An Aristocratic Copy of a Mendicant Text: James of Milan's Stimulus amoris in 1293

An AristocrAtic copy of A MendicAnt text: JAMes of MilAn’s STIMULUS AMORIS in 1293 The wealth of material and exacting scholarship displayed in Falk Eisermann ’s recent study of the Stimulus amoris are impressive. Eisermann reconstructs the textual history and readership of one of the most influential mystical treatises of the Middle Ages, written by James of Milan, who is documented in 305 as lector to the Franciscans of Domodossola (Piedmont ). It is no criticism of Eisermann’s fine scholarship to point to a significant manuscript that has escaped his far-flung net: the Supplicationes variae in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 25.3). The descriptive catalogue of the Laurenziana Library gives no readily recognizable listing for Plut. 25.3’s chapters from James of Milan’s text, and the manuscript itself does not mention James or the title, Stimulus amoris.2 And, while art historians have studied the decoration of this beautifully illuminated manuscript , few have paid attention to its textual contents, which include – with no identifying rubric – Chapters XIV and XV of the Stimulus amoris.3 These are James of Milan’s chapters on the Passion. If the Supplicationes variae merely provided one more manuscript exemplar of a widely read Franciscan text, it would probably not merit special notice. But the excerpt from James of Milan’s treatise in Plut. 25.3 must be counted as the earliest  “Stimulus amoris”: Inhalt, lateinische Überlieferung, deutsche Übersetzungen, Rezeption (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 200). 2 A.M. Bandini, Catalogus codicum latinorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae, I, Florence, 774, cols. 748-54. 3 Anna Maria Ciaranfi, “Disegni e miniature nel Codice Laurenziana ‘Supplicationes variae’, Rivista del R. Istituto d’archeologia e Storia dell’arte  (929) 325-48 (repr. in Scelta di Scritti per la storia dell’arte, Florence: Edam, 988); Bernhard Degenhart and Annegritt Schmitt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300-1450, I/ (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 968), 7-6. The text of the Stimulus amoris is related to Plut. 25.3’s imagery of the Man of Sorrows in Amy Neff, “Byzantium Westernized , Byzantium Marginalized: Two Icons in the Supplicationes variae,” Gesta 38/ (999) 8-03. My book of 25.3, in progress, will discuss the texts and images of the manuscript and give fuller development of sections of the present essay. 235 Franciscan Studies 65 (2007) AMY NEFF 236 known dated example of the text, with unique characteristics that are significant to its early history. A golden inscription at the beginning of the Supplicationes variae dates the manuscript to 293; its calendar indicates intended use in the city of Genoa . Although this inscription makes no dramatic change from Eisermann’s dating of the Stimulus amoris to the “ausgehende 3. Jahrhundert,” it does help narrow it down somewhat.4 The treatise can now be said to have a terminus ante quem of 293. This small push to an earlier date might support Eisermann’s speculation that the friar John, nicknamed Eucharis, for whom James of Milan wrote the Stimulus amoris, was in fact John of Parma, who died ca. 289.5 The earlier date provided by the Supplicationes variae by no means proves Eisermann’s hypothesis, but it does place the Stimulus amoris closer to ca. 280-90, a decade or two before the other earliest dated exemplar of the text, of 30, from the Franciscan convent of Monteripido, near Perugia.6 The Supplicationes variae’s links to Genoa, in the north of Italy, are also significant, since all other thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italian copies of the Stimulus are from central Italy – Umbria and Tuscany. Eisermann notes the curious fact that no Italian manuscripts are known from the region in which it was probably written (assuming that James of Milan did not write his treatise elsewhere, before settling in Domodossola).7 Domodossola , however, was in the Franciscan province of Genoa, placing the Supplicationes variae text relatively close to home. These specifics of date and geography are useful facts, but for the cultural historian, perhaps the most significant aspect of the Supplicationes variae is the type of manuscript in which James of Milan’s chapters on the Passion appear. Although in later years, the Stimulus amoris became a remarkably popular treatise...