Lautore e la trasmissione delle Meditationes vitae Christi in base a manoscritti volgari italiani (403-430)

Descrizione

This article is a re-examination of two recent hypotheses concerning the origin and author of a popular Tuscan Franciscan narrative, the pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi. In a series of recent studies Sarah McNamer argued that the text was originally written in the Vernacular Italian by a Pisan nun whose composition is preserved in a short text she calls “Canonici version”. In response to her claims, the present paper provides a comparative analysis of some of the Latin sources and their quotations in the MVC and its most important Italian versions and rewritings including the Canonici too. In the light of these examinations the Canonici version does not seem to represent the Trecento Italian original of the MVC but rather one of its numerous fifteenth-century rewritings. So with the priority of the Canonici reconsidered, the present essay advocates another hypothesis and argues that the MVC was originally written in Latin at about 1300 by a little-known Tuscan spiritual, Jacobus of San Gimignano, whose name appears in a number of Italian manuscripts as the author of the work.