St Francis and Cultural Memory

by David Salter

ISBN: 9780199292097

Published: 2025-08-10

St Francis and Cultural Memory explores central aspects of English national, spiritual, and broader cultural identity through a detailed yet accessible analysis of a familiar figure: the Franciscan Friar. Covering more than four hundred years from the late fourteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and taking in a wide variety of different literary and artistic forms, the book charts the changing face of the Franciscan friar in the English literary imagination, and examines how developments within this evolving tradition were both shaped by, and have helped to shape, wider debates within English culture about the relationship between religious and national identity, and the past and the present. Central to this analysis is the notion of cultural memory. At the time of its suppression in the 1530s, the Franciscan Order was too deeply assimilated into the social fabric of England either to be forgotten, or to be credibly labelled an entirely alien presence, despite the best efforts...