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This manuscript is a commissione issued to Andrea Valier by Doge Leonardo Loredan in 1502. The text concerns Valier’s duties and rights as podestà or civil administrator of Piran, an Istrian town in present-day Slovenia that was under Venetian control from 1283 to the extinction of the republic in 1797. This exemplar belongs to a wider genre of Venetian administrative records that came to be transformed into luxurious showpiece copies. This folio features an elaborate architectural frontispiece in the all’antica style, a revival of ancient forms characteristic of humanist book production in Renaissance Italy. The illumination has recently been attributed to the First Pisani Master, so named on account of two Aldine editions with Pisani heraldry. During Loredan’s dogeship of Venice (1501–17), the city-state was wracked by conflict with France, the Papal States, and other Italian powers, and yet it also saw some of its most brilliant artistic achievements.

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.

This stout volume is a transcription of two of the astronomer Regiomontanus’s later works, based upon their incunable editions. This manuscript contains Regiomontanus’s highly accurate Calendarium, which provides information on lunar and solar eclipses, daylight hours, and the signs of the zodiac and planetary positions for the years 1475 to 1530 and the Ephemerides, which provides positions for the sun, moon, and planets for each day of each year from 1480 to 1506. Regiomontanus set up his own press in Nuremburg in 1475 in order to ensure sufficient quality in the complex lunar diagrams and tables. Each annual section is indicated by a leather or parchment finding tab. The inclusion of the feast of Saint Kilian and its related Octave in the volume’s liturgical calendar is specific to the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach, in Upper Austria on the Traun River south of Linz.

This is a collection of papal decrees and bulls concerning the Augustinian order. The compilation begins with a series of older texts combined into a sprawling bull outlining privileges for friars of the Augustinian order, the Dum fructus uberes. This work was composed at the instigation of Sixtus IV in 1475. The text was commissioned by the Augustinian theologian and abbot Antonio Meli, for the use of Joannis Angeli, both friars in Crema, Lombardy. The manuscript’s borders can be attributed to the workshop of Giovanni Pietro da Cemmo (doc. 1474–1507). This artist was well-known as a fresco painter who enjoyed very close links to the city’s Augustinian convent (today the Museo Civico) in the early sixteenth century, where he painted a refectory fresco cycle in 1507. The portrait in the roundel at the bottom of this folio is that of Saint Augustine.

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.

This manuscript textbook on practical arithmetic intended for a merchant’s adolescent son or daughter, with common mathematical problems accompanied by vivid illustrations is an apparently unique and possibly autograph text, produced in Nola, east of Naples, by Pierpaolo Muscharello in 1478. The contents reflect the curriculum of the Abacus, a form of secondary school frequented by the children of merchants between the ages of about eleven and fifteen. These schools taught the practical skills of mathematics and geometry useful for commercial transactions, together with knowledge of foreign and domestic trading practices. The work begins with several pages of multiplication tables, followed by a table of contents, and a preface including the arms of the Alberti family. Though the decoration mimics that of contemporary Neapolitan illuminators such as Cola Rapicano (act. 1451–d. 1488) and Cristoforo Majorana (act. ca. 1472–94), the illumination undoubtedly the work of a nonspecialist.

Around 1405, Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) translated Basil of Caesarea’s thousand-year-old Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature into Latin. Saint Basil’s careful call for the appreciation of pagan Greek literature by a youthful Christian audience would become increasingly popular in the 1440s as the Council of Ferrara-Florence brought Greek intellectuals to Italy in droves. Saint Basil’s pithy, ten-chapter tract begins with a justification for the offering of advice for adolescents, originally intended for members of his family. The author then gradually introduces the reader to the reasons why the reading of profane literature might be profitable for the soul. The manuscript can be dated precisely to 19 November 1442; a colophon names the scribe as a certain “Franciscus Tuisanus.” From an early date, the book was owned by members of the Martinotius (Martinozzi) family of Fano, on the Adriatic coast.