Little Flowers (Fioretti)

"When I wrote my book Autism: Explaining the Enigma , in the late 1980s, one day I dipped into this little book that I had inherited from my parents. It is a collection of legends from the 14th century, but anchored in history. Here among the early followers of Francis of Assisi, there was a character called Brother Juniper who was clearly simple-minded and did some strange things that went entirely against convention and indeed against common sense. But he was always forgiven because his extreme innocence and simplicity was considered a special gift. He reminded me of Ellie, the girl from Clara Claiborne Park’s book. Just like Ellie, there was this person who had no understanding of what mattered in the world and yet was so innocent that people had to love him and make allowances for his strange behaviour. The stories are meant to be amusing and yet at the same time they make you aware that people like that must have been around. It was very important to me to find out whether autism existed long ago. It would be very strange if it didn’t. I actually wrote a book on autism in history with an historian. We found a case from the 18th century with sufficient material to conclude he was indeed autistic."