Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The effect of this change in the business conditions was to lessen the practice of hiring manuscripts for a term of days or weeks, or of dividing manuscripts into pecias, and to increase the actual sale of works in manuscripts.

The university regulations, however, controlling the loaning of manuscripts and of the pecias appear to have been continued and renewed through the latter half of the fifteenth century, that is to say, not only after the trade in manuscripts, at popular prices, had largely developed in cities like Florence, Venice, and Milan, but even after the introduction of printing. It would almost seem as if in regard to books in manuscript, the system which had been put into shape by the university authorities had had the effect of delaying for a quarter of a century or so the introduction into Bologna and Padua of the methods of book production and book distribution which were already in vogue in other cities of Italy. I do not overlook the fact that there was in Florence also a university, but it is evident that the book-trade in that city had never been under the control of the university authorities, and that the methods of the dealers took shape rather from the general, common-sense commercial routine of the great centre of Italian trade than from the narrow scholastic theories of the professors of law or of theology.

During the twenty-five years before the art of printing, introduced into Italy in 1464, had become generally diffused, the years in which the trade in manuscripts was at its highest development, Florence succeeded Venice as the centre of this trade, both for Italy and for Europe.

The activity of the intellectual life of the city, and the fact that its citizens were cultivated and that its scholars were so largely themselves men of wealth, the convenient location of the city for trade communications with the other cities of Italy and with the great marts in the East, in the West, and in the North, and the accumulation in such libraries as those of the Medici of collections, nowhere else to be rivalled, of manuscripts, both ancient and modern, united in securing for Florence the pre-eminence for literary production and for literary interests.

Scholars, not only from the other Italian cities, but from France, Germany, and Hungary, came to Florence to consult manuscripts which in many cases could be found only in Florence, or to purchase transcripts of these manuscripts, which could be produced with greater correctness, greater beauty, and smaller expense by the librarii of Florence than by producers of books in any other city. After the Greek refugees began their lecture courses, there was an additional attraction for scholars from the outer world to visit the Tuscan capital.

The wealthy scholars and merchant princes of Florence, whose collections of manuscripts were given to the city during their lifetime, or who left such collections after their death to the Florentine libraries, made it, as a rule, a condition of such gifts and such bequests that the books should be placed freely at the disposal of visitors desiring to make transcripts of the same. Such a condition appears in the will of Bonaccorsi,[334] while a similar condition was quoted by Poggio[335] in his funeral oration upon Niccolo d’ Niccoli, as having been the intention of Niccolo for the books bequeathed by him to his Florentine fellow-citizens.

Foreign collectors who did not find it convenient themselves to visit Florence, such as the Duke of Burgundy, and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, kept employed in the city for a number of years scribes engaged in the work of preparing copies of these Florentine literary treasures for the libraries of Nancy and of Buda-Pesth.

Matthias was, it seems, not content with ordering the transcripts of the works desired by him, but employed a scholarly editor, resident in Florence, to supervise the work and to collate the transcripts with the originals, and who certified to the correctness of the copies forwarded to Buda.[336] At the death of Matthias, there appear to have been left in Florence a number of codices ordered by him which had not yet been paid for, and these were taken over by the Medici.[337]

In a parchment manuscript of the Philippian orations is inscribed a note by a previous owner, a certain Dominicus Venetus, to the effect that he had bought the same in Rome from a Florentine bookseller for five ducats in gold in 1460.[338] Dominicus goes on to say that he had used this manuscript in connection with the lectures of the learned Brother Patrus Thomasius.

During the thirteenth century, there was a considerable development in the art of preparing and of illuminating and illustrating manuscripts. One author is quoted by Tiraboschi as saying that the work on a manuscript now required the services not of a scribe, but of an artist. For the transcribing of a missal and illuminating the same with original designs, a monk in Bologna is quoted as having received in 1260 two hundred florins gold, the equivalent of about one hundred dollars. For copying the text of the Bible, without designs, another scribe received in the same year eighty lire, about sixteen dollars.[339]