Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform by Bert Roest (review)

To write the history of an enclosed, contemplative women’s order, one that set no great store in chronicling or scholarship and whose monasteries were largely autonomous, is indeed a daunting undertaking. In the case of Franciscan women, the so-called Second Order, those challenges multiply when one considers the geographical spread of their houses, the diversity of languages, and the sheer number of houses established during the Order’s first three and a half centuries. Added to all this is the further complication that there were several Rules, none was universally observed, and all admitted, to a greater or lesser degree, of ‘customisations’ which accommodated forma vitae to the needs and preferences of individual houses and their patrons.

Chapters 1 and 2 of Bert Roest’s splendid monograph cover the origins and development of the Order set against the backdrop of the Fourth Lateran Council and papal efforts to impose order on the rapidly expanding women’s penitential movement. The perspective taken on Clare of Assisi’s role and influence reflects recent scholarship: a determined personality, to be sure, but not the founder-of-an-order, correlate of St Francis portrayed in hagiography. Her personal Rule (1253), for example, for which she fought so tenaciously was approved only for a handful of other houses, whereas the Rule of Isabelle of France (1259/63), sister of King Louis IX, which established the Order of Enclosed Sisters Minor, enjoyed far wider reach in Europe and across the Channel. Apostolic poverty, so central to Clare’s Franciscan charism, does not figure in the Rules of 1219 and 1247, nor in Urban IV’s Rule of 1263, which formally established the Order of St Clare and proved to be the Clarisses’ most widely observed Rule. The complexities and realpolitik of cura monialium, the issue that vexed the relationship between the friars and the female followers of St Francis for almost a century, are deftly handled and presented with exemplary clarity.

The period of expansion and reform – covered in Chapters 3 and 4 – poses the greatest challenge by dint of the fragmentary nature of the historical record and the difficulty (often impossibility) of verifying much of the data. Muddying the waters further is the phenomenon of order shifting: ‘Houses listed as Poor Clare monasteries at one time could be recognised as houses of tertiaries, Augustinian canonesses, or Benedictine nuns at another.’ Roest proceeds by way of geographical area providing vignettes of individual houses and highlighting their individuality and their commonalities. What emerges is a composite, richly variegated picture of a dynamic, loosely organised movement in the process of institutional growth and spiritual renewal. Most influential of the reforms was that instigated by Colette. It gave new life to the spirit of Clare’s Rule and served to align Colettine houses with the Observant branch of the Franciscans then in the ascendancy. Particularly valuable is the summary of typologies provided at the end of Chapter 3. It is a pity the maps appended to that chapter are so lacking in clarity.

The last two chapters deal with Clarissan life intra muros, the position of abbess, the novitiate, and general organisation, along with the modes of literary and artistic expression that were available to the nuns.

There have been a number of earlier attempts to provide an overview of the Second Order of St Francis. None comes near the intellectual embrace, the impressive synthesis, and command of detail that is Roest’s formidable achievement. He has crafted a coherent account from a welter of disparate sources, and his judgements are informed by decades of extensive reading in more than half a dozen languages (the bibliography alone runs to fifty-four pages). John Moorman’s A History of the Franciscan Order (1968) devoted just four of its forty-three chapters to Franciscan women. Roest has provided its indispensible companion.