A Collection of Sermons Given in Paris C. 1267, Including a New Text by Saint Bonaventura on the Life of Saint Francis

Abstract

ALMOST as if it had been contrived by its writer and the weight of centuries to suit the pristine Franciscan spirit, a most unprepossessing manuscript clad as it were in gray contains hidden treasures including a new source for the life of St Francis. Possibly the very unattractiveness of the manuscript explains in part why it has been all but overlooked, for not only is it drably bound, sloppily copied, erased, and marked up, but, what is worse, it is mutilated. Another reason, no doubt, is that it contains only a collection of sermons, a genre that too often has been regarded with indifference by historians. Such indifference is not surprising, for medieval sermons, without question, have their dreadful longueurs. Nonetheless, the cultural historian ignores them at his peril. Thus the sermon collection in the Munich manuscript Cim 23372 not only casts light on the daily life and culture of Paris in the last years of Saint Louis but contains a sermon by St Bonaventura for the feast of the translation of St Francis that proves to be a new source for understanding the two greatest Franciscans of the thirteenth century and probably of all time. As little interested as most scholars of the present age have been in medieval sermons, those of the nineteenth century were even less so. When the Royal Bavarian librarian Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785-1852) came to cataloguing Clm 23372 all he thought it necessary to say was: membr. 4?. S. XIII. 98 fol. [sic actually 99] Sermonum de tempore pars (quaterniones VIII ad XX) cum proverbiis gallicis; f. 64 sermo magistri Johannis de Aurelian.' Had Schmeller merely added the fact that among the authors of the diverse sermons in the MS was St Bonaventura, a circumstance that should have sprung to his eyes from a cursory glance at the opening pages, such a notice would no doubt have attracted the attention of the subsequent editors of Bonaventura's Opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1883-1902), who did their best to include every known sermon of Bonaventura in their collection. The Quaracchi edition, however, ignores Cim 23372, and so it seems to have been ignored except for two passing references to it by the great Charles Homer Haskins (see n. 32 below) for a full century