Earlier this year, I proposed that the VMs might possibly have brought by Guillaume Pellicier from Venice to Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier, and listed a short bibliography of titles that would be worth consulting to check this out. A few days ago, I found one of them on the Internet:
Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier, ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542, publiée sous les auspices de la Commission des archives diplomatiques par Alexandre Tausserat-Radel (1899).
Usefully, pp.700-704 of this contain an (admittedly fairly terse) inventory of Pellicier’s personal library of 332 books. However, only one of these sounds even remotely like a candidate for the VMs:-
Hospitalières de Montpellier, Fonds de l’Hôpital général, B. lU; copie.
323. Liber de astronomia., gr., script.,continens lib. XX
Unfortunately, Pellicier seems amply Greek-savvy not to have misdescribed the VMs as a “greek” text, so this seems rather like a dead end. Oh well!
pp.710-721 contains the text “Vita Guillelmi Pellicier, episcopi Monspeliensis, ad virum eruditissimum Bernardum Monfalconiuiu, Benedictinum“, which includes a little bit about Pellicier’s book-buying on p.713 (penultimate paragraph).
As an aside, it’s also possible that had Rondelet acquired the VMs by other means, a quite different fate might have befallen it. According to this 2006 aricle on Clusius (p.95):-
Rondelet himself became very worried after the arrest of Pellicier, and according to Joubert, secretly burned those books in his own private library which he thought might land him in trouble with religious inquisitors.
All of which defensive biblioclasm brings to my mind the underground “Bibliotek” memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, located exactly where the infamous Nazi book burnings began – this was nicely evoked near the end of Alan Cumming’s recent BBC Four documentary on the film Cabaret. The plaque reads: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”