Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria

Book excerpt: In Liturgy, Books and Franciscan Identity in Medieval Umbria, Anna Welch explores how Franciscan friars engaged with manuscript production networks operating in Umbria in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to produce the missals essential to their liturgical lives. A micro-history of Franciscan liturgical activity, this study reassesses methodologies pertinent to manuscript studies and reflects on both the construction of communal identity through ritual activity and historiographic trends regarding this process. Welch focuses on manuscripts decorated by the ateliers of the Maestro di Deruta-Salerno (active c. 1280) and Maestro Venturella di Pietro (active c. 1317), in particular the Codex Sancti Paschalis, a missal now owned by the Australian Province of the Order of Friars Minor.