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  • Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint by André Vauchez Translated by Michael F. Cusato
  • John Tolan
Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint. By André Vauchez. Translated by Michael F. Cusato. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 398. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17894-4.)

André Vauchez has written a learned and very readable biography of the one of the most popular and important saints of the European Middle Ages. Moreover, Michael Cusato, a prominent scholar of Franciscan studies, has produced an excellent translation. The first of the four parts of Vauchez’s book narrates the biography of St. Francis of Assisi, creating a clear and cogent narrative based on the principal sources, with a reasonable preference for the Legend of the Three Companions. Francis’s life is known almost exclusively from texts composed by thirteenth-century Franciscan authors: the provenance and relative importance of each of these texts has produced much scholarly debate, and Vauchez manages to present these complex traditions in a way that is both clear to novices and will seem fair to specialists—no small feat.

In part 2, Vauchez recounts the “transfiguration” of Francis in the years following his death in 1226, into one of the major saints of the Latin Church: the canonization by Pope Gregory IX, the construction of the vast basilica that was to house his relics, and the difficulties of the early Franciscan order in reconciling the radical message of Franciscan poverty with the concrete needs of a large and growing order. He shows the tensions that this struggle caused within the order. For Vauchez, as for earlier scholars who have worked on this material, the institutionalization of the order, although perhaps inevitable, represented a “second death of Francis”: the huge, lavish basilica that was to become the mother church of the order, in particular, violated the ideal of poverty that Francis had embodied.

The third part concerns the forging of “myths and images” of the saint. In a chapter on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Vauchez presents first the textual traditions, with the emphasis on Franciscan hagiography and the dispute between spiritual and conventual factions within the order: a story that has been told many times, here presented succinctly and clearly. A second section on “Francis in images” is somewhat disappointing. By choosing to treat iconography separately from the texts, he removes it from its context—clearly the Bardi dossal was not produced in the same context, or for the same audience, as the frescoes in the upper basilica of Assisi. Moreover, there is a wealth of other iconography that goes unmentioned (as does much recent work in the field), and (perhaps most disappointing for the general reader), there is not a single reproduction of any of the images discussed. Missing from this chapter, as well, is the sense of how Francis and the Franciscans became a part of the daily life of cities in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe), in particular through the building of lavish churches in many cities, with elaborate iconographical programs and chapels financed by rising urban aristocrats—and where they were often buried. The case of Florence’s [End Page 342] Santa Croce (studied by Rona Goffen) is a prime example of a phenomenon repeated throughout Italy and beyond. Another chapter deals with perceptions of Francis from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, with the emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly debate on the different early sources on Francis (which has come to be known as the “Franciscan question”).

A final, fourth part is a series of six interesting and thoughtful essays on different aspects of Francis’s message and mission, with close attention paid to Francis’s writings. Vauchez’s biography should become the fundamental one-volume study of Francis, useful to all those who want an introduction to the rich and complex field of Franciscan studies. Specialists, although they will find little new, should appreciate the clear and balanced presentation of the many of the major themes in Franciscan studies. Some will be disappointed that Vauchez treads the well-worn paths of the “Franciscan question,” focusing on Franciscan hagiography...

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