The Life of St. Francis of Assisi · 27 of 27

Translator’s Note and Edition Details

The present translation of Saint Bonaventura’s Life of Saint Francis has been made especially for the Temple Classics by Miss E. Gurney Salter, who also translated the Legend of Saint Francis by the Three Companions for the series. Miss Salter has added the marginalia and the Note which follows.

September, 1904.

Bedford Street, London.

Translator’s Note

Saint Bonaventura’s Life or Legend of St. Francis, usually known as the “Legenda Major,” or “Aurea Legenda,” was composed between 1260 and 1263, at the bidding of a Chapter-General of the Order. It was intended to supersede former Lives or Legends, and to become the official and standard biography of the Saint. To ensure this, another Chapter-General ordered the suppression of the earlier Lives, from which, nevertheless, St. Bonaventura had largely drawn in compiling his biography. Many passages in it are borrowed, sometimes even verbally, from Celano and the “Three Companions.” St. Bonaventura skilfully held the balance between the two extreme parties in the Order, and his reputation for sanctity and learning,—together with his dramatic power as a narrator,—has rendered his work widely known and popular ever since his own day. It gains a special interest from having served as Giotto’s text for his series of frescoes in the Upper Church at Assisi.

The present translation is made from the text published by the Rev. Fathers of the College of Saint Bonaventura, at Quaracchi, in 1898 (tom. viii. S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia; also published separately). Their text is printed from the codex 7570 (of the fourteenth century) in the Vatican Library, Rome, collated with others at Assisi, Florence, La Verna, and in the same Library. There are 93 codices in all; several, e.g. at Assisi, Paris, Basle, Cambridge, and Ravenna, of the thirteenth century, though without exact date.

The “Legenda Minor” is a series of brief extracts from the “Life” for reading in Church.

In translating the frequent quotations from the Bible, the Authorised Version has been adhered to as far as possible.

E. G. S.