‘In the field of poverty': The stigmata and Franciscan identities in late medieval Ireland: Life and love transfigured: exploring new horizons in the Franciscan tradition conference

Despite the wealth of studies on medieval images of St Francis, the iconography of the Saint in medieval Ireland has been a dedicated topic of only one article (Ó Clabaigh, 2006). This scholarly paucity may be related to the limited number of surviving visual images of St Francis from medieval Ireland and their narrow chronological range (the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries). Yet, their iconographic details and location reveal important points regarding both the perception of the Founder and the institutional values of the Franciscan Order. In addition, textual evidence (gathered from fragmentary yet diverse Irish sources and including hagiography, papal bulls, liturgical texts, devotional texts, prophetic texts, poetry and stories transmitted orally) demonstrates a manifold understanding of the stigmata; it also presents a wealth of transmission channels through which the stigmatisation story was disseminated to Ireland.
By adopting the text-and-image approach, this paper considers the stigmata not only as the illustration of the Franciscus alter Christus topos (discussed by Ó Clabaigh) but as the articulation of the Order’s self-representation and the markers of the friars’ communal identity. The medium of stone allows us to explore the stigmata as the actual open wounds that may have been touched by the friars, especially during the liturgical movement, thus inviting the friars to a personal interaction with their Founder and his transfigured body. When related to adjacent imagery, such as plant motifs, the stigmatised Francis can be viewed as planting and nurturing his Order, the sentiments particularly resonant during the Observant reform and the papacy of Sixtus IV.