Vatican Library Research Articles

Navigating the Vatican Library repositories

An institution of ancient origin, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds a diverse and complex collection of documents that reflect its rich institutional history, distributed among its various collections and institutional archives. This multifaceted heritage, comprising traditional and digital resources, stands as a valuable testimony to the active role of the Library in the international cultural context. This article aims to provide a general overview of these resources and their potential historical significance, focusing on the last century and presenting some significant episodes in the institution’s history.

Paper Travellers

Abstract The Gabinetto della Grafica of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana preserves an album with views of Rome and Naples and reproductions of sculpture. From these, we make new attributions of the authorship of photographs, completing the catalogue of the work of such important authors as James Anderson, Michael Mang, Tommaso Cuccioni, Robert Rive, Giorgio Sommer and Giuseppe Ninci. We also reflect on the commercial dynamics of photographic firms in the nineteenth century and their important role in the consolidation of models and methodologies that served, from then on, for the construction of histories of architecture and art.

Due testimoni parziali delle Historiae adversus paganos di Paolo Orosio secondo il volgarizzamento di Bono Giamboni

Abstract The article aims to investigate two fragmentary manuscript witnesses to Bono Giamboni’s vernacular Italian translation of Paulus Orosius’ Historiae. Neither of these witnesses has been studied until now. The article provides an edition of the shorter fragment, preserved in MS Vatican Library Barb. Lat. 4119, and a full description of the second codex, MS British Library Add. 16554, a multi-text codex that contains a large anthology of Orosius’ Historiae. Among the works preserved in this latter manuscript, particularly noteworthy is the presence of an unknown vernacular Italian version of Sallust’s De coniuratione Catilinae. The article also provides some new insights into the early printed editions of the Italian vernacular translation of Orosius and the authorship of the printed text.

Visages de la contemplation

Visages del la contemplation (1980) is the title of a photography book with images by Michele Pellegrino, a preface by Roger Etchegaray, Archbishop of Marseille at the time of publication, and Cardinal Presbyter of St. Leo I, former president of the Council of Conferences of Bishops of Europe and of the Episcopal Conference of France, with the full text and historical notes by Jean Pier Ravotti. The work, now quite rare and preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library, unparalleled in its reflection, remains a powerful fresco of monasteries and contemplative life, the identities and differences of charisms, and the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience of the different orders and monasteries: the Benedictines, the Camaldolese, the Cistercians, the Canons Regular, the Trappists, the Carthusians, the Poor Clares, the Dominican and Carmelite nuns, the Passionists and the Little Sisters of Bethlehem, and the Little Brothers. A sister dimension to that of the cloistered emerges in the book, a dimension that could be considered the most neglected by historians, especially in the oblivion of sapiential traditions: cloistered monasteries as citadels of culture and art, custodians of priceless heritages, and at the same time extraordinary centres of production that admirably shape territories and landscapes. This world of partially lost sapiential traditions, of care, intelligence, love of nature, harmony, sustainability, invites us to think about the issue of sustainability in the mountains.

New Literature from the Paris Disputation against the Talmud

Abstract In 1239, the convert Nicholas Donin submitted thirty-five articles against the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX. As a result, Christendom became aware of how Jews observed an oral law that was allegedly plagued with folly, blasphemy, and heresy. This triggered the infamous trial against the Talmud and resulted in the production of several Latin translations of rabbinical texts, including the compilation of the Extractiones de Talmud (1245). The present article mainly focusses on a short text taken from the manuscript Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 822 (folios 204ra–205ra), which includes a series of Talmudic passages that derive from texts which emerged from the Paris Disputation against the Talmud (1240–1245). From it, we are able to infer new information regarding the genesis of subsequent anti-Jewish works, including the Errores Iudaeorum by Thibaud de Sézanne and Passau Anonymous anti-Jewish sections. Additionally, we also provide the edition and translation of the text of the Vatican manuscript at the end of the article.

Гуюк ханның Рим Папасы Иннокентий IV-ке жолдаған жолдауының латын тіліндегі аудармасы

The article contains the Latin text and annotated Russian translation of the letter from the supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, Guyuk Khan, to Pope Innocent IV. The original letter was translated from Mongolian into Latin with the personal participation of the Pope’s envoy, Franciscan John of Plano Carpini, at Guyuk’s camp near the capital of the Empire, Qaraqorum, on November 11, 1246. In parallel, the original letter was translated into Persian and, together with the Latin translation, delivered to Pope Innocent IV. The original Persian translation is preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Archives. It was discovered in 1920 and published along with a French translation and annotation by Paul Pelliot in 1923. The Latin translation of the letter survives in two versions made at different times. The article contains the text of the Latin translation of the letter according to a copy in the autograph of Salimbene de Adam from the Vatican Apostolic Library. Salimbene de Adam inserted a copy of the letter into his chronicle written between 1283 and 1288. The Latin text from the chronicle of Salimbene de Adam has been collated with other copies of the Latin translation of the letter. The Russian translation based on a critical edition of the Latin version of the letter is published for the first time. The notes contain the necessary clarifications and correspondences in the translations of the Persian original into French and English

Сиро-мелькитская рукопись XV века Vat. sir. 351: незавершенный проект Минеи месячной на весь год в одном томе

This article describes contents, paleographic, linguistic, and liturgical features of one of the Syriac manuscripts of the Vatican Library, Vat. sir. 351, dating back to the 15th century. A large part of the manuscript is written by one scribe with a very fine and professional handwriting, but there are also insertions of other scribes, two of them we know by their names indicated in the margins (Yusuf, Salam). The manuscript is written mostly in classical Syriac, but some rubrics and texts are written in Arabic. The Menaion contains texts of the Holy Scripture: readings from the Apostol and the Gospel in the beginning of the manuscript, then in the Menaion part — prokimena, alleluiaria, communion hymns, New Testament readings for matins and liturgy, psalms of the great hours and selected psalms (eklogai) for singing after the polyeleos on great feasts. We may suggest that the scribe planned to include the entire Menaion for the whole year, from September to August, in one volume. However, this experiment remained incomplete: services for every day can be found only in the beginning and in the end of the manuscript (months of September, October, part of November, August), while other months contain a selection of the most festive days. Thus, the manuscript cannot be fully characterized by terms like a “Monthly Menaion” or a “Festal Menaion”. Days without services contain only indications of the date, names of the saints, often with addition of stichera, troparion and kontakion, always with indications of readings for the liturgy; the scribe usually left an empty space after the date, due to lack of time or inability to find the necessary texts. The changes from daily services to festive selection and vice versa are situated not far from large portions written by other scribes.

A XIVth century approach to the points problem

The application of expected value as the first decision-theoretical criterion for evaluating risky lotteries is traditionally attributed to the 1654 correspondence between Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. However, an anonymous author of the XVth century Italian manuscript stored in the Vatican Apostolic Library calculated expected value by backward induction in a similar way to Pascal’s approach. This note argues that an even earlier anonymous XIVth century Italian manuscript calculates expected value by a different method resembling the direct rule (regula recta) described in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) in his Liber Abaci as borrowed from the Arabs.

Hieronymus Odam, engraved gems and antiquarianism

This article is designed to recover and reconstruct the antiquarian, collecting, and documentary activities of Italian artist Hieronymus Odam (c. 1681–1740) in respect of engraved gems. Odam is primarily recognized as a painter, while his contribution to the development of antiquarianism and collecting of antiquities remains virtually unknown. Odam’s speciality was intaglios and cameos. The recently discovered drawings of gems in the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, as well as archival sources—Odam’s correspondence and two dactyliothecae (those of Pier Leone Ghezzi and James Tassie)—prove that he possessed a considerable number of engraved gems and was one of the experts in this particular field. But above all, Odam documented thousands of engraved gems, notably for Philipp von Stosch, in a very accurate and innovative way, straying from the traditional antiquarian approach. The co-operation between Odam and Stosch resulted in illustrations that were designed to show techniques of engraving and styles of the ancient masters, qualities that had not previously been addressed by antiquarians. In Odam’s and Stosch’s approach gems were treated as sources of evidence rather than as images useful for illustrating passages from ancient literature. Odam is a fine example illustrating the transformation of antiquarianism in the first half of the 18th century.

An Arabic-Greek Codex of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables from the Eighth Century

Abstract A Greek copy of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables and an Arabic translation of Theon’s Short Commentary on them survive as undertexts in the palimpsest manuscript Vat. sir. 623. pt. 2. The parchment leaves containing these texts were recycled into a new codex at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai in the late ninth century, but they belonged to the same original manuscript and are considered the only surviving witnesses to the project of translating Greek thought into Arabic at the so-called “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad during the second half of the eighth century. In order to show the importance of this startling discovery made in the Vatican Library, the article not only includes an historical, codicological, and paleographical examination of the erased texts and repurposed folios, but also presents an astronomical explanation of the theories and calculations they contain. The article highlights the list of Greek-Arabic winds and its link to Ptolemy’s Horizon Diagram, as well as stresses the continued applicability of Ptolemy and Theon’s presentations. It further argues for a reconsideration of the meaning of an ancient theory of the “inclinations” that the Sun and the Moon (or the Moon and the Earth’s shadow) create during eclipses, the phenomenon which is called prosneusis.

The Vatican Library’s “Statue of Saint Hippolytus” Revisited

Abstract An archaeologist-art historian and an IT scientist specialised in the restoration of architectural and artistic heritage present the scheme of a multidisciplinary research project concerning a long-debated monument, the so-called St. Hippolytus’ statue of the Vatican Library. Inspired by some questions and observations arising from different fields of humanistic sciences, we created a virtual 3D model of the statue. In this paper we propose some ways to exploit it as a research instrument.

Reconstructing Giovanni Vacca’s Collection in the Vatican Library

Abstract This article reconstructs an important but specific portion of Giovanni Vacca’s personal library: his books related to mathematics in Chinese language. Collected during his stay in China from 1907 to 1908, they were donated to the Vatican Library after his death. The article combines detailed archival and bibliographic research with an analysis of handwritten annotations in mathematical books in the Library’s collection R. G. Oriente in order to identify which books were previously owned by Vacca. This not only allows us to contextualize his sojourn in China and understand better his intellectual interests in Chinese science and the way he read and translated Chinese mathematical texts, but it also contributes to a more detailed picture of the Chinese book market in the early twentieth century.

Backward induction and expected value calculations in an anonymous XVth century Italian manuscript

Blaise Pascal famously calculated the expected value of a risky lottery in the 1654 correspondence with Pierre de Fermat in the context of the so-called points problem. Pascal solved this problem by backward induction, whereas Fermat—by counting combinations. This paper analyzes a more complex version of the points problem from an anonymous XVth century Italian manuscript stored in the Vatican Apostolic Library. In this manuscript, the problem of points is solved by backward induction in a similar way to Pascal’s train of thought. In this light, Pascal’s pioneering contribution may be not as novel as it is traditionally believed.

The Letters of Phalaris, between Manuscripts and Editio Princeps

This article deals with the letters of Phalaris, a large corpus of 148 letters contained in the second volume of the Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers. It explores the role of the Aldine edition in the transmission of these letters and mainly focuses on its sources. Building on the works of Lauri Tudeer and Martin Sicherl, it determines the text on which the Aldine edition is based and its position within the manuscript tradition, while stressing the remaining uncertainties: the Aldine is an editorial construction, conflating the text of two different classes of manuscripts with the text of the editio princeps from 1498; its main sources are a close parent to the now-lost London, British Library, Harley MS 5610 and a copy of the manuscript Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. graec. 356 (and not necessarily the antigraph of Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. gr. 134 as Sicherl thought); Marcus Musurus might have used another corrective manuscript.

Scipione Forteguerri (il Carteromaco) as Reader of the Aldine Greek Epistolographers: the Epistles of Phalaris

The Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers has been thoroughly studied in the light of its sources and its genesis, whereas comparatively little is known about how it could be read and used by its contemporaries. An analysis of the marginal notes which Scipione Forteguerri wrote into a copy now in the Vatican Library (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Inc. IV. 149) allows us first insights into these questions, on the basis of the example of his annotations to the highly esteemed Epistles of Phalaris: it soon emerges that Forteguerri, by correction ope codicum and addition of reading aids as folio numbering and running titles, tried to raise the text and the book as a whole to a higher editorial level. As a close collaborator of Aldus Manutius, he thus mirrored then-current ideas of book editing as well as contributing to them, and so proved himself surely to be an exceptional reader of the Aldine Greek epistolographers.

The Florentine Relation: A Newly Discovered Sixteenth-Century Description of the Kingdom of Kongo

AbstractA newly discovered Spanish description of Kongo increases our knowledge of the country, joining Filippo Pigafetta’s famous account to expand our knowledge of Kongo in this early period. This research shows that the MS was written in 1587 or 1588 and was written by Carmelite Diego de la Encarnación. It adds details on the history of the country, daily life culture, and links to other Carmelite works, including an unpublished chapter of an account by Diego de Santissimo Santo and shows the author could have written a longer but well-known account in the Vatican Library. It includes extensive quotations from the new text.

Dominating Demons in the Old English Prose Acts of Andrew

Dominating Demons in the Old English Prose <i>Acts of Andrew</i>

Commedia: A Digital Edition ed. by Prue Shaw

Reviewed by: Commedia: A Digital Editioned. by Prue Shaw Elizabeth Coggeshall Commedia: A Digital Edition, 2nded. Edited by Prue Shaw. Florence: Fondazione Ezio Franceschini; Saskatoon: Inkless Editions, 2021. https://www.dantecommedia.it. ISBN: 1-904628-21-4. T he year 2021 wasmomentous for Dante studies, marking, as it did, the seventh centenary of the poet's death. Universities, scholarly societies, museums, libraries, and other public-serving institutions commemorated the occasion with in-person and online talks and conferences, curated exhibits, performances, and other celebratory remembrances of the anniversary of Dante's death in Ravenna in September 1321. Among these commemorative exercises, one of the most noteworthy was the release of the second edition of Prue Shaw's digital Commedia, published by Inkless Editions (formerly Scholarly Digital Editions) and SISMEL. The CommediaProject, which uses computer analysis to analyze seven key [End Page 167]witnesses in the poem's early manuscript tradition, was originally published on DVD-ROM in 2010. Since then, it has proven to be one of the most valuable resources for the study of the poem's early transmission, even if access to it was limited. The revised edition of the project expands the reach of this rich resource: unlike its limited-access predecessor, the 2021 edition was published as an open-access, free website (https://www.dantecommedia.it/), featuring several new or expanded tools for research. Much like the DVD, the 2021 website presents an information-rich critical edition of the Commedia, with transcriptions of the so-called Sanguineti seven: Ash (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 828), Ham (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 203), LauSC (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 26 sin. 1), Mart (Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Aldina AP XVI 25), Rb (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Ricc. 1005; and Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, MS AG XII 2), Triv (Milan, Biblioteca dell'Archivio Storico Civico e Trivulziana, MS Trivulziano 1080), and Urb (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 366). These are seven complete manuscripts that Federico Sanguineti had identified to compile his 2001 critical edition, revising Giuseppe Petrocchi's 1966–67 Edizione nazionale, which had, until Sanguineti's revision, been nearly universally adopted as the standard edition of the Commedia. The CommediaProject team originally set out to test the validity of Sanguineti's stemma using computerized phylogenetic analysis. The results of that analysis are presented at length in the site's editorial material, which is largely reprinted from the original edition. Shaw's DVD-ROM edition has been much discussed, and its methods and conclusions debated (see, e.g., Giorgio Inglese, "Rev. of Dante Alighieri, Commedia. A Digital Edition, ed. Prue Shaw," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana189, no. 627 [2012]: 453–5; Vera Ribaudo, "Nuovi orizzonti dell'ecdotica? L'edizione elettronica della Monarchiae della Commediadi Prue Shaw," L'Alighieri42, no. 2 [2013]: 95–127; Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann's Method[Libreriauniversitaria, 2014], 208–18; Elena Spadini, "Processing Dante's Commedia: From Sanguineti's Edition to Digital Tools," RIDE3 [2015]). As reviewers have noted, the 2010 edition has much to commend it, features that the revised edition retains or [End Page 168]enhances: meticulous transcriptions that render both text and editorial interventions exactly as they appear on the page; high-resolution images of manuscript folios (excepting MS Urb. lat. 366 of the Vatican Library, excluded at that time because of copyright restrictions but now fully visualizable on the revised site); accurate and thorough witness descriptions, including their paleographical and codicological features; clear, functional, and effective tools for collation; variant maps, wherein relationships between witnesses are graphed as "unrooted phylograms" representing proximity and divergence from one another; and the VBase tool, a proprietary software for complex variant analysis. Many of these features are more prominently displayed or more easily accessible on the revised site, such as the variant maps, which appear in thumbnail images alongside the collation, and VBase, now much more readily accessed through a single click on the static header (previously VBase was only accessible at the bottom of the long drop-down menu in the editorial material). Because much has been said of...

Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta

Reviewed by: Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta Daniele Lauro Naohiro Ōta. Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2021. ix + 134 pp., color illustrations, maps. ISBN: 978-88-210-1076-7. Achief challenge that all scholars of premodern Japan are bound to encounter in the course of their careers is acquiring sufficient skills to read and understand komonjo, a term used to describe various types of documents produced before the Meiji period (1868–1912). The challenge is twofold. First, komonjo feature grammatical structures and words that are no longer in use or that have assumed different meanings in modern Japanese. Second, premodern documents are often written using kuzushiji, a cursive style in which the original shape of the characters is altered, thus making the task of reading texts particularly daunting. In Japan, where the field of paleography emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, an abundance of komonjo manuals and dictionaries have been published over the years. Additionally, Japanese universities, museums, and other research institutions routinely offer classes for the study of premodern documents. Outside of Japan, however, opportunities are more limited, despite the initiatives launched in the past decade by European and American universities. In this context, Naohiro Ōta's volume, Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection, possibly the first komonjo primer in English, is a long-awaited and much-needed contribution. Ōta, a professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Tokyo), developed the volume as a by-product of an international project involving Japanese and European scholars to catalog and digitize a forgotten collection of premodern Japanese documents donated by Mario Marega, a Salesian missionary to Japan, to the Vatican Apostolic Library in the 1950s. The approximately 14,500 documents that Marega collected during his time in Ōita Prefecture were produced between the seventeenth and the nineteenth [End Page 152] century and pertain to the institutions used to control and prevent the spread of Christianity, a religion that had arrived in Japan in the mid-sixteenth century but had been outlawed by the military government of the Tokugawa in the early seventeenth century. The volume, whose primary aim is "to introduce the basic skills for reading Japanese early modern records," is divided into five chapters (3). The first chapter provides an overview of the collaborative efforts that started in 2012 to study and digitize the Marega Collection. The chapter also discusses the genesis of the volume and some of the challenges that the editors, three Italian scholars of Japan, tackled to make the volume as approachable as possible to non-Japanese readers. Chapter 2 introduces foundational knowledge for the study of komonjo, and it is divided into four sections. The first explores the material dimension of documents by examining traditional Japanese writing implements and the formats of paper used for administrative purposes, as well as common techniques to wrap and seal documents. The discussion of the "documents as objects" is noteworthy because, in addition to supplying the reader with the technical knowledge to talk about premodern administrative documents, it casts light on the wealth of information that can be gathered by analyzing the material aspects of written records. For example, we learn that the type of paper and the format used in official documents depended on the social and power dynamics between the sender and the receiver. The second section examines "writing and language as gateways to a full understanding of the documents' content" (15). Ōta starts with an explanation of the traditional scripts as well as the writing styles used in premodern administrative documents. Next, he introduces some techniques to decipher texts written in the complex cursive style (kuzushiji) and some conventions that are adopted in premodern texts to read characters in the correct order. Finally, the author examines the various parts of a document and their position in the text, and general grammatical aspects of sōrōbun, a literary style commonly used in administrative documents. This section is beneficial because the structure of Japanese premodern administrative sources follows conventions that are not necessarily intuitive for non-Japanese readers. For...

Review: Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

Review: <i>Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome</i>