Kirchhoff is of opinion that Moses must have been a travelling pedlar, as it is difficult to believe that a Jew could have at that time secured the post of a licensed university scribe.[347]
In Verona, there is reference to a certain Bonaventura, who is recorded as a scriptor, and who seems to have occasionally utilised for his manuscript work the hand of a woman. An inscription on one of the manuscripts by Bonaventura, quoted by Endlicher, reads as follows:
Dextra scriptoris careat gravitate doloris.
Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella.[348]
In Florence, the earliest librarius of note was probably Johannes Aretinus, whose work continued during the years between 1375-1417. Ambrosius Camaldulensis, who had so much to do with books and with literature, takes pains, in a letter written in 1391, to send a cordial greeting to the librarius Aretinus.[349] Bandini prints a letter of Petrarch’s in which the latter refers to Aretinus as a friend for whom he has a high regard and as a man of exceptional knowledge and clearness of insight, and specifies, as works that he valued highly, nine manuscripts which had been written by the hand of Aretinus. These included Aristotle’s treatise on Ethics, several Essays of Cicero, the Histories of Livy, Cicero’s Orations, Barbari on Marriage, etc.
Kirchhoff gives a list of fourteen other Florentine librarii, whose work extended over the years between 1410 and 1480. The latter date is sixteen years later than the introduction of the printing-press into Italy.
The most noteworthy by far of these manuscript-dealers of Florence was Philippi Vespasiano, who has been previously referred to, and who is to be ranked not only as the most important publisher of the manuscript period, but as one of the great scholars of his time, and as a man whose friendship was cherished by not a few of the leaders of thought during the earlier period of the Renaissance. In one of the Florentine collections has been preserved a number of letters written to Vespasiano by his scholarly friends between the years 1446 and 1463, and these letters show how honoured a position he held in the generation of his time. He was, in fact, in character and in ambition, as well as in the nature of his work, a worthy predecessor of Aldus, and he lived long enough himself to have seen some of the productions of the Aldine Press.
In his earlier years, Vespasiano was for a time secretary to Cardinal Branda in Rome, and it is during this time that he devoted himself earnestly to classic studies. It was while he was in Rome that he began work upon a literary undertaking of his own, which comprised a series of Memoirs of the noteworthy men of his time with whom he had come into relations. The Medici, Duke Borso of Ferrara, and other of the scholarly nobles made large use of Vespasiano’s collections of manuscripts and facilities for producing authentic transcripts.
He was one of the Italian dealers whose agents were actively at work in Greece and in Asia Minor in the collecting of manuscripts, and the clients to whom he supplied such manuscripts included correspondents in Paris, Basel, Vienna, and Oxford.
In the Bodleian Library in Oxford is a codex containing certain works of Cyprian, on the first sheet of which is inscribed:
Vespasianus librarius Florentinus hunc librum Florentiæ transcribendum curavit. (Vespasian, a Florentine librarius, had this book transcribed at Florence.)