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<p>Free Library of Philadelphia, Lewis E 53. Italy, 1250-1280. This mid-thirteenth-century manuscript, produced in Italy, contains a collection of commentaries on works by Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), most of which are anonymous. However, the commentaries on a pseudo-Aristotelian work on plants, on Aristotle's On Sense and the Sensible, and on the On Generation and Corruption, which are included in the manuscript, have been identified as works by Adam of Buckfield, a professor at Oxford during the thirteenth century. Sewn into the back of the manuscript is a printed bifolium on parchment of 1576 that contains an abbreviated Italian biography of Francis Petrarch (1304-1374). This post-medieval addition to the book is partly responsible for the book being misidentified as having once been part of Petrarch's library. Catalog entries and a note written in the hand of John Frederick Lewis further identify this book as stemming from Petrarch's library, which had been gifted to the Venetian Republic in 1362. In 1635, an unknown person added bookplates to books falsely believed to be from Petrarch's library as evidence of their provenance. It is not clear how this manuscript acquired the bookplate, but it now certain that it was not among Petrarch's library collection. The print that was pasted into the inside of the cover is an engraving by Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527-ca. 1607), a Dutch Renaissance architect and engineer.
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<br>Subjects: 13th century; Italian; Italy</div>
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Free Library of Philadelphia</div>
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