Creating Clare of Assisi: Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy (review)

Creating Clare of Assisi by Lezlie S. Knox is the fifth volume in Brill's series, The Medieval Franciscans, the mission of which is to publish annually interdisciplinary research on the Order of St. Francis. The inclusion of a monograph devoted to St. Clare and the uses to which her writings were put in the centuries following her death would no doubt have pleased Clare herself, as she never imagined herself as anything but a follower of St. Francis, even though one successive pope after another tried to hive off her Poor Sisters into a separate but unequal enclosed Order.

Creating Clare of Assisi attempts to contrast Clare's vision of her vocation, which privileged poverty above all else, to the subsequent convoluted history of the various religious groups, congregations and Orders that were directly and indirectly associated with her. That her sisters were variously called Poor Sisters, Poor Ladies, Religious Women, Sisters Minor, Minoresses, Poor Enclosed Nuns, Poor Recluses of the Order of St. Damian, Damianites, and Sisters of the Order of St. Clare exemplifies the complexity of the problem. There was nothing if not variety among the female followers of Francis and Clare, variety that drove a succession of popes, from Gregory IX to Urban IV, to wit's end as they tried to regularize, institutionalize, and enclose Clare's sisters under one monastic rule. So long as Clare was alive she fought off papal initiatives to impose financial stability and regularization on her sisters; on her deathbed she even won the right for her sisters at San Damiano to follow her Form of Life, the first monastic rule written by a woman. Institutionalization began in earnest after her death, when in 1263 Urban IV agglomerated most of the various and sundry Clarissan communities and imposed a new monastic rule on them which authorized the use of both property and possessions. Thus the Order of St. Clare was created. Henceforth, during the latter half of the thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth centuries, Knox argues that Clare's Form of Life or Rule fell into disuse, though there were notable exceptions such as Santa Chiara and Santa Croce, Neapolitan foundations made by Queen Sancia of Mallorca, whose own commitment to Franciscan poverty no doubt informed her decision. It was not until the fifteenth century that interest in Clare, her vision, and her Rule were fully rekindled.

Knox guides her readers expertly through this tangled thicket to show that as Clare's Rule fell into desuetude so did her image as founder, a situation aided by the contemporary hagiographical tradition that tended to drain the life out of Clare by downplaying her Form of Life and commitment to poverty in favor of representing her as a consecrated (and obedient) virgin, conveniently fitting her into a prescribed model of female sanctity. So in the period after Clare's death, Knox suggests, those communities affiliated to the new Order of St. Clare such as Arcella near Padua were more likely to identify with Francis than Clare. Clare and her Rule made a come-back only in the fifteenth century when the Observant Franciscan movement, dedicated to a return to the founding impulses of the Order, rediscovered Clare's writings and drafted them into service as evidence supporting their own battles to retain the privilege of poverty (Werner Maleczek has shown that in order to bolster their case for adhering to strict rules of poverty, the Observant Clarisses added to Clare's canonical writings by forging a "Privilege of Poverty" purporting to be from Innocent III. Most likely it issued from the monastic scriptorium of Monteluce in Umbria. See Maleczek, "Questions about the Authenticity of the Privilege of Poverty of Innocent III and of the Testament of Clare of Assisi," Greyfriars Review 12, Supplement (1998): 1–80.) It would be interesting to know whether material culture supports this argument. Did church, chapel, and convent dedications to Clare follow a...