In recent years research on Clare of Assisi has multiplied quite considerably, despite the fact that we only have a limited pool of primary sources which over the last decades have been scrutinised again and again (most recently by Joan Muller and Lezlie S.Knox). Therefore, most of the material and the information that we find in C.Mooney's book is well known and will not greatly surprise anyone familiar with Clare and her pursuits. Mooney, however, accesses the sources from a new angle and scrutinises how Clare's community, initially founded as an independent house of repentant sisters, ‘was transformed into the flagship of the papal Order of San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother’ (p.4) and how the Assisi saint's story fits into the wider ‘narrative of women and men vying to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference’ (p.14) (the latter observation betrays a twenty-first century sentiment which welcomes these traits, incomprehensible to the average medieval mind). Mooney emphasises Clare's struggle against the attempts of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to bring uniformity to the diverse landscape of female communities and make her convent part of the new order; she comes to the conclusion that ‘The centuries-old narrative of Clare founding a religious order must now be replaced by a new narrative about how a religious order found Clare’ (p.214), but also concedes that with a view to San Damiano Clare's resistance was – to a certain degree – successful. By closely examining the sources Mooney extracts new views from mostly well-known material partly confirming, partly modifying the traditional assumptions of Clare's pursuits. The author mainly relies on material written during Clare's lifetime or shortly afterwards in order to avoid – as far as possible – the notion of her saintliness as conveyed by her contemporaries after her death. This assumption is questionable, though; her conduct during her lifetime and her closeness to St Francis (canonised in 1228) make it impossible to escape the contemporaries’ perception that in her one encountered saintliness. What makes Mooney's book commendable is her meticulous scrutiny of the contemporary sources and the close reading of legal texts, chronicles, letters and the acts of the saint's canonisation which result in a well-founded and reliable representation of Clare's guidance of and her struggles for the religious life in San Damiano in the footsteps of St Francis and the Lesser Brothers.