Miscellaneous Commentaries to minores auctores

A part of the earlier, and also later, medieval school tradition that somehow went across all the period of the early and the late Middle Ages, to the advent of the studia humanitatis, were readings of the so called minores auctores, a set of texts that were to be studied by students who had already got the basis of the Latin grammar and language, but whose curriculum studiorum was not advanced enough to deal with readings of the great classics, the auctores in the strict sense of the term. Part of such a school program is taken by a certain number of works – sometimes of an anonymous or uncertain author – that feature a sufficiently simple Latin language, edifying contents and a style preferably in verses helping their recollection. Reference to such a school program is surely made by this manuscript kept in the City Library of Treviso that contains, under its binding which was restored some twenty years ago making use of the old binding boards, different codicological units, some of which though share a common history. A mere colophon can be read on f. 124r: «Explicit scriptum Prosperi M° CCCC° XIIII, die XII mensis octobris, scriptum per me Franciscum Squaranum de Venzono in domo egregii ac nobilis viri domini Dominici de Ponte de Venetiis decretorum doctoris, quem Deus custodiat». When Francesco Squarani from Venzone, a Friulian, copied these texts was, as declared by himself, by Domenico da Ponte, a Venetian canonist, who was professor at Padua since the beginning of the fifteenth century, where Squarani studied ars notariae. Then Squarani was to come back home, for here he carried on his profession as a notary a decade later.