Enoch from Ascoli

Enoch von Ascoli (* around 1400 with Ascoli Piceno ; † around 1457), Italian Enoch d'Ascoli or Latin Enoch Asculanus was a humanistic teacher and commissioner of Pope Nicholas V to search for manuscripts with classical texts.

Life

Enoch of Ascoli was raised by Francesco Filelfo . He was the teacher of Cosimo de 'Medici's sons . Around 1440 he taught in Perugia , then in Rome.

Services

He was an Italian humanist scholar and commissioner of Pope Nicholas V for the search for manuscripts with classical texts. On behalf of this Pope he looked for manuscripts, first in the Middle East and then in Northern Europe (Germany, Denmark, Norway).

Nicholas V wrote a letter to Enoch of Ascoli in 1451, obliging him to search the monastic libraries in Germany for ancient texts that were lost through the fault of earlier times ( culpa superiorum temporum sunt deperditi ). The Pope made it clear that his aim was to create a large library: so that we could have a library of all Latin and Greek books for the general benefit of learned men, befitting the prestige of the Pope and the Holy See ( ut pro communi doctorum virorum comodo habeamus librorum omnium tum latinorum tum grecorum bibliothecam condecentem pontificis et sedis apostolicae dignitati ).

In 1455 he bought the manuscript Codex Hersfeldensis (with Germania , Agricola and Dialogus de oratoribus des Tacitus as well as grammarians and rhetors from De viris illustribus by Suetonius ) in the Hersfeld monastery . In Fulda Monastery he acquired a manuscript of the cookbook De re coquinaria (About the art of cooking).

literature

• Paolo Viti: Enoch d'Ascoli . In: Dizionario biografico degli Italiani Volume 42, pp. 695–699 ( online version at treccani.it )
• Albert C. Clark: "The Reappearance of the Texts of the Classics"
• "De Re Coquinaria of Apicius" published by Walter M. Hill, 1936 by LacusCurtius