The Garden of St. Francis: Plants, Landscape, and Economy in Thirteenth-Century Italy

Lisa J. Kiser

POPULARLY ASSOCIATED with the environmental movement, St. Francis (ca. 1182–1226) has long been figured as having an intense devotion to nature and an unwillingness to participate in what his admirers have seen as the tendency of Judeo-Christian culture to promote ideologies resulting in the degradation of the natural world. Especially recognized as showing kindness to animals, St. Francis often is invoked as a figure providing an alternative model of human interaction with other living species, one based not on dominance and mastery of them, but on equality and love. Such conceptions of Francis survive unabated not only in popular devotion to the saint today, but also in the writings of some modern historians of environmental thought, who have found in the medieval texts about St. Francis a genuinely distinctive set of ideas about the potential for non-destructive human interactions with the natural world.1	1
Nonetheless, there are problems inherent in the study of St. Francis, most notably the immense difficulties we face in coming to any clear understanding of his beliefs about the natural world because of the paucity and obscurity of the evidence we have concerning him. Francis himself appears to have written very little, and what he did write is, where extant, of little use in deducing much of any consequence concerning the environment.2 His followers, however—those who were members of his original brotherhood and those who joined it in the first decades after his death—wrote extensively about their order's founder and his beliefs. In one of these early accounts of Francis's life, he is said to have overseen the construction and maintenance of a garden. Although there are problems in judging the truth of this claim, the details surrounding it nonetheless provide us with a valuable perspective on early Franciscan attitudes toward the landscape at a time when it was undergoing great changes resulting from urbanization and the commercialization of the economy.	2
The problem with trusting the earliest medieval accounts of Francis's life as unvarnished records of the "truth" is that virtually all of them were written as contributions to a polemical debate about what ideals the nascent Franciscan order ought to promote, especially the degree of poverty that would be acceptable for members of the order. These texts thus to some extent construct the figure of their founder to conform to whatever position their writers happen to be supporting. Yet it is in these polemical narratives that we find, sometimes vividly expressed, attitudes about the natural world. Those who wished the order to preserve strict notions of apostolic poverty presented stories about St. Francis that underscored the ideal of non-ownership of any personal property, often using analogies from nature to argue their point. Those who, on the other hand, thought that the Franciscan organization, in order to survive and grow, needed justification for private—or at the very least communal—ownership of books, vestments, buildings, and property, painted the picture of a Francis much less stringent in his regulation of poverty and in his prohibitions about interaction with the marketplace. They, too, found justification for their position in the workings of the natural world. Not surprisingly, there are also positions that lie everywhere along the spectrum that exists between these extremes. Thus, the figure of St. Francis became a site upon which thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Franciscan polemicists staged their competing views of what the order should be and what it should become, and all of the polemicists used nature in arguing their case. For this reason, we need to treat the early Franciscan sources with care, no matter what the object of inquiry may be.3	. . .