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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.

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

Written in French and dated to 30 December 1524, this document consists of a brevet, or commission, granted to the viscount of Turenne, Antoine de La Tour d’Auvergne, seigneur d’Oliergues (1474–1527), bestowing the rank of captain and the charge of twenty-five lances and fifty men-at-arms. It is signed by the French king, Francis I, in his distinctive scrawl: “françoys.” Politically, the document attests to Francis’s preparations for a new attack on Milan as part of the Italian war of 1521–26. Ultimately, this military campaign would end disastrously for the King, concluding abruptly with the decisive French defeat at the Battle of Pavia in February 1525, where the King was captured and held hostage for several years. Through this document, we become party to a strategic decision, personally approved by the king and issued less than two months prior to this ill-fated expedition.

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.

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 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.

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.