MANUSCRIPTS BELONGING TO RICHARD DE FOURNIVAL*
The library and books of Richard de Fournival have not lacked attention since Aleksander Birkenmajer established some fifty years ago that the Biblionomia represented a real library, that the books had, after Fournival's death, in 1260, passed via Gerard of Abbeville to the Collège de Sorbonne and that they could in many cases still be identified1. By a close comparison of the Biblionomia with the catalogue of the Sorbonne library compiled in 1338, Birkenmajer, working in Krakow with Bjornbo's and Rose's jiotes, identified in the Fonds de la Sorbonne of the Bibliothèque nationale seventeen manuscripts which had belonged to Fournival and which accounted for twenty-two entries in the Biblionomia. Vleeschauwer reprinted the Biblionomia ; Ullman identified Fournival's Propertius and his Agrimensores, and announced a new edition of the Biblionomia. Glorieux has devoted studies to Fournival's library as well as to that of Gerard of Abbeville and the library of the Sorbonne itself. Seidler has examined the medical collection 2. What is curious is that Fournival's books have been studied almost wholly on the basis of careful comparisons between the Biblionomia and the 1338 catalogue of the Sorbonne. The actual
* I am grateful to MUe M.-Th. d'Alverny, Mlle É. Pellegrin and M. Jean Vezin, and my wife Mary for their considerate help on numerous details regarding these manuscripts and their contents.
1.
Umiçjetnosci, Wydzial Filologiczny, Rozprawy, LX 4 (Krakow, 1922) ; translated into French in his collected studies, Etudes d'histoire des sciences et de la philosophie du Moyen Age, Studia Copernica I, Zaklad Historii Nauki I Teckniki Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Kra- kow, 1970), p. 118-120. The recent literature on Fournival and Abbeville is given in R. H. Rouse, The Early Library of the Sorbonne, in Scriptorium 21 (1967), p. 42-71, 227-251, esp. 48-51 ; and idem, The A Text of Seneca's Tragedies in the Thirteenth Century, in Revue d'histoire des textes, 1 (1971), p. 93-121.
2. H. J. de Vleeschauwer, La « Biblionomia » de Richard de Fournival du manuscrit 636 de la Sorbonne, in Mousaion, 62, Pretoria, 1965. — ■ B. L. Ullman, The Manuscripts of Propertius, in Classical Philology, 6 (1911), p. 282-301 ; idem, Geometry in the Medieval Qua- drivium, in Studi di Bibliografía e di Storia in onore di Tammaro de Marinis, 4 (1964), p. 263-285. P. Glorieux, Études sur la « Biblionomia » de Richard de Fournival, in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 30 (1963), p. 205-231 ; cf. corrections given in the Scriptorium article (cited in η. 1 above), p. 48-49, η. 22. Idem, La bibliothèque de Gérard d'Abbe- vïlle, in Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 36 (1969), p. 48-83 ; Glorieux was still at this time working on the basis of Delisle rather than the new information provided in the Scriptorium study and should hence be used with caution. Idem, Aux origines de la Sorbonne. I : Robert de Sorbon, in Études de philosophie médiévale, LUI (Paris, 1966), see p. 82-83, 239-289, 294 ; these portions have been largely revised in the Scriptorium study. E. Seidler, Die Medizin in der 'Biblionomia' des Richard de Fournival, in Sudhoff's Archiv, 51 (1967), p. 44-54.
Bibljoteha Ryszarda de Fournival, Polska Akademja
