Life of Saint Francis by Thomas of Celano

On October 4th, 1226, Francis of Assisi died in the town of his birth. This year marks 800 years.

Thomas of Celano was a Franciscan friar and the earliest biographer of Francis, writing his First Life in 1228 — just two years after Francis's death, commissioned by Pope Gregory IX. He knew Francis personally. What he produced is not hagiography in the dry, formulaic sense but something closer to a portrait — urgent, vivid, and written while the memory of the man was still alive in those who had known him.
Francis of Assisi was born in 1181 or 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Umbria. As a young man he was a carouser, a spendthrift, and an enthusiastic singer of French troubadour songs — he dreamed of becoming a knight, of chivalric adventure. The conversion that turned this young man into the most beloved saint in Christian history is one of the great dramatic reversals in Western civilization.

This is our first saint's life — a form that shaped medieval literature as profoundly as any romance or epic. Thomas of Celano's First Life is also a window into a world where the line between spiritual quest and chivalric quest was thinner than we might imagine.

The edition we recommend is the Francis Trilogy from Franciscan Press. We'll mostly cover "The Life of Saint Francis" in the meeting but if you find the material engaging read The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul and The Treatise on the Miracles of Saint Francis and we'll let anyone who read these share thoughts.
https://a.co/d/035h6rkU
(this is expensive new - so you may want to search for used copies or check your library)

Online Text:
https://archive.org/details/livesofsfranciso00thom/page/n7/mode/2up