  Bonaventure was born Giovanni di Fidanza in Bagnoregio in Tuscany.  He himself attests that he was healed miraculously as a child by the intervention of Francis of Assisi, shortly after the saint’s death on 3 October  1226[2]:  “when I was a boy, as I still vividly remember, I was snatched from the jaws of death by his invocation and merits.” He did not rush to join the Franciscans, but matriculated as a layman in the Arts faculty at the University of Paris in 1235 and proceeded all the way to the Master of Arts, around 1243.  The Arts curriculum at Paris then consisted of the seven liberal arts, supplemented by some works of Aristotle. Heavily weighted in favor of the trivium—the linguistic arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic—teaching in the quadrivium—the four mathematical and scientific disciplines—was somewhat limited, partially due to the prohibition of Aristotle’s works in natural philosophy at Paris in 1210. Though some Masters of Arts, such as Roger Bacon and Richard Rufus, were teaching the Aristotelian natural philosophy, the requirements for becoming a Master of Arts as late as 1252 listed only the old logic, new logic, and the On the Soul (De anima) among Aristotle’s works; the earliest record of Aristotle’s entire natural philosophy and metaphysics as required for graduation only appears in  1255,[3]  two years before Bonaventure left the University. His writing reflects this education; a master of logic and rhetoric, he was less deeply read in the Aristotelian and Islamic philosophical texts than his Dominican contemporaries, Albert and Thomas.