Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance by Catherine M. Mooney (review)

The topic of this study is Clare of Assisi's effort to protect her order's commitment to poverty against the encroachments of a papacy determined to organize and regulate communities of religious women in the thirteenth century. The originality of this study resides in its methodological approach; Mooney does not propose a biography of Clare, but rather a profile based on rigorous adherence to the chronology of sources. Her efforts to contextualize Clare's resistance within a broader trend of religious women highlights the complex networks of actors surrounding her, including Pope Gregory IX and Cardinal Protector Rainaldo of Jenne, each of whom played a pivotal role in shaping the Order of San Damiano and the communities of religious women beyond it.

Mooney's sources include "historical" works—letters, religious rules, papal documents, and biographies—as well as hagiographic works—canonization testimonies, and saints' vitae whose narratives seek to promote Clare's sanctity. Mooney reads these texts strategically, scrutinizing existing scholarship and wringing a coherent narrative of Clare's struggles out of disparate, often opaque and contradictory, sources.

Chapter 1 interrogates the sources of Clare's early life, most of which derive from narrative evidence gathered after her death. Here, Mooney treads carefully, calling attention to those facts that are inaccurate, disputed, conjectural, subject to question since they were offered with the explicit purpose of making Clare a saint, or part of the historiographical trend in Clare studies that is unduly influenced by the life of Saint Francis. Mooney is highly aware that hagiographic embellishment obscures the historicity of the early stories, and seeks in her own profile of Clare to avoid such pitfalls.

Chapter 2 examines the forma vivendi or the rules that Clare inherited from Francis and her determination to defend her order's link with Francis, especially his commitment to radical poverty. Mooney's intensive examination of the pericopes in a Latin letter by Jacques de Vitry from 1216 gives rise to a broader interpretation for a letter that is often assumed to refer to Clare and her order. Mooney suggests that de Vitry was instead referring to other Lesser Sisters inspired by Francis who were free to roam the countryside before the papal crackdown. These efforts to place Clare in her broader context reveal an oft-overlooked fact about Clare's narrative: she is not the founder of San Damiano. Rather, San Damiano is a religious order that "found" Clare and her order, one among many communities that adhered to Francis's vision of the vita apostolica during the opening decades of the thirteenth century.

In Chapter 3, Mooney investigates the early relationship between the Order of San Damiano and the papacy, challenging the traditional portrait that construed Francis as the founder of an order that followed the Rule of Benedict and served as inspiration for other women's communities. Instead, Mooney offers a more nuanced portrait that imagines both Francis and Clare as the founders of an individual community separate from existing communities, which some other communities gradually came to emulate. This chapter also introduces Ugolino (1145–1241), the Cardinal Protector of the Franciscans and later Pope Gregory IX (1227–1241), an agent of papal ascendancy over the increasing centralization of women's religious orders. Throughout the study, Mooney's insistence on Gregory's role in regularizing religious life reveals Clare's resilience in opposing him.

Chapter 4 focuses on the papacy's relationship with the order of San Damiano after the death of Saint Francis; his absence cleared the path for Pope Gregory IX to expand the Lesser Brother's duties towards the nuns, a responsibility that Francis never intended. Mooney cites five documents that explicitly tie Gregory to the changing status of San Damiano: (1) Gregory's 1228 Letter to Clare; (2) Rainaldo of Jenne's 1228 Letter; (3) Gregory's 1228 Privilege of Poverty; (4) Thomas of Celano's First Life of...