Francis, France, the French. Was French culture in fact central to St. Francis of Assisi?

Abstract

Abstract This article explores Francis of Assisi’s relationship with France, starting with his name, and concluding that the importance of courtly culture for his personal development is generally overestimated in scholarship. In some hagiographic sources, it is indeed said that Francis used to praise God in French, but the contexts make it clear that this ability is instilled by the Holy Spirit and is therefore a glossolalic (‘divinely inspired speech’) phenomenon. Other references to French culture appear only in hagiographic legends, never in the writings of Francis, and are mainly attributable to the cultural climate of the period in which these later works were written.