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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2019
The splendid collection of Italian Renaissance books and manuscripts assembled by Mr. Harold C. Bodman of Santa Barbara, California, destined to find a home in the Honold Library of the Claremont Colleges (which have had the benefit of other benefactions from Mr. Bodman), includes nine autograph letters of the Medici family and other prominent Renaissance figures. Of these letters, eight are published here for the first time. These letters range in time from 1426 to 1521 and thus cover the most important century in Medici history, a crucial period for Florence and for Italy.
The first of these letters was written by Palla Strozzi in 1426. It is in the nature of a report from the scene of a sea and land skirmish on the coast near Genoa, between the forces of Florence and Venice and those of Milan and Genoa.
1 I should like to thank Professor Paul Oskar Kristeller for extensive aid in transcribing these letters, and Professor Felix Gilbert and Mr. Bodman for helpful suggestions.
2 This document is printed in the foreword to the ‘Diario di Palla di Noferi Strozzi’, Archivio Storico Italiano, Quarta Serie, XI (1883), 23-24.
3 Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955)Google Scholar, I, 15.
4 Archivio Storico Italiano, Quarta Serie, XI (1883), 20-48, 145-156, 293-309.
5 Vite di uomini ilhstri del secolo XV, ed. Paolo d'Ancona and Erhard Aeschliman (Milan, 1951), pp. 388-389.
6 Justice requires the pointing out that Gaetano Pieraccini, who writes as a physician as well as a historian, interprets the evidence as establishing that Bianca Maria died of a combination of respiratory and cardiac ailments, not of poison (La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed., Florence, 1947, 1, 376-377).
7 Niccolai, Francesco, Pier Vettori (1499-1585) (Florence, n.d.), p. 4 Google Scholar.
8 It appears in Prose volgari inedite e poesie latine egreche edite e inedite di Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano, ed. Isidoro Del Lungo (Florence, 1867), pp. 64-65. There is an English translation in Ross, Janet, Lives of the Early Medici (London, 1910), p. 212 Google Scholar.
9 Selected portions of this letter are quoted in a catalogue of Sotheby & Co., dated 24-25 January 1955, ‘Catalogue of the Well-Known Collection of Autograph Letters, Historical Documents and Holograph Music, the Property of the Late W. Westley Manning Esq.’ The letter appears as Lot 306 in the catalogue of the second part of the sale, covering M-Z. A catalogue of Davis and Orioli, London (Rare Book Catalogue 153, n.d.) quotes the same portions of the letter. I owe this reference to Mr. Bodman.
10 Pieraccini, I, 171.
11 I, 173.
