An unpublished letter of Bonifacius Amerbach to Lukas Schroteisen from the collection of N. P. Likhachev at the Archive of Institut of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint-Petersburg

Abstract

A previously unpublished text stored in the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences is edited in the present article. It is a letter from Basel lawyer Bonifacius Amerbach (1495–1562) to Lucas Schroteisen (d. 1564), chancellor of Duke Württemberg and count of Montbéliard Christoph (1515–1568), dated 17 March 1552. The publication provides also a thoroughly description of the letter as an autograph of Amerbach and its unique significance for the extensive correspondence between the two 16th-century legal scholars. The accompanying article provides biographical information about Bonifacius Amerbach and Lucas Schroteisen and reveals the main themes addressed in both the St. Petersburg letter and the correspondence between the legal scholars: expertise in matters of wine and the use of quotations and phrases from the works of classical antiquity in everyday written speech. A separate study traces the history of the letter’s journey from Schroteisen’s personal archive in Montbéliard to N.P. Likhachev’s collection in St. Petersburg. The main focus is on establishing the owners of the letter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Archival data reveals that the letter belonged to Swiss manufacturer and collector Alfred Bovet (1841–1900) and was sold in 1884 at an auction held by É. Charavay to Heinrich Lempertz the Elder (1816–1898), a scholar and collector from Cologne, resold 1906 to Berlin antique dealer Martin Breslauer (1871–1940), from whom the letter was purchased in 1909/1910 by Nicolai P. Likhachev (1862–1936). This publication serves both as a study of the Renaissance in Europe and humanistic jurisprudence, and as a research of the formation of N.P. Likhachev’s collection