A happy mistake
A medieval manuscript from the convent of St. Francis of Assisi on our premises!
In 1960, the auction of a 13th-century manuscript containing the Latin text of Solomon’s Book of Wisdom, with an inscription referring to the “conventus beati Francisci”, attracted the attention of the library’s directors. The inscription most likely indicates the convent of Saint Francis in Lausanne, and every effort is made to acquire the precious document.
Once the manuscript has arrived at the library, it receives the IS 1841 code, which will henceforth be its identifier in the Manuscript Department.
When Prof. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, former scriptor (specialist in the history of writing, language and history) at the Vatican Library and then professor of medieval history at the UNIL Faculty of Arts, saw this document, the signs at the bottom of the beginning and end pages of the notebooks jumped out at him. These symbols in the form of dotted circles in red and black, which surround the number of the notebook, remind him of a practice in the convent of Saint Francis of Assisi. Indeed, Brother Giovanni Ioli attributed these indications when he reorganized the Assisi Library between 1377 and 1384.
After verification, our volume was indeed part of the treasury of the Library of Assisi, so the inscription that encouraged the purchase of the document does not refer to the convent of Saint-François in Lausanne, but to that of Assisi in Italy. The manuscript is in fact mutilated. It originally included not only the Book of Wisdom, but also Sentences by Pierre de Lombard. To find the parts that have now disappeared, a great deal of research will have to be carried out before they can be located… so the mystery surrounding this document remains unsolved.
We have digitized this manuscript with such a surprising provenance and made it accessible on the e-codices platform with the information that Prof. Paravicini published in an article from which we are now drawing inspiration for our blog entry.
We can only hope that the online version of the manuscript will inspire further research into this medieval document.
Ramona, Curator of the Manuscript Department
