And Anselm is right about Milton, who under Marvell and with Dryden, served
as Latin Secretary to Oliver Cromwell. The Cromwellian Latin secretariat
most carefully studied the Apostolical Chancery practices and adopted them
against the Catholics in a paper war, present even in _Areopagitica_ and
_Paradise Lost_. Much earlier one can find Florence doing the same against
the Imperial Chancery, with Brunetto Latino as their Chancellor. They kept
borrowing each others' styles, sometimes being Republican and Ciceronian,
sometimes being floridly scriptural. Pier delle Vigne mocked the Papacy in
their own curial style, Brunetto's father borrowed that style in writing to
his son in exile at the defeat of the Guelfs at Montaperti, while Brunetto
uses the Republican style for Florence, Dante plays games with all of these
in the _Commedia_. Roberto Weiss was writing somewhat about these practices.
There are splendid letter collections in Florentine, Roman and Vatican
libraries of these paper war documents, beginning with the Pier delle Vigne
and Brunetto Latino ones, going on through Salutati, even including epistles
and material by Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, etc.
At 09.37 19/11/97 +0100, you wrote:
>At 07:13 19.11.97 -0400, you wrote:
>>
>>>I am writing an article on Leon Battista Alberti and
>>>I find that after his studies in law at Bologna, he became an Apostolic
>>>Abbreviator. Exactly what is/was that office? What duties did it entail?
>>>What did it have to do with the Curia, for whom he worked?
>>
>>Milton was *Secretary of Briefs to Princes* to the Commonwealth
>>Government ca 1650. Was Alberti making ABstracts of BRIEFS ie a sort
>>of recording clerk?
>>
>>This is a guess: I do not know the answer.
>
>No, abbreviatores usually did not 'make abstracts' of already existing
>texts, they assisted notaries in drawing up new documents, by producing the
>concepts for these documents. Abbreviatores Apostolici were members of the
>Cancellaria Apostolica, working for the Protonotarii.
>
> Otfried
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Otfried Lieberknecht, Schoeneberger Str. 11, D-12163 Berlin
>Tel.: ++49 30 8516675 (fax on request), E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Homepage for Dante Studies:
>http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html
> ORB Dante Alighieri - A Guide to Online Resources:
>http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/Danindex.html
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
____
Julia Bolton Holloway, Ph.D., Professor Emerita
Hermit of the Holy Family
via del Partigiano 16, Montebeni, 50014 FIESOLE, ITALY
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http://members.aol.com/juliansite/Juliansite.htm
He said not, 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou
shalt not be diseased.' But he said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome'.
Julian of Norwich, Showings, Sloane 2499 Manuscript, fol. 49.
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