
St. Francis, by Giotto
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Week 9. Legenda Aurea: Franciscus
Readings
| Weekly Activities
The lives of the saints were another vital story-telling tradition
in the Middle Ages. This week we will look at the story of Francis of
Assisi - St. Francis - who was born in Italy around 1182,
and who died there in 1226. Biographies were written about Francis soon
after he died; in this unit, we will be reading the Life of Francis contained
in the Golden Legend, an enormous and extremely influential
collection of saints' lives written by Jacob of Voragine in about 1265,
some forty years after Francis's death.
Francis was in fact one of the first people to actually write devotional
literature in Italian rather than Latin, so we will also look at one of
Francis' hymns in a Latin translation, so that you can compare
it to the emerging Italian vernacular. This is almost a thousand years
after Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin "vulgate"
of the common people; it has now come time for the literature of
the Christian Church to be recorded in Italian and the other vernacular
languages spoken by the peoples of Europe.
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