Legenda Maior Research Articles

Radical Succession: Hagiography, Reform, and Franciscan Identity in the Convent of the Abbess Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)

In this article, I study in depth the first vita of the Franciscan Tertiary abbess Juana de la Cruz (Vida y fin de la bienaventurada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz, written c. 1534), examining it as a chronicle that narrativizes the origins and reform of a specific religious community in the Castile of the Catholic Monarchs. I argue that Vida y fin constitutes an account that was collectively written inside the walls of the enclosure that can help us understand themes, motifs, and symbolic Franciscan elements that were essential for the self-definition of its original textual community. I first discuss the narrative of the convent’s foundation and then examine the penitential identity of the community, highlighting the inspiration that Juana’s hagiography takes from the infancy of Caterina da Siena, as described in the Legenda maior by Raimondo da Capua, and analyzing to what extent the represented penitential practices related to the imitatio Christi reflect a Franciscan Tertiary identity in opposition to a Dominican one. Finally, I address the passages in which the hagiographer(s) discuss(es) the sense of belonging to the Franciscan order rather than the Dominicans, and the mystical figure of Francesco d’Assisi as a founder, guide, and exemplar.

Royal Justice and Lawgiving in the Early Legends of St. Stephen of Hungary

The medieval legend of St. Stephen I of Hungary was constructed in three saint’s lives composed between the mid-eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Central to Stephen’s persona as a founder-king and royal saint was his association with justice and lawgiving, themes that touch more broadly on the establishment of the Hungarian kingdom, the conversion of the Magyars to Latin Christianity, and the representation of these processes in historical writing. This article analyzes the ideals of royal justice and lawgiving as embodied by St. Stephen in his early legends to demonstrate how flexible ideals of royal ideology could be within narrative contexts, and how important this conceptual flexibility was for the project of writing Hungary’s early history. Each legenda develops a markedly different understanding of what an idealized standard of royal justice should look like. The early Legenda maior presents an optimistic and comprehensive royal program of institution-building, while the later Legenda minor is suffused with anxiety about religious and moral backsliding, for which it prescribes a harshly punitive standard of juridical violence. Finally, the Legenda sancti Stephani, produced around the turn of the twelfth century by a Bishop Hartvic, carefully synthesizes and modulates the portrayals of royal justice found in the earlier texts to establish Stephen, rex iustus, as Hungary’s apostolic king and the founder of its independent regnal traditions. These texts reflect how, in mythopoietic historical writing, justice and lawgiving functioned narratively to inscribe the licit boundaries of social and religious behavior. The article shows how each successive interrogation of these boundaries and the responsibility of the king to impose and police them responded to the circumstances of the kingdom of Hungary’s turbulent first century. The turn of the twelfth century thus emerges as a critical moment for the establishment of Hungary’s politico-historical traditions, at the vanguard of which stood St. Stephen, rex iustus.

On Manuscripts, Prints and Blessed Transformations: Caterina da Siena’s Legenda maior as a Model of Sainthood in Premodern Castile

In this article, I analyze the translation commissioned in 1511 by Cardinal Francisco Ximénez Cisneros of the Life of Catherine of Siena by Raimundo da Capua, which includes the legendae of Giovanna (also known as Vanna) da Orvieto and Margherita da Città di Castello in the light of its translation, commission, and reception in premodern Castile. In the first place, I clarify the medieval transformations of Caterina’s text by discussing the main branches of her manuscript tradition and explaining the specificities of the editions authorized by Cisneros in order to know what exactly was printed. In the second place, I put these specificities into the courtly, prophetic context in which those books were published. Finally, I analyze the reception of these editions in the Iberian Peninsula, especially in relation to the figure of María de Santo Domingo, the famous Dominican tertiary.

On Manuscripts, Prints and Blessed Transformations: Caterina da Siena's Legenda maior as a Model of Sainthood in Premodern Castile

On Manuscripts, Prints and Blessed Transformations: Caterina da Siena's Legenda maior as a Model of Sainthood in Premodern Castile

Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by Jennifer N. Brown

Reviewed by: Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by Jennifer N. Brown Luke Penkett (bio) Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. By Jennifer N. Brown. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xvi, 314 pp. $75.00 Fruit of the Orchard has been a decade in the writing: it was worth waiting for. During this time Jennifer N. Brown, Professor and Chair of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College, has given papers to fellow medievalists on her subject, received invaluable feedback from a number of other scholars, and thoroughly explored Siena, tracking down Catherine’s landmarks. Brown’s meticulous work shines out on every page and it is a delight to read. In this, her first monograph, Brown builds on the scholarship of the past decade or so, developing the research of Suzanne Noffke’s publication of Catherine’s Dialogo and letters in translation, Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Sighnori’s A Companion to Catherine of Siena, and, more specifically, Rebecca Krug’s Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England and Nancy Bradley Warren’s The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. The book opens with four English depictions of Catherine: two from rood screens (at Torbryan and Horsham), and two from Wynkyn de Worde’s 1519 printing, delightful illustrations that help set the scene. Each of the five chapters are structured around an aspect of Catherine’s English textual tradition, a light one in England contrasted with a much fuller one in Continental Europe. An exceptional woman, by the mid-fifteenth century, Catherine was having a significant effect on insular vernacular devotion and Brown’s book teaches us much about English piety at this time and into the early seventeenth century. This effect was even more significant in France and the Low Countries. However, it is by examining these differences of audience, readership, and piety that English religious culture may be more clearly recognised and better understood. Part of the richness of such a study as Fruit of the Orchard lies in the fact that texts on Catherine herself are so varied – hagiographical, instructive, meditational – that the field worked on is a broad one, giving rise to explorations of provenance, production, distribution, and reception. Catherine’s letter-writing career begins around 1370 and there are 400 complete and incomplete examples of her correspondences. In 1374 the anonymous account of her and Raymond of Capua’s narrative appeared, with Le Orazioni, a collection of 26 of Catherine’s [End Page 265] prayers (mainly known in Italy) being composed around 1379. Before the end of that auspicious decade Catherine had begun writing her visionary text, Il Dialogo. This last text was translated into English three times and became known as The Orcherd of Syon. There are also Stephen Maconi’s letter (Maconi, Prior General of the Carthusian Order, along with Raymond and Gano Giudini, were among Catherine’s followers) regarding Catherine, an excerpt from The Orcherd of Syon, eight copies of a testimony of Catherine’s known by its Latin title as the Documento Spirituale and in English as The Cleannesse of Sowle, and three copies of Catherine’s Legenda maior. Wynkyn de Wolrde printed Raymond’s Legenda maior, The Lyf of Catherine, and The Orcherd of Syon between 1492 and 1519, whilst Henry Pepwell published extracts from The Lyf in 1521, and John Fenn issued a new translation of the Legenda maior in 1609. As with Richard Rolle’s English texts translated into Latin, and his Latin texts translated into English, and a number of Continental writers whose work is translated from Latin or one vernacular into another, Catherine’s texts are altered, in their translation according to audience and readership, location, time, and civic and ecclesial pressures. From ordinances and wills it is possible to discover something of the use and transmission of Catherine’s texts. Placing these discoveries alongside manuscripts, inscriptions, illuminations, rood screens, and dedications it is possible to see both the private and public “landscape of devotion to Catherine of Siena throughout England and, indeed, extending even to...

The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century ed. by Marco Bartoli et al.

Reviewed by: The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century ed. by Marco Bartoli et al. Michael J. P. Robson (bio) The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Marco Bartoli, Jacques Dalarun, Timothy J. Johnson and Filippo Sedda (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2019), vi + 230 pp. ISBN 978-1-57659-433-9-19. Hagiographical studies have seen significant advances in Franciscan scholarship over the last half a century with new critical editions of central texts being prepared. The fruits of this research have been made available in English translations, from the Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St Francis to the publication of Francis of Assisi: Early Documents in three volumes with an excellent index at the turn of the new millennium. The examination of the life of Francis of Assisi is now gravitating towards liturgical texts in order to gauge the image of the saint projected during the sacred liturgy in the Mass and the Divine Office. There is a growing realization that these liturgical texts did much to condition the friars' perception of the life and apostolate of their founder. The comparative neglect of the liturgical sources is now being redressed by a team of international scholars. This volume is comprised of four substantial chapters: first, a lengthy introduction, secondly, the foundational texts from the Franciscan Liturgy, thirdly, the Liturgical Legends of the order of Minor Brothers and fourthly the Liturgy of St Francis outside the order of Friars Minor. The first chapter, for instance, consists of three sections dealing with the contributions made to the recent research by Professors Jacques Dalarun, Timothy Johnson and Marco Bartoli. Professor Dalarun's indefatigable search for the earliest witnesses to the life of Francis of Assisi through both hagiographical and liturgical texts requires no introduction. His exciting discovery, Thome Celanensis Vita beati patris nostri Francisci. Présentation et édition critique, was published by Analecta Bollandiana in 2015 and has since been translated into various languages. He summarises the quest for the historical Francis, the Francis of history, and from intuition to publication. This survey marks the contribution of Fr Luke Wadding's edition of the writings of Francis of Assisi in 1623 and the enduring legacy of the scholarship of Paul Sabatier. Plans for the publication of volumes based on this research are explained along with the incorporation of Professor Filippo Sedda, who was already working on early breviaries from inside and outside the order and publishing the fruits of his research. Much of this scholarship is contained in his Franciscus Liturgicus: editio fontium saeculi XIII, a text which was published at Padua in 2015 in conjunction with Professor Dalarun. Professor Johnson's contribution contains three sections: first, the theological reflections (poverty, identity and prayer), secondly, anthropological [End Page 300] reflections (memory, ritual and performance) and thirdly, literary reflections (place, genre and institution) followed by an epilogue. His reflections on the message conveyed during the friars' communal prayers turn a welcome spotlight on the liturgical sources which have hitherto received too little attention in recent Franciscan studies. He observes: 'For more than a century, scholars have overlooked or dismissed this "prayed Francis" of the choir legends like Julian of Speyer's Legend for Use in the choir or Bonaventure's Minor life in the search for the ever-elusive historical Francis' (p. 21). One of the benefits of this short study is the light which is shed on the application of the decree of the 1266 general chapter of Paris; it is clear that the Bonaventurean ban did not stifle the hagiographical instincts regarding Francis. Both old and new materials were copied and circulated in the ensuing decades. Indeed, the transcription of some of the earlier hagiographical and later texts suggests that the decree was honoured in the breach. Professor Johnson's recent research has rightly drawn attention to another text which had hitherto received inadequate attention, Bonaventure's Legenda minor, a text which was not translated in the monumental Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. The Legenda minor is more than a summary of the significantly longer Legenda maior. It is anchored in the liturgical realm...

The Function and Spirituality of Bonaventure's "Treatise" on the Miracles of St. Francis

The collection of miracle stories appended to Bonaventure's Legenda maior is a succinct adaptation of Thomas of Celano's Treatise on the Miracles of St. Francis. As such, it could be regarded as Bonaventure's own "treatise" on Francis' miracles. Until now, little scholarly attention has been given to this collection, particularly with respect to questions surrounding the redaction of Francis' story. In an attempt to address this lack of scrutiny, this article provides a close reading of the material that Bonaventure added to Celano's Treatise. It concludes that one prominent function of Bonaventure's "treatise" was to defend the Franciscan order from external criticism. In addition, it briefly explores how this apologetic function is connected to a theme that was central to Bonaventure's spirituality: the crucified Christ.

Osoba i przesłanie św. Franciszka

St. Francis is undoubtedly one of the most popular Christian saints. There are two different biographies of St. Francis. The biography by Thomas da Celano is a historical description of St. Francis` life although written according to the medieval hagiographical canons. St. Bonaventure was a theologian and philosopher first of all. He shows us St. Francis as a perfect follower of Jesus. The other biographies relied heavily on Vita prima, Vita secunda or Legenda maior. Notwithstanding the first biographies based on the very first documents and contemporary relations, some questions still linger. Nevertheless, St. Francis message is clear: equality of all before God, everyone is called for the evangelical life, evangelism through good example rather than through words alone. Important is an emulation the radical poverty of Jesus, fidelity and obedience to the Church, which is represented and guided by pope.

Bonaventure’s “Visions of the Cross” in the Saint Francis Cycle at Assisi

This essay focuses on four episodes in the Saint Francis cycle at Assisi, examining how their representation is affected by Bonaventure’s figural interpretation of them in the Legenda maior as ‘visions of the cross’. The iconographic innovations introduced into the Stigmatization scene (the final vision); the subtle manipulation of the iconography, compositions and spatial disposition of the three preceding visions of the cross in the cycle; and the forging of meaningful diagonal links between the Saint Francis cycle and the biblical scenes in the register of wall paintings above it, can all be understood as part of a singleminded strategy on the part of the Franciscan Order at Assisi, in the final decade of the Duecento, to promote the stigmata of Saint Francis and his unique identity as an alter Christus. The visions of the cross in the Assisi cycle also demonstrate the sophisticated ways in which artists and iconographers engaged with the complex problem of how to represent visionary experiences, and the relationship between the visible appearances of things and the invisible truth beneath the surface.

(Un-)Verfügbarkeit. Bonaventuras Stigmata

Abstract The article traces the construction of the legend surrounding the mystery of Francis of Assisi’s stigmata, which are said to have appeared two years before his death. Central to this analysis, which is underpinned by sign and media theory, is the Legenda maior, a description of the life of Francis, written by Bonaventura four decades later on the basis of older testimonies and legends. The focus is on those strategies which allow the change of events between mediation and immediacy, in that they, on the one hand, are dominated by a concrete, spacial framework and, on the other, by moments of that which is unverfügbar.

Inflamed with Seraphic Ardor: Franciscan Learning and Spirituality in the Fourteenth-Century Irish Pilgrimage Account

Inflamed with Seraphic Ardor: Franciscan Learning and Spirituality in the Fourteenth-Century Irish Pilgrimage Account Malgorzata Krasnodebska D’Aughton (bio) Introduction In March 1323 two Franciscan friars, Simon Semeonis and Hugo Illuminator “inflamed with seraphic ardor” left Ireland to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, having attended the provincial chapter in Clonmel in October the previous year. 1They sailed across the Irish Sea, and travelled via London, “the most famous and wealthy city under the sun” to Canterbury, where they venerated the relics of Thomas Becket. In France having made their way through Amiens and Paris, they travelled down the Saone and the Rhone. From there they passed through the mountainous area of Lombardy to Bobbio, where “reposes the body of the blessed Irish abbot Columbanus,” and then went to Padua and Venice. From Venice they traversed through Dalmatia and sailed to Crete and Alexandria, which they reached in October. When they [End Page 283] travelled up the Nile to Cairo, they saw exotic animals, crocodiles, elephants and giraffes, and admired a chicken farm. It was here in Cairo that Hugo died, and the grief-stricken Simon continued his journey. Simon’s account of the Holy Land is incomplete in its surviving format and it breaks at the description of Jerusalem. Simon was back in Cairo in February 1324 as may be gathered from passing references. He most probably visited Rome on his return journey. This paper places the text of Simon Semeonis’s Itinerarium in the context of a Franciscan intellectual and spiritual tradition. Firstly, by discussing the surviving copy of the text, it suggests its possible means of transmission as well as its significance as being representative of a particular genre. Secondly, by looking at references to literary sources, the paper illustrates how travelling friars acted as important agents in the transfer of cultural ideas, including those on Islam. Finally, through an analysis of the references to Bonaventure in Simon’s Itinerarium, the paper argues that the Irish friar was not only familiar with the Legenda maior, but used the text in a nuanced and creative manner to convey his attitude to the Franciscan vows of obedience and poverty, that were hotly debated amongst the friars at that time. The Manuscript This colorful, though incomplete description of the friars’ journey survives in a manuscript preserved in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 407. The codex also includes two other Franciscan travel texts: an account of a mission to the Mongols by William of Rubruck, a Flemish friar who went East between 1253–55 at the instigation of King Louis IX, and a very popular Itinerarium of friar Odoric of Pordenone describing his missionary travels to Tartary, between 1314/18–1329, compiled sometime before Odoric’s death in 1331.2 Each of the three itineraries in MS 407 is [End Page 284] written in a different hand and bound in a separate collection of quires, suggesting that originally they were copied as individual texts.3 What brought these three texts together into a single codex would not only have been their Franciscan origin, but more than likely the manuscript’s owner’s interest in each text’s detailed description of both places and people. From the Irish friar’s wonderment at the sight of Paris as the place of moral and theological virtues, or the wonderfully woven silk clothes worn by Cairo inhabitants, to Rubruck’s feeling that he was “entering some other world” as he arrived at the encampment of the Mongol Great Khan, to Odoric’s descriptions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the three authors shared [End Page 285] interests in new sites, customs and beliefs.4 The arrangement of the three narratives in the Cambridge manuscript presents the reader with a description of the areas gradually removed farther and farther from the center of the Latinitas. The three authors wrote polemically about non-Latin Christians or non-Christians, and they were acutely aware of the challenges of a culturally and religiously diverse society, in which they themselves had to function.5 The alien places and [End Page 286] people they encountered are described with a great attention to detail, but their wonderment...

The Birth of a Legend : the So-called Legenda Maior of Saint Margaret of Hungary and Dominican Hagiography

De nombreuses sources documentent la vie de sainte Marguerite de Hongrie (1242-1270), moniale dominicaine et fille de Bela IV. Cet article examine ladite Legenda maior, la plus longue et la plus belle vita de Marguerite, qui fut redigee vraisemblablement a Avignon par le dominicain et theologien francais Garin de Gy-l’Eveque vers 1340. Il tente d’expliquer pourquoi cette legende a ete demandee par le maitre de l’ordre de l’epoque, Hugues de Vaucemain. Les recherches anterieures ont presume que la fonction de la Legenda maior consistait a fournir aux dominicains une biographie de la sainte, partant du fait qu’ils n’en possedaient pas jusque-la. Cette etude montre que la Legenda maior est le resultat des efforts communs de la direction de l’ordre, de la province dominicaine de Hongrie et de la famille royale hongroise pour ouvrir un nouveau proces de canonisation de Marguerite, pour lequel fut utilisee une nouvelle legende actualisee. Elle commence par une breve analyse de l’hagiographie dominicaine centree...

The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M. Conv. The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century. By Rosalind B. Brooke. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 524. $135.00. ISBN 978-0-521-78291-3.) The volume is massive. Brooke offers an overwhelming wealth of historical information, and she covers multiple and varied areas of medieval study that in one way or another connect the reader to St. Francis of Assisi. Although an introductory brief statement identifies the book as "an important new study of the way in which St. Francis's image was recorded in literature, documents, architecture and art" (n.p.), the notion of "image"is loosely utilized throughout the book. The notion of image serves more as a device to connect the multiple historical, literary, and artistic interests of the author. These interests consist of Francis's own writings, the earliest literature after Francis's death (Thomas of Celano's Life of St. Francis, etc.), the construction of the Basilica of St. Francis, the Expositions of the Rule, further hagiographical texts on Francis through the 1240s, emergence of new altar panels presenting the image of Francis, sermons and the Legenda Maior by St. Bonaventure as well as subsequent [End Page 799] later Leonine writings, and the decoration of the lower and upper churches of the Basilica, with special attention given to the St. Francis Cycle of the upper church. Finally, near the end of the volume there is a chapter on the nineteenth century rediscovery of Francis's body and then a final chapter on Blessed Angela of Foligno's image of St. Francis. Unfortunately, St. Clare's image of St. Francis never appears. The eleven chapters of the book more closely resemble a collection of fascinating encyclopedia articles on very interesting topics. In a footnote at the beginning of chapter 7, the author acknowledges that the chapter is based on lectures delivered in Cambridge in the late 1970s and 1980s. This confirms the impression that substantial parts of some of the chapters represent research done earlier in the author's long and distinguished academic career. Several repetitions in different chapters, especially dealing with Joachim of Fiore, also pointed in this direction. Once the reader forgets about the title of the book, there is easy entry into the study and library of Rosalind Brooke, where abundant knowledge can be harvested of thirteenth-century (mostly Italian) culture, art, and papal politics, all of which contribute to the context for understanding St. Francis and some aspects of literary and artistic origins of the Franciscan tradition. This is the strength of the volume. It makes more historical information on Francis of Assisi and on the efforts to promote his memory and his cult available in one volume than exists in several volumes. Much comes together for the completion of the frescos of the upper church with the election of the first Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV (Jerome of Ascoli) in 1288, especially when he collaborates with his friend and successor as minister general, Matthew of Aquasparta. Brooke offers a wealth of information that lies behind the completion of the frescos. However, when it comes to her interpretation of the three tiers of frescos in the nave of the upper church, the shadows of Ubertino of Casale, Sabbatier, and Moorman linger. Ironically, she overlooks the mystical, biblical, and theological vision of St. Bonaventure that inspired the frescos and appeals to St. Thomas of Aquinas to substantiate her "historical and literal" reading of the frescos. In doing this, the rich theology and symbols behind the texts and frescos that are emphasized in recent studies are missed. Wayne Hellmann Saint Louis University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

:The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century

1. Introduction The soft wax Dawn? 2. The image in life The image Francis sought to present The impression Francis made on contemporaries 3. The image after death The early official image in writing Elias' letter The papal bull of Canonisation Thomas of Celano's First Life of St Francis 4. The official image in stone - the Basilica of St Francis at Assisi I. The creation of the Basilica The achievement of brother Elias Progress of the building and its date Furnishing the Basilica II. The inspiration of the Basilica Gregory IX Innocent IV Sources of inspiration The functions of the double church Conclusion - the image 5. The authority of St Francis: expositions of the rule The Exposition of the Four Masters Hugh of Digne The bull Ordinem vestrum The sources and characteristics of Hugh's Exposition of the Rule The bull Exiit qui seminat 6. Reminiscences: the convergence of unofficial and official images in writing The writings of Leo, Rufino, and Angelo The image of St Francis as presented by Leo, Rufino and Angelo The anonymous of Perugia Thomas of Celano's Second Life of St Francis The Legend of the Three Companions The sources of the Legend of the Three Companions and its date The image of St Francis presented by the Legend of the Three Companions The Sacrum Commercium 7. Visual images The Pescia altar panel The Pisa altar panel The Assisi altar panel The Bardi altar panel Matthew Paris Kalenderhane Camii 8. The official image in speech and writing Sermons St Bonaventure The Legenda Maior of St Bonaventure The Miracles of St Francis 9. The official visual image: the decoration of the Basilica Introduction The decoration of the Lower Church The decoration of the Upper Church The stained glass windows in the Upper Church The decoration of apse and transepts The north transept Cimabue The Four Evangelists The decoration of the sanctuary walls The decoration of the nave of the Upper Church The St Francis cycle Dating the decoration of the nave Nicholas IV 10. The rediscovery of St Francis's body Excavations Reconstruction of St Francis's interment 11. Epilogue: Angela of Foligno's image of St Francis.

F. THOMAS LUONGO. The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 233. $39.95

F. Thomas Luongo's book follows in a distinguished line of scholarly research that has attempted to free Catherine of Siena from the hagiographical shrine in which she has been encased ever since Raymond of Capua, her confessor, spiritual advisor, and biographer, wrote the Legenda maior, the vita meant to serve the cause for her canonization, which occurred in 1461. Beginning in 1921, and followed up with subsequent publications in 1930 and 1948, French scholar Robert Fawtier launched his attack on the Catherinian hagiographical tradition. More recent scholars such as Sofia Boesch Gajano, Odile Redon, Suzanne Noffke, and Karen Scott, while abjuring Fawtier's polemics, also have argued in various ways that Raymond's Catherine is a hagiographical construct composed with an agenda, not a historical portrait. In search of the historical person rather than the saint, they have read Raymond's vita against Catherine's own letters in an attempt to reconstruct her life and reassess her spirituality, along with the public nature of her mission or apostolate. In this slim volume of five chapters, Luongo does this, too, but he moves the discussion forward in a welcome and innovative way by historicizing Catherine in the social and political culture of late medieval Siena. Luongo also intends his work to stand as a critique of the voluminous scholarship on female sanctity that has appeared in the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum's influential book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987). He argues that much of the recent work on sanctity privileging gender as the primary category of analysis has had the unfortunate effect of deracinating holiness from its local context, simplifying and reifying it rather than complicating our vision of it. To rectify this problem, his study plants Catherine Benincasa firmly back into the Sienese soil of the fourteenth century.

D. W. Russell (review)

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 209 mentor, until jealous rivals falsely accused him of adultery with the king's wife. This led to a temporary departure from his entourage, but he was recalled to favour just before the young king fell ill and died. William then accompanied his body to Rouen for burial and took his cross to Jerusalem, in accordance with his dying wish. On his return he joined the old king's household and became involved in Henry's lengthy territorial struggles with the King of France. After Henry H's death King Richard confirmed Henry's giftof a wife forWilliam, and he was appointed an adviser to the chancellor leftbehind in England to look afteraffairswhile Richard went on the crusade . William was then involved on Richard's side in the political manoeuvring that took place in the king's absence. The volume ends in mid-sentence with Richard's triumphant return to England. The narrative is full of incident, often with everyday details and even some amusing moments, such as the picture of William having his helmet prised offat a forge after it had been dented in a tournament! There is every reason to believe that the poem has been scrupulously copied and edited, while the translation, by Stewart Gregory, is accurate and lively. This augurs well for the subsequent volumes. University of Birmingham Leslie C. Brook La vye de seyntFraunceys dAssise (MS Paris, BNF, Fonds Francais 13505). Ed. by D. W. Russell and others. (Anglo-Norman Text Society, 59-60) London: Birkbeck College. 2002. x + 338pp. ?60. ISBN 0-905474-43-0. This translation of Bonaventure's Life of St Francis of Assisi (d. 3 October 1226) is the earliest extant Anglo-Norman version that is known (MS Paris BNF ffr.13505 di? vided forsale from MS 115 ofthe Norman Abbey of Saint-Evroul). The manuscript is dated after 1273, by internal evidence of the year when Bonaventure was nominated cardinal, and before 1275, when certain additions to Bonaventure's Life were autho? rized, which are not included here. The challenge of reading this translation is rather like trying to appreciate Boethius's Latin Consolatiophilosophiaeby way of Chaucer's Middle English. In this case, the anonymous translator's obscurities may often be attributed to confusion between three languages, Latin, English, and French, or at least resolved by consulting early extant versions in these languages. At times, the translator's persona intrudes into the text as distinguishable from that of St Bonaven? ture. He repeatedly refers to his Latin source (Bonaventure's Legenda maior), which he tends to condense rather than amplify for a popular audience. By adding a list of chapter titles to the beginning of Book 11,the Anglo-Norman translator establishes a pleasing symmetry between the two books here, both of ten chapters and both in? troduced by tables in rhyming couplets. Book 1 treats the life proper, while Book 11 handles all the post mortem miracles. Unfortunately, the loss of the last folio, with room fora maximum of 152 lines, excludes the possibility of a colophon in which the translator might have identified himself. Beneath the linguistic layering, however, the recognizable St Francis appears as the ascetic lover of the natural world and the disenfranchised poor, especially lepers, coloured by the scholastic terminology in which Bonaventure clothes mystical experience, above all the stigmata. Nevertheless, the interest of this volume lies not in the saint himself so much as in the Anglo-Norman text. The reader interested in St Francis of Assisi and his historical context will find more accessible information elsewhere. As an editor who inherited a substantial legacy from H. S. F. Collins and the late A. R. Harden, who began the edition, D. W. Russell presents a focused introduction with a valuable guide to the language of the text. The unfinished narrative poem of 8,727 lines is cumbersome in both length and language. Since the period after 1250 210 Reviews is one of degeneracy in Anglo-Norman, it is not surprising to discover an extravagant fluidityof gender and a great wafHing of cases in vestiges of the cas regimeand cas sujet, not to mention the occasional 'ambivalence between preterite and present...

Bernard of Besse: Praises of Blessed Francis (Liber de laudibus Beati Francisci)

BERNARD OF BESSE: PRAISES OF BLESSED FRANCIS (LIBER DE LAUDIBUS BEATI FRANCISCI) INTRODUCTION I Bernard's Life.1 The Chronica XXIV Generalium Ordinis Minorum (Chronicle of the XXIV Generals) completed in 1378, is the earliest source to mention Bernard, calling him "Bernard of Besse of the Province of Aquitaine."2 In the seventeenth century, Luke Wadding notes that Bernard was a member of the Franciscan Custody of Cahors of the Province of Aquitaine, and also was a travelling companion and secretary to the Minister General, St. Bonaventure (1257-1274).» It is difficult to determine exactly Bernard's place of origin. Sbaralea in his Castigatio lists several places in France as possibili1 This study and translation was made possible by a grant from the Younger Scholars Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The following abbreviations have been employed throughout: AF, Analecta Franciscana; AFH, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum; AP, Anonymous of Perugia, ed. Lorenzo di Fonzo, O.F.M. Conv., L'anonimo perugino tra Ie fonti francescane del sec. XIII (Roma: Ed. Miscellanea Francescana, 1972) 435-65, trans. Anonymous of Perugia by Eric Kahn in Damien Isabell, Workbook for Franciscan Studies (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1979); LM, St. Bonaventure, Legenda maior AF 10: 555-652, trans. Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 117-327; MF, Miscellanea Francescana; 1 CeI, Thomas of Celano, Vita prima s. Francisci, AF 10: 1-117, trans. Placid Hermann in Marion A. Habig (ed.) St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus..., 4th rev. ed. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983) 225-356; 2 CeI, Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda s. Francisci, AF 10: 127-160, trans. Hermann in Habig, Omnibus, 357-543; 3 CeI, Thomas of Celano, Tractatus de miraculis beati Francisci, AF 10: 269-331, excerpts trans. Hermann in Omnibus, 545-54. 2 AF 3: 262. The Province of Aquitaine refers to the Franciscan Province. 3 Luke Wadding, Annales Minorum (Ad Claras Aquas [Quaracchi], 1931) 5:55 (references to Wadding indicate marginal numbers). A Franciscan custody is a subdivision of a province. 214DAVID AMICO ties.4 The most likely of these is "a town called Besse in the Province of Aquitaine," that probably corresponds to a present-day town called Besse in the Department of Puy de Dôme, part of the Aquitaine of earlier days. This town is very near Cahors, to which custody Bernard belonged, and it seems logical that he would have entered the Order near his place of origin. We know little of Bernard's early days in the Order. Jacques Cambell in his article on Bernard in the New Catholic Encyclopedia says that he was probably residing in the convent of Limoges in January, 1250, but he does not cite his source for this.8 We do know, however, that Bernard held a significant office in the Order as a secretary to the Minister General, St. Bonaventure, one of the most briUiant theologians of his day. That he had the confidence of St. Bonaventure speaks well both for Bernard's competence and his access to information concerning the history he narrates. Indeed, as SaUmbene remarks in his Chronicle, secretaries to the Minister General were known to be "intelligent, well-read, good speakers, excellent writers, good walkers to accompany the General on his visitations, and men of great authority.6 Bernard, therefore, must have possessed many of these characteristics. As secretary, he probably carried out the normal duties of the office, and in fact he himself says that he "travelled through parts of Germany and Flanders with the distinguished Minister General." Beyond this, though, we are not sure of any specific activities. The early sources do not give a date for Bernard's death, but modern scholars place it sometime between 1300 and 1304.7 II Bernard's Works. The Chronicle of the XXIV Generals lists all but one of the six works ascribed to Bernard of Besse.8 It notes, first of all, that Bernard "wrote a Chronicle"—sometimes called a 4 Joannes H. Sbaralea, Supplementum et castigatio ad scriptores trium Ordinum ed. Attilio Nardecchia (Rome, 1908) 2: 141-42. 8 Jacques Cambell, "Bernard of Besse," New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967). • Salimbene de Adam, Crónica ed. Giuseppe...