VolkerLeppin: Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint. Translated by Rhys S.BezzantNew Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025; pp. 296.

Scholars who write about Francis of Assisi often want to share their love of this fascinating, and in many ways quite modern, saint.Volker Leppin's Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint is well designed to do just that.The book is directed at a general audience, people who know of Francis, but want to explore his life more deeply.That audience is served well by several excursions explaining why decisions Francis made or things he said may look odd to our modern eyes but are more understandable when the medieval context is explained.A map at the front of the book and a chronology and comprehensive glossary at the back help orient the reader to the major events of Francis' life and many of the concepts that Leppin explores throughout his monograph.The Life of a Restless Saint presents Francis and his theology in his social, economic and political milieu in six chapters and a coda.Chapter 1 introduces the many and problematic sources that can be used to reconstruct Francis' life and suggests a useful method of reconciling them, arguing that the "tensions between the sources themselves … provide the most productive lines of inquiry" (p.11).This methodology is put to good use in the following five chapters which flow chronologically from Francis' early life to his death in 1226.Chapter 2 discusses what we know of Francis' family, his early restlessness and desire to become a knight, contrasting it to Francis' conversion and early work in his newfound religious life.Chapter 3 explores how Francis initially "misunderstood" the meaning of the call to rebuild Christ's church, spending time literally building broken-down churches before drawing people to his way of life and receiving leave from Pope Innocent III for himself and his followers to live a life of apostolic poverty and mendicancy.This chapter also recounts the story of Clare's conversion to religious life.Chapter 4 begins to draw together a Franciscan theology from the disparate sources available that give insight into Francis' thoughts and puts that theology in tension with the increasing clericalization of the order.It ends with a discussion of the famous story of how Francis visited the Egyptian sultan al-Malik-al-Kamil.Chapter 5 examines Francis' orthodoxy with the structures of the medieval Catholic Church and the connections between the prelates of the growing Order and the papacy.Chapter 6 explores Francis' retreat from leadership and his move towards a life of contemplation, his growing illness and, finally his death in 1226.A short coda reminds readers that the fragments of Francis' lived experiences cannot possibly provide the story of the saint's whole life.One of the real delights of Leppin's biography is that he does not try to polish Francis into the expected image of a saint.He leaves that to hagiographers.Instead, he points to the moments in Francis' life where he seems disoriented and lost, when his mission was far from clear.These are also often places where the early hagiographies of Francis conflict.Focusing on these moments is fruitful for Leppin's analysis.To give only one example of many, while discussing Francis' missionizing trip to Egypt, Leppin offers a potential explanation for how Francis moved from the Crusader camp to have an audience with the sultan and then returned to the Crusader camp unharmed.He reminds his readers that Thomas of Celano's Vita prima notes that Francis was captured trying to sneak into the Muslim camp (p.146).Once in front of the Sultan, accused of this infiltration, Francis took the opportunity to preach, and al-Malik-al-Kamil in turn took the opportunity to return "the ragged beggar [who] was no threat" to the Crusader camp, because "he didn't find Francis offensive 1

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