This website provides open access research materials from Viridarium consolationis ("Garden of Consolation"), a Latin florilegium 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 by Luigi Tosti in Bibliotheca Casinensis IV, 263-315, which was transcribed from a 15th-century copy: Montecassino, Archivio dell'Abbazia, MS 207.

However, a small portion of the text has been transcribed from another manuscript, Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS lat. 1163, because Tosti's version, and presumably its manuscript exemplar, lacks two lemmata: 4.2 De patientia & 5.11 De doctoribus sacre scripture. The Modena manuscript was selected for this purpose from the 151 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.

Once this revised edition of Viridarium is completed, the text will then be added to the database of the Janus Intertextuality search engine, joining two other Latin florilegia (Manipulus florum and Liber pharetrae) that can be searched with that research tool, and it will also be published with the Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive (SCTA).