Interpreting Francis and Clare of Assisi from the Middle Ages to the Present (review)

This collection of studies from Australia celebrates the 800 years of the Franciscan Order (1209–2009), arising from an event at Yarra Theological Union, one institute in the Melbourne College of Divinity. In the introduction (pp. xi–xvi), the editors explain the origins of the collection and briefly summarize the contributions. The studies begin in Assisi, of course, and then spread throughout Europe and into different fields of learning. Toward the end, they rapidly survey the centuries to the present day. The book contains studies that will interest a variety of readers.

Given that it is a Franciscan collection, it often speaks about poverty. We find an emphasis on poverty in the first article (p. 4) and in a well-developed study on Franciscan identity (p. 79). Poverty is looked at closely in the study on the Sacrum commercium, a symbolic tale of St. Francis and his brothers in search of Jesus’s poverty. Poverty repeatedly comes to the fore in the attention accorded St. Clare and her sisters, whether in her day or in our own (p. 333). However, poverty is a tricky term in Franciscan history. It played no role in the beginning and first arose in the Early Rule as a defensive maneuver. In the Rule of 1223 it stands at the heart of chapter VI, the very core of the Rule. In their 1242 commentary on the Rule, the learned Four Masters define the poverty of chapter VI and mean something clearly different from what Francis meant in 1223. The word is used too easily in accounts of Franciscan history—especially when referring to Francis and Clare—and needs to be handled more carefully. When we encounter it in an early source, it should be contextualized and defined.

Art plays a strong role in these Franciscan studies. Hugh Hudson tells in great detail the story of a reliquary dyptich now in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), produced by the Franciscan artist Pietro Teutonico. Hudson reads several details (pp. 246–47) as bringing together Christ’s birth and the Man-of-Sorrows tradition in art. Mary would have had foreknowledge of her son’s sufferings. Claire Renkin concentrates on the purpose of a miniature in a German life of Clare from the late-fifteenth century. The illuminated manuscript contains a few other miniatures, but Renkin looks closely at the one of Clare and St. Mary Magdalen. He muses on the response that the two figures would elicit from a Poor Clare reader.

The final study in the collection tells about the tapestries of the Australian artist Arthur Boyd. In a series of works he has given Francis and Clare a fresh presence in our times. There was much color in the life of Francis and his brothers, some of it in the music of their lives. The Poor Clare Briege O’Hare and her sisters brought that to light when they wondered what was lacking to their prayer and discovered that it was song (p. 341). Their singing and Boyd’s colors bring the book to a happy ending.