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About this UECF.NET Web Edition
This is a UECF.NET web edition of The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi (I Fioretti di San Francesco), the classic fourteenth-century collection of stories and traditions associated with St. Francis and the early Franciscan movement. UECF.NET did not write the original book.
Source edition
Title. The little flowers of St. Francis of Assisi.
Translator. Sir Thomas Walker Arnold (1864–1930), translating from the Italian.
Note. Guido Biagi (1855–1925), Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, March 1908.
Publisher / year. London: Chatto and Windus, 1908. Open Library records the statement of responsibility as “translated from the Italian by T. W. Arnold; with a note by Guido Biagi,” pagination xxxii, 318 pages, with plates. OCLC 3499953.
Digitization. Scanned for the Internet Archive by the University of Toronto (PIMS), identifier littleflowersof00fran. The same 1908 setting also appears as littleflowersofs00arno.
Original Source
The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi
Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/littleflowersof00fran
Original page images may be viewed on that Internet Archive item. This web edition hosts an optimized local cover; it does not hotlink the Archive’s scan files for everyday reading.
Public-domain status
The Fioretti belong to the fourteenth century. Arnold died in 1930 and Biagi in 1925. The 1908 London edition was published more than 95 years ago and is in the public domain in the United States. UECF.NET does not claim copyright in Arnold’s translation or in Biagi’s note.
What this edition contains
The reading order follows the 1908 table of contents: Biagi’s preface; the fifty-three chapters of the Little Flowers; the five reflections on the most holy Stigmata; the Life of Brother Juniper; the Life of Brother Giles; the goodly sayings and teaching of Brother Giles; additional chapters from the Bibliotheca Angelica and Florence manuscripts; and the Farewell of S. Francis at his parting from the Mount of Alvernia.
Arnold’s wording is not modernized. Obvious OCR damage from the Archive’s DjVu text (broken hyphens, running headers, a handful of misread letters such as “Httle” for “little”) has been corrected where the intended word is certain. Uncertain readings were left close to the scan rather than rewritten.
Scripture
Where a biblical allusion can be identified with confidence, the phrase is linked to the UECF.NET NKJV Bible for lookup. The on-page wording remains Arnold’s. Ambiguous allusions are left as ordinary text.
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