Clare (1194–1253), virgin, foundress of the Minoresses or Poor Clares. She was born at Assisi of the Offreduccio family, but nothing is known of her early life. When she was eighteen, she was so moved by the preaching of Francis of Assisi that she joined him at the Portiuncula, where she renounced all her possessions and took the habit of a nun. She was then formed in the religious life at the Benedictine convents of Bastia and Sant'Angelo di Panzo until Francis was able to offer her and her companions a small house adjacent to the church of San Damiano, Assisi, which he had restored. There she became abbess in 1216 of a community of women who wished to live according to the rule and spirit of Francis: it soon included among its members Clare's mother and two sisters, and some members of the wealthy Ubaldini family from Florence. The way of life was one of extreme poverty and austerity, believed to be harder than that of any other nuns of the time: this was safeguarded as far as communal possessions were concerned by the papal ‘Privilegium paupertatis’ of 1228 for three convents, including San Damiano, to live entirely by alms, renouncing all rents and other common property. Like the Franciscan friars, Clare's nuns soon spread to other parts of Europe, especially Spain (47 convents in the 13th century), Bohemia, France, and England, where four convents were founded in the late 13th and 14th centuries.
Clare never left her convent at Assisi: she was distinguished as one of the great medieval contemplatives, devoted to serving her community in great joy, practising Franciscan ideals, including Francis' love of the world of nature, long after his death in 1226. For the last twenty-seven years of her life she suffered various illnesses, being sometimes bedridden, but she was always devoted to her nuns and to the town of Assisi. This was expressed not only by her sewing altar cloths and corporals for its churches, but also by prayer and penance on its behalf in times of crisis. Twice Assisi was in danger of being sacked by the armies of the Emperor Frederick II, which included a number of Saracens. Clare, although ill, was carried to the wall with a pyx containing the Blessed Sacrament, at which, say her biographers, the armies fled. This is why in art she is often depicted with a pyx or a monstrance, as on the D'Estouteville Triptych of English origin c.1360. She was canonized only two years after her death by Alexander IV in 1255. Among her nuns, as among the Franciscan friars, controversies about poverty continued as a divisive force until Colette reformed the Poor Clares in the 15th century. They continue today in many countries as a contemplative Order, comparatively few in number but still distinguished by the same ideals as those which inspired Francis and Clare. Feast: 11 (formerly 12) August. Recently she has been named patron of television.
Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.
- Five letters of Clare survive, together with her Rule and her Testament; the earliest Life (before 1261) is by Thomas of Celano in AA.SS. Aug. II (1735), 754–67 (Eng. tr. by P. Robinson, 1910)
- Z. Lazzeri, ‘Il processo di canonizzazione di S. Chiara d'Assisi’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, xiii (1920), 403–507
- P. Robinson, ‘St. Clare’ in A. G. Little, Franciscan Essays (1913), pp. 31–49
- Santa Chiara d'Assisi: Studi e cronaca del VII centenario 1253–1953 (1954)
- E. Gilliat Smith, St. Clare of Assisi (1914)
- R. M. Pierazzi, Sainte Claire (1937)
- M. Fassbinder, Die hl. Klara von Assisi (1934)
- N. de Roebeck, St. Clare of Assisi (1951)
- F. Casolini, S. Chiara (1953)
- R. B. and C. N. L. Brooke in D. Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (1978)
- M. Bartoli, Clare of Assisi (1993)
- Bibl. SS., iii. 1201–17
