St. Francis of Assisi: His Life and Legacy (6 books)

The following are 6 books on the life and legacy of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). If you are looking for the writings of St. Francis, see http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8196661


Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey, editors - Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

ISBN: 9780230602861 | 240 pages | PDF

The authors in this collection of essays use the tools of various intellectual disciplines to examine what we now know about Saint Francis in his own era and how the story of "Il Poverello" has been appropriated in our own times. This critical re-discovery of the artistic and textual narratives of Francis of Assisi contributes to our cultural memory by reflecting on the continuities and changes in the way Francis is understood. 


Wendy Murray - A Mended and Broken Heart: The Life and Love of Francis of Assisi (Basic Books, 2008).

ISBN: 9780465002085 | 279 pages | PDF

Francis of Assisi is Catholicism’s most popular saint. Tens of millions of spiritual seekers summon his name and example. But the real Francis -- both his complicated personality and his complex theology -- have been misunderstood for centuries. In 1228, Pope Gregory IX rushed to canonize St. Francis only two years after his death. Soon thereafter, the Church eliminated significant aspects of his biography from the public record. For Francis's early life was defined by his profligacy; shortly before dying, Francis himself warned his brothers: "Don’t be too quick to canonize me. I am perfectly capable of fathering a child." In "A Mended and Broken Heart", journalist Wendy Murray slices through the bowdlerized version of Francis's life promoted within the Catholic tradition and reveals instead a saint who was in every way also a real man. Murray stresses in particular the crucial but completely neglected role that Clare of Assisi played in Francis’s life, both pre- and postconversion, and his theology. A profoundly humane portrait of a misunderstood saint, "A Mended and Broken Heart" makes a powerful case that St. Francis's life and thought make him a role model for religious seekers of every faith.


Michael Robson - St. Francis of Assisi: The Legend and the Life (Continuum, 2002).

ISBN: 9780826465085 | 320 pages | PDF

Instead of simply narrating the life of the saint, Robson looks at Francis through the thoughts and writings of those who knew him: his parents, the local bishop, Pope Innocent III, Cardinal Ugolino, Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Clare. What emerges is a new understanding of the saint.


Roger D. Sorrell - St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (Oxford University Press, 1988).

ISBN: 9780195053227 | 224 pages | PDF

One of the best-loved saints of all time, Francis of Assisi is often depicted today as a kind of proto-hippie or early environmentalist. This book, the most comprehensive study in English of Francis's view of nature in the context of medieval tradition, debunks modern anachronistic interpretations, arguing convincingly that Francis's ideas can only be understood in their 13th-century context. Through close analysis of Francis's writings, particularly the "Canticle of the Sun", Sorrell shows that many of Francis's beliefs concerning the proper relation of humanity to the natural world have their antecedents in scripture and the medieval monastic orders, while other ideas and practices -- his nature mysticism, his concept of familial relationships with created things, and his extension of chivalric conceptions to interactions with creatures -- are entirely his own. Sorrell insists, however, that only by seeing Francis in terms of the Western traditions from which he arose can we appreciate the true originality of this extraordinary figure and the relevance of his thought to modern religious and environmental concerns.


John V. Tolan - Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (Oxford University Press, 2009).

ISBN: 9780199239726 | 416 pages | PDF

In September, 1219, as the armies of the Fifth Crusade besieged the Egyptian city of Damietta, Francis of Assisi went to Egypt to preach to Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. Although we in fact know very little about this event, this has not prevented artists and writers from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, unencumbered by mere facts, from portraying Francis alternatively as a new apostle preaching to the infidels, a scholastic theologian proving the truth of Christianity, a champion of the crusading ideal, a naive and quixotic wanderer, a crazed religious fanatic, or a medieval Gandhi preaching peace, love, and understanding. Al-Kamil, on the other hand, is variously presented as an enlightened pagan monarch hungry for evangelical teaching, a cruel oriental despot, or a worldly libertine. "Saint Francis and the Sultan" takes a detailed look at these richly varied artistic responses to this brief but highly symbolic meeting. Throwing into relief the changing fears and hopes that Muslim-Christian encounters have inspired in European artists and writers in the centuries since, it gives a uniquely broad but precise vision of the evolution of Western attitudes towards Islam and the Arab world over the last eight hundred years.


Kenneth Baxter Wolf - The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, 2003).

ISBN: 9780195182804 | 176 pages | PDF

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. The unusually high regard with which he is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity based first and foremost on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. In this book, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a fresh look at Francis and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. Wolf's point of departure is a series of simple but hitherto unasked questions about the precise nature of Francis's poverty: How did he go about transforming himself from a rich man to a poor one? How successful was this transformation? How did his self-imposed poverty compare to the involuntary poverty of those he met in and around Assisi? What did poor people of this type get out of their contact with Francis? What did Francis get out of his contact with them? Wolf finds that while Francis's conception of poverty as a spiritual discipline may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians like himself, it effectively precluded the idea that the poor could use their own involuntary poverty as a path to heaven. Based on a thorough reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, as well as Francis's own writings, Wolf's work sheds important new light on the inherent ironies of poverty as a spiritual discipline and its relationship to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.