Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 34 No. 34, 2025.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Ms Gesuitico 522 and the Unknown History of Marulić's Repertorium
Neven Jovanović
orcid.org/0000-0002-9119-399X
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Sažetak
The paper describes material and textual aspects of Marulić's autograph of the Repertorium, MS Gesuitico 522 (Rome, Biblioteca nazionale centrale Vittorio Emanuele II); the Repertorium is Marulić’s moral and religious commonplace book, a fair copy of excerpts from more than forty texts from his library. I consider the format of the codex, its fascicle structure and the way they are currently bound together, kinds of paper used and their watermarks, the changes of the ink that Marulić used, and the marginal notes in the codex. These aspects, not previously discussed, are important for an understanding of how the Repertorium was conceived and made, and what happened with the codex when it was not under its author’s control. The elongated format of the codex was named in Italy vachetta; it was used not only for lists, administration and accounts, but also for organizing the notes and commonplace books of scholars such as Ulisse Aldrovandi. Ms Gesuitico 422 in its actual state is composed of 50 fascicles, mostly quinions (31) and quaternions (16). Fascicle 1 is now a duernion, fascicle 2 a ternion, fascicle 3 a bifolium; fascicle 50 contains also a smaller ternion (50a) with another list of Roman emperors who persecuted Christians and of the early Christian martyrs (see Table 1). The fascicle structure explains the empty (surplus) pages of the Repertorium, because the excerpts under a new letter of the alphabet always get a new fascicle. The smudging and wear of the first pages of some of the fascicles suggests that Marulić (and other readers) used the Repertorium unbound, as several sets of fascicles. This supports the claim of Bratislav Lučin that the Repertorium is listed in Marulić’s will (in its Inventarium librorum) as Ex auctoribus dicta, libelli parui n.o 4 (four sets of fascicles, each comprising some 100 leaves). Lučin further advances the idea that when, at some point, somebody decided to have the fascicles bound together, a mistake was made: the first bifolium was lost, the first quinion fell apart, its first and last leaf were bound separately, and the first and the last leaf of the remaining quaternion were folded separately and in a wrong way. This hypothesis was confirmed by my inspection of Ms Gesuitico 422 in situ. The codex contains different kinds of paper with different watermarks; I identified four of them in the standard watermark collections (Images 1–4), which report that all four were used during the period 1489–1506. The watermarks thus support the assertion of Darko Novaković that the Repertorium was composed over an extended period of more than thirty years, from the early 1480s until after 1515. Moreover, some fascicles of Ms Gesuitico 422 are composed of different kinds of paper – except for the letter G, they are always the second fascicles for an individual letter of the alphabet. Compiling the fair copy of the Repertorium over three decades, Marulić wrote in inks of different colours, qualities and consistencies; some ink must have been locally made or even home-made (representative changes of ink are shown in the Table 2). This is a solitary case in Marulić’s scribal usage; all his other preserved autographs were written with one type of ink (using red only for titles and marginal notes; an exception is the In epigr., where Marulić used red ink for an extended section of the main text, probably because it was not possible readily to obtain the black ink).
The Repertorium contains numerous marginal and interlinear notes, both textual and drawn. Textual marginalia provide additions to the main text, corrections, instructions for the reader, emphases, repetitions of certain words from the main text and categorisations of excerpts (such categorisations can become cross-references, using keywords from the Repertorium itself). The drawings are little hands with pointing fingers (maniculae), twining vine-like lines, asterisks, dots, paragraph signs (pilcrows), and interlinear lines drawn above the marked words. The ink and the pen with which these textual and drawn additions were made (see Images 5–9) suggest that they were not contemporary with the main text. Some of them Marulić must have added much later (Appendix 1). Other notes, again, were not from Marulić’s hand (Images 11–17, Tables 3–5, Appendix 2). I have noticed 249 such cases. This was not registered in the editio princeps of the Repertorium (ed. Branimir Glavičić, 1998–2000). The notes in other hands – they seem to have been made by different persons, at different times – include both text (abbreviations for Nota and Attende, repetition of names and terms from the main text) and drawings (manicules and vine-like lines, asterisks, dots, interlinear lines above words of interest). Such notes occur in all parts of the Repertorium except in articles under the letter E. They annotate excerpts from 30 of 40 books from which Marulić had culled commonplaces; excerpts annotated by other hands are most often from the Bible (41), from Plutarch’s Apophthegmata (31), from Plato (25), Plutarch’s Lives (19) and Pliny’s Natural History (18). Of some 300 keywords of the Repertorium, other hands annotated excerpts under 67 keywords, most frequently under Diuitię (27 marginal notes in other hands, excerpts from five books), Bonitas (18 notes, excerpts from five books as well), Nomen (17 notes, excerpts from three books), Victoria (13 notes, excerpts from five books) and Rex (11 notes, excerpts from three books). The keywords annotated by other hands have to do mostly with morals, sometimes with the everyday life (Nauta, Aqua, Venti), rarely with Christianity (Penitentia, Conuersi, Confessio, Spiritus Sanctus). Textual notes by other hands suggest an interest in ancient pagan names and persons (for example, f. 22r Plato, Dionysius; f. 97v Septimuleius, Lysander, Themistocles, Aratus; f. 98r Demosthenes; f. 229r Anacarsis, Feminę Punicę), less frequently in certain themes (f. 23r Temeritas, f. 79v Morbus pestilentie, f. 137r Aduersa, f. 370v twice penitentia, f. 431r fibula aurea donatus, f. 435r philosophi ciuitatibus dominentur).
Ključne riječi
Marko Marulić; manuscript codex; material aspects of the codex; fascicle structure; vachetta format; watermarks; ink; marginal writings and drawings
Hrčak ID:
339014
URI
Datum izdavanja:
21.11.2025.
Posjeta: 626 *