Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In Rome the records of 1454 speak of Giovanni and Francisco as cartolaji and librarii, that is to say, dealers in paper and also in manuscripts. In that year these dealers had for sale among their things, Letters of Cicero (without which work no well regulated manuscript-dealer’s collection appears to have been complete) and the works of Celsus. A copy of the latter was bought for Vespasiano for the sum of twenty ducats. There is record during the same year of a certain Spannocchia who also had Cicero’s Letters for sale.

In Genoa there were at this time one or two manuscript-dealers, but, as before stated, the readers and scholars of Genoa appear for the most part to have supplied themselves from Florence.

The most important trade in manuscripts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as was the case during the fifteenth century with the trade in printed books, was carried on in Venice and Florence. As early as 1390 the inscription of Gabriel Ravenna, librarius, appears in a copy of Seneca’s Tragedies.[354] Kirchhoff is of opinion that Gabriel conducted, during the last fifteen years of the fourteenth century, an important work-shop for the production of manuscripts.

A year or two later, occurs the name of Michael, a German librarius, but it is possible that Michael’s work was more nearly that of a secretary than of a manuscript-dealer. As Kirchhoff points out, it is not always easy at this stage of the trade in manuscripts, to distinguish between the inscriptions of the manuscript-dealers certifying to the correctness of the copy sent out from their shops, and the inscriptions of the scribes or secretaries who, having completed for this or that employer specific copies of the works required, added their names as a record on the final sheet.

Reference has already been made to Johannes Aurispa, by far the most important of the manuscript-dealers of his time and possibly of the entire Middle Ages. Aurispa was born in 1369 in Sicily. The earlier years of his life were passed in Constantinople, where he appears to have held a position of some importance in connection with the Court. While in Constantinople, he began to make collections of manuscripts, and he organised there a staff of skilled scribes. In 1423, at the invitation of his friends, Ambrosius Camaldulensis and Niccolo de’ Niccoli, he came to Florence, bringing with him an invaluable collection of 238 manuscripts.

To this store he afterwards added, while in Florence, a further lot of codices which he had had sent from Constantinople to Messina. At this time, his interest in the collection of manuscripts appears to have been a matter of scholarship merely and of sympathy with the efforts of certain Florentine scholars whom he came to know, to secure the material for their classical studies.

Later, however, in connection, doubtless, with the many applications that came to him for transcripts of his codices, he decided to organise a business as a bookseller and publisher. Before taking this course, he had, it appears, sought a position as instructor, first in Florence and afterwards in Bologna and in Ferrara, but had not succeeded in finding the kind of a post that suited him.

Part of the evidence of his change of mind comes to us through letters from Filelfo, whose keen scholarly interest brought him into close relations with men having to do with literary production. Filelfo writes to Aurispa, in 1440:

Totus es in librorum mercatura, sed in lectura mallem. Quid enim prodest libros quotidie, nunc emere, nunc vendere, legere vere nunquam! (You are completely absorbed in the occupation of trading books, but I should choose that of reading them. For what does it profit you to buy and sell books every day if you never have time for their perusal.)

And again in 1441: