In recent years the Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) has attracted increasing interest from scholars in both Europe and North America. There are several sound reasons for this. First of all, Manetti’s encyclopedic knowledge enabled him to write on a wide variety of topics, including Christian apologetics, biographies, translation theory, moral philosophy, the visual arts, and history. Second, there is this humanist’s many-sided career: despite his constant business activity as a merchant with interests in the main Italian trade centers, he held more than a dozen offices for the Florentine Republic from 1429 to 1453 and was often selected as ambassador by his city’s government before moving to Rome, serving as papal secretary, and finally spending the last years of his eventful life as a handsomely paid member of Alfonso V’s court in Naples. Third, manuscripts are still extant for all of his finished works, according to such a well-informed source as his best friend Vespasiano da Bisticci, who paid homage to Manetti in two lengthy biographies. More important still, from a philological point of view, almost all of these texts survive either in Manetti’s own library in the Fondo Palatino of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana or in the elegant collection owned by Federico da Montefeltro, which came out of Vespasiano’s own bookshop and is now, in its turn, conveniently available at the same Vatican library.

All these features make Manetti an appealing candidate for scholars interested in carrying out original research on archival records and manuscripts, in hopes of editing previously unpublished (or only partially published) texts. Among the desiderata expressed at an international conference on Manetti in 2007 was the critical edition of the De Terremotu, a most interesting treatise that the Florentine humanist wrote on the devastating earthquake that hit Southern Italy in December 1456. On the occasion of that symposium Daniela Pagliara gave a talk on this text. A year later her talk appeared in the conference proceedings, promising the very critical edition now under review. Pagliara has thus kept her promise and she has done so with great philological accuracy and painstaking attention to all the details that an edition like this demands.

A lengthy and very informative treatise on the causes and the history of earthquakes from biblical times to the mid-Quattrocento, De Terremotu is a unique work in a number of ways. As is typical of all his writings, Manetti gathers an impressive wealth of information. Book 1 lists the contrasting views on the causes of earthquakes put forth by natural philosophers and theologians, trying — as Manetti often does — to steer a middle course between such opposing interpretations. Book 2 reports all earthquakes on which it was possible to collect written information of any kind, from the most ancient times onward. Finally, the third and last book is entirely devoted to the tragedy that Manetti witnessed in December 1456.

This interesting text, at once scientific and historic, which Manetti dedicated to his last patron, King Alfonso of Naples, has come down to us in seven manuscripts, including four that belonged to the author’s private library. With good reason Pagliara believes one of them (El Escorial, Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo, MS g.III.23) to have been the dedication copy. Although none of the surviving witnesses was written in Manetti’s own hand, they were all close (in some cases extremely close) to the exemplar that the author must have dictated either to his son Agnolo or to another trustworthy scribe in Naples toward the end of 1457. Pagliara carefully describes and collates all seven witnesses in her introduction, convincingly identifying MS Pal. lat. 1077 as the most reliable of all. This led her in turn to the decision of publishing the text of De Terremotu following the spelling of this specific manuscript, instead of adopting classical rules. To better explain her decision, Pagliara has added an informative appendix on editorial criteria to her eighty-page introduction. The same accuracy dictates the critical apparatus and the rich explanatory notes accompanying the text. Suffice it here to say that the editor has not just identified all the many sources on which Manetti relies in the three books of this work, but has also reported the most significant marginal notes to such texts that one can still find in the author’s own library. As such, Pagliara’s edition of De Terremotu stands out as a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of this fascinating humanist.