SUPPLEMENTA


XXVI

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SUPPLEMENTA HUMANISTICA LOVANIENSIA

Editors: Prof. Dr Gilbert Tournoy Dr Godelieve Tournoy-Thoen Prof. Dr Dirk Sacré

Editorial Correspondence: Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 (Box 3316) B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)

This Publication was made possible by PEGASUS Limitedfor the promotion of Neo-Latin Studies

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LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

2009

SUPPLEMENTA


XXVI

SYNTAGMATIA

ESSAYS ON NEO-LATIN LITERATURE IN HONOUR OFMONIQUE MUND-DOPCHIE AND GILBERT TOURNOY

Edited by Dirk SACRÉ & Jan PAPY

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© 2009 Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven, Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium).

All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers.

ISBN 978 90 5867 750 1D/2009/1869/22NUR 635

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CONTENTS

Dirk SACRÉ – Jan PAPY, Praefatio .................................................. XI

Stefano PITTALUGA, Errori ‘obbligati’ nel commento di Nicola Tre- vet alla Phaedra di Seneca ....................................................... 1

Christian COPPENS, Et amicorum: not just for friends ................... 9

Lucia GUALDO ROSA, Le strane vicende di Seneca nelle biografie umanistiche da Gasparino Barzizza a Erasmo, con qualche

eccezione alla scuola di Pomponio Leto ................................. 19

Klára PAJORIN, Per la storia della novella. Due narrationes umoris- tiche e un frammento di ‘racconto’ di Pier Paolo Vergerio ... 33

Jean-Louis CHARLET, Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Tortelli, Niccolò Perotti: la restauration du Latin ............................................. 47

Béatrice CHARLET-MESDIJAN, Le discours sur le marriage de Janus Pannonius dans le livre II de ses Élégies ................................ 61

Domenico DEFILIPPIS, Forme e modelli del sistema incipitario nell’ Itinerarium di Anselmo Adorno ....................................... 73

Albert DEROLEZ, A Literary Tour de Force: The Latin Translation of Maerlant’s Martijns and the Translator’s Prologues ......... 93

Francesco TATEO, Napoli Neo-Latina e la tradizione di Petrarca ... 105

Mark P.O. MORFORD, Johann Grüninger of Strasbourg ................ 119

Alexandre VANAUTGAERDEN, Érasme bibliographe: la querelle avec Polidoro Virgilio à propos des Adages ................................... 137

Mauro DE NICHILO, Tradizione e fortuna delle opere del Pontano, II. La stampa sonciniana del De laudibus divinis ....................... 147

Wouter BRACKE, Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla’s Adnotationes Novi Testamenti: a note on Royal Library of Belgium, MS 4031-

4033 .......................................................................................... 163

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VI CONTENTS

Jan BLOEMENDAL, Erasmus and Comedy between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: an Exploration ....................... 179

Brenda M. HOSINGTON, ‘Compluria opuscula longe festivissima’: Translations of Lucian in Renaissance England ..................... 187

Paul-Augustin DEPROOST, À la marge d’Utopia. De Thomas More A Pierre Gilles, dédicace ou préface? .................................... 207

René HOVEN, Un opuscule rarissime et méconnu de Gérard Listrius: discours et poème chanté pour l’école latine de Zwolle ......... 221

Michiel VERWEIJ, The correspondence of Erasmus and Hadrianus Barlandus ................................................................................. 233

Harry VREDEVELD, A Case of Plagiarism Revisited: Eobanus Hes-sus’ Victoria Christi ab inferis and Ps. Juvencus, Triumphus

Christi heroicus ........................................................................ 251

Jacqueline GLOMSKI, Patronage, Poetry, and the Furnishing of a Nobleman’s House: Valentin Eck’s Supellectilium fasciculus

(1519) ....................................................................................... 261

Geoffrey EATOUGH, Peter Martyr’s Response to Hernan Cortes .. 271

Philip FORD, Melchior Volmar’s Commentary on the Iliad ........... 287

Ari WESSELING, How to Explore the World while Staying at Home. Erasmus on Maps ..................................................................... 301

Alejandro COROLEU, Notes in a 1531 Edition of Vida’s De arte poetica ...................................................................................... 307

Edward V. GEORGE, Cynicism Enhanced: Late Additions to Juan Luis Vives’s Third Sullan Declamation ........................................... 317

George Hugo TUCKER, Érotisme, parodie, et l’art du centon dans le Gallus (1543; Centones ex Virgilio, 1555) de Lelio Capilupi .. 329

Lore POELCHAU (†), Auf den Spuren einer lateinischen Dichtung im Livland des 16. Jahrhunderts ................................................... 345

Fidel RÄDLE, Pietas et mores – Rebellion und Gewalt. Studenten- leben in der Frühen Neuzeit .................................................... 355

Ronald W. TRUMAN, Fadrique Furio Ceriol’s Institutionum rheto- ricarum libri III (Leuven, 1554) ............................................... 371

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CONTENTS VII

Jean-François GILMONT, Gilbert Cousin et Jean Crespin .............. 385

Dirk IMHOF, A chest full of manuscripts between Antwerp and Nijmegen: The library of the sixteenth-century textile merchant

and philologist Theodorus Pulmannus .................................... 401

Roger P.H. GREEN, Poems and Not Just Paraphrases: Doing Jus- tice to Buchanan’s Psalms ....................................................... 415

Francis CAIRNS, Pietro Bizzari’s Accounts of the Early French Voya- ges to Florida ........................................................................... 431

Chris L. HEESAKKERS, From the Helicon to the Dutch Dunes. On an elegy and a letter by Petrus Bacherius Gandavensis (1517-

1601) ......................................................................................... 445

Demmy VERBEKE, Horace fom Bruges to Cambridge: The Editions by Jacobus Cruquius and Richard Bentley ............................. 461

Ann MOSS, Thinking Through Similitudes ...................................... 473

Rudolf DE SMET, The “Postrema Responsio” by Marnix of Saint Aldegonde: the Tailpiece of his Polemic with Michel de Bay .. 487

Marc VAN DER POEL, Lipsius and the Splitting of Propertius 1.8 . 495

Jeanine DE LANDTSHEER, Towards the Edition of ILE IV (1591): a Revision of its 1974 Version Extended with Five Overlooked

Letters ....................................................................................... 507

Jan PAPY, An Unknown Satirical Dialogue by Justus Lipsius against Matthaeus Dresserus and David Peifer ................................... 521

Hugo PEETERS, L’édition de ILE de l’année 1596: description du ms. Lips. 3(17) et datation de lettres par Juste Lipse ............. 537

Robert V. YOUNG, Constantia nos armat: Lipsius’ Letters and the Trials of Constancy .................................................................. 547

Harm-Jan VAN DAM, The Blacksmith and the Nightingale: Relations between Bonaventura Vulcanius and Daniel Heinsius ........... 557

Minna SKAFTE JENSEN, Tycho Brahe’s Double Identity as a Citizen of Denmark and of the World .................................................. 569

Craig KALLENDORF, Epic and Tragedy – Virgil, La Cerda, Milton .. 579

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VIII CONTENTS

Dirk SACRÉ, A Missing Link. An Overlooked Letter of Jacob Cats to Caspar Barlaeus .................................................................. 595

Antonio IURILLI, Biblioteca e saperi: il progetto di Erycius Puteanus 605

Joaquín PASCUAL BAREA, La Epistola commendatitia de Jacinto Carlos Quintero para la proyectada edición en Flandes de los

Veteres Hispaniae Dei de Rodrigo Caro ................................. 623

Andries WELKENHUYSEN, Scrabbling with Puteanus. The Album of his Friends and Correspondents in De Anagrammatismo, 1643 ..... 639

Noël GOLVERS, An Unobserved Letter of Prospero Intorcetta, S.J. to Godefridus Henschens, S.J. and the Printing of the Jesuit Translations of the Confucian Classics (Rome – Antwerp, 2 June

1672) ......................................................................................... 679

Jennifer TUNBERG-MORRISH, Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Amours de Psiché et de Cupidon (1669) as a Source for Psyche Cretica

(1685), a Neo-Latin Novel by Johannes Ludovicus Praschius . 699

Tom DENEIRE, The Latin Works of Two Poets from Poperinge: Joannes Bartholomaeus Roens and Petrus Wenis ................................. 709

David MONEY, Neo-Latin and University Politics: the Case of Henry Sacheverell ............................................................................... 723

Heinz HOFMANN, Eine neue Quelle für den Mythos von Sol und Nox im Columbus-Epos von Ubertino Carrara ...................... 741

Stéphane MUND, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, un botaniste du roi Louis XIV dans le Caucase au début du XVIIIe siècle ............ 757

J.C. BEDAUX, Gerhard David Jordens (1734-1803), neulateinischer Dichter aus Deventer ............................................................... 773

Paul Gerhard SCHMIDT, Vox veritatis ad Napoleonem. Eine lateini- sche Versinvektive von 1813 .................................................... 791

Paul THOEN, Questions linguistiques. Le tournant remarquable de la formation humaniste vers le milieu du 19e siècle au Petit

Séminaire de Roulers (Flandre Occidentale, Belgique) ......... 799

Emilio BANDIERA, Si fugit tempus di Joseph Tusiani .................... 815

Franz RÖMER, Der lange Sieg ......................................................... 821

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CONTENTS IX

Ingrid A.R. DE SMET, Cui bono? Some reflections on the Aims of Teaching Post-Classical Latin ................................................. 825

INDICES

1. Index nominum ............................................................................ 8352. Index codicum ............................................................................ 844

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1 The first — and still the main — text dealing with the topic is Geoffrey D. Hobson, ‘Et Amicorum’, The Library, 5th ser., 4 (1949), 87-99; later contributions just repeat his statements; see also Graham Pollard, ‘The Earliest English ‘Et amicorum’ Inscription’, The Book Collector, 9 (1960), 326; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as gifts in sixteenth-century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983), 83-84; David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History. A Handbook (Lon-don: The British Library, 1994), p. 25; Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Letture e circoli eruditi tra Quattro e Cinquecento: a proposito dell’ex-libris “et amicorum”’, in I luoghi dello scrivere da Francesco Petrarca agli albori dell’età moderna. Atti del Convegno internazio-nale di Studio dell’Associazione italiana dei Paleografi e Diplomatisti, Arezzo (8-11 ottobre 2003), eds. Caterina Tristano, Marta Calleri & Leonardo Magionami (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2006), pp. 375-393; A. Nuovo, ‘“Et amico-rum”: costruzione e circolazione del sapere nelle biblioteche private del Cinquecento’, in Libri, biblioteche e cultura degli Ordini regolari nell’Italia moderna attraverso la documen-tazione della Congregazione dell’Indice. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Macerata, 30 maggio-1 giugno 2006, eds. Rosa Marisa Borraccini & Roberto Rusconi (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2006 (= 2007)), pp. 105-127. See also A. Nuovo, ‘Il fattore umano nelle biblioteche: Gian Vincenzo Pinelli e Piero Vettori’, in Pensare le biblioteche. Studi e interventi offerti a Paolo Traniello, eds. Angela Nuovo, Alberto Petrucciani & Graziano Ruffini (Rome: Sinnos, 2008), pp. 45-58, esp. pp. 45-46: ‘Tra Quattro e Cinque-cento nessun uomo di lettere avrebbe revocato in dubbio il dovere morale di ogni proprietario di libri (e, a fortiori, di biblioteca) di condividere con altri il sapere rappresentato da essi, nella consapevolezza della costruzione della conoscenza come processo collettivo.’ See in general also Antoine-Jean-Victor Le Roux de Lincy, Researches Concerning Jean Grolier, his Life and His Library, With a Partial Catalogue of His Books, ed. Roger Portalis, trans-lated and revised by Carolyn Shipman (New York, NY: The Grolier Club, 1907), pp. 61-68; H.M. Nixon, Bookbindings from the Library of Jean Grolier (London: The British Museum, 1965); Colin Eisler, ‘Jean Grolier and the Renaissance’, in The Library of Jean Grolier. A preliminary catalogue, ed. Gabriel Austin (New York, NY: The Grolier Club, 1971), p. 7.

ET AMICORUM: NOT JUST FOR FRIENDS

Christian COPPENS

The tag ‘et amicorum’ in provenance entries is known in the first place from its appearance in gold tooling on bindings, particularly on those of Jean Grolier, the prince of bibliophiles. However, it was in use much more and had been in use much longer in handwritten entries, in manuscripts as well as in printed books. The first entries registered date from the beginning of the fifteenth century and they cease around 1600, although the tradition continues here and there until the eighteenth century.1

This tradition is closely connected, of course, with the Republic of Letters. The first time the Respublica litteraria was worded as such is in

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10 CHRISTIAN COPPENS

2 Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, La République des Lettres (Paris: Belin, 1997), pp. 11-12. On utilitas see e.g. Loretano de Libero, ‘Utilitas publica’, in Der neue Pauly. Enzyklopädie der Antike, eds. Hubert Cancik & Helmuth Schneider, 12/1 (Stuttgart- Weimar: Metzler, 2002), cols. 1068-1069.

3 For a first attempt to understand how the establishment of a library in the sixteenth century was based on the model of common places, see C. Coppens, ‘Curiositas or Common Places: private libraries in the sixteenth century’, in Biblioteche private in età moderna e contemporanea. Atti del convegno internazionale, Udine, 18-20 ottobre 2004, ed. Angela Nuovo (Milan: Bonnard, 2005), pp. 33-42, on ‘et amicorum’, see p. 41.

4 Compare, for instance, Gilbert Hess, Literatur im Lebenszusammenhang. Text- und Bedeutungskonstituierung im Stammbuch Herzog Augusts des Jüngeren von Braun-schweig-Lüneburg (1579-1666) (Frankfurt etc.: Lang, 2001), pp. 53-57; see also Dina de

a letter from Francesco Barbaro (1390-1439) to Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1454), who at the time was apostolic secretary to the Council of Con-stance (1414-1418). During a break in the activities he was able to con-tinue his search for new manuscripts of classical texts. In this context Barbaro wrote to him and praised his work for the benefit of the public, pro communi utilitate, where indeed utilitas also has its place. Poggio was praised still further for unearthing works by Quintilian, Lucretius, Tertullian and other Latin authors and for recalling that the classics hon-our learned people as much as victorious warriors. In this way Barbaro considered his friend to deserve a place among those who merited the highest praise, as they had contributed so much to the Republic of Letters and had embellished it so greatly, qui huic litterariae Reipublicae plurima adjumenta atque ornamenta contulerunt.2

This ‘et amicorum’ tag is often interpreted as an expression of gener-osity, generosity to friends. In contrast, it has nothing to do with senti-ment, rather it is ratio. This is a topos, a locus communis, a common place, but one that involved committing oneself.3

It is an anachronism to see friendship in the humanist period as it is seen today. At that time, like daily life in general, it was much more fixed in its rules than it is today, although people nowadays do not realise how much their life is still ruled by all kind of standards. Anyway, starting from Petrarch, the humanist movement was very much influenced by the classics. Translations from the Greek and new Latin texts nurtured the new wave in European intellectual history. From the time of Petrarch onwards we are struck by the idea of sharing, sharing knowledge, sharing sources, sharing with friends, sharing with people with the same aims, the same goal, sharing to make available for reading, for research, what-ever that could mean, but not to spoil it. And texts created imitatio and aemulatio, both embedded in the rhetoric of daily life.4



ET AMICORUM: NOT JUST FOR FRIENDS 11

Rentiis, ‘I[mitatio] morum’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 4, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), pp. 285-303. And, of course, there is no place for women. See also Nicholas Mann, ‘Petrarca Philobiblon. The author and his books’, in Literary Cultures and the Material Book, eds. Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison (Lon-don: The British Library, 2007), pp. 159-173.

5 H.E.S. Woldring, Vriendschap door de eeuwen heen. Wijsgerige beschouwingen over vriendschap als gave en opgave (Baarn: Ambo, 1994), p. 38.

6 Woldring, Vriendschap, p. 41.7 Woldring, Vriendschap, p. 46. See also Enrico Berti, ‘Il concetto di amicizia in

Aristotele’, in Il concetto di amicizia nella storia della cultura europea. Atti del XXII con-vegno internazionale di Studi italo-tedeschi, Merano, 9-11 maggio 1994. Der Begriff Freundschaft in der Geschichte der Europäischen Kultur. Akten der XXII. internationalen Tagung deutsch-italienischer Studien, Meran, 9.-11. Mai 1994, ed. Luigi Cotteri (Merano, Accademia di studi italo-tedeschi, 1995), pp. 102-135, e.g. pp. 103-104: ‘il termine greco che sta a indicare la virtù, cioè aretè, ha un significato molto più ampio di quella pura-mente morale, perché comprende qualsiasi forma di perfezione, di eccellenza, di valore. La virtù, inoltre, per Aristotele è essenziale alla felicità, perché quest’ultima consiste pre-cisamente nell’esercizio dell’attività di cui rende capace la virtù, cioè, si potrebbe dire, nell’esercizio della virtù, intesa nel senso più ampio del termine. […] Il carattere ‘naturale’ dell’amicizia, che Aristotele illustra mediante il riferimento anche agli animali, pur pre-cisando che in senso proprio l’amicizia si dice soprattutto a proposito degli esseri umani, richiama la nota tesi secondo cui ‘l’uomo è per natura un animale politico’, cioè fatto per vivere nella polis e capace di realizzare se stesso soltanto all’interno di quest’ultima. “Chi è senza polis per natura e non per circostanze casuali — dice Aristotele nella Politica — è un essere di poco valore oppure è superiore all’uomo”. E subito dopo indica la ragione di questo nella mancanza di autosufficienza: ‘Se ciascuno, una volta isolato, non è autosuf-ficiente, si troverà nei confronti del tutto nella situazione delle altre parti, mentre chi non è capace di vivere in società o non ne ha alcun bisogno per la sua autosufficienza, non è parte della polis, ma è o una bestia o un dio.’ Pertanto una forma importante di amicizia è l’amicizia civica, che sta a fondamento della polis, ossia la solidarietà che ciascuno prova nei confronti dei suoi concittadini, con i quali collabora alla realizzazione del bene comune.’ But Aristotle is against the idea of friendship as utilitas (p. 108).

For Aristotle friendship, philía, meant something that could foster the highest good, eudaimonia. Real friendship is based on the virtue of peo-ple wanting the best for each other.5 Friendship and virtue go together. A very subtle point in Aristotle’s thought is the relationship or the bal-ance between love for oneself and unselfishness. He answered this ques-tion by means of diversion of the love for others to love for the self.6 Aristotle also considers another type of friendship, namely civic friend-ship, politikè philía. He sees it as something for the common good, the formation of the sense of community.7

For Cicero friendship, amicitia, was also fundamentally based on virtue. Only virtue enabled friendship to exist at all and to be a reciprocal relation-ship between politically like-minded citizens from the social elite. Friendship does not exist for the sake of profit, rather profit arises out of friendship. The source of true friendship for him is mutual inclination to spontaneous




8 Woldring, Vriendschap, pp. 49-55; see also Ernst Badian, ‘Amicitia’, in Der neue Pauly, 1, 590-591; Hans-Joachim Gehrke, ‘Freundschaft’, in Der neue Pauly, 4, 669-670: ‘Erwiderungsmoral […] und […] agonalen Konkurrenzmentalität […]. […] andererseits stand sie in der Obligatorik von Normen und Interessen, die auf Gleichheit und Gegen-seitigkeit beruhten.’ In his De Officiis (1, 16, 51) Cicero wrote for instance: ‘In qua omnium rerum quas ad communem hominum usum natura genuit, est servanda commu-nitas. […] Cetera sic observentur, ut in Graecorum proverbio est amicorum esse com-munia omnia.’ See also Theodorus Pütz, Dr. M. Tullii Ciceroni Bibliotheca (Münster: Theissing, 1925), p. 15: ‘Librorum vero copiam Cicero non solum in urbe sed etiam in villis suis summo animi ardore ad suum et amicorum usum sibi comparavit.’, and p. 19: ‘pro viribus amicum in comparanda et exornanda bibliotheca adiuvisse pro certo habere-mus.’ For the Greek idiom, see i.a. Euripides, Orestes, 735: koinà gàr tà t¬n fílwn. This was in itself already enough to awaken the moral imitatio-aemulatio of ‘et amico-rum’. See i.a. Anthony Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting. Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their books and bindings (Cambridge-New York, NY-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 26. See also Werner Suerbaum, ‘Cicero (und Epikur) über Freundschaft und ihre Probleme’, in Il concetto di amicizia nella storia della cultura europea. Atti del XXII convegno internazionale di Studi italo-tedeschi, Merano, 9-11 maggio 1994. Der Begriff Freundschaft in der Geschichte der Europäischen Kultur. Akten der XXII. internationalen Tagung deutsch-italienischer Studien, Meran, 9.-11. Mai 1994, ed. Luigi Cotteri (Merano: Accademia di studi italo-tedeschi, 1995), pp. 136-171.

9 On the evolution of the meaning of the word between Plautus and Cicero, see Theo-dor Birt, Kritik und Hermeneutik nebst Abriss des antiken Buchwesens, Handbuch der klassischen Altertums-Wissenschaft, I – 3. Abteilung (München: Beck, 1913), p. 54: ‘In besonderer Weise entwickelt sich der urbanus, der zunächst den Grossstädter, dann den Witzbold bedeutet, sodann das Wort amicus, das allmählich entwertet wurde; denn da der kaiserliche Hof seine Hofschranzen amici nannte, nannten auch die sonstigen grossen Herren ihre Klienten ebenso, und die amicitia verlor die Gegenseitigkeit, die zu ihrem Wesen gehört.’ Compare for instance Courtney De Mayo, ‘The Theory and Practice of Friendship in the Middle Ages 1: Ciceronian Amicitia in the Letters of Gerbert of Auril-lac’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1970), 319-337.

10 Woldring, Vriendschap, pp. 63-64; see also Suerbaum, ‘Cicero (und Epikur)’, p. 147: ‘Obwohl Torquatus [Cicero’s dialogue character] kein einziges Mal den Begriff utilitas verwendet, könnte man diese Theorie der Tendenz nach die Eigennutz-Theorie nennen.’ See e.g. also Glenn Lesses, ‘Austere Friends: The Stoics and Friendship’,

help without the aim of material profit. Cicero considers there is a cohesion between virtue, friendship and politics, namely Concordia. Amicitia as well as Concordia are based on ratio.8 This idea of an elite and of ratio is very important in understanding the background to the ‘generosity’ tag.9

For Seneca and the Stoics of his time and those of the sixteenth cen-tury, friendship was embedded in wisdom and virtue. Friendship was inherent in a life according to virtue, and that was the same as living according to reason. A wise man did not need friends for himself, but he controlled his sentiments and made friends based on reason, and in this way friendship was a kind of cement for the State. For Seneca it was not important to have friends, but what mattered was the capacity to make friends and to be a friend.10




Apeiron: A journal for ancient philosophy and science, 26 (1993), 57-75, in fact too abstract to be of real interest here though it might be useful to give a couple of quotations: “only sages can be friends”, “the sage is apathes”, “the Stoics are right to describe their ideal moral as ‘austere’”. See even more in general Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge-New York, NY-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991). It was too late to read properly Perrine Galand-Hallyn e.a. (eds.), La société des amis à Rome et dans la littérature médiévale et humaniste, Latinitates, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).

11 Woldring, Vriendschap, p. 101.12 Woldring, Vriendschap, pp. 105-107; see also Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in

Sixteenth Century France (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 45: ‘In the early fifteenth century, a few decades before the invention of movable type, the theologian Jean Gerson was reminding princes that they must collect books not just for themselves but for the use of those around them. Sixteenth-century authors, book produc-ers and book possessors thus inherited not only patterns of gift-giving, but also a belief that property in a book was as much collective as private and that God himself had some special rights in that object.’ See also her ‘Beyond the market’, p. 72: ‘In the early fif-teenth century […] that they must collect books not just for themselves, but for their companions, “nedum pro te, sed pro consortibus tuis”.’

13 Compare Hobson, ‘Et Amicorum’, p. 94. It was not that Filelfo ‘acted in the spirit of the phrase’, no, the phrase was in the spirit of his attitude (p. 93). And of course this phrase has nothing to do with the fact that manuscripts were scarce (p. 95), it was precisely much more used on printed books, and it is not true that it lost its raison d’être when printing became more widespread. The idea behind it is completely different. And it was of course not the point that whoever tried ‘to make its wonders known to their ignorant

This classical ideal was changed, although the basic ideas remained, by people like Petrarch — who knew the tradition very well — into a vision of friendship that was isolated from and protected against political intrigues and power. For Petrarch a friend was a sounding-board for his ideas. Friendship meant for him the possibility to withdraw from politics and to live without social and political involvement.11

At the end of the Middle Ages, especially in Italy, Cicero was in one way or another more influential than Aristotle, as can be seen, for instance, in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on friendship. Virtue is the basis of everything. In the new philosophy man was seen as a self- defining subject, whereas previously the subject was mainly determined in relation to a cosmic order. In the course of the sixteenth century mod-ern theories about the State developed, such as the State as a social con-tract, a contract between individuals whose own personality became inde-pendent of nature, society and history. One of the main meanings of friendship was on the one hand the virtue of friendship and/or the virtues contained in it, and on the other hand ideas, normative conceptions or virtues one wanted to realise in the State.12

The connection between friendship and humanism is utilitas, which was determined by ratio, reason.13 Seneca criticised the Ptolemaean king




contemporaries’, the ‘friends’ were a very elite group. And this kind of ‘friendship’ also included the relationship between a patron and a client (p. 97). And of course this tag has nothing to do with altruism (p. 98).

14 Klaus Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und ‘gemeiner Nutzen’ im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühneuzeit’, Bibliothek und Wissenschaft, 9 (1975), 207.

for collecting so many books in the library at Alexandria, and Petrarch criticised the copia librorum from a moral point of view, librorum usus pro utentis qualitate limitandus est. Unread books, the only purpose of which was glory and show, should be condemned to be chained and to weep in silence.14

A remarkable defender of a large collection of books, albeit in monastic libraries, but with an argument that comes close to the discus-sion about private libraries, is Joannes Trithemius (1462-1516), the abbot of Sponheim and St. James at Würzburg. In his De laude scrip-torum, In Praise of Scribes (Mainz: Peter von Friedberg, 1494, 4°), which is well-known for his defence of continuing the practice of writ-ing books on parchment, — as he did not trust books printed on paper, — there is a chapter (XIV) on ‘whether monasteries should have many books’:

There are some who reproach lovers of books for having many, or even too many, books. They argue that for the pursuit of an upright life a few books will suffice — those which teach us to flee vice and love virtue. They say to those who obviously have an attachment to books: “Why do you bury yourselves under such a multitude of books? You cannot possibly read what you now possess. It is better to have a few books and read them than to have so many in your library that you cannot possibly read them all.Our answer is simple. If it is wrong to own so many volumes, since only a few will suffice for the knowledge of salvation, you have to admit that the holy Fathers were wrong in having written so many, or even innumerable, books. […] Or do you mean to say that it is permissible only to write many but not to own many? If it is wrong to acquire so many books, why then did the holy Fathers take such pains to collect and write books? You are foolish indeed since you confuse good with bad and since by insulting indis-criminately the lovers of books you do not shrink from contradicting the most holy Fathers. […] Since in good conscience you cannot blame the zeal of the saints, you had better stop reproaching their imitators. […]Besides, there is in this life nothing so pious, so wholesome, or so holy that bad will cannot abuse it. This can happen even to many books as a result not of love of God and of holy Scripture but of curiosity and arrogance. The collector of books should beware that his inclination and liking do not become ends in themselves. May he strive to direct his efforts toward the proper goal lest he deviate from the path of good.




15 Joannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes. De laude scriptorum, ed. with introduction by Klaus Arnold, translated by Roland Behrendt (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1974), pp. 88-93. See also Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und ‘gemeiner Nutzen’, p. 212. On curiosity and libraries, see i.a. Coppens, ‘Curiositas or common places’. Erasmus wrote in one of his dialogues: ‘Nunc adeamus bibliothecam, non illam quidem multis instructam libris, sed exquisitis.’ See Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Opera omnia, I. 3. Colloquia, ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire and R. Hoven (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Com-pany, 1972), p. 264 (ll. 1027-1028).

16 Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und “gemeiner Nutzen”’, pp. 208-209; see also Helmut Lehmann-Haupt, ‘The Bookfool in the Iconography of Social Typology’, Guten-berg-Jahrbuch (1976), 439-447, particularly p. 442; William H. Sherman, Used Books. Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 159. For the text, see e.g. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, ed. Manfred Lemmer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 7-8. For Geiler’s cultural context, see Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture. Books and social change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (New Haven, CT-London: Yale University Press, 1982), passim. In his famous emblem book (1564) Sambucus dedicates the emblem with the reading scholars to Fulvio Orsini (1529-1600). The motto is ‘Usus, non lectio prudentes facit’ (‘The use, not merely reading makes experts’), see Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne (eds), Emblemata. Hand-buch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart (-Weimar): Metzler, 1967/1996), p. 1288; Leon Voet and Guido Persoons (eds), De Emblemata van Joannes Sambucus uitgegeven door de Officina Plantiniana, 2 vols (with the original Latin text (1564), the Dutch (1566) and French (1567) translations), De Gulden passer, 58-60 (1980-82); Arnoud S.Q. Visser, Joannes Sambucus (1531-1584) and the Learned Image. Forms and functions of a humanist emblem book (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 116-117: ‘the emblem ‘Usus, non lectio prudentes facit’ […] deals with a thoroughly humanist issue: the use of learning. In the epigram of this emblem the first four distichs deal with the need to apply knowledge from books. Merely reading books is not enough. […] Orsini is praised for his wisdom, his library and his editions. The edifying message of the emblem is not addressed

This is an unequivocal defence of a large collection of books, but they had to be useful, be it for the sake of God, without curiositas.15

At the same time the ideas of Petrarch were translated by Sebastian Brant (1457-1510) and Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445-1510) in the figure of the bookfool, something like Lucian had done in his satire on ‘The Illiterate Bibliomaniac’. Brant’s Narrenschiff was published for the first time in Basel in 1494. The bookfool, who owns many books without using them, is the very first of the fools in the ship. Brant wanted to convince his readers to use holy and profane books for spiritual educa-tion and moral correction. So, according to Brant, the main fool is also he who only owns this book without reading it to improve himself.

Geiler published a Christian explanation of Brant’s Narrenschiff in 1510. He does not criticise book owners who use their books intelligently, ad usum et finem rationabilem. On the contrary, he sees as fools those who collect books for their own vain glory, propter gloriam inanem, and argues on the same lines as Trithemius.16




to him. On the contrary, Orsini is an example of a generally correct moral disposition. […] Whether there was a form of personal affection to the friendship or not, it is certain that there is a utilitarian side to the relationship.’ About Orsini’s library, see Pierre de Nolhac, La bibliothèque de Fulvio Orsini: contributions à l’histoire des collections d’Italie et à l’étude de la Renaissance (Paris: Vieweg, 1887). In the seventeenth century the same idea of utilitas will be expressed in another emblem, making the contrast between vanitas & veritas, Vanitas, verborum copia; Veritas, nihil copia, sed usus, while the picture is a writing author and a printing press; see Antonius à Burgundia, Mundis lapis lydius sive Vanitas per veritatem falsi accusata & convicta (Antwerp: Cnobbaert, 1639), p. 10; see for instance Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1975), p. 292. It seems obvious that Sambucus was directly inspired by Lucian, whose work was published several times during the sixteenth century. The refer-ence to booksellers, who sell many books but do not become wiser (Possidet ingentem numerum qui vendi auarus, / Doctior at nunquam bibliopola fuit — ‘The avaricious book-seller owns a lot of books that do not make him wiser’) is almost literally in Lucian.

17 L. Pigeaud, ‘Grégoire (Pierre’), in Dictionnaire de biographie française, 16 (Paris: Letouzey, 1985), cols. 1143-1144.

18 Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und “gemeiner Nutzen”’, pp. 212-213. Compare with Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘An Unknown Library in South Italy in 1557’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6/2 (1973), 115-125, where a printed catalogue is discussed with (at least a part of) a private library given to a small place near Salerno, the birthplace of the donor, Luca Gaurico, for the use of the local people, a kind of ‘public library’ with the utilitas of his own library in mind. This can be seen as another (a more direct?) form of ‘et amicorum’.

19 Compare Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, ‘Letture e circoli eruditi’, p. 391.20 Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und “gemeiner Nutzen”’, p. 236: ‘Die “Öffentlich-

keit” einer Bibliothek war im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühneuzeit nicht identisch mit allgemeiner Zugänglichkeit. Mit dem Begriff des “Öffentlichkeit” bezeichnen Rechts- und Staatstheoriker des Spätmittelalters und der Frühneuzeit die publica utilitas, den “öffent-lichen Nutzen”, “den alle Glieder einer Gruppe, Gemeinschaft, Stadt etc. miteinander teilen, im Gegensatz zu dem Nutzen, den die einzelnen je für sich und nicht mit allen anderen gemein haben (singulorum utilitas)“, and p. 246: ‘Die “öffentliche Bibliothek” im modernen Sinne wurzelt in der Gedankenwelt der Aufklärung sowie in einer neuen Konzeption der “Öffentlichkeit”, die sich im 18. Jahrhundert durch das “Auseinander-treten von Staat und Gesellschaft” herausbildete. “Öffentlichkeit” wurde damals zu einem

Too late to exert influence in the sixteenth century, but interesting for reflections on possessing a large number of books at the end of the cen-tury, is the De republica libri sex et viginti (Pont-à-Mousson, 1596, 4°) of Petrus Gregorius, alias Pierre Grégoire (c. 1540-1597), who taught law in Toulouse and Pont-à-Mousson.17 He did not find the possession of books reprehensible in se. Whoever owned a lot of books could render himself and others a service. Those who found libraries for public use, are deserving of high honour.18 Of course the tag ‘et amicorum’ was not an entry for the public, and it was not intended as such either, nor was this the beginning of public libraries.19 The bibliotheca publica was not only not a public library as it is seen today, but the public for the ‘et amicorum’ was even very private.20




Synonym für “staatlich”; es bezeichnet die Sphäre der “öffentlichen Gewalt” bzw. des bürokratisch durchorganisierten, mit dem Monopol der Bildung und der legitimen Macht-ausübung versehenen Anstaltstaates. Als dessen Gegenüber konstituierte sich die “bürger-liche Gesellschaft” — jener Bereich privater Autonomie, in dem voorstaatliche Rechte des einzelnen die Art des Erwerbs und die Formen des Zusammenlebens bestimmten.’

21 Schreiner, ‘Bücher, Bibliotheken und “gemeiner Nutzen”’, p. 210; for the Bücher-narr, see also Eva-Maria Hanebutt-Benz in collaboration with Monika Estermann, Die Kunst des Lesens. Lesemöbel und Leseverhalten vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Kunsthandwerk, 2nd printing, 1989), p. 180; on the rule to have books bound in a simple way, see a later source, but certainly a translation of what was practised long before: Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque, reproduc-tion de l’édition de 1644, ed. Claude Jolly (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), p. 145: ‘ou l’exceder sans prodigalité, ie dis premierement qu’il n’est point besoin pour ce qui est des liures de faire vne despense extraordinaire à leur relieure.’

Altogether it seems that the early users of this tag wrote it out of moral conviction inspired directly by the classics or by the ‘translation’ of Petrarch, in one way or another. It seems that after c.1500 the pressure from the humanist circle itself on the owners of extensive private librar-ies became stiffer, precisely because humanism itself, based on moralism and utilitas, began criticising the mere collecting of books, which seems to have started at that time. At least many attempts were made to do so by the newly learned and the nouveaux riches, who could acquire more books after the invention of printing, just to impose themselves, just to show up others, just to impress.

This is the background to the tag ‘et amicorum’. Before and even more so after 1500 in humanist circles it was known that books had to be of use, should not be for personal pleasure, but for the common utilitas, for ‘friends’. It is striking that Grolier, that early ‘collector’ par excellence, who liked so much to have his books bound in expensive, luxurious bind-ings, — though the fifth bell at Brant’s foolscap was to have his books richly bound, — had ‘et amicorum’ tooled on them.21 To leave no doubt about it? No doubt he wasn’t a fool? The rhetoric of a tag?!

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

Leuven University LibraryDepartment of Old Prints — TabulariumLadeuzeplein 21B – 3000 [email protected]



'et amicorum: not just for friends'

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