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Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436–76), better known as Regiomontanus, was a Central European astronomer whose peripatetic career brought him into dialogue with some of the key humanist thinkers and patrons. He was one of the founders of modern observational astronomy and exerted a profound influence on Nicolaus Copernicus. His works were even used by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama as navigational aids. Regiomontanus completed his Tabulae directionum et profectionum, a series of tables that allowed for the positions of celestial bodies to be determined mathematically with unprecedented accuracy when compared to the existing Alphonsine Tables that had been developed at the court of Alfonso X of Castile in the mid-thirteenth century. Regiomontanus’s tables, as copied in the present manuscript, continue the Ptolemaic system of their predecessors, but with added tables of tangents and sines that allowed for a much higher degree of predictive accuracy.

The Austrian astronomer Georg von Peuerbach (1423–61) served as an influential mentor to Regiomontanus and an advisor to such highly placed individuals as cardinal Basilios Bessarion and the polymath theologian Nicholas of Cusa. He was appointed court astrologer to the teenage King Ladislaus V of Hungary and later to his uncle, Emperor Frederick III. Around 1454, Peuerbach composed the Novae theoricae planetarum, which was published posthumously in Nuremberg in 1473. This dependable astronomy manual became the standard reference work on the subject for over 150 years. This volume contains seventy-three full-page diagrams, one double-page diagram, and four half-page diagrams. It is likely that these moveable diagrams originated as teaching aids devised by Peuerbach himself, a skilled instrument maker, in the fifteenth century. He later wrote a treatise entitled Speculum planetarum on the construction of paper manuscript volvelles to demonstrate planetary motions as described in the Novae theoricae planetarum.

This booklet consists of extracts, abbreviated and transliterated into Venetian-inflected Italian, drawn from the major texts of Renaissance mathematics and architecture: Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità and Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. Pacioli’s Summa, which consists of an Italian-language synthesis of mathematical knowledge, was first printed in Venice in 1494 by Paganini. The extracts found in this booklet are taken from the second part of the Summa, which is dedicated to geometry. The second set of extracts concerns the elements of classical architecture. Finally, this book contains three recipes for making ink and two remedies for stomach aches added to its final leaves, proof of ongoing use of the item in a reader’s daily life. Perhaps owned by an architect-in-training, it demonstrates how geometry, as a branch of the quadrivium, came to influence theories of architecture and their real-life application.

This compendium of abridged classical texts in Latin exemplifies the sort of miscellany that could be used for undertaking the studia humanitatis and is made up of exemplary excerpts. The lengthiest segment of the manuscript is Book 1 of Cicero’s De officiis, popular throughout the Middle Ages, that focuses on the nature of virtue and its vital constituents: truth, justice, fortitude, and decorum. The other substantial sections record two of Terence’s comedies: Andria, which became the first of the author’s plays to be performed since antiquity when it was staged by Florentine students of Giorgio Antonio Vespucci in 1476, and Eunuchus, the author’s most successful play during his lifetime. Shorter passages include the openings of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and Virgil’s Aeneid. The compendium also includes such varia as remedies for the eyes and for sore chests, a recipe for camomile unguent, and aphorisms.

The recovery of ancient collections of letters provided new stylistic models for humanists eager to break with the medieval formularies that had until then structured letter-writing practices. Petrarch had uncovered Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum in 1345 in Verona, but it was only in 1392 that Coluccio Salutati brought to light the entire sixteen books that make up the Epistolae ad familiares. Beyond its exemplary style of Latin prose, this collection of letters provided invaluable historical information concerning the final years of the Roman Republic. The writing of the book was completed in Ferrara on 12 March 1468 by Gregorio Martinello de Buccassolo, as noted in the closing colophon. Little is known regarding the scribe, Gregorio Martinello, though he appears to have been a schoolmaster in Finale Emilia, just west of Ferrara, and seems to have transcribed a copy of Federico Frezzi’s epic poem of circa 1400, the Quadriregio.

Though the Florentine Academy insisted on the primacy of Platonic thought, translations and commentaries on Aristotle remained the norm across Europe. By the turn of the sixteenth century, new versions of these scholarly apparatuses were being produced. This manuscript demonstrates the migration of new humanist approaches to Aristotle to communities north of the Alps, and their impact not just on the field of logic but in the theoretical sciences as well. The bulk of the manuscript is taken up by short tracts: logical and moral, and short summaries related to Aristotle’s logical works, Categories, and Posterior Analytics. These are briefly interrupted by a short recapitulation of the Pythagorean theorem. The final quarter of the manuscript consists of several works on Aristotle’s Physics. The first three are commentaries by a certain Antoine Charpentier on the Physics and on the introduction to that text by the French theologian Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1455–1536).

Guillaume Tardif (ca. 1436–95), born in the central French town of Le Puy-en-Velay, attended the University of Paris in 1456 and became a tutor first to Prince Charles of France (1446–72), and then to the Dauphin, the future Charles VIII (1470–98), who named Tardif his official “lecteur” upon his accession to the throne. Tardif was instrumental in introducing the work of the Italian humanists to the Valois court, translating works by Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and Poggio Bracciolini into French. This is the autograph copy of Tardif’s earliest work, an original textbook on Latin grammar. As such, it is the earliest humanistic grammatical text written in France. Currently the only known document in Tardif’s hand, it was dedicated and offered to his pupil Charles Mariette, godson of Charles of France, as a New Year’s gift for 1470. The first illuminated initial features the arms of the Mariette family.

While the study of the Medieval trivium and quadrivium continued throughout the Renaissance, the arrival in Italy of previously lost or forgotten texts by philosophers of antiquity challenged these entrenched categories. The writings of Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160–ca. 210 BC), whose Pros mathēmatikous (Against the Professors) attacked all branches of the standard curriculum, would exert a strong influence on Western thinkers. This copy of Sextus’s text was written in Italy by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Russia, Isidore of Kiev (1385–1463). Isidore had traveled to the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–45), where he worked alongside Basilios Bessarion (1403–72) to secure the ultimately unsuccessful union of the Eastern and Western churches. Upon returning to Russia, Isidore was imprisoned by a hostile Grand Prince and clergy, and escaped once more to Rome, where he was charged with defending Constantinople and was named its Latin Patriarch by Pope Pius II.

The emblem book genre, in which images and mottoes are accompanied by brief explanatory texts, was a late development of Renaissance humanism, instigated by the Milanese jurist Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata. This unusual paper manuscript is a unique derivation of the arcane emblem books that became enormously popular in sixteenth-century France. The otherwise unrecorded text, primarily in Latin but with some sections in Greek, consists of a dialogue in the form of short riddles posed by the Sphinx and answered at greater length by Oedipus. Fifty-eight watercolor scenes, one per dialogue, offer allegorical illustrations of the relevant riddle. Occasionally, the figures represent recognizable personages from antiquity, while others are manifestly Christian. The book’s text and illustrations are of an obscure genre and not readily linked to other printed or manuscript works.