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Saint Francis of Assisi’s Repair of the Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Anne Kirkham
Anne Kirkham*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

A round 1230 Burchard of Ursperg, a Premonstratensian canon, writing about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), reported that ‘with the world already growing old, two religious orders arose in the Church – whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. The success of the Franciscans in contributing to what Burchard saw as the renewal of the Church’s youth was simultaneously assisted and celebrated by documenting the life of the founder, Francis (1182–1226), in words and images soon after his death and throughout the thirteenth century. Within these representations, the pivotal event in securing Francis’s religious ‘conversion’ was his encounter with the decaying church of San Damiano outside Assisi. His association with the actual repair of churches in the written and pictorial accounts of his life was a potent allegorical image to signal the revival of the Church and the role of Francis and his followers in this. This essay focuses on how references to the repair of churches were used to call attention to the role of the Franciscans in the revival of the Church in the thirteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 44: Revival and Resurgence in Christian History , 2008 , pp. 46 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2008

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References

1 Quoted in Little, Lester K., Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (New York, 1978), 167 Google Scholar. The orders were the Franciscans and the Dominicans. I am grateful to my session chair at the EHS Summer Meeting, Prof. R. N. Swanson, and my research supervisor, Dr Cordelia Warr, for their comments which have contributed greatly to the development of this paper.

2 Thomas of Celano’s first Life of Francis was written in 1229. Celano wrote a second version in 1244–6 and Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior was written in 1263. Scenes from Francis’s life in glass at the Barfu²erkirche, Erfurt have been dated to 1230–5 (see Drachenberg, Erhard, Mittelalterliche Glasmalerei in Erfurt (Dresden, 1990), 30–4 Google Scholar) and the Berlinghieri Dossal in San Francesco, Pescia is dated 1235.

3 The problems of the Church/papacy in this period have been widely studied; my indicative list draws on Michael Goodich, ‘The Politics of Canonization in the Thirteenth Century: Lay and Mendicant Saints’, Church History 44 (1975), 294–307, at 294, Morris, Colin, The Papal Monarchy (Oxford, 1989), 413 Google Scholar, and Lawrence, C. H., The Friars: the Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (London and New York, 1994), 3 and 7 Google Scholar.

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12 Smart, Assisi Problem, 5. Peter Murray states that an inscription on the ‘Dream of Innocent III’ is from the Legenda Maior in ‘Notes on some Early Giotto Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953), 58–80, at 72. See also Meiss, Millard, Giotto and Assisi (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, Bellosi, Luciano, La Pecora di Giotto (Turin, 1985), 9–14 Google Scholar, White, , Art and Architecture, 207–24 Google Scholar, and Zanardi, B., Il cantiere di Giotto: lestorie di San Francesco ad Assisi (Milan, 1996)Google Scholar.

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