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FRANCISCANS AT WORK As infinite as space, good work joins earth to heaven. -Lu Chi A full century ago, Prosper Boissonnade described how ordinary people around 1200, by their labor, could gain a livelihood in the new urban centers of Europe.1 In his study on work in the Middle Ages, Steven Epstein told how the urban centers, in their need for workers, became “havens of refuge for runaway serfs.”2 A. Bartoli Langeli focused his attention on one such urban center in his study on the Assisian municipal charter of 1210.3 Although Bartoli Langeli said nothing specific about work in Assisi, by implication he suggested a great deal, for the accord of 1210 wanted nothing more than stability and perhaps even peace, in the interest of the hard work that would make Assisi prosperous and great. At the same time as the city fathers of Assisi, both the lords and the leaders of the people, elaborated and solemnly proclaimed the new basis of life in Assisi, turning their written accord into the city’s new charter, Francis and his brothers were talking about work. They were already working hard and well, so much so that Assisi’s employers prized their energy and their skills. The brothers discussed working in Assisi because they were wary of their employers’ desire for their collaboration. Whereas their employers shared in Assisi’s ambitions, the brothers labored with other, human goals in mind. In that divergence lie the seeds of our tale. When we speak about Franciscans at work in Assisi in 1210, we have good source material for study. We have the municipal charter edited and analyzed by Bartoli Langeli, which corrected and incorporated the charter of 1203. The charters of 1203 and 1210 help 'M y gratitude to Michael Blastic and Michael Cusato, who read the early versions of this study and pointed to inadequacies and weaknesses and need for exact reference and further detail. - Boissonnade’s study was published in Paris in 1900 and in an English translation in London in 1927. It was republished by Harper and Row in New York in 1964: Life and Work in M edieval Europe. See page 196. 2S. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in M edieval Europe, U. of North Carolina Press, 1991, 257. Hereafter, S. Epstein, Wage Labor. 3 “La realtà sociale assisana e il patto del 1210” in: Assist al tempo di san Francesco, Assisi, 1978, 271-336. The whole ofAssisi al tempo helps us get Francis and his brothers in focus. The book lacks a study on the city’s ecclesiastical institutions. That has since been done in two articles by N. D’Acunto, mentioned below. Franciscan Studies, 59 (2001) 21 22 David Flo o d us understand Assisi as a social system. They supply us with the context from which the brothers were consciously distancing themselves in their discussions on work.4 Then we have the brotherhood’s determinations on work and especially the brief paragraph in which they distinguish their work from work in Assisi.5 They needed a new definition when they consciously set aside the work roles offered them in central Italy. Seeing as both the Assisian material and the Franciscan material propose courses of action, I do not hesitate to qualify the sources at our disposal as excellent. Assisi in these years was detaching itself from feudal forms of social organization and developing communal ones. In 1198, by popular will, the people of Assisi put an end to the services which they owed the feudal lords or the noble families of Assisi, commonly called the maiores. Although the twenty or so feudal families reimposed their domination on Assisi in 1203, after the popular forces of Assisi had lost the war against Perugia, in the next years they reconciled themselves to the changes taking place; and in 1210 they helped draw up the new municipal document, mentioned above, in which they agreed to make common cause with the city’s popular leaders, the minores. They agreed to terms by which those bound to service could indemnify their masters and become socially free. The 1210 document spelled out the costs of economic and social independence, with the...

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