Convents within convents: the refoundation of Santa Chiara, San Gimignano in 1300 and the genesis of the Meditationes vitae Christi

Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) – the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text’s composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named “Jacobus”. This article extends Tóth’s and Falvay’s findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio’s story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio’s donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town’s principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini’s research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male ‘conventino’ of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for which the Meditationes was most likely written.