These three works form the chief sources of the saint's life and the beginnings of the Franciscan Order which he founded in 1212. Born at Assisi in 1182, St Francis embraced a life of holy poverty after a gay and sometimes extravagant youth. At the age of twenty-two he fought with great spirit and was taken prisoner in a petty feud between the town of Assisi and Perugia. During his captivity he reflected on his former mode of life, but attempted to take up arms once more on his recovery. However, a second illness intervened, and after a period in which wordly pleasure and spiritual counsels sought mastery and he finally determined to dedicate his life and work to God. Through pilgrimage, devotion, example and simple teaching he became one of the great Christian reformers. 'Whatever accretions of legendary material', says Fr McKay in his Introduction, 'have crept in here and there to heighten the colours of St Francis's portrait, they are undoubtedly in keeping with the total impressions which St. Francis made upon the world of his day.' Moreover St Francis was the very opposite of a sour Puritan: we are told he was the 'most joyous of saints, and would have no sad, long faces about him, and always rebuked any friar that was gloomy or melancholy.' He wanted his friars to be joculatores Dei ('the minstrels of God'). The Little Flowers is translated from the 'Fioretti', an Italian translation of a Latin original of which the earliest extant manuscript is one of 1390. It is a narration of miracle and hymn connected with the saint and his friars. The Mirror of Perfection is based on documents and memoirs left by Friar Leo, St Francis's favourite disciple, and was completed about 1318. St Bonaventure wrote the Life of St Francis c. 1260, intending it to stand as an authoritative Life and to supersede the numerous fragmentary biographies then in circulation.

Anecdotes relate stories from the life of St. Francis of Assisi, including his sermon to the birds, his healing of a leper, and his conversion of the Sultan of Babylon.

This collection of folk tales, legends, and narratives about the life of Francis of Assisi and his followers appeared about seventy-five years after the saint’s death, in the early fourteenth century. The writings have remained popular ever since due to their beauty and charm, and because they are the nearest thing to a biography of Francis that exists. They are the source of many of the most famous stories about Francis—including the accounts of his preaching to the birds and of his receiving of the stigmata—and they are based on stories that circulated about him in the years after his death. Robert Hopcke and Paul Schwartz provide the first truly new translation of the Fioretti in forty years, and in doing so they bring the spiritual classic up to date, using contemporary language to show Francis to be a living, breathing human being who walked the streets of Assisi in a state of spiritual, physical, and social enlightenment, through his own existence making Christ real in the world. The translators have also edited the work to present the stories that most powerfully present Francis’s spirit and teaching.

These stories of St. Francis and his first followers have inspired millions of people over the centuries. Since they were first committed to paper, they have motivated people to become better followers of Jesus (not St. Francis). For that reason, they have endured unlike any other early Franciscan literature. Many of the stories are known to us from other biographical sources, but in some cases, here they are expanded or made more florid. This edition of The Little Flowers is unique in its physical beauty as well as its editorial arrangement. For the first time, the stories have been arranged in the most likely chronological ordering of when they happened - rather than following the traditional ordering of them handed down for centuries. As a result, today's reader is now able to read The Little Flowers as a biograpical narrative of the life of St. Francis and the world-transforming movement that he founded.