Books and their makers during the Middle Ages : $b A study of the conditions of the production and distribution of literature from the fall of the Roman Empire to the close of the seventeenth century, Vol. IPutnam, George Haven
History
Books and their makers during the Middle Ages : $b A study of the conditions of the production and distribution of literature from the fall of the Roman Empire to the close of the seventeenth century, Vol. I
Putnam, George Haven
Books -- History -- 400-1450; Copyright; Freedom of the press -- History -- To 1500; Manuscripts; Printers
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]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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