Francis of Assisi and the Feminine - Franciscan Institute Publications

Francis of Assisi
and the Feminine
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JACQUES DALARUN
Francis of Assisi
and the Feminine
Franciscan Institute Publications
The Franciscan Institute
Saint Bonaventure University
Saint Bonaventure, NY 14778
2006

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Copyright © 2006
The Franciscan Institute
St. Bonaventure University
St. Bonaventure, New York
Original title: Francesco: un passaggio. Donna e donne negli scritti e nelle leggende
di Francesco d’Assisi
© Edizioni Viella, Rome, 1994
French version: François d’Assise: un passage. Femmes et féminité dans les écrits
et les légendes franciscaines
© Éditions Actes Sud, Arles, 1997
Cover illustration: Anonymous of Rimini,
Central panel of the triptych of
the Blessed Clare of Rimini, c. 1330
Ajaccio (Corsica), Musée Fesch
All rights reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2004113195
ISBN: 1-57659-195-6
Printed in the United States of America
Phoenix Color
Hagerstown, MD
USA

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Contents
Preface .....................................................................................7
Foreword .................................................................................9
Introduction: Francis, Clare, Women ..................................17
Chapter 1: Sparks: The Writings of Francis .........................29
Chapter 2: Mirrors: The Legends of Thomas of Celano ......95
Chapter 3: Diffraction and Tarnishes:
From the Companions to the Deeds ..............187
Conclusion: Dispossession .................................................257
Bibliography .......................................................................287
Postscript by Giovanni Miccoli .............................................333
Index ....................................................................................359

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Preface
Jacques Dalarun first published this study on woman,
women, the feminine and feminization in the life of Francis
of Assisi in Italian: “Francesco: un passaggio. Donna e donne
negli scritti e nelle leggende di Francesco d’Assisi” (Rome:
Edizioni Viella, 1994). In 1997, he published a French
translation, revisited and enlarged: “François d’Assise: un
passage. Femmes et féminité dans les écrits et les légendes
franciscaines” (Arles: Éditions Actes Sud). Upon the author’s
request, it is the French version that has been translated
into English, and that the Franciscan Institute has the
pleasure to publish in this book.
This publication is the fruit of a collective effort. To
Paula Pierce, SFO and Mary Sutphin go our thanks for working
on the translation from the French: it was not an easy
task, given the delicate subject as well as the subtlety of
Jacques Dalarun’s language. We are not less thankful to
Roberta McKelvie, OSF and Daria Mitchell, OSF for thoroughly
reviewing and editing the text. Trevor Thompson’s
contribution was a major help and deserves a special appreciation,
for the long hours he patiently spent (including
several with the author himself) adjusting the scholarly
notes to the publications in English as well as compiling the
bibliography. And, finally, our gratitude goes also to Alison
More, Ph.D. for her help in the elaboration of the index.
The preparation of this book for publication was not an
easy endeavor. It took a lot of time and energy, but it is our
conviction that, in the end, this magistral work of Jacques
Dalarun was well worth it.
Jean François Godet-Calogeras, Ph.D.
Editor

Foreword
Francis, nothing else, simply Francis. It is enough to say
“Francis,” and everyone knows of whom you are talking,
the Umbrian saint, son of Pietro di Bernardone, the man
from Assisi, the Poverello.
At the sound of this single name, “Francis,” a jumble of
words, gestures and images gush forth from the well of
memories, including those of Francis stripped bare and of his
essential nakedness; so many images, and sometimes, even
contradictory. Too many meanings attach to events etched
in the earliest memories; a wealth of symbolism lies behind
the writing of this simple paragraph. How many saints, how
many famous historical characters, enjoy the privilege of
being immediately and irrefutably recognizable from a single
name, detached from those assured facts which provide historians
with at least certain secure facts, such as family,
places and dates?
Francis is unique of his kind, an exception in history,
ever current, possessed of an enduring modernity. The first
temptation is to see Francis as a boundless, ever present horizon
that can never be reached. Belonging to all times and
to none, he is a timeless enigma towering above history.
Other people have set out to scrutinize the paths he chose,
to plumb the depths of his mystery, and have done it reasonably
well: poets, writers, people of faith or conviction.
But historians who would surrender themselves to Francis’s
charm must be careful not to succumb to the established,
intricately-woven ideological constructions, which Franciscan
propaganda has produced in seeking to turn their founder
into an exceptional and inimitable figure: Francis the
Saint.
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10 FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FEMININE
Historians exercise their craft. They historicize. There are
many forgotten figures we would like to resurrect from history,
from the obscurity of the times in which they have
been set. Efforts must be made to retrieve Francis, the wanderer,
brother to the wind. However, a web has been woven
and wafted, into an ever-tighter net. From out of time, Francis
of Assisi, son of Pietro di Bernardone who was born in
1181 and died on October 3, 1226, returns to time. He fills
his times completely, always holding center stage.
The entire Middle Ages are subsumed in Francis, or such
will be the impression of the readers who become immersed
in Franciscan sources. The more they delve into them, the
more plentiful materials they will find, concentrated in the
writings and legends, to build the man from Assisi into a representative
of his time and period. Medieval life with its
landscapes of wild solitude, unchanging rusticity and bustling
cities, and its social order comprising merchant classes
and ambitious aristocracy, self-satisfied wealth alongside absolute
poverty, clerics and laity, literate and illiterate. In the
life of Francis, the quintessential medieval man, we find the
paradoxes of the period, for which he instinctively found
the synthesis – unparalleled conformity to the gospel message.
He was a herald of the future from the Reformation to
today’s struggle against poverty, which can be compared
with 13th century misery. We find ourselves new and willing
victims of the extraordinary Franciscan propaganda,
which has celebrated ever more resolutely the conformity of
the Poverello “to the poor, naked, suffering crucified Christ,
suspended on the cross.” 1 Francis is not a-historical but
rather trans-historical because of his capacity to encapsulate
and assume humanity and human history. In what appears
like a contradiction: the uniqueness of Francis is found in
his similarity; his identity in being identical.
Like Christ his model, captured initially in the writings
of the four evangelists before becoming the center of widely
conflicting interpretations, there are many different interpretations
of Francis. This is evident in the Franciscan
sources themselves, which, since the first century of the Or-

FOREWORD 11
der of Friars Minor, present countless fragmentary images of
their founder, forming a mirror shattered with the most
complex hagiographical dossiers of the medieval period.
There are as many images of the man from Assisi as there are
readers. Everyone will manage to find a text, a passage, a
sentence in which Francis’s character accords with their a
priori intuition of him.
Today, historians no longer seek to reconstruct a universal,
coherent, single image of the one true Francis, following
the rules of critical methodology. He has become more inaccessible.
Narrowly defined or thematic studies have momentarily
taken the place of biographies. 2 This present attempt
follows a direct path and has a limited goal, aiming only at a
part of the truth. I believe that given the seemingly endless
interpretations of Francis, I should explain why I have chosen
the course I will pursue in the following pages. I have no
intention of proving that I have made the best choice.
Rather, I want to dispel immediately the impression that I
may have discovered, and propose, the key to the secret of
Francis of Assisi in this personal and opportunistic study.
A town does not appear the same from every angle of
approach. The traveler who reaches Assisi, having gone
around Mount Subasio, discovers, set in an arid mineral
landscape, a military post, on top of which is perched a lofty
citadel that shields the city from prying eyes. Whereas, whoever
arrives across the plain from Perugia has to mount an
assault on the Sacred Convent and Saint Francis Basilica, as
if trying to board the stern of a steep-sided ship. I came
across Francis, having studied the hermits of western France
at the dawn of the 12th century and also certain holy
women from central Italy at the turn of the 13th and 14th
centuries, preferring hagiographical sources or legends. I
freely admit the enormous difficulty I found in painting a
coherent picture of two centuries of medieval religious history.
My attention was drawn to the Poverello whilst studying
the lives of two people in particular, Robert of Arbrissel
and Clare of Rimini. Although they pale in significance be-

12 FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FEMININE
side Francis, they drew me to concentrate my efforts on certain,
possibly obsessive, themes.
In 1101 Robert of Arbrissel instituted the Order of Fontevraud
in the Loire Valley. In this community for both men
and women, something in itself rare, what is unique is the
fact that the men, at the express wish of their founder, submitted
themselves to the authority of the women. Since
Jules Michelet, historians and others continue to be fascinated
by its strange propositum, the mainspring behind a religious
experiment which seemed to fly in the face of social
norms. In fact, it troubled the brothers themselves during
Robert’s lifetime! I followed the lines of research of Jean-Marc
Bienvenu and an article by Dominique Iogna-Prat, finding
support in the unedited ending of the second legend of Robert,
his Vita altera. I came to understand that this servitude
was conceived by the founder of Fontevraud as a form of
extreme humiliation, a salutary penance whereby one submitted
unflinchingly to the authority of a being regarded as
less worthy.
However, it cannot be denied that, like it or not, this
novel, limited opportunity for women had positive effects
on their status in medieval society. It was the Golden Age of
the 12th century, one generation from the Gregorian reform
of the Church, that decisive moment, described as “acte postgregorien,”
3 by Pierre Toubert. There is an unavoidable ambiguity:
Robert made a propositum for a religious life in which
women, as depicted in a particular understanding of femininity,
were regarded as instruments of male ascetism to the
benefit of men. At the same time, this gave them the opportunity
to come closer to power and the sacred. Whatever
interpretation you choose, it cannot be denied that
whether as subjects or objects, women were central to the
experience lived by the Breton hermit.
An exact contemporary of Dante, since she probably
died in the 1320s, Clare of Rimini, needless to say, did not
reach the fame and notoriety of the author of the Divine
Comedy and De vulgari eloquentia. She did not even share the
reputation of those holy women closest to her in time and

FOREWORD 13
space, Margaret of Cortona (†1297), Clare of Montefalco
(†1308) or Angela of Foligno (†1309). In spite of the remarkable
study by Guiseppe Garampi, prefect of the Secret Archives
of the Vatican, dedicated to her in the 18th century,
the penitent of Rimini remains among the neglected, medieval
women characters, even today when we seem so hungry
for sanctity and mysticism.
While recently proposing a new edition of the Italian
legend of Clare of Rimini, I had the good fortune to detect,
word for word and step by step, the emergence of a female
voice in the field of the sacred. Although stuttering and still
imprisoned in masculine language, it was, nonetheless, alive
and could not be extinguished. The existence of this one
example, given that each voice has within it something
which cannot be suppressed, points to a much broader
movement which historians are beginning to perceive more
clearly. This movement followed two directions, the appropriation
of religion by women and the feminization of religious
themselves, during the last centuries of the Middle Ages
in the West. For a long time the movement was regarded as
insignificant. It was often blocked; it was always controlled.
The feminization of religion was an ambiguous, complex
process, inseparable from and contemporary with the
movement away from the father tongue, Latin, used by clerics,
towards the development of a mother tongue from all
the vernacular dialects. “God changed gender,” ventured
Michelet. 4 The language was crumbling. Lapsus linguæ.
In one region, Fontevraud, there emerged the first clear
signs of a renewed interest in the fate and, in part, the salvation
of women. In another, the communes of Italy, two centuries
after the so-called Gregorian period, a little later and
more hesitantly than in Northern Europe, the murmur of
female voices could be detected seeking redemption but also
nurturing genuinely theological ambitions: to speak to God
and to speak about God. Francis of Assisi was situated between
these two developments. Robert of Arbrissel has sometimes
been presented as a pre-Franciscan figure. This
description may be debatable but indeed, chronologically,

14 FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FEMININE
Francis comes after Robert, and not Robert before Francis.
The holy women who lived between the 13th and 14th
centuries were, on the other hand, part of the movement
led by Francis. It cannot be denied that, regardless of the
institutions to which they belonged or even if they were
not affiliated to any, their spirituality reflects many elements
inherited as a result of the enormous impact of the man
from Assisi. Were they his heiresses, or had they inherited a
later representation of him manufactured during decades of
hagiography and pastoral activity? However that may be, it
is simply stating the obvious to note that they are undeniably
post Franciscan. Post hoc, propter hoc?
The causal chain is uncertain – but we are not so much
looking for causes as at relationships. Situated half way between
these two significant developments, does Francis, as a
consequence, play a role in the respective evolution of the
two genders in regard to religion and hence the relationship
of the genders with one another? Does he in some way express
the change or is he himself the channel?
We have believed this to be so and have also wanted to
believe that he is the essential channel for so many changes:
the blossoming of art which is realistic and accessible to the
senses, the sowing of the seeds of the Renaissance, 5 the affirmation
of individual conscience in the face of the institutional
church, the preference for devotion to the suffering
rather than the triumphal Christ. In its artistic expression,
these transformations are exactly paralleled in the sinuous
and languorous feminization of the figure nailed to the
wood of the cross. The book that Chiara Frugoni has just
dedicated to the phenomenon of the stigmata tries to dispel
our last illusions; it puts them into perspective. This essay
does not therefore propose to find in Francis the only key to
two centuries in the evolution of history. It sets out rather
to detect, in his writings and the legends, traces of a movement
that could not have failed to involve him, of all people.
However famous a person he was, it is not a matter of
claiming that a priori, one single person alone was the guiding
light in the transition to a religion made female from

FOREWORD 15
which there would be no turning back, but rather of proposing
to the reader the possibility that Francis, among others,
was a channel.
Franciscan Studies underwent a complete and radical revival
through Paul Sabatier a century ago. The “Franciscan
Question” was born when the protestant pastor published
his Life of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1894. Other great French
experts, scholars such as Théophile Desbonnets, played a
decisive role through their work and in the debate that ensued.
But, frankly speaking, during the past fifteen years, the
most lively research on the Poverello has clearly taken place
across the Alps. Thus, this book was initially written in Italian
because it was fully charged by the dynamism currently
experienced in Italy for historical studies in general and
Franciscans studies in particular. The original edition gave
me the opportunity to acknowledge the debt I owe to my
Italian colleagues and friends in their own language.
It was nevertheless paradoxical to suggest to a French
editor that he take on the translation and publication of a
text that was neither conceived nor written in the mother
tongue of the author. Hubert Nyssen took up the challenge
with his characteristic freedom of spirit and intellectual generosity.
I express my deep gratitude to him.
Lastly, I wish to express how greatly I am indebted to
Giovanni Miccoli, for much more than helping me to overcome
cultural and linguistic barriers. Specialists agree in recognizing
that, a little less than a hundred years since the
Franciscan Question was opened up, his book, Francesco
d’Assisi: Realtà e memoria di un’esperienza cristiana, 6 has essentially
led to a resolution of the fruitful questions launched
by Sabatier. Without his positive impetus, I could never
have envisioned the publication of this work. A benevolent
and illuminative reader, he suggested a number of new directions
and areas, where I could delve more deeply, which I
am sure I have not used to full advantage. He has agreed,
moreover, to reproduce the substance of the dialogue we
shared, and the words we exchanged on the way, omnia

16 FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE FEMININE
verba quæ diximus in via, in his afterword. From the bottom
of my heart, I thank him for the journey we have traveled
together. We are only passengers on this earth.
Notes
1 LMj 14:4. For Francis’s writings and legends, we will use systematically the
abbreviations and the subdivisions of Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, R. J.
Armstrong, OFM Cap., J. A. Wayne Hellmann, OFM Conv., W. J. Short, OFM,
eds. 3 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1999-2001). The Latin editions are
indicated below in the bibliography. English references are given as FAED and
volume number.
2
Except for the portraits offered to the non-specialized public by F. Cardini
[Francesco d’Assisi (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1989)] and C. Frugoni [Vita di un
uomo: Francesco d’Assisi (Turin: Einaudi, 1995); [English trans., Francis of Assisi: A
Life (New York: Continuum, 1998)], the last biography is that of R. Manselli,
Francesco d’Assisi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1980), revised as San Francesco (Milan:
Cinisello Balsamo, 2002); for the English version, see St. Francis of Assisi (Chicago:
Franciscan Herald Press, 1988).
3 P. Toubert, “Église et État au XI e siècle: la signification du moment grégorien
pour la genèse de l’État moderne,” in État et Église dans la genèse de l’État
moderne. Actes du Colloque Organisé par le Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique et la Casa de Velázquez (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1986), 13.
4 J. Michelet, “Histoire de France: Le Moyen Âge” in Œuvres complètes, vol.
4, 460. P. Viallaneix ed., 21 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-1982).
5 Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in
Italien (Berlin: Grote, 1885); Sandra Migliore, Francesco d’Assisi: tra due secoli
1882-1926 (Rome: Istituto Storico Cappuccini, 2000).
6 See Francesco d’Assisi: Realtà e memoria di un’esperienza cristiana (Turin: Einaudi,
1991).