Lisa J. Kiser

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

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 3

     A second problem that contributes to the difficulty of recovering information about Francis, his views, and the conceptions of nature embodied in them is that medieval narratives emanating from religious communities are often replete with biblical allusions and conventional allegorical motifs, both of which were considered desirable forms of literary embellishment among the authors and readers of the time. What medieval writers considered as mere embellishment, however, we sometimes would consider as obvious fictionalizing; clearly, medieval standards of "truth" in historical writing often differ immensely from our own. Moreover, the most significant medieval writings about St. Francis are written in the hagiographical genre, a genre in which writers were expected to provide incidents from the saint's life which resemble those found in the life of Christ or which narrate situations with identifiable resemblances to biblical stories and to the lives of early Christian saints. Thus, for example, scenes involving wildlife, landscapes, and other natural phenomena sometimes were borrowed from the Bible or drawn from the plentiful stock of conventional hagiographic motifs, existing less as a record of contemporary medieval life than as part of a complex semiotic system involving the Bible and legends about the primitive Christian saints and martyrs, all of which were considered to be unimpeachable sources for the development of narratives about exemplary human sanctity in the medieval period. Hagiography also required that saints be provided with a number of conventional miracles, because part of hagiography's purpose was to aid in documenting the sanctity of an individual during the process of canonization and, afterward, to encourage the growth and spread of the cult. In addition, the hagiographers who were the most artful in their creation of biographical material out of whole cloth to meet the genre's requirements were often those respected as the most "authoritative" sources of information about saints, and their works were copied and imitated throughout the Middle Ages. Needless to say, as medieval historians well know, such authorities must be believed at our peril, even though their writings constitute, in some cases, all we have left in the way of contemporary information about the lives of certain medieval individuals.⁴ 4

     In spite of its unreliability as a factual source for specific information about individual saints, however, hagiography supplies us with a rich source of information about medieval social and philosophical attitudes. Even when narratives about saints and their exploits are entirely fictional, they nonetheless were written partly in order to promote or discourage certain kinds of behavior and certain patterns of thought in their readership. In other words, one of hagiography's most important purposes was exemplary in nature. It was designed to intersect with actual medieval life by urging its readers to accept certain attitudes about the world around them and then to act accordingly in their daily lives. To this end, hagiographers included in their narratives much that we can identify as "realistic." We can discover in them, for example, clear depictions of medieval gender roles, legal practices, economic behavior, monastic ideology, and local social customs.⁵ We also can see, rather vividly in some instances, detailed representations of local geography, with settings tailored to appeal to a readership's identification with a specific place. In those saints' lives that contain geographical description of landscapes (and, along with them, ideas about human interaction with the land), we can detect a variety of medieval environmental attitudes that might otherwise remain hidden from view. In the case of medieval texts about St. Francis, especially those written within the four decades after his death (that is, between 1226 and 1263), we can deduce several things about late medieval environmental thought, specifically about the land, land management, and the botanic environment, at a critical time in Italian environmental history. 5

Early Franciscans and the Natural World

ALTHOUGH MANY are aware of the animal stories in the Franciscan tradition, few have realized that medieval Franciscan sources also demonstrate strong beliefs about the role of humans as stewards of the land and the flora that it supports. Some early biographies of Francis, for example, express the concepts of environmental sustainability, renewable resources, and the importance of plant life in the community of living things. Francis is said, for instance, to have cautioned his fellow friars about harvesting too much wood from the forests. While collecting firewood, he urged the friars to engage in the practice of coppicing, that is, avoiding destruction of the whole tree, "so that it might have hope of sprouting again."⁶ Showing what appears at times to be a rather radically animistic view of the physical world, he also is said to have treated water, rocks, and fire as having sensate being. His biographers note that he would avoid treading on or mistreating the first two, and that he allowed the third—namely, "Brother fire"—to satiate its "hunger" by consuming, at different times, his own linen underclothes (while he was wearing them) and the roof of the dwelling in which he had temporarily taken shelter. Also, in a companion piece to the famous story about his sermon to the birds, Francis is said to have preached to the wildflowers, treating them as a fully comprehending audience worthy of his closest attention and love.⁷ 6

     Perhaps more interesting to the environmental historian, however, are the statements that the saint provided gardening advice, and, in one version of his biography, actually kept a garden himself. These observations might not at first seem remarkable to modern readers, for it is widely known that medieval gardens were ubiquitous, showing up on the grounds of the poorest cottagers, in the backyards of the urban mercantile classes, on the estates of the noble and the wealthy—and on the enclosed property belonging to monastic institutions.⁸ What makes Francis's garden such a surprise to the medievalist is the knowledge that the saint was deeply committed to an itinerant life, a life of mendicancy characterized by wandering and begging door-to-door in towns and in the countryside for his food—a life, in short, removed from the geographical stability that tending a garden would seem to entail. His beliefs about strict poverty, visible in his early Rules, precluded personal ownership of anything (especially land). His earliest biographers remained true to the spirit of the early Rules by identifying his process of food procurement with that of animals and birds—one either foraged for food in the great outdoors or ate whatever was given to one as alms. Indeed, one of Francis's strictest prohibitions is said to have been against the storing of food to be used in the future, the very thing a garden is designed to provide. Using an animal analogy (of the sort that is so frequent in the writings of the early Franciscans), one of his admirers wrote that Francis disparaged the ant "because of the great diligence she hath in gathering together and storing up. ... He was wont to say that the birds pleased him much more, because they laid up not one day for the next."⁹ In another passage from the writings of his followers, Francis's love of the lark is noted, with the bird gaining Francis's affection by the lowliness of its food and the spontaneity of its food collection. "Sister lark," he is reported to have said, "is a humble bird who goes cheerfully along the road to find herself some corn, and even if she finds it among the dung of beasts, she takes it out and eats it."¹⁰ 7

     Moreover, one of the earliest polemical texts about St. Francis, the Sacred Exchange Between St. Francis and Lady Poverty of 1237 to 1239, overtly rejects the notion that the saint and his companions had access to a garden, clearly taking a strong position against Franciscan involvement with privatization of the land: "Since they did not have a gardener and knew nothing of a garden ... they gathered wild herbs in the woods."¹¹ Why, then, would a traveling mendicant, with an aversion to the ideas of property ownership and the storage of food for future use, condone a stationary, privately possessed tract of land intended to provide deferred food supplies? And why would one of his most conservative followers, a man committed to preserving rigorous standards of poverty, allow the saint to be represented as having an interest in such a place? Yet one of the earliest Franciscan biographical texts that we have, Thomas of Celano's The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul (1247), written about twenty years after the saint's death, contains an anecdote about the saint's garden plot, complete with its own gardener. The remainder of this essay will focus on Thomas's treatment of Francis's garden, which will be analyzed both as a feature following the conventions of the hagiographical genre and, more importantly, as a vehicle for understanding actual medieval thinking about human relationships to the land. 8

The Hagiographic Background

ALTHOUGH SOURCES earlier than Thomas of Celano's Remembrance, including his own Life of St. Francis (1228–1229) as well as the Scripta Leonis (a source for Thomas's Remembrance), do not suggest that the saint himself had a garden, it is likely that Thomas—a well-educated Latinist trained in the literary conventions of hagiography—decided to provide Francis with his own garden partly because ownership of gardens was a common literary motif in the biographies of the early desert fathers, those figures whose biographies served as models for medieval hagiography in general.¹² These primitive Christian saints, who were represented as having withdrawn from the world to live eremitic lives in the wilderness, usually had small gardens attached to their caves or huts out of which they scratched their meager subsistences. St. Antony, for instance, considered to be the saint-founder of monasticism, is said to have withdrawn in the fourth century to the Nile Valley and then to the mountains of Egypt, where he grew wheat for his bread and, later in his life, vegetables for visitors.¹³ Other saints, such as Paul the Hermit, Jerome, Felix, Romanus, Aemilianus, Phocas, Godric, Hilary, and Fiacre also are reported to have been gardeners, cultivating their spiritual selves along with their patches of ground.¹⁴ In hagiographical literature, the topos of the garden served to mark these saints as having withdrawn significantly from the worldly marketplace and having achieved a kind of economic self-sufficiency away from the secular affairs of the world.¹⁵ Thus Thomas, Francis's hagiographer, is able to underscore the saint's primitive austerity by providing him with a garden, for the garden allegorically signified flight from the world. 9

     In addition to the suggestion that monks with gardens had escaped from secular society to live self-sufficiently off the fruits of their own labors, gardens in religious texts also had theological significance that we cannot ignore. As symbols of Eden, medieval gardens would have reminded their visitors of the natural beauty of humanity's original protected dwelling place, urging them to contemplate the unhappy result of the Fall and the desirability of making peace with God in order to live once again in his Heavenly garden. That is, gardens on earth, especially those connected to religious institutions, were created, among other more practical reasons, to remind Christians of the biblical dialectics of the Fall and Salvation, and they did so by alluding to both Eden and Heaven, the terrestrial Paradise and the heavenly one to which good Christians aspire. As this theological tradition developed in the Latin West, gardens took on more elaborate religious symbolism, often referring to the Virgin Mary herself, whose virginal fertility was sometimes compared to an enclosed garden (the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs), a private and inviolate space that somewhat paradoxically produced fruit—in Mary's case, the fruit of Christ himself. Gardens thus allowed medieval Christians a chance to meditate on the theology of their salvation, and to do so through the concrete vehicle of geographical form. Although Thomas does not overtly theologize Francis's garden in this way, his monastic readership certainly would have recognized their own monastic gardens as having these symbolic functions.¹⁶ 10

     There is a further reason for the insistence on Francis's garden that is worth considering, namely, that its presence might have helped Thomas to legitimize Francis's new order of friars. At a time when the leaders of many radical Italian religious movements were being persecuted for heresy, Thomas would have wanted Francis's sect to have resembled, at least in some of its practices, the familiar and well-regarded monastic orders that followed the Benedictine Rule, which mentions the monastic garden in its forty-sixth chapter. Cloistered monks throughout the medieval period routinely kept gardens, both for growing their own food and spices and for cultivating medicinal herbs to aid in the healing of their ill brethren. Monastic customaries, documents written to elaborate upon how each house's practices conformed to the Benedictine Rule, sometimes mention in detail the kinds of things that should be grown in a monastic garden; the typical vegetables, generally associated with humility, included cabbage, leeks, beans, garlic, onions, turnips, and radishes, with whatever else might be necessary in the infirmary.¹⁷ By having Francis and his fellow friars attached to a garden, then, Thomas might have been providing his saint with a recognizably monastic identity, one in line with what was expected of an upstanding member of a cloistered spiritual community, yet one whose customs and values subtly reminded readers of the primitive—and rigorously observed—ideals of the ancient fathers of the desert. 11

The Garden of St. Francis

AT THE SAME time that Thomas might have been attempting to legitimize Francis and his order by supplying them with a monastic garden, details provided about the garden suggest that Thomas wished to call attention to its uniqueness. It is now time to look in detail at the garden that Thomas has provided for Francis: 12

Iubet hortulanum indefossos limites circa hortum dimittere, ut suis temporibus herbarum viror et florum venustas praedicent speciosum rerum omnium Patrem. Hortulum in horto herbis odoriferis et florificis praecipit designari, ut in memoriam suavitatis aeternae avocent speculantes.

[He commands the gardener to leave the edges of the garden undug, so that in their season the greenness of the grass and the beauty of flowers may proclaim the beauty of the Father of all. It is designated that within the garden there be a smaller garden for aromatic and flowering plants so that those who see them may be diverted by the memory of eternal sweetness.]¹⁸

     Clearly, as Thomas describes it, Francis's garden is supposed to be seen as different from those of other saints and from those of the monastic tradition with which Thomas's thirteenth-century readers would have been familiar. When Thomas notes that Francis wishes the borders of the garden to remain unditched, or undug (indefossos limites), and that he further wishes to have a portion of the garden plot devoted solely to aromatic and flowering plants, Thomas is suggesting that Francis is distinguishing his garden from those ordinarily expected among medieval monastic tillers of the earth. In other words, at the same time that he is trying to demonstrate Francis's credentials as a gardening-saint and as a bona-fide monastic community member, he also is striving to make Francis's garden idiosyncratically "Franciscan." 13

     To understand the import of Francis's apparent deviations from the plans of typical medieval monastic gardens, it is important to identify the normative structures that his garden violates. A major deviation can be seen in the unditched borders of Francis's garden, which would have been anomalies indeed. Medieval European gardens of all kinds typically were heavily marked out from their surrounding spaces by ditches, walls or some other sort of enclosure. In a twelfth-century encyclopedia, under the category "garden" (ortus), the anonymous author writes that a garden is a space "surrounded by ditches and hedges" (circumfoditur et circumsepitur), as if that were the single defining feature that separated gardens from other pieces of land.¹⁹ Both of the distinguishing words used in the passage about Francis's garden, limites and indefossos, are technical terms, the first meaning the legal boundary separating private property from land adjacent to it, and the second referring to the ditch that gardeners often would use to demarcate the edges of their gardens.²⁰ John Harvey sums up the steps taken to create a medieval garden in the following way: "When a garden was to be formed, the first essential was enclosure. This normally involved the formation of an external ditch with a fence or hedge on the bank made by casting up the soil inwards. Inside the bounding ditch might be a paling fence, or a live hedge, or a stone wall. Walls were often built around gardens; though more costly in outlay, they were generally economical in maintenance."²¹ 14

     Ditches, fences, and walls around medieval gardens served a variety of purposes. First, enclosure served to demarcate the garden as "private property"—as a space that was being managed and overseen by someone for his or her own personal benefit. They were a powerful marker of privatized space, and medieval legal codes were explicit and detailed in outlining the fines or other punishments that would accrue to anyone who breached the boundaries of someone else's garden.²² Enclosures around gardens acted either as signals to deter human trespassing (in the case of a ditch alone) or as actual barriers to prevent theft of the garden's contents (in the case of a wall or a fence). Second, ditches, fences, and other enclosures kept out animal intruders, such as cattle, foxes, and small rodents. The ditch also prevented the root systems of unwanted plants that spread by underground runners (such as some grasses) from invading and colonizing the garden. Third, strict enclosure of the explicitly monastic garden would have further contributed to the symbolic separation of monastic life in general from that of the uncloistered population at large. 15

     In giving Francis an unditched garden, Thomas is first of all clearly suggesting the saint's uneasiness with the concept of overly-managed land, that is, land prevented from behaving as it might if humans were not in control of it. The saint wanted the garden to be open enough to permit the invasion of surrounding plant life, allowing inside the garden's perimeters whatever plants came to rest there by their own devices. Likely volunteers in Francis's garden would have been grasses from the surrounding turf (viror herbarum), whose roots could have penetrated the unditched plot, or—as Thomas seems to imagine—wildflowers, which would bloom "in their seasons" (suis temporibus) to ornament the garden with unanticipated beauty.²³ Francis's garden, in other words, has a spontaneous and unplanned dimension, with nature's processes being allowed to shape it as they might. There exists no concept such as "weed" for the gardeners of this Franciscan plot, nor are its plants distinguished markedly from the wild plant communities surrounding it. In this way, Thomas celebrates a very Franciscan idea, one to be applied to human life (though here embodied in plants), namely, that the privileging of one kind of creature over another, whether by social class (as in the case of humans) or by plant status (as in the case of vegetables versus "weeds"), is wrong—as well as destructive of the Christian principle of God's love for all of his creation. For Francis, the greenness of the invading grass and the beauty of the self-seeding wildflowers forcefully contribute to his belief in the equality and praiseworthiness of all of earth's inhabitants (animal, vegetable, or mineral), including those of humble status, each of which was placed on earth to garner the Christian's respect and love.²⁴ 16

     In addition, the unditched borders diminish the sense that the garden is a private possession being managed by a proprietary overseer. It is instructive to note here that one of the most common garden motifs in hagiographical literature relates to saints and holy men who, by supernatural means, prevent intruders from entering their enclosed gardens and stealing their vegetables. For example, St. Felix's garden is violated by thieves, but through his miraculous powers, the thieves end up tilling it for him all night as a form of divine punishment. St. Godric scolds wild deer for stealing from his elaborately enclosed orchard-garden, and they obey him. A monastic gardener in Gregory's Dialogues orders a snake to guard his hedged vegetable patch, and it succeeds in scaring away thieves. St. Antony, bothered by the wild animals in the desert which trample his garden in search of water, commands them to stop, and they do.²⁵ Thus, in spite of monastic exhortations against the spirit of private ownership, there remained a widespread prejudice that monks deserved to have for themselves whatever their gardens produced. Hagiographical literature continually underscores the notion that saints are strong "border-markers" serving to help delineate the separate spaces of the sacred and the profane, and that intruders into their private lands are violators of these sacred boundaries.²⁶ Although Francis's garden is in part meant to recall the gardens of these previous holy men, his unditched borders are definitely a Franciscan innovation, one which quietly undermines the proprietary displays of the holy men who came before him. Moreover, in opening up Francis's garden to the world outside, Thomas is taking a visible stand against the increasingly widespread practice, especially in the Italy of his own time, of privatizing land that once before had been open to common rights of use.²⁷ We surely would not be amiss in attributing his resistance here to his belief that Franciscanism was—or should be—opposed to exclusionary practices of any kind. 17

     The second major point implicit in Thomas's descriptive passage is that St. Francis had a peculiar aversion to the concept of the strictly utilitarian garden. By writing that the saint wanted a small plot set aside within the confines of the vegetable garden, a hortulum in horto, to be designated for sweet-smelling and flowering plants (herbis odoriferis et florificis), Thomas suggests that this was an unusual demand and an unusual configuration for a garden plot. Francis was, in fact, acting contrary to the most common practices of small monastic institutions here by mixing non-utilitarian flowers with vegetables and medicinal herbs. Large monastic institutions often would have cloister garths (mowed or scythed grassy spaces with flowerbeds along the walls) for the monks' enjoyment and peaceful contemplation or for cultivating flowers with symbolic Christian meaning (such as roses and lilies) to ornament the church on special feast days. Flower gardens per se, however, were not common and were, in fact, markers of wealth, leisure, and elevated social station when grown in any lavish or conspicuous display, a gesture at odds with monastic philosophy.²⁸ The gardens of monastic institutions generally were intended to be symbolic of the monks' humility and poverty, with vegetables grown there that would make monastic diets resemble those of the peasant classes.²⁹ The Fleury customary notes, in its inventory of what might be grown in the monastic garden, that it is for "useful plants" (proficuas herbas)—those serving as actual food (pulmenta) or as compounds to sweeten bitter food and flavor healthful teas.³⁰ At Corbie, records from which are particularly detailed, we find that the gardens in this ninth-century monastery were to contain "plants of whatever kind, out of which food can be made" (herbae cujuslibet generis, unde pulmentarium fieri debet).³¹ And Cassiodorus's De institutione divinarum litterarum, a book consulted as a model for monastic culture throughout the entire medieval period, suggests that monasteries had gardens for growing plants useful in two capacities only: for nutriments and for medicines.³² Therefore, Francis's plan to have a flower garden—solely for olfactory and visual pleasure—was unusual, and even, perhaps, mildly transgressive of thirteenth-century monastic custom. 18

     The image of the non-utilitarian garden gives expression to some central Franciscan doctrines involving nature and the various life forms included under its general purview. First of all, the non-productive garden space would have supported the early Franciscan belief that storing up surplus food for the future was a morally negative act, contrary to a friar's true faith that God (not a garden) would provide for one's needs. As Francis is said to have preached to the birds, "Though you neither sow nor reap, [God] nevertheless protects you and governs you without your least care."³³ Moreover, Francis was characterized, by all his hagiographers and by others who claimed to have known him, as having been deeply susceptible to natural beauty, having been aesthetically (and presumably spiritually) inspired by the humblest of living things. Those familiar with the "Canticle of Brother Sun," a poem attributed by many to Francis himself and one of the most moving declarations extant of the pleasure that nature brings to humanity, will remember its praise for the beauty of "our Sister Mother Earth" (sora nostra matre Terra), especially for her "colored flowers and plants" (coloriti flori ed erba), a phrase that Thomas surely borrowed to describe those very flowers and sweet-smelling plants that he had Francis order for his horticulum in horto.³⁴ 19

Implications for Environmental History

BY STUDYING Francis's garden within its larger setting, then, we can gain an understanding of some thirteenth-century Italian attitudes about the land and its botanical life, attitudes that do not often get overtly expressed in other kinds of writing, whether scientific or religious. Francis's garden, too, helps us understand early Franciscan ideology better, because its details show how Francis's ideas might have been extrapolated and instantiated in actual horticultural practice. Finally, after studying his garden, we might also be better able to explain one of the most mysterious passages in all of medieval Franciscan literature, one likewise predicated on a representation of the saint's thinking about the land. In a passage at the very beginning of Thomas of Celano's Life of St.Francis, written in 1228 to 1229, we learn that the young Francis began his conversion with a glimpse of the countryside: 20

Die quadam foras exivit et circumadiacentem provinciam coepit curiosius intueri. Sed pulchritudo agrorum, vinearum amoenitas et quidquid visu pulchrum est, in nullo eum potuit delectare. Mirabatur propterea subitam sui mutationem, et praedictorum amatores stultissimos reputabat.

[H]e went outside one day and began to gaze upon the surrounding countryside with greater interest. But the beauty of the fields, the delight of the vineyards, and whatever else was beautiful to see could offer him no delight at all. He wondered at the sudden change in himself, and considered those who loved these things quite foolish.³⁵

     Given Francis's later commitment to the beauties of the natural world, this passage seems strange indeed. Why would he be portrayed as rejecting, early on, the very natural beauty that his followers, Thomas especially, would later proclaim as central to his understanding of himself as the harbinger of a new order, of a new way of relating humanity to its natural environment? Using the example provided by the details in Francis's garden, a persuasive case can be made that this passage confirms, rather than contradicts, what Thomas was suggesting about the saint's relationship to the land. For what Francis is surely imagined as seeing here in the landscape of the fields and the vineyards of Assisi's surrounding contado, is the image, writ large, of the overly-managed landscape that he later rejected in his garden. The landscape that Thomas shows him gazing upon, especially its fields and vineyards, betrays the unmistakable marks of human cultivation, of nature tamed and disciplined in its service to the emerging capitalist agricultural economy, the very economy the saint had hoped to critique—and then escape. What we are to imagine Francis detecting behind this simple outdoor scene is the presence of a hidden but powerful system of private land ownership by the Umbrian nobility, the rising bourgeoisie, and the wealthy church, a system of exploitation and exchange which he later came to oppose.³⁶ The observation that Europe in general underwent what we might call the "gardenization" of the countryside in the centuries after the agricultural revolution, which is especially well documented for western and central Europe by French medievalists of the Annales school, has been confirmed and refined by Italian historians, who have thoroughly analyzed the privatization, fragmentation, and enclosure of the Italian landscape which resulted from both urbanization and the rise of the precapitalist market economy. Northern and central Italian city dwellers of the late twelfth century—including Francis's own father at the time the saint experienced his conversion—would have witnessed directly the effects on the landscape of the increased productivity sought from the cities' surrounding areas.³⁷ 21

     We need, therefore, to analyze Francis's garden as an important Franciscan response to the economic and social changes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both his open garden—which allows access to those with no private claim to its contents—as well as his advice to plant a garden with non-utilitarian dimensions—which quietly argues against production of the sort of surplus that might be sent to market for profit—demonstrate Thomas of Celano's rebellion against the proprietary and market-oriented use of the land which was predominant around cities at the time he was writing and which, to him, represented a force that Franciscanism needed to oppose. It is also significant both to the history of the Franciscan order and to the history of environmental thought that in the decades following Thomas's portrayal of St. Francis, the saint's garden virtually disappeared in the literature about him, as did the saint's reflections on the landscape, his preaching to the flowers, and his commitment to the principles of wise forestry. This later lack of attention to the land and the plant life it supports is especially true of the "official" biography of the saint, the Legenda Major written by Bonaventure in 1263. We cannot explain this change of attitude with any certainty, but it surely reflected changes in the ideology of the Franciscan order itself, which was becoming more accustomed to the values of the marketplace and more dependent on the support of the urban mercantile class for its later survival and growth. In the years following Francis's death, the order became less invested in establishing connections with the countryside and its wildlife, and instead identified itself more closely with the economically complex urban centers that provided both the people and the resources for the order's continuing success. Thomas of Celano, perhaps recognizing that the order was beginning to move in this direction, clearly characterized Francis in such a way as to remind his readership of the primitive ideals of the order's founder, one of them being the rejection of the concept of privatized, heavily-managed land being employed as part of a system of mercantile exchange.³⁸ 22

     Thus St. Francis's garden provides us with an unusual perspective on a moment in historical time—the change from older, feudal economic arrangements to incipient capitalism—that was of great significance to the development of modern European attitudes toward the land. Recognizing that the motif of the saint's small plot of ground could have enormous economic and social implications when its function and its design were used to critique the larger socio-economic trends visible in the Italian countryside, Thomas used it, and Francis himself, to protest others' unexamined assumptions about humanity's place in a world filled with other living beings, each of which has a claim to—and a rightful place in—environments unfortunately dominated by the model of human economic gain. 23

Lisa J. Kiser is a professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (1983), Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry (1991), and a number of essays and reviews on nature in the Middle Ages.

Notes
I am grateful to James Battersby, Ethan Knapp, Christopher A. Jones, Adam Rome, Karen Winstead, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable aid in preparing this essay.
^1. This argument was first promulgated in 1967 by Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (March 1967): 1203–07, but it has reappeared in more recent historical analysis. See, for example, Edward A. Armstrong, Saint Francis, Nature Mystic: The Derivation and Significance of the Nature Stories in the Franciscan Legend (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); David J. Herlihy, "Attitudes Toward the Environment in Medieval Society," in Historical Ecology: Essays on Environmental and Social Change, ed. Lester J. Bilsky (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 115; Franco Cardini, "Francesco d'Assisi e gli animali," Studi Francescani 78 (1981): 7–46; Roger D. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes Toward the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); P. Hooper and Martin Palmer, "St. Francis and Ecology," in Christianity and Ecology, ed. Elizabeth Breuilly and Martin Palmer (London, Cassell, 1992), 76–85; Susan Power Bratton, Christianity, Wilderness and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1993); and J. D. Hughes, "Francis of Assisi and the Diversity of Creation," Environmental Ethics 18 (1996): 311–20. Clarence J. Glacken, in Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 214–16, notes some of the narratives in the Franciscan canon that have stimulated scholarly thinking about Francis's attitudes toward nature.

^2. The surviving writings attributable to St. Francis himself include a number of short prayers, letters, admonitions, and exhortations; two Rules for his order (one of 1221 and one of 1223); a Testament of 1226; and some devotional verse praising God and his creation. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. and trans. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), vol. 1, The Saint, 35–167. This series of volumes containing medieval Franciscan texts hereafter will be cited in the abbreviated form, Early Documents.

^3. For the early history of the Franciscan order and the economic controversies within it, see John H. R. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from Its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), esp. 105–54; Rosalind B. Brooke, Early Franciscan Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); M. D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210–1323 (London: S.P.C.K., 1961), 67–102 and 126–40; and Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 146–69. On the medieval legends' role in these controversies, see Moorman's The Sources for the Life of St. Francis of Assisi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1940), esp. 141–48, and Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 16–29.

^4. On the conventions of hagiographical narratives and their unreliability as documents of historical fact, see Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 38–71; Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–15; and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–20.

^5. For example, social information regarding attitudes about gender, class, and local place derivable from hagiographical narratives is examined by Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 166–238.

^6. Quoted from Thomas of Celano, Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, sec. 124, in Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder, 354. (In earlier scholarship, Thomas's Remembrance is often referred to as the Vita Secunda.) See also Mirror of Perfection, chap. 118 (Early Documents, vol.3, The Prophet, 366) and Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum Francisci, ed. and trans. Rosalind B. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), chap. 51, 179. Cp. Job 14:7. The medieval practice of coppicing trees to harvest wood from a continuously growing trunk and root stock is described in Roland Bechmann, Trees and Man: The Forest in the Middle Ages, trans. Katharyn Dunham (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 201–12.

^7. For the best-known passages about rocks and water, see Remembrance, chap. 24 (Early Documents, 2:354); Scripta Leonis, sec. 51, 179; and Mirror of Perfection, chap. 118 (Early Documents, 3:366). For passages about fire, see Mirror of Perfection, chap. 116 (Early Documents, 3:365); and Scripta Leonis, secs. 49–50, 177. For the wildflowers, see Thomas of Celano's Life of St. Francis, chap. 29 (Early Documents, 1:251).

^8. The literature on medieval gardens is extensive and specialized. Useful general studies include John Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens (Beaverton, Ore: Timber Press, 1981); Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Elisabeth B. MacDougall, ed., Medieval Gardens, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, vol. 9 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986); and Filippo Pizzoni, The Garden: A History in Landscape and Art, trans. Judith Landry (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), 10–11 and 20–26. On secular medieval Italian pleasure gardens, see Johanna Bauman, "Tradition and Transformation: The Pleasure Garden in Piero de'Crescenzi's Liber ruralium commodorum," Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 22 (2002): 99–141; Robert G. Calkins, "Piero de Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden," in Medieval Gardens, MacDougall, 155–73; Franco Cardini, "Il limite: Il giardino e la poetica delle spazio chiuso," in Il giardino e la mura: Ai confini fra natura e storia, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Giorgio Galletti, and Maria Adriana Giusti, Atti del Convegno di Studi San Miniato Alto, Pisa, 1995 (Florence: Edizioni Firenze, 1995): 23–36; and Georgina Masson, Italian Gardens (New York: Abrams, 1961). On vegetable and medicinal gardens in medieval Italy, especially between the eighth and tenth centuries, see Massimo Montanari, L'alimentazione contadina nell'alto Medioevo (Naples: Liguori Editori, 1979), 22–27 and 309–71.

^9. The Sayings of Brother Giles, chap. 7, trans. Thomas Okey, in The Little Flowers of St. Francis; The Mirror of Perfection; St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis, intro. Hugh McKay (New York: Dutton, 1973), 166.

^10. Scripta Leonis, chap. 110, 283. See also Mirror of Perfection, chap. 113 (Early Documents, 3:362).

^11. Early Documents, 1:552. It is also relevant here to note that Jacques de Vitry, in his Histories of the East and of the West (ca. 1223), underscores the notion of the rootlessness of the early Franciscans by saying that "the world is their spacious cloister" (cited in Little, Religious Poverty, 167). See also Little's characterization of the early Franciscans: "The Franciscans tended to stay in caves and huts, or just wherever they could find temporary shelter. ... Francis urged his brothers to live in the world as pilgrims and strangers, in part so that they would not become attached to any one place. The friars avoided utterly the Benedictine notion of stability of place, having absorbed into their notion of the apostolate something of the extensive travel engaged in by the original Apostles," 159.

^12. Thomas of Celano's original life of St. Francis, the so-called Vita Prima (1228–1229), does not contain the garden. His Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul (1247), rather than being a full-fledged biography, is actually a biographical addendum, providing further anecdotes about Francis, some of them collected from sources unavailable to the author when he wrote his Vita Prima. One of these sources was the Scripta Leonis. There, Francis makes remarks about a garden plot attached to a friary in which he was staying, a much more rational narrative than the one suggesting that he owned the garden himself. Yet if Thomas did use this story as his source, he dropped the friary, added many details, and attributed the garden to Francis. The garden also appears in one text much later than Thomas's, namely The Mirror of Perfection, chap. 118, a work which borrows heavily from his. The official biography of Francis, written by St. Bonaventure in 1260–1263, does not include the garden.

^13. For a convenient translation of the garden passage, see St. Athanasius's Life of St. Antony, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers Series, vol. 10 (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950), 63.

^14. Romanus and Aemilianus are portrayed in Gregory of Tours's well-known Vita Patrum. See Vita Patrum: The Life of the Fathers, trans. Fr. Seraphim Rose (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1988), 123 and 240. Felix appears in Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 93. For Godric, see Helen Waddell, Beasts and Saints (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1934), 73–75.

^15. See Paul Meyvaert, "The Medieval Monastic Garden," in MacDougall, Medieval Gardens, 25–26. For a glimpse of some of the desert fathers' gardens, see Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers (New York: Henry Holt, 1936), 84, 149, 185, 210, 223–24, and 244–45. John Cassian's De coenobiorum institutis, a foundational work for Western monasticism, also notes the presence of gardens among the anchoritic and cenobitic monks in the Egyptian desert; see esp. Book 4, chaps. 18 and 30, and Book 10, chap. 24, in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: J.P. Migne, 1844–1865) vol. 49, cols. 177, 192 and 395 (hereafter PL). Cassiodorus's De institutione divinarum litterarum, a treatise concerning the ways in which desert monasticism intersects with medieval monastic life, notes that monks should cultivate gardens for their food and medicines; see PL 70, cols. 1142–43. On the garden motif in hagiography in general, see Montanari, L'alimentazione, 339–42.

^16. For scholarly treatments of the theology implied by the medieval garden, see, for example, Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 56–118; A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 48–86; Brian E. Daly, "The 'Closed Garden' and the 'Sealed Fountain': Song of Songs 4:12 in the Medieval Iconography of Mary," in Macdougall, ed., Medieval Gardens, 267–78; and Marcello Fagioli, "Le mura e il giardino," in Luchinat, Galletti, and Giusti, Il giardino, 2–3. For actual medieval archeological evidence from late medieval Norwich suggesting that some monastic gardens may have had exclusively spiritual functions, see Claire Noble, "Spiritual Practice and the Designed Landscape: Monastic Precinct Gardens," Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 20 (2000): 197–205.

^17. See, for example, the customary by Thierry of Amorbach (supposedly reflecting the usages of Fleury around the year 1000) in Consuetudinum Saeculi X/XI/XII Monumenta Non-Cluniacensia, vol. 7, pt. 3, ed. Kassius Hallinger OSB, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticorum (Siegburg: Franz Schmitt, 1984), 32. My thanks to Christopher A. Jones for locating this reference. On medieval Italian monastic gardens, and the kinds of plants and vegetables grown in them, see Montanari, L'alimentazione, 338–71.

^18. Remembrance, chap. 124. All Latin quotations are from the edition of the Quaracchi Fathers in Analecta Franciscana 10 (1926): 226. My translation is partially based on that of Placid Hermann, who refers to the work by means of its older title, Vita Secunda, in St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, ed. Marion Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), 495. I also have consulted the translation in Early Documents, 2:354.

^19. De bestiis et aliis rebus libri quatuor, chap. 13, PL 177, col. 154.

^20. See Luciano Lagazzi, Segni sulla terra: Determinazione dei confini e percezione dello spazio nell'alto Medioevo, Biblioteca di Storia Agraria Medievale, vol. 8 (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice, 1991), 22 and 26; on limites , Lagazzi, Segni, 54–56, also cites Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, in which the tenth-century author notes that the term is applied to refer to agrarian boundaries (chap. 15, section 14). On fossatum as a gardening term, see also Piero de' Crescenzi's Liber ruralium commodorum, which describes how gardeners should dig out borders along the edges of their gardens. See Book 8, chap. 2, sec 1 and chap. 5, sec. 1, ed. and trans. Johanna Bauman, "Tradition and Transformation": 101 and 105.

^21. Mediaeval Gardens, 110. See also Theresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (London: Collins, 1981), 37; Landsberg, The Medieval Garden, 63; and Bridget Ann Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 62, where the author writes: " If a dictionary of medieval gardening terms were ever to be compiled, the two most important entries under the letter C would be control and containment."

^22. Law codes from the ninth and tenth centuries have been especially carefully analyzed for garden-breaching crimes by Montanari, L'alimentazione; see esp. 23, where he quotes one legal document thus: "Si quis in orto alterius introierit aut salierit ad furtum faciendum, conponat solidos sex (If anyone enters or leaves another's garden for the purpose of committing theft, he will pay six solidos)." Lagazzi, Segni, 23 and 26–29, treats some of the same statutes as Montanari, underscoring the notion of gardens as highly privatized spaces. In the Salic Law of the Franks (510–750), admittedly remote in space and time from the material we have been treating, the punishment for breaking into an enclosed garden was five times more severe than for unenclosed ground, an interesting fact that reflects on an earlier, and very proprietary, medieval attitude toward enclosed gardens. See Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens, 27.

^23. Here it is useful to compare Thomas's text with that of his source, the Scripta Leonis, in which Francis advises a friary gardener to "set free part of the land so that it will produce green plants which in their time will bring forth Brother Flowers" (chap. 51, in Brooke, 178; my translation). This text, more obviously than Thomas's, suggests that Francis is imagining wildflowers (rather than cultivars) growing in the garden.

^24. On the medieval belief in the inherent "social status" of various plants (which Francis calls into question here), see Allen J. Grieco, "The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification," I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 131-49; and Grieco's essay "The Social Order of Nature and the Natural Order of Society in late 13th—early 14th-Century Italy," Miscellanea Mediaevalia 21/2 (1992): 898-907. For a rare medieval anecdote about the burdensome practice of weeding large monastic gardens, see Montanari, L'alimentazione, 350-51. It is also interesting to note that the open, potentially weed-filled, garden parallels Francis's own beliefs about his order: despite papal concern, he wanted anyone, regardless of training, social status, or experience, to be allowed to enter his brotherhood.

^25. For Felix, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 93; for Godric, see Waddell, Beasts and Saints, 73-75; for the monastic gardener and his snake, see Gregory's Dialogues, Book 1, chap. 3, in The Dialogues of Saint Gregory, trans. Philip Warner (London: Medici Society, 1911), 14-15; for Antony, see Athanasius's The Life of Saint Antony, 63.

^26. See Lagazzi, Segni, 70-79, for saints as boundary-keepers.

^27. For examples from an earlier period, see Lagazzi, Segni, 53 and 66; and Montanari, L'alimentazione, 474. Enclosure clearly resulted in resentment by neighboring populations in the later medieval period as well. In 1294, some Italian peasants attacked the newly-built enclosures of the abbey of San Martino, making a hole in the wall around the woodlot; during litigation the peasants claimed that the wall was preventing them from gaining access to the wood products they had customarily used. See Charles M. de Roncière, "A Monastic Clientele? The Abbey of Settimo, its Neighbors and its Tenants (Tuscany, 1280-1340)," trans. Chris Wickham, in City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones, ed. Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 62.

^28. For the size and grandeur of flower gardens as markers of social status, see Cardini, "Il limite,"30-33; Pizzoni, The Garden, 22-23; and Bauman, "Tradition and Transformation":136.

^29. See Montanari, L'alimentazione, 357.

^30. Consuetudinum, 32. See also Walahfrid Strabo's poem about a monastic garden, the Hortulus, written ca. 840 but circulated in the centuries afterward; there, the poet lists all of the plants in an ideal monastic garden, noting the practical utility of each, either culinary or medicinal. Lilies and roses are the only showy flowering plants, appearing as symbols of faith and Christ's passion respectively—yet even these two are said to have immediate medicinal applications as well. See Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, transcribed and translated by Raef Payne (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Hunt Botanical Library, 1966). Friary gardens, usually in towns, were even more spartan, specializing in trees to supply the friars with firewood. See McLean, Medieval English Gardens, 53-54.

^31. Statute quoted in Montanari, L'alimentazione, 346n.

^32. PL 70, cols. 1142-43.

^33. Thomas of Celano, Life, chap. 21 (Early Documents, vol. 1, 284); and St. Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis, chap. 12 (Early Documents, vol. 2, 62). This sermon paraphrases Matt. 6:25 and Luke 12:24; in Thomas's text it forcefully praises extrication from all human economic orders.

^34. "Canticle of Brother Sun" (sometimes called "The Canticle of the Creatures"), line 9, in Early Documents, 1:114.

^35. Life of St. Francis, chap. 2, in Early Documents, 1:185.

^36. For general surveys on the growth of the cities and on how that growth depended on surrounding rural development and the new rural bourgeoisie landowning class, see Gino Luzzatto, Dai servi della gleba agli albori del capitalismo (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 157-61 and 207-28; and L. A. Kotel'nikova, Mondo contadino e citt� in Italia dall'XI al XIV secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975), esp. 19-141. On the close relationship of the contado (an Italian city's surrounding agricultural lands, upon which it depends) and the emerging pre-capitalist urban market economy, see Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 171 and 280-81; and Ronald Edward Zupko and Robert Anthony Laures, Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law—The Case of Northern Italy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 89-91.

^37. On the history of the privatization, the intense cultivation, and the enclosure of land throughout France and Central Europe generally, see Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 56-63 and 198-213 ; and Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), esp. 72-75, 84-86, and 158-65. For Italy, see Giovanni Cherubini, Signori, Contadini, Borghesi: Ricerche sulla societ� Italiana del Basso Medioevo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974), 134-35; Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 62-106, where the author closely tracks the changing of "open fields" into the "closed fields" of the age of privatization; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984), 71-82; and Luzzatto, Dai servi, 214-15. On the fragmented landscapes of the Mediterranean and the intensive productivity made possible only by heavily-managed parcels of land in a "landscape of power," see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 209, 219-20, 236-37, 254-55, and 276. On the agricultural lands owned by Francis's own father, who was a merchant living within the city of Assisi, see Arnaldo Fortini, Nova Vita di San Francesco (Assisi: Edizioni Assisi, 1959), 1:142-49 and 2:111-12. For another example of the expansion of city landowning at the time of the rise of the Franciscans, see Chris Wickham, "Rural Communes and the City of Lucca at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century," in City and Countryside, ed. Chris Wickham, 9.

^38. Thomas of Celano's position concerning these internal debates is clearer in the Remembrance than in the Life; the former (i.e., later) work seems to mark him more clearly as a "protospiritual," in that he seems to identify there with those who resisted the order's increasingly relaxed views on private ownership and the accumulation of worldly wealth. For a recent assessment of Bonaventure's more flexible (and thus more practical) views concerning poverty, private ownership of goods, and the order's cooperation with the urban mercantile elite, see Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 16-17.

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