INTRODUCTION
EDITIONS
The “Sacrum Commercium” is an Allegory, simple in form and charming in conception, telling how St Francis wooed and won that most difficult of all Brides, my Lady Poverty. It was written some time in the thirteenth century (most probably in the year 1227) by an unknown Franciscan, and has been six times printed, thrice in Latin, and thrice in Italian.
♦The Latin Editions.♦The first Latin edition was printed at Milan in 1539. It is of exceeding rarity, and has escaped the vigilance of Brunet and Græsse. Père François Van Ortroy, the noted Bollandist (whom few things escape), was the first to call attention to a copy in the Ambrosian Library, and it is the only copy known to exist. (See “Analecta Bollandiana,” xix. 460.)
The second Latin edition was published nearly 400 years later, in 1894, under the editorship of Professor Edoardo Alvisi, in the “Collezione di Opuscoli Danteschi inediti o rari diretta da G. L. Passerini.”[1]Professor Alvisi’s edition has no pretensions to being critical: his sole object in publishing it was to supply an illustration to part of Canto XI. of the “Paradiso.” This edition has, perhaps justly, been decried for its entire want of critical apparatus, but it at least served to call attention to a gem that had hitherto slumbered uncared-for in parchment Codexes.
The third Latin edition is exceptional from every point of view. It was published only last year by Père Edouard d’Alençon, the learned Archivist General of the Friars Minor Capuchins. Père Edouard has taken his version from a Codex (No. 3560) in the Casanatese Library in Rome, which he has carefully collated with three other Codexes (of Milan, Vincenza and Ravenna), noting all the variants at foot. There is but one fault to find with this scholarly edition: it does not attempt to give the numerous Scripture references.[2]
♦The Italian Editions.♦The first Italian edition[3]appeared in 1847 under the title “Meditazione sulla Povertà di Santo Francesco.”[4]It is taken from a Fourteenth-Century Codex in the Franciscan Convent of Giaccherino, near Pistoia. Its editors were the Lexicographer, Pietro Fanfani, and a Canon of Pistoia, Enrico Bindi. It has been quoted in the great “Vocabolario” of the Academicians of the Crusca, and has therefore become a “Testo di Lingua” or Italian classic.[5]The “Meditazione” is a very free translation indeed from the original Latin. The translator adds beauties and leaves out obscurities at will. It is curious to us in these days, when Franciscan studies are being pursued with such avidity all the world over (if I except England), to reflect that the editors, Fanfani and Bindi, did not know whether the “Meditazione” was a translation or an original work. The Fourteenth-Century translator is unknown.
The next Italian edition (1900) is the one given in parallel columns with the Latin version of Père Edouard d’Alençon’s work above quoted. It is taken from Codex B. 131 in the Vallicellian Library, and is probably a Fourteenth-Century work, but, if interesting, it has little or no merit as an example of fine Tuscan.
The third Italian edition is a much-needed and very welcome work.[6]It is a reprint of the “Meditazione,” which has for long been so scarce as to be almost unprocurable. The editor, Don Salvatore Minocchi, a Florentine priest, and one of the foremost authorities on matters Franciscan, than whom there could be no one more fitted for the task, has carefully collated the original edition of the “Meditazione” with the Codex from which it was taken, and has removed quite a host of erroneous readings. We may therefore now be said to have, for the first time, a correct version of this little Italian classic. It was only printed in the last days of May, and I have to thank the learned editor for courteously permitting me to see his proof sheets.