Rather than cite sources for these assertions, to the contrary the Anonymous Florentine noted that definitive details could not be provided due to the length of centuries in the interim, and the scarcity of sources.
The suggestion of Augustine’s possible fifth-century presence at Mount Pisano was then repeated again in the writing of Nicholas of Alessandria O.S.A. in his Sermo de beato Augustino (“Sermon about blessed Augustine”) of 1332; he was the second of the four significant Augustinian writers on Augustinian history and identity. (The third of them, Henry of Friemar O.S.A., has already been mentioned above.)
The strongest proof of the speciousness of this proposal is the time frame that Augustine himself presented in his Confessions, which allows no period of time for Augustine to have spent years as a hermit in Italy.
(This whole issue of the Augustinian myth-making is bound up with the need of the Augustinian Order to develop its identity in the fourteenth century.)
The myth of Augustine’s presence at Mount Pisano continued to be propagated into the following century. Illustrative of this situation was Andrea Biglia O.S.A. (c. 1395 - 1435), a fifteenth-century Augustinian doctor, author and humanist with connections to Milan, Florence, Perugia and Siena.
It is open to conjecture as to precisely how well Biglia was aware of the fact that, in attempting to establish a direct link between St Augustine and the Augustinian hermits of the thirteenth century, he was moving from historical reality (as we would define it today) to myth in order to support loyally the desire of the Augustinian friars to believe that this link had existed.
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