The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century.

Cook, William R.

The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century. By Rosiland B. Brooke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 527 pp. $135 cloth.

Somewhere in this enormous tome, surrounded by numerous asides and tangential matter, is a good book. The author loses her way as she presents the fruits of a lifetime of learning, using the creation of image(s) of Francis that emerge in the thirteenth century as her focus. One wonders what audience she has in mind as she sometimes presents rather elementary background and at other times becomes quite technical and esoteric. If someone read just the final two chapters ("The Rediscovery of St. Francis' Body" and "Angela of Foligno's Image of St. Francis"--there is no discussion of her contemporary Jacopone da Todi's image of Francis), it would be virtually impossible to deduce the major theme of this book.

As one would expect from Rosiland Brooke, there is much to praise in this book. As someone quite familiar with the materials Brooke analyzes, I found myself fairly often thinking, "Of course! What didn't I ever figure that out?" or, "Aha! Now I finally get it!" She often provides useful and not widely known historical context for the life of Francis and the development of the Order. In the chapter about the decoration of San Francesco in Assisi, her careful descriptions, especially of the frescoes in the transept and apse of the Upper Church, are thorough and hard to find even in books dedicated to that building. After having read that chapter just prior to a visit to the Basilica, I was able to see and discover new things thanks to Brooke.

One of the problems with this book is that despite its date of publication and the inclusion of some works from 2005 in her bibliography, Brooke does not in fact carefully and systematically use a good deal of the new scholarship available on topics she writes about. For example, her chapter about the burial of Francis and the rediscovery of his body in the nineteenth century is already outdated since she relied on Gatti's work of 1983 but did not use Donal Cooper's article about it, an article in a volume she cites in her bibliography. Her final chapter, a discussion of Angela of Foligno (an odd way to end the book), makes little use of the vast scholarship on Angela of Paul Lachance and others. Even in her analysis of primary sources, she shows no knowledge of the three-volume edition/translation published 1999-2001 by New City Press. Of course, Brooke did not need to use the translations, but the introductions and notes are important scholarship in their own right. To give one example, she takes for granted the genuineness of Elias's letter written at the time of Francis's death. While it may be genuine, there are some serious problems with the transmission of the text, clearly laid out in volume 2 of the New City Press edition, that she simply does not inform the reader about.

As we would expect from Brooke's earlier work, she pays special attention to the Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli, which she published with commentary and translation in 1970. As often happens with people who have been absorbed in the "Franciscan Question," she often takes great care to deal with the authorship and dating of important texts but sometimes shortchanges her readers in her analysis. No one would deny the importance of getting the authorship and date right when discussing a source, but some of the details she catalogues ultimately make little difference in discussing the image of Francis that each work contains. Oddly, she seems little interested in the Sacrum Commercium. Certain sections of her overstuffed 173-page chapter on the decoration of the Basilica are much more about fairly technical arguments of authorship and dating, where she is really only reporting and summarizing the work of other scholars, than they are about what comprehensive image of Francis those works present.

Brooke is spotty in her discussion of images of Francis that antedate the Assisi frescoes. She ignores the important panel from ca. 1260 in Orte and chooses not to discuss the panel in Pistoia because of the difficulty in dating it. Since the restoration of that panel about 25 years ago, scholars have generally agreed on a date; and the panel is important since it is the second-longest narrative of Francis's life before the painting of the Upper Church fresco cycle in Assisi. I believe that Brooke misreads a section of the panel in Santa Croce in Florence and hence errs in placing it later in the tradition than scholars such as Chiara Frugoni do. Brooke spends fifteen pages (202-217) discussing fresco fragments of a life of Francis from the Kalenderhane Camii in Istanbul. This is a work that is in quite fragmentary condition--we do not even know what the stories of about half of the sections were. This fresco is precious and interesting, but it hardly merits the attention it receives in a book about the image of St. Francis in the thirteenth century.

Often, the book appears to be the work of someone who has many thoughts and ideas about the thirteenth century and wants to get them all into one big book. Hence, we have quite a few asides. Brooke clearly loves and knows about Pisan sculpture in the thirteenth century, but what she says about it in more than one place has little to do with the image of St. Francis. In her section of chapter 8 dealing with Bonaventure's Legenda Maior, it takes her ten pages to begin her analysis of the text, which after all is the proper focus for a book about images of St. Francis.

My respect for Rosiland Brooke is profound, and I ordered this book with great enthusiasm. Many details and some sections were informative and useful, and I value them. However, this book needed more authorial discipline and a lot more editorial guidance to live up to expectations.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640708000644

William R. Cook

State University of New York, Geneseo