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They told about the Christian converts of Siena who had found refuge there from the persecution under Diocletian, about many holy visitors who had come to the forest solitude of Lecceto: St Augustine, St Monica, St Ambrose, St Jerome, St William, St Galganus and St Francis of Assisi were all supposed to have passed some time there - an extremely improbable assertion.
The high regard in which Biglia was held in his Order at that time appears from a number of entries in the registers of Gerardo da Rimini, the Vicar General of the Order from 1431 to 1434 and then its Prior General from 1434 to 1443. And on 1st October 1432, Gerardo da Rimini O.S.A., the Rector Ordinis (the vicar for a Prior General who died in office), appointed Biglia as magister regens (“Master in charge”) in Siena. And then on 24th September 1435, Gerardo appointed him Vicar for the Province of Siena, but Providence had decided differently.
The future looked very bright and promising for the young scholar. But suddenly on 27th September 1435, Andrea Biglia was carried off very rapidly by the bubonic plague (the Black Death) in only his fortieth year.
A historian and subsequent Prior General, Ambrogio Massari da Cora O.S.A. was later to say of Biglia: “He died a young man; his name, had he lived long, would have been immortal.”
In barely four decades of life Biglia had accomplished a great deal. In his brilliant but brief career, he had written some sixty-three compositions of various kinds.
By provision of the Constitutions of the Augustinian Order, unless a friar had made some previous disposition before death, his effects, consisting mainly of his books, belonged to the Priory that had first received him into the Order – in Biglia’s case, this was the Priory of San Marco in Milan.
Apparently Andrea had left no last will and testament, and his library was in due course transported to Milan and incorporated into the collection of manuscripts in his home monastery. Some 146 years later, that is, in 1581, Giuseppe Pamfili O.S.A. published a list of thirty-seven works by Biglia, found personally by Pamfili in the manuscripts of the San Marco library.
Yet another 120 years and the San Marco collection of Bigliana had shrunk to nine items, which were listed by Agostino De Rossi some time prior to his death in 1668.This original list by De Rossi was incorporated by D. A. Gandolfo into his own listing of Biglia's works and published in 1704.
These same nine items were carefully examined in the san Marco library some forty years: later by Filippo Argelati and minutely described by him in his own similar listing of Biglia's works, which was published in 1741.
In 1796 if not earlier, all the Biglia manuscripts still then in the Monastery of San Marco were certainly dispersed during the suppression and confiscation of religious houses by the French under Napoleon.
Today, the existence in manuscript in various European libraries of forty-one compositions by Biglia is known, and additionally there are the titles of another twenty-two of his works, either lost or as yet unidentified. Of the works known to be extant, thus far only twenty-one have appeared in print, either in whole or in part.
ID2975
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