A digital portal for the Franciscan source texts.
The early biographies of Francis of Assisi — in the original medieval Latin, with translations, full-text search, and thematic cross-references — as a fast, offline-capable web app, built on open data and open code.
▶ Open the app — franciscus.app
Franciscus collects the early sources for the life of Francis of Assisi and makes them genuinely readable on the web — searchable, deep-linkable, and annotated, without ever losing the original Latin. It is free to read, free to reuse, and free of a backend: the whole site is static, and the corpus travels as portable, public-domain files.
The project is split across three repositories so each part can be used on its own — read the texts as data, run the pipeline, or hack on the app.
| Repo | What it is | License |
|---|---|---|
| franciscus | The application — a Rust CLI that compiles the corpus into a single SQLite/FTS5 database, plus a SvelteKit SPA that queries it entirely in the browser (sql.js/WASM). Deploys to GitHub Pages with no read-path server. |
AGPL-3.0-or-later |
| franciscus-data | The source corpus — medieval Latin texts, translations, semantic annotations, and topic pages, as plain Markdown + YAML. Portable and reusable on its own. | CC0-1.0 |
| franciscus-scripts | The ingestion pipeline — Python tools that turn reference-edition PDFs into spec-compliant Markdown, plus AI-assisted translation and annotation. | AGPL-3.0 |
They fit together as a one-way flow:
PDFs ──[franciscus-scripts]──▶ franciscus-data (Markdown + YAML)
│
[franciscus] │ Rust CLI → franciscus.db (SQLite + FTS5)
▼
franciscus.app ── static SPA, queries the DB
in-browser via sql.js (WASM)
| ID | Work | Author |
|---|---|---|
| 1Cel | Vita Prima | Thomas of Celano |
| 2Cel | Vita Secunda | Thomas of Celano |
| LMj | Legenda Maior | Bonaventure |
| 3Soc | Legenda Trium Sociorum | The Three Companions |
| Testamentum | Testamentum Sancti Francisci | Francis of Assisi |
Each work is available in the original Latin and an Italian translation, with a reading interface in English or Italian; English translations are planned.
- 📖 Read each work chapter by chapter in Latin, Italian, or English.
- 🔎 Search the whole corpus full-text and jump straight to the passage.
- 🏷️ Follow themes — virtues, persons, places, and events get topic pages that gather every relevant passage across all the works.
- 🔗 Link deeply — every paragraph and verse has a stable, shareable URL.
- 📱 Go offline — it installs as a PWA and caches the database after the first visit.
- 🧩 Reuse the data — the corpus is CC0, so you can take it anywhere.
Two licences, deliberately:
- Code (
franciscus,franciscus-scripts): AGPL-3.0 — the application stays free, and every modified version must stay free with its source available. - Corpus (
franciscus-data): CC0-1.0 — dedicated to the public domain, with no rights reserved. The medieval Latin is long out of copyright; CC0 also covers the editorial layer (encoding, IDs, annotations, topic pages, translations) so those are unambiguously free to reuse too.
We are upfront about how the corpus was made. The Latin texts are transcriptions of real public-domain print editions (chiefly the Quaracchi Analecta Franciscana), machine-assisted but not AI-generated. The translations and annotations are largely machine-generated and not yet fully human-reviewed, so expect occasional errors. Treat Franciscus as a reading and discovery tool, not a critical edition — and reporting mistakes genuinely helps. Details live in each repo's README.
Corrections to the texts, translations, annotations, and code are all welcome —
this is exactly the kind of work that benefits from many eyes. Start from the
CONTRIBUTING.md in the relevant repo:
app & pipeline
·
corpus.
A Verbum Caro project. Questions, corrections, or collaboration — reach us at info@verbumcaro.it.