Monastic provenances of early printed books in Bodleian collections: case 4

An Augustinus from the Augustinian Canons regular of the Lateran congregation of Padua 

Augustinus, De civitate Dei
Venice: Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira, 1470.
Folio (ISTC ia01233000; Bod-inc A-520).
Bodleian Library: Broxb. 18.10

Provenance:

• Petrus de Montagnana (d. 1478), grammarian and bibliophile
• Padua, Augustinian Canons Regular of the Lateran Congregation, S. Johannes Baptista in Viridario, 1478

A gift from Petrus de Montagnana as stated in the inscription on E9r: «Librum hunc Canonicis Regularibus Lateranensibus in monasterio diui Ioannis Baptiste de uiridaria Padue agentibus uir uenerabilis ac deuotus Christi sacerdos & bonarum artium cultor Grece Latine Hebraice eque peritissimus D. Petrus Montagnana optima fide pietatis studio proque salute adscripsit atque donauit quem quisque legens proficiat primum deinde sit gratus | M.CCCCLXXVIII». The collection was moved in the late 18th century to the Marciana Library of Venice.

Fol. 9r: inscription

• Sir John Hayford Thorold (1773-1831)
• Quaritch, London antiquarian booksellers, 1897

The book features in Monumenta typographica (1897), no. 233 for £28. 0. 0.

• Charles Stephen Ascherson (d. 1945)

Bookplate dated 1902.

• Quaritch, London antiquarian booksellers, c. 1954
• Albert Ehrman (1890-1969)

Purchased from Quaritch in 1954 for £210

• Oxford, Bodleian Library

Presented by John Ehrman in 1978.

Bibliography: P. Sambin, ‘La formazione quattrocentesca della Biblioteca di S. Giovanni di Verdara in Padova’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere ed Arti, 114 (1956), 263-80; R. W. Hunt, ‘Pietro da Montagnana: a Donor of Books to san Giovanni di Verdara in Padua’, The Bodleian Library Record, 9 (1973), pp. 17-22.

History of the Collection:

The monastery housed not only a valuable library which contained the collections of scholars such Pietro da Montagnana, Giovanni Marcanova, and Marco Mantova Benavides, but also portraits, sculptures, coins, archeological and natural history specimens. When in 1783 the Senate of Venice decreed the closure of the institution, it also arranged for the tranfer of the collection in approriate locations: manuscripts and early printed books were assigned to the Marciana Library, the rest of the book collection to the public library of Padua.

Other books surviving from the Augustinian canons regular of Padua are today in:

Paul Needham’s IPI refers that Thomas Coke (1697-1759) 1st Earl of Leicester, on Grand Tour bought 40 manuscripts from S. Johannes in Viridario in 1717.

Other incunabula are today in Venice, Oxford, Bodleian Library (2); Harvard Houghton Lib., New York, P. Morgan Library, in private collections, and further research may trace more in…?

[Source: Paul Needham’s IPI, Bod-inc.]