The Cult of St Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby (review)

The parts of the book that deal with the subject indicated in the title are generally good. However, when Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby looks at the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, she is on shakier ground, and it shows. Although the author appears to be well read in that early period, there are mistakes and overstatements. For example, she takes for granted that Thomas of Celano composed the first vita of Clare, although at best that is just a possibility. She says that Clare holds a “reliquary casket” (p. 26) in the earliest images of Clare’s miracle at San Damiano, but surely it is a pyx. At one point, she mentions the archbishop of Assisi, when Assisi is a diocese.

The book has a clear thesis about the ups and downs of the popularity of Clare and the shift of emphasis in her various revivals. In particular, Debby shows how Clare’s popularity increased in the Renaissance in part because of her Eucharistic miracle and in part because of her “defeat” of the Saracens, both of which refer to the miracle at San Damiano. This is well argued. The Eucharist was an obvious focus of devotion in art long before the Protestant Reformation, yet it becomes still more important in the Tridentine Church. Just as the story of St. Francis’s meeting with the sultan becomes more confrontational as the story is retold and the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil begins to look like a Turk, so Clare driving away the Muslim mercenaries looks increasingly like a defeat of the Turks. Debby’s focus on St. Bernardino of Siena as an important figure in the revival of the cult of Clare in the first half of the fifteenth century is convincing.

However, it seems that Debby was not as thorough as she could have been when surveying the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century images of Clare. She also is not clear enough about the origin of images of Clare from that period—predominantly from convents of Clares and rarely from churches of the First Order. Even her analysis of images of Clare in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi is somewhat narrow and not fully informed.

The book is clearly organized, and the purpose and argument are laid out carefully at the beginning. The chapters are thoroughly footnoted, and there is a useful bibliography. The book is well illustrated. However, nine of the ten color photographs also appear in the book in black and white. It would have been better to provide more illustrations of works that are discussed but not presented visually. Poor proofreading—including errors in apostrophes and wording, as well as this reviewer credited with editing a book that he, in fact, did not edit (p. 54n39)—mars the presentation.

This is a useful book, especially its central chapters. The early chapters, however, provide a less than thorough look at the early period of images of Clare. Debby makes a real, although ultimately modest, contribution to early-modern scholarship and the iconography of Clare of Assisi.