AEVUM - 2009 - 3

The Missal given by Gian Galeazzo Visconti to the church of St Ambrose, where it is still kept (Milano, Archivio Capitolare della Basilica di S. Ambrogio, ms. M 6), was signed by the copyist Fazio Castoldi on 24 May 1400 and illuminated by Anovelo da Imbonate and other artists. It is a winter missal with a special mass for Gian Galeazzo. A short text with a genealogy of the Visconti family was soon premised. Probably in 1431, on the occasion of the coronation of the emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg in Milan, an ordo coronationis was added, then a copy of Sigismund’s charter for St Ambrose canons, then a section of summer missal. The text of the genealogy is edited here for the first time, its historical sources are traced and its significance highlighted as part of Gian Galeazzo political project of grandeur.

Under the heading “Hours of the Cross” the Index of Middle English Verse gathers a group of lyrics related to a devotion, particularly successful in the late Middle Ages, which connects one or more episodes of the passion narrative with the seven canonical hours of the Church office. The devotion was formalized in a Latin hymn, Patris sapientia, veritas divina, composed in the first quarter of the 14th century, in which the events occurring in the last day of Jesus’ life were encapsulated in seven quatrains, followed by a final stanza in the form of a prayer. The hymn became immensely popular, especially for being included in a widely circulated Book of Hours known in England as Prymer. The article analyses all the Middle English poems devoted to the Hours of the Cross, the majority of them being some form of “translation” of the Latin hymn. The extraordinary variety of responses to the original text, besides providing further evidence of what medieval translation was meant to be, illustrates an important aspect of medieval poetry, especially in the religious field: that more often than not the literary “creation” is in fact an “art of variation” within a well established tradition.

The Crotti of Cremona, an old merchant family, counted notaries and officiales of the Duchy of Milan among its members. On 9th August 1486, when the eldest brother came of age, all three Pietro Crotti’s sons received their late father’s property from their aunt Violante Fondulo. The notarial document of receipt includes an inventory of the household goods and four crates of books. The books are individually listed and are Latin grammars and school texts, Latin classical poets and historical works, modern exempla epistularum, humanistic tracts, Dante and Petrarch. Most of them are parchment manuscripts.

In 1508 an anonymous scribe wrote in the MS Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. XV 194 a list of 40 books, partly manuscripts, partly printed (in forma). Some items are described as «di mia mano», in my hand. The list author is Giordano di Michele Giordano, whose name appears in some MSS still preserved in Florence libraries. Giordano was not a professional scribe, but devoted much time of his life to the copying of manuscripts, like many others in Florence during the Quattrocento. His collection consisted mainly of texts in volgare or volgarizzamenti relating to different subjects (science and philosophy, devotional texts, travel, cronache, history, literature and romances), but the choice of texts to be copied or bought was neither obvious nor trivial.

Exemplars of XVIth-Century editions of Boccaccio’s Decameron have been systematically examined for the purpose of studying all the handwritten marginalia. A few proved particularly interesting for their connection with Pietro Bembo’s linguistic studies. In Vat. Capponi IV. 508 (Decameron, Venice 1546) some notes attest with full particulars Bembo’s work on an exemplar of the Dolfin edition (Venice 1516). Copious sets of marginalia are seen in Paris, BNF, Rés. Y 2. 799 (Decameron, Venice 1516). The anonymous annotators follow close behind the linguistic interests of Bembo and Niccolò Liburnio.

Some documents from the historical archive of the commune of Brescia attest that, in the early seventeenth century, the municipality of that town was institutionally preserving both epigraphical and manuscript evidences of its own history. In 1605, the text of a classic inscription was registered in one of the communal administrative books. Then, in 1607, a manuscript of Iacopo Malvezzi’s Chronicon, written by Tommaso Mercanda in 1545, was acquired by the commune. This book still lays in the city historical archive (Brescia, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Storico Civico 1463). On the same occasion another manuscript was bought too: a copy of Cristoforo Soldo’s vernacular chronicle, indentifiable as the manuscript now Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, K VI 23, copied by the same Tommaso Mercanda.

An inventory of Greek manuscripts housed in the Ambrosiana Library was prepared in about 1607-1608 and provides information on the provenance and arrangement of the Greek manuscript collection before the official opening in 1609. Part of the inventory was discovered in a miscellany and though incomplete was published a few years ago. Another fragment has now turned up in another miscellany (Ambr. L 43 inf., fasc. 10) and is published here. The total number of Greek manuscripts recorded in the two fragments amounts to 347.

Gioacchino Besozzi (Milano 1679 - Tivoli 1755), a cistercian monk, who became Cardinal of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, was a scholar and a book collector. When he was abbot, the building of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme library, called the Sessoriana, was finished and frescoed, and a bust of pope Benedict XIV, sculpted by Carlo Marchionni, was placed in the hall. Artistic shelves, medals and paintings, including some by Pieter Paul Rubens, adorned the library. All the extant MSS acquired by Besozzi for the Sessoriana are examined: most of these are now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, a few are scattered in other libraries. Chronology of acquisition and provenances, old indexes, bindings, shelf-mark and arrangement of Besozzi’s manuscript collection are here investigated.

Remigio Sabbadini (1850-1934), outstanding scholar of the Italian humanism, used to insist on investigating the same subjects over years and to mark his advancements on the margins of his already published works. For these marginal notes books and offprints from his private library may provide interesting new data. After Sabbadini’s death, his library was dispersed and sold on second hand book market. A block of offprints was acquired by Giovanni Muzzioli († 1961), another one by the antiquarian bookseller Tammaro De Marinis († 1969): about twenty annotated items from Muzzioli and De Marinis collections and from other sources entered the Università Cattolica library and are listed in this paper.

In 1957 the Università Cattolica organized a course on the moral problem in 20th-Century Italy; Ines Scaramucci, a scholar working in the same university, Institute of Italian literature, took part in it, lecturing on matter of ethics in 20th-Century fiction. General Carlo Barduzzi, a former fascist and active anticommunist, who attended the course, wrote to Father Gemelli, then rector of the Catholic University, accusing her of being too compliant with communism. An exchange of letters between Father Gemelli and Scaramucci followed and is here published. She explains her aim at a higher objective of formative nature, particularly through a reflection upon contemporary fiction, where, in spite of an existential crisis, she detects spiritual needs.

Carlo Dionisotti: ricordo di un maestro. Giornata di studio (Milano, Università Cattolica, 19 marzo 2009): MIRELLA FERRARI, Dionisotti e «Italia medioevale e umanistica», p. 953; ROBERTO CICALA, Per uno studio dei rapporti editoriali di Carlo Dionisotti a cominciare dalle lettere con Giulio Einaudi e la casa editrice torinese, p. 960; GIANCARLO ANDENNA, Carlo Dionisotti: un maestro tra storia e filologia, p. 963; VINCENZO FERA, Il progetto per gli scritti sparsi, p. 969 Incontro sulla lingua poetica italiana: a proposito del volume di Luca Serianni (Milano, Università Cattolica, 27 marzo 2009): ALDO MENICHETTI, Spiegare con una antologia, p. 977; GIUSEPPE FRASSO, Tra Lingua e stile: l’apocope (e altro), p. 984

Tradurre dal greco in età umanistica. Metodi e strumenti. Atti del Seminario di studio, Firenze, Certosa del Galluzzo, 9 settembre 2005, a c. di MARIAROSA CORTESI (C.M. Mazzucchi), p. 991 - I classici e l’Università umanistica. Atti del convegno di Pavia, 22-24 Novembre 2001, a c. di L. GARGAN - M.P. MUSSINI SACCHI (A. Manfredi), p. 992 - G.M. CAPPELLI, El Humanismo italiano. Un capítulo de la cultura europea entre Petrarca y Valla (C.M. Monti), p. 996 - G. BARBERO, L’“Orthographia” di Gasparino Barzizza. I. Catalogo dei manoscritti (M. Zaggia), p. 998 - Produzione e circolazione del libro a Brescia tra Quattro e Cinquecento. Atti della seconda Giornata di studi “Libri e lettori a Brescia tra Medioevo ed età moderna”, a c. di V. GROHOVAZ (R. Cacheda Barreiro - A. Manfredi),p. 1000 - D. REZZA - M. STOCCHI, Il Capitolo di San Pietro in Vaticano dalle origini al XX secolo. Volume I: La storia e le persone (F. Della Schiava), p. 1002 - Marino e il Barocco, da Napoli a Parigi, Atti del Convegno di Basilea, 7-9 giugno 2007, a c. di E. RUSSO (R. Ferro), p. 1004 - C. CARMINATI, Giovan Battista Marino tra Inquisizione e censura (L. Sacchini), p. 1006 - B. BUOMMATTEI, Della lingua toscana, a c. di M. COLOMBO (V. Grohovaz), p. 1008 - A. STIPCˇEVIC´, Socijalna povijest knjige u Hrvata / La storia sociale del libro presso i Croati (P. Galic´), p. 1010 - E. PICCHIORRI, La lingua dei romanzi di Antonio Bresciani (M. Colombo), p. 1012 - The Collected Works of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Vol. IV: Oxford Essays and Notes, ed. L. HIGGINS (D. Pezzini), p. 1016 - A. AMICO, Gaetano De Sanctis. Profilo biografico e attività parlamentare (C. Bearzot), p. 1017 - Studi linguistici in onore di Roberto Gusmani, a c. di R. BOMBI - G. CIFOLETTI - F. FUSCO - L. INNOCENTE - V. ORIOLES (T. Pontillo), p. 1021 - A. MENICHETTI, Saggi metrici, a c. di P. GRESTI - M. ZENARI (M.A. Marogna), p. 1024