More on John Capistran's Correspondence: A Report on an Open Forum

Preliminary remarks

Since John Capistran is among the most relevant figures of the fifteenth century, not only for the Franciscan Order but more generally for political and religious life (in a century in which saying "political-religious life" is like saying "life"), the very substantial corpus of his correspondence has a long history as well as a long historiography. The approximately seven hundred letters he sent or received beginning in 1418 until his death in 1456, were discovered and studied one at a time over the centuries, for quite different reasons and with different aims.

Certainly the gradual process of discovering and studying these documents is marked by some milestones. For example, there is the celebration of his canonization process in 1623 (during which the written works by the saint and written testimonies about him were also investigated), as well as the works of the so-called Capistran Commission.¹ This commission was a team established in 1952 in Rome by the leadership of the Franciscan Order (namely by General Minister Sépinsky), which was located first in Grottaferrata, College of Quaracchi, then in the Antonianum, and was managed by friars Ottokar Bonmann and Paulis Bédrune.²

The research archive of Capistrano materials that is housed at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University was brought together through the efforts of Gedeon Gál, OFM. Gedeon had been heading up work on the critical edition of the theological and philosophical writings of William of Ockham at the Institute. His interest in John Capistran came from the fact that he was a member of the Hungarian Franciscan Province of St. John Capistran. The greater part of the material came from the research files of Ottokar Bonmann who died before being able to start any actual editing work for an edition of Capistran. Knowing of Bonmann's work Gedeon asked Conrad Harkins, O.F.M., then director of the Franciscan Institute, to request that Bonmann's research be shipped to the Institute from Rome where it was being stored. Also while Conrad was on sabbatical in Italy, Gedeon asked him to photocopy the manuscript of Capistran's letters copied in the 1600s by Antonio Sessa of Palermo that resides in the library of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. That being done the copies were sent to the Franciscan Institute and joined with the Bonmann materials to form the archive. It is a heritage that deserves to be retrieved by scholars, in order to accomplish the work according to modern criteria, where accomplish means to create a final edition.

Bonmann was very familiar with the earlier research on these letters and his work reinforces the fact that the edition was an obstacle course. This is the case not only because scholars' sensibilities regarding these kinds of documents changed throughout the centuries, previously viewed as a relic of a saint or an attestation of his sainthood, and – more recently – as a precious source about European history in the first half of the fifteenth century. Despite scholarly interest in the correspondence, it remains unpublished.

In fact, the first to have the intention to publish all of the correspondence was Lucas Wadding, who received some materials about these letters at St. Isidore College in Rome, but he could not complete his project although he mentions it in his Annales Minorum.³ After Wadding many scholars tried to work on the same project but using criteria that – in several cases – are no longer helpful because their methods are out-of-date.

For example, as we will soon see, collections such as those provided by Antonio Sessa in the seventeenth or by Atanasio Masci in the eighteenth century, are inspired by hagiographical criteria or, at least, not philological criteria. All of these collections were acquired by the Capistran Commission and then (when the Commission finished its duty) by Ottokar Bonmann who wrote an article⁴ on the subject in which he explains both the characteristics (or perhaps better, the limits) of these collections, and the work having to do with Capistran's...