Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and Claude Dupuy. Une correspondance entre deux humanistes.

Ed. Anna Maria Raugei. 2 vols. (Le corrispondeze letterarie, scientifiche ed erudite dal rinascimento all'eta moderna, 8.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001. Pbk. cxxviii + 770 pp. + 1 b/w pl. index, append. 77.46 [euro]. ISBN: 88-222-4995-X.

Anthony Grafton remarks somewhere that no one alive today can possibly be familiar with the literary tradition running from antiquity to the Renaissance in the intimate way a few learned men were able to be in the sixteenth century. It is probably true: men and women alive today do not learn Latin as a living language or develop the capacious memory for texts that highly literate people had down to the Renaissance, and men and women of learning must now absorb an amount of monographic secondary literature that is vast in comparison to the quantity of the primary texts themselves, whereas in the sixteenth century the main form of secondary literature was detailed commentary on the texts, and the amount of it was not overwhelming. Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601) of Padua and Claude Dupuy (1545-94) of Paris were private scholars (neither published anything) who collaborated with the greatest publishing scholars of their age. This is the first publication I have been asked to review that I felt I was as well qualified as most readers of this journal to assess. Scholars have been reading the original letters at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (where Pinelli's letters to Dupuy are held), and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (the home of Dupuy's to Pinelli) since the nineteenth century, and I was one of the last, I suppose, to do so, in the 1980s; I possess microfilms of the originals; and I can read Latin, into which Dupuy in particular lapses at some point in almost every letter (though the bulk of his are written in French, and all of Pinelli's in Italian). Still, it is hard to feel like a competent reviewer when faced with the correspondence of two such men: they sometimes discuss words or passages from Greek authors which are beyond my reach and are in general dismissive of those they regard as half-learned--a category to which they would certainly consign me and most of us. If you have read this far, you may be asking yourself why you should look at these letters at all.

There are good reasons to do so. One is that they are outstanding examples of an important phenomenon, international epistolary communication in early modern Europe, to which the series in which they are published is devoted. Another is that the letters are not only alive with the love of books, and thus a pleasure for any scholar to read; they are also sources of the greatest value for the history of the book in the sixteenth century: every scholar in that field will want to read them. A third is that these learned, irenic men of the sixteenth century were a historical type with a distinctive mentality that actually had considerable influence on the collective evolution of European society (Anna Maria Raugei has some interesting things to say about this in her introduction), and there is no better way to get acquainted with the type than by reading these letters. A fourth is that the letters are valuable documents for the history of the French and Italian languages. This is Raugei's special field, and the largest part of her introduction is given over to a detailed description of the linguistic features of the letters. A scholar specializing in the transmission of classical texts would have written a completely different introduction, as would a scholar specializing in book history. But all readers are well-served by her thorough editing: apparatus criticus and explanatory notes following each of the 163 letters in the first volume, and a 300-page repertoire of biographical and bibliographical entries on all the persons and books to whom and to which Pinelli and Dupuy refer in the second.

In the remainder of this review I will offer miscellaneous observations. Pinelli and Dupuy were as interested in medieval and contemporary history as they were in ancient history, and they discuss and send one another many new books in all these areas. There is no new information here on the events of the Wars of Religion, but plenty of alert discussion of the literature that surrounded it. Dupuy's letters take us inside the mind of a conseiller (a senior magistrate) in the parlement of Paris, but add nothing to the institutional history of that body either. The Pinelli-Dupuy letters do not stand alone but are part of a web of correspondence maintained by both men with European scholars, librarians, magistrates, clerics, secretaries, and litterati in general; it would be a good thing if all of it were published in the same series. The letters exchanged by Pinelli and Jacopo Corbinelli were transcribed for two different tesi di laurea at the Catholic University of Milan in 1981-82, and Raugei cites them from that source: when can we expect them to be published? Paul F. Grendler's view that the impact of ecclesiastical censorship on Italian culture has been exaggerated might usefully have been discussed here, for Grendler noted that Pinelli was mostly successful in obtaining books in Venice and from abroad. Yet these letters reveal how much trouble it cost Dupuy to evade the inquisitors in Genoa, who did indeed make seizures from his parcels to Pinelli. Dupuy eventually sent books for Pinelli from Paris to the book fair at Frankfurt; from there Venetian book dealers carried them back to Venice, where an accommodating inquisitor gave Pinelli a break that few other Italians would have been granted. Dupuy's letters include a couple of detailed accounts of the cost of books he has purchased for Pinelli, and the cost of shipping them. He tallies the sums in livres tournois/sous/deniers, and converts them to ecus pistolets / sous / deniers, at rates that rose with inflationary pressure, then fell with government regulation. Years ago I worked through these accounts for myself, with childlike pleasure (doing the sums is like doing a puzzle), and any reader can now do the same. The following, though, should be noted: p. 279, line 8 up, read "Pour le port jusques a Francfort 2 [[pounds sterling]] 12 [s]," not "1 [[pounds sterling]] 12 [s]"; p. 280, mid-page, the figure "4 [[pounds sterling]] 5 [s]" belongs one row down from where it is printed (it is, again, the cost of shipping to Frankfurt); p. 280, line 4 up, the figure "12 [ecus pistolets] 26 [s]" belongs one row down from where it is printed (it is the total cost of books shipped in September 1578, not September 1577). In places where Dupuy refers to payments he has made, Raugei oddly and persistently misreads paier, where Dupuy wrote fraier. Overall, the number of mistranscriptions in the passages I checked was well within tolerable limits: occasionally a word or two is skipped or misread. Letter 13 is misdated: it was written on 10 July 1571. Raugei does not identify the leges iudiciaria and agraria discussed by Pinelli and Dupuy (her main note is n. 12 to letter 65, 186); see Michael H. Crawford et al., Roman Statutes (London, 1996), items 1 and 2.

WILLIAM MCCUAIG

Toronto