Life of St. Francis of Assisi by Paul Sabatier

Description

Paul Sabatier’s Life of St. Francis of Assisi has a good claim to be the most influential biography of a saint ever written for the general reader. Published in French in 1894 and translated at once into the world’s languages, it changed the image of the little poor man from a safely-enshrined medieval figure into a living, difficult, irresistibly human presence. Sabatier was a Protestant pastor and historian who saw in Francis a Christianity stripped of power and property — and his book scandalized and thrilled exactly as its subject would have wished.

The volume opens with a portrait of Assisi itself, “very much what it was six or seven hundred years ago,” its ruined feudal castle and ancient houses climbing the hill beneath Mount Subasio. From that setting Sabatier draws the young Francis — the rich merchant’s son, the gaudy knight, the sudden encounter with lepers and the voice from the cross at San Damiano — and follows him through the founding of the order, the approval of the rule, the mission to the infidel, and the slow, sorrowful retreat as the order grew beyond the man who made it.

Sabatier wrote with immense learning worn lightly, and his footnotes consult every surviving source. But the book’s authority is finally literary: a biography that makes the reader love its subject, and that reads the saint’s story as the story of a soul. This edition carries the complete text and apparatus in a single well-set volume.

Why readers still come back to it

• The classic modern biography — the book that re-created Francis for the twentieth century.
• Scholarship and sympathy in perfect balance, with full scholarly apparatus.
• A moving portrait of the saint whose radical poverty keeps speaking to every age.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, real linked footnotes, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.