Essays on Giovanni of Capestrano Preface

Abstract

The following essays focus on one of the most important figures in the religious history of the later middle ages. Giovanni of Capestrano is in one sense familiar to many, above all to scholars and students of Franciscan history. The story of the friar from Abruzzo, one of the ‘four pillars’ of the Observance, appears in every standard account of the Order’s history: his career as a jurist, his conversion and tutelage under Bernardino, his fierce advocacy for the Observants, his long preaching tour north of the Alps and his role in the crusade of 1456. And for centuries that story has been the subject of progressively more refined scholarship, from Luke Wadding in the seventeenth century to Johannes Hofer and Ottokar Bonmann in the twentieth. Some of the best has appeared in the last generation, including important conference proceedings and essays in the 1980s and 1990s. But momentum and focus have increased in the last decade in particular, as scholars from Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania have turned to Giovanni with renewed focus and interest. Yet in the Anglophone tradition of studies on the Franciscan Order, to which the journal Franciscan Studies has long been central, Capestrano remains by turns relatively neglected, misread, or misunderstood. He remains a challenging, enigmatic, and overall difficult figure who can be subject to widely divergent, even contradictory interpretations. The sources for access to his life and work, in contrast to other Franciscan figures, remain very difficult to access. And overall his story, perhaps along with that of the Observants generally, may seem too ‘late’ for scholars interested in Francesco d’Assisi and his followers, or the ‘golden age’ of the Order. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains: despite the great scholarly energy devoted to Giovanni in recent years, we still have relatively little English-language scholarship on this important figure, and in comparison to his contemporaries he remains marginal in Anglophone histories of the religious history of his era. In an effort to remedy that neglect, and to add to the few but significant studies on Capestrano that have appeared previously in Franciscan