Kirchhoff gives the names of the following Italian manuscript-dealers and scribes whose scholarly activity during the latter half of the fifteenth century was especially important: Antonius Dazilas, Cæsar Strategus, Constantius Librarius, Andreas Vergetius, and Antonius Eparchus. The latter made various journeys to the East in search of manuscripts. The fact that the dealers in manuscripts very rarely placed their own names on the copies of the texts sent out from their work-shops has, in a large number of cases, prevented these names from being preserved for future record. The names that have come into record are in the main such as have been referred to in the correspondence of their scholarly friends and clients. I quote a few of these references from the lists given by Kirchhoff:
In Bologna the oldest librarius whose work is referred to is Viliaric, who was called an antiquarius, and whose shop was open in the beginning of the thirteenth century. In a manuscript, previously referred to, containing a treatise of Paul Orosius, originally written in the seventh century, and from which this copy was transcribed early in the thirteenth, there is at the end an inscription, as follows:
Confectus codex in statione magistri Viliaric antiquarii,
Ora pro me scriptore, sic dominum habeas protectorem.[346]
(This codex was completed in the stall of Master Viliaric, bookseller; pray for (the soul of) me, the scribe, and you shall have the Lord for your protector.)
This codex seems to have been prepared, according to the usual university practice, for hire, as on the sixteenth page there is noted the memorandum, “this quaternio has five sheets.”
In 1247, Nicolaus is recorded as being the stationarius universitatis, and in the same year a certain Johannes Cambii is recorded as a stationarius librorum; and Minghinus as a stationarius peciarum. Here we have in one year record of three classes of scribes being at work. They were all noted as being doctors of the law, and they all appear on the list of persons exempt from military service.
Later in the same century, a certain Cervotti, who had inherited from a deceased brother a collection of books, undertook to use these for profit by offering them for hire. The list of the books, drawn up by the notary Noscimpax, has been preserved, and includes twenty different works. Certain of these are collections of the university lectures in the Faculty of law, and the others have also, in the main, to do with the subject of jurisprudence. The first book on the list is Diversitates Dominorum, and the last Margarita Gallacerti, which latter does not appear properly to belong to the subject of jurisprudence.
In the year 1400, there is reference to a scribe named Moses and specified as a Jew, which, in view of the university regulations previously referred to prohibiting the sale of books by Jews or to Jews, is noteworthy.
The entry appears at the close of a manuscript of Bartholomæus Brixiensis:
Emi hunc librum anno domini MCCCC die XXI. Mensis novembris a Moysi Judeo pro viii. florenes.