The Privilege of Poverty: Clare of Assisi, Agnes of Prague, and the Struggle for a Franciscan Rule for Women (review)

With Clare of Assisi, it is practically obligatory to identify her as the first woman to write a monastic rule for other women. This achievement, the culmination of a decades-long battle with the papal curia to secure the right for a female monastic community to live without endowments, is Joan Mueller's subject. As a Franciscan herself, Mueller writes sensitively about what it meant for these women to choose radical poverty following the model of the Poor Christ. For historians, her main contribution is that of bringing Clare together with the Bohemian princess, Agnes of Prague, to show how some women could negotiate effectively with the papacy to define how their institutions developed.

When Francis of Assisi died in 1226, Clare realized that her community at San Damiano needed ecclesiastical recognition of their commitment to radical poverty. However, papal efforts to monasticize San Damiano and likeminded communities with endowments provoked a crisis. Mueller characterizes Pope Gregory IX as moving from sympathetic regard for the sisters' evangelical vocation, to an adversarial role in which the commitment to radical poverty became "mere rhetoric" (p. 36) and "pious flourishes" (p. 48). Apparent victories, such as the Privilege of Poverty granted to San Damiano in 1228 (and a few other houses at later times), were rather temporary compromises offered in the hope that the women eventually would accept possessions. By 1230, Clare and the pope were at "loggerheads," and Mueller asserts rather dramatically that "her soul, her identity, and the quality of the monastery were at stake" (pp. 51-52).

Enter Agnes of Prague, whom Mueller casts as Clare's collaborator and "soul mate." These chapters, drawing on her earlier studies, represent the book's most original contribution. The women and their allies used diplomacy to achieve their goals, while invoking spiritual authorities for their commitment to evangelical poverty. Agnes also secured exemptions that allowed her community to live without possessions, but the papacy remained determined to secure their welfare. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV issued a new rule designed to unify standards within female Franciscan communities. It required endowments, a situation that was not unwelcome to many houses. This constitution provoked Clare to compose her rule, which Innocent approved on her deathbed in 1253. Mueller identifies its historical significance in recognizing radical poverty as a legitimate, but exceptional, vocational choice for women. Only a few other houses beyond San Damiano requested and were allowed to adopt it. Mueller suggests that the rule, combined with the lived experiences of both Clare and Agnes, further indicates that some Franciscan women saw radical poverty as a spiritual ideal with a social dimension. In response to Kenneth Baxter Wolf's claim that Francis' conversion hurt the medieval poor, she argues that these Franciscan women valued their commitment to being "poor among the poor" (p. 106).

Shortly before her death, Clare wrote a final letter to Agnes of Prague which Mueller reads as a practical guide for Agnes to protect and promote apostolic poverty (pp. 118-121). This idea is intriguing, but also problematic in the broader context of understanding Clare's role in the nascent female Franciscan Order. Throughout the book, Mueller casts her as a leader of a movement for apostolic poverty. Recent scholarship carefully distinguishes between the pious identification of Clare as an active founder and her more limited influence revealed in thirteenth-century documents. Mueller remains somewhat vague about how she understands Clare's involvement in the broader female penitential movement and whether communities founded in poverty are meant to be connected to her, rather than papal efforts to regularize female religious life. The connection with Agnes of Prague offers an example of Clare's influence; however, there were other contemporary models of female Franciscanism, such as those advocated by Douceline of Digne or Isabelle of France (another worthy diplomat...