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BOOK REVIEWS81 unions. He does not succeed in putting this interpretation into a context intelligible within the customs, language, and theology of the times and places he is studying. His failure is adequately demonstrated by Brent D. Shaw in his review in The New Republic, July 16 and 25, 1994, pp. 33—41. John T. Noonan United States Court ofAppealsfor the Ninth Circuit Clare ofAssist. By Marco Bartoli. Translated by Sister Frances Teresa, O.S.C. (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press. 1993. Pp. xii, 244. «21.95 paperback.) The First Franciscan Woman: Clare ofAssist and Her Form ofLife. By Margaret Carney, O.S.F. (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press. 1993. Pp. 261. $12.95 paperback.) Clare ofAssist: A Biographical Study. By Ingrid J. Peterson, O.S.F. (Quincy, Illinois: Franciscan Press. 1993. Pp. xxviii, 436. «20.95 paperback.) Over the past two decades, the English-speaking world has witnessed a veritable explosion of interest—both scholarly and popular—in medieval religious women. But until recently, there has been a notable gap in this literature. Especially when one compares the number of studies on Benedictine women and Béguines, there was a real dearth of research into their impressive Franciscan counterparts. This was due partially to a lack of readily available sources, remedied only in 1989 with the appearance of Regis Armstrong 's Clare ofAssist: Early Documents. But a deeper reason was the inherited tendency of Franciscan scholars to view Clare as simply a passive disciple of the almost mythic figure of her fellow Assisian. Her life was viewed as just a chapter in the story of Francis. Thus one of the most important fruits ofthe eighth centenary observance ofClare's birth ( 1993/94) was the decision of the Franciscan Press of Quincy University to publish these three important studies. Each of them has its unique strengths; together they go a long way toward remedying this lacuna in medieval scholarship, at last providing a rich introduction to this important thirteenth-century woman. Marco Bartoli's biography appeared in Italian in 1989, and quickly has become the standard work on Clare in that dominant language of Franciscan research. Bartoli is a disciple of the late great medievalist Raoul Manselli, and his approach shares his master's strengths: a thorough immersion in the primary texts and a rich background in medieval Italian social history. He has produced a portrait of Clare that is well documented, clearly written, and rendered here in an excellent English translation. Its merits are clear, but it also has several defects. The first is rather technical, but it is surprising that in his otherwise fine introduction to the sources on Clare, Bartoli should accept so uncritically the traditional attribution of her Legend to Thomas of Celano (p. 4), even though he is later forced to admit that the author of that 82BOOK REVIEWS work does not appear to appreciate certain key elements ofClare's spirituality (pp. 48, 64, 124). Do not these discrepancies support a different hypothesis: that the Legend's author was not Thomas, and in fact may not have been a Franciscan at all? Two other omissions are more serious. Bartoli presents only a very cursory treatment of Clare's composition of a distinctive form of life for herself and her sisters (pp. 177-180), a fact which severely limits his analysis of that critical document. Finally, the author evinces virtually no awareness of the recent research on the religious experience of medieval women, especially that emanating from the English-speaking world. These two latter defects are remedied respectively by the contributions of Carney and Peterson. Carney's study, originally presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Franciscan Spirituality in Rome in 1989, is an in-depth exposition of Clare's Rule. Beginning with an excellent critical discussion of the relationship ofFrancis and Clare in the sources, Carney goes on to describe the historical development ofher Rule, emphasizing her active responsibility for framing a distinctive form of life for herself and her sisters. This is illustrated through an examination of three central facets of the Rule: poverty, mutual charity, and collaborative governance, which clearly demonstrate Clare's genius in synthesizing "the evangelical ideals of Francis, the new...

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