularity in the later Middle Ages, and four distinct dialectal Italian translations of the text appeared in the Renaissance. The present manuscript contains the first vernacular adaptation in a Tuscan dialect.

This compact Hebrew manuscript provides evidence of the intellectual exchanges that animated the daily life of one of Northern Italy’s most prominent Jewish families, the Finzi. The first portion of the volume contains copies of twenty letters in which the names of various members of the dynasty occur frequently. The first letter identifies the astronomer and mathematician Mordekhai Finzi (ca. 1407–76), Yehudah of Rhodos (Rhodes?), and Abraham Kohen as “men of influence at the courts of the Pope and the King of France.” Lastly included is the Sefer ha-seder ha-katan, an anonymous translation from Arabic into Hebrew of an abridgment of Avicenna’s Qānūn fī al-ṭibb (Canon of Medicine), which begins with a list of human limbs and their qualities, and proceeds to the middle of the third book, which is dedicated to special pathology, or diseases concerning single organs.

Avicenna (ca. 980–1037) was the most renowned Islamic medical author of the Middle Ages. The present text contains Books 1 to 3 and the beginning of Book 4 of his comprehensive quasi-encyclopedic work, the Qānūn fī al-ṭibb or Canon of Medicine, translated into Hebrew from the original Arabic by the Italian Jewish translator, Nathan ben Eliezer ha-Me’ati (act. 1279–83). The Canon is an immense compendium of ancient and Islamic medical knowledge drawing from the work of Galen and Hippocrates, known to Arabic audiences through translations from the Greek originals. Avicenna adduced findings from his own medical practice, producing a work that was canonical in Muslim and Jewish cultures and was immediately accepted as authoritative in Europe after its translation into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century. The Canon of Medicine constituted the first systematic description of the human body, its diseases, and their treatment.