In the mid-1990s, my esteemed and much-missed graduate advisor, Joseph H. Lynch, memorably summed up the challenge that hagiography can pose for the historian. “The trouble with writing about Francis,” he quipped, as we discussed the founder of the Friars Minor, “is that everyone who studies him falls in love with Francis!” Hagiographers, or St. Francis of Assisi himself, left us such endearing images that historians typically find themselves lost in admiration, rather than analysis. In that light, Trembinski's new monograph, rooted in Francis's lived experience and admirable in all particulars for its thorough scholarly acumen, offers a crucial refinement of our historical understanding of Francis's life, and of the origins and development of his order.
Trembinski achieves this refinement by advancing a single, straightforward central argument: disability, she asserts, is a fundamental force that shaped Francis' lived experience from before the point of his conversion until his death. However, she contends that Francis's prior biographers have not, as they assessed his life and his interactions with his own growing order, taken into full account the degree to which his life was shaped by his chronic illnesses, which included fevers, weakness and debility, and progressive visual impairments. Chapter 1, “Francis Overdiagnosed and Underdiagnosed,” examines the modern historiography on Francis, arguing that historians have tended to underplay his experience of illness, while medical thinkers have sought to offer blanket diagnoses for his illnesses based on limited evidence. Neither approach accurately assesses how these illnesses were disabling to Francis, nor how they shaped his devotions, his relationship with his growing order, or the path of his life.
In Chapter 2, “Recentering Illness and Infirmity in Francis’ Lived Experience,” Trembinski sets out to reclaim chronic illness as a defining factor in Francis's adult life. She builds this argument on a painstaking exploration of the sources produced by Francis himself, offering an exacting assessment of both the content and the material qualities of the surviving texts written in his own hand. She supplements that assessment with evidence written by Brother Leo, Francis's closest companion. Based on that evidence, she ultimately asserts that Francis was frequently (if intermittently) ill, and that for this reason he found it difficult to travel, to write, to read, and to adhere to his devotional regimen. She then moves on, in Chapter 3, “Et licet infirmus fuisset semper: Testimonies of Illness in the Early Lives of Francis,” to trace the evidence of Francis's disabling conditions that was preserved in his medieval vitae. As she does so, Trembinski also constructs a timeline of these conditions, noting where his levels of impairment intersect with major events in his life. Throughout this reconstruction of Francis's disability, Trembinski handles the historiographical “Franciscan Question” about the relative veracity of the many vitae with extraordinary transparency and care, considering exactly how reliable each source was based on its proximity in both time and in its goals to Francis himself.
In light of this exhaustive re-evaluation of Francis's illnesses, in the latter half of the book Trembinski turns to an analysis of their social reverberations. Chapter Four, “Disability and Tensions in Francis’ Lived Experience,” describes the ways in which “gaps existed between Francis’ desire to live a rigorously ascetic life and the requirement to address the needs of his delicate constitution” (85). Here, she argues, pivotally and effectively, that there was a connection between Francis's progressive visual impairment and his resignation as leader of his order, not only because his illnesses required pragmatic accommodations, but also because of canon law's longstanding prohibition against the ill, infirm, or (most particularly) those living with blindness serving in leadership positions. In Chapter 5, “The Hagiographers’ Search for Meaning,” she turns to the question of how this tension over disability was managed in the developing hagiographical traditions about Francis, which, she argues, diminished discussions of his chronic illness, his engagement with medical care, and the causal connection between his illnesses and his step back from leadership in or before 1221. Hagiographers increasingly suggested that Francis had advocated for moderation in asceticism, rather than describing him as experiencing conflicted distress about his devotions, and described his leadership decisions as driven by his humility, rather than disability.
Finally, Chapter 6: “On Disability, Power, and Gender: A Speculative Conclusion,” offers a thoughtful excursus on the power dynamics of Francis's disabled experience. As his disability began to erode his traditionally masculine authority over his order and even over his own body, Trembinski argues, Francis resisted that loss of authority, a tension that his hagiographers later downplayed in favor of an emphasis on Francis's devotional life: that is, on his patience with illness and his identification with the suffering Christ. She connects this shift to the generally feminizing, or asexual, connotations of disability in medieval medicine and culture, and traces its consonance with feminine modes of Christian asceticism.
Trembinski points out that the process of the exclusion of disability from Francis's vitae meant that “Francis seems to have shed his personality, and even his humanity, in the narratives of his life that continued to be written throughout the thirteenth century” (125). Her work is, fundamentally, a restoration of that humanity—of Francis' bodily experience (to the degree that it can be known) and of the internal and social tensions that surrounded his disability. Trembinski's contention that this humanity fundamentally reorganizes our understanding of the man himself, of disability in the Middle Ages, and of key developments in the history of the Friars Minor is lucid and thoroughly convincing throughout, and also provides an indispensable methodological model for scholars of both disability and hagiography.
