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 enough to make him a martyr” (p. 147). This seems as likely as any other story of the exchange, perhaps more. Leppin's book was originally published in German (WBG, 2018) and was translated into English by Rhys Bezzant, a Senior Lecturer at Ridley College in Melbourne. Bezzant has translated Leppin's work before, which was surely helpful when translating this book that moves quickly through the many insights it presents about Francis. The translation is loose, which helps it read well in English, but at times, it is a bit too loose in ways that introduce errors into the text. In the sometimes technical discussion of which sources about Francis are most reliable, Bezzant introduces misconceptions as fact, for instance, the idea that we have an autograph of The Canticle of Brother Sun and Testament. “After all, in some writings—not least the already mentioned Canticle of Brother Sun— his own hand has been preserved” (p. 7). The same terminology is used to describe Francis' Testament: “we do at least have an extremely important text from his own hand relating to his autobiography” (p. 7). The German original only notes that Francis' own writings are fruitful for reconstructing Francis' inner life. “Besonders fruchtbar sind Franz’ eingene Schriften natürlich für eine Rekonstruktion seiner inneren Biographie, seiner Spiritualität.” It seems likely that Bezzant, as Leppin, meant only to imply that these texts were authored by Francis, and not truly autographs that survive to today, but when dealing with the Franciscan Question, it is best to be precise. Bezzant also includes far fewer citations in his translation, which makes his book more accessible but loses some of the original evidence and context found in the German. That The Life of a Restless Saint was written and translated by two more generalist scholars of Francis whose interest was in making his life more accessible is sometimes apparent. Why for instance, was the Legend of Perugia/Assisi Compilation, with its pericopes from close companions of Francis, not included in the discussion of reliable sources? There are important secondary sources missing: Chiara Frugoni's Francesco e l'invenzione delle stimmate (Giulio Einaldi, 1993), and Raoul Manselli's critical work on the Franciscan Question Nos qui cum eo fuminus: Contributo alla questione Francescana (Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1980). Both works would have been immediately helpful to Leppin as he tackled both the Franciscan Question and the development of the story of Francis' stigmata. Similarly, Rosalind Brooke's work on the Legend of Perugia/Assisi Compilation, along with her later monograph The Image of St Francis (Cambridge UP, 2006) was not included, nor was Michael Robson's recent work on Francis and the early order. Additionally, Bezzant's choice to use Marion Habig's confusingly paginated and out-of-date Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of Francis (Franciscan Press, 1972), rather than the newer and more scholarly English translations found in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents (New City Press, 1999–2001) is perplexing. It is probably clear from the above that scholars of Francis may be a bit frustrated with this book, which seeks to simplify the very complicated source traditions of Francis' life into something that is easily digestible for a learned but not specialist audience in 300 pages. Yet, as a broad and engaging introduction to the baffling and fascinating contradictions of Saint Francis that seeks to make the saint more understandable to a 21st century audience, it does its job admirably. Even if it has some flaws as a work of textual criticism and history, Francis of Assisi: The Life of a Restless Saint is excellent in its thinking through Francis' theology and its meaning in Francis' own time and today.

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