Further Reading
Clarence Smith, J. A. Medieval Law Teachers and Writers,
Civilian and Canonist. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press,
1975, p. 53.
Diplovatatius, Thomas. De claris iuris consultis: Pars poste-
rior, ed. Fritz Schulz, Hermann Kantorowicz, and Giuseppe
Rabotti. Studia Gratiana, 10. Bologna: Institutum Gratianum,
1968, pp. 158–161.
Emden, A. B. “Accorso, Francesco.” In A Biographical Register of
the University of Oxford to 1500, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon,
1957, Vol. 1, pp. 9–10.
Haskins, George L. “Francis Accursius: A New Document.”
Speculum, 13, 1938a, pp. 76–77.
——. “Three English Documents relating to Francis Accursius.”
Law Quarterly Review, 54, 1938b, pp. 87–94.
Haskins, George L, and Ernst H. Kantorowicz. “A Diplomatic
Mission of Francis Accursius and His Oration before Pope
Nicholas III.” English Historical Review, 58, 1943, pp.
424–447.
Kay, Richard. “Francesco d’Accorso the Unnatural Lawyer.” In
Dante’s Swift and Strong. Essays on “Inferno” XV. Lawrence:
The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978, pp. 39–66, 319–332.
Panzirolo, Guido. De claris legurn interpretibus. Leipzig: J.
F. Gleditsch, 1721, pp. 120–121. (Reprint, Farnborough:
Gregg, 1968.)
Sarti, Mauro, and Mauro Fattorini. De claris Archigymnasii
Bononiensis professoribus a saeculo XI usque ad saeculum
XIV, 2 vols., ed. C. Albicini and C. Malagola. Bologna: Ex
Offi cina Regia Fratrum Merlani, 1888–1896, Vol. 1, pp.
193–203.
Senior, W. “Accursius and His Son Franciscus.” Law Quarterly
Review, 51, 1935, pp. 513–516.
von Savigny, Friedrich Karl. Geschichte des romischen Rechts
im Mittelaker, 7 vols. Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1834–1851,
Vol. 5, pp. 306–322.
Weimar, Peter. “Die legistische Literarur der Glossatorenzeit.” In
Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäisch-
en Privatrechtsgeschichte, ed. Helmut Coing. Munich: Beck,
1973, Vol. 1, p. 220.
Robert C. Figueira
FRANCIS OF ASSISI, SAINT
(1181 or 1182—1226)
Saint Francis of Assisi (Francesco di Pietro di Bernar-
done) was a religious reformer and the founder of the
Franciscan order and the Poor Clares.
By some estimates, more books have been written
about Francis of Assisi than about any other person who
ever lived. In the twentieth century, for instance, he was
the subject not only of historical and religious works but
also of literary fi ction, movies, songs, and comic books.
Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a novel about Francis, and
W. E. B. DuBois once gave a commencement speech
in which he urged the graduates to make Francis their
model. Hermann Hesse and G. K. Chesterton wrote
essays on Francis. Adolf Holl called Francis “the last
Christian,” and the theologian Leonardo Boff described
him as the “model for human liberation.” In the nine-
teenth century, to take just one example, Henry Thode
(during the 1880s) described Francis as the initiator of
the Renaissance.
There was nothing new in the attention given to
Francis during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The artists who were called to Assisi in the century after
his death to decorate his burial church are a who’s who
of Italian painting: they included, among many others,
Giunta Pisano, Cimabue, Pietro Cavallini, Giotto, Sim-
one Martini, and Pietro Lorenzetti. The name Francis
was often given to boys, in Italy and beyond, during the
fourteenth century. Dante devoted a canto of Paradiso to
praising Francis. In short, Francis was an extraordinary
man who has inspired people of very different ways of
life and beliefs ever since he walked the roads of Italy
in the early thirteenth century.
Francis was born in the small Umbrian town of Assisi,
the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. Almost nothing
is known for certain about his youth. Apparently, Fran-
cis was renowned for generosity, even for prodigality;
and he clearly had an interest in chivalry and military
affairs. When he was about twenty years old, he fought
in a war between Assisi and its hated neighbor, Perugia.
Assisi was defeated, and Francis spent some time as a
prisoner of war. Later, he planned to enter the service of
Walter of Brienne in Apulia against the Hohenstaufen
king and to make a name for himself as a knight. Francis
also worked in his father’s cloth business, of which he
was to be the heir. Literally, Francis did not get very far
in his military career—he turned around and returned
to Assisi after traveling only a few miles—but he was
learning the cloth business, and he enjoyed the social
life of wealthy, popular youth.
When Francis was in his early twenties, he began to
fi nd solace in solitary prayer in the countryside around
Assisi. Soon, he came to believe that God wanted him
to rebuild churches, both by providing supplies and
by helping with the reconstruction. Thus far, Francis’s
father had indulged him, but a crisis came when Francis
sold some of his father’s cloth and offered the money to
the priest of San Damiano, a church in need of repair.
The family confl ict became a public matter when the
bishop was called on to decide between Francis and his
father, and this was also the moment when Francis’s
life crystallized. Francis stripped himself naked before
the bishop and returned every stitch of clothing to his
father. He had chosen a new path in life, and there was
no going back to his father; even after Francis came to
be famous and revered, he and his father were never
reconciled. Francis was to fi nd a different kind of family
and rely on a different kind of wealth.
Francis’s dramatic conversion is often represented as
a complete repudiation of everything he had been taught,
and as a metamorphosis of his own personality and char-
acter. However, Saint Bonaventure (d. 1274), who may
have been Francis’s most sophisticated biographer, didFRANCESCO D’ACCORSO