Life of St. Francis of Assisi

“Love is the true key of history.” — Paul Sabatier

When Paul Sabatier’s life of Francis appeared in Paris it was an immediate success, and within a year this translation had carried it to readers in England and America. For many of them it was a first meeting with Francis as a living man rather than a figure in a stained-glass window. It is also the book with which the modern study of St. Francis begins.

Sabatier was a French Protestant pastor who loved Francis and the friars, and it shows on every page. Setting aside centuries of embroidered legend, he went back to the earliest witnesses (Thomas of Celano, the Three Companions, the Mirror of Perfection and Francis’s own writings). His questions about which sources tell the truth, still called “the Franciscan Question,” set the course for a century of scholarship.

This edition presents Louise Seymour Houghton’s English translation complete: the twenty chapters of the Life, Sabatier’s Critical Study of the Sources, his appendix on the Stigmata and the Portiuncula Indulgence, all of his notes, and a new Note to This Edition.