Could Saint Francis be the Church's most modern saint? An ecologist in his fascination with nature, an anti-consumerist in his radical choice of simplicity, a defender of freedom of spirit, joy, and community life, he was a feminist from the outset in his relationship with Saint Clare and the Order of the Poor Clares. Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone, the son of Italian merchants from the city of Assisi, changed not only the concept of holiness and devotion, but also the attitude of the Church and the laity toward the sacred at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries.
Franciscan fraternity, his dedication to poverty, and his dynamic leadership, alternating between solitude and social involvement through preaching in the cities of Umbria, established him as one of the most revered religious figures in the West. By recounting the story of the "Poor Man of Assisi" through four essays, Jacques Le Goff shows us that if Saint Francis was modern, it was because his time was "the product of a place and a moment: communal Italy at its height. In this context, three phenomena are decisive for Francis's orientation: the class struggle, the rise of the laity, and the advancement of the monetary economy."
"I have always been fascinated by Saint Francis, one of the most impressive figures of his time and of Medieval History (...) Francis was, very early on, the one who, more than anyone else, inspired in me the desire to make him an object of total history, an example for the past and the present", writes Le Goff when justifying this investigation into one of the most moving examples of humility and solidarity, creator of a feeling for nature that was expressed in religion, literature and medieval art.
Le Goff does not ignore the controversial aspects of Saint Francis, who rejected knowledge and books at the birth of universities and condemned money during the transition from feudal economics. The historian's masterful exploration leads us to understand how the author of the Canticle of the Sun, who preached to the birds, condemned not knowledge or enrichment, but power structures. The lessons of Franciscanism were born modern in the Middle Ages and reaffirm their unequivocal relevance in the 21st century.
