I codici agiografici di Santa Croce fra Duecento e Trecento

In the century around the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, more than twenty manuscripts with hagiographic content can be traced in the convent of Santa Croce. A small part of these are earlier codices, but many were made in this period and for some there are good reasons to think that the convent was the very place of copying. Among these volumes we find several copies, both autonomous and combined, of five clearly predominant works: the Vitae Patrum, Cassian’s Collationes, Gregory the Great’s Dialogi, the Legenda aurea by Iacopo da Varazze and the two legendae on Francesco by Bonaventura. It is evident that the friars’ interest focused on these writ-ings, and at least in the case of the Vitae Patrum and Cassian, it can be shown that there was a precise strategy of multiplying the copies and carefully revising the copied texts.