Life of St. Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi had been retold as legend for centuries by the time a French Protestant pastor decided to treat him as a historical subject. Sabatier published this life in 1893, working from the earliest documents he could find and weighing which accounts came first and which had been shaped later. He follows the merchant’s son through the break with his father, the gathering of the first brothers in Umbria, and the slow pressure of Rome on a brotherhood that began with little more than a few gospel verses for a rule. That portrait, Francis as a free spirit brought to heel by the institution, was pointed enough that the Vatican placed the book on the Index within a year. It opened the long argument over the Franciscan sources, and it reads with unusual warmth for scholarship.