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Tiny incunables do exist, but the constraints in the production of miniature metal type limited the amount of information they could contain. The finely crafted book, which contains an array of astrological and astronomical charts, as well as other useful information for travel, was produced in 1511 by Imbert Feutrier. Little is known about this individual, who was bailli or bailiff of Crèvecœur-sur-l’Escaut near Cambrai. However, his rank may have given him occasion to travel. Though many of the short texts concern the movements of the celestial bodies, several also touch upon topics as diverse as international commerce, the positions of various European cities, textile production, and remedies for certain ailments. Together, they suggest that the book’s original user, probably Feutrier, intended to bring it along with him on far-flung journeys. Combining science with superstition, the book’s contents represent an updated version of the medieval “bat-book,” or portable medical almanac.

This diverse early humanist compendium, mostly in Latin, contains short works and extracts of longer texts relating to political philosophy, religion, history, and literature. The presence of much material related to the political circumstances in the region around Bologna in the fourteenth century helps localize the manuscript. It includes multiple texts by Donato Albanzani (ca. 1328–after 1411), a rhetorician active in Venice, Ravenna, and Ferrara. Albanzani was a friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, translating their respective works into Italian. Over a quarter of the manuscript is devoted to Jacobus de Cessolis’s De ludo scachorum of circa 1300, a collection of sermons comparing the proper relationships between a king and various subjects to the rules of chess, providing a detailed introduction to the game as it was played in his time. Portions of the manuscript are a palimpsest; the undertext appears to be a fourteenth-century legal text.

These splendid initials, which form part of a larger set of cuttings held at the Free Library, demonstrate the creativity and delicacy that could be applied to aspects of book illustration sometimes considered secondary to larger narrative miniatures. The Milanese artist to whom these can be attributed, the so-called Master B.F. (act. ca. 1490–1545) is so named after a number of works he signed with these initials, including an historiated initial of King David, also at the Free Library. The three historiated initials in Philadelphia, these sets of initials, and several more decorated letters, all in the Free Library, were associated with numerous other fragments from a dismembered set of twenty choir books from the Olivetan monastery of Santi Angelo e Niccolò at Villanova Sillaro, near Lodi.

This single leaf is a rare survival of a stand-alone practical tool designed to be pinned to a surface or kept loosely among papers for easy reference. It consists of a simple diagram showing the years from 1490 to 1504 and their equivalents in a fifteen-numbered sequence of Roman numerals: the indiction system. This method for dating had its roots in Roman Egypt and was first used as a means of assessing periodic land and agricultural taxes in late antiquity. It became popular in the early Byzantine world and was revived in the West as a result of its mention by Bede the Venerable (672/3–735), though its use later declined. By the time this simple diagram was made, it may have been unfamiliar enough to justify such a computational aid. The text above and below the diagram, written in a humanist cursive script, explains how the system functions.

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.

The growing financial demands placed upon the French state during the reign of Francis I (r. 1515–47) precipitated efforts to reform the nation’s tax system that had been in place since the Middle Ages. This unique booklet consists of fifty-eight recommendations and was issued in 1522 or 1523. The colophon echoes the claim voiced by the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy that she and her son were being continuously swindled by financial officials. Tax collection in the kingdom had previously been farmed out to independent merchants who extracted a substantial cut of the revenues, a system the author sought to reform. The intent was to provide a more stable and predictable means of financing the king’s activities and to free him from dependence on credit from foreign merchants.

This manuscript contains four texts united on cosmography. The first is Plato’s Timaeus, in the canonical fourth-century translation with commentary by Calcidius. This remained the only text by Plato known in the Latin West until Henry Aristippus’s translation of the Meno and the Phaedo in the twelfth century. The second text is a unique translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian On the Universe, produced by John Argyropoulos (ca. 1415–87). The third work is Philo of Alexandria’s De incorruptione mundi, probably translated by the Umbrian humanist Lilio Libelli Tifernate (1417/18–86). The final text is the sole known work by the Greek astronomer Cleomedes, De contemplatione orbium excelsorum, translated and dedicated to the condottiere Cesare Borgia by his humanist secretary, Carlo Valgulio (ca. 1440–98). The geometric diagrams for the Timaeus are annotated in Latin, while those for the Cleomedes are in Greek, suggesting an early user fluent in both.

This Franciscan compendium depicting Saint Francis in an illuminated letter P, painted in a Northern Italian style, features a varied collection of stories and apocryphal legends regarding Saint Francis, his companions, and his disciples. Known as I Fioretti di San Francesco (the Little Flowers of Saint Francis), this was one of the best loved of all Franciscan anthologies. The Fioretti comprises a florilegium of chapters recounting Franciscan stories and legends, some directly concerned with the Order’s founding figure and others related to his successive followers. The first edition of the text was printed in Vicenza in 1476. Originally based upon oral accounts transformed into Latin, these had been retranslated into the Tuscan dialect by the mid-fourteenth century. The volume also contains an Italian prose translation of the Life of Saint Clare, which has likewise not yet been the subject of a critical edition.

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.

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.