Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art [Hardcover]

Contributors demonstrate how the tools of various intellectual disciplines can be used to examine what we now know about the story of Saint Francis in his own era and how that story has been appropriated in our period.PART I:?Francis in Medieval Text and Painting * Franciscan Spirituality and Narrative at Assisi:?The Legend of St. Francis in Text and Painting - Beth Mulvaney * The?Miraculous?Moment:?Expressing?the?Spiritual?Experience?in Thirteenth-Century?Frescos?at?Assisi - Janet Snyder * Francis Preaching to the Sultan: Art in the Hagiography of a Saint - Mahmood Ibrahim * PART II: Franciscan Devotion * The Wolf in the Forest: St. Francis and the Italian Eremitical Tradition - Rodger Payne * What Has Paris to Do with Assisi? The Theological Creation of a Saint - John V. Apczynski ??* ?Franciscans in the World - Felix Heap and Jesus Gonzales?* The Visual Piety of the Sacro Monte di Orta - Cynthia Ho * PART III: Francis Remembered in New Contexts * A Christian Modernist and the Awe of Nature as Presented in Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint Fran?ois d'Assise - John McClain * Constructing Saint Francis for the?Twenty-first Century - Janet McCann?* Capturing the Gravity and Grace of St. Francis of Assisi on Stage: A Study of Divine Reciprocity - John Bowers * St.?Francis?in?the Twenty-first Century - John Hart * Canticle of Memory: Political Theology and Francis of Assisi - John Downey

This collection is an intriguing combination of the scholarly and the personal, and given the uniqueness of its subject, Francis of Assisi, this approach seems not only appropriate but also needed. It takes Francis into new areas, looks at him from some interesting perspectives, and given its range will have something new for any reader with an interest in Francis, from hard-core Franciscan scholars to those interested in Francis for more personal reasons. - Ronald Herzman, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo

Cynthia HolsJ