St Francis

[tealin]

I'm reading The Little Flowers of St Francis, a nearly contemporary memoir of anecdotes about Francis of Assisi and the early days of his monastic order, and

• There are an awful lot of monks who go spend the night in the woods in pairs to, er, 'talk about God', just sayin' (hey, God is love, man)
• I have seen lots of depictions of St Francis but none of them told me the stigmata actually had nails in them?!
• Friar Juniper is basically Arthur Shappey – or perhaps more accurately Father Dougal – but either way it's funny to see that character trope go all the way back to the 13th century.

It's interesting, though ... it's a medieval Italian document translated into Victorian English and yet it still manages to sound incredibly fresh and conversational, with tenses switching to the historic present when the writer gets excited and personalities coming through the fog of time. Interesting also to see how religious and cultural values have and haven't changed since that time ... For all that the Franciscans get conflated with hippies (and there is plenty to back that up) there are moments where, say, a monk is deathly ill and wants pigs' foot to eat, so his brother monk goes off into the woods with a knife and just cuts off a pig's foot and cooks it for him, which is absolutely unthinkable nowadays.

It's also interesting just how much was happening concurrently in the 13th century – St Francis and St Dominic, who founded two of the most prominent religious orders, were contemporaries and actually met each other. Because of the music I have always jokingly called the 13th Century 'the rockingest century' but I'm starting to wonder if it actually was, at least until the 19th.