Vittori Girolamo

Girolamo Vittori (also Gerolamo Vittori; in French forms, Hiérosme or Hierosme Victor) was a Bolognese Protestant exile and lexicographer active at Geneva in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The surviving biographical record is limited, and the year of his death remains unknown. He was born at Bologna before or about 1549 and, amid the persecution of adherents of the Reformation in Italy, settled with his family at Geneva in 1567. In 1573 he married Camilla Arnolfini, a member of a Lucchese family established in the city; the marriage produced seven children. On 30 December 1574 he obtained Genevan citizenship and continued to reside there. These circumstances place Vittori within the substantial Italian Reformed diaspora whose members contributed to the commercial, intellectual, and typographical life of Calvinist Geneva, although no detailed account of his occupation or education has been securely established. ([redalyc.org](https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/5175/517554417017.pdf?utm_source=openai))

Vittori is known principally through the Tesoro de las tres lenguas española, francesa y italiana, accompanied by the parallel French title Thresor des trois langues, espagnolle, françoise et italienne. The first authenticated edition appeared at Geneva in 1609, with Philippe Albert and Alexandre Pernet associated with its publication. On the title-page Vittori was identified as “Hierosme Victor Bolonois,” while an Italian prefatory address bore the form “Girolamo Vittori, Cittadino Bolognese.” The work was initially divided into two complementary sequences: the first arranged Spanish headwords with French and Italian equivalents, and the second French headwords with Italian and Spanish equivalents. It was thus conceived as a practical instrument for composition and linguistic acquisition rather than as a historical or etymological dictionary. Its trilingual organization answered the requirements of a mobile European readership—merchants, travellers, secretaries, tutors, translators, and cultivated readers—for whom French, Italian, and Spanish possessed considerable diplomatic, commercial, and literary currency. ([search.worldcat.org](https://search.worldcat.org/title/Tesoro-de-las-tres-lenguas-francesa-italiana-y-espanola-Thresor-des-trois-langues-francoise-italiene-espagnolle-%3A-auquel-est-continue-l%27explication-de-toutes-les-trois-respectivement-l%27une-par-l%27autre-%3A-divise-en-deux-parties-.../oclc/1045568977))

The textual ancestry of the Tesoro is unusually complex. Vittori took as his immediate foundation César Oudin’s Tesoro de las dos lenguas francesa y española, first printed at Paris in 1607. He reproduced most of Oudin’s Spanish–French and French–Spanish material, even incorporating the latter’s preliminary notice on Spanish orthography, and supplied Italian equivalents. Vittori’s Italian preface represented his labour as the translation into Italian of a Spanish–French dictionary, but did not identify the dictionary or its author. The book was not, however, merely a mechanical trilingualization of Oudin. Louis Cooper’s comparative analysis established that Vittori introduced approximately three thousand additional articles, besides numerous smaller alterations, abridgements, reformulations, and corrections. The origin of all these additions has not been conclusively determined, and the older assertion that his Spanish–Italian material simply derived from Cristóbal de las Casas cannot be maintained without qualification. Vittori claimed to have drawn his Italian usage from distinguished Tuscan writers in prose and verse; the quality of the resulting equivalents is uneven, but later editions substantially revised parts of the Italian text. ([nrfh.colmex.mx](https://nrfh.colmex.mx/index.php/nrfh/article/download/367/367))

The relationship between Vittori and Oudin became a celebrated instance of reciprocal appropriation in early modern lexicography. In the preliminary matter to the second edition of his bilingual Tesoro of 1616, Oudin denounced the Genevan dictionary for reproducing his work, adding Italian, and claiming the honour of compilation. He also criticized Vittori’s command of French and Spanish and cited a mistaken Italian explanation of the cedilla as evidence. Yet Oudin’s own revised edition incorporated a large proportion—Cooper estimated nearly three quarters—of the supplementary entries that had first appeared in Vittori’s 1609 dictionary. The episode should be understood within the highly cumulative working practices of Renaissance and seventeenth-century lexicography, in which dictionaries were routinely enlarged from earlier repertories, but it also illustrates the growing importance attached to authorial attribution and commercial priority. Vittori’s contribution was therefore paradoxical: his dictionary depended fundamentally upon Oudin, while the additions made in Geneva subsequently entered Oudin’s own textual tradition and, through later dictionaries, enjoyed a still wider diffusion. ([nrfh.colmex.mx](https://nrfh.colmex.mx/index.php/nrfh/article/download/367/367))

The publishing history of the Tesoro is marked by false dates, altered title-pages, divided publishing responsibilities, and unstable attribution. The supposed edition of 1606 is now understood to represent a typographical error for 1616: the first part bears the defective date M.DC.VI, whereas the second is dated M.DC.XVI. In 1617 the first part was reissued with a changed title-page that suppressed Vittori’s name and attributed the compilation collectively to Oudin, Nicot, the Crusca, and other authorities. A third sequence, arranged Italian–French–Spanish and advertised as drawn from various authors and lexicographers, especially the Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca, was also added to the undertaking. This third part largely reorganized material already distributed through the earlier sequences, although it completed the symmetrical architecture expected of a three-language dictionary. A complete three-part edition followed in 1627, with further editions in 1637, 1644, and 1671. Vittori’s name returned to the title-pages of 1637 and 1644, both associated with Jacques Crespin; in 1671 the De Tournes edition again presented the work without naming either Vittori or Oudin. There is no secure evidence that Vittori personally supervised these later transformations. ([idus.us.es](https://idus.us.es/bitstreams/4837f039-3473-40e0-af57-e4b61dc688dd/download))

The so-called Antwerp issue dated 1614 further exemplifies the commercial expedients surrounding Genevan printing. Examination of surviving copies has shown that it is not an independent edition but an issue of the 1609 printing furnished with substituted title-pages and the fictitious Antwerp imprint of “Corneille Lectin.” The false imprint was apparently intended to facilitate the export of a book produced in Calvinist Geneva into territories where Genevan publications were liable to censorship or confiscation. Other copies bear Cologny, Geneva, or forms liable to confusion with Cologne; in certain surviving books the place-name was cancelled or overprinted. Such variants, together with the separate title-pages and occasionally different booksellers attached to the several parts, account for many erroneous catalogue descriptions and mistaken attributions. The established sequence is most conservatively represented as the 1609 printing with its 1614 issue, the 1616–17 complex, and the editions of 1627, 1637, 1644, and 1671. ([resdi.net](https://resdi.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/resdi-vol-6.pdf))

Vittori’s historical significance resides less in an independently conceived theory of language than in the adaptation, enlargement, and transmission of lexicographical material across linguistic and confessional frontiers. His Tesoro belongs simultaneously to the history of Spanish–French lexicography, Italian language teaching, the Italian Protestant presence in Geneva, and the international commerce of reference books. Its repeated reprinting over more than six decades demonstrates the utility of its trilingual format, while its complicated material history reveals the active role of printers and booksellers in reshaping dictionaries after their nominal compiler had disappeared from view. Modern historical lexicography continues to cite the 1609 Tesoro as evidence for early Spanish vocabulary, confirming that a work assembled through extensive textual borrowing nevertheless became an important witness to the circulation and interpretation of the Romance lexicon in seventeenth-century Europe. ([temporalraeweb.rae.es](https://temporalraeweb.rae.es/dhle/panderero?utm_source=openai))