GIOVANNI da CALVOLI (a Caulibus). — A San Gimignano in Tuscany, a great Franciscan preacher of the 14th century, sometimes erroneously called Giovanni da San Gimignano, who according to Wadding and Papini was still alive in 1376; but nothing more is known of 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, as well as with a refined sense of literary art.
The work, which had 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 considered a linguistic standard.
The work itself has, in the manuscript tradition, two versions: one abridged, and the other more extensive and common in 93 chapters; but that G. da C. is its author has been definitively excluded by the most competent scholar, C. Fischer, in 1932 (op. cit. in bibliography, pp. 449-83), assigning the work to an unknown Tuscan Franciscan. He defends the priority of the original vernacular and also maintains, against the opinion of others and of the editors of St. Bonaventure himself, that the Seraphic Doctor is the author of the *Meditationes de Passione* (i.e., of the 13 chapters, from the 68th onward). 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 contested with excellent internal arguments by Fr. Cicchitto. However, the question of its authenticity remains at least doubtful.