Historia Destructionis Troiae

The copy of Guido delle Colonne's Historia Destructionis Troiae held in the Special Collections Department was acquired before 1669 from what the library catalogue tells us, and it is a curious one. Perusing the 1669 library catalogue in fact, I noticed an important detail: the copy bore the same signature as three other incunabula, P. d. 4.

This was a giveaway that the copy was acquired by the library bound with other copies. As well as that, after having analyzed the hand-writing of the annotations situated on the front page and on the margins of the copies it was possible to assert that this copy was part of a convolute, or a composite volume. A composite volume of manuscript is a book made up of multiple distinct manuscripts or texts that have been bound together into a single volume. These individual texts can vary in content, origin, and date, and they may have been created by different authors or scribes. The binding of these diverse manuscripts into one volume often occurred later, sometimes for convenience, preservation, or because the texts were thematically related. In this case, Guido's Historia Destructionis Troiae was bound with three other books: De Oratore by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Historia de bello Iudaico, sce̜ptri sublatione, Iude̜orum dispersione et Hierosolymitano excidio by Hegesippus Palaestinus, and Defensorium fidei dialogos septem contra Judaeos, haereticos et Sarracenos continens by Johannes de Turrecremata.

The last detail that confirmed the certainty of a composite volume were the traces of glue left by book tabs in all of the four copies. In this case the marks of glue appear in order between the different copies, further pointing out that they were tabbed one after the other.