# Favalli, Ad decuriones Cremonenses, 1563

**Titolo bibliografico:** Hieronymi Faballi Laudensis Ad decuriones Cremonenses in controversia gymnasiarchiae orationes quinque

**Autore:** Favalli Girolamo

**Dati editoriali:** Cremonae, in civitatis palatio apud Vincentium Conctum, 1563 (Cremona, Vincenzo Conti, 1563)

**Codice archivio:** 166

**Prezzo:** 2000.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/favalli-orationes-gymnasiarchiae-1563

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

Two parts in one volume, 8vo (147x95 mm). [16], 402, [6], 106, [4 of 6] pp. Collation: *8 A-BB8 CC4 2A-2G8. Leaves *8, CC4, 2G7-8 are blank. Here lacking the final blank 2G8. Printer’s devices on the title and on ll. CC3r and 2G6v. Colophon on ll. CC2v and 2G6r. Contemporary stiff vellum, inked title on spine and lower edge (recased, endleaves renewed, minor restorations). Ownership entry on the title page (“Caroli Aloysij Ponn […]”). Small paper loss to the lower outer corner of l. Z5 not affecting the text, some pale staining at the beginning of the volume, worm track on a few leaves not affecting the text, a good copy. Rare first edition, dedicated to Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna (1531-1591), Duke of Sabbioneta -the town in Lombardy that he founded and designed according to the Renaissance principles of the “ideal city”-, of Girolamo Favalli’s five orations on the controversy surrounding the government of the public school of Cremona. The book deals more specifically with the organization of public teaching, the professional status and selection of teachers, the admissibility of Jewish learning within Christian institutions, the expansion and repression of Hebrew printing, and the increasingly invasive mechanisms through which the Counter-Reformation sought to regulate books and knowledge. Favalli, who Latinizes his name on the title-page as Hieronymus Faballus Laudensis, came from the Lodi area but became closely integrated into the learned and ecclesiastical world of Cremona. His surviving activity places him within the rhetorical and humanist milieu of the city’s schools and within the intellectual network associated with figures such as Marco Paolo Tartesio and Marco Girolamo Vida. The dispute had begun before the appearance of the present collection. Favalli had already intervened in print on the choice of the gymnasiarch, while other Cremonese humanists took opposing positions. Francesco Zava had defended the preservation of the traditional organization of literary studies and subsequently published an oration explicitly directed adversus Gymnasiarchiam. Tartesio, Vettioli, Favalli and others entered the same debate. What was at stake was not merely the appointment of a headmaster but the institutional form of the public school itself: whether educational authority should remain distributed among several teachers and schools or be concentrated more firmly in a single directing office, how professors should be selected, what weight should be given to reputation and expertise, how salaries and civic resources should be allocated, and what intellectual structure best served the interests of the city. One of the most historically significant elements of the controversy is the discussion of whether Jews might legitimately be admitted as teachers within the Cremonese educational institution. In Cremona in 1563 that question carried an exceptional weight because only four years earlier the city had experienced one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of Hebrew books in Renaissance Italy. In 1559 the Dominican scholar Sisto da Siena, together with Girolamo Franchi and under the authority of the Holy Office, participated in a campaign of censorship, confiscation and destruction of Hebrew books. The operation struck not merely private Jewish ownership but the institutional world of Jewish learning and the material infrastructure of Hebrew printing. It formed part of the wider anti-Talmud campaign that had begun with the Roman burning of the Talmud in 1553 and had rapidly affected other major centres of Hebrew printing. Cremona had initially benefited from the disruption of Hebrew printing elsewhere. When restrictions made production increasingly difficult in Venice, printing activity shifted toward centres such as Cremona, Mantua, Sabbioneta and Riva. Vincenzo Conti’s press became one of the principal beneficiaries of this displacement, and from the mid-1550s it developed into one of the most important centres of Hebrew printing in northern Italy. That period of relative opportunity did not last. By 1559 the same inquisitorial pressure had reached Cremona, and Hebrew books were physically seized and burned. The precise number of volumes destroyed varies in the historiography. What is secure is that the campaign directly affected the commercial stock of Conti’s own establishment. Entire deposits of Hebrew books belonging to the Conti press were among those seized and destroyed. The printer of Favalli’s 1563 volume was therefore not merely a witness to the repression of Hebrew books; his own enterprise had been materially struck by it. The events of 1559 nevertheless reveal a cultural situation more complicated than a simple opposition between Christian and Jewish learning. Sisto da Siena himself combined hostility to the Talmud with serious Hebrew scholarship and could distinguish between Jewish books he considered dangerous and Hebrew works he believed useful to Christians. Hebrew knowledge was not rejected indiscriminately; it was classified, appropriated, licensed, censored and suppressed according to Christian criteria of orthodoxy and utility. Favalli’s discussion of Jewish teachers belongs precisely within that intellectual environment. In one sphere ecclesiastical authorities were deciding which Hebrew books might legitimately circulate; in another, the civic authorities of Cremona were debating whether Jewish learning might enter public education through the person of a teacher. Both controversies concern the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in a Christian city. Vincenzo Conti’s role makes that connection still more immediate. He was one of the most significant Christian entrepreneurs involved in Hebrew printing in sixteenth-century Italy. His Cremonese press, active in Hebrew from 1556, issued more than forty Hebrew titles and employed skilled Jewish workers and correctors. Among its most celebrated productions was the Cremonese Zohar of 1559-1560, one of the major monuments of early printed Kabbalah. The workshop therefore stood at the intersection of Christian capital, Jewish scholarship, converted Jewish correctors, ecclesiastical licensing and commercial competition. The crisis of 1559 appears to have affected not only Conti’s stock of books but part of the specialized typographical equipment used in his Hebrew production. The Gross Family Collection records that Conti had taken particular pride in having new Hebrew fonts cast for his press rather than purchasing worn material from other printers, and that his earlier Hebrew books employed a cursive rabbinic type. Those rabbinic cursive characters were burned in 1559 and were replaced by newly cast square Hebrew letters. The wording of the imprint “in Civitatis Palatio” on the title page and in the colophons makes clear that the physical place of production was the same institutional environment in which the educational policies discussed in the book were being decided. Favalli’s speeches were therefore addressed to the Cremonese decurions and printed within the civic palace itself. The structure of the edition appears to preserve traces of a composite textual history. A more substantial first part is followed by a second independently paginated section. Since Favalli had already intervened in the gymnasiarchia controversy before 1563, it is reasonable to suspect that the collected volume may incorporate materials originating at different stages of the dispute and later reorganized into a larger polemical collection. Favalli was a humanist and an orator, originally from Castiglione d’Adda near Lodi. He later became provost of the Church of St. Lorenzo in Monticelli in Cremona. He also published Orationes in M. Hieronymi Vidae Cremonensis Albae episcopi laudem I. In Nicolai Sfondrati Crem. episcopi in suam dioecesim aduentu II. Ad animulam Crem. iambicum carmen. In funere Io. Baptistae Schitij III. De gymnasiarcho deligendo IIII (Cremona, Vincenzo Conti, 1561) (cf. F. Arisi, Cremona literata, Cremona, 1741, II, p. 276).

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

M. Benayahu, Ha-defus ha-‘Ivri bi-Kremona: toldot bet ha-defus shel Vincenzo Conti, ha-censurah ve-serifat ha-sefarim, u-problemat hadpasat ha-Zohar, Jerusalem, 1971; R. Ricciardi, Conti, Vincenzo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 28, Rome, 1983, s.v.; R. Barbisotti, Ipotesi su Vincenzo Conti, stampatore cremonese del ’500, in: “Strenna dell’ADAFA”, 33, 1993, pp. 90-116; A. Raz-Krakotzkin, Printing, Burning and Censorship: Hebrew Books in Italy in the 1550s., in: “Judaica”, 66, 2010, pp. 1-12; M. Benfatto, The Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books: New Sources and Methodologies for Studying Catholic Censorship and Other Forms of Dismemberment and Rescue of Hebrew Texts in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy, in: “Cromohs”, 26, 2023. Edit 16, CNCE18452; USTC, 828886.

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