National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Sir Sydney COCKERELL and Professor E. H. MINNS to have been done in Italy about

the year 1470. The Italians in 1795 dated the manuscript about 1400, and the

scholars at Toledo to day assign it to the first half of the fifteenth century. There

are two fly-leaves at either end, of eighteenth century paper (one of them water-

marked A.M.G. in a shield), and the first of these leaves is inscribed ` 4 ' in the

top left corner, '1163'

1163' in the bottom left corner, and `Cajon 49 Num zo Zelada'

in the middle. The volume is bound in marbled brown calf with the ribs gilded, and is lettered on the spine MARC.PAUL.OP. in the second panel with ZELADA'S crest

and F X :•: Z (Francisco Xavier Cardinal Zelada) in the lowest panel. The figures

49 .zo, which indicate the shelf and number of the book in the Zelada Collection

at Toledo, appear again on a paper label pasted on the back of the volume. The

book is entered with these numbers in the manuscript Catalogue of the library which was made by Joaquin and Juan VILLALOBOS in 1808 and is still in use.

The first owner of the book who seems to be known was Joseph Antenor SCALABRINI, 1694 - 8 April 1777, born at Ferrara and from 1743 a Canon and

Professor there, and a noted antiquary and a friend of MURATORI.   His name

appears in Greek initials and in Latin at the foot of the title page (p. iii). From

him it seems to have passed to Cardinal Francisco Xavier de ZELADA, 27 August 1717

- 19 December 1801, who coming from a Spanish family, though born at Rome,

was amongst the most prominent men of letters of his time in Italy, and had been

"Librarian of the holy Church" (1778-1801) and Secretary of State to Pio VI

(1789 - 1796). Part of Cardinal ZELADA'S great library, which he is said to have

bequeathed to the Casa di Gesù at Rome, was obtained by Cardinal Francisco III Antonio LORENZANA, 22 September 1728 - 17 April 1804, and conveyed by him

to the already famous Cathedral Library at Toledo, of which city he had been the

distinguished Archbishop from 1772 till 1800.

In making the transcript which is here printed I have tried to copy the original

letter for letter, only writing out the abbreviations (except &) in full, and have

even preserved the erratic and often apparently meaningless punctuation ; feeling

that students who use such a text will like to have as nearly as possible an exact

representation of the manuscript, unchanged by any editing at all. It has proved

to be impossible to be perfectly consistent in the use of capital letters, especially

of the large capitals which begin the paragraphs . The double spaces indicate the

ends of the sentences, and are indeed a piece of editing as the sentences are not

divided in the manuscript. Missing letters and, sometimes, words are often

supplied in square brackets ; additional or wrong letters have not been left out or

corrected .   A. C. M.

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