To my family for giving me life and love - Bilkent University

The chronicles serve to a degree to this purpose. The lives of the individual friars,
as far as they can be reconstructed faithfully, also give evidence that can enable
us to understand the steps of their education. In the second part of this thesis, I
have used extensively Ubertino’s Declaratio and Responsio, which contained his
complaints about educational activities and which was presented to the Pope
before the Council of Vienne in 1311. 13 There is little reason to doubt the truth of
Ubertino’s laments. In fact, his complaints about lectors and the school system,
when set alongside the constitutions, present quite a plausible picture of what the
system looked like and what deficits and abuses were present at the time.
In addition to these fairly traditional sources of evidence, I have also
realized that a potential source of evidence, which can be used particularly for the
history of mendicant education and libraries, has not yet been exploited by
historians. More than twenty years ago, Raoul Manselli, in his article on the
convent libraries of the Franciscans in Florence and Padua, rightly argued that,
although the study of the nature of acquisitions and donations to the mendicant
libraries could serve as invaluable testimony for the establishment and evolution
of the cultural milieu in the convents, it, nevertheless, had not received enough
attention from the historians. 14
What Manselli did not talk about, was the study of the manuscripts
themselves—not just the works in them, as another significant source to shed
13 “Zur Vorgeschichte des Councils von Vienne no. 4 Vorarbeiten zur
Constitution Exivi de Paradiso vom 6. Mai 1312.”, ed. F. Ehrle, ALKG, 3 (1887),
pp.1-195
14 R. Manselli, “Due Biblioteche di “Studia” Minoritici: Santa Croce di Firenze e il Santo di
Padova” in Le scuole degli Ordini mendicanti (sec. XIII-XIV), ed. M. d’Alatri, pp. 355-6.
12