Titolo della tesi: Um Specchio para a Observância. A inventio da memória nos manuscritos da Franceschina de Iacopo Oddi | Uno Specchio per l'Osservanza. L’inventio della memoria nei manoscritti della Franceschina di Iacopo Oddi
The memory of the Observance concerning the friars of the family who died in odor sanctitatis developed throughout the fifteenth century, evolving from fragmented local memories to catalogs of saints that not only narrated the wonders of these figures but also connected them, within the framework of hagiographic memory, to the History of the Order and the fraternitas of Francis. Working in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, Iacopo Oddi, a friar from the San Francesco al Monte convent (Monteripido) in Perugia, was responsible for producing one of these compilations, the so-called Specchio dell’Ordine Minore, a work traditionally known by the name Franceschina. Five manuscripts of this work are known to us: 1) manuscript 1238 from the Biblioteca Augusta in Perugia, originating from the Monteripido convent; 2) manuscript 46 from the Biblioteca della Porziuncola in Santa Maria degli Angeli (Assisi), from the Assisi-Perugia area; 3) a manuscript owned by the Biblioteca Comunale of Norcia, temporarily held in Spoleto, also from the Assisi-Perugia area; 4) a manuscript held by the Archivio di Sant’Erminio, Monastero di S. Maria di Monteluce in S. Erminio, in Perugia, copied in the same monastery; 5) manuscript S.C.39 from the Fondo Moderno of the Biblioteca del Sacro Convento in Assisi, probably copied in the same location. Of these, the first three date to the fifteenth century and bear witness to the work’s moment of composition. The last two, however, from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, reflect the reception of the work in Modernity and in spaces outside male Observance.
This thesis investigates the five manuscripts containing Oddi’s work, aiming to understand them in their moments of production and reception as participants in a project to legitimize the Franciscan Observance through the construction of memory regarding these figures. By presenting a harmonious version of the Order’s history, proposing a direct link between the generation of Francis and Oddi's contemporary friars through their virtues, the Franceschina positioned them as legitimate heirs of the group’s founder. Through an interdisciplinary approach, a description of the codices was conducted, alongside an analysis of their reception in Modernity; the possible path of the work’s genesis and elaboration in its texts, images, and paratextual elements was also reconstructed. I argue that through transmediality, that is, the interconnection between texts, images, and the ornamentations of the Franceschina manuscripts, a memory proposal emerges for the Observance, one that potentially re-elaborates the group’s self-awareness by adapting, in the realm of memory, Paoluccio de Trinci’s unstable project to the stable reality of late fifteenth-century Observance—which a few years later would be defined as Ordo Fratrum Minorum by the Ite Vos bull (1517). The conclusions of the thesis point to the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in the study of Franciscan hagiography, one that considers not only the text but also the material and visual elements characteristic of manuscript codices.
Keywords: Specchio dell’Ordine Minore; Franceschina; Franciscan Observance; Hagiography; Manuscripts.