Pope John XXII's Annotations on the Franciscan Rule: Content and Contexts

Abstract

Pope John XXII’s Annotations on the Franciscan Rule: Content and Contexts Over 50 years have now passed since Anneliese Maier matched an autograph letter of Pope John XXII (1316–1334) in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano with a series of marginal annotations in early fourteenth-century manuscripts once part of the papal library in Avignon and now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. These annotations constitute an important source for the intellectual and institutional debates of one of the longer and more eventful pontificates of the Middle Ages. One controversy to which John XXII’s marginalia seemed immediately relevant concerned the poverty of the Franciscan Order: Maier pointed out that the Pope had annotated both the Franciscan Rule and a collection of theological and legal consilia on the question of whether it was heretical to assert that Christ and the Apostles had nothing either individually or in common. The fundamental importance of these opinions (contained in MS Vatican BAV vat. lat. 3740) for the apostolic poverty controversy has recently been underscored . However, the manuscript containing the Franciscan Rule (MS Vatican BAV Borghese 242) has yet to be studied in similar detail. In her article, Maier transcribed some of the marginal annotations in Borghese 242, but she did not indicate exactly which parts of the Rule of St. Fran- A version of this article was read at the Fourteenth International Medieval Congress in Leeds and I would like to thank Barbara Bombi, Melanie Brunner, Peter D. Clarke, and Joëlle Rollo-Koster for their questions on that occasion. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer at Franciscan Studies for their stimulating and helpful comments. A. Maier, “Annotazioni Autografe di Giovanni XXII in codici Vaticani,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 6 (1952), 317-32; reprinted with new pagination and corrections in Ausgehendes Mittelalter: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts. II (Storia e Letteratura, 105; Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura , 1967), 81-97. Patrick Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), passim. 295 Franciscan Studies 65 (2007) 13.Nold.indd 295 12/5/07 18:38:5 Patrick Nold 296 cis the notes she transcribed corresponded to – something which limited the usefulness of her transcription. The present article gives these annotations of John XXII the attention that they merit: first it examines the manuscript containing the Franciscan Rule and the marginalia, second it summarizes the content of the annotations, third it considers the historical contexts that have been suggested for the Pope’s note taking, and finally it argues against these suggestions for a new and different dating. The Manuscript It is best to begin with the manuscript. Maier treated Borghese 242 not only in her article on John XXII’s annotations but she also described the manuscript in her 1952 catalogue of the Borghese fondo in the Vatican library. She observed that the manuscript was written in a hand characteristic of the papal chancery in Avignon and she surmised that it had been made at the Pope’s request. Borghese 242 is not comprised exclusively, or even primarily, of Franciscan texts. It is a miscellany of statutes and rules of various religious orders: specifically, the Rule of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit (fo. 1r-8r), the Constitutions of the Dominican Order (8r-18v), the Constitutions of the Franciscan Order (fo. 18v-31v), a book of statutes of the Cistercian Order (fo. 31v-56v), the Rule of St. Benedict (fo. 56v-68r), the Customs of the Cistercian Order (fo. 68v-105v), and the Rule of St. Francis (fo. 105v-107r). Of these texts, only the last is annotated by John XXII. It is worth considering these items individually (and refining Maier’s treatment in the process) as they provide some indications about when and why this manuscript was put together. The first text in Borghese 242 is identified by Maier as the Rule of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. This was Here is Maier’s treatment in its entirety: “A quanto pare suscitarono principalmente il suo interesse le distinzioni fra precetto e consiglio, con le diverse sfumature che sono possibili nei due...

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