His chronicle, therefore, forms as it were the continuation of that legend. The members of the little circle of Greccio are they who recommend it to us; it has also their inspiration.
But writing long years after the death of these Brothers, Clareno feels the need of supporting himself also on written testimony; he repeatedly refers to the four legends from which he borrows a part of his narrative; they are those of Giovanni di Ceperano, Thomas of Celano, Bonaventura, and Brother Leo.[20] Bonaventura's work is mentioned only by way of reference; Clareno borrows nothing from him, while he cites long passages from Giovanni di Ceperano,[21] Thomas of Celano[22] and Brother Leo.[23]
Clareno takes from these writers narratives containing several new and extremely curious facts.[24]
I have dwelt particularly upon this document because its value appears to me not yet to have been properly appreciated. It is indeed partisan; the documents of which we must be most wary are not those whose tendency is manifest, but those where it is skilfully concealed.
The life of St. Francis and a great part of the religious history of the thirteenth century will surely appear to us in an entirely different light when we are able to fill out the documents of the victorious party by those of the party of the vanquished. Just as Thomas of Celano's first legend is dominated by the desire to associate closely St. Francis, Gregory IX., and Brother Elias, so the Chronicle of the Tribulations is inspired from beginning to end with the thought that the troubles of the Order—to say the word, the apostasy—began so early as 1219. This contention finds a striking confirmation in the Chronicle of Giordano di Giano.
V. The Fioretti[25]
With the Fioretti we enter definitively the domain of legend. This literary gem relates the life of Francis, his companions and disciples, as it appeared to the popular imagination at the beginning of the fourteenth century. We have not to discuss the literary value of this document, one of the most exquisite religious works of the Middle Ages, but it may well be said that from the historic point of view it does not deserve the neglect to which it has been left.
Most authors have failed in courage to revise the sentence lightly uttered against it by the successors of Bollandus. Why make anything of a book which Father Suysken did not even deign to read![26]
Yet that which gives these stories an inestimable worth is what for want of a better term we may call their atmosphere. They are legendary, worked over, exaggerated, false even, if you please, but they give us with a vivacity and intensity of coloring something that we shall search for in vain elsewhere—the surroundings in which St. Francis lived. More than any other biography the Fioretti transport us to Umbria, to the mountains of the March of Ancona; they make us visit the hermitages, and mingle with the life, half childish, half angelic, which was that of their inhabitants.
It is difficult to pronounce upon the name of the author. His work was only that of gathering the flowers of his bouquet from written and oral tradition. The question whether he wrote in Latin or Italian has been much discussed and appears to be not yet settled; what is certain is that though this work may be anterior to the Conformities,[27] it is a little later than the Chronicle of the Tribulations, for it would be strange that it made no mention of Angelo Clareno, if it was written after his death.