A New Manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Abstract

This article examines a previously unknown Latin manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi (MVC) at Morris Library, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). The MVC was a popular medieval devotional text chronicling the life of Christ and originally attributed to the medieval Franciscan theologian Bonaventure, but more recently to the Franciscan preacher John of Caulibus. The manuscript was discovered during an inventory of the Morris Library’s Special Collections in 2010 and, thus, not consulted by C. Mary Stallings-Taney for her critical edition of the MVC published in 1997. Stallings-Taney based the Latin text of her edition on eleven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Latin manuscripts housed in European libraries. In particular, she relied on a consensus of four fourteenth-century manuscripts that, in her view, contained a more original text less influenced by later Neo-Latin alterations. The SIUC MVC manuscript shares some defining characteristics with this oldest group of manuscripts and is followed by a fourteen-leaf epilogue after the final chapter. The decoration and script of the SIUC MVC suggest it should be dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, making it one of the earliest known copies of this text. In this paper, I provide an overview and description of the SIUC MVC manuscript, a comparison of the SIUC MVC to the 1997 critical edition, and a discussion about the implications that the SIUC MVC manuscript has for the date and authorship of the MVC.