West. He brought home to Italy hundreds of books
from long journeys in the Byzantine East in
1405-1413 and 1421-1423, thus greatly impro\'ing
the supply of Greek texts a\'ailable in the West. But
Aurispa's interests were not restricted to Greek liter¬
ature. He also collected books in Latin, and his most
important discoveiy in this field was the commentary
on Terence's comedies written in the fourth century
by Aelius Donatus, which he found at Mainz in
Germany in 1433.

In his indefaugable acti\it)' as a book hunter,
Aurispa showed himself a worthy colleague of his bet¬
ter-known contemporaries, Poggio Bracciolini and
Niccolo Niccoli, although his literar)' and scholarly
production does not at all match their wide-ranging
acti\'ity. "WTiile Poggio, for example, "indulged in a
\'ariety of literary pursuits, ranging from history and
moral essays to polemic and pornography" (Reynolds
&: Wilson), Aurispa produced only one short original
work and a handful of translations from Greek to
Latin.

So why did Aurispa collect books? On this ques¬
tion scholarly opinion is divided. It has been suggest¬
ed that his motives were purely commercial, and that
he was more of a book trader than a collector. There
is e\idence that Aurispa sold many of his books, some
of which commanded high prices, and Aurispa's
friend Francesco Filelfo, also a book collector and a
humanist, accused him of being more interested in
trading books than in studying them.

Filelfo's remark was taken seriously by the
ground-breaking investigator of early Renaissance
book-hunting, Remigio Sabbadini: "He [Aurispa]
instead was entirely focused on peddling them [his
books]." In addition to the evidence already men¬
tioned, Sabbadini based his conclusion on an inven¬
 

tory of Aurispa's books written after his death and
published in 1890 by Sabbadini himself There are
very few Greek books in this list, and Sabbadini con¬
cluded that Aurispa had sold all but a few of the
many books he had brought home from his Eastern
journeys.

More recent scholarship has shown, however, that
this inventor)' lists only a part of Aurispa's collection.
In 1976, Adriano Franceschini published a more
complete inventory written in 1459, which portrays
an impressive library of no less than 578 books. At
least 210 books were in Greek. Except for a few
renaissance works in Italian, the bulk of the remain¬
der were in Latin. The content of the librar)' reflects
Aurispa's himianist interests: very few medieval
authors are represented, and the focus is on the lit¬
erature of Greek and Roman antiquity. In this area,
Aurispa's collection is the most complete since the
end of antiquity. It does not contain a full run of what
can be found in the Loeb classical library, but this
modern series is the comparison that springs to
mind. But there are also some conspicuous lacunae,
such as Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and Civil Wars,
Quinlilian's rhetorical writings, and the Greek
Anthologf, a copy of which Aurispa had actually
brought home from one of his Greek Journeys.

Apart from these specific gaps, the inventoiy con¬
jures an image of "a highly specialized library, col¬
lected with passion and intelligence" (Franceschini).
In other words, it is the library of a scholarly biblio¬
phile. It must have taken many years and a deter¬
mined effort to assemble such a collection, especially
since Aurispa does not appear to have been a wealthy
man. He complains about his lack of means in a let¬
ter dated 1437 to the viceroy of his native Sicily and
even claims that he had to sell his clothes to be able
to buy books in Constantinople. Though this asser-