BONIFACE OF CEVA. — Francesco, born at Ceva (Piedmont), of a noble marquessal family, between 1460-70, died at Paris on 12 April 1517 (Easter Day). He entered (c. 1495) the Coletans of Rougemont in the province of St Bonaventure of Burgundy, after having been a page at the courts of the Prince-Electors of Saxony and of Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (1458-90). A learned jurist and a man of great practical ability, his life was dominated, both in his very active career and in his writings, by the idea of a just reform within the Franciscan Order, which for him was that of the Coletans, under the Conventual Ministers, while he opposed in every way, both juridically and practically, even with the support of the court of Burgundy, the reform of the Observant Friars, whom he considered outside the juridical bonds of the Order. His activity continued more intense and violent under the intriguing general Fr Egidio Delfini (1500-1506), of whom B. was a strong arm for the fusion of the various reforms into a single Order of Reformed Centuriates, and by whom he was made Minister of the Province of France (1504) and Commissioner of the other French provinces, a post he held until his death. After his attempt to reinstate the Statuta Iulii II (1506), cleverly reworked by B. himself (1508), and after various appeals for the same purpose to the Lateran Council, to General Chapters and both political interventions by the Parliament of France and doctrinal ones by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, the “Dux Coletanorum” died one month before Leo X united, under the Observants, all the various Franciscan reforms, definitively separating them from the Centuriates (bull Ita et vos, 29 May 1517).
It was the complete collapse and overturning of all B.’s work. In Franciscan history his activity, pursued with what seem the best of intentions, may be compared to that of Bonagrazia of Bergamo (q.v.) against the Spirituals in the 1300s and to that, in opposition, of William Josseume against the Centuriates in the early decades of the 1400s.
Among his historical writings we may recall the rich and important Frimamentum trium Ordinum b.mi P.N. Francisci (Paris 1512) in five parts, and the violent Defensorium educatiarum, against the Observants (ibid. 1516); among his other works: Adventuale (ibid. 1512), Quadragesimale et Sermones paschales (ibid. 1517), De perfectione christiana cum praeselari imaginibus ad Leonem X (ibid. 1517), rare and esteemed; Vitatice excursiones: de variis hominum vitiis (ibid. 1518), another fine ascetical treatise.