Ken Feinstein's Neville Research Blog: Part 3: Henry Neville's Annotations in Guicciardini's The History of Italy

There is a 1580 copy of Francesco Guicciardini's History of Italy at Audley End. Here is the USTC entry. You can see a facsimile of another copy at Google Books. Here is the title page from Google Books:

The book is on the Billingbear Book List. So we know for a fact that the book was at Henry Neville's ancestral home of Billingbear in 1780:

The 1580 year of publication of this book is significant because Henry Neville was travelling in Europe, and specifically Italy, from 1579-1582. There are many titles on the Billingbear Book list specifically from that time period. It is quite likely that Henry Neville purchased this book when he was in Italy.

The book has several annotations and underlining. The annotations are consistent in terms of handwriting among themselves and a perfect match for the handwriting of Henry Neville.

The book was likely rebound and trimmed at some point, so the annotations are cut off:

As we can clearly see, the three annotations appear to be in the same handwriting. Here is a sample of Henry Neville's reasonably simple italic handwriting from 1599:

And here are samples taken from a letter form 1600 in a "fancy" formal style:

I will do some careful comparisons here, and add in more samples from other letters, but these two samples are enough to confirm the attribution.

Here are "de" and "du" from the annotations compared with "de" from Neville's formal letters. This is an obvious match. The shape and angle of the oval in the "d", the curved upward stroke with nub on top, and the shape and connection to the "e" are all a match:

This less formal example is another good match, though the "d" and "e" are not connected in "dedimus":

Compare "florence" and "flanders" from Neville's handwriting with the annotations. Not especially the shape of the "l" and "r" and "n". The "r" below is Neville's fancy version with a nub at on the end: