Le lectiones latine del codice “Illuminati” e il Planctus Magistrae Doloris

[Autom. eng. transl.] The manuscript assisiate 705, also called "Illuminati", is known to be the only known witness of the Santo Stefano Disciplinary laudary; as a laudary, it has been studied and recently published. The laudistic repertoire, however, concerns only the first two of the four issues that make up the code: the third and fourth dossiers contain some texts in Latin relating to the offices that the fraglia was required to celebrate, completed by two groups of lectiones - also in Latin - which, according to the liturgical time, had to be recited. Of the first group of lectiones, he gave an account to Angela Terruggia, noting that their text is nothing but a long and articulated cry of the Virgin which must have been well known in Assisi, since a second manuscript belonging to the Library of the Sacred Convent reports a redaction almost identical, but with different incipit. Franco Mancini returned to the text of the lectiones, arguing that it derived from a Latin median weeping, later inserted into the ritual of the discipline and then became the matrix of some vulgar lamentationes. Well aware of the decisive role of the planctus sequences in the birth and development of that "theater of mercy" which had precisely in the practices of the laity a decisive and unavoidable element, both scholars had grasped the importance of the text preserved in the assisiate codes and of the his recitation in the brotherhood ceremonies. Nevertheless, this singular lament of the mother was only a marginal object of the historical-literary studies, being ignored, instead, by those theatrological or interested in the dramatic devotions of the medieval West. Recent philological contributions, along with a broader mapping of the sources and a reading of them against the background of the dramatic change that characterized the thirteenth-century spirituality allow us now to shed more light around the "Illuminati" planctus and its original dramaturgical structure. The present contribution is divided into two parts: in the first part a list of known text witnesses will be given, trying to place each source within the spiritual context to which it belonged. In the second part, instead, it will be shown how this planctus is of central importance for Passionist dramaturgy in Europe and particularly in Italy.