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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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This manuscript anthology on paper of forty-four Christmas Carols, or Noels, written principally in French and dating to the sixteenth century, are a combination of well-known songs and unique or unrecorded texts. One carol, “Il fault mourir à ce coup cy,” is attributed by an inscription to its author Olivier Maillard (ca. 1420–1502). The use of the regional Angevin terms “nau” and its diminutive “naulet” for Noël, as well as the notarial document reused as a wrapper mentioning Nantes, point to the Western Loire Valley as the region of production and use. The volume is notable for its twenty-five vividly drawn, watercolor-tinted sketches added to the blank marginal spaces surrounding the text. The manuscript can be dated to ca. 1520–30 on the basis of the script’s style and marginal images, whose pastoral character connects them to compositions found in tapestries of this period.

The vogue for vernacular translations of classical epics, whether in prose or in rhyme, intensified throughout the fifteenth century as bibliophiles became less comfortable reading the original Latin or Greek texts. Among the more successful French translators was Octavien de Saint-Gelais (1468–1502), whose ecclesiastical career as bishop of Angoulême (as of 1494) brought him into contact with Louise of Savoy, mother of the future king of France, Francis I (r. 1515–47). The present manuscript is a fine copy of Octavien’s verse translation of the Aeneid, written in decasyllabic couplets. Like many such manuscript copies, the volume was intended from the start to accommodate large introductory miniatures for each book, but these remain blank.