Excerpt from Helps for Students of History: A Guide to Franciscan Studies It is difficult for a modern to enter into the thoughts and feelings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Anyone who reads about St. Francis without having studied the age and country in which he lived is certain to misunderstand a good deal of what he reads; he would undoubtedly gain much from such reading, and might by degrees build up round the central object of his study the knowledge necessary to understand the general environment; but knowledge so acquired is apt to be deficient, one-sided, and full of gaps, and it is safer for a student to start from a general acquaintance with the European history of the period before embarking on any special medieval study. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.