Welcome to
The Compendium moralium notabilium Project

The purpose of this digital humanities project is to provide open access research materials from Geremia da Montagnone's Compendium moralium notabilium, an early humanist florilegium compiled at Padua in the early 14th century (c.1310) which survives in about 50 manuscripts but was printed only once, two centuries after it was created. This website provides two types of resources derived from the 1505 Venice edition, which is entitled "Epytoma Sapientie":

Portrait of
Geremia da Montagnone
by The Novella Master

from a historiated initial "U"

Compendium moralium notabilium

Los Angeles,
Getty Museum,
Ms. Ludwig XIV 8
fol. 1r (detail)
(early 15th cent.)

Used with permission

  • The Author/Source Index is the portal for accessing editions of the quotations attributed to particular authors and sources. At present nearly 1700 quotations ascribed to seven classical authors have been edited and are provided through this portal. Each transcribed quotation is accompanied by the version of that passage from a modern edition of the original source text and variants are indicated by breaks in the underscoring in the latter version. Additional auctores will be added in 2024.

  • The Subject Index is the portal for accessing transcriptions of the quotations under particular topics. At present it provides digital transcriptions of all of Partes 1-4 and also Pars 5, Libri 1 and 4. The full transcription should be completed before January 2024.


While this website will provide a critical edition of the 1505 Venice edition, a critical edition based on multiple manuscript witnesses is currently being developed for the Scholastic Commentaries & Texts Archive, directed by Dr. Jeffrey Witt at Loyola University Maryland, who is the primary collaborator on the grant funding this project. One of the manuscripts that is being collated for this project is Toronto, Fisher Rare Book Library, MS 09264, which was produced in or near Padua about a century after Montagnone completed this text in that city.

The following student research assistants have generated draft editions for the Author/Source Index resource: Veronica Parkes (2013), and Erin Kurian, Grant Schreiber, Alasdair Sliter, Alicia Koepke, Graydon Lee & Katrina Van Der Ahe (2023). The latter group also contributed to the development of the SCTA edition of this text. This project has also benefitted from transcription and editing work done under the editor's supervision by Aaron Bolarinho for his 2015 MA thesis: "'…tamquam civili causa' - The Reception of Vegetius and Frontinus in Geremia da Montagnone's Compendium moralium notabilium" (https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1781).

©2013-23 Chris L. Nighman
History Department
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

The editor gratefully acknowledges that seed funding for this project was provided through a 2013 Undergraduate Research Assistant Grant that was partly funded by WLU operating funds and partly by a General Research Grant awarded to WLU by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The completion of this project is being financed by a 2021 SSHRC Insight Grant for the Digital Auctores Project.