Pecia

In Late medieval and Renaissance Italy the book played a significant role, yet studies on literacy have tended to pay scant attention to the libraries that belonged to women. In this essay I will offer a first survey on books and libraries of certain Italian noblewomen including Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427-1482), Ippolita Maria Sforza Visconti (1445-1484) Eleonora d’Aragona (1450-1493), and Isabella d’Este (1474-1539).

Thirty-nine manuscripts containing works by ancient authors and another eight about Antiquity are documented in libraries in Brittany at the end of the Middle Ages. They were owned by eighteen different individuals (fifteen from the nobility, of which eleven were already known as bibliophiles). These books are mostly about Roman Antiquity, consisting of titles from Cicero, Livy and Valerius Maximus. Some are translations from Latin into French. In addition, a few titles about a same subject may have been bound into the same volume. These books have many origins: acquisitions, gifts and confiscations from religious orders. However, their owners, although born into important families of Brittany, lived mostly in France or were in the king of France’s service. Interest in the Antiquity does not seem to have been a Breton peculiarity.

The study of female patronage - particularly in the field of manuscripts - has undergone major developments over the past twenty years. Those publications amplify the movement initiated in 1982 by Susan Groag Bell’s article, considered as foundational for understanding the role of women in material culture. In particular, she promotes new analytical schemes focused on the transmission of artworks and the concept of ownership. Nearly forty years after this publication, it is useful to ask how this article, and more generally gender studies, have renewed the understanding of the female patronage.

This paper focuses on the way Medici patronage contributed to a dialogue between art and literature during the Renaissance. While Cosimo the Elder participated in the rediscovery of the texts of the Latin father of the second century Tertullian, the altarpiece of the private chapel of the family, executed by the Carmelite painter Filippo Lippi, was full of items inspired by Tertullian’s works. On the one hand, there was a particular interest in the Child’s flesh taken from the virginal body of Mary, as it was described in De Carne Christi. On the other hand, the desert as a prison - another theme specific to Tertullian’s theology - seems to take shape in the painting. Thus, this article highlights the way in which, through the image, Tertullian’s ideas were received and understood in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century.

The paper will examine a manuscript prepared during the signoria of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, between 1395 and 1402: the Dal Verme codex, a miscellany that contains a variety of short historical texts with abundant corrections, insertions, and marginal notes, produced by the Chancery of the Duke to celebrate the Visconti dynasty. Through a detailed analysis of the apparatus of marginal notes and the layers of different writings, it is possible to prove that the Dal Verme codex was a preparatory dossier structured on several levels, showing clearly distinct stages of preparation and various layers of interventions. It was a “construction kit” for the historical memory, and its palaeographic and codicological analysis shows how historical memory could be shaped, manipulated, and fabricated in order to justify ideological purposes and legitimate the Visconti dynasty and its policy. Through examining this extraordinary source, it is possible to focus on three relevant topics: the practices of writing history in the Chancery of a Renaissance state, the role of intellectuals and government officials at the service of the signoria, and the practice of study and edition of miscellanies of historical texts today.

Margaret of York’s library is now well known, thanks to several studies that have renewed history of women’s patronage concerning religious manuscripts as well as active workshops (and their copyists and illuminators) nearby princely courts. Duchess of Burgundy in uncertain times, Margaret of York does not only take over the role of her predecessors about manuscripts. She indeed makes them (and their production, their donation or their receiving) a tool for political practices hitherto used by the dukes rather than the duchesses. This article thus examines the process of politicization of the women’s patronage in the 1470s’ as an attempt for Margaret of York to meet the challenge of both Fortuna and the eschatological context establishing an unprecedented pressure on the House of Burgundy. More widely, the manuscript policy makes Margaret of York an intermediary between the Middle Ages’ Duchesses and the Early Modern period’s governesses.

Giovan Marco di Parma, known as Cinico, occupies a special place in the Library of the Aragon in Naples in the 15^th century. Scribe, he has ties of friendship with many humanists of the court, and even participates in the establishment of the printing press in Naples. His philosophical position, claiming Cynicism, earned him the admiration of his contemporaries and a great freedom in relation to administrative constraints. His philosophical commitment also pushes him to favor copies of history or political books. However, even if he is stoic, Giovan Marco fits perfectly into the courtesan life of his time. His collaboration with the great illuminateur Rapicano, shows thes ties between writing and painting in building an ideal portrait of the royalty. He even tries to soften the harshness of the king towards the barons by becoming author of miscellanea with partly controversial content.

The reception of Italian humanist culture in early modern France has stimulated longstanding scholarly interest and different methodological approaches. Through biography and art patronage, this article examines the response of Thomas James, bishop of Dol-de-Bretagne, to humanist thought and all’antica from his activities in Rome. Drawing on Vatican records, correspondence, and literary and religious texts, this study reveals James as an important eyewitness, a passenger between cultures, whose life provides a lens through which to observe his acculturation of Italian humanist interests in language, history, and art.