The Little Flowers of St. Francis

The Little Flowers of St. Francis is a collection of stories first set down in the fourteenth century a little more than 100 years after the death of the Saint. It was probably an adaptation of a work written in the middle of the preceding century by a Franciscan monk, Ugolino de Montegiorgio. Wholly a product of the middle ages, it was written in a time when the commonplace and the miraculous shared the same stage, as if the boundaries between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the everyday life, were not so clearly demarcated. In describing Brother Silvester, one of the first followers of St. Francis, the author tells us that "he held converse with God, like one friend with another, as Moses did of old." With extraordinary devotion and charm this lovely book recounts miraculous happenings and provides examples of extraordinary piety, but its simplicity of style lends it an immediacy that bridges the centuries to speak to our jaded and weary sensibilities.