JacquesDalarun<scp>,</scp>SeanField<scp>, and</scp>ValerioCappozzo, eds.: A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023; pp. vii + 175.

offer an exciting new model for translations of medieval saints' lives with their A Female Apostle in Medieval Italy: The Life of Clare of Rimini.Insightful, succinct, and incredibly well-written, the book will be valuable for undergraduate readers and for researchers both.Clare of Rimini (c.1260Rimini (c.-c.1324-29) -29) was only beatified in the late eighteenth century but had been revered locally since her death.Married twice and twice widowed, Clare chose the path of penitence first as a solitary penitent and then, begrudgingly, as the leader of a small group of like-minded women and a well-known regional personality.While her cause for sanctity may have languished, her Life proves of immense historical value.It offers windows into the gender constraints of her time and place and the ways in which her practice of sanctity broke them, the complicated and political nature of both civic and family life, the lived and dialectical experience of religious art, the nature of linguistic and narrative composition, and the divisive plurality of contemporary religious practice.The editors consistently highlight these themes and many more besides in their commentary.Instead of following the traditional practice of inserting a lengthy editorial introduction before the translation or edition of the Life, the editors chose to append discursive essays to each chapter of the Life.The commentaries flow remarkably well for being the work of many authors.While one can detect the various areas of expertise of the editors at work (religious orders and Franciscan history, women and sanctity, and Italian literature), each essay reads seamlessly.The editors place a very helpful timeline in the front matter that situates Clare's life (and afterlife) within the important political, literary, and religious events of her day.They also provide informative endnotes (even explaining scholarly abbreviations like "cf."! [Ch. 2 n. 1]) to the text and a very useful annotated bibliography for each chapter.One does wish that the index would have been more completeit only tracks people and placesfor the sake of the undergraduate reader who was clearly otherwise in the forefront of the editors' minds.The editors frequently draw attention to the anonymous Franciscan who wrote Clare's life and who makes a number of fascinating textual choices.Most notably, he stages the several suspiciously heterodox moments in her vita to place them in line with orthodox expectation.He also elects to write in the vernacular.The editors surmise that he likely had Fraticelli leanings himself and so was sensitive to the need for making some of Clare's more extreme behaviour palatable to orthodox observers.Clare's life is the first known hagiographic text to be written in an Italian vernacular and the editors pay careful attention to the author's linguistic choices, composition, and lyricism (all while making these elements very accessible and interesting for novice readers).After a brief introduction explaining their editorial choices, the editors present the Life with a chapter-by-chapter commentary.The first chapter sets the stage by explaining the geography, politics, and questions of social status pertinent to the cast of characters.Chapter 2 centres on Clare's conversion story exchanging the pleasures of this world for the joy of divine love.Chapter 3 introduces Clare's penitential practices and the editors insightfully invite readers not to pathologise those practices so much as to understand them using the analogy of modern athletic training and competition.Chapter 4 documents her family's political struggles and her first steps away from her family.The editors offer an extended commentary on the medieval family and social constraints around gender.Chapter 5 sees Clare using a roofless hole in the old Roman walls of Rimini as a penitential cell and beginning to build a network of spiritually-minded women in Rimini.Clare takes on a teaching role