II

The papacy assumed a keen interest in Clare's cult even before her corpse was cold. By luck or design, Innocent iv himself was at hand to preside over her requiem mass. Ostensibly swayed by the assembled crowd's affection for her, the pope announced his intent to celebrate not the usual obsequies but the Office for Virgin Saints. It took a timely admonition from Cardinal Raynaldus, warning the pope against the rashness of yielding to populism at the expense of papal authority over the canonisation process, to prevent her from being canonised there and then.Footnote ⁵ Whatever the truth of this story, the completion of Clare's canonisation process was unusually swift when compared, if not to Francis, to those of other contemporaries, and held the distinction of being commissioned by the papacy.Footnote ⁶ Whereas second assessments were demanded of the diocesan investigators into the cases of such illustrious figures as Hildegard von Bingen, Gilbert of Sempringham and Robert Molesme, the investigation to establish Clare's holiness and miracles was concluded in a mere six days.Footnote ⁷

Papal assistance in the promotion of the cult of Clare did not end with her elevation to the celestial pantheon. As early as 1253 Cardinal Giovanni di Toledo was charged with negotiating with the canons of the cathedral for San Giorgio, the convent to which the nuns of Assisi were moved after their abbess's death, to be demolished and replaced by a basilica to Clare.Footnote ⁸ In 1255 Alexander iv issued a bull to the new abbess to authorise the construction of the basilica, which was sufficiently complete in 1260 for the nuns to take up residence.Footnote ⁹ It was Alexander also who around 1255 commissioned the Legend of Saint Clare to serve as a definitive account of her life and works.Footnote ¹⁰ The art historian Jeryldene Wood has suggested that papal sponsorship of the shrine at Assisi continued through the thirteenth century and that the frescoes in the interior of the basilica were the result of a papal commission in the 1280s.Footnote ¹¹

The papacy had good reason to take special interest in the promotion of Clare's cult as part of its attempts to create structures for the swelling numbers of women who enthusiastically embraced the religious life in Italy and beyond. The rise of towns across Europe from the twelfth-century onwards created a new category of female religious within these urban settings. John Freed has already shown the reluctance of the Cistercians and other traditional monastic orders, whose base was primarily rural, to assume responsibility or establish convents in such areas.Footnote ¹² For the thirteenth-century papacy, however, the care of these women was a genuine concern and, as Edith Pásztor has argued, it sought to open up new possibilities of religious expression for these women but within a framework of existing modes of regulation and supervision.Footnote ¹³ Thus their care was entrusted to the new orders of friars, both Dominican and Franciscan, who operated within the urban constituencies in which the women lived.

In the 1930s Herbert Grundmann observed the efforts of the papacy from the Fourth Lateran Council onwards to regulate and group together the various female religious houses across Italy and ultimately Christendom.Footnote ¹⁴ The principle behind this policy was promulgated in the canons of Lateran IV, which forbade the foundation of new orders and encouraged those seeking to establish monasteries to assimilate them with an existing and approved rule.Footnote ¹⁵ The Privilege of poverty afforded to Clare by Innocent iii was very much an exception to the prevailing trend. As early as 1218 Honorius iii instructed Hugolino, papal legate in Tuscany, to identify all the new convents in the region and exempt them from diocesan jurisdiction. Presumably the purpose of this was to unite them under a single observance, in compliance with the decrees of Lateran IV. The following year Hugolino did indeed bind all such houses under his own rule, based on that of St Benedict, a process charted through the various regions of Italy by Roberto Rusconi and Anna Benvenuti.Footnote ¹⁶

The evidence suggests that not all the convents to be included within the Damianite order shared Clare's mendicant ideals. In other houses in the order the difference between Clare's principles and their practices were all the more marked. In 1223 the sisters at Milan took possession of the land adjoining the church of Sant'Apollinare to build their convent. The following year they acquired the church itself. They added the hospital of San Biagio di Monza in 1233 and, at some point in the following decade, the hospice of San Giorgio, making them one of the most significant religious landowners in the city.Footnote ¹⁷ The papal registers are plentiful with decrees confirming the property bestowed on houses by the papacy.Footnote ¹⁸ Some sisters may even have been happy to exist as Benedictines, rather than as Franciscans, under Hugolino's rule. In 1252 Innocent iv issued a bull to the bishop of Ostia, permitting the Poor Ladies of Sant' Angeli Esculano not to be compelled to exchange Hugolino's rule for his own of 1247.Footnote ¹⁹

Only the convent in Prague, of which Clare's royal disciple Agnes was abbess, and some houses in close proximity to Assisi, where Clare's personal influence was no doubt strongest, appears to have offered significant dissent.Footnote ²⁰ Agnes opposed papal donations of property for the endowment of her convent and petitioned the pope to be allowed the same privilege of poverty as the sisters at San Damiano. It was only in 1238, after several years and much correspondence, that Gregory agreed to bestow the privilege upon the house at Prague. He would not, however, accept a new rule that Agnes had drawn up for the sisters.Footnote ²¹ Elsewhere, Gregory had difficulty in persuading the sisters at Monte Lucido, near Perugia, to accept the donation of a book in 1228 and of a mill, vineyards, oliveyards and garden the following year, even though all were to be held in the name of the Holy See (the same legal fiction used in the management of Franciscan properties). When the sisters objected, Gregory wrote to their bishop and ordered him to retrieve the properties on their behalf and see to it that such an incident was not repeated. A number of bulls were issued to prevent other houses of Damianites in the region from relinquishing properties that had been given to them.Footnote ²²

The importance of Clare to the new order constructed in her name was twofold. Not only was she able to act as a symbolic head to unite these disparate communities of nuns, but she also fostered a tie to Francis. By exploiting this tie and identifying the nuns as the second order of St Francis, the papacy hoped to pass on pastoral responsibility for the nuns to the Franciscan brethren. Thus in 1219 Cardinal Hugolino wrote a rule for the ladies of San Damiano on the authority of the pope and applied it to other independent houses in the vicinity. At the same time, while Francis was in the Middle East, he persuaded Br Philip, the acting head of the male order, to take responsibility for these women's houses and accept the position of visitor-general.Footnote ²³

Such is the background to the image of Clare projected in the documents surrounding her canonisation, an image very different from that suggested by her writings. The first stage in the process of the canonisation was the acquisition of evidence of sanctity from witnesses who had known the saint. Innocent iv commissioned such an inquiry from Bartholemeo, bishop of Spoleto, only two months after Clare's death, though the only surviving copy of these ‘Acts of the process of canonisation’ is in a late fourteenth-century manuscript in the local Umbrian dialect.Footnote ²⁴ It contains the instructions issued by the pope to Bartholemeo and the testimonies, some in summarised form, of twenty witnesses in turn, fifteen of them nuns of San Damiano and five townsfolk who remembered Clare from before she entered the convent. Giovanna Casagrande has already studied what this document reveals about the nuns themselves and their relationships with Clare. The ‘process’ is the only extant record of the nuns' voices on Clare, even if it is impossible to be certain how much their words were manipulated by the papal scribes who recorded them. What will be considered here, therefore, is the image of Clare presented by the testimonies and its relationship not just to Clare's own writings but also to the two vitae for which the ‘process’ was the major source.Footnote ²⁵

The testimonial accounts in the ‘process’ contain a good number of the staple miracle stories necessary for the compilation of a saintly vita. There are those with biblical parallels: Clare's miraculous transformation of a jar of water into oil through the power of prayer, recalling the wedding feast at Cana; a replication of the feeding of the five thousand when Clare was able to produce sufficient slices of bread for all the sisters from a mere half loaf. The similarity is acknowledged by the sister who testifies that when she told Clare that ‘to make fifty slices out of that, we will need the Lord's miracle of the five loaves and two fishes!’Footnote ²⁶ Various sisters testify to Clare's ability to cure the sick and heal the lame, especially children. They report that she helped a three-year-old boy from Spoleto with a pebble lodged in his nose and another from Perugia who had a film covering his eye. She was particularly effective at curing her fellow sisters of fistulae, abscesses and other ailments.Footnote ²⁷ A townsman of Assisi also reported her prophetic knowledge of the birth of his son.Footnote ²⁸

In line with André Vauchez's observations about the increasing emphasis on the qualities and character of the candidate for sainthood, the sisters all stressed Clare's holiness, righteousness and humility.Footnote ²⁹ The biographical profile of Clare assembled by the sisters fits similarly into the patterns identified by Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell in their grand analysis of late medieval saints.Footnote ³⁰ Two of the sisters reported how Clare told them of a prophecy of her greatness made to her pregnant mother by a crucifix, combining imitation of the Annunciation with the very Franciscan symbol of the talking cross.Footnote ³¹ Clare's conversion story, as reported by two further sisters, was no less dramatic with the young Clare clinging desperately to the altar cloth as her family tried to drag her away from her vocation.Footnote ³² Both these events formed seminal chapters in the biographical construction of the vitae.

Though in some areas, such as her devotion to the cross, the ‘process’ shares some common ground with Clare's own writings, it is a little surprising that only three of the sisters mentioned the Privilege of poverty in their testimonies.Footnote ³³ Moreover, many of the most striking stories it contains have bases for which there is no parallel in Clare's own works. Clare herself was not a eucharistic mystic, in contrast to her northern contemporaries and her successors in the order, Margaret of Cortona and Angela of Foligno.Footnote ³⁴ Her rule legislates for its reception only seven times a year.Footnote ³⁵ The eucharist is absent from the letters to Agnes of Prague that comprise the corpus of her mystical writings. It has been argued by Caroline Bynum that even Clare's advocacy of abstinence, which would on the face of it seem similar to the practices of eucharistic mystics, was a reinterpretation within the parameters of her own existence of the Franciscan mendicancy barred to her rather than a form of conscious eucharistic fast.Footnote ³⁶

Yet the ‘process’ is replete with powerful eucharistic miracles. Sr Francesca heard the Host talking to Clare with a voice of ‘wonderful sweetness’ as she prayed to have the city freed from the siege of a Saracen army.Footnote ³⁷ She also saw the Host transform into a small boy as it entered Clare's mouth, then later appear in Clare's lap.Footnote ³⁸ Another sister saw a young boy appear to Clare as they listened to the preaching of Br Philip of Atri.Footnote ³⁹ Most of these stories are replicated in the vitae.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is Sr Francesca's version of the liberation of the city from the Saracen army, rather than the six others which do not mention the Host and its child's voice, that is included. It is probable that the sisters were most frequently exposed to such imagery through the preaching of Philip and his brethren and that it is reflected in the setting of the story. In any case, the eucharist was a popular and rising cult in the thirteenth century and one encouraged by the papacy. The proliferation of eucharistic miracles in the ‘Process’ and their prominent inclusion in the vitae is indicative of a strong external influence on the hagiographic depiction of Clare.

The other theme on which the ‘process’ is plentiful is in comparisons to Mary. Sr Balvina declared that ‘except for the Virgin Mary no other woman was greater than this lady’. Something echoed by all the sisters who asserted in chorus ‘that all that was found in the holiness of any other holy woman, except the Virgin Mary, could be truly said and witnessed in the holy memory of Lady Clare’.Footnote ⁴¹ Sr Francesca claimed to have seen, ‘in the lap of Saint Clare, before her breast, the most beautiful young boy, whose beauty was so great that she could not express it’.Footnote ⁴² Elsewhere, Sr Benvenuta recalled that as Clare lay dying she herself had seen ‘a great throng of virgins, all dressed in white with crowns on their heads, who came and entered through the door of the room where the holy mother Clare was lying’. Mary was at their head and she approached the bed of Clare and enfolded her in a divine embrace.Footnote ⁴³

Imitation of the Virgin Mary is not a major theme of Clare's writings, although it is probably going too far to argue, as Catherine Mooney does, that Clare was specifically engaged in imitating Christ in opposition to imitating his mother.Footnote ⁴⁴ Clare's letters to Agnes, saturated as they are with the imagery of the Song of Songs, reveal a woman whose theological vocabulary was firmly rooted in the traditions of the twelfth-century Cistercian and Victorine monks.Footnote ⁴⁵ Clare identifies Agnes with the bride, for whom perfection occurs when ‘the King will unite himself with you in the heavenly bridal-chamber where He sits in glory on a starry throne’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The way to heaven is to ‘hold fast to the footprints of Him to whom you have merited to be joined as a spouse’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The structure of the Trinity, however, is such that the Bride of Christ is not necessarily distinct from his mother. This idea is present in passages of Bernard of Clairvaulx's Sermons on the Song of Songs and also in Clare's writings in which she seems to understand the role of the woman as the cloister of Jesus.Footnote ⁴⁸ The pious woman is also the mother of Christ, the vessel in which he was borne: ‘May you cling to His most sweet Mother who gave birth to a Son whom the heavens could not contain; and yet she carried Him in the little enclosure of her holy womb and held Him in her virginal lap’, she advises Agnes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Elsewhere she writes: ‘just as the glorious Virgin of virgins did materially, thus you too, following in her footprints, especially humility and poverty, without any doubt can carry [Him] spiritually always in your chaste and virginal body, holding Him by whom you and all things are held together’. Although Mooney has sought to challenge the translation of the phrase ‘sequens eius vestigia’, Clare would appears to be quite unambiguous in her Marian parallel.Footnote ⁵⁰

While it could easily be argued that the ‘process’ places more emphasis on Marian imagery than Clare does in her own writings, the comparison is a natural one, especially given the increasing prominence of the Marian cult over the course of Clare's lifetime. What is more peculiar, however, is the absence of such overt Marian references in either the papal bulls concerning her canonisation or the vitae written as a result of it. The bulls Gloriosus deus, announcing the commission into her sanctity, and Clara praeclaris Clara, confirming her canonisation, only engage in the florid use of the kind of nuptial imagery incorporated into her writings by Clare. The authors of the vitae edited out almost all the Marian references of the ‘process’. Sr Francesca's vision of Clare holding the baby Jesus in her arms is not repeated in either vita.Footnote ⁵¹ In their accounts of the scene at Clare's deathbed, both authors describe the entrance of a virgin host as in the ‘process’, but fail to identify the head virgin as Mary. Instead, before the arrival of the virgins, the vitae include a vision of Jesus, the ‘King of Heaven’, for which the ‘process’ provides no precedent.Footnote ⁵² Far from attempting the ‘Marianisation’ suggested by Catherine Mooney, the authors of Clare's vitae were concerned not to support the parallel between the two women so enthusiastically perceived by the nuns. Any reason offered for this can only be speculative but must rest in an analysis of the context within which the vitae came to be written in the years immediately following Clare's death.

III

Papal moves to fashion an order of Damianites from the disparate female houses of duocento Italy and to use Clare's name to attach them to the Franciscans did not pass without considerable opposition from the friars. For their part, they did no more than follow a trend set by other orders in opposing the incorporation of responsibilities towards female houses into their duties. The Cistercians and Premonstratensians had already abrogated their responsibilities to their sister orders by the late twelfth century. In 1228 the Dominican chapter, concerned at the strain the care of women placed on their resources, directed their brethren to disengage from activities with their sister order to further the fight against heresy.Footnote ⁵³ However, Francis's special reliance on papal approval for his activities, alongside his pledge of obedience made his order more vulnerable than others to the wishes of the papacy.

It is hard to be sure what the saint himself thought about the role of women in his order. The account of Jacques de Vitry, passing through Assisi in 1216, gives no more than a tantalising image of a Franciscan community in which women did at least play some part.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet, as Jacques Dalarun has pointed out, the question of women is clearly of only secondary importance in Francis's writings, largely because it was of only peripheral importance to him.Footnote ⁵⁵ Francis does not mention Clare once by name in all his writings. Further even than this, it would seem paradoxical for Francis to have had strong views on the role of women in the order when he was in principle opposed to the very process of regularisation. One of the few phrases in his own writings that appear to impinge on this issue is the interdict against any brother receiving an oath of obedience from a woman in his 1221 rule, yet here it seems more likely that his hostility was to the idea of obligations rather than to the presence of women in the lives of friars.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ultimately, it was because the rule was too restrictive of such institutional ties to be applied to the nascent order that it was rejected by Francis's papal protectors. Like Clare, and following the tradition of his Cistercian and Victorine predecessors, Francis used both masculine and feminine imagery in his writings. The famous Canticle of the Sun, for example, maintains a surely deliberate balance between the gender of the objects with which he praises God.Footnote ⁵⁷

After Francis's death, the papacy continued to face resistance from the brothers to the union of the two orders. Literate and articulate, often recruited from the schools of Paris and Bologna, they were no doubt encouraged by the success of other orders in absolving themselves of such responsibilities and saw no reason why they should be unduly encumbered. Franciscans writing about their founder in the decades after his death sought to present a picture of a saint who was not just indifferent to women but hostile to their involvement in the order. Thomas of Pavia reported the fury of Francis when he returned from the east to discover that Br Philip had agreed to undertake pastoral care of the female convents bound by Hugolino's rule: ‘Until now the thorn was in our flesh, but there was still a hope it would be healed. Now it has penetrated to the bone and is beyond healing.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Jordan of Giano recorded how Francis went as far as the Curia in Rome to demand the revocation of all the decisions made in his absence.Footnote ⁵⁹

More sympathetic attitudes towards the sisters did persist, at least in Clare's lifetime, permeating from the original group of followers of Francis who had long been accustomed to the presence of Clare and San Damiano in their lives. Elias and Leo, two of Francis's original followers, continued to visit. The latter wrote out a breviary for Clare and was present at her deathbed.Footnote ⁶⁰ These activities were recorded in a number of contemporary lives of Francis that reveal at least a dissenting view within the order about its role in the cura monialium. The Compilatio assisiensis and the Legend of the three companions both described Clare as ‘emulatrix Sancti Francisci’ and conceived for her an important place amongst Francis's brethren.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet while the papacy might in principle have encouraged such a viewpoint amongst the friars, it represented and was articulated by precisely the retarding elements who opposed the regularisation and clericalisation of Francis's movement that successive popes held as a primary objective. Elias's resistance to this was far more important than his support for Clare and the papacy not only made no attempt to save him from deposition in 1239, but excommunicated him when he continued, against instruction, to visit the sisters at San Damiano.Footnote ⁶²

The papacy had to resort increasingly to firm directives to compel the clerical élite of the order to maintain their ties to the female houses. Immediately after the saint's death, Gregory ix transferred the care of the women back to the minister-general of the Franciscan order.Footnote ⁶³ Innocent iv rewrote Hugolino's rule to make the ties between the sisters and the friars more explicit, incorporating a rule that Francis himself had written specifically for the Poor Ladies of Damiano.Footnote ⁶⁴ Alexander iv sought to solve the problem by tying the two orders together as closely as he was able, appointing one man to be protector of both. Perhaps sensing that even this was not enough, he explicitly commanded the provincial-minister of Germany to appoint friars to visit the houses of the Poor Clares there and to care for and protect them.Footnote ⁶⁵

The friars' reluctance to take responsibility for the Poor Clares is reflected in the increasing distance placed between the sisters of San Damiano and Francis in their literary output. Jacques Dalarun and Catherine Mooney have already noted the contrast between the two vitae of Thomas of Celano in their representation of Clare and the Poor Ladies.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the Vita prima, written shortly after the saint's death, Clare is presented as a paragon of holiness and a shining light in the Franciscan order. The sisters are hailed as ‘that glorious sanctity and most excellent order of Poor Ladies and holy virgins’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thomas is unequivocal in his admiration for Clare and refers to the order itself as ‘a noble structure of the most precious pearls’, bestowing upon the Ladies the whole gamut of virtues expected of holy women.Footnote ⁶⁸ The sisters are accorded a central place in the funeral procession of the saint – one of the defining moments of any apotheosis and therefore indicative of their exalted place in the life of Francis and his order. Thomas permits himself a lengthy digression, complete with weeping and lamentation, as the coffin stops outside San Damiano for the sisters to catch a final glimpse of their spiritual leader.Footnote ⁶⁹

Thomas' Vita secunda, commissioned as an authoritative account of the saint's life for his order, offered a radically different interpretation of the relationship between Francis and the sisters, with Clare in particular stepping backwards into obscurity. The moving scene of the sisters' farewell to the coffin is cut; Clare herself is not even worth a mention by name.Footnote ⁷⁰ In a shift to what became the prevalent position under Bonaventure, his successor as official biographer, Thomas sought to portray Francis as spiritual guide rather than practical aide to the sisters. His comment that ‘though their father [Francis] gradually withdrew his bodily presence from them, he nevertheless extended his affection in the Holy Spirit to their care’ might even be seen as a comment on how he believed the friars ought to act with regard to their sisters.Footnote ⁷¹ It is in this version too that emphasis was first placed on Francis's misogynistic side, drawing attention to the passage in his rule which states that familiarity with women was ‘a poisonous honey … which leads astray even holy men’.Footnote ⁷²

By the time that Bonaventure's Legenda maior was written as Francis's official hagiography in around 1266 (supplanting all previous biographies of the saint, which Bonaventure ordered to be burned), Clare was totally dissociated from the Franciscan in the official hagiography of the saint.Footnote ⁷³ Bonaventure includes her as the testamentum veritatis of his greatness and echoes her famous self-description as Francis's, ‘first little plant’, but praise of Clare is directed not at her enthusiasm to follow Francis into the vita apostolica but at her embrace of his new rule of penance.Footnote ⁷⁴ Her role in the Legenda maior is as foremost amongst the laity who supported and revered Francis; she is firmly outside the order. As far as relations with the sisters went, Bonaventure emphatically claimed that Francis specifically sought to avoid women, a sentiment that spread to others like Thomas of Pavia when they recalled the saint's life.Footnote ⁷⁵

Clare cannot have been unaware of the currents within the male order and it is into this context that her writings have to be placed. The thirty-two mentions of Francis in her texts (in contrast to his silence about her) were not just an outpouring of devotion but an attempt to shore up his association with the sisters in response to their political needs. Even the very form of her later writings, a rule, a testament and a final blessing, imitates the output of Francis, a fact that has led some to question their authenticity. The rule is disjointed and contains lengthy passages copied wholesale from earlier documents. The blessing uses scriptural quotations not found elsewhere in Clare's corpus. The testament contains incongruities that Regis Armstrong puts down to the use of different scribes during its dictation. Whether or not they were composed by Clare, she or someone else was attempting to make a conscious link between the two saints.Footnote ⁷⁶

Perhaps the most interesting question about the rule is not who wrote it but why Innocent iv chose to license it, especially with the tantalising phrase ‘for reasons known to me and the protector of the monastery’ added to the manuscript.Footnote ⁷⁷ Clare's rule is substantially based on that which Innocent himself had drawn up in 1247. The crucial differences lie in the explicit invocation of Francis and attempts to involve the friars in the running of the order, an objective that Clare and the papacy held in common. The opening chapter of the rule affirms the ties between the sisters and the Franciscan friars, stating that they will be ‘obliged to obey the successors of the Blessed Francis and Sister Clare’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Later it quotes substantial passages from Francis's own rule and last will for the sisters.Footnote ⁷⁹ The minister-general of the friars is required to oversee the election of abbesses and to provide the visitator and the chaplain for the convent.Footnote ⁸⁰ The testament and blessing are similarly steeped in references to Francis and his relationship to the sisters.

If these documents are by Clare, it is hard to know how much her own lifelong ambitions were tempered by a pragmatic appraisal of the possibilities open to her in drawing up a form of life. The rule, for example, in contrast to the two Privileges of poverty that Clare obtained from Innocent iii and Gregory ix, appears to accept implicitly the premises not only of claustration, but also of communal ownership of property.Footnote ⁸¹ Perhaps Clare's awareness of the way Francis was isolated within the male order in the 1220s by his unwillingness to compromise the austerity of his vision, together with her need for papal support, led Clare to adopt a more pragmatic view of the possibilities open to her and her sisters. The rule, however, was never adopted beyond San Damiano, for whose use alone it had been licensed. When the sisters were moved to San Giorgio, within the city walls, a short time after Clare's death, they too reverted to the Innocentine rule.

The Legend of Saint Clare, written within a few years of her death and canonisation, stands chronologically between the Vita secunda of Thomas and Bonaventure's damnatio memoriae of the sisters. In spite of its papal dedication, it maintains a clear tension between the objectives of its anonymous author and its patron.Footnote ⁸² The ‘process’ provides a record indicating a quite substantial level of interaction between the male and female brethren. It was a friar who, in the miracle of the oil, ran errands for the sisters and discovered that the jar was full.Footnote ⁸³ When the infant Jesus is seen hovering around the saint, the sisters are listening to a sermon by Br Philip, who seems to have been a regular visitor. According to Sr Benvenuta, Francis would send brothers to Clare to be cured of illness.Footnote ⁸⁴ On one occasion she correctly prophesied the desertion of a new recruit whom he had sent to her for vetting.Footnote ⁸⁵ Almost all these episodes are missing from the Legend. Moreover, the Legend makes it quite clear that as soon as Clare had decided to follow Francis's form of life, he sent her to the church of San Paolo.Footnote ⁸⁶ The implication was surely that he never had any formal responsibility towards her and that the care of her and her followers was always with the regular clergy.

Though many miracle stories with just a single witness were included in the vitae, tellingly neither makes mention of a well-reported vision experienced by Clare in which she brought a bowl of hot water to Francis with a towel for drying his hands. When she reached the saint he invited her to drink from his breast. After she had imbibed, the nipple stuck between her lips and had turned to solid gold.Footnote ⁸⁷ The implications of the mutual responsibility and support of the brother and sister orders for each other could not be laid out in a more obvious manner, yet this miracle is entirely absent from both the prose Legend and its verse counterpart. By way of contrast, both vitae include accounts of Clare's opposition to Gregory ix's assertion in the bull Quo elongati that the papacy should have control over the relationship between the brothers and the sisters, although this is not stated by any nun in the ‘process’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Pointedly, both authors noted that when Gregory heard of Clare's opposition, he immediately mitigated the prohibition into the hands of the minister-general.Footnote ⁸⁹

Perhaps it is not surprising then that Clare is represented so little in the artwork of thirteenth-century Assisi. Where her image does appear it is in non-Franciscan sources such as the famous Santa Chiara dossal on which the depictions of the two saints together, for Jeryldene Wood, serve almost as a visual rebuke to the friars for repudiating the Poor Clares of the town.Footnote ⁹⁰ As if to make an emphatic statement about the separation of the two orders, the basilicas of Francis and Clare were constructed at opposite ends of the town. There are, nevertheless, some images of Clare in the Franciscan enclave. Giotto's frescoes in San Francesco, from the end of the thirteenth century, depict Clare only twice, once in a sequence of saints associated with Assisi and once as part of the group of sisters weeping over Francis's corpse in the scene from Thomas of Celano's Vita prima. Tellingly, Clare was never chosen as the subject for a great cycle on the walls of a Franciscan church.

IV

Though these various images of Clare that were refracted in her early hagiography held little in common with how she presented herself in her writings, this hardly makes her unique amongst medieval saints. However, it is only by understanding the individual circumstances in which such documents were written that we can hope to generalise about the manipulation of women religious like Clare by their male counterparts and to reach a more complex understanding of the stresses and factors involved. The development of Clare's hagiography was trapped within wider debates about the Church's response to new trends in urban religiosity, both for the care of women and even the structure of the order that would do so. While Clare prayed within the walls of San Damiano, outside the various participants were engaged in a Weberian ‘routinisation’ of Francis's charismatic movement into a religious system.Footnote ⁹¹ The sisters of San Damiano became the centre of a pan-European order of female houses bound by their name and rule. The iconic figures of Francis and Clare were essential apparatus for this process. Francis, the young man who had rejected his father's business to live a life of absolute poverty, became the patron saint of the rich merchants whom his friars were to win for God.Footnote ⁹² Clare, the devoted disciple who was not allowed to follow her leader in a life of mendicancy, was intended by the papacy to be the pivotal link between its new order of nuns and the friars it wished to minister to them.

In this respect, Clare and Francis fitted strongly into a tradition that had been established over the previous century. Caroline Bynum has observed of twelfth-century holy men that ‘to begin to behave in the pattern of Christ was often to found a movement in spite of oneself’.Footnote ⁹³ Francis was not the first wandering preacher to spawn an order that became incorporated into the religious fabric of the Church. Robert of Arbrissel, after a career as an itinerant preacher, founded the monastery at Fontevrault; Norbert of Xanten founded Prémontré and the order associated with it in similar fashion.Footnote ⁹⁴ Francis and Clare, in the next generation, had to contend with a papacy ever more concerned to strengthen its grip on all forms of religious life. It was Francis's paradox that he received the papal acceptance necessary to pursue mendicancy safely only because he explicitly submitted to the papal authority that sought to regularise it.

The process of marginalisation that Clare underwent in the Franciscan sphere was very similar to that felt by Francis himself. Increasingly at odds with those running the order in his name during the 1220s, Francis became more important as an image than as a person. After his death, that image was subtly altered by each hagiographer to suit the needs of the developing order. Chiara Frugoni has demonstrated the changes in the theology of the stigmata, from a gift of God to aid Francis in empathising with Christ's suffering to the physical manifestation of Christ's wounds transferred to the saint. The implication of this shift was clear: Francis was a unique figure, not merely in imitation of Christ but somehow also as part of him, and for this reason a man whose way of life was impossible to emulate. Thus was born the legend of the ‘alter Christus’. It was at the very least licence for Bonaventure, as minister-general, to relax the austerity of Francis's rules for the order.Footnote ⁹⁵

The complicating factor in Clare's case lay in the struggle between the papacy and the clericalised Franciscans over who should maintain responsibility for the sisters and whether or not the orders of Clare and Francis should be regarded as one or two. Though she remained a central image to her own order, Clare was made increasingly marginal to his. In the decade after the production of the Legend, attempts by the papacy to promote the union of the two orders were even more unsuccessful. In 1263 Urban iv drew up a rule formalising the severance of obligations on the part of the brothers towards the sisters and placing the latter under the protection of the papacy, ironically conceding defeat to the very clerics whom his predecessors had encouraged to take control of the order in the first place. Perhaps Clare would appreciate the new irony that, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of her birth, she is not only embraced once again by the Franciscan order but also held up as a beacon for the voices of her female contemporaries. How she would react now to the fiftieth anniversary of her latest role is less certain. In 1958, as part of a creative trawl through medieval hagiography to find old saints to guard and protect the inventions of modern times, Pius xii recalled the testimonies of several sisters who claimed that on her final Christmas on earth, unable to get up from her sickbed to attend mass, Clare had miraculously tuned in to it as a radio broadcast from San Francesco. It seemed appropriate and perhaps even obvious, therefore, that hereafter she was to be the patron saint of television. Footnote ⁹⁶