In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi

Clare of Assisi opens with a mysterious email begging a well-known author to take up the story of Saint Clare. The correspondent claims to share traits with Clare, her namesake: she is a young woman of no material means but a fervent intellectual life, seeking purpose, and ashamed of her body, which she starves. The author comes to share the young woman’s fascination with this complex historical figure and as the author grows captivated by her subject, so do we, following her to distant places that are beautifully strange yet oddly familiar.

We witness daily life in a medieval convent, the great deprivation and compensating joy of communal devotion and discover the challenging realities of women’s lives in the Middle Ages. We fall in love with Saint Clare, an astonishing and subversive figure whose contradictions come to life: a religious devotee who is unforgivingly harsh to herself yet infinitely generous to the women she supervises; a cloistered nun who is spiritually a wife and mother; a physically disabled woman who travels widely in her imagination; a mendicant who, by relinquishing all claim on the material world, achieves a radical autonomy, transcending her bonds to become truly free.

Dacia Maraini achieves in Clare of Assisi a moving act of imagination. This brilliant secular writer discerns in an austere historical figure an icon for today. A visionary who liberated herself from the chains of materialism and patriarchy, in Mariani’s masterful narrative Saint Clare becomes an inspirational –and timely–figure
for a new generation.