Jacques Dalarun is well known for his incisive and ingenious contributions to Franciscan studies; and ‘la questione francescana’ is an exceptionally fascinating field of critical enquiry. This book is an edition, with French translation, of a collection of thirty-nine miracles of St Francis, preceded by a brief account of the last two years of Francis's life, his death, canonisation and the founding of the basilica in his honour in Assisi. In a sense it is an artificial text, since none of the four manuscripts upon which the text is based – which are helpfully illustrated in the colour plates – is anything like complete, and in this version most of the miracles occur only in one or another of them. The edition was needed, since these manuscripts are early and the fragmentary nature of the texts has led to their relative neglect. Dalarun argues at length, and on the whole convincingly, that they were composed by Thomas of Celano himself and represent a stage in the development of his work earlier than his Second Life of St Francis – an early attempt, maybe, in the early 1240s towards what became the Tractatus de miraculis in the early 1250s. The fragmentary nature of these texts certainly suggests that we have access here to some of the materials in Celano's workshop. They fit well into the period assigned, and there is one fragment of evidence – a reference to a recluse who had been enclosed for thirty years as against forty years in the Tractatus (pp. 120–1), which would nicely fit a date ten years or so earlier than the Tractatus. The chief argument given for their date, that they precede The legend of the three companions, is less convincing: it is based on Desbonnets's view that the introductory letter to The legend of the three companions, dated 1246, is an integral part of the Legend, which ignores a long line of scholarly opinion – Van Ortroy, Burkitt, Moorman, Brooke – which has argued cogently that it cannot be an introduction to the Legend (most recently stated in my Image of St Francis, Cambridge 2006, 108, 147–8), and the evidence, accepted even by Desbonnets, that the last two sections of the Legend incorporate material from Bonaventure's Legenda maior, completed in the early 1260s (cf. ibid. p. 148). The heart of ‘la questione francescana’ lies in the collections of stories connected with brother Leo and the other companions of the saint, for these are the most revealing of all the sources about Francis himself. They are relegated here to a footnote (p. 236 n. 668); but this is not the place to discuss this region of Franciscan studies, which I have explored at length in The image of St Francis, ch. vi. The texts here printed provide nothing new on the saint himself, but they are an interesting and valuable link in the chain of early Franciscan sources, and Dalarun's attempt to bring them into a clearer light makes the book a welcome addition to the vast literature on early Franciscan sources.