The Poor Clares, as they were commonly called, were led by some formidable ladies, and this fine book is a story of their faith, pragmatism and grit. The faith of St Clare (born Chiara di Faverone in Perugia, Italy) never faltered. Throughout her life, and in spite of understandable papal concerns, she herself adhered to the spirit of the informal Forma vivendi given to her and her nuns by St Francis of Assisi in c.1212, when they became associated with his Order of Friars Minor – mendicant friars who aimed to live, like Christ and His Apostles, in holy (and grinding) poverty, simplicity and humility, a life devoted to prayer and service. For women, this was not easy. While Innocent iii had supported St Francis and his ideals, his papal successors recoiled at the idea of highly-born ladies, as many of them were, roaming the streets doing good works. Initially, after all, not being allowed by St Francis to beg, they had no visible means of support other than that which they could glean from friars who were already poverty-stricken themselves. Hence the Forma vitae, drawn up by Cardinal Ugolino (later Pope Gregory ix) in the 1220s, which aimed to regulate the situation. And after Clare's death in 1253 (Francis himself died in 1226), had it not been for the powerful intervention of St Louis ix's sister Isabelle, who ‘brought in the cavalry’ in the form of the aristocracy, things might still have turned out very differently. In the 1250s Isabelle founded a house of Poor Clares (or Damianites, or Minoresses: terminology varies) at Longchamp, Paris, and also drafted a revised rule for the aristocratic nuns therein, which led to the foundation of other such houses of Poor Clares in France, England and Italy. A far cry from St Francis's advice to the nuns ‘to live always in this most holy life of poverty’.

But this is not just a story of survival: it is one of triumph. Between their beginnings in the early thirteenth century and the formal reorganisation of their order by Pope Leo x in 1517, houses of Poor Clares blossomed, especially by the 1290s. Around 24 houses existed by 1228, between 97 and 107 by 1253, and about 480 by c.1400. These were established initially in Italy, but spread rapidly to France and Spain, Germany, England, and very far beyond (see the maps on pp. 161–3). Several existing houses of nuns also switched their allegiance to this newer order in a sort of ‘pick-and-mix’ fashion. Not all survived, particular those that were small. But another wave of expansion was initiated in the early fifteenth century by St Colette (Nicolette Boylet of Corbie). Observant reforms had already been promoted by the Blessed Angelina of Montegiove in the late fourteenth century, but it was Colette's Constitutiones which revitalised the order. Needing to earn their keep, Poor Clares, while primarily engaged in lives of prayer, contemplation, humility and good works, had long maintained themselves by doing manual work such as gardening and embroidery, and had strategically placed or moved many of their nunneries to towns along the established pilgrim routes, which aided their hospital work and enabled them to gain charitable urban support. Now they expanded their activities still further. They taught children within convents (a way both to spread influence and to gain new recruits) and took in ‘pensioners’. They engaged in a wide variety of writing, mainly hagiography (Battista Alfani's Legenda Sanctae Clarae Virginis; Agnes of Harcourt's Life of Isabelle de Longchamp), chronicles (Eufrasia Alfani, Caterina Guanieri), homiletic literature (building on the earlier work of Bonaventura of Bagnoregio), devotional poetry (Caterina Vigri), Passion meditation (Camilla Battista, Eustochia Calafato), and epistolography. They also produced work on teaching and preaching (Caterina Vigri's Treatise on the seven spiritual weapons, first printed in the 1470s), illumination and painting (Sibilla di Bondorff of Freiburg), staged devotional plays within convents, and busied themselves with scribal activities and book illustration.

Refreshingly, Clarissans never allowed themselves to become boxed in by uniformity: as Roest accurately writes, ‘As in all other matters, diversity remained the rule’. This reflects the spirit of St Clare herself. She had had to submit to claustration in San Damiano in order to survive, but that was as far as she was prepared to go, even for Pope Gregory ix. And her reaction to the activities of Pope Urban iv was to write her own Rule and Testament. She insisted on the principle of keeping Franciscan friars as spiritual counsellors, and she won, at least in respect of her own San Damiano community. In fact, her individual, even obstinate, approach clearly ‘spoke’ to the educated aristocratic ladies who later joined her communities in large numbers. She must have driven successive popes to near distraction. A formidable saint indeed!

Bert Roest's learned, balanced and sympathetic book captures the spirit of St Clare and her nuns to perfection. He does not gloss over the cracks. He acknowledges the imperfections (class distinction, for instance, often barred all but high-born ladies from becoming abbesses), but neither does he judge such matters through twenty-first century eyes – a rare quality. The fact is that, had Isabelle of France not weighed in on the nuns' behalf, one wonders whether popes would have remembered with half as much attention St Clare's insistent pleadings to be allowed to maintain St Francis's original vision. And while Roerst's chapter on the expansion of the order is learned and wide-ranging, he realises that mere lists of houses, however impressive, tell only half the story. He makes a real and refreshing attempt to appreciate the individual character of such houses, and to understand how Clarissan nunneries worked. His account of the duties of the abbess is particularly impressive, and he constantly laments that the internal lifestyle of medieval monasteries remains so difficult to penetrate. But at least he tries to do so, thus revealing rare and remarkable insight from which many modern historians would do well to learn. And his choice of illustration for the front cover is excellent. It seems churlish to criticise so scholarly a book, and the only two quibbles which one might raise are small ones. His use of made-up terminology, while aiming at instant description, sometimes grates – for instance, ‘aristocratization’ (p. 160), charitative (p. 154 – why not ‘charitable, as used on the next page?), ‘normative centering’ (p. 195 – what on earth does this mean?) and ‘epistolary correspondence’ (strictly speaking, was there any other kind, at this time?). And the maps on pp. 161–3 – while well-intentioned – are almost unreadable. But these are minor defects in an otherwise excellent book.