Abstract
“Praise be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy Will, for the second death shall do them no harm.”1 On his deathbed in 1226 Francis of Assisi composed these words and added them as the final verses to his “Canticle of the Creatures,” thereby making known his acceptance of death to his followers and securing a place for this attitude toward death in the Franciscan spiritual tradition. His was not a passive acquiescence to death; instead he welcomed it. Francis saw death as a reason to offer praise to God since it provided yet another indication of God’s will and it initiated the Christian believer into new life. The ease and tenderness toward death expressed in the canticle, however, belies contested efforts to write the definitive account of Francis’s decline and death. As the founder of a rapidly growing order and as a canonized saint by 1228 just two years after his death, Francis was the focus of widespread spiritual attention, admiration, and even imitation. How to account for his life and his death in appropriate ways to edify and inspire the faithful while excising stories of spiritual traits that could be misunderstood and potentially misappropriated by his admirers including fellow friars was of concern to contemporary ecclesial authorities including the leaders of the Franciscan Order.
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Notes
All early biographies of Francis need to be read as hagiography since they were all written in order to promote faith in his saintly status. As such they need to be read carefully, but clearly do include some biographical and historical detail in addition to hagiographical topoi. On the analytical use of hagiography see Jacques Dubois and Jean-Loup Lemaitre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris: CERF, 1993). Definitive editions and translations of all the early hagiographic texts related to Francis of Assisi are found in the three volumes of FAED.
Francis has been the subject of many scholarly biographies. Most recently and reliably see André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael Cusato (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
Belief in Francis’s receiving the stigmata was not uncontested even by Franciscans. On the stigmata and their meaning to Franciscan spirituality, see Octavian Schmucki, The Stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi: A Critical Investigation in Light of the Thirteenth Century Sources (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1991);
and Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Torino: Einaudi, 1993).
The development of Francis as an alter Christus in hagiography and image is succinctly presented by H. W. van Os, “St. Francis of Assisi as a Second Christ in Early Italian Painting,” Simiolus: Netherands Quarterly for the History of Art 7.3 (1974): 115–132. The image was not without controversy, as some near contemporaries took Francis to be the angel of the sixth seal, an apocalyptic reference used by zealous splinter groups who were persistently condemned in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
See Stanislao da Campagnola, L’angelo del sesto sigillo e l’alter Christus (Rome: Laurentium, 1971).
On women’s role in caring for the dying and the dead in the Middle Ages, see Christine Guidera, “The Role of the Beguines in Caring for the Ill, the Dying, and the Dead,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 51–72.
Francis’s strong ambivalence toward women is discussed by Jacques Dalarun, Francis of Assisi and the Feminine (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2006);
Clara Gennaro, “Clare, Agnes, and Their Earliest Followers: From the Poor Ladies of San Damiano to the Poor Clares,” in Women and Religion and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 39–55, at 41;
and Darleen Pryds, Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and Their Mendicant Vocation (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2010), 8–11.
The scholarly literature on Jacopa is minimal. The most readily available study remains Edouard d’Alençon, OFM, Cap., Frère Jacqueline: Recherches Historiques sur Jacqueline de Settesoli (Paris: Oeuvre de Saint François d’Assise, [1899]1927).
The best academic study is the rare thesis by Carol Reilley Urner, “The Search for Brother Jacopa: A Study on Jacopa dei Settesoli, Friend of Francis of Assisi and His Movement,” M.A. diss., Ateneo de Manila University, 1980. I am grateful to Kevin Elphick for sharing his copy with me.
Vat. Bibl. MS lat. 8486, f. 78. Published by D’Alençon, Frère Jacqueline, 37–38. The document is transcribed and translated into English by Urner, 288–292. Michael Cusato links Jacopa’s drop of litigation against the papacy to the influence of Franciscan preaching in Rome. See Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, ed. Michael J. P. Robson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 24.
The popularity of the Jacopa story among the Spirituals lies outside the scope of this present chapter, but warrants further exploration especially in light of the growing awareness of female leaders, such as Angela of Foligno, among the Spirituals. On the Spirituals in general, see David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans. From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); on Angela and the Spirituals,
see Jacques Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno a-t-elle existé?” in Alla signorina: Mélanges offerts à Noëlle de la Blanchardière (Rome: École Francisçaise de Rome, 1995), 59–97.
The mention of the almond cakes in most of the accounts has particularly piqued the interest and likely the sweet tooth of readers through the centuries so that many people today reduce the story of Jacopa to one of her bringing almond cakes. For example, it is surprising that the only mention of Jacopa in a recent publication on Franciscan views and approaches to dying was merely to mention her bringing almond cookies to Francis. See Daria Mitchell, ed., Dying, as a Franciscan: Approaching Our Transitus to Eternal Life Accompanying Others on the Way to Theirs. Spirit and Life. Essays on Contemporary Franciscanism, Vol. 15 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2011), 77.
Assisi Compilation, FAED, Vol. 2, 122; Mirror of Perfection, FAED, Vol. 3, 222 (although this reference is absent from Paul Sabatier’s edition of the same work, FAED, Vol. 3, 355), and Deeds of the Blessed Francis, FAED, Vol. 3, 473–474. While Thomas of Celano does not explicitly call Jacopa a Magdalene figure, he does depict her insisting that Francis’s stigmata be revealed to the public after his death. Contemporary readers of the text would have likely understood that Jacopa was being cast as an apostolurum apostola, or “apostle to the apostles,” as Mary Magdalene was known. But it remains true that if Thomas implied this connection, he did so indirectly. On the image of Mary Magdalene in the thirteenth century especially among the friars, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 86–99.
Herbert Grundmann’s study remains the starting point for understanding the complex changes in Christina religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. See Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
See for example, Beverly Maine Kienzle, “The Prostitute Preacher: Patterns of Polemic against Medieval Waldensian Women Preachers,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. B. M. Kienzle and P. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 99–113.
Francis’s own concerns with women are mapped out in Dalarun, Francis of Assisi and the Feminine, see esp. Chapter One. On the order’s ongoing ambivalence about interactions with women, especially lay women, see Pryds, Women of the Streets, 8–11. And on Francis’s own rejection of receiving sisters into the order, see F. di Caccia, “Santa Chiara ‘domina’ e Jacopa dei Settesoli ‘fratello’ di S. Francesco d’Assisi,” Studi Francescani 79 (1982): 335–341.
Sister Mary McGee, FMM, Francis, A Medieval Misfit (Makati: SSP, 1975)274–275.
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Pryds, D. (2015). Lady Jacopa and Francis: Mysticism and the Management of Francis of Assisi’s Deathbed Story. In: Cattoi, T., Moreman, C.M. (eds) Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_2
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