Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

"Bonis in bonum"? What's that mean, something like "right are the morally good"?

The "Bonis" looks like the ablative case to me so I would translate it as "Unto good for the sake of good". But I, of course, am not a professional translator so please take that as just a guess.

If you're really interested in what it means, I can tell you where you might find the correct answer. Get a modern-day book entitled "Bonis in Bonum", which actually has direct bearing on the case at hand (late 16th / early 17th centuries) and hopefully will explain the meaning of its humanistic title. It's written in Dutch but that's fine because the book I alluded to, though written in Italian, was actually printed in the Netherlands but falsely attributed to a printer in Venice.

That reminds me of Giordano Bruno whose books, a couple of decades earlier, were published in London but falsely attributed to printers from all over Italy. Indeed, they were master forgers. Numerous booklets called almanachs and quartos were forged by them, backdated, and falsely attributed to real printers who were genuinely active on the backdated date. They modeled their forgeries on real publications (which provided fonts, vignettes / logo, shop address, et cetera) of said printers and often not even experts could detect that those publications were fake.