The Legacy of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi in Franciscan Texts, c. 1305. Three Contrasting Assessments

Recent historiography in the United States has come to a different assessment of the purpose and meaning of the Sacrum commercium beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate. Instead of being read simply as a charming tale about Francis and his brothers in search of Lady Poverty, the more recent interpretation reads it as a stinging critique, not merely of failed monastic poverty but the current practices, in the 1230s, of the order of Friars Minor: that is, as a betrayal of the social minoritas of the earliest fraternity, symbolized most vividly in the basilica of San Francesco outside Assisi. The text then virtually disappears for about seventy years, resurfacing only when Ubertino da Casale quotes an extensive pivotal paragraph of it in Book V of his Arbor vitae (1305). And yet, in his critique of the order’s practice of poverty, no mention is made of the polemical critique of the basilica. Why not ? This paper endeavors to answer that question by contrasting Ubertino’s comments with those of two other testimonies of the period: the laude of Jacopone da Todi and the story attributed to Giles of Assisi in the so-called Longer Life.