Ambrogio Calepino

Ambrogio Calepino, painting in the former Augustinian monastery in Acolman , Mexico

Ambrogio Calepino or Ambrogio Calepio , Latin Ambrosius Calepinus (* 1440  ? In Bergamo , † late 1509 / early 1510 ibid), was an Italian lexicographer during the Renaissance . His Latin dictionary , written in the spirit of humanism , found widespread use in the 16th to 18th centuries and appeared in over two hundred, mostly heavily revised and expanded editions. As a result, the name “Calepino” became the name of a dictionary in several languages.

Life

Convento di Sant'Agostino, now the University of Bergamo

Calepino (= "of Calepio") was born the illegitimate son of Count Trussardo, Lord of Calepio , and was baptized with the name Iacopo. He had two brothers: Marco and Nicolino († 1484), who was legitimately fathered and inherited the family property. With his permission, Iacopo and Marco, who was also born out of wedlock, were legitimized.

In 1458 Iacopo was accepted into the Augustinian order , namely in its Reformed branch, the so-called Observants. After the novitiate in Milan in the convent of Santa Maria Incoronata, he received the religious name Ambrogio in the following year, under which he became known.

After about two years each in Mantua , Cremona and Brescia , the decision on his further career in the order was made in Cremona in 1466. At this point he was already ordained a priest. He chose the humanistic studies because his superiors contradicted his desire to study philosophy and he was constitutionally too weak for the ministry.

Then he went back to Bergamo, where he lived in the Convento di Sant'Agostino. This convent was founded by Augustinian hermits at the end of the 13th century and since 1442 in the hands of the Reformed Augustinians who rebuilt it with the support of the citizens of Bergamo - including the Calepio family - after it had previously fallen into disrepair. From the years before 1487 at the latest, Calepino worked here on his life's work, a Latin dictionary , because the first surviving draft is dated to this year.

The distribution through printing of the dictionary, which was already in handwritten form, was a personal concern of Calepino in order to reach a wider audience. Calepino's nephew Count Andrea Calepio (Nicolino's son) partially financed the printing. Dionisio Bertocchi from Reggio Emilia was chosen as printer , perhaps because he had already gained experience with Latin dictionaries with an edition of Cornucopia Perottis 1494, perhaps because he promised to print in Bergamo in the presence of the author (which was not done) . The book was published in Reggio Emilia in 1502 and was dedicated to the Senate and the people of Bergamo, a gesture for which the City Council bequeathed 25 gold ducats (approx. 150 lire) to Calepino in February 1503. A copy of the dictionary cost 4 lire 10 soldi.

From a letter from Calepino to the order general Egidio da Viterbo of October 1, 1509, it emerges that he was sick and almost blind at that time. He died shortly afterwards.

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The Latin Dictionary

Example page from Calepino's Dictionarium from 1502

With the Dictionarium , Calepino created the first Latin dictionary in an almost modern sense. He was guided by the Cornucopia of Niccolò Perotti ("Cornucopia", from 1489 several editions, a commentary on the Roman poet Martial , who could also serve as a dictionary) and the work The subtleties of the Latin language (1471) by Lorenzo Valla . In accordance with these guidelines, he largely ignored late antique and medieval Latin , while the Renaissance humanists found a place right next to the classics. The church fathers, especially Augustine and Jerome , are also often quoted.

Gigliola Soldi Rondinini and Tullio De Mauro describe the intention of the dictionary in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani as follows: "The dictionary sees itself as a guide for those who want to leave the Middle Ages behind and ascend back to classical Latinity."

The focus of the dictionary articles was on explanations of meaning. Quotations from ancient authors should legitimize the use of the language. Compared to the medieval dictionaries, such as the widespread Catholicon of the Dominican Johannes Balbus from 1286, Calepino's theological teaching content and etymological explanations were less important.

Calepino's dictionary also recorded proper names, and some word explanations went into antiquarian, even if they did not concern proper names. For example, the article “pingo” = “to paint” contained a history of painting.

A revised version of his dictionary, which he was able to finish in 1509, appeared in Venice in 1520. It corrected errors in the first edition and added around 1,500 new lemmas.

The researchers of the work Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli and Francesco Lo Monaco name several characteristics of the dictionary that could have contributed to its popularity:

• The high number of lemmas (approx.20,000)
• The diversity of the fields of meaning: from literature to history, theology, geography, science and medicine
• The brevity of the article
• The ordered structure of the articles (mostly in the order: accents and spellings; grammatical peculiarities; etymology; if available: Greek equivalents; main meaning; if available: other meanings, introduced with “hinc” = “therefore”, “aliquando” = “sometimes "," Alias ​​"=" or also "," item "=" and also "; example sentences; if available: sub-lemmas)
• The richness and usefulness of the text examples
• The alphabetical order that almost always goes to the third letter of the lemma
• Last but not least, the tendency towards personal anecdotes and fleeting comments is a lovable quality of the work.

Other works

Apart from his main work, Calepino wrote a few other writings. In 1483 Giacomo Filippo Foresti , a brother of Calepino in the monastery of Sant'Agostino in Bergamo, published the Supplementum Chronicarum , a comprehensive historical work, to which Calepino contributed praise from Venice . However, this is only a poem in four hexameter verses.

A vita of the hermit Johannes Bonus , which he probably wrote not much later than 1484, is more extensive. This happened in the course of a renaissance of veneration of this important precursor of the order of the Augustinian Hermits.

After the first edition of the Dictionarium , Calepino worked on a smaller Latin-Italian dictionary, but it remained a manuscript. He is also said to have written a sacred work Confessionale and two Latin hymns to Clare of Montefalco and Augustine.

Adaptations of the dictionary from the 16th to the 18th centuries

Title page of the six-language Basler Calepino edition from 1568

Marble bust by Gaetano Matteo Monti, Bibliotheca Angelo Mai, Bergamo

The Dictionarium achieved rapid and long-lasting success. From 1502 to 1509 there were nine editions, by 1520 there were already about 26, which had appeared in Venice, Basel, Strasbourg, Paris, Lyon and other places in Europe.

Soon after the first edition, the need for an improved new version arose. Around 1528 this request was made to the Parisian printer Robert Estienne . Since Estienne could not win scholars for this difficult task, he undertook it himself and in 1531 published the Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae Thesaurus . Although Estienne's thesaurus is an original work, it was in part a reworking of material found at Calepino, which Estienne rearranged, added new things, removed old items, checked and completed documents and provided French translations added.

In the course of the 16th century, the Dictionarium of Calepinus developed into a multilingual dictionary. However, the Latin language always remained the basis of the word explanations and equivalents in other languages ​​were usually not added continuously. The first edition already contained occasional Greek information, the second version expanded this, and later the Cologne edition of 1534 in particular advertised its suitability as a Greek dictionary. The first multilingual edition was the Pentaglottos , Antwerp 1545, which offered Greek, German , Dutch and French, three living West and Central European languages.

Most Calepino editions in German-speaking countries were published in Basel. They partly took up the improvements introduced by Estienne, for example with regard to the alphabetical order of the lemmas or the separation of the language and name dictionary. Staff were scholars like Conrad Gessner and Christian Wurstisen . The Basel edition of 1590 comprised eleven languages: Latin, Hebrew , Greek, French, Italian , German, Flemish, Spanish , Polish , Hungarian and English . It was reprinted in 1598, 1605, 1616 and 1627 and represents the climax of the polyglot development of the Calepino.

Spanish was first included in the Lyon edition of 1559. In 1595, Jesuit missionaries published a Latin- Portuguese - Japanese version of the dictionary in Amakusa, Japan, near Nagasaki .

At the beginning of the 18th century, the linguist Jacopo Facciolati created one of the last revisions ( septem linguarum Calepinus . 2 volumes, Padua 1718) with the help of Egidio Forcellini , which was reprinted several times.

Albert Labarre's bibliography lists 211 editions from 1502 to 1779.

Others

Because of the widespread use of his work, the name “Calepinus” has become a synonym for all kinds of dictionaries in several languages, such as Italian “calepino”, French “calepin” (with the second meaning “notebook”) and English “calepin”.

In 1839 a bust of Ambrosio Calepino was placed in the Bergamo Ateneo. The marble sculpture created by the classical sculptor Gaetano Matteo Monti (1776–1847) is now in the Angelo Mai library. With several manuscripts and 48 different print editions, this library has one of the most important Calepino collections. The most extensive collection worldwide, with 81 issues, is that of the Bavarian State Library .

Works

• Ambrosii Calepini Bergomatis Dictionarium. Dionisio Bertocchi, Reggio Emilia 1502 ( books.google.com ).
• Ambrosius Calepinus Bergomensis, dictionum Latinarum, et Graecarum interpres perspicacissimus, omniumque vocabulorum insertor acutissimus . Bernardino Benaglio, Venice 1520.
• Vita of Johannes Bonus in three books. In: Acta Sanctorum . Octobris. T. 9. Brussels 1858, pp. 748–767 (edition Paris and Rome 1869 Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).

literature

• Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro:  Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 16:  Caccianiga-Caluso. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1973.
• Albert Labarre: Bibliography du dictionarium d'Ambrogio Calepino. (1502-1779). Koerner, Baden-Baden 1975.
• Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Provincia di Bergamo, Bergamo 2002 ( giuliooraziobravi.it ).
• Maria Mencaroni Zoppetti, Erminio Gennaro (ed.): Società, cultura, luoghi al tempo di Ambrogio da Calepio. Bergamo 2005 ( table of contents ).

Web links

Wikisource: Ambrogio Calepino  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Ambrogio Calepio  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Further information and bibliography
• Calepino's work editions in EDIT 16
• Calepino's publications in the Opac des Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale
• Publications on Calepino in the Opac des Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale
• Publications about Calepino in the Opac of the Regesta Imperii
• Standard entry in the Opac of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale
• Greek spirit from Basel presses - Basel University Library
• Short biography and material on Italian Calepino editions in seven languages - Accademia della Crusca (Italian)
• Works by and about Ambrogio Calepino  in the German Digital Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002, p. 25. According to other information: around 1435 (Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino. 1973.)
2. ↑ In a letter of January 31, 1510 from Father Giovan Gabriele di Martinengo to the Order General Giovan Benedetto da Ferrara, Calepino is mentioned as recently deceased. See Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino. 1973.
3. ↑ Ms. 883 in the Bibliotheca Trivulziana in Milan ; Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002, p. 13, p. 33.
4. ↑ Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino . 1973.
5. ↑ "Il dizionario intende offrirsi come guida a chi Intenda risalire, oltre l'età di mezzo, alla classicità." Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, ditto il Calepino . 1973.
6. ↑ Peter O. Müller: German Lexicography of the 16th Century . Tübingen 2001, p. 118.
7. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002. pp. 38-42; MAB 39, Biblioteca Angelo Mai .
8. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002. p. 43 f.
9. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002, p. 30 f., P. 63.
10. ^ Kaspar Elm: Comunità eremitiche italiane del XII e XIII secolo ; Acta Sanctorum. Octobris. T. 9. Paris and Rome 1869, p. 745 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
11. ↑ Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino. 1973. Manuscript MAB 38, Angelo Mai Library .
12. ^ Agostino Salvioni: Di Ambrogio Calepino e del suo dizionario. Bergamo 1839, pp. 42-44 ( Google Books ).
13. ↑ Gigliola Soldi Rondinini, Tullio De Mauro: Calepio, Ambrogio, detto il Calepino . 1973. Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002, p. 13.
14. ^ Lexicographical works of Robert Estienne
15. ↑ Peter O. Müller: German Lexicography of the 16th Century . Tübingen 2001, pp. 119-126.
16. ↑ Peter Burke : Words make people. Society and Languages ​​in Early Modern Europe . Wagenbach, Berlin 2006. ISBN 978-3-8031-3621-3 . P. 129.
17. ↑ Dictionarium Latino Lusitanicum, ac Japonicum ex Ambrosii Calepini volumine depromptum. Amacusa 1595. Reprint Tokyo 1953. Cf. Telmo Verdelho: O Vocabulario da lingoa de Iapam (1603), uma fonte inexplorada da lexicografia portuguesa. In: Giovani Ruffino (ed.): Atti del XXI Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Romanza (Palermo, 18-24 Setembro 1995). Vol. III (Lessicologia e semantica delle lingue romance). Tübingen 1998 ( clp.dlc.ua.pt PDF). The same: O Calepino em Portugal ea obra lexicográfica de Amaro Reboredo. In: Revista Portuguesa de Filologia, Vol. XXIII, 1999-2000, pp. 125-149. ( clp.dlc.ua.pt PDF).
18. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Ambrogio Calepio detto il Calepino e il suo dizionario. Bergamo 2002, p. 38.
19. ^ Christian Friedrich Schwan : Dictionary of the German and French languages. Mannheim 1782–1798 ( google books ). "This is why the French have given the word calepin the general meaning of a dictionary, or a collection of remarks, excerpts, etc. prepared for its own use."
20. ↑ James AH Murray (Ed.): A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles . Oxford 1888–1928 ( Text Archive - Internet Archive ). “(Obs.) From Franz. Calepin, ital. Calepino, dictionary, polyglot… fig. one's book of authority or reference; one's notebook or memorandum-book. ”For Latin“ Calepinus ”cf. J. Ramminger: Neo-Latin word list. neulatein.de , also the verb “calepinare” was used in the sense of “concentrate on the single word (neglecting the context), proceeding word for word.” neulatein.de
21. ↑ Catalog Biblioteca May ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
22. ^ Giulio Orazio Bravi, Maria Giuseppina Ceresoli, Francesco Lo Monaco: Manoscritti e edizioni del Calepino nella Civica Biblioteca “A. May". Numero monografico di: Bergomum. Bollettino della Civica Biblioteca Angelo Mai, 97th year, 2002/1. P. 40 f. ( giuliooraziobravi.it ).