Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi is one of the few medieval saints whose appeal has never faded, and the reason is the radicalism of his choice. The son of a prosperous cloth merchant, he renounced his inheritance, stripping off his clothes in the public square to return them to his father, and embraced absolute poverty, begging his bread and calling Poverty his bride.

The order he founded, the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor), took that renunciation as its rule and grew, within his lifetime, into one of the great forces of the medieval Church. His spirituality was affective and concrete rather than scholastic: he preached to birds, tamed the wolf of Gubbio in legend, composed the Canticle of the Creatures in praise of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and assembled the first Nativity scene to make the humility of Bethlehem visible. Near the end of his life, on Mount La Verna, he is said to have received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, the first recorded case. His feast, and his modern adoption as patron of ecology, keep alive a vision of Christianity stripped to poverty and delight in creation.

Francis was written about almost immediately after his death, and the multiplying accounts did not agree with each other. Thomas of Celano wrote two separate biographies within Francis's own lifetime's living memory, and Bonaventure, elected head of the Franciscan Order decades later, composed a further Legenda Maior intended specifically to become the Order's single official account.

In 1266 the Franciscans went further than simply preferring Bonaventure's version: the Order formally ordered earlier biographies destroyed, a directive that shows how much was at stake in controlling Francis's memory rather than merely preserving it. That stake was real and practical. After his death the Order split into factions, generally called Spirituals and Conventuals, disagreeing sharply over how literally to apply Francis's radical embrace of poverty to the growing, increasingly institutional community he had left behind, and each side had reason to shape the founder's remembered words and priorities to support its own position.

The famous stigmata Francis reportedly received on Mount La Verna in 1224 is described with variation across the surviving early sources as well, consistent with a figure whose earliest and most vivid memories were recorded, edited, and in some cases suppressed by an institution actively working out what it wanted to become in his name.