Saint Francis of Assisi left little specific advice to his followers regarding education. Early Franciscan documents simply enjoined the members of the order to possess nothing except a tunic and a breviary. Yet within a generation of its founder's death the order became embedded in the administrative and educational hierarchies of Western Christianity. Francis' successors readily filled in the blanks in his message and made scholastic learning, as Neslihan Şenocak demonstrates in The Poor and the Perfect, not an adjunct to their other functions but an essential element of the order's identity. Şenocak approaches the task through chronologically and thematically divided chapters. The first chapter, dealing with the formative years (1219–1244), is an introduction to contemporary issues and sources as much as to the extensive historiography of medieval and Franciscan education. Şenocak then examines the changes in Franciscan portrayal of learning from something problematic to a sign of evangelical perfection. As she explores the process she dismantles the assumption that Franciscans embraced scholasticism because it was essential for preaching and confession. Instead, advanced education provided a new kind of wealth and status together with the discourse to justify and further develop its use. In the fourth chapter, titled “Paradise Lost,” she breaks down the paradoxes and contradictions that arose from the friars' participation in educational institutions. The fifth chapter is an outline of the parameters of the Franciscan educational system around the year 1300. The Poor and the Perfect is an intelligent, engaging narrative of the history of Franciscan education. The book resolves several contradictions created by Franciscan historiography, and allows insight into a religious order in which the discourse of simplicity, mysticism, poverty, and cosmic renewal coexisted with pragmatic administrative and economic concerns, corruption, and insistence on social stratification. Şenocak vividly describes the attractions of Parisian education along with the educated brothers' increasing reluctance to participate in the lowly tasks of preaching and confessing. She also reminds us that poverty was not a heated issue among Franciscans until the generation after Francis' death — interestingly about the same time as the order began to develop a framework for distinguishing between “useful” and “useless” brothers. By focusing her attention directly on scholasticism and its impact, Şenocak avoids the Spirituals-versus-the-rest-of-the-community teleology common in Franciscan historiography. The change of focus results in another binary (educated versus uneducated) with its own limitations, but it allows for a fresh and unsentimental investigation of a little understood aspect of the formation of Franciscan identity. While Francis insisted on equality among brothers, his followers developed a stratification of usefulness and spiritual perfection in which a brother's level of learning came to play an important role. Learned brothers brought spiritual and social prestige, power, and wealth. By the early fourteenth century the friars introduced learning as a criterion of sainthood. The journey was neither easy nor inevitable, and Franciscan scholars faced the challenge of balancing seemingly contradicting ideals. Their resolution — a redefinition of simplicity and evangelical perfection as consistent with, rather than opposing, learning — irrevocably changed the order and Christianity itself. Apart from intellectual stimulation it also led to tensions, criticism, and was a factor in the order's fragmentation. In the end, Şenocak argues, it was the pursuit of learning that transformed the Franciscans, not the other way around. Given Senocak's excellent analysis of Franciscan scholars' reconciliation of learning with simplicity and humility, it would have been interesting to see her explore further on the uniquely Franciscan scholastic contributions, in particular regarding wisdom as granted freely by God, and the debates on virtues and the role of the will. Although the book's focus is explicitly Franciscan, it made me also want to know more about Franciscan scholars' engagement with their peers outside their order, especially Dominicans like Aquinas who aroused both enthusiasm and polemic. Similarly, the complex engagement with eschatology and Joachimism was not confined to the Franciscan order. As a historical narrative, The Poor and the Perfect is one of the most approachable recent works on Franciscan education and fits well into the growing corpus of works on the subject. Contributing to a debate which is retreating from the elusive search for an authentic, pristine Francis and his original intentions, Şenocak reveals the genius of an order that actively recreated the image of its founder along with its mission and priorities. Her recognition of the “gradual but relentless” progress of learning in the order will help historians move away from trying to discover what the Franciscan order could have been, towards understanding what it became.