Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditationes vitae Christi, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [England (perhaps Lincoln), first half of the fifteenth century]

1. John Enderby, chaplain of Louth, Lincolnshire: his fifteenth-century ownership inscription on fol.2v, "Iste liber constat Johanni Enderby de Louth capellano". He also owned a volume of treatises on astronomy, including Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (cf. C. Eagleton, Monks, Manuscripts and Sundials, 2010, p.81).

2. Cuthbertus Dalle: inscription in seventeenth-century hand on fol.14v.

3. Francis Dale de Ingoldmells and Adlethorp, Lincolnshire: seventeenth-century inscription on fol.36r.

4. The Revd. Matthew Snow (d. 1809) of Clipsham, Rutland: his notes on fols.1v and 2v recording his gift of it to John Paget of Newberry, in 1792; and by descent to Sir John Paget; his sale in our rooms, 14 July 1981, lot 100.

5. Bergendal MS.27; bought by Joseph Pope from Alan Thomas in May 1982: Bergendal catalogue no.27; Stoneman, 'Guide', pp.177-78.

text

This handsome little book claims in its explicit on fol.96v to contain the Meditations on the life of Christ by St. Bonaventura (1221-74), but it is more probable that the author was a fourteenth-century Franciscan named Johannes de Caulibus of Gimignano, who composed the work between 1346 and 1364. It is a series of imaginative embellishments of the Gospel accounts written for the religious needs of a Poor Clare nun for whom the author served as spiritual advisor. It brings alive the episodes of Christ's life, setting out the text as a series of eyewitness accounts of the events, and emotionally engaging with the narrative as it unfolds in order to prompt the nun to reform her life and conform to Christ's model. The most modern edition is that of C. Mary Stallings-Taney, Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi, 1997. The text was well-known in the Middle English as the Mirror of the Life of Christ by Nicholas Love.