Introduction

Summary

For those who study the physical and material culture of chivalry, Pietro Monte's Collectanea is a resource without parallel. We can glean much about the material world of the knight from other written sources, whether in the technical instructions offered by combat treatises, in references embedded in theoretical writings like those of Ramón Llull and Christine de Pisan, or in the workaday details recorded in inventories and accountbooks. Medieval painting and sculpture are crucial sources as well, and of course there are the surviving artifacts, whether preserved in ancestral armories or excavated from the ground. But among all these windows on the physicality of the chivalric past, Monte's work stands out in a class by itself.

Surviving copies of Monte's writings are rare, and for a long time the Collectanea was widely believed to be lost. It began to receive scholarly attention from Raimund Sobotka and others in the 1970s and 1980s, since when it has become an object of considerable international interest, and today it is readily available in digital format. Nonetheless the work has remained something of a closed book, largely owing to the linguistic challenges it poses. The Collectanea addresses a wide range of topics whose technical subject matter ranges well outside the mainstream of historical scholarship: Monte explores topics as diverse as biological heredity, the manufacture of life-preservers, and the best way to execute a long-jump, zeroing in on details as minute as the relative merits of rivets versus leathers in assembling components of armor. The highly specialized – not to say idiosyncratic – vocabulary Monte deploys to cover such wide-ranging topics, combined with the book's multiple linguistic layers, make it a singularly challenging work to interpret.

Yet the fruits are well worth the labor. The information Monte offers about the vocabulary, construction and use of arms and armor is unique among surviving writings from the period when armor was in use. His material on martial arts overlaps with other writings of the period, but he takes the topic in directions well beyond the scope of comparable treatises. His detailed discussions of the rules and techniques of track-and-field sports are unparallelled until centuries later. And amidst it all, he offers a fascinating glimpse of the personal world of a military professional on the cusp between Middle Ages and Renaissance.