The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in literature, cultural studies, comparative religion, gender studies, political science, and related fields.

In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi, A Novel is by Dacia Maraini, an Italian author whose work focuses on women’s issues. When she was a child, Mariani’s family moved to Japan in 1938 to escape Fascism. They were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Nagoya from 1943 to 1946 for refusing to recognize Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, allied with the Empire of Japan.

The TU Library collection also includes other books about the religions of Italy.

Clare of Assisi (born Chiara Offreduccio almost one thousand years ago) was an Italian saint and one of the first followers of Francis of Assisi.

Inspired by the teachings of St. Francis, she founded the Order of Poor Ladies, a monastic religious order for women in the Franciscan tradition.

The Order of Poor Ladies was different from any other order or convent because it followed a rule of strict poverty.

Clare wrote their Rule of Life, the first set of monastic guidelines known to have been written by a woman.

Following her death, the order she founded was renamed in her honor as the Order of Saint Clare, commonly referred to today as the Poor Clares.

St. Clare is the patron saint of computer screens and televisions.

Late in her life, she was too ill to attend church, and one day the images and sounds of the entire Mass celebration appeared on the wall of her room.

In 1957, Pope Pius XII named her the patroness of television, which he called a “wonderful instrument… which can be the source of very great wealth, but also of deep troubles.”

St. Clare, whose life was spent in humility and poverty, is also the patron saint of sore eyes and embroidery.

The publisher’s description of the novel reads:

An author receives a mysterious e-mail begging her to tell the story of Clare of Assisi, the thirteenth-century Italian saint. At first annoyed by the request, the author begins to research Saint Clare and becomes captivated by her life. We too are transported into the strange and beautiful world of medieval Italy, witnessing the daily rituals of convent life.

At the center of that life is Saint Clare, a subversive and compelling figure full of contradictions: a physically disabled woman who travels widely in her imagination, someone unforgivingly harsh to herself yet infinitely generous to the women she supervises, a practitioner of self-abnegation who nevertheless knows her own worth. A visionary who liberated herself from the chains of materialism and patriarchy, Saint Clare here becomes an inspirational figure for a new generation of readers.

In this feminist reimagining of Clare of Assisi, an author with the initials DM receives a letter from a Sicilian student who visited the town of Assisi and became fascinated by its 13th-century history, asking for the author to join her in learning about Clare’s life.

DM is baffled by the request, but her replies slowly shift from dismissal to curiosity as she becomes intrigued by Clare’s story.

DM discovers that the saint came from a line of nobility and proposes that Clare committed herself to a life of poverty as a nun as a means of achieving independence from men:

“To have property meant to be controlled. A control that was economic, political… and rigorously masculine.”

After the student stops responding to DM, the narrative takes the form of DM’s journal as she further researches Clare’s life and uncovers a vision of the saint as a strong-willed leader of her order of nuns who was generous and charismatic, “with powerfully strategic intelligence, fierce passion, and considerable peace of mind.”

Here are some thoughts by Clare of Assisi:

• “Do not be disturbed by the clamor of the world, which passes like a shadow.”
• “Our labor here is brief, but the reward is eternal.”
• “Let the love you have in your hearts be shown outwardly in your deeds.”
• “May the excitements of the world, fleeing like a shadow, not disturb you.”
• “Because the way and path is difficult and the gate through which one passes and enters to life is narrow, there are both few who walk it and enter through it.”

An early biography of St. Clare claimed:

No one else, indeed, appears to have caught the spirit of St. Francis so completely as St. Clare — that exquisite Franciscan spirit, as it is called, which is so tender and yet so strong, so human and yet so other-worldly — and in that spirit she threw around poverty an ineffable charm, such as women alone can impart to religious or civic heroism.

After St. Francis was gone, Clare proved herself the faithful heiress of his ideals; and when those ideals were in danger of demolition, because some of his disciples would fain have tempered their master’s teachings by the dictates of worldly wisdom, it was she who struggled to uphold them beyond all the rest.

That struggle lasted more than a quarter of a century: it ended only with her life. But the victory lay with Clare, whose steadfast striving after an ideal through good report and evil report, no less than her engaging example of “the praying spirit that worked as it prayed,” did much to guide the women of her day toward higher aims.

St. Clare used to call herself the “little flower of St. Francis,” and St. Bonaventure tells us that she shed around her the fragrance of springtide. Something of that fragrance still clings to the story of her life and lends it a special charm. It is truly one of those lives that can teach perfection without sacrificing poetry.

And, in so far as it may be allowable to associate the idea of romance with such a subject, the friendship of St. Francis and St. Clare forms one of the most romantic chapters in the Lives of the Saints. For more than one reason, then, the story of St. Clare opens up a page of medieval biography full of import and pathetic interest even for those who are not especially students of the Franciscan Legend.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)