Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson, O.P. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson, O.P. Michael Robson Francis of Assisi: A New Biography. By Augustine Thompson, O.P. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2012. Pp. x, 299. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5070-9.) In the last quarter of a century friars have been very conspicuous in the literature regarding their canonized founder and the movement that he has inspired. In an earlier age the study of the saint and the Order were illuminated by the erudition of a group of eminent Catholic scholars and others drawn from diverse Christian communities. This biography is the work of an accomplished medievalist and a Dominican: Augustine Thompson, O.P., the [End Page 122] author of Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, PA, 2005). Thompson brings to his examination of the Franciscan sources, medieval and modern, a welcome freshness that encourages him to challenge some of the hagiographical assumptions about the saint of Assisi. The deaths of Cardinal John of St. Paul and Pope Innocent III left St. Francis virtually bereft of friendship and influence in the corridors of the papal court at a critical juncture in the development of the fraternity (p. 50); this situation undoubtedly lay behind the insistence of Cardinal Ugolino di Conti (later Pope Gregory IX) that Francis should not continue his journey to France; instead, Francis was advised to leave Florence for Umbria, where he would be better placed to answer critics of the growing fraternity. Thompson is undoubtedly correct in dismissing some biographical material that has been taken too literally by some scholars, and so, for instance, doubt is cast on whether Francis embarrassed Ugolino by bringing alms to his table (pp. 77, 240–41). The Franciscans’ sensitivity to questions concerning the institutionalization of the Order is dubbed as a sequel to original sin (p. 236). Similarly, Francis’s prophecy about the attack of Damietta in 1219 is given a balanced interpretation rather than being regarded as pacifism (p. 232). The first part of this volume covers no more than 143 pages, and the second is devoted to sources and debates. It has no footnotes. Its endnotes are frequently extensive with an account of the various positions in question; they provide the reader with a useful guide to the sources, despite the author’s frequent recourse to the personal pronoun I. Some of this material might profitably been transferred to the first part of the book where there was sufficient space for a fuller account. The suggestion that Francis may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder on his release from prison would have embellished the treatment of this question in the first chapter (e.g., p. 177). Thompson states that, had Raoul Manselli lived for a further decade, this book would probably not have been written (p. 160). The decision to make use of extended endnotes creates some difficulties, because such a format can give rise to claims that call for qualification. For instance, Thompson associates himself with the view of Manselli that “academic study among the Franciscans became common only in the 1230s, after the conversion of Alexander of Hales” (p. 263). While there were undoubtedly many more theologians in the Order after 1236, the establishment of the network of Franciscan schools goes back to the 1220s with the minister general and provincial playing a leading role. The friars’ seriousness about the theological foundation for their ministry is glimpsed in the engagement of Master Robert Grosseteste to teach the friars at Oxford from 1229/30. This volume identifies areas in which some Franciscan scholars have displayed discomfort, such as the institutionalization of the Order. Its endnotes on Franciscan sources, medieval and modern, will be of assistance to students of the saint and his followers. Despite the author’s voluminous research, his account of why this is a New Biography, as his subtitle indicates (p. vii), is not persuasive. [End Page 123] Michael Robson St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press