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‘In the case of Clare and Francis, it seems there was a fair bit of yin and yang in the relationship’

 Behind every great man there’s a great woman, often one with even more potential than her male partner. That certainly seems to have been true of St Clare of Assisi: on a trip to her home town I was struck by how slight her legacy is, in comparison with her friend St Francis. Yet when you unpick her story, there’s as much to commend the woman they called “the poor lady of San Damiano” as there is to salute the founder of the Franciscans.