Fioretti di San Francesco (Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi), in Italian, decorated manuscript on paper [Italy, c.1450]

42 leaves (7 blank), 137mm. by 100mm., complete, collation: i^{18 (i the flyleaf), ii16, iii8 (viii the pastedown), single column, 21 lines in black ink in a minute humanist script, titles in iridescent red, capitals touched in faded yellow, sixteen initials in red, the largest with undulating extensions terminating in red flowers, those on fols.6r, 8r, 16v and 19r excised (leaves now with modern restoration), a yellow initial edged in red penwork on fol.39r, some small stains, else excellent condition, modern limp vellum over early (perhaps original) sewing structures; with a copy of the edition of the work by Father Antonio Cesari printed in Verona in 1822 (a nineteenth-century hand has added cross-references on the manuscript on fols.1r, 2v, 4v, 7r, 8r and 10r to this edition)}

The Little Flowers of St. Francis was composed by an anonymous Franciscan friar from Tuscany in the last decades of the fourteenth century, condensing and translating the longer Latin account Actus beati Francisci et sociorum eius into Italian. To this he added an appendix on the stigmata of the saint (fol.39r here), as well as the life of Fra Ginepro and the life and sayings of Fra Egidio. This text was the most popular and widespread version of the saint's life, offering colourful anecdotes, miracles and pious stories about the saint and his followers in an accessible and entertaining form, and is still reckoned among the masterpieces of Italian literature. The work is claimed to have been more widely read in Italy than any other work apart from the Bible or the Divine Comedy, and many manuscripts survive (see L. Manzoni, I Fioretti Di Sancto Franciescho, 1902). The present manuscript belongs to the initial wave of the dispersal of the text in the decades immediately after its composition.