Rene Hernandez

This book explores the manuscripts written, read and studied by Franciscan friars from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries in northern Italy, and specifically Padua, assessing four key aspects: ideal, space, form and readership. The ideal is studied through the regulations that determined what manuscripts should aim for. Space refers to the development and role of Franciscan libraries. The form is revealed by the assessment of the physical configuration of a set of representative manuscripts read, written and manufactured by the friars. Finally, the study of the readership shows how Franciscans were skilled readers who employed certain forms of the manuscript as a portable, personal library and as a tool for learning and pastoral care. By comparing the book collections of Padua’s reformed and unreformed medieval Franciscan libraries for the first time, this study reveals new features of the groundbreaking cultural agency of medieval friars.

The article assesses the role of manuscript miscellanies as a tool to solve the question of ownership of books within the late medieval Franciscan Observance. The analysis of manuscript evidence from the observant convent of San Francesco Grande in Padua shows how miscellanies, usually written by their own readers, on the one hand were tools for learning, preparation for preaching and pastoral care and, on the other, played a significant role to solve, at least formally, the question of exercising ownership of books while keeping a reasonable adherence to the Franciscan Rule.

This article studies the library of the Franciscan convent of Sant'Antonio in Padua during the fifteenth century. By analysing the information provided by a medieval inventory of the library, the current Padua, Pontificia Biblioteca Antoniana MS 573, the article aims to describe the composition of the book collection, as well as the distribution of the volumes on benches and cupboards, according to their destination for consultation or loan. The analysis shows that the organisation of the book collection followed a particular pattern of balance and symmetry, reflected the main purpose of the library and corresponded to the Franciscan approach to the sources of intellectual authority.

The paper offers an analytical comparison between the book collections of Franciscan friars in the city of Padua, Northern Italy, during the fifteenth century. In order to do so, the study offers, first, a swift survey of the medieval book collections of Dominicans and Austin friars, and then it considers with further detail on the one hand, the library of the Friars of the Community, or Conventuals, and on the other, the book collection of the Friars of the Observance, or Observants. The exceptional circumstances of preservation of their book collections allows one to compare their libraries in terms of their respective tradition, dimension, and composition of the collection. The study explores their similarities and pays particular attention to their differences. As a result, it will offer an insight into how specific typologies of books were related to each collection, how the strategies of circulation of volumes guaranteed their availability, how the original cluster of the libraries reflect the nature of friars as readers and writers, and into how their apparently contradictory nature reveals late-medieval conceptions of librarianship that had significant and lasting impact in written culture.
A section of the contribution is offered.