Professor Sabatier's long-out-of-print work is the ur-text of Francis biographies, the one to which most of the contemporary biographers refer most centrally in their own work (Julien Green in particular). Therefore, reading this text in its particular historical and scholarly context is essential; to truly appreciate Sabatier's intervention into the popular and scholarly understanding of St. Francis is to have ready reference to the body of work, and the weight of tradition, to which Sabatier was responding. Unfortunately, Mr. Sweeney sees fit to excise just this apparatus in his "edition" of Sabatier; he cuts out Sabatier's Introduction, condenses several chapters, and replaces Sabatier's footnotes and bibliography with his own commentaries and explanations of the text, set right into the margins of Sabatier's own text, and a cursory bibliography that cuts out the vast majority of Sabatier's own points of reference. Scholars are left without resources for critical or comparative study, and readers who wish to learn more about Francis are pushed into Mr. Sweeney's particular framework of understanding with little warning. I hope another more reputable publisher sees fit to reprint Sabatier's seminal work in an uncompromised edition; until that happens, let the reader beware.