Articles / Aufätze
“Si hoc saeculo natus fuisset”: Refurbishing the Catholicon for the 16th century

John Considine
University of Alberta
Summary

The lexicographical part of the Catholicon of Giovanni Balbi of Genoa (d.1286), compiled in 1286, was the dominant Latin dictionary of the 15th century and the first major Latin dictionary to be printed: 24 editions recorded from the 1460s to 1500, another 7 from 1501 to 1520. In the twenty-five years before the final edition, two attempts were made to refurbish it, one by a certain Master Petrus Aegidius in 1499 and one by the humanist Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) in 1506. Their editions were meant to maintain the place of a 13th-century dictionary in the world of humanist reference publishing. This paper gives an account of Aegidius’ and Badius’ additions to the Catholicon, emphasising both the intellectual content of their work and the dictionary’s place in the history of the learned book. The paper concludes with an account of how the Catholicon was driven out of the market by a dictionary compiled in the late 15th century, the Dictionarium of Ambrogio Calepino (c.1435–1511), published from 1502 onwards. An appendix sets out the editions of the Catholicon from 1499 onwards, with title page transcriptions.

Table of contents

The Catholicon of Giovanni Balbi of Genoa (OP, d. 1298?) was a grammatical compendium in five parts, of which the fifth, also the largest and most influential, was a monolingual Latin dictionary compiled in 1286. At the time of its compilation, the dictionary portion must have struck some readers as a retrograde production, for its approximately 15,000 entries were listed in absolute alphabetical order. This arrangement recalled the alphabetical macrostructure of a much older dictionary, the Elementarium of Papias (late 11th cent.), rather than the derivational groups in which words had been treated in the more recent Panormia of Osbern Pinnock (fl.c.1148) and its great and widely circulated successor, the Derivationes of Hugutio (later 12th cent.), this last being the principal source of the Catholicon (see Powitz 1996: 303). There are more 14th-century manuscripts of the Derivationes than of the Catholicon, suggesting that the new alphabetical dictionary did not immediately seem preferable to its derivational predecessor. But there are more 15th-century manuscripts of the Catholicon than of the Derivationes, and whereas the Derivationes was never printed, the Catholicon was printed repeatedly, becoming the dominant large-scale incunabular Latin dictionary, with 24 editions [ p. 413 ]recorded from about 1460 to 1500, and another 7 from 1501 to 1520. The text transmitted in its manuscript tradition was fairly stable, and the text of the first printed editions followed this tradition.

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References

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