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This ascetic miscellany contains a selection of works related to self-privation, and yet, its first page is decorated with vibrant white-vine motifs fashionable in central Italy around 1470. Five texts are included in the miscellany, beginning with the anonymous tract on the art of dying well, De arte bene moriendi, followed by an excerpt from the legend of Saint Bernard by Jacobus da Voragine. The manuscript’s longest text, the De miseria humane conditionis, was authored by Lothar of Segni (1160 or 1161–1216), who would reign from 1198 as Pope Innocent III. His text was extremely popular in the later centuries of the Middle Ages and survives in over 700 other copies. The other texts in this miscellany consist of a rhyming poem on the fifteen signs of doomsday extracted from Jacobus da Voragine’s writings and a dialogue between the body and the soul attributed to Saint Bernard.

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.

This large, decorated initial B is a fragment cut from the beginning of a twelfth-century copy of Cassiodorus’s book on the Psalms, the Expositio psalmorum. Text on the reverse side of the cutting is identifiable as the preface of Cassiodorus’s work. Here, the large letter B begins the short excerpt from Psalm 1, “Beatus vir..”

This initial has been excised from an eleventh-century copy of Florus of Lyon’s commentary on the Epistles of Paul: the fragmentary text visible on the reverse side includes the conclusion of the commentary on Philemon and the beginning of the section on Hebrews. Florus (ca. 810–60) was a theologian, canonist, and liturgist educated in the spirit of the Carolingian Renaissance. His work on the Pauline Epistles was widely copied in the following centuries. The white-vine scroll decoration seen in this fragment—known in Italian as bianchi girari—is typical of manuscript illumination associated with the Romanesque period. It was later borrowed by humanist scribes and illuminators who thought the texts they were copying were ancient, or at least reliable copies of lost originals.

Arezzo-born historian and statesman Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) is credited with instigating the tripartite vision of history made up of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. His synthetic work on the First Punic War (264–41 BC), completed in 1420, became wildly popular. Some 160 manuscripts preserve the original text, with many in the early Italian translation. This copy of Bruni’s text was written in 1444 by the Milanese scribe Milano Borro (act. ca. 1430–50), one of the first practitioners of the littera antiqua in Milan. The true recipient of this copy of Bruni’s text was Gian Matteo Bottigella, secretary to Filippo Maria and later secret councillor to his successor, Gian Galeazzo Sforza. The escutcheon bearing his arms in the lower margin has been obliterated, but the crowned, gilded initials of his double-barreled first name are visible above it.

Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945–1003) was the first Frenchman elected to the papacy and reigned as Sylvester II for the final four years of his life. His renown, however, stems from his prowess as a mathematician and pedagogue. Among his achievements were the reintroduction of the abacus and armillary sphere to Western Europe, via the Islamic civilization of Al-Andalus. He is also thought to be responsible for introducing the Hindu-Arabic numeration system to the Latinate world. This volume contains texts such as Gerbert’s correspondence with Adebaldus of Utrecht on the isosceles triangle, and a short treatise on the astrolabe, another instrument that he helped familiarize to Christian audiences. This manuscript is an excellent example of Renaissance engagement with scholarship from the High Middle Ages. An assiduous reader of classical authors, including Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius, Gerbert of Aurillac was an outstanding conduit of classical thought for much later readers.

This manuscript was produced in Tournai in the first half of the eleventh century and contains the texts of Gregory the Great’s Ten Homilies on Ezekiel, Radbod II’s Sermo de nativitate Mariae Virginis, and selected brief moral maxims and exhortations. A note on the first folio, “Liber Radbodi epi,” was likely written by Radbod II himself. Radbod II was elected Bishop of Noyon and Tournai in 1067–68 and died in 1098. The existence of two manuscripts of Radbod’s Sermo de nativitate has been noted, one in the Vatican and the other in the library of Saint-Martin at Tournai. Given that this exemplar once belonged to Radbod, our manuscript may be the Saint-Martin copy.