Period of Original Use

[-JKP-]

Linda: There are parts of what is today northern Italy that until 1918 belonged to Austria (Trento), and the area bordered on Tyrol in Switzerland. The Habsburgs of Austria were also the Counts of Tyrol by that time and ruled the whole area. The northern tip of Lake Garda and the eastern tip of Lake Constance are included in the greater area described, ie Trentino Tyrol Austria.

The connections go back much farther.

The Lombards settled and ruled what we call northern Italy and the southern boot of Italy (Salerno/Naples area). They were southern Scandinavians (from the same general area as the Angles that colonized England and the Normans that spread west). Some of the southern Scandinavians also settled in Switzerland.

So, even though they lived for many generations between Germany and the Italian states, their ancestral ties were with the north (and with the colonies in the boot), not so much with central Italy.

One can see this orientation in their political support of the Holy Roman Empire when it was in a power struggle with Rome, and in the transmission of manuscripts. While reading itineraries of travels, I noticed that some writers still considered Florence to be within the boundaries of Lombardy in the 15th century. Historians say that Lombardy had been pushed back to the Po River by this time, but clearly some travelers still had friends or relatives in this area, enough that they did not recognize the border of Lombardy to have receded yet.

So... we see a lot of medieval herbal literature from Lombardy disseminated through France, England, and Germany, along with other kinds of manuscripts.

.
Another interesting example of cross-pollination between Italy and the north...

It took me quite a while to figure out why John Dee's handwriting (his formal script, not his note-taking hand) was so similar to Isabella d'Este's handwriting.

After Marco posted those examples of handwriting, I looked into the Italic-to-Humanist evolution and discovered that Poggio (who was from beautiful Tuscany) had spent five years in England. He had very fine handwriting and was one of the main teachers and proponents of this style of script and probably influenced the early humanist handwriting revolution that occurred in the north (good thing too, his writing was far more attractive and legible than Gothic scrawl). He was also an avid collector of manuscripts and apparently traveled extensively in France and Germany seeking them out, and may have traded some of what he had for better ones along the way.

We also know that Dee, another avid bibliophile, spent several years living at Trebon, and it's more than likely that he looked around the region for manuscripts that ended up in England when he returned to his homeland.


All of which is to say that there were a lot of connections between Italy (both north and southern boot) and northern Europe in those days. People traveled much more frequently and for greater distances than I ever realized.