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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.

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).

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.