Catalogue by Rosario Moscheo
Introduction
1 ForewordThe following catalogue is mainly based on microfilms and on direct inspection and contains, partitioned into two disjoint sections, all of Maurolico's autographs known to me as well as those manuscripts that, albeit not autographs, show anyway an `ancient' connection with some of Maurolico's materials. The minute description of each codex (format, dimensions, number of leaves, binding, contents, `incipit' and `explicit' of each single text) is supplemented both by some data concerning the so-called `external' history, and by a careful collation with printed works by Maurolico. The above mentioned collation, whose original goal was to assess the importance of the material come to us in manuscript form, has allowed me to discover the unpublished parts of them and to find variant readings with respect to edited works. Most of such texts, mainly prefaces, forewords, and short tracts of various nature, are here transcribed and published for the first time. A better light is thereby thrown on the interrelationships between what constitutes, albeit in rough outline, Maurolico's work in progress and what (be it printed or not) looks as an accomplished work. Maurolico's use of accurately dating each single writing of his, or even successive elaborations of it, has permitted compiling a very detailed chronology of the whole of his works. A third section of the catalogue collects the available data about all those manuscripts, both copies and autographs, get lost or at least nowadays not to be found. Such data can be used to understand or to fill up the `holes' in Maurolico's huge production. Even if it is impossible to have such materials at our disposal, the data about them are of some use in clarifying several aspects of Maurolico's biography and works, and in some cases may provide useful pieces of information about the chronology of his writings. The manuscripts are presented, within the first two sections, in order of importance, as far as their number is concerned, of the single funds of Maurolico's manuscripts available in the various libraries. Within each fund the order of the press-mark is followed. The richest fund is that of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a subset of the so-called `Fonds Latin', briefly described in Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Regiae, pars III, tomus IV, Parigi, 1744, pp. 210, 331, 362-364; for the other manuscripts I refer to the general information provided at the beginning of each description. In describing each single item of the first section (where the autographs are located) I tried to follow Maurolico's original criteria of graphical formatting (centering of the titles and of the colophones; use of peculiar shorthands, astrological symbols, etc.). It is important to point out the value of such a choice as a general criterion, beside the graphological ones, of ascription to Maurolico's hand (or even to his style) of other, possibly lacking any epigraph or even the whole beginning, manuscripts containing works or `lucubrationes' of his that could be found in the future. As far as punctuation, use of upper-case letters, etc. are concerned, modern philological criteria have been used in the transcriptions here inserted of autograph texts and of copied texts, with the exception of the cases in which a more faithful presentation of the text suggested different criteria (in the descriptions of any single codex the asterisk * denotes unnumbered leaves). 2 Shorthands and Sigla Employed
3 Manuscripts3.1 Autographs
3.2 Non-autograph Manuscripts and Copies
3.3 Lost Codices
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