Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters: A Census of Manuscripts Found in Eastern Europe and the Former U.S.S.R..

Blessed is the scholar who leaves to future generations a work that will not be redone, but only updated. The volumes under review are such works. They form the first two of a proposed three (but what I suspect will eventually be a four) volume census of all the extant manuscripts of the ars dictaminis and ars arengandi.

The ars dictarninis was the medieval art of letter-writing; the ars arengandi, the medieval an of haranguing, or secular speech-making. As such, each is tremendously important in itself as a reflection of the rhetorical culture of the Middle Ages. But each also has wider historical significance. The ars dictaminis was a central product of the literary culture of medieval bureaucrats from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. Several scholars have noted the association of this culture with the emergence of medieval vernacular literature. Paul Oskar Kristeller has long argued that the culture of the ars dictaminis in Italy also incubated Renaissance humanism. The related ars arengandi (its authors, teachers, and practitioners were frequently also leading figures in the ars dictaminis) was peculiar to the politics and social customs of medieval Italy and unquestionably anticipated the intense oratorical interests of Renaissance humanism.

What Professor Polak has given us is a solid statistical and bibliographical basis for taking stock of this medieval rhetorical tradition from its origins through the end of the Renaissance. In the volumes under review (oddly, their tire pages give no indication that they are consecutive volumes, though - almost as an afterthought - the second has a "(2)" on its spine) he inventories all extant dictaminal and arengandial manuscripts in the world except for four countries (Austria, France, Italy, and the former "West Germany"). He thus has yet to inventory at least a third and probably closer to half of the relevant extant manuscripts. But he has gone far enough along the road for us to draw up a preliminary tally sheet of what he has accomplished.

By my count (based on the Index of Manuscripts at the end of each volume), Polak reports 1,297 manuscripts. So we can surmise that there will eventually be shown to survive at least 2,000 and probably 3,000 or more medieval and Renaissance dictaminal and arengandial manuscripts - no mean figure for texts that were destined to be consumed in use and that went out of date relatively rapidly as times and places changed. I noted one tenth-century manuscript in Polak's census, a handful of eleventh-and twelfth-century manuscripts, and a goodly number of thirteenth-century manuscripts. The largest proportion by far of these manuscripts, however, dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The number of manuscripts understandably declines precipitously as we proceed into the sixteenth and then the seventeenth century. But the fact that these treatises were still of use and circulated in manuscript well into the seventeenth century is a good indication of the continuity of medieval cultural forms throughout the Renaissance. Indeed, for Eastern Europe, seventeenth-century manuscripts surpass in number the twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, a fact suggestive of the later emergence and continuity of dictaminal culture east of the Elbe.

Every area of Europe produced dictaminal authors, but Polak's census, which does not yet cover Italian libraries, already firmly documents the predominance of Italian authors in this field. Only the late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century Frenchman Pierre de Blois and the fourteenth-century German Nicolaus de Dybin statistically match the popularity of Italian authors such Guido Faba, Lorenzo di Aquileia, Tommaso di Capua, and the humanists Gasparino Barzizza and Agostino Dati. I noted with interest that the fifteenth-century Franciscan Lorenzo Traversagni of Savona was remarkably popular in Eastern Europe.

Polak has measurably increased our knowledge of the diffusion of known texts and authors. He has also identified a great many previously unidentified dictaminal texts and manuscripts. As another by-product of the census, he has turned up a rich store of anonymous dictaminal and arengandial works. One may hope that through the aid of Polak's Index of Incipits many of these authors will eventually be identified. In passing, he has also given the reader a rich secondary bibliography. Indeed, his volumes are guides to the secondary literature. At the first mention of a text, he collects the relevant literature and then refers back to this bibliography in subsequent remarks. Eventually, only texts for which no manuscripts survive will escape the net of his secondary bibliography.

When complete, Polak's census should be virtually comprehensive for medieval treatises and useful but not all-inclusive for Renaissance texts. The reason for the difference is twofold: first and foremost, because Polak made a census of manuscripts, while many relevant Renaissance treatises (probably the majority) survive only in printed editions; second, because in the Renaissance the study of epistolography and oratory changed and the ensuing products do not always correspond to the type of work Polak includes in the census. Humanists produced full-blown rhetorics; they edited classical manuals; and, most of all, starting with Petrarch, they liked to collect real letters rather than the fictive models of the dictaminal tradition. As it is, Polak included in his census relevant works of Agostino Dati and Gasparino Barzizza. He also happily includes the fifteenth-century Iberian humanists Iacobus Publicius and Ioannes Serra. When he surveys Italy and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris with its rich store of manuscripts of Italian provenance, many more humanist treatises will appear in the census.

There are several minor ways in which the census can be improved. One is typographical. At present its running heads identify only the country. In big collections or in cities with several collections, it is easy for a reader to become confused and have to hunt back over many pages to find the name of the library and even the city in which a given manuscript is located. The running heads should give the city and the library instead of the country. Furthermore, I am unhappy with the handling of lost manuscripts. In the first volume their shelf marks are given, but their contents and authors are not identified, which makes their listing next to useless. In the second volume, however, lost manuscripts are almost always properly described (the exception, on page 30, is the repetition of shelf marks taken from a fifteenth-century inventory), but the omissions in the first volume need to be made good. I also wonder about the value of including the secondary bibliography associated with each author in subsequent volumes. Apart from fresh authorities, reference back to the earlier volumes should suffice.

Polak examined on the spot the vast majority of the manuscripts he lists. His descriptions and identifications are exceptionally reliable. And since he attempted to cover every relevant collection, he listed score upon score of libraries where he found nothing. His census for the areas already inventoried is as dose to exhaustive as one can reasonably hope to attain. New and overlooked items will inevitably turn up, but they will affect only on the margins the vast documentation provided by Polak. Justly did Paul Oskar Kristeller, the patron saint of manuscript research in our century, write a foreword to the first volume of this census.

JOHN MONFASANI State University of New York, Albany