FRANCIS AND CLARE, THE MERCHANT AND THE LADY

Francis seemed to be surprised when other men asked to join him. But he welcomed those who came, and soon an evangelical fraternity was born. In 1209, when, according to the hagiographers, they had reached the symbolic number of twelve, Francis and his brothers went to Rome to seek papal confirmation of their form of living. Eventually they returned to Assisi, having been blessed by Innocent III. Did Francis consider the possibility of women joining his group? There is clearly no mention of a female presence on the journey to Rome. In the context of the time, it would certainly have created problems for unmarried men and women, especially from different social classes, to travel on the road together. It is quite unlikely that such a group would have been viewed positively in Rome, much less that it would have received the blessing of the pope. And yet some sources – including the Testament of Clare of Assisi herself – mention that before Francis had any brothers, while he was working on the restoration of the little church of San Damiano outside Assisi, he used to call out to people in French, talking about the coming of holy women to that holy place:

The use of the word lady puts the story in the medieval context of chivalry and nobility, the social class that Francis, wealthy but only a merchant, had been longing to become part of.

INTRODUCTION

Within two years of his death, Francis of Assisi was celebrated as the ‘form of minors’ in a liturgical antiphon composed by Cardinal Rainiero Capocci. This role given to Francis would give rise to a significant number of hagiographical accounts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, texts that continued to re-propose a model of Francis to be imitated. Each of these accounts reflects a particular historical context which determined the way the story of Francis would be told. Thus, no two hagiographical accounts of Francis are the same, even those that used the same sources. This fact is often referred to as the ‘Franciscan Question’, whose origin goes back to Paul Sabatier, who challenged the accepted image of Francis, at that time largely determined by Bonaventure's Major Legend, claiming that it was a manipulation of the real Francis, who was represented more accurately in the accounts of his companions, and especially that of Brother Leo.

As long-forgotten Franciscan legends came to light in the early twentieth century they were approached first from a philological perspective and investigated with a literary methodology. More recently, historical criticism has been employed to unravel the relationship of these many texts, and today scholars are able to identify the sources, the historical contexts and the authors for almost every hagiographical account of Francis's life. This paper will provide an introduction and brief overview of the major hagiographical texts of Francis composed up until 1253. Each text will be placed in its historical context, information about the author will be provided, its sources will be discussed and a brief description of the author’s approach to Francis will be supplied. With this background, the reader will have the necessary information to investigate each text in more detail.

As the son of a successful merchant, Francesco Bernardone grew up in a city, enjoying his father's wealth and social status. He was formed by an urban style of life which included distinctive entertainments and festivities, and his training and education prepared him for a world of commerce which was centred on towns. He took on this role in his early 20s at the latest, when he was following in his father's footsteps, e.g., transporting bales of cloth from Assisi to nearby towns for sale there (1 Cel., 8). Thomas of Celano describes him in this phase of his life as an urban dweller who lacked any sense of the beauties of nature (1 Cel., 3). All this changed with his conversion, which included not only rejection of his social status and breaking with his family, but also abandonment of his urban lifestyle and indeed departure from the town of Assisi itself (1 Cel., 16). Later in the thirteenth century the symbolic value of abandoning urban life in favour of religion was underlined by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Paris master and minister general of the order, who, in a commentary on the Gospel of Luke, stated: ‘Travelling into the desert and abandoning the town means abandoning the secular and entering the life of religion.’

Some people have the misfortune to be remembered primarily through the writings of their critics. Others, such as Francis, who are mainly remembered in the writings of their admirers, are not necessarily better off. Uncritical adulation and hero worship can be worse than honest criticism. In this sense hagiography has long had a poor reputation among historians. They have never trusted the hagiographer (and still do not) and have rebuked him for being biased and uncritical, preoccupied with miracles and supernatural powers. Whereas the supposedly impartial historian is interested in reality and hard facts, the hagiographer simply tells us stories. However, in the foregoing chapters we have seen that Franciscan hagiography presents us with a surprisingly human saint: in fact, we find a remarkable concentration on the saint's humanity, on his needs, on his body, on his afflictions, his sufferings and weaknesses.

It is also clear that for thirteenth-century writers the difference between hagiography and history was far less significant than for scholars trained in the academic traditions developed in the nineteenth century. Finally, the modern historian's preoccupation with ‘real facts’ rather than ‘stories’ has been rudely shaken by the discovery that historical science, even in its most methodological, quantifying and analytical aspects, cannot exist independently of narrative constructions. In other words, history (whether an art or a science) is, and always will be, bound up with story-telling.

In 2004, the French publishing house Gallimard published Héros du Moyen Âge: le saint et le roi, a 1,318-page tome combining two recent works by Jacques Le Goff, one about Francis of Assisi and the other Louis IX of France. The subtitle is slightly misleading, since both ‘heroes’ were in fact recognised as saints after Louis's canonisation in 1297. Nevertheless, it is no surprise that Le Goff would find these two men intriguing, or that Gallimard would pair them, for they were two of the thirteenth century's emblematic figures, linked by the influence that Franciscan ideals had on Louis, his family and his Capetian descendants.

This influence is undeniable but difficult to pin down, for several reasons. First, there is the problem of defining ‘Franciscan ideals’. Francis's admirers and modern scholars have long argued over who he ‘really was’ and how his message should best be interpreted. Thus, we cannot simply ask whether the French royal court followed one predetermined model arbitrarily defined as Franciscan. Secondly, there is the problem of disentangling Franciscan piety from other related strands. The French court fostered close ties to many different orders and branches of the Church. It would therefore be disingenuous to ascribe every Capetian impulse towards piety, simplicity or humility to Franciscan influence. Searching for Franciscan influence requires close attention to actual interaction between royal figures and leading Franciscans and to structural links built up between court and order.

The historical question of whether or not Francis approved of the pursuit of learning by the clerical Franciscans is a tough one in view of the scarcity of the evidence, and Bert Roest in Chapter 10 here offers an answer to this question. A medieval Franciscan who asked the same question had much less material in his hands for an answer than we do now. In the Middle Ages, with the exception of the Rule and the Testament, the writings of Francis remained inaccessible to the great majority of the friars who joined the order in places remote from Italy and who never had the chance to meet Francis or any of his early companions. If a clerical friar's conscience was burdened by a suspicion that his enthusiasm for the pursuit of booklearning was in conflict with the saintly founder's intentions, he could find no help in the Rule or the Testament. Francis did not approve of a quest for learning by illiterate friars, but he remained silent about the pursuit of learning by clerical friars. He did, however, prohibit the appropriation of things (which included books, with the exception of a breviary), but this ban ceased to be an obstacle to studying after the papal permission given to friars in 1230 to use things, including books. Francis's Testament was not helpful on the subject of learning either. Therein he admonished friars to respect theologians, but this hardly meant that he wished to see his brothers become theologians.

INTRODUCTION

The stunning transformation of the Franciscan order from a small band of laymen into a well-organised international order of educated preachers and theologians, with schools all over Europe, took place even more quickly than was acknowledged until recently. Ignoring suggestive insights by Hilarin Felder, who in 1904 published the first monograph on this issue, many historians writing on Franciscan education have argued that the question of studies was only addressed systematically under Bonaventure, minister general (1257–73), and particularly by the constitutions of Narbonne in 1260. According to this interpretation, the creation of a school network began in earnest under the Franciscan ministers general Albert of Pisa (1239–40) and Haymo of Faversham (1240–4), to be brought to full fruition under Bonaventure.

As numerous Franciscan study houses can be traced back to the early 1220s, and Franciscan chronicles provide references to lectors and the exchange of students during the 1230s, it becomes plausible to assume that the creation of schools and provincial study houses for the training of lectors was well under way during the leadership of Elias, who governed the Franciscan order as a vicar from 1221 to 1226, and again as minister general between 1232 and 1239. This brings the problem of studies back to Francis's final years. Between his abdication of leadership of the order in 1221 and his death in 1226, Franciscan schools and study houses started to appear in Italy, Spain, France and England.

In Tribute to Freud (1956), her memoir of work with the founder of psychoanalysis, H.D. at one point describes herself as ‘uncanonically seated’, placing herself outside the circle of those around Freud who, she suggests, were ‘richly intellectually and materially endowed’. As she often does in her work, here H.D. constructs her ‘uncanonical’ status as an important source of alternative knowledge and ability. Surprisingly, she even allies herself with Freud on this basis, going on to note that he himself is ‘uncanonical enough’. Her ‘enough’ here frames ‘uncanonicity’ as a quality one possesses to a greater or lesser extent (rather than as a lack of something) ‘enough’ of which can yield desirable effects. Here as elsewhere, H.D. places value on what lies outside the boundaries of that which is culturally sanctioned.

In her work more generally, however, in addition to featuring the position of the ‘outcast’, H.D. often also features compelling liminal zones, neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, raising questions about the costs of inhabiting the stable locations assumed by discourse about canons, which decides between inside and outside. When addressing H.D.'s place in our literary canons, it is important to bear in mind what H.D.'s work often implies both about the benefits of ‘uncanonicity’, as well as of inhabiting in-between conditions that problematise both the legitimacy of the borderline between inside and outside, and the value of being definitely positioned as one or the other.

It is very hard to detach H.D.'s name from literary modernism. Indeed, her oeuvre demonstrates the fundamental themes, poetics and ideological standpoints of that movement: the change from Victorian norms to a modern world primarily concerned with science, technology and the nature of modernity itself; the coinage of innovative poetics; and the challenging of existing stereotypes through new discourses, in H.D.'s case through the ideology of early to mid twentieth-century feminism.

Indeed, H.D.'s relationship with modernism has been explored at great length. Among the most sophisticated analyses is Cassandra Laity's reading of H.D. in light of Romantic and Victorian literary values. Laity argues that the poet embraces the sexuality-driven poetic masks of hermaphrodism, androgeneity and homoeroticism previously propagated by decadent Romantics such as A.C. Swinburne and Walter Pater, and suggests that H.D. appropriates these personae to ‘fashion a modernist poetic of female desire’. Georgina Taylor's subsequent study, H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers (2001), demonstrates the author's centrality in the modernist public sphere of literary women. With other female authors – among them, Amy Lowell, Edith Wyatt and Marianne Moore – H.D. had a hand in promoting modernist work primarily through the editorship of self-published magazines such as The Egoist, Little Review and Poetry. Both Laity and Taylor see H.D.'s work through the lens of identity politics, whereby aesthetics and poetic masks speak for communities of women. More recently, Adalaide Kirby Morris attempts to explore H.D. outside the field of gender studies.

The Cambridge Companion to H.D. is a critical overview of the author's work, featuring analyses of her major poetry, prose, translations and nonfiction, as well as arguments of how the author fits in the literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century. The essays we have specially commissioned for this volume were written by leading or emerging scholars in the field. In our choices we attempt to give a sense of the diverse viewpoints through which H.D. has been read.

The book is divided into two parts. The first examines the literary context of H.D.'s work. The essays focus on specific issues and debates, such as the author's initial displacement from and reinstatement in the modernist canon, her tendency to use biography in her work, her active contribution to ‘little magazines’, her work's affinities with modernism, her utilisation of gendered perspectives, and the lasting influence of her aesthetics on later generations of writers. These readings intend both to concisely map the field of H.D. and to help familiarise the reader with the contexts through which her work is read. These discourses are wide-ranging, taking in the history of canon formation, biographical approaches to literature, modernist culture and literature, gender theory/feminism and the writer's legacy.

The second part of the book explores a wide range of H.D.'s major texts, including her most well-known poetry and prose, translations and memoirs. The chapters are organised mainly in chronological terms, starting with her early poetry in Sea Garden (1916) and finishing with her 1940s works, The Gift and Tribute to Freud. We hope that this structural arrangement will help to locate H.D. both within the social and cultural context of modernity and also within the context of the dialectic between the Romantic, Victorian and modernist aesthetics.

HERmione, H.D.'s early autobiographical novel, provides an excellent case study through which to explore the author's connections between gender, text and reader. In HER, H.D. exposes patriarchal textual gendering and, then, inserts texts alternative to the patriarchal ones. Mirrors, both literal and metaphorical, allow her women characters to read themselves and each other in spaces that produce lesbian eroticism, female subjectivity and a woman's writing. By framing through reflection, H.D. questions a patriarchal ‘normal’ subjectivity, subjectivity defined in terms of a unitary individualised self. Her reflecting, textualised women protagonists, paramount in her writing, illuminate, through the texts they create, a stirring gendered link between female subjectivity and creativity. For H.D., gender is a text to be read.

Patriarchal foundations

H.D.'s early fictional autobiographies – HERmione (1927), Paint it Today (1921) and Asphodel (1922) – portray (in that order, in sequential chronology) H.D.'s early years as a writer – when she first writes poetry, when Ezra Pound became her fiancé and mentor, when she meets her lovers Frances Gregg, Richard Aldington (her husband), Cecil Gray, then Winifred Ellerman (Bryher). Susan Stanford Friedman's and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' plot synopsis of these interlocking novels emphasises the gendered complications of their scripts: ‘This story moves from intense love of both man and woman, centers in the experiences of loss and betrayal engendered by heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal context, and ends in the celebration of a love for a woman and the birth of a girl child.’

Like most modernist poets, H.D. found her first chance to publish her avant-garde work in ‘little magazines’: ‘Priapus’ (later renamed ‘Orchard’), ‘Hermes of the Ways’ and ‘Epigram, After the Greek’ appeared in 1913 in the third issue of Harriet Monroe's new Poetry magazine. Until after the Second World War, some of H.D.'s most important poetry and crucial critical essays continued to appear first in such magazines. During the teens and twenties, her poems could be found in all of the most daring and innovative journals of the time – including (in addition to Poetry), The New Freewoman, The Egoist, Glebe, The Little Review, Contact, Sphere, The Dial, Coterie, Gargoyle, Rhythmus, Double Dealer, Transatlantic Review, This Quarter, The Chapbook, Close Up, transition, Agenda, Pagany, Seed and Life and Letters Today.

This was the era of the great women editors and publishers, including Harriet Monroe of Poetry, Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver of The New Freewoman and The Egoist, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review and Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier of Shakespeare & Company. H.D. knew them all, but like Marianne Moore, who for a few years edited The Dial, she was deeply committed to her own writing career and never wished to make editing and publishing the work of others her dominant literary contribution. Despite this, she was thrust into the role of literary editor on The Egoist during the teens, when she also undertook a stabilising editorial role in the compilation of Some Imagist Poets 1915, 1916 and 1917.

At the heart of Sea Garden, H.D.'s first published book, is the desire:

Published in 1916, in the midst of war, Sea Garden is a site of conflict and of transformation. Its very title is contradictory, like Sappho's celebrated oxymoron bittersweet, which resonates through this and subsequent volumes in expressions like ‘scented and stinging/ … sweet and salt’ (H.D., CP, p. 36). In an inspired essay, Eileen Gregory has asserted that the poet Sappho is a ‘latent mythicpresence’ in Sea Garden, while I have suggested elsewhere that a Sapphic aesthetic of variegation patterns this poetry and is carried into H.D.'s later work. Both insights identify her poetics with an ancient tradition, reaching back to the pre-classical era in Greece, but also active in renaissance England.

H.D.'s way of writing is very old, but it is also very new, with the shocking, iconoclastic newness that prefers rupture to perfection, kinesis to stasis. Ezra Pound immediately recognised this and, as he turned his attention from imagism to Vorticism, used H.D.'s ‘Oread’ to illustrate its aesthetic of moving energies. That much-anthologised poem is not in Sea Garden, but contemporary with it, like the rest of those gathered in The God. The poetry of this early period, which is the foundation of all H.D.'s later work, is modern in its abruptness and brevity, its unpredictable open form, its natural language, its inherent riskiness.

‘Hermione lived her life and lives in history.’ So murmurs the speaker of H.D.'s long, reflective sequence ‘Winter Love’. This melancholy note provides an apt starting point for a study of H.D.'s legacy for a number of related reasons.

First, the publication history of this particular poem evidences one of the obstacles to establishing definitive lines of influence in H.D.'s case. Written in 1959 and conceived, as Norman Pearsall reports, as the ‘coda’ to 1961's Helen in Egypt, ‘Winter Love’ was not finally published until 1972 (H.D., Hermetic, p. viii). This sizeable – although not in H.D.'s oeuvre unusual – delay means that what may appear at first to be striking similarities (for instance, between the structure, voice and imagery of this poem and examples from Sylvia Plath's work) should be dismissed on the grounds that Plath predeceased the publication of ‘Winter Love’, or argued on rather different premises. In like manner, H.D.'s Asphodel, written in the early 1920s, remained unpublished until 1992. Although editor Robert Spoo identifies in it a ‘high modernis[t]’ tendency ‘toward strong formal control and experimental abandon’, its attenuated publication history makes it problematic to argue for its explicit influence on the wider development of a modernist aesthetic.

The second reason for taking ‘Winter Love’ as a point of departure lies in the speaker's recognition that one might live two different lives simultaneously or palimpsestically, to use one of H.D.'s favoured figures.

H.D. is best known as a poet: her imagist and long poems receive the most attention outside of a small circle of critics, and are usually the only parts of her oeuvre to be anthologised. Susan Stanford Friedman is the first critic to have written a book-length work on her prose: Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction establishes that H.D. was not only a frequent prose writer, but also an experimental one, comparable with Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Despite H.D.'s efforts to publish some of them, many of her prose works remained unpublished during her lifetime, and some have taken more than half a century to see the light of day. However, she wrote much more than she tried to publish, her prose being less vulnerable to the blocks and psychic breakdowns that halted her poetry. Like many modernists, H.D. worked over a lifetime at the same story, allowing it to evolve, mature and achieve a considerable depth, intricately and intimately bound up in her own life. Her poems, on the other hand, are more like offspring, separate, autonomous even in the post-imagist long poems, and inevitably breaking away from the life of their progenitor. Because of its distinct, intimate role in her writing, her prose is difficult, murky and opaque; but it is valuable not only as a significant experimental body of work but also as a rich source of companion material that informs her poetry in often unexpected ways.

By the end of the Second World War, H.D. had come to understand her writing – both poetry and prose – as prophetic. She was to mine her unconscious, her personal and family history, and Moravian American history generally, to point the way towards a future of peace built on a religious syncretism in which women's role was at least equal to that of men. The promise of that peaceful future was ‘written’ in history for those who knew how to read it – visionaries such as herself who had a divinely inspired ‘Gift’. Psychoanalysis, H.D. believed, offered the tools she needed to access her gift for historical interpretation, but she also believed that her interpretive gift was a mystical inheritance passed down through her maternal Moravian ancestry.

In The Gift and Tribute to Freud, the relationship between history and psychoanalysis is a symbiotic one. In both works, H.D. uses psychoanalysis to ‘read’ history the way a fortune-teller reads cards – an analogy she uses several times in Tribute to Freud and a plot-sequence she invokes in the second chapter of The Gift, ‘Fortune Teller’. H.D. derived from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams her understanding of the ‘fourth dimension’ as a ‘universal consciousness’ outside time (Tribute, p. 71), with the precise form that consciousness might take at any given moment determined by particularities of time and place (or socio-historical space), and inflected with personal specificities.

In her 1949–50 essay ‘H.D. by Delia Alton’, H.D. exemplified the dialogic nature between her life and work, an understanding of autobiography she had consciously introduced as early as 1920 in her first extant novel, Paint It Today. Delia Alton, her nom de plume, authors H.D.; though only a textual self, she ‘writes’ H.D. the woman, thus conjoining life and work. The dialogic nature between H.D.'s life and her ‘highly autobiographical’ work casts into sharp relief the way she, much like Sylvia Plath, manipulates life ‘with an informed and intelligent mind’: while writing, she is being written.

H.D.'s autobiographical method does not promise revelation, nor do her texts uncover a miraculously intact female subject. Instead, the autobiographical subject finds herself on multiple stages simultaneously; thus, her work is partly a process of fabrication and replenishment, a rewriting of life to generate a new textual identity by appropriating myths and revisiting personal history. H.D.'s work represents the self as produced not by experience, but by autobiography itself, ‘[t]he story must write [her]. The story must create [her]’ and, as if in accordance with Olney, she ‘creates a self in the very act of seeking it’. Her quest is bi-focal: she needs to determine her poetic vocation in a patriarchally dominated world, and second, to come to terms with her sexuality, which is amorphous and ambivalent, vacillating between homo-eroticism and a heterosexuality related to her quest for the eternal lover.