autobiography of medievial period
Answers
Answer:
Opicino wrote this account of his life around 1336, while he was working in the Papacy at Avignon. What is unusual about his writings is the work he put it in: the manuscript Palatinus Latinus MS 1993, which is kept in the Vatican, contains 52 large colour drawings on parchment covered with notes. One historian calls it “a dizzying sequence of circles, lines, animals and faces wherein a synergy of cosmological and cartographic elements outlines a fourteenth century vision of the ideali
Answer:
We have very few autobiographical accounts from the Middle Ages. Some of the most well-known works are those by Augustine, Peter Abelard and Margery Kempe. However, there is also one account by Opicino de Canistris, which happens to be both very ordinary and very strange.
Explanation:
Opicino wrote this account of his life around 1336, while he was working in the Papacy at Avignon. What is unusual about his writings is the work he put it in: the manuscript Palatinus Latinus MS 1993, which is kept in the Vatican, contains 52 large colour drawings on parchment covered with notes. One historian calls it “a dizzying sequence of circles, lines, animals and faces wherein a synergy of cosmological and cartographic elements outlines a fourteenth century vision of the idealized role the Church was intended to play.”
For example, the image above shows the Virgin Mary and a map of northern Italy, along with symbols of the four evangelists, which is surrounded by a circular calendar. It is within this work that he offers an account of his life, which Victoria Morse explains “should be understood more as a confession than as autobiography in the modern sense.” Beginning with his conception, Opicino writes about his childhood and his lack of interest in getting an education. He and his family lived in and around Pavia, with Opicino slowly learning to be a cleric. However this Italian city was involved in the long-lasting Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, with the neighbouring city-state of Milan, and in 1315 the family is forced to flee the city. After spending three years in Genoa, during which Opicino’s father and brother die, they return to Pavia. Opicino works to become a priest, which is made difficult because Pavia had been placed under interdict by the Papacy. It seems that he has difficulty getting his career on track, but eventually goes to Avignon and gets the Pope to know about his skill at writing, leading to a job within the Papal bureaucracy.