This may have been how people viewed thirteenth-century Catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, after whom San Francisco is named. Francis is known for renouncing his family’s wealth and caring for lepers. But he also preached to birds and animals in a state we might today call psychotic, and suffered from what some scholars believe was mental illness.3 When his parents intervened, possibly by trying to appoint a legal guardian to manage Francis’s finances, the local bishop ruled that Francis could have his freedom as an “ecclesiastical person” if he renounced his family and inheritance.
