Item 42 - Accounts of events in Florence and elsewhere

1 volume (32 x 22 cm), containing 315 leaves. The boards appear to be covered with parchment.

The compiler of the main part of this volume calls himself Notedia Doanti, which according to the writer of the entry in the Sotheby’s auction catalogue (see below) is an anagram of Antonio de’ Dati, the surname being that of ‘a well-known ancient Florentine family’. Nothing more of this man is known. The contents are similar to those of a MS in the John Rylands Library (Italian MS 27). The present volume was once in the collection of Guglielmo Libri, much of which was acquired by theft, but its previous history is unknown. Libri’s collection was auctioned by Sotheby and Wilkinson between 28 March and 4 April 1859, this book being sold on the third day as lot number 318. (See the Catalogue of the Extraordinary Collection of Splendid Manuscripts … formed by M. Guglielmo Libri, 1859.) There is a sticker bearing the number ‘365’ at the top of the spine, and inside the front cover are written, in different hands, ‘692’ and ‘30/–’. The armorial bookplate of Robert, Earl of Crewe, is pasted below these inscriptions.

On the spine is written ‘Narazioni Casi diversi’. The contents comprise a number of narratives by different writers (pp. 1–530), most of them unidentified, followed by verses by Giambattista Felice Zappi and others (pp. 532–57). The authors of the verses are not indicated in the manuscript.

Paginated i–xxii, 1–42, 42a–42d, 43–604.

• Italian

In quotations from the manuscript most abbreviations have been expanded and the use of the letters i, j, u, and v has been modernised. It is often uncertain whether or not an initial letter was intended to be a capital.