In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi, A Novel

By Dacia Maraini, Rudolph Bell and Jane Tylus

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. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978833944

Book preview

Dear Author,

I’m a student from Sicily who lives in a tiny little village called Santo Pellegrino on the slopes of Mt. Etna. It’s at the far end of this impoverished but beautiful island—an island you know well, and one that I love, although I always feel its flaws gnawing at me like starving fleas.

My name is Chiara. It’s a name that may mean nothing to you, but for me it’s really a lot, possibly everything. For a long time, this luminous, crystalline name, a name that speaks with pensive radiance, has been driving me crazy. The choice was simple, almost banal; my pious mother wanted to name me Clare because I was born on the day when we celebrate the saint, August 11—the day she died, since we don’t know the date of her birth, or even the year, exactly; perhaps 1193 or 1194.

The banality of coincidences. If I’d been born on the feast day of Saint Genevieve, would my unlucky mother have named me Genoveffa? Blame it on the calendar, I’d say. The fact is that my father wanted to name me after his mother, Giuseppina—a name that made my mother want to vomit. I feel the same way. So to pacify my mother they agreed to name me after the saint on whose feast day I was born. Does this seem remotely serious to you? In the end I’m the result of a compromise. A nice solution, huh? I’m someone who has always felt compromises like knives digging into my flesh.

For years I’ve been asking myself who I am, because I honestly don’t know. That’s why I’ve started with my name, hoping you might help me figure things out. A few months ago I took the train to Assisi. During the trip I read a little book about the saint that I found in our village library. We’re poor, as you might have guessed: my father is a contractor, who built some awful, illegal homes on the side of a hill that, when it rains, tend to slide down into the valley. And so he was reported to the authorities. But it wasn’t his fault. He built them on behalf of a certain gentleman—though to call him a gentleman is a bit of a stretch. So let’s just say this man is one of those types who wanted to save the money it would have cost to hire a real architect, who would have forced him not only to pay more but to submit his project to the town council for approval, the kind of thing he’d never done. And in the end, all the blame was laid on my poor, timid father.

My mother is half illiterate, a girl from town who thought she’d made it big by marrying this modest, homely man of peasant stock, a man who learned with considerable effort how to draw lines on a piece of paper, how to count, and how to work with bricks and mortar. The gentleman, however, who enabled us to survive for years—until they convicted my father of illegal construction, fining him and sending him to jail for four months—owned rural properties that he succeeded in getting rezoned for residential purposes with the help of a friend who was a town commissioner. He built lots of illegal apartment buildings, but right before the authorities put a stop to it, he sold them off for a small fortune and with the proceeds bought an enormous shopping mall. Then he turned around and sold that too. He transferred all his money to Romania, where he now runs a big furniture factory. The blame for the illegal construction fell on my father. His name is Alfio, just so you know. He’s a good father, in the sense that he’s supportive and doesn’t ask questions. He let me continue my studies and he doesn’t beat his wife, like other men in the village. He has big, blue, innocent eyes and is always sad. In short, I love