The Rediscovered Manuscript A Story of Friendship

Many skills are required for research and many virtues too: patience, humility, audacity, prudence... But I would like to illustrate a very important dimension of our activity: friendship. Actually, our session at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, with Sean Field and Timothy Johnson, under Wayne Hellmann’s chairmanship, is exactly the illustration of what I want to say.1 On September 15, 2014, I received an email from Sean Field, in which he told me about a manuscript on sale on Sandra Hindman’s site, Les Enluminures. In the excellent description on line by Laura Light, I was immediately attracted by the mention “THOMAS OF CELANO (?), Vita et miracula sancti Francisci”: “The opening sections of the Vita agree with the Legenda S. Francisci, readings for Matins for the feast of St. Francis in a Breviary in the Vatican (Vat lat. 8737), printed by Lemmens, 1908. [...] The concluding sections of our Vita are found in another source, known as the Umbrian Legend (edited Dalarun, 2007). [...] The text in this manuscript, therefore, represents an important discovery regardless of whether it was compiled by an unknown author, using these two sources, or if it is in fact the original version of a hitherto unknown Life by Thomas of Celano, that was itself the source for the other two texts.” As soon as I deciphered the dedicatory letter which was reproduced on line, I understood that the second hypothesis was the right one: we were facing a complete Legend written by Thomas of Celano under Elias’ generalate (1232-1239), a Legend of which the readings for Matins of the Vatican Breviary (plus the readings of another breviary of the same Library I discovered in 2007) and the entire so called Umbrian Legend were only excerpts. Actually, all the fragments which were already known represent only 40 % of the complete text now exhumed, which runs from Francis’ birth to the translation of his corpse in the Assisi basilica and includes more than seventy posthumous miracles. It is true that, since 2007, I had been expecting such a discovery. It is true too that Sean could