Manuscript Collecting as Social Prestige in Quattrocento Italy: The Case of Tommaso Spinelli

Tommaso Spinelli was a fifteenth-century papal banker and Florentine textile merchant who collected a variety of manuscripts, including works by Cicero, Ovid, Jerome, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. This paper undertakes a codicological investigation of manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and documents in the Spinelli Archive to reconstruct a broken codex that once belonged to Spinelli and to reevaluate his reading and collecting habits. I argue for a new schema of categorization for Spinelli’s manuscript collection based on three distinct types of edification, demonstrate that his literary interests lay largely in vernacular works, including volgarizzamenti, and ultimately show that his personal library reinforces the notion that the nouveau riche merchant class of Quattrocento Italy used book collecting to enhance their social prestige alongside public endeavors such as ecclesiastical patronage—a relationship that in Spinelli’s case also involved the gifting of manuscripts. This paper therefore offers a window into the intellectual life of a man whose career has largely remained in the shadow of his more notable contemporaries and associates, including Cosimo de’ Medici, Poggio Bracciolini, and Pope Eugenius IV.