Preface

The Fioretti, or "Little Flowers," is not a biography, but a collection of episodes, or, as the title itself describes it, the fairest and choicest flowers of the seraphic life of S. Francis and his companions. For this reason it begins at a comparatively late period in the life of the Saint.

We do not here propose to discuss the researches of scholars into the origin of the Latin text of the Fioretti, the earlier writings from which they have been derived, or the extent to which they may be regarded as authentic. Though much discussed, these problems have never been satisfactorily settled, and here we can do no more than briefly notice them.

The originality of the Italian text of the Fioretti was never even discussed by the old editors of those golden pages. Charmed by the simplicity of the narrative, the freedom of style, and quaint sweetness of speech, they paid no heed to the fact that towards the end of the seventeenth century, Wadding — a learned English Franciscan— discovered amongst the archives of the Order a Floretum which he held to be the Latin source of the Fioretti. The same incredulity greeted Ireneo Affò when he pointed to several chapters of the Chronicles of the XXIV Generals of the Order, which had been faithfully translated and included in the Italian selection of the Fioretti. The honour of pointing the way to a solution of the question belongs to the Florentine "Accademia della Crusca," which body, in the fifth impression of its Vocabolario, first issued in 1843, claimed that a portion of the Conformitates Sancti Francisci of Brother Bartolommeo degli Albizzi, presented to the Chapter General of the Order in 1399, was the Latin source of the Fioretti. As a matter of fact this was an error, for there certainly existed Fioretti manuscripts previous to that date. A few years later, however, Barbieri, in his edition of the Franciscan work, pointed out a new source of the Fioretti in the Speculum vit, S. Francisci et sociorum ejus — and recently, after a patient and methodical examination of the manuscripts of the Irish College of S. Isidore, Edoardo Alvisi rediscovered the text mentioned by Wadding, the Actus S. Francisci et sociorum ejus, which he immediately identified as the Latin text of the Italian Fioretti. According to Giuseppe Staderini, however, the Actus cannot possibly be the immediate source of the Italian work, but both the one and the other are in all probability derived from a still older and unknown source. In short, much remains either entirely unknown or else disputed — and indeed must remain so until a thorough comparative study has been made of the manuscripts of the Actus and the Fioretti, some of which exhibit numerous and important variants. Meanwhile, however, the long labours of the critics have made it clear that the Fioretti were originally written in Latin, that part of this Latin original is found in the Actus, and that the Italian translator must have abridged his version from a much larger work. We can now only believe and hope that the ceaseless researches of students of Franciscan matters will some day succeed in discovering the much desired manuscript whence both the Actus and the Fioretti take their immediate source.

Even less is known concerning the author of the Floretum. It would appear that Brother Ugolino di Monte Santa Maria most certainly had a hand in compiling the work, but it is impossible to decide whether his co-operation was limited to the chapters dealing with the life of Brother Giovanni della Verna, and indirectly to the compiling of the rini believes, or whether, as Sabatier conjectures, he was partly author and partly a mere compiler of the book, making use of older documents in all matters concerning the earliest companions of S. Francis. Scholars have discovered nothing decisive as to the translator of the Fioretti into Italian, but they suppose that he was a Brother Minor of the fourteenth century, a Tuscan, and that his work is an almost literal rendering into his own tongue of the Franciscan records collected by the friar of Monte San Giorgio.

While we neither desire nor intend to discuss the opinions of scholars, a brief expression of our own views is permissible. To our thinking, the question of the ancient source of the Floretum whether derived from this or that manuscript or author, is a matter of secondary importance. In any case, the Floretum is not the composition of any single author, but rather the work of an entire people. It is a collection of the legends and traditions relating to the Saint of Assisi and his best-loved and more prominent companions: these gradually increased in number, and were written down by one or more of the brethren for the greater glory of their seraphic founder and the edification of the world in general. This, in our opinion, is the reason why the contents of the Fioretti differ in so many and important respects from those ancient biographies of the Saint, of which the principal and most famous are the Legenda and Memoriale of Brother Thomas of Celano, the Legenda Trium Sociorum — namely, Brothers Leo, Angelo and Ruffino — and the biography written by S. Bonaventura.

As is well known, the Legenda, or First Life of S. Francis, was compiled by Brother Thomas of Celano at the express command of Pope Gregory IX in the years 1228 and 1229, and the Second Life, or, more properly, the Memoriale, towards 1247,,', consequence of a decision of the Chapter General of the Order, which in 1244 entrusted the recording of the most memorable deeds and words of the Saint to the friar of Celano, as the one who '* more than any other should be acquainted with them, because of his constant conversation, and intimate friendship, with the Saint." In these writings of Thomas of Celano we may recognise so to speak, the official biographical notices of S. Francis. In his recent study — S. Francis of Assisi and his Legend, Professor Nino Tamassia, of the University of Padua, carefully examines the sources of Thomas of Celano's two Lives, with the twofold intention “of pointing out the literary reminiscences which they evidently contain, and of investigating their source." We learn, thus, that if S. Francis had not in his youth led a life of folly and vanity, Brother Thomas would never have recalled to mind the conversion of S. Augustine. He points out how, in the description of the death and apparition of the Saint — couched almost in the exact words of Sulpicius Severus — Thomas slips into the biography of S. Martin, because the latter appears to Sulpicius ” borne upon a white cloud,” for the sole purpose of rewarding him for his labours in writing his life. And, finally, he declares that the acquaintance shown by Thomas of Celano with the works of Gregory the Great, explains many an enigma in the life and perhaps also in the Rule of the Franciscan Order, because the atmosphere saturated with dogmatical and theological literature of which Thomas is the principal representative, is the same wherein was developed the activity of the Saint of Assisi.

All this certainly proves that the biographer had an excellent memory for what he had read; it also enables us to say precisely which legendary or biographical elements in the Legenda and the Memoriale survive from earlier theological and ascetic works. It will not suffice — unless we are much mistaken — to destroy all faith in the narra- tive of Thomas of Celano. To try the Middle Ages by the rules of modern literary copyright would seem sufficiently strange, but to speak of plagiarism — even '* elegant plagiarism" — in connection with Brother Thomas is certainly absurd. Those who are familiar with the works of the ancients know the views and the rules, which they held and followed, and how, when necessary, they simply appropriated not only the thoughts and ideas of other writers, but frequently even the very words or sentences in which these ideas were expressed. Not only did the writers of the Middle Ages draw largely from whatever they deemed the fullest and the most useful sources for their purpose, helping themselves with impunity and without any reproach of plagiarism, but in so doing they exercised more than a right — they performed the recognised duty of a precise and faithful narrator. The use of traditional forms and conceptions was not a practice to be condemned; it was, on the contrary, an absolute necessity for the purpose of impressing with the stamp of truth whatever was to be presented to the mind or imagination of the reader. S. Augustine has a passage to this effect in one of his works.

The legend, on the other hand, as Ildebrando della Giovanna observes in his study on S. Francis of Assisi, " is a plant which springs up and grows vigorously in every field fertilised by popular sentiment and imagination; it is a spontaneous growth.” The life of S. Francis, which was spent amongst the most sincere and lively manifestations of love and feeling at a time when society was torn by great and unquenchable hatreds — hatreds which the Church of Christ never dreamed of pacifying, but rather did its best to keep alive — naturallyoffered a soil well prepared for the reception and subsequent abundant flowering of the seed of legend. And it is precisely in the light of popular legends that we see the figure of the Saint in its most lifelike and truest presentment: legends grew up around him so luxuriantly that — again to quote Delia Giovanna — ” every biographer may find new material not previously used by others."

As we have already remarked, the Fioretti of S. Francis possesses but a restricted value if regarded from the biographical point of view. It lacks a certain and consistent historical foundation, and the anonymous compiler, if there was only one, obtained his knowledge of facts less from reliable written documents than from the oral traditions which are even to this day preserved unspoilt in the convents of Umbria and Tuscany. He gathered them, we may suppose, from the very people through whose midst the Saint and his fervent companions passed upon their way, filling them with marvel at their life of simplicity and their words burning with love and charity. A splendid example, truly, must these friars have shewn, as they preached amidst the dreadful clamour of war, the greed and suspicion of rulers, the horrors of fraternal discord, ruin, fire, sack, and starvation, their divine message of justice and of peace. At this time, moreover, heresy was rampant on all sides, disturbing men's consciences and threatening with overthrow the Church of Christ, already torn with internal strife and corrupted by simony and the evil practices of the clergy, which neither the power of Papal reformers nor the isolated efforts of individual preachers could succeed in overcoming or restraining.

But however poor in historical foundation they may be, it is certain that in the Floretum and its translations we see the figures of the Saint and his friars as vividly as did the people of Umbria and Tuscany, who actually beheld and loved him; we see him, moreover, still surrounded with that glory with which their eyes invested him. Better than any critical reconstruction, better than any biography, old or new, the Franciscan legend contained in the Floretum gives us a faithful picture of S. Francis, transporting us to the green Umbrian land, to the Marches of Ancona, or to stony Monte la Verna betwixt Tiber and Arno, wherever, indeed, the Saint lived, passed, preached, hoped and prayed, bringing back to our ears the clear echo of his words, showing us his habitations in the wilderness, and enabling us to share in the life, half childlike, half angelic, of those who dwelt there.

Wherein, then, lies the power and charm of the Floretum if not in the fact that it represents the evergreen legend of the Poverello and his humble followers as it lived in the minds and hearts, in the simple but fertile imagination, of the people whose joys and sorrows, whose hopes and needs he shared, the people who saw the saint living and working in those places which formed the field of his activity, and to whom he attributed his own passions and feelings. For this reason the Fioretti is incomparably more valuable in our eyes than all the hagiographies ever written; for on the figures of S. Francis and his chief companions — Fra Matteo, Fra Egidio, Fra Ginepro, or Fra Lupo — as portrayed in this collection of legends and narrations, sometimes childlike and sometimes miraculous, the popular verdict has conferred an historical reality perhaps more convincing and more near to the truth than all the well-known Lives of the Saint, or all the reconstructions and researches of critics and scholars.

The secret of the great success of the Fioretti, the secret of the singular fascination exercised by these old pages, which even now, after so many centuries, speak straight to the heart and mind of the reader, lies precisely in the mystery of their composition, which can be compared with that of no other literary work. Here we find ourselves face to face with a spontaneous and popular production, which has preserved only those elements in the Saint's life that accorded with the popular faith, credulity and conscience. The book of the Fioretti is not a literary work; it is folk-lore and represents the hagiographic saga — that is to say, it represents what was said and felt about S. Francis in his own country by the people who preserved the traditions of his heroic and saintly life and deeds.

To criticise such productions of an entire people and an entire age — productions which breathe pure and simple poetry — as though they were the inventions of a single brain; to treat them as if they were a genuine literary work, to strip the legend of all that is most attractive, is surely both useless and cruel. It is useless, because in spite of all criticism the legend will ever awaken a response in the hearts of all who can feel and love, because the affections instinctively cling to these saintly dream-figures which have about them nothing of human reality. It is cruel, because criticism, with its cold inquiries and revelations, has no right to rob poetry of its charm, faith and credulity of their comfort.

Scholars may apply their pruning-knives to the ideal figure of the Saint as he appears, full of life and of love, in the simple pages of the Fioretti. But the golden book which was born in the green Umbrian hills, and has passed from Latin, through Italian, into other tongues without suffering any loss of its grace and charm, will continue to be read in spite of critics, and will make the hearts of its readers beat faster so long as they are capable of feeling aught that is tender and true. In this popular and mystical legend, S. Francis, encircled with a halo of love and charity, and shining with a pure glory which no cloud of criticism is able to dim, appears like a knight of the San Graal in the immortal legend of the north.

For the purpose of increasing the value of this new edition of the Fioretti, we have reproduced for the first time certain of the quaint illustrations relating to events in the life of the Saint of Assisi contained in Codice Laurenziano Gaddiano CXII — a parchment manuscript belonging to the second half of the fourteenth century, described by Bandini in his catalogue of the Laurentian Library (Florence, 1792; Supplem. col. 124).

This manuscript belonged to a convent of Franciscan nuns, called the Convent of Foligno, which to this day exists in Florence in the Via Faenza. As is the case with most old manuscripts, the names, both of the scribe and of the artist who furnished the illustrations, are unknown; the writing is undoubtedly by a fourteenth-century hand, and to the same period belong also the ornamentation of the initial letters in blue and red, and the drawings, many of which are mere sepia outlines, others being more or less fully coloured. The latter part of the manuscript was finished in 1427, according to the inscription at the end. This note, however, which brings us forward a score of years into the fifteenth century, has no bearing whatever on the palaeographic and artistic character of either writing or drawings. These are as strictly of the preceding century, as is our own handwriting of that nineteenth century in which we were educated. Quaint and crude as they are, these drawings have, in their very simplicity, a charm and ” power of persuasion ” that many will find unsurpassed by even the very masterpieces of Giotto himself.

GUIDO BIAGI Biblioteca Laurenziana Florence, March 1908.