PART II (1952)
by Paul Oskar Kristeller

The following list is a logical sequel to the bibliography of printed catalogues published some years ago (Traditio 6 [1948] 227-317), and it serves the same purpose, namely to facilitate the study of Latin manuscript books, which is important to classical and patristic scholars as well as to historians of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. A continuing exploration of the extant collections still leads to the discovery of unpublished writings, brings to light copies of known texts that are of special interest, or at least gives statistical evidence for the diffusion of certain well known works at the time when the manuscript book was the predecessor or rival of the printed book. Information on the general importance and content of the various manuscript collections proved essential both for the project of Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, which has been undertaken by a group of scholars under the auspices of several learned societies, and for a summary list of philosophical and literary manuscripts of the Renaissance which I am preparing for the Warburg Institute in London. The present list is an outgrowth of these two undertakings, and it was first compiled in a less elaborate fashion for the former project and issued in mimeographed form under its auspices in 1951.

The manuscript collections which have no printed catalogues and are hence briefly called 'uncatalogued' are no less important for the scholar than the catalogued ones. Under normal circumstances, their content cannot be ascertained without an actual visit, but on the other hand, and for that very reason, they are likely to contain greater surprises in the way of unpublished tetxs. Now, contrary to a widespread belief, the case where such collections have no lists whatsoever and must be explored by actually handling every single manuscript is comparatively rare. In most instances, the 'uncatalogued' collection has a handwritten list which may be used on the spot and fulfills there the function of a 'catalogue.' These unpublished catalogues vary greatly in their quality and usefulness, but they are the only and indispensable keys to the respective collections. It is now possible to have them reproduced in photostat or microfilm, if the originating library permits it, and thus to study the general content of a collection before or without actually visiting the library. The usefulness of this procedure for scholars is obvious.

The handwritten catalogues are arranged in different ways. They may be on index cards or continuously written volumes. The card system is useful for checking individual entries, but when it is necessary to glance through a whole collection, a volume is preferable. The handwritten catalogues in volumes appear in two main types of arrangement: either they are shelf lists describing the manuscripts one after another in the order of their shelf marks, or they are alphabetical indices of names or subjects. The former type is commonly known as a 'topographical inventory,' and this term will be used in some of our descriptions. Some collections have only a shelf list (although this is rare), others only an index (which is more frequent). In the many cases where there is both a shelf list and an index, I have usually found the shelf list more useful than the index because it gives a more direct picture of the collection as a whole. Consequently, in my list I have placed greater emphasis on topographical inventories than on indices except in the cases where the index was definitely better, or where there was nothing but an index.

There are many sources of references for printed catalogues, but published information on handwritten inventories is suprisingly scanty. Such well known and reliable reference works as Minerva, or the Minerva-Handbücher dedicated to libraries, or Beer's 'Handschriftenschätze Spaniens' say nothing or nearly nothing on the handwritten inventories of uncatalogued collections. While information is available for a few famous libraries such as the British Museum, the Bodleian, and the Vatican, I have come across only few publications which give this information on more than one library. One is the series of reports on Italian libraries published in the periodical Accademie e Biblioteche. This publication is quite valuable for Italian libraries, but it varies in quality and completeness. Its major inconvenience is the fact that the data which interest us are scattered in six bulky volumes of a periodical and that the handwritten inventories are mentioned along with printed catalogues, lists of printed books, and many other pieces of information. A few additional data are found in the work of Apolloni and Arcamone, which covers the libraries of Northern Italy. The other publication is a booklet by L. K. Born, recently issued by the Library of Congress, which covers many Western European countries, but omits Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Scandinavian countries. From our pount of view, it has two main shortcomings: first, it puts a heavy emphasis on archives and lists comparatively few library collections of manuscript books, and secondly, it fails to give the original titles of the inventories listed, thus making their identification sometimes difficult. I have utilized these publications (see below for bibliographical details) and shall refer the sign Cf. to the reference whenever I give information not supplied by them.

If analyzed by countries, the list reflects some peculiar facts and difficulties. Obviously, the number of handwritten inventories will be in inverse proportion to the number of available printed catalogues since in most cases the former are superseded by the latter. Among the countries which have important collections in our field, cataloguing has been nearly completed in France and the United States, and is fairly well advanced in Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. The gaps are greater in Spain, Sweden, Austria, and Italy, and, unfortunately, in Germany, where so many collections were destroyed or dislocated during the last war. The list which I am able to present is necessarily incomplete, since it depends on the opportunities I had to visit the various libraries, and on the additional information I was able to gather by correspondence from librarians or other scholars. This may account for the fact taht the list is more complete for Italy than for any of the other countries, and very scanty indeed for all libraries behind the iron Curtain. Collections in Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary as well as the public library in Leningard are or were rich in Latin manuscript books, but under the present political circumstances it has been impossible to visit them or to obtain much information about them.

The inventories included in the hand list have been selected according to the following criteria: I included only inventories of extant collections, and excluded those of collections which no longer exist, except when they survive as separate units within an extant larger collection. The emphasis is on public rather than on private collections, although a few of the latter are included. Since we are concerned with manuscript books (codices) and not with charters or other documents, inventories of archives have been excluded, except in those cases where an archive possesses a separate collection of manuscript books. I excluded collections which contain only modern MSS. Finally, we are primarily concerned with Latin MSS rather than with those in other languages. However, most of the collections are not divided according to languages, and thus I mentioned in a few cases, where an important uncatalogued collection is subdivided by languages, also its inventories of Greek and Italian manuscripts.

The style of my arrangement follows on the whole the model of the Bibliography of Printed Catalogues. The list is arranged alphabetically by cities, using the native name of each city and following the political geography of the period between the two world wars. The present list has been improved over the Bibliography by making a clear distinction between the various libraries in the same city, and also between the various collections (Fondi) within each library. I place an asterisk both before libraries which I did not visit, and before inventories which I did not see. The two cases do not always coincide, since I have used copies or microfilms of inventories which describe libraries I never visited, and on the other hand, I visited many libraries, especially some years ago, without taking down precise data on their inventories. Most of the inventories included in this list without an asterisk were seen by me in 1949 and 1952, and I assume the responsibility for the errors which may have occured in describing them. In the case of inventories listed with an asterisk, I give my source of information.

In the description proper, I treat the handwritten inventories like real books, giving their original titles wherever possible, and the number of volumes though not the number of pages or folios. Each inventory is in one handwritten volume unless stated otherwise. As often as possible, I give the number of manuscripts or the shelf marks of the first and last manuscript described in each volume. Since shelf marks present their peculiar problems and are almost a matter of luck in certain places, I shall sometimes explain their system, and call attention to cases where shelf marks have been changed or do not correspond to printed catalogues. If any inventory has been partly superseded by a printed catalogue, I shall try to make clear to what extent the inventory is still needed, (and refer to Traditio 6 for the printed catalogue listed in that volume). I shall indicate the cases in which an inventory is particularly superficial, or fails to give important data such as centuries or actual shelf marks.

I wish to express my gratitude for the valuable help which I have received from many persons and institutions and which has made the compilation of the list possible: the Fulbright Committee, which granted me a fellowship in 1952; the American Philosophical Society and the Columbia University Council for research in Social Sciences, which awarded travel grants to me in 1949 and in 1952, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, whose hospitality I enjoyed on both occasions; Mr. D. A. Bullard of the Fulbright Committee in Rome and Mr. Frederick Cromwell of the American Embassy in Madrid; Prof. G. Arcamone, Direttore Generale delle Accademie e Biblioteche in Rome; Sr. Francisco Sintes, Director General de Archivos y Bibliotecas, Sr. Amadeo Tortajada of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, and Sr. Miguel Bordonau, Inspector General de Archivos in Madrid; Sr. J. Gomes Branco of the Instituto para a Alta Cultura in Lisbon. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the library directors and librarians in the various places who shared their information with me or replied to my queries, and especially to the Very Rev. A. M. Albareda and Msgr. A. Pelzer of the Vatican Library. Mlle M. T. d'Alverny of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Dott. Giorgio E. Ferrari of the Biblioteca Marciana, Sig.rina Teresa Lodi of the Biblioteca Laurenziana, the Rev. P. Longas and Sr. R. Paz of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Sig.ra Berta Maracchi of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, Sig.ra Teresa Rogledi Manni of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, and M. C. E. Wright of the British Museum. The following scholars also helped me through valuable advice or by suggesting additions to my mimeographed list: L. Bertalot (Friedrichdorf), L. Bieler (Dublin), G. Billanovich (Fribourg), Rev. P. Boehner (Franciscan Institute), Dr. Emilie Boer (Berlin), Dr. H. Boese (Berlin), A. Campana (Vatican Library), L. Delaissé (Brussels), C. Fahy (Manchester), E. Franceschini (Milan), J. García Morales (Madrid), Otis H. Green (University of Pennsylvania), the late E. Kaufmann (Los Angeles), N. Ker (Oxford), Dr. Ludmilla Kresten (Vienna), S. Kuttner (Catholic University), Dom J. Leclercq (Clervaux), D. P. Lockwood (Haverford), E. Loenroth (Uppsala), A. Mancini (Pisa), Berthe Marti (Bryn Mawr), R. A. B. Mynors (Cambridge), Miss B. S. Nordin Pettersson (Stockholm), B. Peebles (Catholic University), A. Perosa (Pisa), Miss Virginia Rau (Lisbon), Miss Toni Schmid (Uppsala), Dorothy Schullian (Armed Services Medical Library), F.

Stegmüller (Freiburg), Dom Anselm Strittmatter (Rome), S. H. Thomson (University of Colorado), L. Thorndike (Columbia University), B. L. Ullman (University of North Carolina), Mlle Jeanne Vielliard (Paris), R. Weiss (London), and F. Wormald (London). I am especially indebted to G. B. Fowler (University of Pittsburgh) for ample information on Austrian collections, and wish to express my appreciation for the opportunity to use the microfilms of Austrian inventories, obtained by Prof. Fowler with the help of Frau Prof. E. Patzelt (Vienna) and under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society, and now deposited in the Library of Congress.

I hope that the hand list will be useful as far as it goes, and provide orientation for some of those uncatalogued collections which are important and relevant for our field of study. I am aware of the numerous gaps which I was oblidged to leave, and shall be grateful for any additions or corrections which scholars or librarians in various places may care to send me.

Columbia University

1952