Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to University of Pennsylvania Library’s Ms. Codex 1630, an early Renaissance commentary on most of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a 15th-century copy of a systematic treatise on rhetoric composed in the first century B.C. and frequently attributed to Cicero into the Renaissance. It was written in northern Italy, possibly Venice, between 1440 and 1460.
The text was the foundation for the study of rhetoric in the medieval and Renaissance periods. This manuscript is in an unusual small format. It is divided into 6 books rather than the customary 4, with the influential Book 4 divided into 3 parts so that Book 5 contains the figures of diction and Book 6 contains the figures of thought.
You can read the complete record for this document (and find links to digitized copies) on Franklin. You can also download a copy of this video from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 