The Library, 7.1.4, December zooo 453 conclusions regarding the Venetian music printing business are impressive. This book proves to be complementary to the existing works in the field and is thoroughly deserving of a place on the shelf beside them. Oxford MARTIN HOLMES Charta of Greek Printing: The Contribution of Greek Editors, Printers and Publishers Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/1/4/453/943484 by guest on 01 October 2021 to the Renaissance in Italy and the West. Vol. I: Fifteenth Century. By KONSTANTINOS SP. STAIKOS. Cologne: Jiirgen Dinter. 1998. lxix + 557 pp. + 128 illus., one folding map. 500 DM. ISBN 3 924794 19 7. THIS IS A VERY LARGE, very handsome, and very expensive book. It is also infuriating: so much effort expended to produce a guide (a map, in the word of the title) that can do nothing but mislead the unwary, perpetuate old errors, and start new ones. It is not about the printing of Greek, but as the subtitle puts it, 'The Contribution of Greek Editors, Printers and Publishers to the Renaissance in Italy and the West'. It is thus a long essay in Renaissance cultural history from a strictly Hellenic perspective. There are many faults with Staikos's lists. Practically everyone who knew Greek in Quattrocento Italy is said to be a pupil of Chrysoloras (d. 1415), including Nicholas V, who was born the year that Chrysoloras started his short stint of teaching in Florence (p. 70). Throughout chapter 1, Staikos wobbles between Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira as prototypographer of Venice, an honour accorded to Nicolas Jenson in the index. On p. 86 Johannes de Spira is given as the first printer of Holland. Students of Italian humanism will be surprised to learn of 'annotated translations' from Greek by Niccolo Niccoli (p. 7), who hardly knew a word of the language. The Epistles of Phalaris — never a hint here that they have been known to be spurious since Bentley — are credited with two different editions as the princeps (pp. liv and lix), and neither of them is. The Brescia edition of Leonardo Bruni's De primo bello Punico, a translation of Polybius, is said to 'complete the corpus of Plutarch's works' printed there (p. lviii). Of this town of some 6,000 fifteenth-century souls it is ludicrously asserted that 'Plutarch was more widely read in Brescia than anywhere else'. Bruni again is said to have translated the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle (p. 11), but the work printed under that title is Bruni's own Isagogicon. Staikos's conception of 'Greek' is broad enough to include Apuleius's Opera as a 'Greek work of philosophy' (p. lv). Plato's Gorgias is counted as having an incunable edition in virtue of the quotation from it in the Sweynheym and Pannartz Gellius (pp. 6, 74-75). The same Gellius is said to incorporate a tract by Plutarch (p. 76), which in fact amounts to a brief quotation at the beginning of Book I of the Noctes Atticae. All medieval commentators on Aristotle are counted as further exponents of Greek philosophy, though scarce one in a hundred knew the language. Politian's Opera, misdated 1499, is said (p. lvii) to be merely a 'collection of annotated translations', and to contain 'the Charmides (which was attributed to Plato during the Renaissance)', yet no one to my knowledge has ever doubted that the Charmides is a genuine work, and Politian's translation is lost except for the preface and a single introductory leaf in the Aldine Opera of 1498. 454 Reviews Staikos thinks that Aristotle's Opera in Latin could have been printed at Lyon in 1468 (p. 10), and Cicero's letters at Lyon in 1469 (p. 26), before printing had even started in France. On p. 98 he appears not to realize that Bessarion's defence of Plato that Fichet wanted to print at the first Paris press is the same In calumniatorem Platonis already printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz and discussed on p. 94. Aristotle's Rhetoric is persistently confused with the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (p. 11 and passim). Carlo Marsuppini's translation of the Batrachomyomachia is distinguished from that of Carlo Aretino (p. 13), though Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/1/4/453/943484 by guest on 01 October 2021 they are by the same man. Beccadello, as Staikos calls Panormita, or Antonio Beccadelli, was a 'personal adviser to King Alfonso V of Aragon', while in the next note (p. 85) Fazio writes a life of 'King Alfonso I of Naples', again with no indication that they were one and the same. Berlinghieri's Geographia of 1482. is said to be a paraphrase of Ptolemy in an Italian translation by Ficino and to have maps engraved by Sweynheym: all three elements of this description (p. 13) are wrong. The panhellenizing tendency reaches a new low point when we find no fewer than five editions of 'Virgil, Aeneis' listed in the 'Addenda to the Greek Bibliography' (the table on pp. 42-46, nos 42, 53, 97, 105, 156). On investigation, this turns out to be the solitary edition of an Italian prose rendering of the Aeneid (Vicenza: Liecht- enstein, 1476), which is said in the book to be 'in lingua vulgare reducta per lo literatissimo greco Athanagio per consolatione de Constantio figluolo de Con- stantino Imperatore'. The other four editions represent either a different Italian paraphrase or ghosts from the haunted pages of Copinger, as John Goldfinch explained years ago (Davies and Goldfinch, Vergil: A Census of Printed Editions, 1469—1500 (London, 1992), pp. 78,123). This Athanagio is thought by Staikos to be Athanasios Chalkiopoulos (pp. 108-09, where the editions become 'at least six'), even though he quotes Scholderer in BMC VII 1036 to the effect that 'Athanasius is probably an invention of Liechtenstein's editor', with good reasons. Why a Greek who died in 1497 should be said to have made an Italian version of the Aeneid for the consolation of the son of the emperor Constantine is a question that never occurs to Staikos. It is enough that the two share a common Greek name. Chalkiopoulos's only known accomplishment in print is a rendering into Latin of the epistles of pseudo-Crates, which appeared in three non-Italian incunables. The fundamental problem with the book is that there is so much inherited or misunderstood mumpsimus thrown in pell-mell with straightforward sumpsimus. Staikos's reading has been voracious but uncritical, and works that would have set him straight have not been consulted (e.g. for Bessarion, Lotte Labowsky's Bessarion's Library and the Biblioteca Marciana (1979), or the large 1994 volume Bessarione e I'umanesimo). Old and often unreliable literature is regularly cited, and yet when it is reliable it is apt to be misused: Ernst Walser's Poggius Florentinus (1914) is quoted for the life of 'Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini' (p. 61, n. 16), though Walser devoted some valiant pages to showing that these first names were never Poggio's and that he was never in life known as Bracciolini either. 'The only monograph on Nicolas Jenson is still' something from 1796 (p. 63, n. 66): Martin Lowry's 1991 book on Jenson is the essential reference here, a sign that Staikos has done no further work since the appearance of the original Greek edition of his own book in 1989. The general accuracy of citation may be judged from the reference to The Library, 7.1.4, December 2000 455 L. de Gregori's work on the Subiaco types (p. 87, n. 43) where the author and title are both wrongly given and the article is said to have appeared in Studi e Ricerche sulla Storia della Stampa del Quattrocento, XX. The innocent reader may suppose that this work is volume zo of a journal, instead of a book (perhaps better known as Omaggio dell'ltalia a Giovanni Gutenberg) published in 1942. in the twentieth year of the Fascist era, a system destined to be discontinued soon thereafter. In short, this is emphatically not a book for the unwary, and the wary will steer well clear of it. London MARTIN DAVIES Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/1/4/453/943484 by guest on 01 October 2021 Emblem Books in Leiden: A Catalogue of the Collections of the Leiden University Library, the 'Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde', and Bibliotheca Thysiana. Comp. and ed. by A. S. Q. VISSER. Co-edited by P. G. HOFTIJZER and BART WESTERWEEL. Leiden: Primavera Press. 1999. 190 pp. + no illus. NLG 69.90. ISBN 90 74310 53 z. FOR THE PURPOSES of the present catalogue, the term 'emblem book' has been interpreted sufficiently widely to allow the listing here of some 539 items; though one might wonder at the inclusion of such items as late nineteenth-century scholarly reprints of early emblem books. There are no major new discoveries announced here, but there is one newly identified 'emblematic' work, no. 481, Petrus Stephanonius, Gemmae antiquitus sculptae . collectae et declarationibus illustra- tae (Rome, 16Z7, no publisher given), which includes some emblematic plates among the illustrations of the author's gem collection. The endpapers reproduce a view of the city of Leiden from no. 360, Thysius's copy of Daniel Meisner's enormous Sciographica cosmica . ., eight parts with 682 engraved illustrations (Niirnberg, 1638-42), though we might perhaps have been told that it was earlier issued as Thesaurus philo-politicus (Frankfurt, 16Z5), which significantly proclaimed itself 'ad instar albi amicorum exhibita'; in the foreground we see a gentleman poking a sleeping dog with a stick and thus illustrating the proverbial folly of not letting sleeping dogs lie.