WATERLOO, Ont. -- Where will you spend the millennium year?

A University of Waterloo faculty member, French studies Prof. Delbert Russell, will spend part of it as a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, studying an event that took place more than 750 years earlier. He has a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to study the canonization of St. Francis of Assisi.

At Cambridge, Russell will be working at a modern critical edition of the Vie seint Fraunceys, which involves a (medieval) French transcription of the Latin manuscript used by the Roman Catholic church to support the proclamation of sainthood for St. Francis.

The task will include deciphering ambiguous passages in the medieval manuscript and preparing a modern printed edition of this text (the translation), with notes explaining textual problems, historical annotations, a glossary of the text and a linguistic study. The time at Cambridge will be spent mainly on historical annotations and the lexical study needed to create the glossary.

A number of resources will be available to him at Corpus Christi including the expertise of renowned Cambridge history and theology scholars as well as the extensive library holdings, including manuscripts.

"My main interest is the study of medieval French; that is, I will be looking into how the language evolved as revealed in the translation," he said. "However, my studies of St. Francis will include dealing with the legend, which is quite varied and as such is of considerable interest."

Thus studying the translation should prove of interest beyond linguistics and should reveal much about the society of the day. Russell said this was the case for earlier studies he has made into other saints’ lives including St. Lawrence, who was martyred in 258, and St. Richard of Wyche, the former bishop of Chichester (England) who was canonized by Pope Urban IV. (It was generally believed that after St. Richard’s death, in 1253, miracles were wrought at his tomb and it subsequently became a popular pilgrimage.)

Russell is also interested in such questions as: Who were the patrons for the translations of the papal texts of the time from Latin to French? What use may have been made of the manuscripts?

"These translations were not as literal as one might expect to find in a modern work," he cautioned. "They are really adaptations. Thus studying them can tell us a good deal about the society of the day."

He said that scholarly interest in this area began to revive in the last century when "medieval languages were rediscovered." Within the past 10 or 15 years, there has been a fresh wave of interest not only among church historians and theological scholars, but also among language and culture specialists.

Russell said that while violence and sexuality are readily evident in lives of many of the saints (St. Lawrence, for instance, was literally burned to death on a grill) these elements are more muted in the story of St. Francis. Violence in his lifetime is in the form of self-mortification such as wearing a hair shirt, eating only the cheapest and simplest of foods, sleeping on the ground, using a rack for a pillow, and so on.

"It could be called internalized violence in the interests of elevating the spirit," he said.

There are lots of images of St. Francis suppressing his body, he said. There is also a story of him having prayed so hard that he was moved to tears, and weeping so over the sorrows of Christ that he even risked blindness . . . yet he gladly submitted to the cauterizing of the running sores around his eyes with a red hot iron.

St. Francis lived in the latter 12th and early 13th centuries; he died in 1226 and was canonized two years later by Pope Gregory IX. He was born into a well-to-do family in Assisi, Italy, a small Umbrian town about 75 miles north of Rome.

He became much-loved for his kindness including his remarkable kindness to animals, as well as for his devotion and service to the poor. Indeed, he renounced the world to focus on his vocation as he saw it, bringing Christ’s message to the poverty-stricken.

He went on to become the founder of a mendicant order, the Franciscans (known in England as the Grey Friars). The Franciscans and Dominicans were alike in that they were highly urban, in contrast with some of the older orders that existed in rural monasteries. To this day, the Franciscans remain a major monastic order.

"St. Francis’ mother was French and he often spoke French," Russell noted. "As well, he often makes references to French literature in his writings." This may heighten his interest in the translation of the canonization document for St. Francis.

He said that when translations were made -- of canonical documents relating to the proclamation of sainthood (into, for example, French, German, or English) -- there appears to have been a tendency among translators to omit a good many theological technicalities, though they kept the narrative line of the saint’s life.

The translator/adapter often expands the text to explain motivation or even, simply, to heighten the drama.

One reason for this is that while the Latin was in prose, the translations were often in poetry . . . because poetry was a more entertaining and effective way to recite the saints’ stories to audiences. Poetry would, in a sense, have more appeal.

"But the switch from prose to poetry would force the translator to constantly adapt the original Latin text," he added.

Russell is interested in looking into one famous and highly significant incident in St. Francis’ life as reported in the canonization document. He received the stigmata (marks on his body corresponding to the wounds received by Christ at the Crucifixion) in September of 1224; this is now often considered the most celebrated stigmatization within Catholic Church history.

Coincidentally, this phenomenon resurfaced in March of this year when Pope John Paul beatified Padre Pio, an Italian mystic who died in 1968. This act by the Pope accepted Pio’s claim to have received stigmata, a claim that is not universally supported however, and as a result the press in Italy has criticized the Pope for "returning to the Middle Ages."

Another famous documentation of the sainthood of St. Francis involved his preaching to the birds.

"Francis had something of a crisis of conscience," Russell said. "He was torn by the question: What does God want of me -- that I should pray a lot, or that I should devote myself to bringing the word of God to the people? He sought help with his problem and was told by Brother Sylvester and Sister Clare that ‘God prefers you to preach’."

He thereupon dashed off to do so, and the first audience he came across was a flock of birds . . . so he spoke to them. According to the canonization document the birds listened to him and even showed signs of great pleasure over his sermon, remaining rapt until he told them to go; then they all flew off. Later, St. Francis said he was sorry he hadn’t done that earlier because the birds listened so well.

"In Francis’ eyes, of course, birds are God’s creatures and have to be respected," Russell added.

He said recent analyses of some translations of canonization documents (for other saints) have led to a considerable debate on the institution of marriage.

In medieval times, the powerful and famous were very concerned about marriage, though largely for dynastic reasons. That is, women were used as economic pawns and marriage was seen, essentially, as a way of providing economic support to the power of the dynasty (distant echoes of this type of concern were seen in the Prince Charles and Diana marriage).

Russell said the writings in which he has been particularly interested show that the medieval church had begun challenging some aspects of the society. The church attempted to control marriage and took, and actively promoted, the position that marriage should be voluntary for both parties.

The medieval church also decided that it could determine whether a marriage was valid or not.

One consequence of this was a power struggle between the church on one hand and the secular powers -- monarchs and the nobles -- on the other. In short, the church’s goal was to replace a secular power structure with an ecclesiastical one.

Russell said there was also great concern in medieval times over the control of relics, such as the bones of saints. This was a hotly debated topic since there were direct economic implications to attracting visitors to the shrines, in search of miracles.

He finds it interesting that the manuscripts he will be working with at Corpus Christi indicate that England was, at the time, a trilingual country (English, French and Latin) and there was considerable interplay between the three. Many English people learned French in the interests of social advancement. Ordinary people tended to use English only.

Russell is aware that shortly after the canonization of St. Francis, radical dissent arose within the Franciscan order. The controversy involved those who espoused extreme poverty for the order (who wanted to follow St. Francis very closely), and others who were more moderate in their outlook and who tended to feel that a modest level of physical comfort ought to be permitted.

This conflict resulted in a second official Life of Francis, also in Latin, written in 1263 by St. Bonaventure, head of the Franciscan Order who later became pope. This came to be accepted as the only authorized version and it is this version, subsequently translated into French, that Russell will be working with in England.

Since his main research interests have to do with language and culture he is particularly interested in identifying new French words, used in the translation for the first time. To a lexicographer (dictionary author) this is a fascinating study because these new words represent "our first examples of this kind of deliberate vocabulary creation," he said.

St. Francis is still receiving an enormous amount of attention from scholars and others. The contemporary French novelist, Julian Green, for instance, completed a new biography in 1983. More recently, an Australian scholar published, in Italy, the first modern edition of one of six medieval French translations of the life of St. Francis.

The Basilica built in Assisi in 1230 in honour of St. Francis attracted many gifts in the Middle Ages including a thorn believed to be from Christ’s crown of thorns, sent by Louis IX of France. The Basilica was richly decorated with early Renaissance frescoes, by Giotto and Cimabue. Recently seriously damaged by earthquakes, it is currently being restored.

"But my focus is less on the hagiography -- the worship of the saints -- than in the linguistic, cultural and historic implications of the texts I will be studying," Russell said, "including what these changes may indicate to us today with respect to the medieval world."

He knows from his studies of St. Richard that women played a role in the translation of many Latin documents and said this has recently begun to attract considerable interest on the part of women’s studies scholars interested in learning more about the role of women in the medieval world.

"Thus the role of women is being rediscovered through the examination of such texts. Today’s discussion about the role of women in the Roman Catholic church is being taken right back to the middle ages."

He said the manuscripts contain references to the repression of sexuality through an emphasis on celibacy, as well as to great violence within medieval society.

- 30 -

Release no. 99 -- May 27, 1999