CORPUS FRANCISCANUM, Francis of Assisi body and texts.

In the years following the death of Francis of Assisi in 1226, the Friars Minor—his spiritual sons—took care to collect and copy his writings, to write and disseminate his biographies: the teaching he had left behind both by his words and by his example. All groups that wish to institutionalize themselves feel this need to establish themselves as a "textual community," founded on a corpus that achieves consensus, "common sense." But it is rare for the figure of the founder to occupy such a place, here bordering on a cult of personality. The paradox is that this textual elaboration developed around a man who, in his time, was considered illiterate, an idiota, since he did not have a perfect command of Latin. A few decades later, in light of the constitutions of 1239, Francis would have had the greatest difficulty in being recruited into his own foundation, and a cultural abyss separates him from a learned brother like Bonaventure, a theologian at the University of Paris and minister general from 1257. However, all the anthologies of Franciscan writings (writings by and about Francis), which exist today in most modern languages, present as a homogeneous corpus this improbable agglomeration of levels of culture, covering all the degrees of literacy distinguished by the great Italian paleographer Armando Petrucci, notably in Promenades au pays de l'écriture (Zones sensibles, 2019). The first originality of Corpus franciscanum is to highlight this variegation, rather than seeking to blur it, and to attempt to understand its multiple implications. Are words dictated by Francis in Umbrian and transcribed into Latin by a more educated scribe than he really a writing by Francis? Where does a text begin? Where does it end? Is a legend inserted into the office part of the text of the office? Is a collection of posthumous miracles extending the biography of the saint part of the legend? From the moment we accept these challenges, we realize that the famous "Franciscan question" - this puzzle of Franciscan writings that we have been trying to piece together for some 120 years - was posed on equally artificial bases, more ideological than codicological. If we take into account the only reality available to us – the "codicological" reality, that of the handwritten codices – it suddenly appears that all the scenarios developed over the past century, opposing one dissident legend to another official one, have no real basis since these two texts are transmitted by the same handwritten volume and are unlikely to come from opposing factions. Corpus Franciscanum has two parts. In the first, Jacques Dalarun tells a new story of Franciscan origins through the corpus of writings and legends. The second part consists of 45 double-page spreads, each of which reproduces in very high definition and at a scale of 1:1 a manuscript discussed in the first part of the work. Each manuscript is succinctly presented and analyzed, so that one can consult the manuscripts independently of the text of the first part, or read the text independently of the manuscripts.