Introduction

By the middle of thirteenth century, the English Benedictine monk Matthew Paris described, with a hint of praise, an interesting group of newcomers. In his Historia Anglorum, he wrote how these men carried a great number of books, practically entire libraries, in sacks hanging from their necks and how over time ‘they built schools, cloisters and lofty churches and how within their confines they established schools of theology and fervently talked to the people, bringing back no small crop to the barn of Christ, where the harvest was rich, but the labourers so few.’

These peculiar characters were Franciscan friars, members of a community whose main elements of identity were, at the time, engagement in pastoral care, preaching and books, despite the fact that, according to their founder, books were not required for the friars to live in the simplicity of the first Christian group of apostles.Still, by the second half of the thirteenth century, Franciscans had transformed themselves from a brotherhood of simple laypeople into an order of masters of theology, science and philosophy. Of course, the main tools of that transformation were their books, which leads one to ask: What were the contents of these books? How were they constructed physically? How were they employed? Furthermore, can these volumes provide us with clues on the friars’ conception of the book? These questions will guide the discussion in this chapter.

After exploring aspects of the Franciscan manuscript such as the relation between its ideal and its reality, as well as the space where it was collected and read, it will be useful to assess the relation between the manuscripts’ physical characteristics and purpose according to their contents and use. This is the sense that the dimension of the ‘form’ of the manuscripts will assume within this study. The first chapter of this book discussed the set of regulations on the use of books within the Franciscan order, as well as how these regulations were followed in the convents of Sant’Antonio and San Francesco Grande in Padua. Chapter 2 explored and compared the libraries of these Paduan convents and established significant differences that reflected the particular interests and the nature of each of them.