The Cult of St. Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby (review)

In 1240, Muslim mercenaries in the service of Frederick II entered the sisters’ cloister at the church of San Damiano just outside Assisi’s city walls. Although the community’s abbess — the future Saint Clare — was lying sick on her pallet in the dormitory, she nonetheless arose and went to the convent door with some of the sisters. Holding a monstrance, she began to pray. According to the sisters who testified about the event at Clare’s canonization process, a voice spoke from the tabernacle announcing “I will save you.” The soldiers fled. This miracle story, unique to Clare’s saintly persona and rarely represented in Italian art before the sixteenth century, serves as a unifying thread for Nirit Ben Aryeh Debby’s account of the growth of Clare’s spiritual authority as represented in the visual arts. In a thirteenth-century painting (reproduced in color plates both on the book’s cover and within), Guido da Siena dramatically shows three Saracen soldiers falling from the city walls as Clare stands with her sisters in the convent doorway. This striking image proclaims divine favor and suggests her early reputation as Assisi’s protector. However, this presentation was anomalous and artists more typically depicted Clare as a passive virgin saint whose humility led to generic representations even within the communities named in her honor. Debby convincingly shows that Clare did not become a powerful, much less a popular, saint until the sixteenth century when she came to exemplify the spiritual ideals of the Counter-Reformation. Clare’s iconography increasingly stressed her role as a defender of the Catholic faith who, in priest-like fashion, elevated the monstrance and expelled the Saracens. This transformation underscores Debby’s main point that sainthood and its meanings are ultimately flexible and change according to the audience.

The book’s three main chapters are organized chronologically and thematically, with particular attention paid to images from Assisi, Florence, and Naples. Each also pays attention to the interrelations between sermons and artistic representations, a topic Debby has explored in two earlier books. Chapter one assesses Clare’s transformation from a civic saint to the passive and humble virgin of the hagiographic tradition during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Chapter two addresses Clare’s gradual emergence in art as a miracle-working saint and as a Franciscan exemplar under the influence of the fifteenth-century Observant Reform movement. One of Debby’s most intriguing suggestions is that the Franciscan Order may have developed Clare’s cult deliberately in response to Dominican efforts to promote Catherine of Siena (87). Both chapters clearly demonstrate that medieval artists were most likely to represent Clare as an important figure in the Franciscan movement under the influence of female patronage, a situation that corresponds with the textual evidence for her cult and saintly reputation.

Debby’s chronological organization is certainly reasonable, as it allows her to discuss the development of Clare’s iconography in comparison with other female saints and their cults. At times, however, this linear narrative can oversimplify differences concerning spatial and gendered contexts. It also does not allow her to account for differences related to audience or to discuss the public cult. Even in Assisi, material evidence for pilgrimage to her tomb and other sites is limited before the early modern era, and the claim that “veneration of St Clare was central to the civic identity of its citizens” (35) is not elaborated. Historians and literary scholars in particular might like to know more about Clare’s status within medieval confraternities. For example, the first chapter briefly discusses a Neapolitan panel depicting the Multiplication of the Bread, which was one of Clare’s miracles. Although there are other visual representations of this scene of imitatio Christi, the panel exceptionally represents Clare with blood on her tunic, an acknowledgment of her severe ascetic practices, testified to by the...