Welcome to
The Manipulus/Lucula noctis Project

This website provides an open access revised edition of the Lucula noctis (1405) by Giovanni Dominici, O.P. (d.1419), based upon Edmund Hunt's critical edition of this text (University of Notre Dame Press, 1940), which superseded the 1908 edition published at Paris by Remi Coulon.

The Lucula is an extended scholastic critique of humanist education that Dominici, a Florentine Dominican, sent to Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of Florence and the pre-eminent humanist scholar of his day.

In the process of editing Thomas of Ireland's influential florilegium for The Electronic Manipulus florum Project, I discovered that Dominici made extensive use of this anthology of authoritative quotations from classical, patristic and medieval writers. This discovery has inspired me to propose a new critical edition of the Lucula. I intend to maintain this website only until the new edition appears(expected by 2028), at which time the website will be retired.

The revised edition provided on this website doesn't reproduce Hunt's critical apparatus for the three extant manuscripts, nor does it replicate his source apparatus for the various quotations and textual references in this text; rather, it demonstrates the textual evidence for Dominici's reception of 78 quotations that he surely or very likely derived from the Manipulus florum.

Since March 2016, the revised edition of Dominici's prologue and all 47 chapters has been accessible via the Capitula Page. The 78 quotations that have been identified as being definitely or probably derived from the Manipulus florum are highlighted and supplied with a marginal link to a PDF source apparatus file for that quotation, which provides the versions in the Lucula and the Manipulus in parallel columns along with the corresponding passage from the original source/s, and in some cases the intermediate source/s as well. Variants in the Manipulus and the original source/s are indicated by breaks in underscoring.


©2015-23 Chris L. Nighman
History Department
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada