Little rich boy made good

Francis of Assisi By Adrian House (Chatto £20)

Three years ago, it looked as if no tourists might ever come to Assisi again, for its sumptuous basilica, housing St Francis's tomb, was wrecked by an earthquake. Giotto's great frescoes of the life of Francis were terribly damaged. But piece by painstaking piece, they have been put back together, 800 years after the man whose life they commemorate lived in this small Italian town. The tourists not only come for these miraculous works of art and their souvenirs, but for the man himself. Adrian House's new biography illumines just how extraordinary a figure he was and how he can still touch us today.

After enjoying a privileged upbringing and a life of pleasure, Francis, who was born to a wealthy cloth merchant in 1181, was caught up in a local war and held prisoner for 12 months. After a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was shocked by the sight of beggars at St Peter's, he returned to Assisi, living in caves and churches which he restored. A calling to live with and for the poor led to his founding a religious order which within a century had 25,000 members, and is still going strong, worldwide, today.

Adrian House's work reveals a Francis who is both medieval and modern. The Francis of the visions, the miracles, the scourgings and the hairshirts is a disturbing figure. But the man who commits his life to identification with the urban poor, who believes in the need for man to develop a harmonious relationship with nature and is as concerned with the welfare of animals as with his fellow human beings, seems a cool hero for our own time.

House is particularly successful in setting Francis in his medieval context. Assisi, with its warring families, rats and open sewers, its cloistered, virginal girls awaiting a suitable match in exchange for a dowry, young bloods revelling in fighting and fucking, the stinking lazar houses for lepers, the rituals of courtly love and the songs of the troubadours, are all brought vividly to life.

The account of the mystical nature of Francis's religious experience, and his all-consuming desire to conquer the self on the road to redemption, is also sensitively handled. Only those with a sturdy constitution should attempt House's discourse on the stigmata which Francis acquired two years before his death. Stigmata were part of Francis's legacy to the world - he was the first to receive them, and another 300 have since, including 12 people in Britain today. Francis also inspired the growth of naturalism in Western art, he was the first major poet in Italian, and he invented the Christmas crib.

As House suggests in this intelligent volume, we have turned today to other, non-Christian prophets such as Marx, Einstein, Darwin, Freud and Gandhi. Will any of them have followers 700 years after their death, bringing a sense of justice and love to the poor, the sick in body and spirit, the distressed and the desperate, and inspiring a movement - ecology, in Francis's case - that they could never have even imagined?