Pietro Paulo Muscarello, Nola, Italy, 1478

Trade and commerce were powerful engines of literacy and education in Renaissance Italy. It was important that merchants and bankers be able to read, write, and calculate in the interests of business. By the fifteenth century, success, particularly in international trade, was directly related to the acquisition of verbal and numerical literacy skills. Business was not for the ignorant. Muscarello's handsomely illustrated treatise was written as textbook for young men who needed to learn elementary mathematics and geometry as part of their preparation for the world. It includes sets of practical problems for students to solve, each of which comes suggestively illustrated. The illustrations, in turn, are marvelous windows through which to view daily life in late fifteenth-century Italy.

This manuscript was quite probably written by the author himself--or at least that is what the evidence of the colophon here and in another, related manuscript points to. If this conjecture is true it would make this manuscript all the more important, as one of the relatively few examples of the author as scribe in the Renaissance.

Parchment, 113 leaves, 219 x 160 (212 x 155) mm, in Italian, written in a partially cursive bookhand.