An exceptionally handsome sammelband in a beautifully preserved, unsophisticated contemporary binding from the monastery of Wiblingen, Ulm; complete with 28 intact finger tabs labelled in manuscript, original clasps and catches, extra blank leaves, and corrections and annotations in a meticulously neat contemporary hand - all the hallmarks of a working copy intended for use in an educational setting, likely that of the monastic school.
Established in the late eleventh century, the Benedictine Abbey of Wiblingen near Ulm contained both a scriptorium and a monastic school, built during the Melk Reforms of the early fifteenth century. The reforms saw the restructuring of Benedictine monasteries in Austria and Southern Germany and a renewed focus on writing, learning and education; to that end the scriptorium at Wiblingen housed up to 30 monks at any one time, and the library, by the eighteenth century, would house over 15,000 volumes. As the present volume indicates, there was also a binding workshop, active between 1475 and 1551.
This sammelband contains two eminently ‘teachable’ works - a later incunable edition of the epigrams of Martial, a popular educational text in this period, and Petrarch’s pastoral poems, Bucolicum Carmen. Though not uncommon, the first work, Bartolomeo Zani’s edition the epigrams, is handsomely printed and contains the popular commentaries of Domizio Calderino and Giorgio Merula, as well as preliminaries that include letters to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga and Lorenzo de Medici by Calderino, and a brief life of Martial. It has been sporadically, but painstakingly marked up in an extremely neat early hand; marks range from vertical lines between words and underlining to amendments and corrections, many made by painstakingly scraping away the ink of the printed text and overwriting corrections in manuscript. Fuller annotations are both marginal and interlinear and are most fulsome in Xenia, though do appear throughout, and occasionally in German. There is a lovely little note in the lower blank margin of 140v, ‘pruna: pflaum.’ translating ‘plum’ from Latin into German; and on f.78v ‘capitolium vetum’ is translated as ‘Ratthaus’. Alongside an explanation in the commentary of melimella, a type of sweet or honey apple, is the neat translation ‘angstöpfel als höngling’ f.73r.
The second work in the sammelband is an edition of Petrarch’s eclogues, printed in Venice by Simone Bevilacqua in 1503, separately printed to, but intended to be grouped with, Bevilacqua’s 1503 edition of the Latin works of Petrarch, Librorum Francisci Petrarche Impressorum Annotatio (the eclogues are listed in the index at the front of the work, but it is the only part to have its own title page, and is frequently found separately). Neither printer nor date are indicated in the colophon, however, which instead gives the name ‘Marcum Horigono de Venet.’ and the date 1416 (with an additional ‘c’ added later by hand). Though sadly not an indication of this being an incunable of unprecedented age, it is an interesting and unusual bibliographic oddity, that speaks to the still-porous boundaries between manuscript and print cultures in the early sixteenth century. ‘The mysterious name of Marcus Horigono has been thought to be that of an otherwise unrecorded printer…[but] the obvious inference is that Marcus Horigono was the Venetian scribe of the original manuscript, which he finished copying on 15 July 1416. It is not unknown to find early printers copying a scribe’s colophon and retaining the original date’ (Rhodes, ‘Notes’; see also Fowler, pp.3-4). Fowler also draws attention to the identical type used in the title page of the present work and the general title page of Bevilacqua’s 1503 edition, of which this was part.
Scattered worming, though minimal, otherwise a lovely copy in exceptional condition.
Provenance: Benedictine monastery of Wiblingen, with inscription ‘F F Wibling.’ above title on first leaf. 2. Bernard Rosenthal, bookdealer in Berkeley, California, with copies of his correspondence with Dr Tilo Brandis of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and 3. Kimball Brooker, bibliophile.
I. ISTC im00311000. BMC V 432. Goff M311. II. Goff P370. CNCE 33849 (full record for Librorum Francisci Petrarche…, Bevilacqua, 1503*).* Mary Fowler, Catalogue of the Petrarch collection bequeathed by Willard Fiske (Cornell, 1916), pp.3-4. Dennis Rhodes, ‘Notes on the 1503 edition of Petrarch’, Studies in Early Italian Printing (1982), pp. 69-71.
