The circulation of the De XII abusiuis saeculi among thirteenth-century Franciscans was so intense that it is not entirely surprising to find a new version appearing at the time when the Observants took hold of the books of the Spirituals in the early fifteenth century. The item we shall discuss in this final chapter features in the codex Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, MS U.V.5. This small size volume was entirely copied and annotated by Bernardino da Siena himself (1380–1444) at an early stage of his preaching career, probably in the first part of the 1420s. After some extracts from Bonaventure's De triplici via and Itinerarium mentis in Deum, it comprises a series of excerpts from a large array of writings by the main Spiritual Franciscan authors: Peter John Olivi, Ubertino da Casale, Jacopone da Todi and Ugo Panziera. Olivi is by far the most frequently represented writer in a collection that reflects the contents of a remarkable selection of prohibited texts to which Bernardino had access.

It has long been noted that the early Italian Observant theologians and preachers, and in the first place, Bernardino, made abundant use of the writings of the Spirituals, especially Olivi and Ubertino. The way in which they could access those works is less often stressed. Throughout the fourteenth century, dissident groups carefully kept at hand the documents that defined the basis of their opposition to the papacy and the Franciscan hierarchy, after they had broken their allegiance to John XXII and the leaders of the Order.

One of the major accomplishments of Constant Mews is his effort to establish Heloise as a thinker and a writer in her own right. Long before he joined her name to that of her husband in the title of a volume dedicated to ‘great medieval thinkers’, he had already pinpointed her intellectual impact on Abelard in an important article devoted to their readings of Jerome. Of the pair, she clearly was the one who had a greater familiarity with the Church Father. Asserting this fact was instrumental in Mews's identification soon afterwards of Heloise as the woman in the Epistolae duorum amantium, whose intimate knowledge of Jerome is remarkable. Jerome is also a central reference in what has to be considered as Heloise's intellectual masterpiece. Her famous ‘Dissuasion from marriage’ (‘dehortatio matrimonii’), inserted within Abelard's Historia calamitatum, relies heavily on arguments to that effect borrowed from Jerome's Contra Jovinianum. It is unfortunate that the study of misogynistic prejudices is itself sometimes encumbered by misogynistic preconceptions. Scholars often doubted that Heloise could have really built on her own a complex argumentation, putting to use a large number of classical examples. Since Abelard also used many of them in his Theologia christiana (written in or soon after 1122), it seemed logical to infer that he first gathered them at that time, before putting them to use again in the Historia calamitatum (around 1131). Yet, a closer textual analysis reveals that, in that chapter of the Historia, Abelard is indeed reporting extracts of the authentic letter Heloise had sent him around 1117, while refusing the wedding plans he had made with her uncle Fulbert.

The process through which a group of devout Franciscans and their lay followers in southern France gradually moved away from obedience to the Roman Church, were condemned as heretics in May 1318, and were then hunted down throughout lower Languedoc, is one of the best documented cases of collective heretication in medieval Europe. The story of these Spiritual Franciscans and their Beguin followers could even serve as a model in helping historians to realize that heresy is neither just the projection of inquisitorial fantasies, nor the expression of a revolutionary will to break with ecclesiastical authority, but rather the result of a complex interaction between opposing forces whose conflicting views over what constitutes a legitimate Christian community gradually harden to the point of becoming entirely irreconcilable. Robert E. Lerner has made the crucial point that the Beguins are the first popular dissidents to make abundant use of writings. These books or quires allowed them to engage in repeated collective readings of the key documents defining their beliefs and convictions, most of which were works by Peter John Olivi. Yet, as far as is known, none of the volumes that circulated in Languedoc at the time have been preserved. During the core of the repression period (1318–25), while about a hundred Beguins were burned at the stake, confiscated books and papers were probably also destroyed. The great mission that the Beguin Peire Trencavel set himself after his escape from the Wall (Carcassonne's inquisitorial prison) in 1323 was to save Olivi's written texts from destruction. While entrusting a number of these books to Johan Adzorit and Johan Rotgier, both secular priests in Béziers, Trencavel was planning to meet up with another companion in the Auvergne. Sadly, the probability of one day recovering a leather bag containing Olivian manuscripts from the cellar of an isolated farm in Correze or Cantal is extremely low.

Historians must rely instead on documents produced or kept by the persecutors, in the first place by the inquisitors of Carcassonne and Toulouse. The story of Olivi's doctrinal trials and eventual post mortem condemnation can be traced thanks to the annotations made by his censors in the books they studied, either at the time of the 1283 Paris commission that examined his controversial works, or when Bonagrazia of Bergamo wrote repeatedly in one volume from 1310 to 1325.

Posterity has been unfair to Jacques Fournier. During past decades, the attention of historians has been focused almost exclusively on the famous inquisitorial register of the bishop of Pamiers, which is, in the end, merely a document of his administrative practices. At the same time the scholarly works of the Cistercian theologian have remained utterly forgotten. While little or nothing survives of his oeuvre, it was actually in Avignon during his time both as cardinal and as pope that Fournier wrote his great theological opus. This monumental commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, magnificently preserved in six volumes in the papal library, has, however, rarely found a voice. It was partially published, and even then only by accident, by a Dominican who believed that he was editing the works of his fellow friar, Benedict XI (1303–1304). A second aspect of Fournier’s intellectual production is linked to his position as theological advisor to John XXII (1316–1334) during the most important doctrinal trials of the years 1325–1333. Of this activity, which is both cause and effect of his dazzling ascent to the papal Curia in this period, only the dossier of his arbitrations on the debate concerning the Beatific Vision has been preserved, although it remains for the most part unpublished. In what follows I add to this list a new document identifying one of his earliest theological assessments – an opinion or piece of advice given on the occasion of the last phase of the trial against the Commentary on the Apocalypse by the Franciscan theologian Peter John Olivi.