Two booklets, in Latin and Italian, manuscripts on paper [Italy, fifteenth and sixteenth century]

two booklets: (a) 9 leaves, 295mm. by 110mm., with Italian terzine verses, c.36 lines in a loose but legible hand showing the influence of humanistic script, end of verses marked with “finis”, watermark close to Briquet nos.94-96 (all Pisa, and 1550s-1570s), some tears to edges with loss of a corner of one leaf, spots and stains, else fair, Italy (probably Pisa), mid-sixteenth century; (b) 4 leaves from a legal codex, 300mm. by 220mm. paginated 407-08 (corrected to 409), 410-411, with 2 naïve sketches of medieval walled towns set in hilly wooded landscapes in pen with brown wash in the lower margins of 2 leaves, and larger sketches of a woman playing a harp and a crowned eagle holding a coat-of-arms, some spots and stains and edges bumped and woolly in places, else fair, Italy, late fifteenth century

Item (a) contains a collection of anonymous terzine verses, and the form of some additions suggests that this may be the author’s own copy. One is styled as a lengthy dialogue between ‘Iroldo’, one of the heroes of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s late fifteenth-century chivalric romance Orlando innamorato, and his adversary in love, Prasildo (here ‘Ersilia’). Boiardo’s work was an Italian reinterpretation of the romance motif of the star-crossed lovers torn apart by fate. Boiardo drew much of the tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Pisa did not really experience the Renaissance until the sixteenth century, when Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-74; for whom the Uffizi was built), took his court there for periods of time to escape the hubbub of Florence. This may have brought new literary influences to Pisa, and perhaps this poet as well.