Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance by Catherine M. Mooney (review)

Catherine Mooney’s expert analysis of historical and hagiographic sources of Clare of Assisi offers an exceptional study of an even broader question: how did 13^th century women religious live out their spiritual calling within the contemporary vita apostolica. In the case of Clare and her followers, Mooney argues that their unique ties to Francis of Assisi gave them a fame and importance that brought papal attention that transformed Clare’s penitential community of women into “the flagship of the papal Order of San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother” (4). Through collaboration with other groups of penitential women, Clare and her followers fostered ways to resist and persist in the form of vocation they sought. Based on a wide range of primary sources including Clare’s own writings, hagiographic sources, papal letters, including previously overlooked letters, as well as pertinent secondary literature, this book, organized chronologically, offers a model of historical scholarship on the complexity of medieval religious life and the sainted leader who has so often been subjected to a “great woman” approach (14). Mooney places Clare and Clare’s followers within a much broader context of 13^th century women’s struggles for religious identity and expression within an ecclesial culture of unification.

Divided into nine chapters, this book begins with an analysis of Clare’s life up through her initial conversion. Basing her first chapter on hagiography and personal testimonies for canonization written after the death of Clare, Mooney is careful to emphasize the polemical purpose of her sources and aims to offer a “barebones” picture of Clare clarifying how her hagiographic attributes have led scholars to define her as a saint and monastic foundress. Chapters two and three trace the development of the community of women around Clare from a group of penitential women, or sorores minors, to a cloistered monastery. Mooney critically analyzes texts from Jacques de Vitry which scholars have used to characterize the early community around Clare to be like that of the friars. The presentation of pertinent texts in Latin and English translation allows Mooney to offer a complex conclusion on the subject: Jacques de Vitry’s texts allow for a wide range of interpretations for the early period. But in time it becomes clear that the women at San Damiano came to take on a cloistered and regular status like contemporary Cistercian and Dominican women.

Chapters four through eight provide the meatiest analyses through the careful presentation and examination of key texts, many of which have been long known but are here presented in different context. Chapter four details the singular transformation of the community into a papal order of “poor enclosed nuns” (67) after the death of Francis with the special attention given by Pope Gregory IX and his interventions with the women and the friars. Chapter five examines Clare’s own writings in her letters to Agnes of Prague and teases out details of the cooperation between the two in preserving a way of life that privileged poverty and “minority” among women. Chapter six delineates the controversies between the popes (from Gregory IX to Innocent IV) and women who persistently sought to protect officially their way of poor life through formae vitae, or rules. The imposition of a Benedictine way of life that involved property was at the heart of the ongoing contests between women and popes.

Chapter seven marks the shift in papal course with Innocent IV’s engagement with the women’s arguments about the Benedictine form of life and their preference for a life in keeping with the model lived out by the friars. This turnabout offered new areas of contestation involving the women. While allowed to live a poor life, they were, in the form of life proposed by Pope Innocent I, to be placed under the pastoral authority of the friars. Mooney offers new material, specifically with an...