Today in 1483, the Manipulus florum ('A Handful of Flowers') was first printed in Piacenza, Italy, by Jacobus de Tyela.
The Manipulus florum, a collection of about 6,000 quotations from authoritative sources, was compiled by Thomas of Ireland or Thomas Hibernicus in 1306 at the Sorbonne, where he was a fellow.
The medieval florilegia were “handy reference works that were widely employed prior to the twentieth century by writers of both vernacular and Latin texts to find eloquent, authoritative quotations from venerable authors.”
[Thomas] assigned unique reference letters to the individual entries under each topic, doubling the letters when the number of entries for a given topic exceeded 23 (i.e. the number of letters in the Latin alphabet... As Thomas explains in his Preface, these reference letters were created to support his cross-referencing system; at the end of nearly all of the topics he provided a reference list which includes similar topics (essentially synonyms and antonyms, such as Temperancia and Gula which are cross-referenced at the end of Abstinencia) and, more usefully, individual entries of related interest under unrelated topics. According to Mary and Richard Rouse, this combination of an alphabetized subject listing and a cross-referencing system represents the cutting edge of information technology at the beginning of the 14th century.