Copy number: B-367(1)

Bound before 67 manuscript leaves of Italian works of Boccaccio in a fifteenth-century hand, comprising: fol. 1^ra -34^ra Il Filostrato, incipit: ‘Molte fiate gia, nobellissime done, auene, che jo . . .'; see Tutte le opere, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 2 (Milan, 1964), 17-228; fol. 34^ra -56^rb Ninfale Fiesolano; see Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, vol. 3 (Milan, 1974), 291-421; on 56^rb -61^vb an Italian poem in 112 stanzas, incipit: ‘Signori chari, essendo zoveneto | un ziorno foi mestesso maginando . . .' and fol. 62^ra -67^va the Storia di Ippolito e Leonora in Italian prose, incipit: ‘Per la magnifica et bellissima zita di Fiorenza sono dece . . .'; see William Roscoe, Frederic Madden, and Seymour de Ricci, A Handlist of Manuscripts in the Library of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall, Supplement to the Bibliographical Society's Transactions, 7 (Oxford, 1932), no. 722.

Wanting the blank leaf [a1] and leaf [m10]. [a2] cut out and re-attached. In this as in all but one of the surviving copies, two columns of text have been printed upside down, on [B8v]. The text of column one belongs to book IV, chapters 93 and 94, of column two to chapter 98; differently set up from leaves [s3^ra] and [s4^vb]; BMC, followed by GW, explains this as a result of erroneously inked bearer type; Neil Harris, ‘Una pagina capovolta nel Filocolo veneziano del 1472', Bibliofilia, 98 (1996), 1-21 suggests that an error in setting up the text of chapters 93 and 94 was discovered before the whole sheet had been printed, and that the sheets were not discarded but used for printing the last bifolium, probably as a result of a shortage of paper.

Binding: Nineteenth-century English gold-tooled russia, stamped with the crest of Coke of Holkham. The upper cover loose.

Size: 328 × 235 × 63 mm.

Size of leaf: 312 × 215 mm.

In the inner margin of [a2r] Italian (Venice?) quarter white vine-stem border with some gold dotting on a blue, red, and green ground incorporating a seven-line epigraphic initial painted in gold. At the beginning of each book, initials are supplied in gold, surrounded by white vine-stems defined in red, blue or green and colours with some gold dotting. Initials and paragraph marks are supplied in red or blue. See Pächt and Alexander II, 110 no. pr. 65.

Provenance: Cosimo Almeni (seventeenth century?); on the rear endleaf: ‘Questo libro e del Caualiere Cosimo Almeni nato in Fiorenza, ma discendente della Augustisima Città di Perugia, Caualiere del hordine di Toscana di S. Stefano Papa e martire', followed by a drawing of a Maltese cross and the motto: ‘Sic fortis Hetruria crescit Pietas fortitudo nobilitas'. Old shelfmarks ‘M.S.722' and ‘A 4 B.11'. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Earls of Leicester. Purchased in 1953.

SHELFMARK: Holk. c.2.