In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 455 Francis of Assisi: A New Biography. By AUGUSTINE THOMPSON. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012. Pp. 312. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-08014 -5070-9. Having written two solidly grounded and highly regarded monographs on the forms of religiosity in the medieval communes, the Dominican historian Augustine Thompson has set himself a formidable task in this imposing work: to explore the life and spirituality of one of the most commented-upon personages of Christian history, Francis of Assisi. The result is a finely wrought and critical new biography of the Poor Man of Assisi, worthy of the formidable historian who has written it. The volume presents a distinctive read on the saint—at times deeply moving, at other times provocative and jarring—which is at some variance with more recent interpretations of Francis. To accomplish his task, the author had to confront an ocean of medieval source materials that do not admit of easy interpretation and had to dialogue with modern-day assessments of the Poverello. This he does, fearlessly and comprehensively but, it must be said, with decidedly mixed results. The volume is divided into two main parts. The first half presents Thompson’s “new biography” of Francis, built upon an intense and erudite reading of the medieval sources and based upon a hermeneutic which the author has developed to make his way through the thicket of wildly divergent readings of Francis, especially from among his own followers (the famous “Franciscan Question”). Despite having to navigate such shoals, his biography is eminently readable, engaging and cohesive as a narrative. The second half of the volume is a running commentary on how he, as a historian, has arrived at the results presented in the first half of the text, chapter-by-chapter, comparing his hermeneutic with the wide array of studies produced on Francis and his movement over the last 120 years. This latter portion of the book will make turgid reading for all but the most stalwart, for it serves to demonstrate to specialists that the author has read—and read closely—virtually the entire historiographical corpus on the saint of Assisi and measured their readings against his own. Although much can be said about these comparisons, it is the first part of the book—his grand narrative—that commands our attention here. Contemporary examinations of Francis (and his movement) rise or fall on the strength of one’s methodology, and Thompson’s narrative is constructed on the basis of a carefully thought-out hermeneutic. Simply stated, this methodology takes seriously the problems associated with reading hagiographical texts as history. This problematic, sparked by Paul Sabatier’s famous publication of his Vie de S. François (1894), has engaged Franciscanists of all stripes ever since in contentious debates over Francis’s intentio and the “eredità difficile” of the first century of Franciscan history (to use the phrase of Roberto Lambertini and Andrea Tabarroni). Thompson is aware of these difficulties. But he seems to be of two minds with respect to these texts. On 456 BOOK REVIEWS the one hand, he recognizes the nature of the literary genre; he knows it presents the reader with accounts that are filled with miraculous happenings and prophetic utterances in order to underscore the sanctity of the founder; and he recognizes that such texts are skewed or fanciful and thus relatively unreliable as history. And yet, on the other hand, he uses them quite freely when they underscore his own reading of Francis as a person of exceptional spiritual character. Thus, the hermeneutic seems engineered to confirm the author’s own preconceptions (although, I am sure, he would argue the opposite). In his search for the historical Francis, Thompson uses the content of the writings of Francis himself as the primary touchstone for his reconstruction of the mind of the founder. However, most of these were occasional pieces addressing specific issues or moments rather than, with the exception of the two rules, intentional or comprehensive statements of the minorite vision. The problem, in other words, is that the writings also require a discerning eye and an interpretive context. This is no more evident than in Thompson’s treatment of the...

pdf

Share