UN MANUSCRIS ITALIAN INEDIT AL BIBLIOTECII BATTHYANEUM (MS. II. 106)1
A LITTLE KNOWN ITALIAN MANUSCRIPT OF THE BATTHYANEUM LIBRARY IN ALBA IULIA (MS II. 106)

Summary/Abstract: The present article discusses Alba Iulia, Batthyaneum Library, MS II. 106 from a palaeographical, codicological and philological perspective. MS II. 106 has never been properly described so far, and the two texts it contains have not hitherto been identified. The manuscript is a fourteenth-century book of small size (23 fols., 237 x 175 mm), written in a decent textualis rotunda, typical for Northern Italy. It contains texts in Italian, whose dialect confirms that the manuscript was produced in the area of Venice. In earlier literature, the manuscript was called, after the rubric of its first text, Libro de moralites; the second text went unnoticed by scholars. The two texts can now be identified as Italian translations of (Pseudo-)William of Conches’ Moralium dogma philosophorum and Guido Fava’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus. The Moralium in volgare is transmitted by 13 manuscripts, all in Florentine dialect; a single MS of Guido’s Summa, also in Florentine dialect, has been identified by Italian scholarship. MS II. 106 thus becomes an important item in the textual history of both texts, as the only witness of a Venetian version.

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