The High Medieval Era · 1209-1300 · Italy, then everywhere
The Franciscan Movement
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About This Movement
Francis of Assisi was a cloth merchant's son who gave away his inheritance, took the gospel's instructions to the apostles as a literal rule of life, and began preaching and caring for lepers in the towns of central Italy. By 1209 others had joined him and Pope Innocent III gave the group verbal approval. What made the movement new was that it did not withdraw behind walls — the friars owned nothing, begged, worked, and preached in the streets of the fast-growing commercial towns. Clare of Assisi built the movement's women's branch and wrote her own Form of Life, the first monastic rule known to have been composed by a woman, and a third order let married lay people live a version of the same discipline without leaving ordinary life. Within a generation of Francis's death in 1226 the order was quarrelling bitterly over how literally his poverty had been meant. A fight that eventually split it into Spirituals and Conventuals, and that also produced repeated rewritings of his own life story, by his own brothers, within living memory of him.
Sources
- Francis's own writings (Testament, both Rules, Canticle of the Creatures, letters), in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1 (ed. Armstrong, Hellmann & Short, 1999; free online) (primary) — The founder's undisputed first-person layer, kept distinct from all hagiography.
- The layered hagiography: Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vols. 1-3 (1999-2001) - Celano's Lives, Legend of the Three Companions, Assisi Compilation, Bonaventure (primary) — Printed in datable layers, with a scholarly apparatus that lets readers trace how the sources built up over time.
- Clare of Assisi: Early Documents (ed. Regis Armstrong, rev. 2006) (primary) — Clare's letters to Agnes of Prague and her Form of Life (the first monastic rule written by a woman) - the movement's female branch in its own voice.
- Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli (writings of Brother Leo and companions; ed./trans. Rosalind Brooke, Oxford Medieval Texts, 1970) (primary) — The companions' counter-memory against the official portrait; central evidence in the poverty dispute.
- Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Cornell, 2012) (secondary) — Deliberately source-critical, layer by layer.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 3 'Religious poverty and the search for perfection' (Kienzle); cf. ch. 4 (McGuire) (reference)