Gadaldini’s Library

A few years ago in Mnemosyne, Keith M. Dickson convincingly argued that the numerous notes in a Greek manuscript in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, Hauniensis gr. E variorum donatione 29, 2°, may well have been written by Agostino Gadaldini (1515-1575).²⁾ By comparing them with Gadaldini’s emendations in his Juntine edition of 1554 of Stephanus’ Commentary on Galen’s Ad Glauconem, Dickson showed that the physician of Modena had probably used the Copenhagen manuscript directly. The manuscript came from the collection of Johann Rhode, a Danish physician who collected Greek manuscripts during his long stay in Padua (1623-1659), where it was seen by Jacopo Tomasini.³⁾ Despite some excellent arguments, Dickson remained cautious in his conclusions, for he knew of no example of Gadaldini’s Greek handwriting that could provide a conclusive comparison.

However, it has long been suspected, ever since F.R. Dietz in the 1830s, that the marginalia in the Basle edition of Hippocrates (1538) now preserved in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, shelfmark S Q T VIII 9), were the work of Gadaldini. When the latest edition of Hippocrates Airs, Waters and Places was published,⁴⁾ a comparison between the Copenhagen and the Milan marginalia was suggested by Jacques Jouanna. For some reason, it has not been made until now. There are also traces of Gadaldini in a sixteenth-century manuscript in Paris, Parisin. gr. 2383, that contains a part of Galen’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (ff. 27-34) and was used by Gadaldini for his Latin translation.⁵⁾

We know little about Gadaldini’s library, and even less about Agostino Gadaldini himself;⁶⁾ however, we do know that Gadaldini was a physician in Modena, and that his major work on Latin translations of Galen, which were revised on the basis of Greek manuscripts, could not have been made without sufficient manuscript material to hand. René Chartier, the seventeenth-century editor of the Greek Galen, used the Juntine editions of Galen and Hippocrates in order to improve (or simply alter) his Greek text,⁷⁾ which is a sign of Gadaldini’s importance in the constitution of the Galenic corpus in early modern times. It must also be stressed that Galen’s readership from 1550 onwards knew the complete works of Galen mainly through the Latin editions prepared by Gadaldini for the Giuntas (therefore called Juntines).⁸⁾ It is therefore crucial to try to discover more about the sources of such an important work. Why should this manuscript material have vanished entirely from sight? Why could it not be found, for example, in Gadaldini’s native city? Stefania Fortuna has suggested that Gadaldini may have used a Venetian manuscript for his revised translation of On Affected Parts.⁹⁾ But, in general, modern editors of Galen have shed very little light on Gadaldini’s sources.

In a recent paper I drew attention to a series of Greek medical manuscripts in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, arguing that they had been written in a short space of time as part of an editorial project.¹⁰⁾ Despite the catalogue’s inaccuracies, direct inspection revealed that five manuscripts, Mutinens. gr. 211, 213, 217, 226 and 237, all written by the same unidentified scribe and containing exclusively works by Galen, must be dated after 1525 at the earliest. All of them have in their margins Greek notes of various kinds (collations, emendations, conjectures) by an identical hand that is also unidentified. In addition, I noticed strong connections with yet more manuscripts in the same library. The mysterious marginalia appeared in other Greek manuscripts of Galen (Mutinens. gr. 78, 175, 218 and 219) and possibly of Hippocrates (Mutinens. gr. 220); the evidence of watermarks and copyists also established a link between the Galen series and three manuscripts of Hippocrates studied by Jacques Jouanna (Mutinens. gr. 220, 227 and 233).¹¹⁾ On philological as well as codicological grounds, I suggested in my paper that the Modena series (in a broad sense: all manuscripts with marginalia of that same hand) may be linked to Gadaldini’s preparatory work on the Juntines.

Of course, this hypothesis needed to be supported by evidence, and it was for this purpose that I went to the Ambrosiana in Milan and to the Royal Library of Copenhagen. My visit proved conclusive. The handwriting in the Basle edition of Hippocrates in Milan is identical to that of Modena; and that in the margins of the Copenhagen manuscript E donat. var. 29, 2° also resembles it strongly. It is very likely that the author of these notes is none other than Gadaldini himself, for so many elements converge.

The same E donatione variorum collection also contains two other sixteenth-century manuscripts of Galen bearing annotations by the same reader: Hauniens. Gr. Bibl. univ. E donatione variorum 14, 2° (Galen’s Synopsis on the Pulse) and 42, 4° (Galen’s Art of Medicine). This is not very surprising, since every one of these manuscripts came from the same library, namely that of Prof. Anchersen, whose collection came into the possession of the University library around 1770. One of them is explicitly linked to Johann Rhode’s collection (42, 4°), who owned it in 1625.¹²⁾ This gives further support to Dickson’s theory of the origin of 29, 2°. All three are written in elegant mid-sixteenth-century Greek hands, two of them being particularly close to each other: Camillus Zanettus wrote 14, 2° and a fellow scribe (possibly Bartholomaeus Zanettus) 29, 2°.¹³⁾ However, those common features do not exactly fit with the Modena series: the watermarks, where they exist at all, are different, and so are the sizes of the manuscripts.¹⁴⁾ Also, the way in which conjectures are introduced is slightly different: the Modena manuscripts often have λεκτέον or οἶμαι, whereas those in Copenhagen prefer ἴσως. It is therefore likely that all manuscripts, if once owned by Gadaldini, were not used at the same time. Further philological investigation should help to determine which manuscripts were used for which edition, for Gadaldini worked over many years, revising some Galenic texts as early as 1543,¹⁵⁾ but others as late as 1556 or 1565.¹⁶⁾

Some questions remain unanswered about the fate of Gadaldini’s copies of Galen. We do not know for certain if he owned these manuscripts (or some of them) or simply borrowed them, for there is no owner’s mark on any of the volumes listed below. Of course, they may have been removed when the manuscripts were rebound, but if Gadaldini himself did not have the five volumes of the ‘Anonymus Mutinensis’ (at least) copied for his use, then who else did, for they show a systematic copying work in progress. But it could also date back to an earlier editorial project independent of the preparations for the Juntine edition. As for the models of Gadaldini’s manuscripts, a detailed philological analysis will naturally shed further light; at the moment, some stemmas are available, showing a clear relationship of these manuscripts either with already known manuscripts or with lost prototypes—which is more interesting and gives support to Gadaldini’s own claim, that he used old manuscripts.¹⁷⁾

Another question is whether some manuscripts of Hippocrates were also used by Gadaldini. As Jacques Jouanna has convincingly stated, the ‘Hippocrates of Modena’ (Mutinens. gr. 220, 227 and 233) is likely to have been consulted by the editors of the Aldina. But reliable codicological connections with the Galen manuscripts of the same collection, and notes in the margins of Mutinens. 220, show that they may also be linked to Gadaldini’s work.¹⁸⁾

Finally, the margins of the manuscripts which I have studied are filled not only with Gadaldini’s presumed handwriting, but also with collations made by the copyists themselves. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Modena manuscripts written by the ‘Anonymus Mutinensis’. Also, the handwriting found in each manuscript and in the Basle edition of Hippocrates of the Ambrosiana is strangely variable; the changes of ink or pen show that the reader wrote his notes over a period of time. Accordingly, the ‘manuscripts of Gadaldini’ are the result of long co-operation and teamwork and it would be useful to learn more about his collaborators, such as the scribes who probably worked with/for him,¹⁹⁾ and the numerous doctors mentioned in the Juntine prefaces.

Further research in other libraries will probably provide new testimony to Gadaldini’s unquenchable activity, and give more evidence of the importance of the physician of Modena as an editor, and of his methods at a time when sound philology was supposedly migrating to France.²⁰⁾