The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi.

The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi Jacques Dalarun The Franciscan Institute, $24.95, 295 pp.

Thirty-four years after the death of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1226, the general chapter of the Franciscans commissioned a new legenda (literally: a work to be read aloud) about the saint. Three years later, Saint Bonaventure (d. 1274) published the Legenda Major, and the earlier "legends" were ordered suppressed. The purpose behind this draconian intervention was to quell competing claims about Francis's aims and how those aims (especially concerning poverty and the role of learning in the order) were to be achieved. Some earlier "legends" escaped destruction, however. When they came to light again in the late nineteenth century, Paul Sabatier, a French Protestant scholar, published a path-breaking biography of Francis in which he argued that Francis's followers had been hijacked by Rome and turned into just another religious order subject to the bonds of canon law, clericalism, and monastic observance. Sabatier's portrait of an evangelical reformer avant la parole was daring enough to receive the ultimate Roman accolade: His work was put on the Index of Forbidden Books.

Since Sabatier's time, the scholarly world has been embroiled in the "Franciscan Question." There is a certain (inexact) analogy between it and the search for the "Historical Jesus" in New Testament studies. For example, careful literary and historical study is made of the legends themselves. (How historical are they? To what degree do they represent polemical positions?) There are further studies on how the legends depend or on one another, whether particular stories actually go back to Francis and his own words, and which ones are constructions to serve a polemical need. Finally, there is the task of trying to recover an adequate picture of the saint himself, who is so often seen through the haze of nineteenth-century romanticism. Is there not truth in the somewhat snippy observation about Francis by an earlier writer in Butler's Lives of the Saints that "religious and social cranks of all sorts have appealed to him for justification and he has completely won the hearts of the sentimental"?

It is the precise merit of Jacques Dalarun's highly readable but quite demanding book that he examines the recent research with a scholarly eye on the various legends to make sense of their provenance, intentions, and historical value. This is not a book for the casual consumer of pious Franciscan biographies, but one for those who would try to get closer to Francis and his life. As such, it is an excellent introduction to the issues involved. Dalarun helps us understand why the earliest life (by Thomas of Celano) is so hard on Francis's parents, and why that harshness gets muted in later stories; how Brother Elias turns from hero to villain (and back again, in the estimation of scholars) as time goes by; what to make of the different accounts of the stigmata; and so on. Dalarun keeps a firm eye on the tradition and seems to have total mastery of the pertinent research, especially that of the more recent scholars, mainly Italian and French, who have worked so diligently on the Franciscan materials.

We are in a better position to appreciate what Dalarun has done because of the labors of three excellent American Franciscan scholars who have translated or overseen the translation of all of the writings by and about Francis, from his own time to a century and a half following his death (Saint Francis of Assisi [three volumes], New City Press, 1999-2001, with a fourth volume promised, including an exhaustive index). Using those volumes and Dalarun, serious students of one of the most complex saints in Christianity now have a guide through the stratigraphy of the early sources. As a consequence, the genius of Francis begins to emerge in a more serious and understandable light. The Franciscan Institute at Saint Bonaventure University tells us there are two more volumes of Dalarun's research in the works. They will be eagerly anticipated.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.