Sometime in the fourteen nineties, Mancinelli or his North Italian printers seem to have conceived the notion of issuing all his short textbooks in a collected set. Mancinelli himself had made lists of his works as they multiplied, which appeared in print in 1490, 1492, 1493, and again in 1499, but the context of these early lists was mere advertising. The 1492 list of twenty four works, for example, appeared in a Venice edition of Regulae constructionis with Summa and Thesaurus. It may have been a sort of calling card for Mancinelli, newly arrived in Venice, or it may have been intended to announce a plan by the printer, Giovanni Roscio, to start a series. It is a confusing list, however, since it incorrectly describes the Spica as a work on supines and it includes the mysterious Centiloquium, of which no copy survives. At best it is a garbled version of a list Mancinelli might have supplied in manuscript. (76)
A larger, later project is similarly fuzzy in the earliest documents, which date from the beginning of 1498. Giovanni Tacuino had been issuing textbooks by Mancinelli for some years. On January 21, 1498 he published an edition of the Regulae constructionis with Summa and Thesaurus that contained a note listing twenty seven distinct works of Mancinelli, in no particular order. (77) This list, like that of 1492, included not only grammatical textbooks and reading anthologies, but also the commentaries on Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, and the Centiloquium. It also included the never-published Lima on Giovanni Tortelli and another (but different) mistaken description of Mancinelli's Spica. This disordered list cannot be Mancinelli's making. Most likely Tacuino cobbled it together from earlier lists or from the title pages of earlier publications in his stock that he intended to use as copy texts for new issues. This would explain why the commentary on Tortelli shows up, since it was listed on the title page of the Pincio edition of Tortelli even though it was never issued. (78)
Soon after the list above, the project becomes a little clearer. On February 9, 1498, Tacuino reissued the Valla/Ad Herennium tracts. Some copies of this little volume bear a title page announcing an Opera omnia. (79) This title page implies that Tacuino now saw himself as publishing a complete set. Perhaps he saw the project as a way of keeping his presses busy in otherwise slow periods. If he still had earlier editions of some works in stock, he would have had no incentive to reprint them in a new format, but the new title page might create a demand for the older booklets. Both the older and new issues were in standard chancery quarto format and could be bound together as any given customer desired. In the event, Tacuino does not seem to have gone far or fast with the series. He reissued only four works in the next two years. On January 9, 1500 Tacuino received a privilege from the Venetian authorities that included "all of Mancinelli's works together with a new commentary on Valerius Maximus." But neither project resulted. Across two years, Tacuino had created a substantial little series, but it never approached a real Opera omnia. He only picked up the project again after Mancinelli's death. (80)
Meanwhile, other printers also started collecting works of Mancinelli, probably spurred on by the announcement of Tacuino's project. Beyond the Alps, the Lyon printer Jean de Vingle carefully selected a few works to represent a complete curriculum from Donatus to the Rhetorica ad Herennium. (81) In Milan, the publisher Giovanni da Legnano began a grandly titled Opera omnia, starting with a Valla/Ad Herennium volume, just like Tacuino's issue of 1498. In fact the Milanese book is a close reprint of Tacuino's. The Milan book is undated but likely to have been printed in 1499 or 1500. (82 ) Da Legnano employed several printers; for this first volume he chose Pietro Martire Mantegazza. Part of the same project were several other small volumes that appeared desultorily with the De Legnano mark in 1500 and shortly thereafter. Some of these betray rather more care in correction than was usual in small grammar books, but there is no good reason to think that Mancinelli himself was directly involved. (83)
The only clear indication we have that Mancinelli was personally involved in collecting his works is a preface dated 1504 which, however, first appeared with a 1507 Opera omnia title page by Tacuino. Mancinelli had died in the meantime, probably in 1505, and so here he was made to speak posthumously. He wrote that the project was to assemble the corrected works written for young boys and adolescents into a single volume, and then he gave a classified list, which is precious evidence for his retrospective sense of his own career. There are three classes, Grammaticae Praeexercitamenta, or preparatory exercises in grammar, Carminum Opuscula, short works in verse, and Solutae orationis Opuscula, short works in prose. (84) The list that appears under these headings is tantalizing. Missing are the commentaries on Juvenal, Horace and Virgil (presumably because Mancinelli did not see them as made for adolescent students), but included are the Valla and Ad Herennium commentaries. At the very end are the three lost anthologies -- Plato, Aristotle, and Centiloquium. If Mancinelli himself edited this list, it may be that the three "lost" anthologies were simply projects he still had in hand in 1504 and which he never completed.
The evidence for Mancinelli's direct involvement in collecting his works is fragmentary, but, whoever came up with the idea initially, it seems that by 1504 the eminent author had been recruited to oversee the project. He started by imposing some order. For Tacuino, however, the order was still an afterthought. The title page with Mancinelli's logical classification dates from August 5, 1507; but the only copy of this Opera omnia I have seen contains more fascicles printed before that date than after. The title page was merely Tacuino's device for encouraging customers to collect a set. (85)
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