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Re: VMs: Costamagna and abbreviation...

Hi Petr,

At 19:38 04/12/2003 +0100, Petr Kazil wrote: 
> > It may well be that all we're missing is examples of heavily abbreviated
> > scribal text from circa 1450 (I'd suggest from near Milan): and that the
> > VMs is merely a heavily obfuscated version of this kind of text.

There is an adress list of Dutch medievists here:
http://www.medievistiek.nl/pdf/adreslijst.pdf
Shall I send an e-mail with this question to some of them at random? We
might be lucky.

Bear in mind that 1450 isn't really "medieval" as such, but rather is "early modern". For example, Umberto Eco is primarily a medievalist - which is probably why he hadn't looked at the VMs (it was probably a century (or more) too late).

So, what we're really looking for is an expert in "early modern Italian palaeography" to advise us. What I have found online is quite fragmented, and tends to polarise into either medievalist palaeography or 17th/18th century palaeography - once again, we're looking for stuff that has fallen (at least part-way) through the cracks in the pavement of history. :-/

Here's a short list of the kind of sites I've been searching to form this opinion:-
http://individual.utoronto.ca/ullyot/teaching/resources/paleography.htm
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/mss/mss.html
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/mss/paleobib.html
http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/medren.html

There's also the Ilardi Collection to consider as a possible resource: the first document on this page is from Galeazzo Maria Sforza to the King of France's ambassador in 1472:-
http://www.library.yale.edu/Ilardi/il-toc.htm#Image_Page

Another tip for source material would be documents from the voluminous Medici archives:-
Medici Archives : Parts I & II
Mediceo Avanti il Principato - http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it/Map/
Digitalized early Medici archives of the Archivio di Stato di Firenze.
NOTE: requires gratis registration to enter website.
(14th century - 1537; facsimiles)

Once you've registered onlined, find the person in whose correspondence you're interested (on the Inventario Sommario screen), then click on the filza number beside it, and then move onwards to the scanned documents themselves. For example, [77], [78], [85], [87], [125] and [127] hold letters to Caterina Sforza, so clicking on (say) [125] takes you to one set, with all the document pages within that filza clickable on the right. As another example, [101] also has a little related to Cecco [Cicco] Simonetta.

Really, you could spend your entire life reading all the correspondence here - it's *vast*. In the letters I looked at, the amount of abbreviated text varied... but not by a great deal. Also, letters to family members seemed to be abbreviated more than more formal letters: have a look through and see what you think. It's a great (palaeographic) resource to have available.

Also: for later (ie, 1537 onwards) Medici files, there's the (possibly equally voluminous) Medici Archive Project http://www.medici.org/ After a quick surf, I found this nice (baths-related) page:-
http://www.medici.org/news/dom/dom112002.html

This is a specialised area, so we shouldn't be too surprised if it takes us a little time to find someone who can properly help us. My gut instinct at this point is that we'd probably need a Milanese early modern palaeographer to point us at the resources most likely to be of use to us (but that these might not currently exist online). I'll ask around, you never know...

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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