Abstract
Francis of Assisi, the fool of God who preached to the birds and author of the first Nativity play, as well as one of the most popular Catholic saints, whose personality is the subject of idealization and nostalgia. However, the contemporary image of the saint is based on a selective approach that leaves aside the adoration of suffering and contempt for his own body mentioned in his writings and in the legends promoting his cult.
A similar selective attitude can be observed in the historiography that seeks to reconstruct an "authentic" portrait of Francis' parents. How do modern scholars deal with the fact that the image of the parents in the legends is contradictory and the figure of the father is subject to harsh condemnation? Can the 1984 sculpture of Francis's parents, on display in the Piazza Chiesa Nuova in Assisi, tell us anything about historiography? And how can we approach the literary representation of parents and parenthood in medieval hagiography? These are the questions that the present paper seeks to answer.