OVID [with] [CHRYSOLORAS, Manuel].

A most interesting, annotated student’s textbook with two rare French editions, in Latin and Greek, from the early decades of the C16. The first is unrecorded in USTC; the second is recorded in 2 copies only, student textbooks were read and studied intensively, and subsequently discarded. Both were printed by Gilles de Gourmont. He resumed Greek printing in Paris from 1507, in a systematic manner, assisted by the humanists François Tissard and Girolamo Aleandro, who contributed to circulating the knowledge of Greek in Paris and taught the likes of Philip Melanchthon. Edited by François Vatable for Aleandro, the Chrysoloras edition features one of the earliest appearances of Gourmont’s Greek type, where the breathings and accents were cast together with the letters.

This collection was extensively used by several French school boys for over the course of a century, from the 1510s, when it was first bound, to at least 1646. The earliest and likely contemporary owner – Humbertus Moretus – was also the copious annotator. (The only Hubert Moret (or Morette, fl.1530-50) we have traced at that time was a merchant, goldsmith and jeweller, apparently from Lyon, who also sold his goods to Henry VIII of England; however, a goldsmith would unlikely to have been educated in Greek.) The notes on the eps include a section on prepositions taken from Lorenzo Valla’s ‘Elegantiae linguae latinae’, and notes on Ovid’s ‘Fasti’ (especially ‘Imponit libum farraque mirta sale’). His notes on Ovid include lengthy reflections on his use of figures of speech and rhetoric, as well as quotes from other works or comparisons with, for instance, Cato and Horace. The notes do not seem to have been drawn from printed sources, and were arguably taken in class.

The study of Greek, as in Moret’s annotations, was not widespread in pre-1600 France. The main schools were the Collège Royal in Paris, from 1530, or provincial Jesuit Colleges, from 1540. Interestingly, Moret’s annotations appear, from the handwriting, to predate these. They may thus be witnesses to a time when Greek was taught privately by tutors, like Aleandro, or through the occasional lecture at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris. Chrysoloras’ was one of the key student grammars of the time. The annotations on this copy shed unique light on how Chrysoloras’ work was studied: the teacher translated the whole text into Latin, which the student wrote down in the form of interlinear translations, with marginal glosses concerning the teacher’s contextual comments on grammar and syntax. Great attention was paid to Chrysoloras’ own innovative concept, ‘klisis’ (i.e., Greek inflectional groups), which Moret glossed abundantly with diagrams of grammatical endings. In 1646 the book was the property of Henricus Acquarius, from Mâcon just north of Lyon, who signed his name several times throughout, and added a couple of marginal glosses.

Very interesting annotated copies just awaiting further research.