4 - The Readership: Reading Franciscan Manuscripts in Padua

Summary

Introduction

Piers Plowman is an allegorical poem written during the second half of the fourteenth century that narrates the quest of its eponymous hero for the true Christian life. It had a strong impact on popular culture, as shown by the large number of related compositions that appeared shortly after. One of Piers Plowman 's sequels was a poem known as Jack Upland, a polemical work arranged around a set of questions that aimed at condemning the hypocrisy of particularly the mendicant religious orders. At a certain point Jack, the main character, asks a sycophantic friar: ‘Friar, what charity is it to gather up the books of God's word, many more than you need, and place them in your treasure room, and thus imprison them from secular clerks and curates, so that they are prevented from knowing God's word and from preaching the gospel freely?’This excerpt provides an interesting depiction of the relationship between friars and books. In fact, according to the poem, friars were guilty of at least two sins, namely, avidly treasuring books and afterwards restricting access to them in a pronounced display of uncaring egoism.

Shortly after the poem's composition, between 1389 and 1396, the Franciscan friar William Woodford, a master at Oxford, prepared a threefold answer to these accusations.William argued that friars restricted access to books, firstly, because that was the common practice within other orders, especially monastic ones. Secondly, friars needed to protect their books from mutilation and loss, and therefore they could not make them available to everybody. Thirdly, friars had the need and obligation to study, and so books should always be available to them.

As William's answer underlined, friars jealously protected their books because Franciscan convents had become centres of study, that is, places where books were written, collected and, most importantly, read. The essential role of reading for the purposes of learning in Franciscan life is well illustrated by the example of the Paduan convents, and this will be precisely the main topic to be discussed in this chapter. So far, this work has explored three dimensions of the manuscripts produced, studied and kept by the Franciscans in Padua from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.