Ɵ Hercules Oetaeus, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [Italy, later 14th century or c. 1400]

Ɵ Hercules Oetaeus (a play on the death of Hercules on Mount Oeta), 688-710, 714-735, 953-974, 979-1000, in Latin, large cutting from a decorated manuscript on parchment[Italy (probably northern), second half of fourteenth century or c. 1400] Cutting from a bifolium, with one near complete leaf (only trimmed at foot with loss of 4 lines there) and the other leaf trimmed away at foot and along vertical edge (with loss of half the text column there), each leaf with single column of 25 lines in Italian gothic bookhand (Italian rotunda), capitals set off in margin as common with layout of verse, extensive marginal and interlinear gloss in a tiny humanistic bookhand, paragraph marks in red or blue, red rubric, one simple blue initial, recovered from a binding and hence with tears and small holes, reverse soiled and scrawled on (but legible there), overall fair and presentable condition, 200 by 180mm.; in cloth-covered card binding Provenance: 1. Probably copied in northern Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century or the turn of the fifteenth century, perhaps for a scholarly reader, who added numerous interlinear additions to the text in a humanist hand.2. Later discarded and cut up for reuse on bindings, the present cutting ending up as a binding of a book owned in the first half of the seventeenth century by one Pietro della Valle: his ex libris on reverse ("libro per il sig' Pietro della Valle"). This is most probably the important Italian cultural figure of the same name, who was a member of the Accademia degli Umoristi, as well as a composer and musicologist. In 1614 he left Italy to travel to Constantinople (where he spent a year learning Turkish and Arabic), and then throughout the Holy Land and Middle East (in Baghdad he married a famously beautiful Syriac Christian woman, Sitti Maani Gioerida, as well as supplying some of the earliest descriptions of Ancient Babylon and bringing inscribed bricks from Nineveh and Ur back to Europe - among the very first examples of cuneiform known to the West). In 1618 he campaigned alongside Shah Abbas in northern Persia, before setting sail for India and North Africa, only returning to Rome in 1624, when he was appointed to the private staff of Pope Urban VIII. He died in 1652.2. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 1596, acquired Quaritch, London, in July 1992. Text:This work survived the late Antique and Medieval worlds among the plays of Seneca the younger (c. 4 BC:-65 AD.; more properly Lucius Annaeus Seneca), the Roman statesman, philosopher and dramatist, but is more probably the work of another associated Ancient writer who used numerous phrases and quotations from Seneca's other plays. There are notable differences in style and the work is twice the length of any of Seneca's other works (and in fact is the longest play from antiquity). Interestingly, this witness shows signs of scholarly comparison of manuscripts of the work, following in its main text the 'A' branch of the work (that descending from a twelfth-century French manuscript), but swapping one of its lines for the alternate reading of an 'E' branch (line 959 of the original work; this redaction deriving from the earliest complete manuscript of the work: Florence, Laur. MS 37.13, an eleventh-century Italian codex).