¹ The number of published studies is too many to mention, but among works of medievalists, see: Linde, Cornelia, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carruthers, Mary J., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fentress, James and Wickham, Chris, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar. A few recent studies on Charlemagne have looked into aspects of how his memory has been shaped and employed towards certain political ends: Gabriele, Matthew, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Latowsky, Anne Austin, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 (Ithaca, NY, 2013)Google Scholar.

² Demacopoulos, George E., The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ See for example, Moorman, John R. H., A History of the Franciscan Order: From its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford, 1968), 1–9Google Scholar, ‘Francesco Bernardone’; William A. Hinnebusch, The Dominicans: A Short History (Staten Island, NY, 1975), 3–11, ‘Dominic the Founder’.

⁴ In Social Memory, Fentress and Wickham identify two modes in which historians have read the contemporary works of history, among which we can count the vitae and medieval histories of the order: ‘For the positivist tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was enough to work out the sources and the “bias” of ancient and medieval writers, and to discount “obvious” errors and superstitions, in order to draw reasonably firm conclusions about the “truth content” of their writings. Such procedures were often naive, and, indeed, particularly in periods where the writers so analysed were the only sources, logically circular … At the other extreme, particularly in the last two decades, we find a more textual approach, which, through literary analysis of structure, style, or the network of meanings inside a work, aims at restoring an understanding of the internal context of what a writer intended. The problem of this approach is that it sometimes tends to assume that it is pointless to use historians as sources for anything but themselves; it argues that Livy or Bede were so far from the events they described, and intervened in their material so much (whether for literary or ideological reasons), that we can analyse only their world-view, rather than their world’: ibid. 144.

⁵ At the beginning of his bestseller, Paul Sabatier presents a critical discussion of all sources regarding the life of Francis. Regarding Francis's own writings, he says that they are the most important ones to understand the saint and one cannot help but be surprised that his biographers neglected them: Vie de S. François d'Assise, 9th edn (Paris, 1894), xxxvi. This critical discussion of sources is missing in the English translation cited in n. 12 below.

⁶ To give one example, we find Michael Robson calling the chronicle by John of Perugia composed in 1239–41 ‘partisan’, and serving to justify the ‘present orientation of movement with Haymo of Faversham at the helm’: The Franciscans in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), 7.

⁷ I have dealt extensively with the question of how much friars knew about Francis in The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, NY, 2012), 96–105.

⁸ Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de Principiis Ordinis Praedicatorum, ed. Scheeben, D. H.-C., Monumenta ordinis fratrum praedicatorum historica 16 (Rome, 1935)Google Scholar.

⁹ Kyle C. Lincoln, ‘A Canon from Castile: The Early Life of St Dominic of Osma (1170/4–1207)’ (MA thesis, Saint Louis University, 2012), 3.

¹⁰ Paul Sabatier, Vie de S. François d'Assise, 1st edn (Paris, 1893).

¹¹ For a more detailed analysis of Sabatier's argument and his influence on the subsequent histories of the Franciscan Order, see my The Poor and the Perfect, 9–11.

¹² Sabatier, Paul, The Life of Francis of Assisi, trans. Houghton, Louise Seymour (New York, 1928), xiv–xvGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Koudelka, Vladimir, Dominic, ed., trans. and rev. Tugwell, Simon (London, 1997), 3Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Dalarun, Jacques, The Rediscovered Life of St Francis of Assisi, trans. Johnson, Timothy (Bonaventure, NY, 2016)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ For all the biographies of Francis mentioned here, except the recently discovered life, the critical Latin editions are found in Enrico Menestò and Stefano Brufani, eds, Fontes Franciscani (Assisi, 1995). Similarly, for the English translations of the Franciscan corpus mentioned here, see Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short, eds, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 3 vols (Hyde Park, NY, 1999; hereafter: FAED).

¹⁶ Jacques Dalarun, Vers une Résolution de la question franciscaine. La légende ombrienne de Thomas de Celano (Paris, 2007). See also the contributions of several scholars in a round table on Dalarun's book: Jacques Dalarun et al., ‘The “Umbrian Legend” of Jacques Dalarun’, Franciscan Studies 66 (2008), 479–508.

¹⁷ Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda, in Menestò and Brufani, eds, Fontes Franciscani, §158 (my translation).

¹⁸ Thomas of Celano, The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, §195, in Armstrong, Hellmann and Short, eds, FAED, 2: 372.

¹⁹ Carruthers, Book of Memory, 234.

²⁰ This reversal of values in hagiography has also been discussed recently by Dalarun, Jacques, Gouverner c'est server. Essai de démocratie médiévale (Paris, 2012), 13–15Google Scholar. I am grateful to Sean L. Field for allowing me to read his forthcoming translation of this book, To Govern is to Serve: An Essay in Medieval Democracy.

²¹ Heffernan, Thomas J., Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988), 10Google Scholar.

²² Doyle, Eric, The Disciple and the Master: St Bonaventure's Sermons on St Francis of Assisi (Chicago, IL, 1984), 64Google Scholar.

²³ On the use of St Paul in Bonaventure's sermons, and the contextualization of this particular sermon within the polemical preaching at the University of Paris, see C. Colt Anderson, ‘Polemical Preaching at the University of Paris: Bonaventure's Use of Paul as a Forerunner of Francis’, in Timothy J. Johnson, ed., Franciscans and Preaching: Every Miracle from the Beginning of the World came about through Words, Medieval Franciscans 7 (Leiden, 2012), 91–113.

²⁴ Sermon 1 on St Francis, preached at Paris, 4 October 1255: Doyle, The Disciple and the Master, 66.

²⁵ For the turbulent story of the mendicant-secular dispute, see Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 11–61. For the most recent edition and translation of William's work, see William of Saint-Amour, De periculis novissimorum temporum, ed. and trans. Guy Geltner (Paris, 2008).

²⁶ Sabatier, Life of Francis of Assisi, 394.

²⁷ John V. Apczynski, ‘What Has Paris to do with Assisi? The Theological Creation of a Saint’, in Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney and John K. Downey, eds, Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art (New York, 2009), 79–93, at 82. On the Legenda Maior, see also Susan J. Hubert, ‘Theological and Polemical Uses of Hagiography: A Consideration of Bonaventure's Legenda Major of St Francis’, Comitatus 29 (1998), 47–61.

²⁸ Joshua Benson, ‘Reflections on Memory in Thomas of Celano's Vita Prima’, in Michael Cusato, Steven McMichael and Timothy Johnson, eds, Ordo et Sanctitas: The Franciscan Spiritual Journey in Theology and Hagiography. Essays in Honor of J. A. Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M. Conv., Medieval Franciscans 15 (Leiden, 2017), 11–31, at 24–5.

²⁹ Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 6.

³⁰ See the introduction to the Legenda Maior in Armstrong, Hellmann and Short, eds, FAED, 2: 500.

³¹ Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1975), especially 7–11 for White's categories of emplotment.

³² Ibid. 8–9.

³³ Epistola de tribus quaestionibus ad innominatum magistrum, in Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, Opera Omnia, ed. Patres Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 10 vols (Florence, 1882–1902), 8: 331–6, at 336. For a more recent edition of this letter, see F. M. Delorme, ‘Textes Franciscains’, Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 1 (1951), 179–218, at 212–18.

³⁴ ‘The Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero's transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it – the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall. The archetypal theme of Satire is the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is, in fact, a drama of diremption, a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is man's unremitting enemy’: White, Metahistory, 8–9.

³⁵ Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women's Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism (Notre Dame, IN, 1995).

³⁶ Thompson, Augustine, ‘The Origin of Religious Mendicancy in Medieval Europe’, in Prudlo, Donald, ed., The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies (Boston, MA, 2011), 3–30Google Scholar.

³⁷ The two most recent editions are Angelo Clareno, Liber chronicarum; sive, Tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. G. M. Boccali (Assisi, 1999); Historia septem tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. O. Rossini (Rome, 1999).