Presented by the Italian Consulate General in Melbourne, the Italian Cultural Institute, Monash University and CO.AS.IT., on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, the lecture by Professor Michele Campopiano (University of Catania) focuses on Francis of Assisi , a pivotal figure in medieval culture who remains at the centre of an active historiographical debate spanning both social and environmental history.
Beginning with Lynn White‘s influential interpretation of Franciscan thought , which cast Francis as the major exception to the traditional Christian understanding of humanity’s dominion over nature, and, in White’s words, “the greatest revolutionary in history” for replacing human sovereignty over creation with a kind of democracy embracing all of God’s creatures , scholarship has increasingly reassessed the broader significance of his message.
At the same time, studies of poverty and the social transformations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have traced the impact of Franciscan ideals on debates about social class and popular rebellion, from the uprisings of the late Middle Ages to nineteenth-century radical and socialist historiography. Jacques Le Goff‘s work on the historical vocabulary of social categories adds a further lens, inviting a reconsideration of poverty, marginality and exclusion within their medieval context.
Drawing particularly on the work of Giacomo Todeschini, for whom early Franciscan thought recognised the “mysterious value” of all creatures, especially those living outside the “magic circle” of civilised humanity , the lecture argues that the environmental and social dimensions of Franciscan thought cannot be understood separately. The rejection of money as an instrument of accumulation, the critique of property as the basis of social belonging, and an openness toward those pushed to the margins , animals, the sick, vagabonds, beggars, peasants and the poor , emerge as interconnected elements of a single vision, one that still speaks to contemporary debates on ecology, inequality and social justice.
The lecture will be accompanied by readings performed by Roxana Păun Trifan, actress and theatre professional researcher.
About the speaker: Michele Campopiano is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Catania. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, and was Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of York (UK) from 2014 to 2024. His research focuses on medieval environmental history, landscapes, natural resource management, and the political and intellectual history of medieval Europe. He is the author of Writing the Holy Land: The Franciscans of Mount Zion and the Construction of a Cultural Memory, 1300–1550 and Storia dell’ambiente nel Medioevo, and the forthcoming Empire, Nature, and Power in the European Middle Ages (ARC Humanities Press).
Image: Attributed to Giotto, Legend of St Francis: Sermon to the Birds, c. 1295–1299, fresco, Upper Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi. Image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Thursday 1 October 2026, 6.30–8pm, CO.AS.IT., 199 Faraday St, Carlton
Free event, registration essential: https://www.coasit.com.au/san-francesco-2026