Soon after the death of St. Francis the Franciscans began to acquire missals and other handbooks in order to live up to their new identity as preaching mendicants. New book explores their relationship with manuscript production networks operating in Umbria

Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria
Series: The Medieval Franciscans, Volume 12
Brill 2016
ISBN13: 9789004278837
E-ISBN: 9789004304673

In Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria, Anna Welch explores how Franciscan friars engaged with manuscript production networks operating in Umbria in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to produce the missals essential to their liturgical lives. A micro-history of Franciscan liturgical activity, this study reassesses methodologies pertinent to manuscript studies and reflects on both the construction of communal identity through ritual activity and historiographic trends regarding this process.

Welch focuses on manuscripts decorated by the ateliers of the Maestro di Deruta-Salerno (active c. 1280) and Maestro Venturella di Pietro (active c. 1317), in particular the Codex Sancti Paschalis, a missal now owned by the Australian Province of the Order of Friars Minor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Anna Welch, Ph.D. (2011), University of Divinity, works in the History of the Book Collection at the State Library Victoria (Melbourne, Australia). Her research interests include Franciscan history and spirituality, book history, and the relationship between ritual and identity in medieval Christian communities.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Image from the medieval manuscript, Codex Sancti Paschals, owned by the Welcome to St Paschal Library, Franciscan Province of the Holy Spirit, Australia.