Welcome to The Manipulus/Somnium Project

This website provides Open Access research materials from the Somnium (1372) of Giovanni da Legnano in order to document the author's limited but significant reception of Thomas of Ireland's Manipulus florum (1306). The text has been transcribed from the printed critical edition compiled by Giulietta Voltolina for the volume published in 2004 by Maria Consiglia De Matteis with Banca di Legnano.

This digital resource thus serves as an addendum to the printed critical edition, following the template of two previous websites I developed in 2015-16 to document the extensive reception of Manipulus in two 15th-century texts:

- Giovanni Dominici's Lucula noctis (The Manipulus/Lucula noctis Project)

- Walter Bower's Scotichronicon (The Manipulus/Scotichronicon Project).

Marble carving from the tomb of Giovanni da Legnano, by Jacobello & Pierpaolo dalle Masegne (1383-86), Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna

The only intertextual evidence for the reception of Manipulus in Somnium is found in only three capitula in Giovanni da Legnano's Prohemium, but these passages contain 17 quotations that were surely or very likely derived from Manipulus, as demonstrated by links to the relevant fons/fontes apparatus files from The Electronic Manipulus florum Project website.


©2024 Chris L. Nighman
History Department, Wilfrid Laurier University
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto


The editor gratefully acknowledges financial support for this project provided by an Insight Grant awarded in 2021 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for The Digital Auctores Project.
Funds allocated to this component of the Auctores project have been used to pay the salary of Sophia Starkey, an MA student at the Centre for Medieval Studies,
who is working as a Research Assistant on this project.