This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

1588, Milan. Where via Rispoli ends, you would have found Stefano d’Oriens, owner of a small business selling books and prints. We don’t know much about his operation, except that it sold religious material in formats that were relatively cheap and likely designed to be ephemeral. Given his location at the crook of a road just four minutes from Milan’s Cathedral (the Duomo), Stefano probably did good business—or at least he would have had a shot at doing good business. 

That year he published a new edition of a small, eight-page pamphlet that had previously been issued in Bologna almost a decade earlier, in 1579: Avisi notabilissimi intorno al progresso della Religione Catholica [Most notable news concerning the state of the Catholic religion]. The only copy of it known to survive was recently added to the Ransom Center’s already extraordinary collection of English Catholic materials: It describes the martyrdom of four Jesuit priests in 1578, the injustice of their deaths, and consequently their exemplary fortitude. It also underlines the tyranny and illegitimacy of the Elizabethan regime as seen by Catholics and emphasizes the piety of the English Colleges on the Continent, where students were trained for future martyrdom.

In the not-too-distant past, modern scholars would have treated this slight volume as an oddity. They wouldn’t have known what to do with it, and relatively few would have cared to begin with. It would almost exclusively have interested that rare breed of scholar who studied English Catholicism to fight centuries-old confessional battles. 

Things have changed. 

As I and others have argued, English Catholic history is worth another look for its own sake and because of its significance in European history as a whole. The embeddedness of English Catholics in Europe was not in any way “natural” or foretold; it was the result of active efforts, especially by exiles on the Continent, to become part of a broad intellectual and cultural landscape. To do this, they employed the powerful weapons of paper, pen, and print. 

Why would a publisher of quick and saleable leaflets want to publish anything about English martyrs in Italy—and in Italian rather than Latin or English? Simply put, there was likely a market for it. 

By 1588, English Catholic exiles had been hard at work lobbying for their cause against the Elizabethan regime and spurring European interest in combating (English) heresy. Perhaps the most important tool to this end was De origine ac progressu ac schismatis Anglicani (On the origin and progress of the English schism), a history of England from the time of Henry VIII to the later sixteenth century written by an influential theologian, Nicholas Sander. Originally published in Latin and adapted and translated into several European vernaculars, the widely influential book insinuated itself in the minds of many and functioned as a dire warning of what Protestantism would bring to even the healthiest Catholic kingdom. England had, after all, been the purest flower of the Church before Henry came along.

The pamphlet might seem like an ant to De origine’s elephant, but it does just as good a job at exemplifying both English Catholic efforts to plead their cause on the Continent and their success. Written before De origine and resuscitated afterward, the Avisi captures, with admirable economy, Sander’s fundamental arguments about Protestant threats and an appeal to other Catholics to take up the English cause.

The Avisi‘s source material, printed and manuscript letters, suggest a world thick with reports on the English Catholic situation. The title works to draw in the Italian reader by announcing itself as broadly Catholic (as opposed to English Catholic), pointing to an effort to highlight the relevance of the English plight to all true believers. 

The fact that a pamphlet first published almost a decade earlier could remain in currency so long after the events it recounts had at least something to do with the continued fragility of English Colleges on the Continent. Subject to the whims of kings and popes, the Colleges were often short on cash. The Avisi, in fact, starts with a notice about the 1578 expulsion of a College from Douai to Rheims. Almost certainly as a way to drum up support for it and other English Colleges, the pamphlet tells of martyrs whose role was essential to the salvation of Christendom. Surely, the pamphlet suggests, the institutions that trained Jesuits on the frontlines against Protestant heresy were worth giving a ducket to here and there. Indeed, several of the English Colleges remain operational today. 

Importantly, the Avisi is a report specifically on Jesuit matters. It publicizes the death of Jesuit martyrs and the iconography on the title page evokes the Society of Jesus. The printer ingeniously scrounged for a title page image and found one used previously by the publishing house of Giovanni Giacomo da Legnano and his brothers during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Although the emblem appeared well before the Jesuit order came along, the “IHS” at the center had become linked to it by the late 16th century. The centrality of Jesuits here implicitly fits into intra-Catholic rumblings about the place of the Society of Jesus within English Catholicism, especially in relation to secular Catholic priests, which in turn connected with broader concerns of the Counter-Reformation church. 

1588, too, was the year of the famous Armada, the naval expedition by Spanish forces meant to strike a definitive blow against the Elizabethan regime. One of the central justifications for these efforts was the abuse of English Catholics, which was exemplified by the martyrs. The association between the Avisi and the politico-religious moment resonates more when we think that among d’Oriens’s publications that year there was another text—drawn on previous publications in Verona and Piacenza—dealing with the success of Christian forces against the Muslim enemy in 1571 at Lepanto, the result of coordinated efforts among Christian powers that included the Pope and the King of Spain. 

Documents like the Avisi can help unleash the imagination. In Rome, it was said that in the 1580s students at the English College would pass out pamphlets about English martyrs to revelers during feast days, a means of self-promotion and promotion of anti-Protestantism. It is easy to imagine that this little volume served precisely that kind of purpose. Though today we turn its pages gently and with some reverence, it’s not hard to imagine the sound of their flutter and crinkle in the hands of Milanese Catholics. In the Ransom Center’s unique Avisi we have a rare survival of the ephemeral that was, in its way, meant to ensure eternity.

Freddy Domínguez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas- Fayetteville. He studies early modern European history with a focus on religion and politics. His first book was Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (Penn State Press, 2020). Domínguez is currently working on two edited volumes and a monograph on Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish missionary in seventeenth-century England. His next book will be Bob Dylan in the Attic: Essays on Music and History (UMass Press).

This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

In 1603, a thirteen-year old boy called Jean Grenier from La Roche-Chalais, a small barony in France’s Dordogne region, stubbornly confessed that he was a werewolf. The young shepherd boy’s troubles had begun in May when he encountered three female cowherds who were discussing the latest wolf attacks in the region. One wolf had taken an infant out of its crib and eaten it behind a hedge, while one of the girls, thirteen-year-old Marguerite Poirier, had also been attacked while out with her cows. She still had the scars to prove it. The boy, who was widely considered slow and small for his age, approached the teenagers, asking them who was the most beautiful: “because (he said) I want to marry her, so if it is you, I want to marry you.” Finding himself ignored by the three girls, he inserted himself into their original topic of conversation, declaring that he was afraid of no wolves. When he was disbelieved, the boy doubled down on his boasts, again, and again, until he claimed to have been a werewolf himself. “Boys and girls,” the clearly underfed Grenier declared, “were much more pleasant and delicate to eat.” 

Given the widespread climate of fear, it did not take the cowherds long to report the teen wolf to the local authorities. Grenier was found and arrested, and he quickly confessed to lycanthropy. Convicted by the local court, the case was swiftly sent up to the Bordeaux Parlement, the region’s appeals court, for review. There the boy’s insistence that he was a werewolf had everyone flummoxed. Two physicians examined him but came to differing conclusions. They both judged him “melancholic” or mentally ill, but one saw evidence of a devil’s mark and witchcraft as well. The judges, too, could not make up their minds. Some supported a death sentence based on the boy’s confession, others could not believe he was telling the truth. It is at this crucial junction that we should turn to the Harry Ransom Center’s Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230. It contains the mysterious text that appears to have settled Grenier’s fate.

We probably know more about the Grenier trial than about any other case that came before the Bordeaux Parlement in its long and illustrious history. The palace that housed the Parlement went up in flames in the early eighteenth century, taking its records with it. The teen wolf case, however, was sensational enough that three separate attempts to excerpt or summarize it were made shortly after the trial’s conclusion. In a 2019 article, I showed that we could learn a lot more about the trial and Grenier’s confession when we collated these three accounts, as each offers different but complementary details. Crucially, MEM MSS 230 was not one of these three versions—in fact, I was not even aware of its existence at the time. While it offers few details on the Grenier trial itself (and does not mention him by name), its study can help us examine outstanding issues about the authorship of the other accounts and reconsider a mystery about the sentence that the Bordeaux Parlement pronounced.

The most extensive account of the Grenier trial is contained in a manuscript that belongs to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. MS Français 13346 is described as containing Mélanges théologiques, a mix of theological texts. For the most part, they belong to the late seventeenth century. The strangest contribution, though, is earlier and has a lengthy descriptive title (on fol. 279r): 

Criminal trial against Jean Grenier accused of witchcraft on which there has been a judgement by the Parlement on 6 September 1603. Mr Filesac has examined the information and has given his opinion in his own hand as follows.

(Procez criminel contre Jean Grenier accusé de sorcellerie sur lequel il y a eu arrest du Parlement le 6 septembre 1603. Mr. Filesac a examiné les informations et donné son avis écrit de sa propre main comme il suit.)

The document does fall neatly into two almost equal parts: a lengthy description of the legal proceedings followed by an opinion on the case at hand and the possibility of lycanthropy, a rather vexed question on both philosophical and theological grounds. Where the first half of the document provides a detailed account of the judicial investigations that led to Grenier’s arrest and conviction in La Roche-Chalais, the second is a rich tapestry of biblical, classical, and patristic sources about werewolves, the imagination, and human-animal transformations.

Its purported author, Jean Filesac (1556–1638), was a Sorbonne theologian, who rose to become dean of the Paris theology faculty. Best known for his De idolatria magica dissertatio (Dissertation on magical idolatry, 1609), Filesac would naturally have been interested in the Grenier case. So far, so good, but when we dig deeper, questions appear. How did Filesac obtain an account of the trial? He may have been a logical expert to consult, but there was no tradition of consulting universities in witchcraft matters in France, as existed in Germany at the time. Moreover, if the Bordeaux judges sent Filesac an account of the trial, they evidently did not wait for his response—the manuscript ends abruptly by noting Grenier’s sentence of perpetual confinement in a Bordeaux monastery.

The mystery deepens still further when we turn to a second account of the Grenier case. (The third account of the trial does not concern us here.) In 1612, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre published his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Tableau of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons), a work of demonology which devoted one of its six books to the question of lycanthropy. De Lancre was not one of the original judges, but he interviewed the imprisoned Grenier shortly before his death, aged 20 or 21, in 1610. (The reformed werewolf told the judge that he used to prefer the flesh of little girls over boys “because they are more tender.”) As part of his discussion of lycanthropy, de Lancre published the full sentence against Grenier pronounced by the court’s first president Guillaume Daffis on 6 September 1603. What comes next is very odd: this sentence, nearly fifty pages of printed text, is virtually identical to the second half —that is the “opinion” part—of the Filesac manuscript. De Lancre prefaced what he called “the judgment delivered ‘in red robes’ in the Parlement of Bordeaux on 6 September 1603” with excerpts from the original trial proceedings so that the reader may correctly interpret it, so evidently his copy did not contain the first descriptive half of the Paris manuscript. Still, de Lancre’s excerpt matches the second half almost word for word. De Lancre thus presents a question that is beyond perplexing: How did the same text end up circulating under the name of two different authors? 

The most straightforward hypothesis was that the Bordeaux judge was mistaken. De Lancre obtained the “sentence” only in 1610 from the Daffis estate after the president had passed away. The judge described the manuscript as a complete mess: “so badly and falsely arranged, as if it had passed through an infinity of different hands, that I could hardly recognize the workman in the work.” It was certainly possible, as I suggested before, that Daffis received Filesac’s opinion sometime before his death and that de Lancre confused it with the sentence the first president had pronounced. I took care not settle the issue. For the purposes of my article—I was principally interested in the trial proceedings and the testimony they offered, not the philosophical and theological debates that followed—it did not matter greatly. 

Study of the Ransom Center’s MEM MSS 230 suggests a second possibility, however. The manuscript came into the Center’s possession in 2017. Its title on the cover “Sobre la Licantropía” (On Lycanthropy) would appear to indicate that it spent time in Spain, although its provenance is otherwise unclear. The volume contains two items, numbered 49 and 50 in French, suggesting that it was once part of a much larger collection. The first of these has been titled “Du Loup Garou” (On the Werewolf) and fills almost all of the leaves. The second is a mere two pages but, as we shall see, may be helpful for our discussion of the volume’s authorship.

Even a casual glance shows that “Du Loup Garou” is a third version of the same text we examined before, and crucially it starts at the same position as de Lancre’s “judgment” does. Like the version that fell into de Lancre’s hands, it lacks an opening account of the Grenier trial and, yet, appears to be complete. The manuscript thus raises the possibility that de Lancre may have been right—that President Daffis was the author and that the attribution to Filesac in the Mélanges theologiques is mistaken. MEM MSS 230 is certainly written in an earlier hand than MS Français 13346. (Whatever its claims about Filesac’s “own hand” the version included in the Bibliothèque nationale manuscript is by the same late seventeenth-century scribe as the rest of the manuscript.) It seems unlikely, however, that the Ransom Center’s version is the one that came into de Lancre’s possession. MEM MSS 230 did not “pass through an infinity of different hands”—I count only three. In addition to the scribe who wrote the main Grenier text, there is evidence of activity by at least two seventeenth-century readers. One extensively corrected parts of the text. The other hand was much less invasive, likely of a later reader not involved in its original composition. This reader underlined sections of apparent interest and added a few notes in the margins.

The hand that has emended parts of the text offers a potential clue to our authorship mystery. A quick comparison shows that, with one exception, all the corrections were incorporated into the Paris manuscript and de Lancre’s 1612 Tableau. Two solutions thus present themselves. It is possible that the original hand was merely a particularly careless copyist and that the second hand simply checked and corrected shoddy work against another version, such as de Lancre’s Tableau. 

Yet the rather early scribal hand and the types of mistakes present both suggest that MEM MSS 230 may well have been considerably more important than that. It is striking that the corrections often pertain to unfamiliar words, often in Latin quotations—the name of an obscure tribe mentioned by Pliny the Elder, for instance, and the name of the little-known Greek historian Palaephatus. Could the original scribe have heard the text (or judgement!) spoken? In that reading, the second hand could have been Daffis himself or, just as plausibly, an educated audience member for whom the document was intended.

One factor that could support such an interpretation is the second, very short item—number 50—included in the manuscript. Its title, “Remonstrance faicte à la reception du Vicomte d’Aubeterre” (Remonstrance made at the reception of Viscount d’Aubeterre), suggests a similar oral origin and appears to have been written by the same person that emended the Grenier text. Crucially, the individual remonstrated, François d’Esparbès de Lussan, Viscount d’Aubeterre (1571–1628), was a nobleman who held a variety of government positions in the southwest of France during the early seventeenth century, thus placing the manuscript closer to Bordeaux than to Paris and providing further support for an early date.

More careful comparison of the two manuscripts and de Lancre’s Tableau by other (fresher) eyes may bring new hypotheses, but as things stand Filesac’s authorship of this text can no longer be considered a given. Whether MEM MSS 230 is merely another manuscript copy or, more plausibly, closely linked to the text’s composition, De Lancre seems to have been right—the text as preserved in the Ransom Center manuscript may well have been the judgment pronounced in the Grenier case. Daffis’s authorship would explain aspects of this text, notably its ending, although it remains frightfully long and abstract for a sentence. (One wonders how much thirteen-year-old Grenier would have understood.) Other issues also emerge. Daffis’s authorship raises questions about the Paris manuscript—in particular, its first half, which includes details about the trial not found in other sources. Who composed this part, and when, and why, and where? It seems impossible to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. We may well conclude that these manuscripts have proved as vexing for us today as the issue of lycanthropy was for early modern lawyers and theologians.

Jan Machielsen is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015) and the editor of The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (2020). He is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the TU Dresden, completing a book provisionally entitled Witches, Children, and Refugees: Terror in the Basque Country.

This and other articles in  Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

The library catalog of Alfonso Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna from 1597 until his death in 1619, begins with a flashy title-page bearing Paleotti’s illuminated coat of arms, and, written carefully in red and black ink, the words, “The Library of Alfonso Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna.” Judging from the long list of books that follows, Paleotti’s collection contained much of what we might expect to find in an archbishop’s library in the early seventeenth century. There were works on religious history, including Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici, a gargantuan work on the history of the Catholic Church, published in several volumes between 1588 and 1607.¹ He owned the Bible and writings by the early church fathers, like St. Ambrose, too. The catalog even included Paleotti’s own bestseller about the shroud of Turin, an object that mystified and fascinated early modern visitors much as it does those in the 21^st century.²

The shelfmarks entered next to many of the archbishop’s books in the catalog hint at the less straightforward story of how Alfonso’s library came to be. They show us that the books were largely inherited from his predecessor in office, his cousin Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna from 1567 to 1597. A comparison between a 1586 catalog of Gabriele’s library with the Ransom Center catalog of Alfonso’s reveals that many of the books in Alfonso’s library retained the same shelfmarks they had in Gabriele’s collection.³ For example, a 1578 martyrology by Pietro Galesini under the shelfmark E.2 in Gabriele’s catalog was also listed as E.2 in Alfonso’s.⁴ And although added by a later hand in Gabriele’s catalog, Baronio’s Annales was kept under F.1 in both.⁵ As in Alfonso’s, Gabriele’s catalog generally lists books alphabetically by author, with a shelfmark at the end of the entry.⁶ Even the title-pages of the two archbishops’ catalogs are similar, featuring their shared family crest. But not everything is identical. In addition to adding more recent books like his work on the shroud, Alfonso also removed books that had been included Gabriele’s catalog and could no longer be found. It seems Alfonso had done due diligence: missing books were marked as such in Gabriele’s catalog by a later hand, and a list was compiled of the hundreds of missing books.⁷ Alfonso’s catalog in the Ransom Center lists the books that survived.

The many missing books perhaps attest to the collection’s heavy use. Gabriele wanted his books to serve as a kind of public library for clergy, particularly poor clerics who could not afford to buy good books to help them write sermons. During Gabriele’s lifetime, the English Catholic refugee and theologian William Shepreve served as librarian for the archbishop’s collection, “always adding books, not only for the service of the archiepiscopal palace, but also for preachers, or others who have need of the books, of which he keeps an index.”⁸ In his final years, Gabriele took steps to make his personal book collection a permanent feature of Bologna’s archiepiscopal palace. He had a purpose-built room constructed for it in 1595, and in his will, he stipulated that a complete inventory be drawn up within two months after his death, and that no book be sold or taken out of the library.⁹ The catalog in the Ransom Center advertises itself as “the library of Alfonso Paleotti.” In reality, though, Alfonso’s library was both a family heirloom and an institutional resource for the archdiocese of Bologna.

The current location of Alfonso’s catalog is also revealing. It is bound as part of a miscellany of manuscript material (both originals and copies) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This single volume is one of the 620 volumes the Ransom Center owns from the Ranuzzi collection—another Bolognese family library. This collection was started by Count Vincenzo Antonio Ranuzzi, between 1706 and 1726, who wanted to preserve information and knowledge for his son, Marc’Antonio.¹⁰ As in other Ranuzzi volumes, the one containing Alfonso’s catalog begins with Count Ranuzzi’s own elaborate coat of arms and a title-page with a shelfmark. This one was the 34th volume in the library’s “Raccolta di varii manoscritti,” or “collection of various manuscripts.”

It seems likely that the Ranuzzi acquired Alfonso’s catalog during the Count’s initial burst of collecting in the first decades of the eighteenth century; by 1731, another archbishop of Bologna had searched for this text in vain. Better known as Pope Benedict XIV, Prospero Lambertini was archbishop of Bologna from 1731 to 1754 and made it his pet project to restore the Paleotti library in the archiepiscopal palace to its former grandeur. Lambertini lamented that in 1642, Archbishop Girolamo Colonna had moved the collection to a different and more spacious location: “But in that part [of the archiepiscopal palace], nobody remembered it.”¹¹ During one of Bologna’s wet winters, the books became water damaged.  Lambertini had the books repaired, including the magnificent Antwerp Polyglot Bible that he had found “mutilated,” and moved them to another wing. He also sought to fulfil the stipulation in Gabriele Paleotti’s will that an inventory of the books be made by his successor. He wrote, “With no amount of diligence could we find this catalog—if it was ever made.” So, in 1738, Lambertini created a new catalog. And he had it printed so it would avoid the same fate as the manuscript catalog Alfonso must have made:

We had this inventory of the books that could be found printed so that there would be many copies, and it would never again disappear, if it were only left copied in manuscript—as we strongly suspect happened earlier to the first catalog, which we don’t doubt was created and compiled by Alfonso Paleotti, who succeeded Gabriele, even if as we said, it never came into our hands.¹²

If only Lambertini had thought to send his agents on a short walk across town to Palazzo Ranuzzi, where Alfonso’s missing catalog was already bound and shelved as “Raccolta di varii manoscritti,” Vol. 34.

Fortunately for us, the once-elusive manuscript is now in Austin. In addition to solving a little eighteenth-century puzzle about its existence and whereabouts, its presence at the Ransom Center makes it possible to tell part of a long history of the creation, continuation, and destruction of book collections in Bologna. The vast majority of the sources we study as historians are often several times removed from their original contexts, and recovering those contexts often requires tracing the sinuous provenance of the books and manuscripts that preserve them. We can see other places that Alfonso’s catalog had meaning when we learn that it moved to Ranuzzi’s collection and was sought after by Lambertini in the eighteenth century.

A similarly rich story could be told about the catalog’s journey to Texas. What does Paleotti’s catalog tells us about the movement of books in early modern Bologna? The libraries of elite families and ecclesiastical institutions overlapped, and, even though both were intended to preserve knowledge for future generations, books often went missing. The creation of one library drew on the dissemination of books from others. Gabriele’s creation of an archiepiscopal library incorporated his own family’s books.¹³ Books that had once been kept in the Palazzo Paleotti were moved to the Palazzo Arcivescovile. Even then, under Alfonso’s care, the collection continued to blur the line between a personal library and a public, institutionalized resource. And as Alfonso marked books in Gabriele’s old catalog as missing, more almost certainly disappeared. A century later, the Ranuzzi turned to Bologna’s ecclesiastical libraries as well as the city’s private collectors to create their family library, making their collection out of the remnants of many Bolognese libraries. The catalog documenting “The Library of Alfonso Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna” sheds light on one of them.

Madeline McMahon is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, funded by the Mellon-CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship (’20-’21). Beginning in the 2021–2022 academic year, she will commence a postdoctoral appointment in History at The University of Texas at Austin. You can find her on Twitter @madmcmahon. 

¹ Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, “Alfonsi Palaeoti Archiep: Bonon: Bibliotheca,” fol. 175r, and “Annales ecclesiastici Baronii Tomi III. F 1,” fol. 179r. 

² Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 174v. “Alfonsus Palaeatus Dichiaratione della sindone.” Alfonso Paleotti, Esplicatione del sacro lenzuolo (Bologna: Heirs of Giovanni Rossi, 1599).

³ Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, “Catalogus bibliothecae…Gabrielis Palaeoti.”

⁴ Pietro Galesini, Martyrologium S. Romanae Ecclesiae (Venice, 1578). Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 198v. Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, fol. [137r].

⁵ Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 179r. “Caesaris Baronij Annales eccles.ci Tom: IIII F.1.” Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, fol. [31r]. “Cesaris Baronii Annales ecclesiastici Tom. 4. F.1.”

⁶ In fact, Alfonso’s catalog tended to list works both by title and author’s first name, while Gabriele’s listed works under author’s first name.

⁷ Archivio Arcivescovile di Bologna, Misc. v. 841, fascicolo 7, “Index librorum qui in archiepiscopali bibliotheca desiderantur.”

⁸ Quoted in Paolo Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522 – 1597) (Rome, 1959-1967), vol. 2, 264-65. “sempre si va aumentando di libri, non solo per servitio dell’Arcivescovato ma ancora per predicatori, o altri che habbino bisogno de libri, de quali tiene l’indice.”

⁹ Prodi, vol. 2, 266-67.

¹⁰ Maria Xenia Zevelechi Wells, The Ranuzzi Manuscripts (Austin, 1980), 1–5. 

¹¹ Prospero Lambertini, Catalogus librorum qui reliqui inventi sunt in bibliotheca archiepiscopali Bononiae (1738), sig. a 2 v. “Primo adventu nostro Bibliothecam Cardinalis Palaeoti, studio Cardinalis Columnae novis Codicibus ornatam deprehendimus in amplo quidem loco Sedis Archiepiscopalis, sed in ea parte ubi nemo commoratur. Quare ob negligentiam hominum factum est, ut per hyemis tempora in eum locum aquae penetraverint.”

¹² Lambertini, Catalogus, sig. [a 3v]. “Porro hunc Catalogum (si fortasse antea confectus est) nulla diligentia potuimus invenire: Illum modo Librorum, qui inventi sunt, Typis imprimendum committimus, ut multa exemplaria suppetant, ac ne rursus intereat, si solum manu descriptus relinquatur, uti contigisse merito suspicamur primo, quem ab Alphonso Palaeoto (qui Cardinali Gabrieli Palaeoto statim successit) confectum, digestumque minime dubitamus, licet in manus nostras, uti dictum est, nunquam pervenerit.”

¹³ Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, vol. 1 (1959), 52-53, vol. 2 (1967), 264.