Dear List Members,
One of my students is trying to track down a cryptic reference to a story
about St. Francis--so far, with no luck.
Here's the reference that first aroused his curiosity:
"It has none of the exuberance of St. Francis of Assisi rolling naked in
the filth and welcoming his Sister Death" pg 178 in Mary Douglas' *Purity
and Danger*
He's looked in all the sources that he and I could think of, including the
"Little Flowers" and even the Latin *Speculum Perfectionis*, but the
closest parallel he's found to Douglas's story is an oblique reference to
the same or a related tradition, again by a modern writer:
"Francis, before his death, asked to be stripped of his clothes and placed
on the naked earth for he wished to have no other coffin for his body" pgs
81-82 in Lawrence Cunningham's *St. Francis* (in the Twayne series). This
second reference points to a "xl, 117" in Dante. This turns out to be
Paradiso Canto xi line 117, which in my edition merely
states that Francis requested to be laid on the ground when he died; the
editor
(Sinclair) does not cite any earlier source for this.
In Thomas of Celano's account, there is the lying on the ground and
comforting his brethren til death-- but no exuberance, and he is laid naked
on the ground so to fight naked againts the fiend if he should come-- not
because he wanted no coffin.
Do this story (in any of its variants) ring a bell with anyone on the list?
We'd welcome any suggestions you may have about its source or sources.
Sherry Reames (Dept. of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison)
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