Beschreibung:

Franciscan devotional compendium, including two works by Bonaventura, and another by James of Milan but often misattributed to St. Bonaventura, in Latin with short Middle English marginalia, decorated manuscript on parchment [England, fourteenth century (perhaps mid century) with fifteenth century marginal additions] 71 leaves, wanting leaves at front and back, and a few singletons within volume, also wanting gatherings after first, second, third, fourth and fifth gatherings, collation: i7 (wanting leaves at front and sixth leaf), ii-iii10, iv7 (wanting i-ii and v), v11 (last a singleton to complete section), vi6 (wanting i-ii), vii-viii10, with catchwords and some remnants of original quire signatures, single column with approximately 31 lines in good and legible English semi-secretarial hand, rubrics and book headings in pale red, chapter headings in margin stroked in red, red rubrics, small initials in dark blue with red looping penwork picking out trilobed leaves, 2 large variegated red and blue initials within red penwork, some leaves partly torn away, leaves at each end with holes (one at front repaired with small cuttings from a seventeenth-century French document), some losses to corners of some leaves, somewhat darkened in places, small smudges and cockled throughout, other strips of same seventeenth-century document used to support gutters of some gatherings, overall fair condition on often yellow and rustic parchment, 170 by 115mm.; bound in old parchment over pasteboards with strips of manuscript from c. 1200 visible along join between boards and text block, in fitted modern card case which reuses strips from same French seventeenth-century document (perhaps once used as endleaves or a wraparound cover and recovered from there when case was made) An important witness to a crucial mystical text that influenced much of late medieval English theological thought; here in one of the very earliest recorded copies from that country, and one of only two such copies recorded in private hands Provenance: 1. This is almost certainly all that remains of an English medieval book, written and decorated in the mid-fourteenth century probably for a Franciscan friar. The texts are overwhelmingly Franciscan (see below), and the small size of the book might suggest its original use by an itinerant preacher. As the creation of the book predates the arrival of the Observant friars in England by a century, it must have been produced for a member of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, who had approximately fifty houses in England in the fourteenth century. It appears to have remained in contemplative use, most probably within the same order, until the late fifteenth century at least when some of its leaves received short Middle English comments of a devotional nature, of the form Mans soule is not to be wyked (these on fols. 1rv, 2rv, 12v, 13r [2 longer incriptions], 13v). The Franciscans were among the earliest and strongest voices opposing Henry VIIIs divorce of Catherine of Aragorn and suffered his wrath as a result. Many fled to the Continent in the 1520s and 1530s, following Jerome Barlow and William Roy after their publication of The Ymage of Love (1525), William Peto, the friend of Thomas More who was exiled and went to Italy, and the group of religious who went into exile to Pontoise, Paris, after the execution of the Franciscan John Forest. The presence of the fragments of a French seventeenth-century document in the binding and repairs here might suggest that its sixteenth-century English owner passed into exile in France. 2. Re-emerging a few years ago in the London market. Text: The initial text here is that of James of Milan, Stimulus divini amoris, often misattributed to St Bonaventura or Bernard of Clairvaux. James of Milan was a Franciscan theologian, documented in 1305 as a lector to the Franciscan convent of Domodossola in Piedmont. The work was of fundamental importance to theological thinking across Europe in the l