Product Description

Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) was the least dogmatic of saints, seeing himself as God's troubadour or fool. His life was rich in its succession of dramas. After his debauchery as a young playboy, merchant and soldier - he fought at the Battle of Collestrada - he stripped naked in court, abandoned everything he owned and devoted his life to the poorest and the sick. On his missions he walked over the Pyrenees barefoot, was shipwrecked, and crossed the lines during the Fifth Crusade to parley with the Sultan in Egypt. In 1224 marks similar to Christ's wounds appeared on his hands, feet and side, the first recorded case of Stigmata. Francis's feelings for creation, epitomised in his sermon to the birds, stimulated the realism of the Italian Renaissance artists; his vernacular poems inclined Dante to write The Divine Comedy in Italian not Latin. The first religious order he founded, for men, had a radical effect on social justice and the developing universities in Europe; his second order, the Poor Clares, for women, soon numbered hundreds, including royalty and half a dozen saints; his third, for laity sworn to peace, helped destroy the military power of feudalism. But above all it is through his universal love that he has influenced the world for nearly eight centuries, drawing more than three million people every year to his tomb in Assisi.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #357803 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the Preface to Francis of Assisi Adrian House writes that the inspiration for writing his biography came while visiting an Anglican friary in Dorset where all the visiting guests, be they bishops, ex-prisoners, retired generals, travellers or alcoholic stockbrokers, were treated identically by the friars, making it impossible to know for certain who was who. At the start of a story so synonymous with the compassionate and loving acceptance of all forms of life, this anecdote serves as a powerful reminder of St Francis's enduring appeal and popularity--the man whom the French agnostic scholar Ernest Renan called "the only perfect Christian" after Christ.

House's real achievement is to relate what he calls "the almost continual drama" of Francis's life to the political, social, economic, military and religious upheavals of 12th and 13th century Italy, not as though these were noises off to a larger drama, but in order to explain the culture that formed Francis, and expected his compliance to its mores--a culture that, to a great extent, he set about changing with ferocious energy and wit.

The picture of Francis that emerges, then, is far more complex and, of course, more fully realised than the hazy image that many hold in their heads from stories such as that of his preaching to the birds. He was not only the great orator and evangelist we think we know but also: soldier, poet (he wrote the first surviving poetry in Italian and is said to have inspired Dante away from Latin to the same), socialite, linguist, merchant, troubadour and ecologist. Notably, though educated he was no scholar, and comes across as an non-doctrinaire and unconventional man of action who was as hard on himself as he was on the feudal system that created so much poverty and suffering. In one story he eats some chicken while ill (he had malaria) and fasting. Thinking this self-indulgent, he drags himself into Assisi where he preaches from the pillory, strips naked and is led to the stocks on a rope to confess gluttony and deception before a shocked crowd. When his bones were exhumed in 1978 his skeleton showed signs of extreme malnutrition and osteoporosis. He died aged 44.

The bourgeois who embraced poverty; the soldier who preached peace; the snob who washed the wounds of lepers: there is hardly an incident in this absorbing biography that does not enlarge our understanding of Francis's vision of God's love lived out generously, like a diamond giving off "splinters that seem to differ according to the way they are struck by the light". --Anthony Wilson

From the Publisher
'A brilliantly composed, totally absorbing account of the saint's life.' Sunday Times

About the Author
Adrian House read Modern History at New College, Oxford, and was for many years a publisher with William Collins. He spent four years researching and writing this book, living for six months in Assisi and visiting Franciscan sites, communities and libraries in Britain, Italy, Spain, Egypt and the United States. Francis of Assisi therefore combines his own earliest sources and the work of contemporary authorities. In 1989 he helped to produce the documentary series Art, Faith and Vision for Channel 4. He is the author of a joint biography of George and Joy Adamson, who were famous for Born Free, the story of their African lioness.