Renaissance Studies Vol. 28 No. 5 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12047 Giannozzo Manetti’s New Testament: new evidence on sources, translation process and the use of Valla’s Annotationes Annet den Haan Although the Florentine diplomat, author and translator Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was in his own day counted among the most prominent intellec- tuals, he is not nearly as well known to today’s students of the Renaissance as, for instance, his contemporaries Leonardo Bruni and Lorenzo Valla. Fortu- nately, Manetti is on his way to rehabilitation: over the past few years a number of publications on his life and works have appeared. These cover primarily the first fifty years of his life, which he spent in Florence, and to a lesser extent his last years in Rome and Naples.1 At the court of Nicholas V (1447–55) he produced Latin translations of the Psalter, the New Testament, and Aristotle’s moral works. These translations have not been studied much, and they remain in manuscript to this day. Manetti’s New Testament is the first Latin version since Jerome’s Vulgate, and it predates Erasmus’ Novum Instrumentum by half a century. What makes this translation especially interesting is that it was produced at the height of humanism at the centre of ecclesiastical power, the Vatican; furthermore, it was written contemporaneously with the second redaction of Lorenzo Valla’s annotations to the New Testament. I am currently preparing a critical edition and commentary of Manetti’s translation of the New Testament. So far, this text has been discussed in several overviews of Renaissance biblical scholarship and translation. Especially, Paul Botley’s recent study on Latin translation in the Renaissance provides much helpful information concerning Manetti’s movements in the 1450s, his con- nections with other humanists and his other literary projects.2 In what follows, I build on Botley’s work, as well as on the studies on Renaissance biblical 1 Some recent studies on Manetti’s life and other works are: Stefano Baldassarri (ed.), Dignitas et excellentia hominis. Atti del convegno internazionale di ‘Studi su Giannozzo Manetti’, Fiesole-Firenze 18–20 giugno 2007 (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2008); Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Stefano Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl (eds.), Giannozzo Manetti: Biographical Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 2 Botley, Latin Translation, 63–114. © 2013 The Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 732 Annet den Haan scholarship by Charles Trinkaus, Jerry Bentley and John Monfasani.3 I concen- trate on the internal evidence for the writing process of Manetti’s translation, evidence as provided by Manetti’s own manuscripts. This will also enable me to offer fresh insights on the influence of Valla’s biblical criticism on Manetti’s work. In what follows, Manetti’s translation will be briefly placed in context first. The writing process of the translation will be discussed next, followed by an investigation of the sources on which the translation was based. Finally, Manetti’s translation will be compared with Valla’s annotations to the New Testament. MANETTI AT THE VATICAN COURT Manetti commenced his translation of the New Testament after moving to the Vatican in the last months of 1453 or early in 1454.4 Reflecting on this period in his biography of Nicholas V, he mentioned two literary projects he took up at the papal court. The first was an encyclopaedic work in defence of Chris- tianity, Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes, which was only partly completed.5 The second was a translation of the Bible: Nova deinde quedam utriusque et veteris et novi Testamenti, partim ex hebreo, partim ex greco idiomate, ut ab origine a propriis scriptoribus suis litteris mandata fuisse constabat, in latinam linguam traductio non iniuria mentem irrepserat. (Manetti, De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi pontificis, 66)6 [Second, a new translation of both the Old and the New Testament into the Latin language, made partly from the Hebrew and partly from the Greek lan- guage, as they were as a fact from the beginning handed down by their own authors in their writings, had justly come into my mind.] Manetti does not make explicit if he commenced these works at the request of the pope, although the context – Nicholas’s translation programme – cer- tainly suggests it. Manetti’s friend and biographer, the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, was convinced that Manetti travelled to Rome at Nicho- las’s invitation, ‘per tradurre e comporre’ [to write and translate].7 3 John Monfasani, ‘Criticism of Biblical Humanists in Quattrocento Italy’, in Erika Rummel (ed.), Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008), 30–34; Botley, Latin Translation, 82–98; Jerry Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 57–9; Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, Vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1970), 571–8. Other studies that mention Manetti’s New Testament are: Riccardo Fubini, L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2001), 114–17; Salvatore Garofalo, ‘Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia’, Biblica, 27 (1946), 338–75. 4 On Manetti’s movements in the 1450s, see Botley, Latin Translation, 64–8. 5 One book of this work was published by Stefano Baldassarri: Stefano Baldassarri, ‘Giannozzo Manetti, Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes VI’, Letteratura Italiana Antica, 7 (2006), 25–75. 6 Manetti, De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi pontificis, ed. Anna Modigliani (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2005), 66. 7 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco, Vol. 1 (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1970), 64–5. Giannozzo Manetti’s New Testament 733 At this time, biblical scholarship was already being practiced at the Vatican in several forms. Cardinal Bessarion had just written a treatise, In illud: si eum volo manere, in which he proposed a new reading of John 21:22 and addressed some questions concerning Bible translation and the quality of the manu- script tradition.8 Much more extensive were Lorenzo Valla’s annotations to the Vulgate New Testament.9 Valla wrote several versions of this work in the 1440s and 1450s. A first version was written in Naples in the early 1440s. This version was published by Alessandro Perosa in 1970.10 It seems unlikely that Manetti knew of Valla’s annotations in these early years, let alone read them.11 Another version of the work was dedicated to Nicholas V by 1449. This copy was no longer in Rome by the time Manetti arrived there.12 Valla’s project was not received well by the pope; it may have inspired him to ask the less controversial Manetti to retranslate the Bible instead. But Valla continued to work on it all the same. He wrote another version between 1453 and 1457, the year of his death – contemporarily with Manetti’s translation of the New Testament. This later redaction of Valla’s annotations was discovered by Erasmus in 1504 in the library of Parc, and published in 1505.13 The text published by Erasmus is commonly referred to as the Annotationes, the earlier version published by Perosa as the Collatio. I will adopt this practice here, although Valla did not distinguish between the two in his writings, and prob- ably would have considered them as two stages in an ongoing writing process.14 The question of Valla’s influence on Manetti’s translation will be addressed below. 8 The Latin text of the treatise is in Patrologia Graeca 161, 624–39. Influence of Bessarion’s treatise on Manetti’s translation cannot be ruled out, but is difficult to prove. For a discussion of this treatise and especially the position of George of Trebizond, who disagreed with Bessarion, see: John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: a Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 90–102. 9 Valla’s annotations have been studied much more than Manetti’s translation. See, for example: Christopher Celenza, ‘Lorenzo Valla’s Radical Philology: The “Preface” to the Annotations to the New Testament in Context’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42 (2012), 365–94; Mariarosa Cortesi, ‘Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo e la Vulgata’, in Motivi letterari ed esegetici in Gerolamo. Atti del convegno a Trento il 5–7 dicembre 1995, eds. Claudio Moreschini and Giovanni Menestrina (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1997), 269–89; Christopher Celenza, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the New Testament: Lorenzo Valla’s Annotations to the Vulgate’, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24 (1994), 33–52; Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ; Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: umanesimo e teologia (Firenze: Istituto nazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1972). 10 Lorenzo Valla, Collatio, ed. A. Perosa (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970). 11 For the dating of the redactions and the chronology Manetti’s movements, see: Botley, Latin Translation, 87–9. 12 Valla, Collatio, xlix. 13 Lorenzo Valla, Opera omnia, ed. E. Garin (Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962); this is a reprint of Erasmus’ edition. 14 For the development and sources of Valla’s work, see: Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ, 34–6. A manuscript containing an intermediate version of the annotations to the Gospels and Acts was discovered by Riccardo Fubini in the 1980s in the private archives of the Bichi Ruspoli family. Riccardo Fubini, ‘Una sconosciuta testimonianza manoscritta delle Annotationes in Novum Testamentum del Valla’, in Ottavio Besomi (ed.), Lorenzo Valla e l’umanesimo italiano: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi umanistici (Parma: Editrice Antenore, 1986). This paper reappeared, in slightly altered form, as ‘Leonardo Bruni e la discussa recezione dell’opera: Giannozzo Manetti e il Dialogus di Benedetto Accolti’, in Riccardo Fubini (ed.), L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2001), 169–83.