Ianus Lascaris (1445–1534) and his protégé Marcus Musurus (ca. 1474–1517) were the last two major Greek émigrés of the Italian Renaissance. Lascaris had brought Musurus to Florence from Crete in 1492 to be a student in the Greek college he planned to start under Medicean patronage. The death of Lorenzo the Magnficent that same year short-circuited these plans, and the fall of the Medici two years later forced both Lascaris and Musurus to seek their fortunes elsewhere. By 1495 Musurus was in Venice and probably already working for Aldus Manutius, who began to print books under his own name that very same year. Today, Musurus is famous for his collaboration in Aldus’s grand enterprise of Greek editiones principes. But in his own day he was no less celebrated as a teacher of Greek, first at the University of Padua from 1503 on and then, when the war of the League of Cambrai forced the university to close in 1509, at the Ducal Chancellery school in Venice. In 1516, Pope Leo X named Musurus bishop of Monembasia in Greece, and there was even talk of him being made a cardinal before he died the next year. All through this time, even when he worked in Ferrara and Carpi in 1499–1503 under the protection of Prince Alberto Pio of Carpi, Musurus continued to collaborate with the Aldine Press.

Ferreri’s Marco Musuro is notable and useful on multiple counts. It is the first volume in a series (L’Italia degli Umanisti) that is the Italian counterpart of the two-volume French La France des Humanistes: Hellénistes (1999–2010). The latter, in turn, was the first consequence of the 1995 repertorium L’Europe des humanistes, by Jean-François Maillard, Judit Keckseméti, and Monique Portalier, which despite its title really does not encompass all Renaissance humanists, but only those who had something to do with the editing, translating, or printing of classical, biblical, or postclassical texts. So the series hardly challenges in comprehensiveness Mario Cosenza’s monumental Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of the Italian Humanists and of the World of Classical Scholarship in Italy, 1300–1800 (1962) and Checklist of Non-Italian Humanists, 1300–1800 (1969). But Marcus Musurus is a perfect candidate for L’Europe des humanistes series, and Ferreri does an outstanding job in documenting Musurus’s activity as an editor, teacher, and copyist.

The last forty years or so have seen an extraordinary flourishing of Musurus studies. Ferreri’s book is in essence a gathering in of all this scholarship, and he himself is very generous in giving credit to the scholars who created this Musurus renaissance, starting with the numerous writings of Martin Sicherl in the 1970s and culminating in the even more numerous articles and recent book (Marco Musuro: Libri e scrittura [2013]) of David Speranzi. Ferreri himself diligently edits (and translates into Italian in the case of Greek texts) the enormous number of prefaces, letters, poems, and documents reflecting Musurus’s life as a scholar. He also provides a thoughtful analysis of all this material, and since he is so generous in citing others, it needs to be stressed, as I have been able to verify, that he himself is responsible for much of the fresh detail that appears in the book.

After a general introduction, the book opens with a biography, which is slightly more up-to-date than Paolo Pellegrini’s excellent “Musuro, Marco” in volume 77 of the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (2012). The core of the book then follows. This consists of a detailed analysis of the editions definitely and probably edited by Musurus, the editions in the production of which he definitely or probably collaborated, and the editions dubiously or falsely attributed to Musurus. Part 2, covering the courses Musurus taught, is no less precious because it inventories all surviving textual and literary evidence, and because Musurus loomed so large as a teacher in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The final part of the volume covers Musurus’s library, including the manuscripts he copied, the printed books he annotated, the manuscripts falsely ascribed to him, the manuscripts bearing the ex libris of his patron Alberto Pio of Carpi, and, finally, the somewhat mysterious group of Greek manuscripts, per gli Eupatridi, associated with Musurus. Much of part 3 would not have been possible a generation ago. It is heavily dependent upon the work of David Speranzi and reveals the deep imprint Musurus left on the tradition and study of Greek texts in the sixteenth century independently of the editions he edited or collaborated on.

No review could do justice to the immense mass of detail intrinsic to the catalogue of any rich manuscript collection. In terms of the number of manuscripts and early printed editions Ferreri describes, his Marco Musuro is equivalent to such a catalogue, and like such a catalogue, rather than being a terminus, it is in fact now the jumping-off point for any future scholarship on Musurus.