Stories, Archaeology and Narratives: Francis of Assisi: The Suppressed Story

Francis of Assisi: The Suppressed Story

Paris, year 1266. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Minister General of the Franciscan Order, orders the destruction of all biographies of Saint Francis of Assisi, who had died forty years earlier.

In each of the nearly fifteen hundred convents of the order and the four hundred monasteries of the Poor Clares, the old biographies are replaced by a new one written by Bonaventure himself, called the Legenda Maior (“Major Legend”). Monastery by monastery, convent by convent, the earlier testimonies disappear from archives, study centers, and friars’ reading rooms. From that moment on, the image of Francis becomes that of a simple, uneducated friar.

Only centuries later, in 1890, the Calvinist pastor Paul Sabatier began searching for the missing texts — a stubborn investigation lasting decades that ultimately succeeded.

Chiara Mercuri reconstructs, on the basis of unofficial sources, the life and teachings of Francis. What emerges is a previously unseen portrait of a deeply cultured man, resolute to the point of severity, yet loving toward his companions — Leo, Clare, and the others — who together with him became the driving force behind an extraordinary season of spiritual renewal.