RICERCA ITALIANA     

An index of the western latin archival sources (VII c.-1520)

Università degli Studi di Verona

Abstract

The aim of this reaserch consists in the realization of a Repertorio of books inventories that have been written between the VIIIth century and the 1520 considered in their quality of historical sources. The geographical area that we bring into focus of our analysis covers the whole Latin West, with the exclusion only of Tuscany and France; for both, in fact, this kind of analysis it's coming to an end (for Tuscany by the SISMEL, for France by the IRHT in Paris).
Till now such an instrument for the modern historical research has not been available because the only Census of inventories was taken by Th. Gottlieb more than a century ago (Th. Gottlieb, "Über mittelalteriche Biblioteken", Liepzig 1890).
The realization of this Repertorio went through an eleven years long biographical perusal and now it can take advantage of a suitable informatic platform: a specific software planned by SISMEL, with whom organize, select and make available the collected data in a ductile and effective way.
For what concerns Italy, we can say the Census it's coming to an end for what concerns its bibliographical perusal as well as for the data recording.
For the extranational areas instead, at the moment, the recording concerned only that part of documents their historical and cultural relief has been considered of the greatest importance.
Through the description of the inventorial repert, articulated into well defined ranges, it's possible to find every single element by the so-called "Query System".
Therefore our Repertorio presents two essential features: on one hand we can call it the 'contextual' and on the other the 'dynamical' one. With the 'contextual' feature we mean to show the genesis, the modalities and the circumstancies that produced such a documentation; so that our Census occurs not only as an aseptic enumeration of data but also in a narrative form, preserving yet the pre-estabilished standards of uniformity and homogeneity.
With the 'dynamical' term we want to emphasize the care relating to the formation, to the increase, to the eventual dispersion and the the transmission of books: in this case such a documentation plays a role of a faithful and reliable witness.
One can look at the role of the beneficiaries of a donation or of a loan, as well as one can consider the acquisition and the endowment processes of a whole property of books or part of that.
An extension of the Census to typologies of sources, improperly valued of minor importance, if compared with the biggest ones as Catalogues and Inventories, has been considered absolutely necessary.
That's why the Census contemplates all the book attestations found in the archivial sources (like testaments, differents acts…) or in registers conceived for specific aims (notes of loans, notes of expenses, notes found out the obituaries…).
The collected data shall be articulated in chronological order according to geographical localities and owners' names (organizations and persons).
For every inventory the regest, the indication of the source/es (manuscript or by archivial) shall be shown together with the editions gifted with fundamental bibliography.
The spreading of the Repertorio will be made by booklets, each concerning a defined geographical area and fitted out with a CD-ROM. <<<

Principal Investigator

Massimiliano Bassetti Università degli Studi di VERONA

Research Objectives

From what we said before we can now enucleate the principal aims of this project:
-to complete the census of the italian inventorial sources;
-to achieve the census of the extranational inventorial documents by the enpowerment of the bibliographical perusals and the insertion of the already selected data with the exclusion of France. That happens because the IRHT is working on an up-to-date version of the Repertorio edited twenty years ago by A. M. Genevois, J. F. Genest &amp; A. Chalandon, "Bibliothèques de manuscrits médiévaux en France…", Paris 1987. Comprehensive only of the French inventories till 1799, with a digitalization of their most rare editions, it's named ISBA (Inventaire des Sources sur les Bibliotèques Anciennes). [For the work in progress see on line the M. Peyrafort's briefing, "L'odysée de l'ISBA (…)" exposed on the 1th of December 2005 during the XIIth Convention on the topic "Le manuscrit dans tous ses étates (…)", organized by IRHT-Aedilis (http://aedilis.rht.cnrs.fr/manuscrit/isba.htm). The scholar spoke about it during the last 14th December Convention dedicated to "Les bilbiotèques médiévales au XXe siècle…" in which the Docs P. Massalin and G. Fiesoli took part (SISMEL) introducing their own researches "in itinere".
-to publish the census results in volumes, eventually fitted out with CD-ROM, giving priority to Italian Regions and, following, to the extra-Italian areas.
On this perspective it's previewed to articulate the edition for regional areas limitedly to Italy, and for macro-areas relatively to the rest of the Latin-West (Iberian area, Anglo-Saxon, German, Belgian and Dutch areas, Bohemian area, 'peripherial' regions and centers). The Corpus will be made up therefore by some different booklets that will account of the geographical factor.
The employ of a software will guarantee a profitable work of indexing as an equipement of the single booklets.
Incited by the conviction that's necessary to redeem the book inventory, especially the very ancient one, from the state of "a dumb and untrustworthy fossil witness", that a certain tendency in the studies with a 'codex-centric' view still inclines to place it within, the Repertorio we are proposing wants to be considered as a flexible instrument with the capacity to travel over the book history, as far as it's possible, or -more generally- of any funds, giving in this way concrete elements in order to establish, historically, the vicissitudes that have carried to a progressive dispersion of it and to further passages of property.
Pursuing these aims, with a renewing and up-to-date "catalogue-centric" perspective, we think to do the first and decisive step in that direction indicated by Giorgio Pasquali in that far 1934, from the skillful pages of his book, "Storia della tradizione e critica del testo": «The time is already come of a systematic and complete collection of all the Medieval catalogues. I wonder, indeed, that this work has not made yet, because, here, the interests of the classicist scholar coincide with those of the medievalist, who wants to know which books were read in a certain period in a certain cultural area» (p. 168).
So our Repertorio wants to be a new instrument, realized with the modern informatic systems but in support of an old, unfortunately, disregarded warning. <<<

First Results

In such way configured, our Repertory of inventorial documents will be an essential instrument for the realization of the first universal collection of edited book catalogues -in a broad sense- contained in medieval and humanistic libraries from the Carolingian Age to the first Renaissance age (ab. 1520); it will be a collection that is needed for Italy and generally for the whole Latin-West. Anyone can see the further potentialities guaranteed by the process of digitalization of the textes, that is coming to an end, though only to the Italian area, and will permit the check of the collected data with the help of the editions. The informatic platform able to keep such a big Corpus, will permit, with the necessary enpowerment, to add anytime addenda and corrigenda, trying to avoid to let it ageing too early, because of the frequency this kind of documentation is studied and edited.
By taking as a starting point the publication of the Actes of a profitably international Meeting titled "Books, readers and libraries of the Medieval Italy (IX-XV cent.). Sourches, textes, utilisation of the book", Actes of the French-Italian Round-table (Rome 7th-8th of March 1997), edited by G. Lombardi and D. Nebbiai Dalla Guarda, published in the year 2000, organized by two of the agencies that have been overseeing such a research since a long time, the IRHT in Paris and the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU in Rome), we must say that the growing interest in the book inventarial sourches it's submitting several scholars, gifted of a different formation and of different specific interests to the same problems about the typological definition, the diplomatic criteria of transcription, the numerous cases of dubious attribution, the individualization of the works in the inventorial items; in this choral and opened debate, in this confrontation of different statements of method appears how is necessary a severe and wide census of those sourches like the one we have started and that we are now pointing out to your attention.
One can be expected in studying the medieval and humanistic inventories (including the ones that were written after the movable types print invention) to attend, expecially for those areas where a census or corpus of documentation is absent - for ex. Italy and the Iberian peninsula - or not so systematic collected as happens in the German countries or however as it's happening with a good outcome in the Belgian and Anglosaxon areas, to a clear declaration of his purposes supported by a solid method of biblographhic exploration, reproduction, interpretation and decifration of the document; this operation also requests to show a consciousness of the peculiar nature of the documentation with whom, in a more or less direct way, we can reconstruct the history of the libraries, the tastes and the tendencies of a specific social-cultural milieu, or the process that has regulated the act of a donation or of a loan or determinated the loss of huge book assets.
All this considered - in particularly we have considered the most important collections devoted to the study of such documentary witnesses [cf., according to the chronological order, "Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, ed. by (Kaiserl.) Österreich. Akad. der Wissenschaften in Wien, vols. I–V, Wien 1915-1971 [= MBKÖ]; "Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz", ed. by (Koenig.) Bayer. Akad. der Wissenschaften in München, vols. I–VI, München 1918–1979 [= MBKDS]; A. Derolez (ed. by), "Corpus Catalogorum Belgii", vol. I: "Prov. West-Vlaanderen, Bruxelles" 19972 ; vol. II: "Prov. of Liège, Luxemburg, Namur", Bruxelles 1994; A. Derolez – B. Victor (edd. by), "Corpus Catalogorum Belgii: The Medieval Booklists of the Southern Low Countries", vol. III: "Counts of Flanders, Prov. of East Flanders, Antwerp and Limburg", ed. with the collaboration of W. Bracke, M. Oosterbosch and J. W. Klein, Brussel 1999; vol. IV: "Prov. of Brabant and Hainault", Brussel 2001 [= C.C.B.]; naturally, for Anglo-Saxon area, we must cite the collection "Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues" (= C.B.M.L.C.), born in the '90's, under the general editor Richard Sharpe, with the support of the British Library and the British Academy, vols. I-XII], through the RICABIM we want, not only call with a sufficient severity the attention of the potential users to a huge series of documents but even redeem the ancient inventory of manuscripts or incunabula from that subordinate rank in which from years was put it by the criticism of the sources.
Trough the days of retrospective accounts and reflections on method the time is come for a constructive period: therefore the huge monographic works about ecclesiastical corporations and famous bibliophiles must proceed on the one hand together with the ones about the humanistic princes's big collection; in fact by this comparison with the world of the studies plainly originates the solicitation not to lose the contact with the specific lexicon and terminology of the inventories, a real mine of informations for codicologists and paleographers [cf. "Vocabulaire du livre et de l'écriture au Moyen Âge", Actes de la table-ronde (Paris 24-26 sept. 1987), ed. by O. Weijers, Turnout 1989] and not to leave the laborious searching among the files of the documentation guarded inside the archives in order to profile local or regional situations with their peculiarities. On the other hand a 'Catalogus Catalogorum' it's missing and the meritorius deeds of Gottlieb show some insufficiencies; so that's why we have the mind to fill this gap with scientific rigours.
Encouraged by the results for the time being, we wish finally to give an actual contribution to the exploitation of scriptoria, libraries, or more generally, of the Latin-West book-assets in their milieu. As well as we wish to promote the revaluation of areas we think about wrongly like periferic and marginal ones compared with the historic and cultural process that has influenced the textual and cultural transmission during the Middle Ages and the first Modern Age, trying not to forget the dynamic side of the diffusion of manuscripts and first incunabula.
A so large documentation needs the consciousness that the whole scene can be rebuilt only with a succession of approximations, amassing data we can compare the one with the others, to be available for further elaboration and suitable to join more diffuse studies.
From this point of view the work in progress is a connection, exposed to modifications and improvements, among many different student's needs, who can so have at their disposal an instrument able to take a census of the inventories out of libraries and ancient collections.
Only with the help of such an instrument and with the will to pursue delimited aims, we'll be able to make the first and decisive step in that direction Giorgio Pasquali have shown in 1934, launching his appeal, cited above, from the pages of his magistral work the "Storia della tadizione e critica del testo". <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The need to dispose a repertory of inventorial documents about book properties, drawn up between the early Middle Ages and the Renaissance, able to include the Latin cultural inheritance as a whole, is constantly growing everywhere. Th. Gottlieb’s monographic work, “Über mittelalterliche Bibliotheken”, Leipzig 1890 (reprint Graz 1955), actually the only census shaped as ‘regestum’ or short communications, endowed with universal amplitude, not only in relation to the large number of involved geographical areas, but also to the heterogeneous range of documentary typologies examined (inventories and catalogues properly speaking and archives as wills, donations, purchases etc.), was a commendable enterprise, worthy of the highest praise, but at present it needs ‘addenda and corrigenda’. Moreover, the modern scholarly approach to the search around ancient books has radically changed: a careful re-examination of the issue is imposed by the change of sensibility as well as by the comparison with different methodological praxis (codicological, palaeographical, philological, historical attitudes) and by the progressive increase of editions of these documents as well as specific studies devoted to the genesis, to the progressive development and to the eventual dispersion of ancient book collections. By treasuring the Gottlieb’s pioneering enterprise and joining together the elements in our possession, flowed from bibliographical research lasted beyond one decade by help of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin (S.I.S.M.E.L. - Florence), which in the meantime has realized software systems able to construct a flexible database, we thought it was the moment for realizing the “Repertory of Inventories and Catalogues of Medieval Libraries” (so-called R.I.Ca.Bi.M.), devoted to take a census of the most ancient documentary witnesses in the West Latin until to the conventional year 1520.
The realization of this ‘catalogus catalogorum’, that has reached a fully satisfactory stage for Italy (8.820 records of documentary witnesses up-to-date), is under construction for the other states by recording descriptive cards about the most impressive book catalogues (in addition to the previous approximately 2.000 cards which increase the total number around 9.000 records); it is the first step for the construction of a well organized corpus of Medieval and Renaissance inventories, inexistent up-to-date, both Italian and extra-Italian.
Some numerical relieves can give a more exact perception of the amount of the hitherto collected elements: up-to-day we have collected beyond 26.000 useful witnesses for the repertory; approximately a third of these, as we said, is already present in the database (the remaining part constitute at the moment the nucleus of an independent file on paper stand or in Word format, which shall be progressively recorded in the database according to close examination as well as collation between original documents); these witnesses have come out of the systematic perusal on beyond 2.200 bibliographical contributions which cover over one century devoted to searching about librarian heritage of Medieval and Humanistic libraries (we have employed the 1890 year like t. p. q., that is the date of edition of Gottlieb’s book). Consequently, we judged it better to concentrate the first phase of the search just on rewriting the 1.391 news whose the Gottlieb’s book is composed: practically this operation often has provoked a big ‘earthquake’ around the attributions, dating and indication of the sources that transmit single documents.
According to the wide amount of documentary witnesses collected, S.I.S.M.E.L. believed it was right to proceed to the planning a database able to favour the data recording, the management and the use of the great set of information in immediate way; moreover, it must answer to the scientific requirements of searching, specifically according to the software equipments and functional resources, already experimented with optimal results in the sections “Medieval Libraries” and “Manuscript Catalogues” of the annual Bulletin “Medioevo Latino. Bollettino bibliografico della cultura europea da Boezio a Erasmo (secc. VI-XV)”, edited by C. Leonardi and L. Pinelli. Therefore R.I.Ca.Bi.M. is a flexible and dynamic database that takes part in the construction of ‘meta-data’ (i.e. the branched tree of “Medioevo Latino” that obviously sinks its roots between works and authors). So the realization of an adequate query–system to technical requirements of an expert operator, involved even directly in introducing new data, as well as to any external user apart from his level of acquaintances in matter, has been believed absolutely opportune. Hence the realization of a repertory shaped as database, able to analytically describe the document required and, in the meantime, answer promptly to any question.
R.I.Ca.Bi.M. is also characterised by two other noteworthy factors:
- the wide collected range of documentary typologies;
- the identification of eventual consignees or beneficiaries (both institutions and specific individuals) of library estate, in order to fully value the dynamical aspects of book circulation, particularly with regard to peculiar even if frequent typologies as testamentary bequests, donations, loans i.e. lending notes written in official register-books, pledges etc.
Nowadays, by exploiting the documentary resources collected, we brought at an end the following projects:
- “Inventari delle Biblioteche Medievali ed Umanistiche Italiane in rete (secc. VIII-XVIin.)”, realized by S.I.S.M.E.L. with financial support of the Italian Ministry for the Cultural Assets and Activities within the national program “Biblioteca Digitale Italiana: Internet culturale”, under the ICCU’s direction. Head-coordinator: Prof. Donatella Frioli (Univ. of Trento). Local coordinators: Dr. Paola Massalin and Giovanni Fiesoli. The digital reproduction of inventorial documents edited, through scanning, includes an essential description of the contents; it was realized with the involvement of the National Central Library and of the Department Library of Arts in the University of Florence, which have placed their book collections at our disposal for digital acquisition. This moment SBN’s server does not allow the direct access to this resource however utilizable in Intranet by S.I.S.M.E.L.;
- “Libri e biblioteche in Toscana tra Medioevo ed Umanesimo”, project realized by S.I.S.M.E.L. It is in printing by SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo the following book: G. Fiesoli – E. Somigli (edd. by), “Libri e biblioteche in Toscana tra Medioevo ed Umanesimo. Censimento delle fonti inventariali dal Medioevo al 1520”. <<<