Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how Thomas of Celano applied embodied emotional practices as a technique to integrate his first hagiography of Saint Francis into the highly emotional and bodily devotional context of his time, in the process exploring the development of the identity of Saint Francis.

Paper long abstract:

Thomas of Celano (1190-1260) was an Italian Franciscan friar who wrote the Vita Prima (1228), which was the first hagiography of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). In the Vita Prima, Celano describes Francis as imitating Christ, while in later hagiographies, Francis is subsequently described as a mirror image of Christ, close to Christ, and finally identified with Christ. The latter sparked an Imitatio Francisci tradition. In other words, the identity of Saint Francis as a saint changed between de Vita Prima and a later imitation Francisci tradition.

There are several reasons why the hagiographical tradition developed from Francis' imitation of Christ to an Imitatio Francisci. In this paper, I highlight one reason not yet articulated in the literature: his contemporaneity and recognisability. Francis illustrated how Christ could be followed and how the life's pilgrimage could be translated into the context of the period. To substantiate the latter, I will illustrate in this paper how the Vita Prima was able to translate the life's pilgrimage to the highly emotional and bodily context of the devotional life of the high and late medieval period.

The paper aims to illustrate how this emotional and bodily devotional life comes to the fore in the account of Celano. Moreover, the paper will reveal how these emotional and bodily devotional lives are interwoven. To investigate this, I will employ the embodied emotional practices of Monique Sheer as a theoretical and methodological framework. This methodology connects bodily actions to emotions, making them more tangible and opening them up for comparison. Lastly, I will argue that these embodied emotional practices were used as a technique to ingrain the Prima Vita in the context of the time and unknowingly started the identity transformation process of Saint Francis.