Catherine M. Mooney. Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance.

Abstract

Preserved in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi is the coarse brown tunic Francis of Assisi is said to have worn during the final years of his life. It is a remarkable garment, held together by many patches of varied brown hues, sewn and oversewn, to repair its many places of wear. Textile evidence shows that the patching came from a similar brown tunic worn by Clare of Assisi, friend and follower of Francis: Clare had mended Francis’s tunic with her own, seemingly over a series of years. Like the two interlaced garments, the histories of Clare and Francis have remained woven together, obscuring the saints’ separate origins and struggles. In Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church, Catherine M. Mooney proposes to consider Clare and the community of women at San Damiano on their own terms. While seeking to uncover Clare as an independent actor, Mooney also sets Clare within the networks of religious men and women that formed her local world and shaped the future trajectory of what would come to be called the Order of St. Clare. Mooney offers a “micro-study” that narrates the “extremely contested nature of regulating penitent women in the thirteenth century” (5).