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The Franciscans

A Mendicant Order with the Whole World as Its Monastery

Francis of Assisi and His Community

What was in terms of sheer numbers the largest religious order of the Middle Ages spread out very rapidly from Assisi, across Christendom, and even beyond. Already in the lifetime of Francis himself, his followers had become active in England¹ and Ireland,² on the Iberian Peninsula, in France,³ and even in Muslim North Africa. They appeared early in Germany, too, with the foundation of the first friaries from 1221 (in Augsburg, Worms, and Speyer among others).⁴ Provinces—a form of organization that may have had as its model the circuits of the Premonstratensians or the provinces of the Cluniacs—were soon organized. By 1230 there were two, for the Rhineland and Saxony, and in 1239 the growing number of communities led to the division of the Rhineland province into the provinces of Upper and Lower Germany.

Soon the Franciscans had made their way beyond the boundaries of the known world: in 1245 on behalf of Pope Innocent IV, John de Plano Carpini (1185–1252) set out for the east to scout the looming threat of the Mongols, who were just then appearing in Europe. He came as far as the center of power held by the heirs of Genghis Khan, near Karakorum, south of Lake Baikal. William Rubruk (1215/20–1270) followed him a little afterward on behalf of the French king Saint Louis IX, who had taken special care to surround himself with many Franciscans.⁵ Around the turn from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century the Franciscans began to form a province of their order in China, with an archbishopric in Beijing and a suffragan in Zaytun (today Quanzhou), even though that province was lost with the ascendance of the Ming dynasty in 1368.⁶ By the end of the fourteenth century there were in all probably more than fourteen hundred Franciscan communities across all of Latin Christendom.

This unprecedented success had been inspired by one person—the little poor man, the “Poverello,” as Francis was called. But from the beginning, and today, those who wanted and who still want to follow him have wrestled with appropriating and interpreting the model of life he created. The reason is perhaps to be found in the fact that Francis’s embodiment of a particular way of life and its meaning was to be understood above all as a message, one that had to be embraced individually and thus had always to be realized anew.

In this respect, Francis stood as heir to the tradition of the twelfth century. At that time, the question was how far the process of institutionalization that led to monasteries and orders might simply silence any invitation to embrace an individuality of the soul, not least because of the tendency to cloister that kind of invitation. Now in Francis’s day, however, new religious communities would remain openly accessible. When in a later allegorical text “Lady Poverty” asked the followers of Francis where their community was to be found, the response was revealing: “They showed her all the world they could see and said: ‘This, Lady, is our enclosure!’”⁷

The oldest representation of Francis of Assisi: a fresco in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco. It must have been completed before the canonization in 1228, because Francis has no halo.

In Francis the layman, a particular form of medieval piety had crystallized into a new focal point for Christianity. The new way of life he represented thus deserves more extensive treatment. A few facts deserve note at the outset, even if they are only external points of reference for the more important story, which was to unfold only in Francis’s inner life.⁸

Francis, born around 1181/82, was some twenty-eight years old when he first encountered Innocent III, a moment that signaled a breakthrough for his career. By that point he had already passed through a decisive inner crisis. He had grown up in Assisi, the Umbrian episcopal city on the western slopes of the Apennines, as the son of Giovanni Battista Bernadone, a wealthy cloth merchant. He enjoyed a solid education, including a bit of Latin, the language of the church. But for his intended career—as his father’s heir he was destined to lead the life of a long-distance merchant—French was more important; he later used that language often, especially to express his religious sentiments. His charismatic ways won him many followers among those his own age, and as their leader he stood at the center of a group that at first embraced a boisterous and superficial life.

Yet when Francis was hardly twenty years old, he had to go to war for his native city against neighboring Perugia, and he was taken prisoner for a year. The result was a prolonged illness and a profound psychological crisis. Nevertheless, a short time later, around 1204/5, he joined a military expedition to southern Italy, still seeking to achieve his ambitions to become a knight and to climb the ranks of society.

On that journey, while in Spoleto, Francis believed that he heard the voice of the Lord in a dream. The experience broke his resolve and led him back to Assisi. There he began inwardly to turn from the worldly life. He distanced himself from his friends, retreated to a grotto in prayer and penance, and made his way to the slums of his city to care for its lepers. One day, as he prayed before the crucifix of the dilapidated church of San Damiano, he heard the divine voice again. It spoke directly from the cross and commanded him to rebuild the church. Francis took the call literally and sought with his own hands to renovate the building. To finance that renovation and to pay for the priests of San Damiano, he appropriated his father’s wealth without permission.

In the same years Francis also set off on a pilgrimage to Rome, where for a short time he exchanged his fine clothes for those of a pauper and begged anonymously before the doors of Saint Peter. Returning to Assisi, he once again embezzled his father’s money for the renovation of his church and for feeding the poor. Fearing punishment, he fled to a solitary cave and after a time resolved to confront his father again. When he arrived in Assisi, he was jeered in public for his ragged appearance and pelted with garbage. His father imprisoned him.

This misfortune drove Francis to turn from the world entirely. At the beginning of 1207, after his father had dragged him into episcopal court, in front of Bishop Guido II Francis took off his clothes, gave them back to his father, and announced that from then on he would acknowledge only his heavenly father. Clothed in the rags of a hermit, he devoted himself anew to the renovation of San Damiano. He also took on the renovation of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, called the Portiuncula. In February of 1208 in that church he heard the words of the Gospel of Matthew that told of the sending forth of Christ’s apostles, who were to have neither gold, silver, nor copper coins in their purses (Matt 10:9). Francis, struck mightily by these words, recognized in them his way forward. He thereafter clothed himself in a beggar’s cloak held together by a simple cord and began a life of absolute poverty.

In the same year, three followers joined him—two learned jurists and a craftsman—and Francis was thus able to share his way of life with like-minded peers. For this little community he needed concrete principles as a guide, and he found them in the gospels in the formulations of Matthew and Luke: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matt 19:21); “Take nothing for your journey” (Luke 9:3); “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves” (Luke 9:23).

Francis set out from Assisi with his followers and began to call those they encountered to repentance and inner conversion. He soon did the same for himself: in a grotto in Poggio Bustone on the slopes of the Rieti valley, he immersed himself in contemplation, which according to tradition revealed to him not only the assurance of his salvation but also the nature of his divine mission. After the small group had returned to Assisi, a Benedictine abbey handed over to them the Portiuncula, where they could remain without any other means of support. More followers now joined them, and together they cared for the indigent and the sick, begged on their behalf, and admonished the rich to repentance.

Francis and his followers were laymen. It was thus still unclear what exactly was to be done with a community like theirs. There were no normative standards that might have served to identify their religious spirit objectively. There was nothing beyond the charismatic power of Francis himself but key phrases from the gospels, which Francis then crafted by means of other biblical passages into what was still a very simple form for a religious rule. It is true that what had been a sharp skepticism toward Francis and his followers on the part of the leading families of Assisi had slowly evolved, by virtue of such a public, pious passion, into respect, and it is true that the bishop continued to view Francis positively, but there was still no traditional institutional model into which the group could be integrated. In 1209 Francis traveled with twelve followers to Rome, seeking recognition for their undertaking.⁹ It can be presumed, though there is no evidence, that Bishop Guido had led the way in arranging the affair. It was surely thanks to his good relationship with John, the cardinal of Saint Paul, that the group was even allowed to see Pope Innocent III.

But Francis had already refused before the cardinal to subject his followers to a stationary, monastic, or eremitic way of life. The cardinal was a Benedictine monk and thus sworn to uphold his Rule’s accusation against the life of the Sarabaites, which had already been leveled against so many wandering preachers at the beginning of the twelfth century. But despite a certain level of mistrust from within the College of Cardinals over whether a life lived according to the gospels in strict poverty was even possible, in the end the community around Francis received oral permission from Innocent III to continue to live their way of life and to preach penance—under the condition that they should inform the pope after a time about the fruits of their labor, so that if need be he could entrust them with still greater tasks.

The innovation already deployed on behalf of the Humiliati—separating dogmatic from penitential preaching and allowing the latter for the laity—now showed its usefulness once more. Yet this case involved something still more decisive: in contrast to the case of the Humiliati, this preaching was not limited to defined urban circles but allowed to laymen who traveled with no geographical limitation. All other laity who had previously done that had been branded as heretics and attacked as such. It speaks to the pope’s considerable breadth of vision that he recognized how urgently the church needed precisely these kinds of people, who lived Christianity from its innermost core and who longed to use the world’s public spaces as a means of passing on their model of life to others.

From this point forward the sphere of influence of what was at first a small community, for the moment called only a brotherhood (fraternitas), quickly grew and multiplied. On the evening of Palm Sunday in 1211 (or 1212), a woman came for the first time to the Portiuncula. Persecuted by her family, she sought acceptance into the community. Her name was Clare; she was the eighteen-year-old daughter of the nobleman Favarone di Offreduccio. Francis cut her hair before the altar, thereby performing the ritual for consecrating virgins (consecratio virginum). Soon thereafter Clare (1193/4–1253) and a small following of like-minded women would withdraw to San Damiano near Assisi, where they would seek to live an evangelical life in imitation of Christ, in absolute poverty and contemplative retreat. They would also write their own rule as a guide to their way of life, and uphold it even against the pope’s reservations. Their way of life became an essential precedent for a distinctly late-medieval form of women’s religious life. The discussion will soon return to that later history.

In those years Francis received as a gift the mountain of Alverna (La Verna), which lay at some distance north of Assisi, to serve as a site for contemplative retreat,¹⁰ yet at the same time he also led an intensive preaching campaign in Italy. His followers spread out across its regions, consciously choosing places where they were foreigners and where they could avoid familiar interaction with relatives and friends.

The size of Francis’s community grew almost explosively, and when his followers all gathered together for the first time at the Portiuncula on Pentecost in 1217, they could already resolve to send their brothers across the Alps, to the Iberian Peninsula, and even to Muslim lands. Francis himself wanted to go to France, but in Florence he was forbidden to do so by Cardinal Hugolino, who would soon take a leading role in the development of the community (and who would later continue to do so as Pope Gregory IX).¹¹ In June of 1218 Francis and his community for the first time received, from Honorius III, a written confirmation of the orthodoxy of their way of life and their preaching. Addressing himself to all prelates in Latin Christendom, the pope urged his audience to support and to protect these brothers “as they travel from place to place according to the example of the Apostles.”¹²

Francis then set out on what would be a yearlong trip to the Orient. On the way he encountered the Sultan Malik al-Kamil and preached the Christian faith to him without harm, though also without result. As a fateful drama would have it, around the same time the first followers of Francis met with martyrdom in Morocco.¹³

In 1220 Francis fell gravely ill and returned to Italy. There he recognized that his former community had grown so rapidly that it had reached an almost unmanageable size. There was no longer merely a small circle of followers gathered around a charismatic leader whose word alone was enough to serve as a guide but now an international order, whose organizations and agencies were staking their claim to institutional validity. Francis successfully asked the pope to name Cardinal Hugolino, mentioned above, as protector of the Order,¹⁴ then stepped down from his position as leader and named as his successor Peter Catanii, one of his oldest and most trusted companions, with these words: “From now on I am dead to you. But here is brother Peter Catanii, whom we all, both you and I, now resolve to obey.”¹⁵

The next year, 1221, was a key year for another important step. Again at Pentecost there was another gathering at the Portiuncula, called the “Mat Chapter” because all who attended sat on straw mats in a broad circle. More than three thousand people gathered there, the new cardinal protector among them. Once again the brothers were sent out across all of Christendom. But, most important, the Order received for the first time a more elaborate rule than the one that had been prepared for presentation to Innocent III. Francis himself had also drafted this new text, since his authority, despite (or perhaps even because of) his formal resignation, remained unquestioned. There was no doubt in this regard, as so many signs of his charismatic attraction suggest—for example, a fascinatingly successful sermon in Bologna in August 1222. As Kaspar Elm has put it, “The saint, who at the Pentecost chapter of 1220 had declared that he was thenceforth dead to the Order, and who was in fact increasingly estranged from the Order’s second generation, began for the first time in these years fully to become what he had wanted to be: a forma, a figura, an exemplum, a regula vitae.”¹⁶

But Francis’s crafting of a rule had never been formally approved by the church—hence the text’s designation as Regula non bullata.¹⁷ And only two years later, in 1223, the Order received a third rule, again written by Francis, but with the support of Hugolino and his jurists. Pope Honorius III recognized this text and promulgated it officially by inserting it into a bull of confirmation.¹⁸

With this act the community around Francis had definitively taken on the form of an order, one legally established in every aspect of its organization.¹⁹ All of its affairs, as they were now explicitly recorded, presumed both a functioning general chapter and a graduated hierarchy of leaders who were elected to limited terms, rising from the guardian as leader of a community, to the custodian as leader of a district, to the provincial and general minister. The building of the Order thus took shape not as the gathering together of affiliated monasteries, each of them independent entities (as in the case of the Cistercians, for example), but rather as an organization shaped strictly along regional lines. The focal point of the rule, furthermore, was to be found in guidelines concerning fasting and penance, in the manner of fraternal correction, in norms regarding preaching authority, and in regulations regarding entry to the Order and the establishment of a novitiate.²⁰ This last set of regulations explicitly signaled the de facto end of charismatic leadership, which usually calls new recruits to be members and then ties them directly into the community of followers.

Ever more strongly afflicted by illness, from this point onward Francis led a more and more withdrawn, in some ways even eremitical, life. To make that way of life more available to his brethren in small groups, he had in fact already written a rule for it. La Verna (among other solitary places) became a place of refuge for him, and after his death the brothers learned that he had received the stigmata there.²¹ Upon his return to San Damiano, he dictated his most poignant poetic work, the “Canticle of Brother Sun,” a prayer that powerfully embraced God’s creation.²² He died in Assisi, according to his wish, lying naked on the ground, on October 3, 1226. He was barely forty-six years old.

The Legacy of Francis

In order to understand the normative impact of this way of life on future developments—which sometimes took on an obsessive quality, but which seemed to establish an unbreakable bond between Francis and every member of the Order—it is essential to gain deeper access to this extraordinary personality. Francis’s own words, and the interpretations they inspired, are the best means to that end.

Apart from the texts of his rules, Francis left little writing behind. Charismatic figures typically do not write; they speak and act and thus require evangelists who seek to immortalize their legacy. Francis found many such figures—from those among his own followers to the authors of what would become official biographies, whose differentiated ways of crafting legend and different ways of representation often give some access to the real, historical Francis and not just to his image. Yet Francis himself also wrote a text that revealed the mission to which he felt God had called him and the path he saw to fulfilling it. A few months before his death he looked back on his life and wrote his spiritual Testament.²³ It is helpful here to fill in the bare chronological outline of his biography with the essentials of this text.

A key sentence in this work reads, “After the Lord had given me some brothers, no one showed me what I had to do. But the Most High himself revealed to me that I should live according to the pattern of the Holy Gospel.”²⁴ So Francis explains that he found himself directly tasked by God to follow the Gospel and to live it out along with his disciples. The consequences were dramatic, since to accept that task meant in the strict sense to follow Christ in every way—in his poverty, his humility and self-denial, his suffering and repentance for the sins of humankind, his obedience to the Father, and his love for people, his preaching and homelessness.²⁵ In a word, it meant to take on the image of Christ (Christiformis).²⁶ Here was the core of Francis’s entire way of life, and here alone was the calling he sought to pass along—both to his followers as a model for a particular way of life and to all humankind around the world as something that could give their life direction and possibility.

Already in the lifetime of Francis and, as we will see, after his death as well, the strictness with which he upheld the imitation of Christ was not uncontested. So, according to the surviving sources, the cardinal of Saint Paul had emphasized this point when he first introduced Francis to the pope and cardinals: “I have found a most perfect man, who wishes to live according to the form of the holy Gospel and to observe evangelical perfection in all things. I believe that the Lord wants through him to reform the faith of the Holy Church throughout the world.”²⁷ But when, in the wake of Francis’s appearance, certain reservations arose among some of the cardinals over whether what Francis proposed was just a bit too novel after all, even overwhelming, the cardinal responded—somewhat apologetically—with remarkable words. Even if invented by later authors, they highlight a paradox deeply embedded in the history of the church, one that Francis was convinced he could resolve: “If we refuse the request of this poor man as novel or too difficult, when all he asks is to be allowed to lead an evangelical life, we must be on guard lest we commit an offense against Christ’s Gospel. For if anyone says that there is something novel or irrational or impossible to observe in this man’s desire to live according to the perfection of the Gospel, he would be guilty of blasphemy against Christ, the author of the Gospel.”²⁸

To live a life in accord with the Gospel meant a gradual renunciation of the entanglements of earthly life.²⁹ Already in the first lines of Francis’s Testament that theme becomes clear: “So the Lord gave me, brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way; for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them, and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. Thereafter I delayed a little and left the world.”³⁰ The passage makes clear that for Francis to leave the world meant to reverse the sensibilities of the soul in a life lived between virtue and vice. All that was bitter became sweet, hence his expression. Francis sought out and lived his ascetic deprivations, his self-renunciations, his poverty, and his contemplative immersion with ecstatic passion, and he found his soul’s happiness in the fullest possible intensification of those sensibilities of renunciation. One of his biographies handed this inward feeling down to his followers: “Such an overwhelming, heavenly sweetness flowed through him then, as he himself told the story, that he not only had no words to express it but could not even move from where he sat. In that moment, a tremendous energy shot through him and drew him into the realm of things unseen. In its power he came to see all earthly things as not only trivial but totally worthless.”³¹ This power alone brought him in his own eyes a bit closer to the Christ of the gospels, and his ardent soul became thoroughly obedient to a compelling rational logic.

According to his own testimony Francis had left the world behind and yet still lived in it, without monastery walls and only seldom retreating into eremitical isolation. His protective separation from the world was nothing more than an inward sense of blessedness, which displaced the bitterness felt by those who remained trapped in sin. For this reason it could be said confidently of both Francis and those his spark ignited that the whole world was their monastery. For everywhere they went, in a certain way they took the monastery with them. The structures of that way of life provided a mental framework that supported the powerful mission of brothers who were sent out into all regions of the world and who took shelter wherever they could find it.

The religious spirit of a life that both renounced the world yet also remained open to it was approved by the church hierarchy—albeit with certain later institutional adaptations—and therefore did not fall into suspicion of heresy. And that approach was of decisive importance for the survival of the community. As Francis recorded in his Testament, its origin was to be found again in the insight that God had given him: “Afterwards the Lord gave me and gives me still such faith in priests who live according to the rite of the Holy Roman Church, because of their orders, that were they to persecute me, I would still want to have recourse to them. . . . And I do not want to consider any sin in them, because I discern the Son of God in them, and they are my lords.”³² For him the church was founded by the work of Christ, and its holiness was therefore unassailable.³³ For the sake of Christ he was able even to overlook the sins of its consecrated priests. Thus the church did not need to fear some kind of unsettling way of life from Francis, like those of earlier figures like Robert of Arbrissel, for example, or of so many preachers among Francis’s contemporaries who were branded with the verdict of heresy—especially since Francis had developed with Cardinal Hugolino, as the protector of his Order, a personal relationship that according to the Vitae was like that of a child seeking the protection of a father,³⁴ and especially because in his now-approved rule, Francis had explicitly recorded the subjection of his Order to the authority of the Roman church. In return, the church supported the expansion of the Order with every means at its disposal. Already in 1218 Honorius III, as has been noted, had called on all bishops to guarantee the protection and support of the Franciscans.

In a remarkable way, Francis nevertheless saw himself as personally independent from the claims of any outsider who sought to make decisions about the norms that guided his way of life and that of his community. Here again his Testament provides a key insight, this time with the phrase cited above: “The Most High Himself has revealed to me that I should live according to the holy Gospel.” Mandate and authority were thus given to Francis as the irrefutable and unquestionable requirements for proper conduct. By virtue of God’s revelation, Francis was able as late as the “Mat Chapter” of 1221 confidently to renounce before Cardinal Hugolino every rule that had been established for his Order: “God has called me to follow the way of humility and showed me the way of simplicity. I do not want you to give any rule to me, neither that of holy Augustine nor of holy Bernard nor of holy Benedict.”³⁵

In the Testament, toward the end of the text, Francis included an analogous passage: “But the Lord has given me to speak and write the Rule and these words simply and purely; may you understand them simply and without gloss and observe them with a holy activity until the end.”³⁶ Through his Testament, by looking back on his life, Francis sketched a broad vision in which the norms of the beginning would be strengthened anew, with great power. The text obligated both the Order as a community and Francis himself to obey the leadership of the minister general and the superiors of the individual communities, the Guardians. But above all, it emphasized that absolute poverty was indispensable: “The brothers should guard themselves against accepting in any way churches, poor dwellings, and anything else that can be built.”³⁷

Francis understood his Testament to be absolutely binding. Every officer in the Order was to keep the text at his side, along with the Rule itself. All who followed it would be “filled with the blessings of the highest Father in heaven.”³⁸ Everyone who knew Francis must have recognized this turn to the divine as self-evident. But it was also a sign of the last gasp of the passing of an era. The Testament had been written too late.

Hugolino, now as Pope Gregory IX, declared Francis a saint in a bull of July 19, 1228. In it, he wrote these words: “Behold, at the eleventh hour the Lord raised up his servant Francis, a man after His own heart. He was a beacon whom the rich viewed with contempt, but whom God had prepared for the appointed time, sending him into his vineyard to root out the thorns and brambles after having put the attacking Philistines to flight, to light up the path to our homeland, and to reconcile people to God by his zealous admonition and encouragement.”³⁹ A mere two years later, on September 28, 1230, in another bull (called Quo elongati) the same pope nullified the validity of the Testament after the general chapter had complained that the Order could not uphold its severity with respect to the issue of poverty. He grounded the act juristically in these words: “Regarding this mandatum [i.e., the Testament], we say to you that you do not need to observe it, because it is not binding without the agreement of those it concerns, namely the brothers, and above all the Ministers. Nor is it binding on your successors, since one equal has no authority to command another.”⁴⁰ Francis had thereby been invoked, yet in a way that robbed him of his holy reputation as the savior of Christendom in its last, almost apocalyptic hour. He was positioned as “equal among equals,” and one moreover who had now been linked to his Order’s right to determine its own affairs collectively.

The pope had a plausible reason, however, for contradicting Francis.⁴¹ With the text of Quo elongati Gregory IX took away a part of Francis, so to speak—Francis as an official, as an earthly leader of the community that had already decisively distanced itself from him. The pope thereby made it possible to keep pure the other aspect, namely, Francis as a charismatic figure. For what remained of Francis is captured in Gregory’s earlier bull, which called him the man of the “eleventh hour,” the spiritual leader, the unassailable model of a perfect imitation of Christ. A Francis like this could be divorced from any possible quarrel over his earlier acts and decisions amid the everyday business of running an order. That kind of confrontation might have tarnished his memory. But the normative power of the validity of his former actions now referred exclusively to his charismatic impact as a figure of salvation history⁴²—a validity that allowed Francis to become a myth that was at once otherworldly and yet always captured anew in the present.

Yet even this solution left a number of serious problems unresolved. How fierce the fights now became over the correct image of Francis, and above all how many tried to perpetuate his charisma by capturing it in written texts, is made clear by the great number of lives and collections of legends about him. These works again and again seized on surviving traditions in new ways or sought to invent new ones.⁴³ Such efforts—at the heart of the seminal study of Paul Sabatier published in 1893—raised the so-called Franciscan question into Francis’s own intentions,⁴⁴ and they inspire important research still today.⁴⁵

Yet the contradictions were already apparent in the problem of how best to honor Francis’s corpse. Planned by the pope immediately after Francis’s death, a massive, two-storied burial church—a structure that posed tremendous challenges of architecture and engineering—was erected in Assisi; the building is a marvel still today.⁴⁶ It was meant to symbolize for Christendom the glory of the saint and his renown. Yet how could it be fitting as a memorial for a figure who was so steeped in humility, one who had once chided his general minister because he had allowed a small building to be erected for his brothers beside the Portiuncula? One surviving source records how much this contradiction irritated Giles, one of the oldest companions of Francis.⁴⁷ He insisted that it was as impossible to dispense with obligations of poverty as with those of chastity. Then, gesturing to the pompous church building that had grown up on the outskirts of Assisi, he quipped that with the completion of such a building as that, there was also no longer any reason to be concerned with chastity.

A noticeable generational shift took place in the course of the thirteenth century. After the contested resignation of the minister general, Elias of Cortona,⁴⁸ from 1239 on the Franciscan community—to that point made up overwhelmingly of laymen—became increasingly clerical.⁴⁹ Francis himself had never become a priest. But already in 1224 he had made the Portuguese cleric Antonius (1195–1231), who had achieved great renown at the University of Padua, the first theological teacher in his Order.⁵⁰ In the following decades the holy simplicity of the faith, so central to the life of the humble Francis and his early followers, yielded ever more to learned theology.⁵¹

Although in their rapidly expanding areas of growth the Franciscans at first consciously avoided the establishment of permanent monastic buildings, Franciscan churches and complexes nevertheless soon grew up in countless cities. They had been founded by local citizens who feared for their own salvation in light of the coarse moral climate of the day. Their contemporary Thomas of Celano captured something of that climate in his first Vita of Francis. He spoke of the many who “had nothing of the Christian spirit in them, whether in their way of life or in their character; they are Christians in name only.”⁵² The Franciscans brought hope, because unlike wastrel clerics who lived off of prebends, they sought to set an example according to the Gospel. Moreover, as priests who could administer the sacraments and who had the right to preach, they could aid in the salvation of those entrusted to them.

There was never a doubt that Francis’s imitation of Christ in absolute poverty was a powerful model, but considerable discussion took place concerning the proper degree of that imitation. The cancellation of the Testament signaled a symbolic turning point. Only fifteen years later, in 1245, a regulation from the Curia allowed the Franciscans to accept moveable and immoveable property that had been donated to them, though not as their own property but as property to be used. Ownership itself was transferred to the papacy. By means of this legal fiction the vow of poverty remained in force.

Yet almost immediately many attacked it precisely as a fiction. The spirit of the early days of community around Francis, expressed symbolically in the dismay of a figure like Giles, lived on, since there were still texts that captured that spirit, or that were now produced—the Rule, the Testament, the legends—in ever greater numbers.⁵³ Many later appealed to these texts, often in explicit opposition to prevailing opinion, and consequently the unity of the Order as the ongoing invitation of the Poverello could not be preserved—a point to which the discussion will soon return.

Clare of Assisi

Shortly before his death, Francis also left a bequest for Clare and her sisters in San Damiano, again emphasizing poverty: “And I ask you, my ladies, and give you this counsel, that you live always in this most holy way of life and in poverty, and that you guard yourself carefully, lest you ever depart from it in any way, regardless of the teaching or counsel of any other.”⁵⁴ These lines had explosive power, because they highlighted the precarious circumstance of women whose intention to follow Christ in absolute poverty faced an even greater skepticism on the part of the church hierarchy than had the analogous intention of Francis and his followers. From the very moment Clare came to Francis, allowed him to cut her hair, and retreated to San Damiano with a small circle of like-minded women, she strove to realize that ideal. But she would not be allowed to do so without further difficulties.

Clare of Assisi: Fresco from the years 1317–1319 in the Lower Church of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi.

Because the old tensions between inner spiritual conviction and the demand for formal institutional structures arise here again in an exemplary way, the story as it unfolded must now be followed in more detail.

In the second decade of the thirteenth century—thus around the time of the emergence of the Beguines north of the Alps—in the urban milieu of Italy (in Florence, Milan, Siena, Lucca, and other places) a growing number of women’s communities sought to lead a life of poverty and charitable activity according to the Gospel and the model of the early church in a way that reveals certain parallels to the Franciscan tradition. Cardinal Hugolino, seeing the potential threat of their uncontrolled growth, felt himself called to rein them in. In 1219, after Francis had set out for the East, the cardinal wrote for these women a normative text, a forma vitae shaped by Benedictine and Cistercian precedents. But the women this way of life addressed now found themselves in circumstances completely at odds with their original intention. All of their charitable activities were forbidden. They were commanded to observe strict enclosure and only allowed to observe personal poverty. Their convents continued to own property, and those resources were intended to maintain a respectable standard of living. These sorores pauperes inclusae, “poor enclosed sisters,” would even have to face the possibility that the circle around Clare in San Damiano would be granted a leading position over them. Hugolino clearly envisioned himself as the founder of a larger order of religious women—one that would be the first of its kind.⁵⁵

After the death of Francis, and after Hugolino’s ascent to the papal throne as Gregory IX, in 1227 the new pope issued the bull Quoties cordis. This decree placed the cura, or the pastoral care, of what he considered his nuns’ communities under the authority of the Franciscan general minister.⁵⁶ In 1228 Gregory used the occasion of the canonization of the Poverello in Assisi to arrange a meeting with Clare and sought to force her to agree to live under his forma vitae. Clare, a remarkably bold woman who was filled, so it was said, with the spirit of the deceased Francis, firmly resisted: “In no way, Holy Father, do I wish to be freed permanently from the imitation of Christ.”⁵⁷ She was successful. Gregory IX allowed her to live in absolute poverty and granted her autonomy.

Yet it was only a temporary victory. Already in 1230 Gregory sought to deprive the community around Clare of the special place that it held within the Franciscan Order, and he decreed that only papal visitors should now have access to San Damiano. Clare responded to the attack by threatening a hunger strike. In the same years Agnes (1211–1282), daughter of Bohemian King Ottokar I Přemysl, had built up a women’s community in Prague that was modeled on Clare’s example, and in 1238 she received a papal decree that both prohibited her from observing evangelical poverty and commanded her to take up the forma vitae of Gregory IX. Meanwhile the title of Ordo Sancti Damiani, curiously enough, took root for convents of the so-called papal congregation, even though San Damiano itself did not belong to it. The pope even brought forth the deceased Francis as the supposed founder of this “Damianite Order”—thereby, on the one hand, legitimizing it and, on the other hand, strengthening his strategy of attrition against Clare.

Gregory IX had no further success. His last years were consumed with his struggles against Emperor Frederick II. His successor, Innocent IV, did seek at first to adhere strictly to his predecessor’s politics, approving in 1245 the existing forma vitae. But in 1247 a new formulation called for the adoption of the Franciscan form of profession and for subordination to the general minister, thereby binding the women’s communities more strongly to the Franciscan Order.⁵⁸ All sides rejected the move, however, and the strategy failed.

The final act had begun. Innocent IV met with Clare in person shortly before her death. Mesmerized by this great personality, in 1253 he approved for her, despite the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, a rule that she herself had written.⁵⁹ Clare died two days later, undefeated. In 1255 she was canonized by Pope Alexander IV in the cathedral of Anagni.⁶⁰ Clare’s was the first rule that had been written by a woman for women. It was valid for the monastery of San Damiano alone. It commanded obedience to the pope, as Francis himself had wanted, and to the leaders of the Franciscan Order. An elected abbess was to lead the convent and, in an almost Benedictine sense, to serve as a model for the women entrusted to her. On the other hand, she could be voted out of office if she were to prove unsuitable. The central passages of the Rule, however, concerned what it called “most holy” poverty, a chastening way of life, manual labor, and the kinds of alms that could be sought. In this connection appeared perhaps the text’s most spiritually deep and also its most touching passage. Here Clare articulated her profound trust in the way of life that had been given to her and from which she drew an unshakeable power:

After the Most High Celestial Father saw fit by his grace to enlighten my heart to do penance according to the example and teaching of our most blessed Father Saint Francis, shortly after his own conversion, I, together with my sisters, willingly promised him obedience. When the Blessed Father saw that we had no fear of poverty, hard work, trial, shame, or contempt of the world, but, instead, we held them as great delights, moved by piety, he wrote for us a form of life as follows: “Because by divine inspiration you have made yourselves daughters and servants of the most High, most Exalted King, the heavenly Father, and have taken the Holy Spirit as your spouse, choosing to live according to the perfection of the holy Gospel, I resolve and promise for myself and for my brothers always to have the same loving care and special solitude for you as for them.” As long as he lived he diligently fulfilled this and wished that it always be fulfilled by the brothers.⁶¹

Pope Urban IV established in his 1263 bull Beata Clara virtute clarens that all groups within the observance of this forma vitae should be drawn together into a newly established Ordo Sanctae Clarae. To this end, with the aid of Minister General Bonaventure and other cardinals, he fashioned a new text, one that had nothing to do with the text that Clare herself had written just before her death but instead presented Clare as the model for a new monastic, female sanctity. The Order of the Poor Clares, as it has been called ever since, had thereby been established.⁶²

In the later course of their history the Poor Clares would see incomparable success. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Order already consisted of around four hundred convents across Europe, with a notably high number of its foundation initiatives coming from the courtly milieu.⁶³

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¹ Annette Kehnel, “Die Formierung der Gemeinschaften der Minderen Brüder in der Provinz Anglia,” in Die Bettelorden im Aufbau, ed. Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Munster: LIT, 1999), 493–524; Michael Robson and Jens Röhrkasten, eds., Franciscans in Medieval England (Canterbury: JEM, 2008).

² Anne Müller, “Conflicting Loyalties: The Irish Franciscans and the English Crown in the High Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, C 107 (2007): 87–106.

³ For an overview of their expansion in Europe: “Franziskaner. B. Verbreitung in den übrigen Ländern Europas. I–IX,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Zurich: Artemis, 1989), 4:807–19. For an overview in English, see Clifford Hugh Lawrence, The Friars (New York: Longman, 1994), and for Germany, John Freed, The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1977).

⁴ Kaspar Elm, “‘Sacrum Commercium’: Über Ankunft und Wirken der ersten Franziskaner in Deutschland,” in Reich, Regionen und Europa in Mittelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Paul-Joachim Heinig et al. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 389–412.

⁵ Raymond C. Beazley, ed., The Texts and Versions of John de Plano Carpini and William de Rubruquis (London: Hakluyt Society, 1903).

⁶ Christian W. Troll, “Die Chinamission im Mittelalter,” Franziskanische Studien 48 (1966): 109–50; 49 (1967): 22–79.

⁷ “Sacrum commercium,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 1730; Franziskus-Quellen: Die Schriften des heiligen Franziskus, Lebensbeschreibungen, Chroniken und Zeugnisse über ihn und seinen Orden (hereafter Schriften), ed. Dieter Berg and Leonhard Lehmann (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2009), 683; Francis of Assisi: The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong et al., Early Documents, vol. 1 (New York: New City Press, 1999), here 552.

⁸ On the following, see Raoul Manselli, San Francesco d’Assisi, ed. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan: San Paolo Edizioni, 2002); Grado Giovanni Merlo, Tra eremo e città (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 2007); Helmut Feld, Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007); Giovanni Miccoli, Francesco d’Assisi. Memoria, storia e storiografia (Milan: Biblioteca francescana, 2010); Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Michael Robson, The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For an overview of the sources, see Roberto Rusconi, Francis of Assisi in the Sources and Writings (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2008).

⁹ Werner Maleczek, “Franziskus, Innocenz III., Honorius III. und die Anfänge des Minoritenordens. Ein neuer Versuch zu einem alten Problem,” in Il papato duecentesco e gli ordini mendicanti, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medio Evo, 1998), 23–80; Maria Pia Alberzoni, Santa povertà e beata semplicità. Francesco d’Assisi e la Chiesa romana (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2015), 79–108.

¹⁰ Giovanni Miccoli, “Francesco e La Verna,” in Itinerarium montis Alvernae, ed. Alvaro Cacciotti (Florence: Studi francescani, 2000), 225–59.

¹¹ Gregorio IX e gli ordini mendicanti (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medio Evo, 2011); Alberzoni, Santa povertà, 145–68.

¹² Bull “Cum dilecti filii,” in Bullarium Franciscanum Romanorum Pontificum, ed. Giovanni Giacinto Sbaraglia (Rome, 1759), 1:2; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 558.

¹³ John Victor Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

¹⁴ On this office, see Martin Faber, “‘Gubernator, protector et corrector.’ Zum Zusammenhang der Entstehung von Orden und Kardinalprotektoraten von Orden in der lateinischen Kirche,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 115 (2004): 19–44.

¹⁵ “Compilatio Assisiensis,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 1484; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 1098; Francis of Assisi: The Founder, ed. Regis Armstrong et al., Early Documents, vol. 2 (New York: New City Press, 2000), 125.

¹⁶ Kaspar Elm, “Die Entwicklung des Franziskanerordens zwischen dem ersten und letzten Zeugnis des Jakob von Vitry,” in Kaspar Elm, Vitasfratrum. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Eremiten- und Mendikantenorden des zwölften und dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Dieter Berg (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde, 1994), 173–93, here 192. See selections from James of Vitry in Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 578–89.

¹⁷ “Regula non bullata,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 185–212; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 63–86.

¹⁸ “Regula bullata,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 171–81; La regola dei Frati Minori (Spoleto: Edizioni Porziuncola, 2010); Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 99–106.

¹⁹ On this overall development, see Théophile Desbonnets, De l’intuition à l’institution. Les Franciscans (Paris: Editions franciscaines, 1983).

²⁰ Mirko Breitenstein, “Das Noviziat im hohen Mittelalter,” in Zur Organisation des Eintrittes bei den Cluniazensern, Cisterziensern und Franziskanern (Münster: LIT, 2008), 423–28.

²¹ André Vauchez, “Autour de la stigmatisation de saint François. Une histoire de textes et d’images,” in André Vauchez, Francesco d’Assisi e gli ordini mendicanti (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 2005), 73–80.

²² “Canticum fratri Solis,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 39–41; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 113–14.

²³ “Testamentum,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 227–32; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 124–27; Jacques Dalarun, “A dernière volonté de saint François,” Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo 94 (1988): 329–66.

²⁴ Dalarun, “A dernière volonté,” 228; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 125; Alberzoni, Santa povertà, 225–61.

²⁵ Dalla “Sequela Christi” di Francesco d’Assisi all’apologia della povertà (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1992); Gert Melville, “What Role Did Charity Play in Francis of Assisi’s Attitude Towards the Poor?” in Aspects of Charity, ed. Gert Melville (Berlin: LIT, 2011), 99–122.

²⁶ Raoul Manselli, “La povertà nella vita di Francesco d’Assisi,” in La povertà del secolo XII e Francesco d’Assisi (Assisi: Società Internazionale di Studi Francescani, 1975), 255–82, here 270.

²⁷ “Legenda trium sociorum,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 1421; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Founder, 61–112, here 96.

²⁸ Bonaventura de Balneoregio, “Legenda maior,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 801; translation from Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Founder, 525–683, here 547.

²⁹ Oktavian Schmucki, “Schrittweise Entdeckung der evangeliumsgemäβen Lebensform durch den heiligen Franziskus von Assisi,” in Oktavian Schmucki OFM Cap. Beiträge zur Franziskusforschung, ed. Ulrich Köpf and Leonhard Lehmann (Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 2007), 305–58.

³⁰ “Testamentum,” 227; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 124.

³¹ Thomas de Celano, “Vita secunda,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 449; cf. Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Founder, 72.

³² “Testamentum,” 227–28; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 125.

³³ On the image of the church among the early Franciscans, see Yves Congar, Die Lehre von der Kirche. Von Augustinus bis zum Abendländischen Schisma, Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3.3c (Freiburg: Herder, 1971), 142–45.

³⁴ For critical remarks, see Ulrich Köpf, “Hugolino von Ostia (Gregor IX.) und Franziskus,” in Franziskus von Assisi. Das Bild des Heiligen aus neuer Sicht, ed. Dieter R. Bauer et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 163–82, here 170; Alberzoni, Santa povertà, 145–68.

³⁵ “Compilatio Assisiensis,” 1497–98; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 1105; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Founder, 132–33.

³⁶ “Testamentum,” 231; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 62; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 127.

³⁷ “Testamentum,” 229; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 61; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 126.

³⁸ “Testamentum,” 231; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 62; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 127.

³⁹ Bull “Mira circa nos,” Bullarium Franciscanum Romanorum Pontificum, ed. Giovanni Giacinto Sbaraglia (Rome: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1759), 1:42–44; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 1631; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 566.

⁴⁰ Herbert Grundmann, “Die Bulle ‘Quo elongati’ Papst Gregors IX,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 54 (1961): 3–25; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 1637; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 571.

⁴¹ On the following, see Gert Melville, “Der geteilte Franziskus. Beobachtungen zum institutionellen Umgang mit Charisma,” in Kunst, Macht und Institution, ed. Joachim Fischer and Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2003), 347–63.

⁴² On the later impact of this eschatological thought in the Franciscan Order, see Hans-Joachim Schmidt, “Legitimität von Innovation. Geschichte, Kirche und neue Orden im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Vita religiosa im Mittelalter, ed. Franz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), 371–91, here 378–82.

⁴³ Roberto Rusconi, Francis of Assisi in the Sources and Writings (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2008).

⁴⁴ Paul Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi (New York: Scribner, 1930).

⁴⁵ Franz Xaver Bischof, “Der Stand der ‘Franziskanischen Frage,’” in Franziskus von Assisi, ed. Dieter Bauer et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 1–16; Jacques Dalarun, Vers une résolution de la question franciscaine (Paris: Fayard, 2007).

⁴⁶ Jürgen Wiener, “Kritik an Elias von Cortona und Kritik von Elias von Cortona: Armutsideal und Architektur in den frühen franziskanischen Quellen,” in Frömmigkeitsformen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Johannes Laudage (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004), 207–46; Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

⁴⁷ Ramona Sickert, Wenn Klosterbrüder zu Jahrmarktsbrüdern werden. Studien zur zeitgenössischen Wahrnehmung der Franziskaner und Dominikaner im 13. Jahrhundert (Münster: LIT, 2006), 213.

⁴⁸ Ramona Sickert, “‘Difficile tamen est iudicare alieni cordis occulta . . .’ Persönlichkeit oder Typus? Elias von Cortona im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen,” in Das Eigene und das Ganze, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 303–38.

⁴⁹ Laurentio C. Landini, The Causes of the Clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor 1209–1260 in the Light of Early Franciscan Sources (Chicago: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1968).

⁵⁰ Jacques Toussaert, Antonius von Padua (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1967).

⁵¹ Achim Wesjohann, “Simplicitas als franziskanisches Ideal und der Prozeβ der Institutionalisierung des Minoritenordens,” in Melville and Oberste, Die Bettelorden im Aufbau, 107–67.

⁵² Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 278; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 200; Armstrong et al., Francis of Assisi: The Saint, 171–310, here 183; Schmidt, “Legitimität von Innovation,” 376.

⁵³ Adriaan H. Bredero, Christenheit und Christentum im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 207–10. For a general overview of the later history of the Franciscans, see Duncan B. Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order: From Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1987); Grado G. Merlo, In the Name of Saint Francis: A History of the Friars Minor and Franciscanism until the Early Sixteenth Century (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2009).

⁵⁴ Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 119; Berg and Lehmann, Schriften, 200; Schmidt, “Legitimität von Innovation,” 63. See Jacques Dalarun, Francis of Assisi and the Feminine (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2006); Alberzoni, Santa povertà, 171–93. English translations of main sources are in The Lady: Clare of Assisi; Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong (New York: New City Press, 2006).

⁵⁵ On the general institutional development, see Maria Pia Alberzoni, Chiara e il papato (Milan: Edizioni Biblioteca Francescana, 1995); Maria Pia Alberzoni, Clare of Assisi and the Poor Sisters in the Thirteenth Century (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2004); Niklaus Kuster, “Quia divina inspiratione . . . ,” in Klara von Assisi: Zwischen Bettelarmut und Beziehungsreichtum. Beiträge zur neueren deutschsprachigen Klara-Forschung, ed. Bernd Schmies (Münster: Aschendorff, 2011), 193–211.

⁵⁶ Bullarium Franciscanum Romanorum Pontificum, 1:36–37.

⁵⁷ “Legenda Hl. Clara,” in Leben und Schriften der Heiligen Klara von Assisi, ed. Engelbert Grau and Marianne Schlosser (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2001), 133; Maria Pia Alberzoni, “Nequaquam a Christi sequela in perpetuum absolvi desidero,” in Chiara d’Assisi e la memoria di Francesco, ed. Alfonso Marini (Cittá di Castello: Petruzzi, 1995), 41–65; Kuster, “Quia divina inspiratione,” 198.

⁵⁸ Cristina Andenna, “‘Secundum regulam datam sororibus ordinis sancti Damiani.’ Sancia e Aquilina: due esperimenti di ritorno alle origini alla corte di Napoli nel XIV secolo,” in Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context, ed. Michael Robson and Jens Röhrkasten (Berlin: LIT, 2010), 139–78, here 149.

⁵⁹ Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 2291–307; Armstrong, The Lady, 108–26.

⁶⁰ Bull “Clara claris praeclara,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 2331–37; Armstrong, The Lady, 263–71.

⁶¹ “Clara Assisiensis, Regula,” in Menestò and Brufani, Fontes, 2299–2300; Armstrong, The Lady, 117–18.

⁶² Giancarlo Andenna, “Urbano IV e l’istituzione dell’ordine delle clarisse,” in Regulae—Consuetudines—Statuta, ed. Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 2005), 539–68; Lezlie Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi: Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2008). See also Bert Roest, Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares Between Foundation and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

⁶³ Raphaela Averkorn, “Adlige Frauen und Mendikanten im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Macht und Religion. Studien zur Iberischen Halbinsel im Spätmittelalter,” in Imperios sacros monarquías divinas, ed. Carles Rabassa and Ruth Stepper (Castelló de la Plana: Univ. Jaume I, 2002), 219–68; Ingrid Würth, “Altera Elisabeth: Königin Sancia von Neapel (1286–1345) und die Franziskaner,” in Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Matthias Werner, ed. Enno Bünz et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 517–42; Andenna, “Secundum regulam.”