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This humanistic miscellany contains three texts: the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini’s encomium of the Venetian system of government, In laudem rei publicae Venetorum written in 1459; the ninth-century historian Einhard’s biography of his patron Charlemagne, the Vita excellentissimi imperatoris Magni Karoli; and Alcuin of York’s Confessio, a prayer of contrition apparently composed for Charlemagne’s recitation on a daily basis. Bracciolini (1380–1459) composed the first work in this manuscript as a slight against the high taxes and incompetence of the Florentine regime, arguing that Venice embodied the Ciceronian ideal of an aristocratic government. Though Bracciolini’s portion is largely unrelated to the others, it concludes with a historical anecdote concerning Charlemagne, recounting how the son of the early Venetian doge Maurizio, having been captured by the Lombard king Desiderius, was liberated by the emperor. The coat of arms on the first page is of the Bembo family of Venice.

This mid-fifteenth-century manuscript contains six texts relating to papal affairs in the first half of the century, each written by a prominent literary figure of the day. The first, by the diplomat and scholar Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), consists of an oration to Nicholas V, who was widely admired for rebuilding Rome and establishing the Vatican Library during his pontificate (1447–55). The second text consists of another oratio in praise of Nicholas V, Poggio Bracciolini’s oratio ad summum pontificem Nicolaum V, which is followed by Franciscus Florentinus’s Letter to Nicholas V. The final three tracts are shorter works by Leonardo Bruni and deal with the circumstances surrounding the Council of Basel and its convocation by Martin V (r. 1417–31). The coat of arms depicted here, a red unicorn rampant on a silver field, suggests that the manuscript’s first owner was a member of the Picenardi family of Cremona.

In the incunable period, it was common practice for a small number of copies of a single edition to be printed on parchment, rather than on paper. These could be specially commissioned by discerning bibliophiles, offered to prized patrons by booksellers, or given to the sponsors of that particular print run. This copy of Cicero’s Orations, printed in Venice in 1471, is an example of just such a phenomenon. Its opening page has been transformed into an elaborate architectural frontispiece by the Veneto-Paduan illuminator Giovanni Vendramin (act. 1466–ca. 1509), a prolific artist who embellished numerous other incunables in the 1470s, as well as the occasional manuscript. This incunable edition contains twenty-eight of Cicero’s Orations, edited by Ludovico Carbone (ca. 1430–85), a humanist orator in the service of the d’Este court in Ferrara.

The Walloon poet and historiographer Jean Lemaire de Belges (ca. 1473–ca. 1525), wrote this autograph copy of a unique text produced for the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany (1477–1514). This copy is likely the sole surviving exemplar of this unpublished and unknown work. Anne, to whom the work is dedicated, was an extraordinary political leader and a great patroness of the arts. She has the distinction of being the only French sovereign to have been twice crowned, first as the wife of King Charles VIII and then, after his sudden death in 1498, as the consort of Charles’s successor and second cousin once removed, Louis XII. The first page opening includes the year in Roman numerals as well as the queen’s Castilian motto “NON MUDERA,” which she inherited from her Spanish mother.

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.

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).

This manuscript is a twelfth-century copy of the Sententiae of Saint Isidore (ca. 560–636). As bishop of Seville, Isidore was instrumental in converting the Visigothic kings to Christianity, but he is most famous for his encyclopedic summa of universal knowledge, the Etymologies, which has led him to be called “the last scholar of the ancient world.” The Sentences, though less influential than the Etymologies, consist of a collection of theological writings meant to serve as a manual for the clergy and were gleaned from the works of Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine. The work is divided into three parts and covers subjects such as creation, the nature of evil, ecclesiastical orders, and the judgment of God. Though this manuscript was produced in the Iberian Peninsula, the interlaced initial S depicted here resembles initials produced by Florentine scribes and illuminators in the fifteenth century.

This hybrid print and manuscript book consists of a printed edition of the fifteenth-century Franciscan mystic Hendrik Herp’s Mirror of Perfection.It is bookended by two eight-folio manuscript sections written and illustrated by Denis Faucher (1487–1562), a mystical poet and Benedictine monk, who spent the majority of his career at the Abbey of Lérins off the coast of Provence. Faucher’s poems are here mostly addressed to a scholasticate, a nun in the training period following the novitiate, and concern the attainment of spiritual perfection in the world. The poems are accompanied by two striking images, which he painted himself. The first shows a nun in a black habit being crucified, with a snake biting a heart, representing sin, entwined around her left arm, depicted here. The lit oil lamp the nun holds in her right hand represents faith and refers to the parable of the Wise Virgins (who tended their lamps).

Those who traded in the interconnected Mediterranean world of the fifteenth century needed to be well informed about the types of goods available in a large number of cities, the units of measure and coinage used, their denominations, and their exchange rates with principal domestic currencies. This commercial manual in Italian responded perfectly to the needs of the Renaissance merchant, containing information for converting weights, measures, and money across Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, with major sections devoted to the trading capitals of Florence, Venice, and Genoa. The text is attributed to the Florentine merchant Giorgio di Lorenzo Chiarini and called the Libro di mercantieet usanze de’ paesi, or Book of Trade and Customs of Countries. A coat of arms of the Bertini family is present on a terracotta monument by the della Robbia workshop in the church of San Jacopo in Gallicano, north of Lucca

This Prayer Book pairs a unique selection of texts with an extensive cycle of printed images, demonstrating an alternative to the Book of Hours in a period of religious foment. It contains popular devotional works by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Marco Girolamo Vida (ca. 1485–1566), and Prudentius (ca. 348–413), copied by hand from printed sources. Within the first half of the book are also sections from the Christiad, an epic poem published in 1535, first written by Marco Girolamo Vida, a humanist bishop, at the request of Leo X, which provides a Christian counterpart to Virgil’s Aeneid. It also features works by the early Christian poet Prudentius, such as hymns, which were appreciated by Erasmian humanists for their conflation of classical Latin forms with Christian motifs. This manuscript demonstrates how readers adapted modern and ancient devotional texts, replacing the traditional Book of Hours.