Some New Sources for the Life of Blessed Agnes of Bohemia: Including a Fourteenth-Century Latin Version (Bamberg, Misc. Hist. 146, E. VII, 19): and a Fifteenth-Century German Version (Berlin, Germ. Oct. 484)

Walter Seton’s 1915 book focuses on one of the key, understudied figures of the early Franciscan movement. Abbess of the Convent of Prague, Blessed Agnes was central to the establishment of the Order of Saint Clare. She presented persuasive arguments to convince the Holy See to permit female Franciscans to live according to their Rule and practise voluntary poverty. Seton’s edition, drawn from manuscripts in German libraries, includes the oldest extant Latin version of Agnes’ Life together with a fifteenth-century German version and German copies of four letters she received from Saint Clare. Praised in 1916 for its ‘admirable thoroughness’, this edition sheds new light on Blessed Agnes, whose importance was long overshadowed by her more prominent contemporaries, Saint Clare and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, her cousin. This reissue makes this valuable primary material accessible again to scholars working on Franciscan history and medieval women’s spirituality.