The Lady Poverty: A XIII. Century Allegory

Giovanni da Parma

• Publisher: Library of Alexandria
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781465660435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

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." 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.

Table of contents

• THE LADY POVERTY