The scribe who wrote this manuscript, Franciscus Gennay—about whom nothing, not even work on other manuscripts, is known—signed it in four places and dated it 1409. He was particularly interested in matters that concern Bologna and Cesena. An early owner of the book came from Mantua ("Dompnus Paulus de Mantua scripsit."). These two facts encourage assignment of the manuscript's origins to north Italy. Paul of Mantua's signature appears at the end of Petrarch's letter to his brother, a Carthusian monk to whose spiritual state Petrarch contrasts his own. The book is open to the letter's beginning (f. 138v). The bottom of the leaf on the right shows repair to the vellum; above it, a reader (Paul himself?) has drawn a marginal finger pointing to a "sentence," a moral apothegm: "To beginners all things appear difficult . . ." Other Petrarchan texts, among them several of the Canzoniere, also appear in this volume. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) is one of its previous owners.
