GIOVANNI da CALVOLI (a Caulibus). — Near San Gimignano in Tuscany, a great Franciscan preacher of the fourteenth century, sometimes also erroneously called Giovanni da S. Gimignano, still alive, according to Wadding and Papini, in 1576; but nothing more is known about him. According to the most common attribution, he would be the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, one of the masterpieces of Franciscan spirituality, which the author wrote with dramatic vividness and expressive power, almost plastic in quality, as well as with an exquisite sense of literary art.
The work, which had a great influence on religious life, was written for the edification of a Poor Clare nun around 1335, in Tuscany, probably first in the vernacular and then translated into Latin. The vernacular text is regarded as a model of the language.
The work itself has had, in the manuscript tradition, two recensions: one abridged, and the other longer and more common, in 93 chapters; but that G. da C. was its author was categorically excluded by the most competent scholar, C. Fischer, in 1932 (the work cited in the bibliography, pp. 449–83), who assigned the work to an unknown Tuscan Franciscan friar; he defends the priority of the vernacular original, and furthermore maintains, against the opinion of others and of the editors of St. Bonaventure themselves, that the Seraphic Doctor is the author of the Meditationes de Passione (that is, of the 13 chapters beginning with chapter 68). But this claim, judged certain and definitive even by the recent Spanish editors of the Obras de s. Bonaventura (II, Madrid 1946, pp. 735–47), has been challenged with excellent internal arguments by Fr. Cicchitto. Nevertheless, the question of its authenticity remains at least doubtful.
449–83; Collect. Franc., 13 (1943), p. 42; L. Cicchitto, in Miscell. Franc., 48 (1948), pp. 391–95; L. Döppenschmitt, Joh. de Cunlibus, in LThK, V, col. 486. Lorenzo di Fonzo