BARTHOLOMEW OF URBINO

Augustinian bishop, compiler of patristic compendia; d. 1350. He served the last three years of his life as bishop of his native city of Urbino. In papal documents he is called Bartholomeus Hominis de Taiuti (Ditaiuti or Dio ti aiuti), of which the name given by certain Augustinian historians, Bartholomeus Simonis de Carusis, may be a corruption. He was a student at the universities of bologna and paris and after 1321 was a teacher at Bologna, where no doubt he began his friendship with a fellow teacher, the canonist joannes andreae. It was there, too, that he must have first met petrarch. From Petrarch's pen there is a letter to Bartholomew (Fam. 8.6), probably dating from 1348 or 1349, forwarding two alternate sets of verses for the embellishment of the Augustinian's principal work. This opus by Bartholomew, the widely used and still valuable Milleloquium veritatis s. Augustini (Lyons 1555), suggested by the Hieronymianus of Joannes Andreae, reveals in its compiler a knowledge of the writings of St. augustine probably unmatched in his time. Dedicated to clement vi, the work is an orderly assembly of perhaps 15,000 citations from Augustine's works, under about 1,000 subject headings (Abel-Zizania). A Distinctio librorum, in which Bartholomew lists and identifies the letters (about 190), the books, and more than 600 sermons from which he quotes, all apparently consulted directly in originali, places Bartholomew among the prehumanist discoverers of Latin manuscripts. Similarly arranged is a less widely dispersed Milleloquium Sancti Ambrosii (Lyons 1556). Little is certain about Bartholomew's other writings.

Bibliography: r. arbesmann, "Der Augustinereremitenorden und der Beginn der humanistischen Bewegung," first pt., in Augustiniana 14 (1964) 277–296; entire work to appear also as monograph. b. m. peebles, "The Verse Embellishments of the Milleloquium Sancti Augustini, " Traditio 10 (1954) 555–566. g. pozzi, "Il Vat. Lat. 479 ed. altri codici annotati da Roberto de' Bardi," Miscellanea del Centro di studi medievali 2 (1958) 142–145. a. zumkeller, "Manuskripte von Werken der Autoren des Augustiner-Eremitenordens in mitteleuropäischen Bibliotheken," Augustiniana 172–174; incomplete list of MSS of the two Milleloquia, also of a doubtful De pugna spirituali. f. dolbeau, "Un sermon inédit de S. Augustin sur la santé corporelle, partiellement cité chez Barthélemy d'Urbino," Revue des études augustiniennes 40 (1994).

[b. m. peebles]