The incunabula of the Koventareios Library

The staff of the library, headed by the Director, Ioanna Stergiopoulou, and the Deputy Head of Archives, Museums and Galleries, Eleni Margariti, welcomed us very warmly. We also had the opportunity to take a tour of the special collections, and the staff facilitated our research in every possible way. We would like to thank them all very much again!

The Koventareios holds one of the largest Greek collections of incunabula outside Athens: a total of six volumes from five different editions. Each of these books has its individual features, signs-testimonies of its former owners and its history. Having passed through several hands, they carry a lot of varied provenance information. Also, precisely because they have been in the library for centuries, they have preserved several old bookbindings and of course bear the stamps and ownership labels of various periods of the library.

The books, and selectively the most interesting pieces of material evidence we have found, are the following:

• Johannes Matthaeus Ferrarius, de Gradibus, Expositiones super tractatum de urinis et fen XXII tertii Canonis Avicennae. Milan: Jacobus de Sancto Nazario, de Ripa, 1494.
• Aristoteles, Opera, 5 vols. Venice: Aldus Manutius, Romanus, 1495-98.
• Aristophanes, Comediae novem. Venice: Aldus Manutius, Romanus, 1498.
• Suidas, Lexicon graecum, 2 vols. Milan: Johannes Bissolus & Benedictus Mangius, for Demetrius Chalcondylas, 1499.
• Epistolae diversorum philosophorum, oratorum, rhetorum. Venice: Aldus Manutius, Romanus, 1499.
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Johannes Matthaeus Ferrarius, de Gradibus, Expositiones super tractatum de urinis et fen XXII tertii Canonis Avicennae. Milan: Jacobus de Sancto Nazario, de Ripa, 1494.

The medical edition Ferrari Expositiones super tractatum de urinis et fen XXII tertii Canonis Avicennae, the sole copy in Greece, printed in Milan in 1494 by Jacobus de Sancto Nazario, de Ripa. The Koventareios has only the first part (De urinis), bound together with another medical work of 1551, in a 18th century leather binding.

The most interesting provenance detail of this copy is the ownership inscription of Georgios Megdanis, a 19th-century physician, son of the most famous, perhaps, “iatrophilosophos” (doctor – philosopher of Kozani), Harisios Megdanis, whose family is linked with one more incunable, as we shall see below.

Aristoteles, Opera, 5 vols. Venice: Aldus Manutius, Romanus, 1495-98.

The famous edition of Aristotle’s Works that was printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius. The Koventareios Library has two of its five volumes, the 3rd (January 1497) and the 4th (June 1497), which, as evidenced by their provenance, reached the library each following a completely different path.

The 3rd volume contains, exclusively in the book De Anima (On the Soul), some of the most interesting and detailed miniatures we have come across. They probably date back to the 16th or early 17th century. Manuscript notes and annotations in dark ink by a later hand are found in other parts of the book.