l ac ta n t i u s .
Book. Until then it was assumed that the two technologies had remained largely separate and that printing effectively immediately destroyed the production of manuscripts until the early 16th century, when manuscripts again became fashionable as luxury items. Buhler pointed out however that many scriptoria survived late into the 15th century, particularly monastic scriptoria, and that in the very early period of printing, incunabula were regarded as merely manuscripts not written by hand: “The fifteenth century itself made little distinction between hand-written and press-printed books. Indeed in their own day, the early books were sometimes called by the curious term ‘codices ... absque calmi ulla exaracione effigiati’ and as volumes ‘escriptz en lettre d’impression,’ to distinguish them from those that were ‘escriptz a la main’ ... One cannot deal with the early years of printing without casting an occasional – or better, a continuing – glance at the traditions, habits, and methods of the scribes” (Buhler p. 18). If this manuscript is indeed a direct copy of the 1465 Lactantius, and there is every indication that it is, then it allows us to follow, letter by letter, the work of a particular group of scribes in a firmly dateable period. Incunable exemplars shed a fascinating light onto the world of the scriptorium: “A number of [incunables] are of high value for the study of scribal habits and practices. When the immediate prototype is a printed edition, then absolute control is available for judging the control of a scribe. It happens but rarely, in the case of manuscripts copied from manuscripts, that the precise “Vorlage” of a copy can be determined beyond question, so that it is impossible, as a result, to judge how faithful or how inaccurate a scribe may be – or even can be, when he so wishes – in regard to his source. But when one can lay an incunabulum side-by-side with its manuscript copy, then the scribe’s capabilities or lack of them, his mannerisms and personality quickly become apparent” (Buhler p. 48).
PROVENANCE (1) Most probably written in Genoa in 1472. The colophon is adapted from that of the Sweynheym and Pannartz edition of 1465 to give the variant date “M.CCC LXXII”, and the two watermarks, while not conclusively identified, point to Genoa (the first is a hand with a flower, close to Briquet no. 11159, produced in Genoa in 1483; the second is a pair of scissors beneath a crown, not recorded in Briquet, but with close variants recorded by the Gravell online database: Scissors 071.1 and 069.1, both scissors beneath single flowerheads, made in Genoa in 1475 and 1513; and Scissors 072.1, scissors beneath an arrow, made in Vicenza in 1516). (2) Within a few decades it was in the library of a Dominican convent,
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