INTRODUCTION

Saint Francis of Assisi is one of the best known and most beloved figures of the medieval era. Although the scion of a privileged class, he has inspired generations of followers through his radical renunciation of wealth and physical comforts and through his works of charity, to the extent that his influence today reaches most of the nations of the world and well beyond the limits of the Catholic Church. His embrace of absolute poverty made him both an exemplar and a thorn in the side of the thirteenth-century church, which found him useful to counteract the image of the luxury-loving priesthood and also to elevate the status of the poor and humble, but he also served to embarrass some by the contrast and worry others who saw the necessity of possessions toward the future stability of his Order. He founded the three Franciscan Orders—the First, the Order of Friars Minor or OFM; the Second, the Order of Saint Clare or Poor Clares; and the Third or Tertiary Order of Saint Francis (which allows members of the laity to observe vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience within their stations in secular life)—all of which thrive today. Although he was personally a little suspicious of learning, his followers would include some of the great philosophers and theologians of the late Middle Ages. His love of nature and of animals has rendered him dear to many who might not be moved by more conventional forms of religious piety. He was a nature mystic, and he is today the patron saint of animals and ecology. He was responsible for staging the first living Nativity scene, or creche, in Christian history; and he was also Christianity’s first stigmatic. He shares the honor of being patron saint of Italy with Saint Catherine of Siena. His feast day is celebrated on October 4, the day of his death; many churches, including the Anglican, Lutheran, and Episcopal churches, commemorate this with a blessing of the animals.

Saint Francis’s sanctity was acknowledged immediately after his death, with the result that his life was well documented from the first, in part by eyewitnesses and people who knew him and accompanied him on his travels. This occurred initially at the behest of Pope Gregory IX, toward the process of canonization. One of these early authors was Thomas of Celano, who wrote Francis’s First Life (1228), Second Life (1247), and Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (1253). Thomas of Celano is, however, unreliable and contradictory on details of Francis’s youth, and it is very difficult to construct a chronology from his works. A second whose writings contributed to our knowledge was Francis’s secretary and confessor, Brother Leo, along with Brothers Angelo di Tancredi and Rufino; their reminiscences provide the basis for the thirteenth-century Legend of the Three Companions and The Assisi Compilation: “both texts provide facts about and insights into Francis not found in the earlier lives and, as such, are indispensable in knowing the details of his life and vision.”1 These latter two have been described as the most authentic of the early lives, because they contain many anecdotes that could come only from everyday association with Francis. The authorship of many of the early documents (aside from Thomas of Celano’s) has been much debated; both of the authoritative anthologies of works by and about Saint Francis (see below) contain the arguments of various scholars in the introductions to each work, and it is not necessary to address the issue here.

In addition to the earliest figures, the great Saint Bonaventure, elected Minister General of the Friars Minor in 1257, wrote two early biographies of Francis, the Major and Minor Legends, by 1263, but it is unlikely that he ever met Francis, despite legends to the contrary. The thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman poet Henry of Avranches wrote one of the most important literary artifacts of the era, a life of Saint Francis in Latin verse, shortly after Francis’s canonization. Although it was based on Thomas of Celano’s First Life, it contains many “poetic expansions and embellishments” and a “much more critical account of [Francis’s] misspent youth.”2 A number of other lesser, early biographies exist, in addition to the many that have been written more recently.

A difficulty in dealing with the early accounts of Francis’s life, as with all medieval hagiography (and medieval biography in general), is that medieval saints’ lives are very formulaic: they abound with stories and images that are repeated in one life after another, so that what survives today is often more symbolic of the general virtues that saints are supposed to have had—and that Francis undoubtedly had in abundance—rather than authentic and individualized portraits of characters. Thomas of Celano’s work is more characteristic of this tendency than the more authentic-seeming works by Leo and his companions. The very language used by early hagiographers like Thomas can be highly ritualized. As A. G. Rigg3 puts it: “[hagiography] was at times a minor literary industry,” and hagiographers, as “professional” writers, were familiar with all of the topoi available for portraying their lives: “over time a collection of traditional themes or topoi emerged which reoccur in accounts of saints’ lives. . . one of the consequences of this is that it is possible to group together saints whose stories follow a common pattern.”4 The early lives of Francis are by no means free from this tendency, and it is necessary to sift through them carefully to present a more factual account of Francis’s life.

For instance, in accounts of his individual dealings with lepers, it is probably wiser to view the episodes in general as representative of his kindness to them and other unfortunates, because other saints are associated with lepers and, indeed, the Order of Saint Lazarus was founded for their care.5 On the other hand, there is no doubt that Francis and the Franciscan friars made a point of helping lepers and other outcasts and frequented their dwellings and hospitals, and some of the episodes described are probably rooted in fact. The same may be said of many of the legends of Francis and his dealings with birds and animals; an ability to communicate with animals and birds is a frequent topos of a certain category of saints’ lives (Saint Cuthbert, who spent years in hermitage off the coast of Scotland, communing only with seals and birds, springs to mind). But this is not at all to say that Francis did not love nature and demonstrate kindness to creatures, and whole books have been written on the topic. Other topoi of saints’ lives concern the dreams and visions that saints had or others had about them, their encounters with other holy men or women, their forbearance in suffering, their misspent youths, and the like. All of this said, we are very fortunate in having so much detail about Francis’s life that must be regarded as authentic; the same cannot be said about many another saint.

Francis himself was the author of a number of works, dictated most probably to Brother Leo, although two examples exist in Francis’s own handwriting: a Letter to Brother Leo and the Praises of God, written for Leo. Francis wrote in both Latin and Umbrian Italian (he also spoke French); his Latin is not of a very high quality. In addition to the two works aforementioned, Francis wrote a number of letters and prayers, his Testament on his deathbed, and two versions of a rule for his order, one in 1209/10 (the original lost today, but existing still as revised in 1221) and one in 1223. Of these rules, the prominent scholar and biographer of Francis, Paul Sabatier, believed that the early or “primitive” rule was closer to Francis’s true intent, and that “the latter Rule represented not what Francis wanted for his order, but what Cardinal Ugolino and the Church forced upon Francis.” Sabatier was not a Catholic, however, and it is possible that he overstates the degree to which Francis was compelled against his will: a later, Catholic theologian suggests instead that the Rule of 1223 was simply the primitive rule expanded by revisions in 1221 and then rendered more legalistic in 1223.6 Other writings by Francis are known to be lost. One last work that must be mentioned is the beloved Canticle of Brother Sun, perhaps the work most popularly known today, so expressive of both Francis’s love of creation and his profound faith:

“All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,

And first my lord Brother Sun,

Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.”

Francis’s works, however, were never intended to be autobiographical, so it is primarily to his biographers that one must look for the details of his life.

Physical artifacts and early artistic depictions of Saint Francis abound. At Greccio, which Francis first visited in 1217 and where he sited one of his favorite hermitages, there is a depiction of him on a wood panel dating from the early thirteenth century (possibly during his lifetime) and originating from the accounts of people who knew him and could describe his appearance; it shows him mopping his eyes because of the eye affliction (possibly trachoma) from which he suffered beginning around 1220. His burial place, the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, built in his honor shortly after his death, contains frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue illustrating his life, as well as the twelfth-century crucifix from San Damiano that inspired his pivotal experience of religious conversion. Samples of his own handwriting remain, most notably on a parchment containing his Blessing for Leo; Leo’s handwritten description of Francis’s experience at La Verna exists on the same parchment, housed at the Basilica (which also houses one of his habits). His very remains were exhumed in 1978 to provide for scientific analysis and then, after a special rite, reinterred in the lower church of the Basilica. Indeed, it is not common for a figure from the Middle Ages, other than royalty, to be so well and early documented and depicted.