Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
i + 24 + i folios, on parchment with blank paper flyleaves, modern foliation in pencil, (collation i-ii12), complete, no quire signatures, catchword in lower margin of f. 12v (“quo bonum malumque discernit”), pricked and faintly ruled in thin lead into two columns of 43 lines (justification 152 x 46mm), written in an abbreviated cursive gothic book hand with some rotunda features, in brown inks, probably by one scribe, rubrics in red, red and blue paraphs, 2-3 line initials in blue and red with occasional penwork in opposite colors, 4-line initial in blue on red ground with red spraywork in the left margin on f. 1, trimming of parchment’s outer edges indicated by the clipping of scribal side notes (see, e.g., f. 13v and 15v), marginal annotations and maniculae by a later hand, small holes and minor smudging and buckling, sewn repair to outer edge of f. 2 perhaps contemporary. Bound in plain Turkish marbled paper over eighteenth-century papier croisé boards, some warping. Dimensions 190 x 140mm.
“A kingdom without justice is but a thieves’ racket”: so begins Michael de Massa’s scholarly discursus on the four cardinal virtues, with a quote from Augustine’s City of God. This rare manuscript of a text that has never been edited witnesses the development of medieval political thought as it mediates between the classical past and the Christian present. Other manuscripts of Michael de Massa’s text usually include it in anthologies among other didactic and moralistic texts, rather than on its own. Modest in appearance, nevertheless, this copy is decorated with red and blue ink that provides flare as well as utility.
1. Written, likely in Italy, by a single scribe who fits the text neatly into two quires. The text has been subsequently corrected throughout, with text struck out and revisions and additions supplied in margins and located by signes-de-renvoi (‘//’). Top-line ascenders are occasionally embellished. This scribe is also responsible for the many side notes indicating Michael de Massa’s authorities. Frequently cited are Augustine, Gregory the Great, Macrobius, Policraticus, Vegetius, and Valerius Maximus.
2. An early annotator draws attention to passages with manicules (see f. 2v, 9, 10). This same annotator, seemingly, has written marginal comments: “Narrat in hoc idem macrobius in saturnalibus,” f. 8v; “xerses rex persarum Vide historiam in 2o libro. Justini,” f. 11v, directing readers to Justinian’s Epitome to complement a section of the text giving the account of Xerxes drawn William of Conches’s Moralium dogma philosophorum.
3. Giovanni Cavassa. On f. 24v, into empty text space has been written, “Editus a fratre michaelle de massa ordinis sancti augustini de quatuor virtutibus moralibus ad usum Magistri Johannis Cavacie de Car[magnol]ia,” (On the Four Cardinal Virtues, edited by Brother Michael de Massa of the Order of St. Augustine, used by Master Giovanni Cavassa”) in the sixteenth century. This is undoubtedly an inscription by Giovanni Cavassa, a member of this prominent family of Carmagnola and Saluzzo (whose palazzo is now a museum in the latter city). He inscribes his name into Turin, Biblioteca nazionale universitaria, MS E. IV. 46, f. 29, wherein he Latinizes it as “Johannem Cauaciam de Carmagnolia.”
4. Armorial bookplate of Johann Baptist Ignati Ebinger von der Burg (1705-1772), lord of Steisslingen (just northwest of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg), pasted onto inside upper cover.
5. “No. 118,” written in pen in the upper margin, f. 1, in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
ff. 1-24v, Michael de Massa, Incipit tractatus de quattuor virtutibus moralibus editus a fratre Michaele de Massa ordinis sancti Augustini, incipit, “Regna remota a iusticia non sunt nisi magna latrocinia…”; f. 8v, Sequitur de prudentia, incipit, “Uerso de iustitia videndum est de prudentia…”; f. 14v, Sequitur de continentia, incipit, “Similiter invenit quod haec continentia scilicet luxurie ab antiquis viris servata fuit…”; f. 20, Sequitur de fortitudine, incipit, “Restat modo dicere de quarta virtute cardinali scilicet de fortitudine”; f. 24, epilogue, incipit, “His premissis concludendum est de virtutibus quod si antiqui vel pro cupiditate…”, explicit, “qui vivit et regnat in secula seculorum. Amen. Explicit liber iste deo gracias amen.”
Michael de Massa, De quattuor virtutes moralibus, also known in the Middle Ages as the Liber Communiloquiorum (Book of Common Discourses). No complete edition of Michael’s Treatise has ever been published. An edition of the epilogue is edited from two manuscripts by Diem and Verweij, pp. 266-69.
There are nine manuscript witnesses to the text, all of them are in European libraries. These are Bernkastel-Kues, St. Nikolaus Hospital MS 91, ff. 168r-187v; Bordeaux, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 267, ff. 75-91v; Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Cod. II 58, ff. 71r-100v; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14298, ff. 181-204v; Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 727, ff. 52-69; Rein, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 205, ff. 225v-231v; Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS 6 (A.I.13), ff. 1-32v; Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 230, ff. 86-122; Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 404, f. 1-56v. It may be noteworthy that the final half-column of the present manuscript matches the final page of this text in Tours MS 404, and that the two manuscripts share similar page dimensions. Since this text is unedited, however, there may yet be further manuscript witnesses unaccounted for in Zumkeller, Kristeller, or other sources.
The life of Michael de Massa OESA (d. 1337) is known only in broad outline, but a picture emerges of a talented scholar who had mastered the established genres of scholastic theology of his day, as well as some emerging devotional ones. He was likely born around 1298, in the town of Massa Marittima in southern Tuscany. There one can still visit the churches of San Pietro in Orta and Sant’Agostino, where Michael joined the Order of Augustinian Hermits as a novice. After initial studies there, he then went to Paris for a time. In the prologue of his commentary on Matthew, he tells us that he then lectured elsewhere on this Gospel in an Augustinian studium (a kind of conventual school). He apparently returned to Paris around or after 1330, to lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard in pursuit of a doctorate in theology. As he reworked his commentary on the Sentences, he wrote (among other things) a quite influential life of Christ (Vita Christi) that would be translated into Dutch, German, and French before dying in Paris in May 1337.
Still unedited Michael’s De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus offers a Christian, medieval view on the classical world. Thinkers of the Middle Ages inherited the “cardinal” virtues – justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance – from “pagan” philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. They debated whether and how a Greek like Plato or Alexander the Great could be truly virtuous, or whether virtue depended on a knowledge of God, and divine grace. In preparing his own text, Michael adapts the earlier, influential Breviloqium antiquis principorum et philosophorum by John of Wales OFM, written between 1260 and 1270. John of Wales collects exempla of these four cardinal virtues from pagan antiquity. He recounts great deeds of ancient men as material for philosophical consideration as well as political instruction in the medieval mirror-for-princes tradition. In Michael’s adaptation, he is even more certain that apparently righteous figures of the classical past should not looked upon as examplars of virtue, or of good; his revisions to John of Wales instead emphasize that virtuous actions must work to Christian ends, with the salvation rather than glory in mind. John of Wales Breviloquium is printed in Summa Ioannis Valensis de regimine uite humane seu Margarita doctorum ad omne propositum prout patet in tabula (Venice, 1496).
Bloomfield, Morton. Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100-1500 A.D., Cambridge, MA, 1979, p. 440, no. 5124.
Courtenay, William. “The Quaestiones in Sententias of Michael de Massa, OESA,” Augustiniana 45 (1995), pp. 191-207.
-. “Michele di Massa,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 74 (2010), treccani.it.
Curlo, Faustino. Il Memoriale Quadripartitum di frà Gabriele Bucci da Carmagnola, Pinerolo, 1911.
-. Storia della famiglia Cavassa di Carmagnola e di Saluzzzo, Saluzzo, 1904.
Diem, Albrecht and Michiel Verweij. “Virtus est via ad gloriam?: John of Wales and Michele da Massa in Disagreement,” Franciscan Studies 63 (2005), pp. 215-69.
Schabel, Christopher. “Michael of Massa,” in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages (2003), pp. 443-4.
Schulthess, Peter and Ruedi Imbach. Die Philosophie im lateinischen Mittelalter: ein Handbuch mit einem bio-bibliographischen Repertorium, Zurich, 1996, pp. 521-2.
Swanson, Jenny. John of Wales: A Study of the Works and Tdeas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar, Cambridge, 1989.
Trapp, Damasus. “Augustinian Theology of the Fourteenth Century,” Augustiniana 6 (1956), pp. 146-274.
Tuve, Rosemond. “Notes on the Vices and Virtues,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26.3/4 (1963), pp. 272-3, n. 14.
Zumkeller, Adolar. Manuskripte von Werken der Autoren des Augustiner-Eremitenordens in mitteleuropäischen Bibliotheken, Würzburg, 1966.
Bordeaux, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 267, ff. 75-91v
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14298, ff. 181-204v
Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 727, ff. 52-69
Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 230, ff. 86-122
Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 404, ff. 1-56v
Johannes Gallensis, Summa de regimine vitae humanae seu Margarita doctorum(Venice, 1496), ISTC ij00333000, ff. I2-B8v
TM 1426
