Appendix: Sources

APPENDIX: SOURCES he major sources for this book are Vincent Ferrer’s writings, his sermons, T and the records of his canonization inquests. All three pose problems at every turn. Writings Vincent did not write much, and he may have written even less than is generally supposed. I reckon the number of extant and complete letters whose authorship can be securely attributed to Vincent as fi ve. Among the various treatises attributed to him, three (or, more precisely, two treatises and one “question,” a genre characteristic of medieval scholasticism) pose few problems of authenticity and localization: the Questio de unitate universalis , the Tractatus de suppositionibus, and the Tractatus de moderno ecclesie scismate . The Questio de unitate universalis and the Tractatus de suppositionibus date to 1371 or 1372, and their manuscripts explicitly identify “Vincent Ferrer” as their author. 1 Pietro Ranzano’s vita of Vincent, written in the 1450s just after the late friar’s canonization, identifi es Vincent as the author of the “opus de Dialecticis suppositionibus ,” as Ranzano called it. 2 Vincent’s Tractatus de moderno ecclesie scismate survives in a single Parisian manuscript that identifi es “Vincent Ferrer” as the author and 1380 as the date of composition. Ranzano did not mention the Tractatus de moderno ecclesie scismate in his vita , but that omission, if intentional, is easily explained. Ranzano wished to portray Vincent as a healer of the schism; mentioning a polemical and partisan work written in support of the Avignon papacy would have been counterproductive. Other authors and sources besides Ranzano’s vita do mention the treatise. Pope Benedict XIII’s library catalogue, compiled either in 1405 or 1408, includes the Tractatus magistri Vincentii de scismate ; Jean Carrier, whom Benedict named a car- dinal, in a letter of 1429 mentioned it as well.3 If a modern reader has read any of the treatises attributed to Vincent, it is almost certainly not one of those three, but rather the Tractatus de vita spirituali ( Treatise on the Spiritual Life ), which has been translated into English and Chinese. Its popularity stretches back to the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Latin, or in German or Italian translations, the Tractatus de vita spirituali exists in nearly two dozen fi fteenth-century manuscripts, nearly all of Italian, Swiss, and German provenance. The fi rst published editions appeared in the fi nal decade of the fi f- teenth century. Printers published 19 diff erent editions in the sixteenth century 190 APPENDIX and 12 more in the seventeenth century; every century since has seen the publi- cation of multiple editions. 4 For all of its popularity, the Tractatus de vita spirituali is a puzzling work; in 1923, Matthieu-Maxime Gorce aptly characterized it as “bien é nigmatique .”5 Some confusion arises from the proliferation of early printed editions, whose editors freely changed words and sentences, reordered passages, introduced divisions and chapter headings, and lopped off multiple chapters. 6 (Even today, there is no modern critical edition of the Tractatus de vita spirituali .7 ) Some confusion arises from the text itself. Of the various fi fteenth-century manuscripts, two are cru- cially important: Basel, Univ. Bibl. A.X.129, which dates to 1438; and most especially Basel, Univ. Bibl. A.VIII.8, which contains the oldest known version of the Tractatus de vita spritiuali . A note at head of the treatise states that the Dominican Giovanni di Ragusa (d. 1443) copied the Tractatus de vita spirituali at Bologna in 1428, possibly in January; the manuscript attributes authorship to “Master Vincent, of the Order of Preachers.” 8 Ragusa presided over the Council of Basel in the early 1430s and gifted manuscripts to the Dominican house there, which would explain how the oldest version of the Tractatus de vita spirituali wound up in Basel. 9 Also from Basel comes the only surviving Latin manuscript of the brief Tractatus consolatorius in temptationibis fi dei (Basel, Bibl, univ. A.X-41). Just as Ragusa claimed Vincent’s authorship of the Tractatus de vita spirituali , so, too, he vouched for Vincent’s authorship of the Tractatus consolatorius , doing so in a letter that he sent (along with a copy of the treatise) to a correspondent, thereby seconding the manuscript’s own affi rmation of Vincent’s authorship. The Tractatus de vita spirituali gives no indication of where or when Vincent composed it. He traveled in northern Italy—although he did not go as far to the east as Bologna—in the fi rst decade of the fi fteenth century, and it is conceivable that Vincent wrote the treatise during his time there. Alfonso Esponera Cerd á n proposes circa 1407 as, possibly, the date of composition. 10 On the other hand, Sebastiá n Fuster Perell ó, Adolfo Robles Sierra, and others date the treatise to 1394 or 1395, and there are indeed reasons to think that Vincent might have written the Tractatus de vita spirituali much earlier than 1407. 11 Regarding the issue of religious visions and their authority, the opinion expressed in the Tractatus de vita spirituali —namely, that visions ought to be regarded with great suspicion, as they might be of demonic inspiration—echoes the opinion expressed in the Tractatus de moderno ecclesie scismate of 1380. 12 From 1399 onward, Vincent traveled across much of Europe in compliance with a vision that he himself experienced. One wonders whether, after 1399, he still would have expressed the same hos- tility to religious visions that he had expressed in 1380. But even 1394 or 1395 might be too late a date for the Tractatus de vita spirituali . Vincent’s responsibilities for the spiritual direction of younger friars came earlier in his career, in the 1370s and the 1380s, when he was a teacher and a prior—and when he was an active writer of treatises. Then there is the question of whether Vincent authored the Tractatus de vita spirituali at all. Ranzano knew about the Tractatus de suppositionibus and cited it by name; he did not, however, name or mention the Tractatus de vita spirituali , and neither did Pope Calixtus III in his canonization bull. Robles suggests that the APPENDIX 191 vita and bull’s “concrete objectives” rendered any mention of the Tractatus de vita spirituali superfl uous. 13 That explanation is most unlikely. Given that both the vita and the bull were concerned, above all else, with the attestation of Vincent’s holiness, surely a treatise off ering spiritual guidance to others was at least as ger- mane and worthy of mention as a treatise on supposition theory. 14 The more likely explanation for Ranzano and Calixtus III’s failures to mention the Tractatus de vita spirituali is that neither knew of its existence and that few if any of their contemporaries knew of its existence—or, if they did know of its existence, they did not believe Vincent Ferrer to have been its author. Modern attempts to demonstrate Vincent’s authorship from the treatise’s internal characteristics have been unsustainably speculative. While the author of the Tractatus de vita spirituali seems familiar with the Dominican Rule and Constitutions, that hardly proves Vincent’s authorship, as Dominicans besides Vincent were familiar with those texts, and others were familiar with the Rule and Constitutions who were not themselves Dominicans. While the author’s thoughts on preaching might refl ect substantial personal experience, that hardly proves Vincent’s authorship, as there were other experienced preachers besides Vincent. As for the argument that Vincent should be regarded as the author of the Tractatus de vita spirituali because its author possessed “clearly a maturity and experience of religious life that matches the maturity and experience of Saint Vincent,” there is no objective way to demonstrate or measure authorial maturity in a text, still less to use its presence or absence to determine authorship. 15 Furthermore, the Tractatus de vita spirituali is largely a work of compila- tion. Several chapters are copied from the Vita Christi of Ludolph von Sachsen (d. 1378); other passages are taken from the writings of the Franciscan Venturino da Bergamo (d. 1346); still others depend heavily on the Franciscan Peter John Olivi. 16 The last of these three was an apocalyptic thinker with whose ideas Vincent did not at all sympathize. For Vincent, at any stage of his career, to have drawn upon Olivi when off ering spiritual guidance to others would be surprising. In the end, there is just enough manuscript evidence for one, if one so chooses, to follow Sigismund Brettle, Gorce, and Thomas Kaeppeli in attributing the Tractatus de vita spirituali to Vincent. But there is also suffi cient evidence to jus- tify withholding one’s acceptance of that attribution, especially considering that, from the fi fteenth century onward, scribes and publishers repeatedly associated Vincent with works that were not his, so that those works might share his fame, circulate widely, and sell well. 17 Even if Vincent did write the Tractatus de vita spirituali , its value to historians is slight, because he might have written it at any point between the 1370s and his death in 1419. For those reasons, I do not draw upon the Tractatus de vita spirituali . The Sermons Many hundreds of Vincent’s sermons are extant today, but they survive as repor- tationes , or reports, made by his usually anonymous listeners. 18 The act of report- ing was a multistage process. At the fi rst stage, a reporter or several reporters 192 APPENDIX took notes while Vincent spoke—a Valencian retable shows the friar preaching while two reporters sit nearby, one writing and one resting, which suggests that reporters (at least sometimes) took turns writing, rather than every reporter taking a full set of notes throughout the sermon.

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