Iter Gallicum - Source-gathering trip to France

For a long time I had been planning a source-gathering trip to France due to the fact that some manuscripts of Biondo's Decades were in its libraries. The loud construction site on our building in Jyväskylä helped to set the trip on May-June 2023. Furthermore, since our seven-month-old daughter was now part of our lives, we decided it was best that she and my wife both accompanied me to France. This way we wouldn't have to spend any time apart from each other. In the next three blogs, I give some glimpses of what I have discovered on my voyage.

The aim of this journey was to consult, digitize and analyse five manuscripts, one in Besançon, three in Paris, and one in Saint-Omer. Some of the manuscripts had very scarce information online, so I was partly going in blind. The first destination was Besançon in the Eastern France, so we decided to fly to Zurich, and head to Besançon by train. The train journey took about four hours and finally Besançon was within sight.

Besançon is an ancient city as it has had occupants since Antiquity. It was called Vesontio by the Romans and Julius Caesar writes about the city in his Gallic Wars this way:

Vesontio [...] is the largest town of the Sequani, [...] and so fortified was it by the nature of the ground, as to afford a great facility for protracting the war, inasmuch as the river Doubs almost surrounds the whole town, as though it were traced round it with a pair of compasses. A mountain of great height shuts in the remaining space, which is not more than 600 feet, where the river leaves a gap, in such a manner that the roots of that mountain extend to the river's bank on either side. A wall thrown around it makes a citadel of this [mountain], and connects it with the town. (De bello Gallico 1.38).

Johannes Hinderbach (1418-1486) and his copies of Decades

For the past four months, I have been studying on a collection of Decades copies once owned by Johannes Hinderbach. These manuscripts have been really insightful as they contain several annotations of Hinderbach. I thought it useful to write something about these manuscripts as they are so fascinating.

First, few words about Johannes Hinderbach (1418-1486). He was a German-born diplomat, who had studied in Vienna and in Padova. From the latter he graduated as doctor utriusque iuris (doctor of canon and civil law) in 1447. Most of the 1450s Hinderbach worked as an ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire and visited Italian peninsula multiple times. He could be called as an expert in the Italian affairs and therefore he accompanied emperor Frederick III (1415-1493) to Rome in 1452, where the emperor was officially crowned by pope Nicholas V (r. 1447-1455). In 1465, Hinderbach was elected as prince-bishop of the alpine city of Trento, and he would hold that position the rest of his life.

Source gathering trip to Italy (and first live paper presented in Siena!)

On commute to the Vatican library

I thought I'd write a short post of my source gathering trip few weeks ago. The trip focused on Italy, more precisely, to Rome, Florence and Siena. The original aim was to participate the final colloquium of the Lamemoli-project (Late Medieval and Early Modern Libraries 2017-2022) and present a paper there, but this trip grew to a full three week journey to various Italian libraries.

I spent the first week (20.2.-27.2.) in Rome, where I delved in the Vatican library. My aim was to finish my research on certain manuscripts, which was interrupted by covid-19 in February of 2020. I honestly got a lot of things done, measuring codices and counting quires. I even managed to inspect some new manuscripts such as Ott. Lat. 1440 and Ott. Lat. 1916, which are some later copies of Decades. The latter manuscript was especially fascinating, partly due to its huge size (430 x 240 mm, with over 400 leaves). Also in Rome I had the time to meet many friends, some residing in the Finnish Institute in Rome, and some were just conveniently on holiday in the Eternal City. 

Intertextuality in Biondo's works

Few days ago, I noticed a small, but quite interesting piece of information while researching a copy of the first decade of Biondo (Vat. Lat. 1936). The scribe of the copy had the habit of copying everything from the model, even marginal texts and colophons. He also copied a certain marginal note in the seventh book on f. 120r, which raised my eyebrows:

Luceolim co(e)ptum postea hui(c) et in Italia desc(ri)psi : fuisse : ubi nu(n)c pons est luceolis dictus oppido p(ro)xim(us) Canthiano, Urbinu(m) int(er) et Eugubiu(m) civitates. In vetustissima oli(m) flaminia via.

Why study book history?

This question is one I have heard countless of times (along with: Who really needs to study medieval history? But that one is a subject for another time). I do not intend to give a full and satisfactory answer, for my focus is going to be on my views and why I think book history is an important discipline.

History is, in essence, stories. Those stories are told over and over again. One key feature about stories is that they spread the ideas within them. Thus, ideas move through humanity via stories. While the most common way to tell a story is orally, the most enduring one is text. Today, ideas spread through internet, social media and other electronic devices. It might appear that no one reads physical texts anymore. Well, before the digital age, information and ideas had to be transferred usually via written texts. And before the newspaper industry, that format was a book, or a codex.

Studying a copy of Decades in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome last June.

Book history studies the books as vessels which transmit ideas among humans. Well, at least in one sense. It also studies the book itself, its dimensions, structure, material, writing, layout etc. Just like scholars who study social media platforms and newspapers, book historians study the book. The physical appearance of a book can tell us much about the technology of the period when the book was made. It can also help in locating the origin of a book, whether it is a manuscript or a printed book. The used writing material informs us what kind of animal skins were used, whether some animals were popular in specific regions etc. Moreover, finding a watermark in a paper manuscript can point to a specific paper manufacturer revealing important information of the paper trade.