The Project
This website provides open access research materials from Viridarium consolationis ("Garden of Consolation"), a Latin florilegium containing over 1000 Latin quotations from authoritative sources that was compiled in the mid-13th century by a Dominican friar named Iacobus de Benevento. The text is primarily a revised edition of the version published in 1880 (and mis-attributed to St. Bonaventure) by Luigi Tosti in Bibliotheca Casinensis IV, 263-315, which was transcribed from a 15th-century manuscript: Montecassino, Archivio dell'Abbazia, MS 207. However, a small portion of the text has been transcribed from an earlier manuscript: Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS lat. 1163. This is because Tosti's version, and presumably its manuscript exemplar, lacks two lemmata: 4.2 De patientia and 5.11 De doctoribus sacre scripture. The Modena manuscript was selected for this purpose from the over 150 known surviving manuscript copies because it is one of the few extant copies of Viridarium dating from the 13th century, and one of only two manuscripts that attribute it to Iacobus de Benevento (nearly all copies are anonymous), an attribution confirmed by Tommaso Kaeppeli in "Iacopo da Benevento O.P.," Archivio italiano per la storia della pieta, 1 (1951), 463-79.
Since 11 February 2023 the text of this revised edition has been searchable via the Janus Intertextuality search engine, together with my open access editions of two other Latin florilegia
(Manipulus florum and Liber pharetrae). By August 2024 it is expected that this text will also become available through the Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive (SCTA). I recently published an
early research result from this edition project, which is available as an open access article:
Chris L. Nighman, "The lemma De predicatoribus in Iacobus de Benevento's Viridarium consolationis: an unexpected preaching tract in a Dominican florilegium," Medieval Sermon Studies 67 (2023): 19-28.
