Copyright date 1999 | ||
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Similar Vita Christi, Imagination - Meditation - and Cogn, The Pseudo‑Bonaventuran Lives of C, Affective Meditation and the In, The Mirror of the Blessed L | ||
The Meditations on the Life of Christ (Latin: Meditationes uitae Christi or Meditationes de uita Christi) is a fourteenth-century devotional work, later translated into Middle English by Nicholas Love as The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.
Contents
Authorship
The work's precise date of composition, and its author, has occasioned much debate. Until the late nineteenth century, it was traditionally ascribed to Bonaventure. Once it was realised that the work was not by him, but by an unknown author, the ascription was changed to pseudo-Bonaventure, representing a work previously thought to have been written by Bonaventure, but now of unknown author. It has since been thought to be the work of a Franciscan friar.
The critical editor of the Meditations associated it with a John of Caulibus (Latin: Johannes de Caulibus), an attribution also appearing with the work's most recent English translation. It was also suggested that the work may have been based on a vernacular work, perhaps one written by an Italian nun, but this view has not won wide acceptance. Newly discovered documentary evidence showed that the work was indeed that of a Franciscan, and was written around 1300 by Jacobus de Sancto Geminiano, who is also identifiable as the leader of a revolt of Tuscan spirituals, one of the Fraticelli, in 1312.
Influence
The work's popularity in the Middle Ages is evidenced by the survival of over two hundred manuscript copies, including seventeen illuminated ones. The popularity of the work increased further with early printed editions, with a surviving Venetian blockbook of 1497.
The work's detailed evocations of moments from the Gospels influenced art, and it has been shown to be the source of aspects of the iconography of the fresco cycle of the Life of Christ in the Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto. It has also been credited with inspiring the great increase in depictions of the Veil of Veronica from the late 14th century.