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SERVUS OF SINT ANTHONIS, O.F.M.Cap. THE PSEUDO-BONAVENTURIAN WORK « SYMBOLICA THEOLOGIA » "'WITH THE EDITION OF ITS TABLE OF CONTENTS AND SOME EXTRACTS In how far modern Franciscan research is indebted to Father Fidelis of Fanna is difficult to say. The twenty-one volumes he cram– med with notes on manuscripts during the years 1870-1877 when he ransacked more than 500 European libraries, have never left the •Quaracchi Archives for publication. Yet, they were and will still be the starting-point for countless studies in the field of Franciscan ·writings. The work we are going to be occupied with owes it to Father Fidelis that it was rescued from oblivion. He discovered it in the Basel University Library and it must immediately have attracted his attention and curiosity. In his provisiqpal catalogue of manuscript works attributed to Saint Bonaventure that he published in 1874, he listed our treatise Symbolica theologia as number 40 and, besides an .ample incipit, he printed four shorter chapters of the work, including the full explicit, certainly in the hope that some more manuscripts might be brought to light1. He did not dwell on the contents and peculiarities of the work, nor even did he reveal where he found the manuscript, but simply dismissed the matter with a footnote: « Opu– sculum, quamvis mutilum, valde fusum; ex quo excerpta quinque exhibeo » 2 • We admit the good reasons Father Fidelis had for being brief and incomplete in his provisional catalogue. He planned to return to the question at full length in his critical edition of the works of Saint Bonaventure. But he died in 1881, and his successors, to whose responsibility this task was left, do not seem to have appreciated the Symbolica theologia to the same degree that he did 1 FIDELIS A FANNA, Ratio novae collectionis operum omnium sive editorum sive anecdo– .torum Seraphici Beel. Doctoris S. Bonaventurae proxime in lucem edendae, manuscriptorum . bibliothecis totius Europae perlustratis, Taurini 1874, 282-287. 2 Ibid. 282 note 1. .MMP I - 14