Too often, booksellers, collectors, and librarians would simply remove and throw away early bindings, replacing them with more sumptuous ones designed to celebrate the rarity of the imprint they contained and thus eliminating potentially critical provenance information. Nevertheless, we can at least be grateful for the entirely unintentional survival of this leaf and its preservation. It also constitutes a particularly early scribal fragment of the Trionfi, likely handwritten in a fine rounded humanista hand near the time of Petrarch’s death or shortly thereafter, making it an especially important witness to the scribal tradition of the poem. Further analysis of any variations between this early scribal exemplar and the subsequent textus receptus of the poem may yield potentially fruitful philological findings.

This solitary leaf has as its antithesis JHU’s complete first incunabular edition of Petrarch’s Opera Latina, printed in 1496 by the leading Basel printer at the turn of the sixteenth century, Johann Amerbach, who was also instrumental in introducing novel roman humanistic letterforms north of the Alps. It is not without irony that even this magnificent monument of literary compilation and preservation was itself made up partially of sacrificed medieval manuscript leaves used to strengthen its binding. The manuscript pages also reflect their own tradition of use and subsequent augmentation over generations of medieval readers. An apparent fragment of canon law text, these pages bear dozens of marginal and interlinear interpretive comments that remain as yet unstudied.