Gazette 66

The study identifies the oldest group of manuscripts (first half of the 12th century), within a corpus of 41 manuscripts, produced in Pisa for city Church or for municipal institutions. The writing, textual typology and mise en page and their relationship with private documentation were studied. It can reasonably be assumed that the oldest manuscripts were produced within the Canonica of the cathedral and, sometimes, in collaboration with the Papal Court, where some cardinals from the city of Pisa were present.
The study attempts to build a model that supports the search for new Pisan manuscripts
and helps us to better classify the known corpus of the XII century.

Through the study of the abundant corpus of ex-libris of the library of Saint-­ Victor of Paris, between the 12th-14th centuries, a particular category of ex-libris, named “SV-XIIIe-A” for the purpose of this study, stands out because of its number and because of its beautiful chancellery script. A study in the archives of Saint-Victor and of ­ several Parisian institutions, in the first third of the 13th century, has been led to allow a ­ better dating of this group of ex-libris. It seems the scripts in the charters of Saint-Victor barely evolve during those years compared to the other institutions. This allows to state that the identical script to the SV-XIIIe-A group found in the archives of Saint-Victor indeed comes from the abbey and is certainly the same hand than the one who wrote the ex-libris. Hence it provides a more precise dating for the writing of these ex-libris and confirms the juridical and symbolic value of this type of ex-libris in the manuscripts.

Cortesana script was the most important cursive script in the Kingdom of Castile during the Late Middle Ages, owing to its widespread use and to the range of formal features that it could present. However, not all the versions of Cortesana script were completely cursive. In the second half of the 15th century, one of them consisted of a Cortesana alphabet slowly executed, without ligatures between letters. In other words, this was the appearance of the Castilian pseudocursive, which would be determinant for the evolution of the scripts in the 16th century in this kingdom. Thus, the aim of this research is to analyse the process of creation of this new pseudocursive script, the kind of books in which it first occurred and those in which it was used afterwards, the extragraphic features involved in this transformation of Cortesana or the relevance of this script for
later graphic typologies.

This article examines the evolution of the printed surface of Lyon’s incunabula. It shows the importance of the page layout, long lines or double columns, which often give more different results than the change of format. The study highlights the increase in the filling of the printed page, both through the increase in the printed surface (up to a certain limit) and through the decrease in the size of the characters. This phenomenon, which allows a large paper economy, is particularly visible on the occasion of the crisis of the early 1490s and for a specific type of books: the in-quarto with two columns. Our data also make it possible to see the different sizes of sheets used and to note the importance of law books in Lyon’s production.

The success of a work is measured primarily by the various manuscripts, preserved but also lost, which are both a medium of transmission and a true embodiment of the text they contain. Any research that claims to study the global diffusion, reception and use of a work, in other words its fortune, must begin with the most exhaustive census possible of the different witnesses that, together, constitute its manuscript tradition. Although the data collected on the various deperditi often prevent any form of qualitative ­ analysis, they are nonetheless essential when it comes to quantifying the success of a text. In the same vein, the study of the literary tradition of a work, in other words its use within other textual productions, whether diplomatic or more properly literary, offers precious clues to its socio-cultural and geographical penetration. The picture we will try to draw of the medieval diffusion of Cassiodorus’ Variae will consider these three elements: preserved manuscripts, lost manuscripts, textual replacements.