Abstract

The Latin religious text known in the Middle Ages as the Stimulus Amoris must be considered a key text of late-medieval Franciscan spirituality, and one of the texts from the Franciscan milieu that was most widely copied and disseminated throughout the Middle Ages among monastic as well as lay readerships.1 In a recent study, Falk Eisermann has demonstrated that the Stimulus Amoris was subject to a particularly productive reception with multiple adaptations through centuries, and that the text to a large extent was without one clearly discernible, normative form. The Stimulus Amoris, in other words, appears to have been regarded as an open text that could be, and in fact was altered, excerpted, shortened and...