Zomino di ser Bonifazio, usually known as Sozomeno (1387–1458), was a Pistoian priest, canon, humanist, and canon lawyer. He was a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, occasionally employed by the University of Florence but more often serving as a private tutor to members of the Florentine elite; he was also the author of a Latin universal chronicle, but he is most important as a scribe and bibliophile. He was one of the earliest practitioners of the new humanist script, developed by Poggio in imitation of Caroline book hand. Sozomeno began using this script, contemporaneously known as littera antiqua, in 1410, copying numerous classical Latin authors and humanist texts over the following two decades. At the same time, he amassed a large library, embracing classical and medieval grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, philosophy, and canon law. To add to his humanist credentials, Sozomeno learned Greek, benefiting from intermittent lessons with Guarino Veronese, resident and teaching in Florence from 1410 to 1414, and as a result he began making his own copies of Greek classical literature, history, and philosophy. He studied most of his books closely, making copious marginal and interlinear glosses; he also wrote freestanding lemmatic commentaries on the Latin classics used as school authors in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (Persius, Horace, Cicero, Juvenal, Ovid, and Seneca the Tragedian).

With the present volume, Irene Ceccherini has completed the first comprehensive catalogue of Sozomeno's books, now dispersed throughout Europe and Britain. The contemporary inventory of his collection listed 110 volumes, of which an astounding three quarters have now been identified and included in this catalogue. Ceccherini provides the fullest imaginable palaeographic and codicological description of each volume, including at least one black-and-white plate for nearly every entry. The work also includes a useful presentation by Ceccherini's research group leader, Stefano Zamponi, summarizing Sozomeno's importance as a scribe and humanist. Tilly de la Mare had included a chapter on Sozomeno in her pioneering volume on humanist scribes, but Ceccherini now offers what she terms as a new interpretation of Sozomeno's development as a copyist. While de la Mare, so Ceccherini suggests, saw a linear progression on Sozomeno's part from Gothic script to littera antiqua, she herself sees what amounts to a regression from his humanist book hand of the 1410s and ’20s to a cursive script in later life, retaining some humanist elements but mainly similar to the Gothic bastarda characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is true that as Sozomeno's interests moved from copying to intensive reading, annotating, and commenting on his books, he adopted what could be termed a more practical cursive semi-humanist script, not dissimilar to scribal hands in the Florentine mid-fifteenth-century chancery; nevertheless, de la Mare's focus was on Sozomeno as a humanist scribe, not as a working student and teacher of classical and medieval authorities.

Ceccherini is in her element describing and chronicling Sozomeno's Gothic, humanist, and cursive script in the first half of the fifteenth century, but Sozomeno was also a bibliophile, whose collection of manuscripts included exemplars from the eleventh to the early fourteenth century. When dating and localizing some of these older copies, Ceccherini, like many paleographers, does not specify her criteria. In fact, greater account needs to be taken of crucial features, such as the abbreviation for qui, slanting or vertical ductus, counterpoised curves, t as an uncrossed or crossed letter, and the lower bole of g as separate or compressed. After inspection based only on the plates provided, the following suggestions can be offered: Harley 4804—North Italy, not France; Harley 4838—XII in., not XI¹; Forteguerriana A.30—Italy XIII in., not France XII²; Forteguerriana A.31—Italy XIII², not France XII¹; Forteguerriana A.36—Italy, not France; Forteguerriana A.38—XI–XII, not XII^mid; Forteguerriana A.62—XIV¹, not XIII²; Forteguerriana A.65—Italy, not France; Romorantin, Musée de Sologne, Fonds Martin 8—XIII–XIV, not XIII^mid.

David Speranzi appends an essay to the volume, treating Sozomeno as a Greek scribe. He provides further paleographic evidence that Sozomeno was a pupil of Guarino in Florence, although, given Sozomeno's documented residence as a student of canon law at Padua from 1407 to 1413, this instruction must have been limited, and Sozomeno needs to be regarded largely as a self-taught Hellenist. Completely original, however, is Speranzi's discovery that Mattia Lupi, a grammar teacher and bibliophile from San Gimignano (1380–1468), knew Greek and was a Greek copyist; based on annotations of provenance now nearly invisible, Speranzi shows that two Laurentian manuscripts with Greek annotations (Pl. 21.7 and 69.25) came from Lupi's library. This evidence can be confirmed by the fact that Lupi glossed the latter manuscript in his distinctive Latin script, with letters identical to those used in writing Greek (a and t). As Speranzi correctly observes, the view that Lupi could not write Greek will need revision.