Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming

Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life

The Medieval Franciscans General Editor

Steven J. McMichael University of St. Thomas

VOLUME 6

Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming

Edited by

Michael F. Cusato & G. Geltner

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: Illustration from the XVth century manuscript of Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior in the Museo Francescano, Rome. Copyright Museo Francescano. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Defenders and critics of Franciscan life : essays in honor of John V. Fleming / edited by Michael F. Cusato and G. Geltner. p. cm. — (The medieval Franciscans, ISSN 1572–6991 ; v. 6) Essays were presented at a conference honoring John V. Fleming at Princeton University on Apr. 21–22, 2004. Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-17630-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Franciscans—Congresses. 2. Monastic and religious life—Congresses. I. Fleming, John V. II. Cusato, Michael F. III. Title. IV. Series. BX3603.D44 2009 271’.3—dc22 2009012414

ISSN 1572-6991 ISBN 978 90 04 17630 0 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Editors’ Introduction ......................................................................... Contributors .......................................................................................

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Preface: A Literary Apostolate: John Fleming and the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages ................................. D. Vance Smith

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PART ONE

FRANCISCAN EXEGESIS Francis of Assisi, Deacon? An Examination of the Claims of the Earliest Franciscan Sources 1229–1235 ......................... Michael F. Cusato

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Tobit’s Dog and the Dangers of Literalism: William Woodford O.F.M. as Critic of Wycliffite Exegesis ...................................... Alastair Minnis

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PART TWO

STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS Franciscan Learning: University Education and Biblical Exegesis ........................................................................................... William J. Courtenay

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Using, Not Owning—Duties, Not Rights: The Consequences of Some Franciscan Perspectives on Politics ................................. Janet Coleman

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Langland and the Franciscans on Dominium ............................... Lawrence M. Clopper

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contents PART THREE

FRANCISCAN CRITICS AND CRITICS OF THE FRANCISCANS

William of St. Amour’s De periculis novissimorum temporum: A False Start to Medieval Antifraternalism? ............................ G. Geltner

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History as Prophecy: Angelo Clareno’s Chronicle as a Spiritual Franciscan Apocalypse ................................................. David Burr

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Two Views of John XXII as a Heretical Pope .............................. Patrick Nold

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Kicking the Habit: The Campaign Against the Friars in a Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia ............................................. Penn Szittya

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“Si sind all glichsner”: Antifraternalism in Medieval and Renaissance German Literature .................................................. Geoffrey Dipple

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PART FOUR

FRANCISCAN LEGACIES Imitatio Francisci: The Influence of Francis of Assisi on Late Medieval Religious Life ................................................................ Lester K. Little

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Louis IX: Preaching to Franciscan and Dominican Brothers and Nuns ........................................................................................ William Chester Jordan

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Preaching as Playwriting: A Semi-Dramatic Sermon of the Fifteenth Century .......................................................................... Katherine L. Jansen

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Index ....................................................................................................

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION The essays gathered in this volume were presented at a conference honoring John V. Fleming, which took place at Princeton University on April 21–22, 2004. 1 The idea behind the event, “A Literary Apostolate: Franciscans, Lovers and Critics in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” was to revisit Fleming’s 1977 An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages from a number of different perspectives, including social, religious, and literary history, as well as art, exegesis, political thought, and the history of education. A special (but not exclusive) emphasis was placed on criticism launched against the Order of Friars Minor during its early centuries, so that the themes of “defenders” and “critics” emerged before us while transforming the proceedings into the present book. Although not an exclusive theme of this collection, the distinction between “defenders” and “critics” merits emphasis, given its sometimes misleading nature in the context of early Franciscanism. As to the critics, their attacks against the Franciscans were usually not a matter of mean-spirited carping. Rather, their writings were often—though not always—motivated by a genuine spirit of ecclesial reform: that is, a desire that the Church be what it was intended or even ordained to be (albeit from their perspective). Hence, innovations to structure were viewed as unorthodox deviations; lapses in behavior from vaunted claims of evangelical perfection were excoriated as moral turpitude or simple hypocrisy. Indeed, sometimes such critics of the friars were the friars themselves, ardent that the minorite life be lived more authentically and faithfully.

1 Two original contributions have been omitted: Vincent Gillespie’s presentation, “Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism: Cooking the Books in The Doctrine of the Heart,” is being published separately in A Companion to the Doctrine of the Heart, ed. Christiania Whitehead and Denis Renevey (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, [forthcoming]); and an expanded version of Susan Einbinder’s paper, “Between the Lines of Exile: Expulsion, Memory, and the Poetry of Piedmontese Jews,” will appear as a chapter in her No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [forthcoming]). G. Geltner’s contribution was not originally presented at the conference. The respondents’ remarks following each of the papers are likewise not included in this volume.

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As to the defenders—those outside the Order as well as those within it—their apologiae on behalf of the Franciscan life should not be construed merely as knee-jerk defensive reactions or self-righteous chestthumping about any supposed superiority of the forma vitae fratrum minorum. Rather, they, too, saw this particular form of evangelical life as a valuable, if not essential, form of Christian witness for the Church of their time and, possibly, for all of time. For such men and women, fidelity to the Gospel was the heart of the matter; and, for them, it was the Franciscan charism—especially its following of the poor and crucified Christ—that best exemplified the fullness of that Gospel life. Indeed, recent scholarship has shown that the dividing line between medieval defenders and critics of Franciscan life was often not as sharp or as clear, perhaps, as had been thought in the past. Certain critics were in fact great admirers of the friars; certain friars were not unaware of the failures and foibles of their brothers and of the frictions caused by their intrusion into ministerial fields traditionally reserved for clergy and bishops. Nor can all the voices represented in this volume be easily categorized as either critics or defenders; some of them should rather be described as commentators on the Franciscan Order and its contributions to Church and society. Defenders, critics or commentators: all were in some way interested in engaging the phenomenon of medieval Franciscanism. This, more nuanced approach to medieval Franciscan life is a reflection of the many scholarly developments that have occurred in the “large, rich and underworked field” which John Fleming introduced to English readers a generation ago.2 And even if the “little army of Franciscanists” Fleming alluded to can still benefit from some recruitment, there is nonetheless a widespread recognition of the relevance of the early Franciscans’ literary efforts to many walks of medieval life. To be sure, the observation that theirs was a uniquely literary apostolate could have confused the early friars, whose leader was a self-professed simplex et idiota with an ambiguous approach to formal studies. Yet, as Fleming argues, by virtue of their special evangelizing mission, the Minorites spawned numerous literary products and influenced late-

2 Idem., An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), xi.

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medieval literary activities and education generally in diverse and profound ways.3 It is a tribute to the accuracy of this observation that veteran and young scholars alike are able to engage in a multifaceted exploration of the Franciscans’ impact on medieval life and culture. Needless to say, no single conference can hope to cover all aspects of this topic. What we tried to offer, therefore, was a selection of recent and current approaches, with an emphasis on soliciting contributions from scholars distinguished for their wide contextualizing skills. For just as the history of medieval Franciscan literature is to a considerable extent the story of medieval literature writ large, so do other salient efforts led by the Franciscans complement our understanding of diverse contemporaneous realms. To take a celebrated example: Franciscan discussions about (indeed, struggles over) the meaning of salvation history and their own peculiar role within it illuminate late-medieval understandings of property relations and lordship (see the article by Janet Coleman), exegetical techniques and curricular emphases (as the articles by William Courtenay, Alastair Minnis, and Michael Cusato attest), and apocalyptic reflections about the spiritual role that the Church, in general, and friars, in particular, had to play (as discussed by David Burr). To take another key aspect of the Franciscan mission: vernacular preaching, with its evolving themes and techniques, responded sensitively to wider social and cultural phenomena such as urbanization, rising rates of literacy, and—as Katherine Jansen’s essay shows—the increasing demands of sophisticated lay audiences. Last, but not least, the Order’s founder and the ripples he sent throughout western Europe are brought into focus in Lester Little’s study, which explores the ways in which late-medieval religiosity was an imitatio Francisci. Franciscan evangelism did not go unobstructed, even though recent scholars have challenged the accuracy of distinguishing neatly between the friars’ “defenders” and “critics.” Indeed, as G. Geltner’s article argues, many of the criticisms that have traditionally come under the umbrella term of antifraternal literature were issued by authors who decried the friars’ departure from their founder’s ways. In this revised view, men such as William of St. Amour and John Wycliff emerge

3 Idem, “The Friars and Medieval English Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 349–75.

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as exceptional and radical rather than representative and directly influential. This approach was inaugurated by Lawrence Clopper in his revisionist interpretation of Piers Plowman, a work commonly listed as antifraternal, but which Clopper argues betrays Langland’s deep engagement with Franciscanism from a reformist (as opposed to an abolitionist) perspective. Still, as is implicit in Alastair Minnis’ article, and as both Penn Szittya and Geoffrey Dipple stress, there was a discernible effort across Europe, at least among certain circles, to blemish Franciscans and mendicant friars generally by construing their activities as an illegitimate usurpation of the clergy’s privileges or by underscoring their moral depravity and hypocrisy. The broad range of these attacks, from learned treatises, to interpolated satirical poems, to physical violence, bears witness to one inadvertent outcome of the friars’ enormous success. With diverse outcomes, the mendicants’ autonomy was safeguarded at the highest political levels. One pope and one king stand out in particular, albeit in different ways, as influential in early Franciscan history. Patrick Nold revisits a common perception of a pope who is usually associated with the violent demise of the rigorist wing of the Order, despite an apparently little-recognized veneration and defense of Franciscan life. William Jordan offers a new insight into the brothers’ intimate relations with one of their most ardent supporters, King Louis IX of France (St. Louis), by suggesting that the familiar environment of mendicant convents provided an arena for developing Louis’ unique ideas about the role of a Christian king. We hope that the present collection, partial though it may be, will challenge and stimulate further investigation, especially through testing the relevance of its observations in the context of other mendicant orders, lay piety, urban culture, and, of course, literary production and intellectual life in late-medieval Europe. It remains a pleasant duty to offer our heartfelt thanks to the speakers, respondents, session chairs, and audience of the original conference for their enduring commitment and enthusiastic participation, and especially to D. Vance Smith, who co-organized the entire event, and to Peggy Reilly for her invaluable support. For their generous financial aid, we are grateful to the Program in Medieval Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Council of the Humanities, the Program in Italian Studies, the Shelby Collum Davis Center, the Department of English, and the Offices of the Provost and the President of Princeton University. In preparing the volume for

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publication we have greatly benefited from the expertise and patient dedication of Sister Daria Mitchell, O.S.F., at the Franciscan Institute, and our counterparts at Brill Academic Publishers. Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M. The Franciscan Institute St. Bonaventure University

G. Geltner University College Oxford University

CONTRIBUTORS David Burr is Professor Emeritus of History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and books on medieval Franciscanism, among which are Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of The Apocalypse Commentary (1993) and The spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (2001). He is co-translator of the Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations by Angelo Clareno (2005) as well as translator of the latter’s Commentary on the Rule of the Friars Minor (forthcoming). Lawrence M. Clopper is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and a specialist in late medieval literature. After the publication of his dissertation on The Structure of the Chester Cycle (1969), his later works include an edited volume on the Chester Cycle (1979) and his monographs “Songes of Rechelesnesse”: Langland and the Franciscans (1997) and Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (2001). Janet Coleman is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Political Thought in the Government Department at the London School of Economics and Political Thought and one of the foremost historians of medieval political theory. Among her many publications are: Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350–1400 (1981), Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (1992), and A History of Political Thought, 2 vols. (2000), in addition to editing several important collections on medieval political theory. William J. Courtenay is Professor Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An expert in the life and thought of the medieval universities, his monographs include Adam Wodeham: An Introduction to His Life and Writings (1978), Schools and Scholars in FourteenthCentury England (1987), Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Social Portrait (2000) and Ockham and Ockhamism: Studies in the Dissemination and Impact of His Thought (2008).

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Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M. is Dean of the School of Franciscan Studies and Director of the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University in New York State. Author of numerous articles on medieval Franciscan history, his areas of expertise are the early Franciscan movement, the historical contextualization of the early Franciscan sources and apocalypticism in the Franciscan tradition. The first of two volumes of his collected studies is being published as The Early Franciscan Movement (1205–1239): History, Sources and Hermeneutics (2009). Geoffrey Dipple, Associate Professor of history at Augustana College, is a leading expert on antifraternal literature in late medieval and early modern Germany. Among his scholarly contributions to this field are Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars (1996) and “Just as in the Time of the Apostles”: Uses of History in the Radical Reformation (2005). G. Geltner is a Lecturer in Medieval History at University College, Oxford. He has recently published William of Saint Amour’s De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum: A Critical Edition, Translation and Introduction (2008) and The Medieval Prison: A Social History (2008). He is currently writing a social history of medieval antifraternalism. Katherine L. Jansen is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a specialist in late medieval piety. After completing her doctoral dissertation, Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants in Late Medieval Italy (Princeton University, 1995), she developed and broadened this theme in her monograph The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (2000). William Chester Jordan is Professor of History and former Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of several monographs, among which are Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (1979), The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (1989), The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (1996), and A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and SaintDenis in the Thirteenth Century (2009).

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Lester K. Little is Dwight W. Morrow Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College. He is a specialist in the social history of religion and religious movements in the European Middle Ages and the author of Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (1978), Liberty, Charity, Fraternity: Lay Religious Confraternities at Bergamo in the Age of the Commune (1988), and Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (1993). Alastair Minnis is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University is a recognized specialist in late medieval literature, literary theory and the vernacular appropriation of philosophy and theology. His many works include Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (1982), Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (1984), Magister Amoris: the Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (2001) and, most recently, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (2008). Patrick Nold is Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of History at SUNY Albany. A specialist in the history of the papacy in the early fourteenth century, he has published the monograph Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (2003) and a forthcoming volume Marriage Advice for a Pope: John XXII and the Power to Dissolve (2009). D. Vance Smith is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (2001) and is completing work on a book entitled Dying Medieval: The Termination of Middle English Literature. Penn Szittya is Professor of English at Georgetown University. After completing his dissertation, “Caimes Kynde”: The Friars and Exegetical Origins of Medieval Antifraternalism, he published his monograph The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (1974). He has also published widely on medieval literature found in Old French, AngloSaxon, Icelandic, Middle English and Latin.

PREFACE

A LITERARY APOSTOLATE: JOHN FLEMING AND THE FRANCISCAN LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES D. Vance Smith

I am not sure that one could predict John Fleming’s extensive and important engagement with Franciscan literature on the basis of his other very extensive work on the literature of the classical era and the Middle Ages. It runs the gamut from the Bible (of course: this is a man who immediately thinks of the Exodus when he reads about Chaucer’s Summoner’s breath smelling of garlic, onion, and leeks), Ovid, Virgil, The Dream of the Rood, Jean de Meun (and Guillaume de Lorris), Pearl, Chaucer, Erasmus, iconography, Luis Vaz de Camões, Christopher Columbus, William Morris, and, at the beginning and end of his career at Princeton, articles on monasticism. In Middle English studies John is known as an eminent Chaucerian, the author of the definitive study of classical allusion in Troilus and Criseyde, and the teacher of a famous and extremely packed lecture course on Chaucer. In Old French he is known for his two indispensable studies of the Roman de la Rose, both of which represent the highwater mark of exegetical criticism in medieval literature. As a student and then a colleague of D.W. Robertson, John inherited the four-fold mantle of allegoresis, and tailored it to fit vernacular literature even better than it had. Unlike Robertson, John is both a close and an extensive reader of medieval literary texts, and if anyone demonstrated how these texts could and should be read with what Robertson referred to as irony and slightly younger readers would call a hermeneutics of suspicion, it was John. Yet John, along with his friend and colleague Robert Hollander, also treated it as axiomatic that reading medieval literature was anything but an exercise in relativism and simple skepticism. Hovering invisibly over the literatures of the Middle Ages is a tradition even greater and more forceful than the Leavisite Great Tradition: the text of the Bible and its extensive commentary, the writings of Augustine and Boethius, and important classical texts by Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid—a world of ideas

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and terms that John referred to as a “supertext,” a powerful authority outside any text directly alluded to, and “not a subtext because it does not infiltrate from below but commands from above.”1 If Freud and Fradenburg have helped us to find the unconscious in the subtext of medieval writing, then John helped us to locate its superego. There is something of the voice of the superego in his work, but only if one does not listen closely. His famous identification of an “Ithacan heresy” in Reason and the Lover, for instance, might suggest the rigidity of a Dominican inquisitor or the sternness of the Presbyterian divines whose portraits festoon the walls of the Faculty Senate in Nassau Hall. John last spoke before those formidable portraits as a full faculty member in the last Senate Faculty meeting of the year on May 15, 2006. The issue before the Senate was whether to change some official language to be “gender neutral.” The minutes of that meeting cannot sum up the delicate irony and self-deprecating air, with a hint of deference to the learning and severity of attitude conjured by the faces of Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, and Woodrow Wilson, with which John pointed out that, while he agreed entirely with the sentiment of the emendation, “neutral” had originally meant “neither of two,” and therefore a change to accommodate gender neutrality could only mean “neither male nor female.” A literalist might find material for accusations of an exclusionary or elitist attitude in that bald account, but to read John’s work in that light is to miss perhaps the most compelling and humane aspect of his work, to overlook the refinement of a subtle and sympathetic irony. This temperament, among his many other distinctive attributes as a scholar, is what makes his work on the Franciscan literature of the Middle Ages such an enlightening, humane and, well, charitable work. With a fine-tuned reticence, his book sketches out the many ways in which his project could—and perhaps should—have exceeded its own ambitions. The Franciscans produced some of the most brilliant scholars of the Middle Ages, yet their founder insisted on using the vernacular and referred to himself as an idiota; they are best known for monuments of spirituality written by the likes of Bonaventure, Ubertino da Casale, Francis himself, yet John’s book focuses on the writings that

1 Reason and the Lover (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 69. See also idem, “Carthaginian Love: Text and Supertext in the Roman de la Rose,” Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 1 (1981): 51–72.

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had until then been regarded mostly as epiphenomena of Franciscan mysticism. One cannot help but think of the extremes in the career of a selfprofessed farm boy who became a Rhodes scholar and the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English Literature. There were more obvious paths for him to follow, at least when it came to the professions of mendicancy in the Middle Ages. It is not patently clear why the Franciscans should have become his object of study, rather than any of the other three major fraternal orders. For one of Princeton’s legendary lecturers, the recipient of the President’s Teaching Award and the object of so much praise by students that it would have made colleagues less gracious and charitable jealous in the extreme, it might have made sense to have investigated the pedagogy and public of the Dominicans, the great preaching order. For someone who has made a career of demonstrating the proximity of Biblical reference and geography, John’s deeper interest, one would think, would lie with the Carmelites, with their legendary foundation at Mt. Carmel and their preoccupation with the careers of Elijah and Elisha. And one surely must regret the loss of historical and scholarly symmetry in John’s neglect of the Austin friars, founded according to the principles of, one would think, the very Augustinianism that lies at the foundation of John’s conception of the Middle Ages. The question, then, is, how did this man from Mountain Home, Arkansas, come to his interest in the disciples of the man who saw a seraph on Monte La Verna? One of the ironies of John’s book on Franciscan literature is that it can be read tropologically for its advice on setting aside immediate ambition. It is a strikingly humble book: humble about its exclusion of the vast scholastic literature of the Franciscans, its relative silence about the achievements of the Dominicans and Carmelites, even its glancing critique of Bonaventure himself. “It remains to be seen,” John says in his chapter on Bonaventure, “how the works of a university professor and religious administrator . . . could have exerted so great an influence over the emerging popular cultures of medieval Europe.”2 To the degree that this sounds like a question posed by a university professor and administrator (sometime Chair of both the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Master of Wilson College, and head of

2 Idem, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 209.

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innumerable committees), this is exactly the question that lies behind so much of John’s work. How is it that one of the most erudite readers of some of the Middle Ages’ more obscure texts has become the means by which generations of very diverse students and readers have discovered the profound spiritual and intellectual delights of medieval texts for themselves? The answer, at least for Bonaventure, is the kind of deeply “right” observation that it almost immediately becomes axiomatic. “The truth,” John says, is that “Thomas and the Dominicans generally despised poetry, or at least tried to . . . Bonaventure, on the other hand, was always a poet with a poet’s intuition.”3 As the last in a long line of John’s junior colleagues, I am frequently surprised at the profligacy and extent of John’s skills and abilities, but as far as I know, the writing of poetry is not comprehended by them. What John’s insistence on the literary quality of the Franciscans meant was that they produced, and he rediscovered for us out of a repetition of that sensibility, a body of writing in which the world is a book: “poetic images led the mind, captivated by truth and beauty, to look beyond the visible image to the divine exemplar.”4 As John would be the first to admit, the image of the world as a book one learns to read spiritualiter is hardly one the Franciscans invented, but he would be the first to point out that this book is one in which the life and the work are identical (as Dante says of the volume out of which Bonaventure speaks). That is, what is uniquely powerful about the Franciscan Order is its eschewal of narrow and cloistered virtues, of a rule that dictates concretely how one’s mind, one’s heart, and one’s soul occupy themselves in the world. What the Franciscans give us, instead, is simply literature in the deepest sense of the term, a sense that John’s scholarly and teaching career has always been aimed at explicating. The “double movement” of the Order’s conception of the religious life, the accommodation of both Mary and Martha, is responsible for the extraordinary richness of the contemplative literature of the Franciscans, a richness John compares to that of the Desert Fathers and the twelfth-century Cistercians. But at least as significant is what he calls the “evangelical press” of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the literature of the Marthas (as opposed to the Marys, those whose contemplative preoccupations preclude quotidian concerns). It is this first body of writ-

3 4

Ibid., An Introduction, 210. Ibid.

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ing that most engages John’s attention. As he argues, it is one of its characteristics that it appears in the vernacular, the “language of the world,” as opposed to the language of the academy, and even more acutely, that it takes up the literatures of the peoples among whom the Franciscans find themselves. It is, in short, the “vernacular order par excellence,”5 an order that John describes in his later, magisterial précis for the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, as a “literary apostolate.” If the medieval Franciscans found deep learning and deep humility not antithetical, John found in that double movement a correlative for his engagement with the academy. In my first year at Princeton, I precepted for John’s legendary Chaucer course (the only other people to teach the Chaucer course in the 20th century at Princeton were Robert K. Root and D.W. Robertson), and, as often happens, discovered that we had one group of students that simply could not take any of the regularly scheduled precepts. The usual outcome is that such a group would simply be out of luck or, at worst, a junior faculty member like myself would be invited to consider taking on an extra precept or two. But John instantly volunteered to meet two extra precepts, including one on a Friday, a day usually set apart from all classroom instruction at Princeton. I came to find that John also taught entire courses that he was not obligated, from a strict administrative standpoint, to teach, and even, as the Master of Wilson College, regularly attended the undergraduate Bingo nights. If that is not an exemplary instance of the mortification of the flesh, I don’t know what is! A larger irony of John’s important work on the Franciscans is that he himself sometimes conspired to keep his fraternal light under a bushel. It may have been because Brother Olivi said that the light under the bushel in Matthew’s gospel signified the viam inflammationis, not the viam rationis, and if any medievalist today is associated with the way of reason, it is John V. Fleming, the debunker of unreasonable loves.6 Yet there is incontrovertible evidence that he hid his considerable erudition in Franciscan matters under the most basic misapprehension of students in matters fraternal and monastic. In an interview with the Princeton Alumni Weekly, excerpted along with a piece by Alfred Kazin 5

Ibid., 15. Thomas Murtagh, Peter Olivi’s Matthew Commentary: A Critical Edition of Chapter 5, Verses 1–26 with a commentary (master’s thesis, Melbourne College of Divinity, 1992), 22. 6

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the following week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, John summed up his curriculum vitae thus: I AM A MEDIEVALIST. For many years I studied dead monks, but recently, responding to methodological breakthroughs, I have added obscure dead nuns to my repertory. I got into this line of work more or less on purpose. When it became clear to me that I was destined to be a college professor, and therefore irrelevant anyway, I said to myself, “What the hell? Do it with as much pizzazz as possible.” Aelred of Rievaulx and Angela of Foligno then followed naturally, as a matter of course, as night the day.

It is a characteristically witty and self-deprecating gesture for the author of An Introduction to The Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages to omit mentioning friars altogether, but to press ecclesiastical distinctions in front of a general audience would be uncharacteristically pedantic for someone by whom generations of readers have been set on the viam inflammationis, always guided by reason, of course, to writers such as Angela of Foligno—whether we call her a tertiary, nun, or sister. The essays that follow were presented in their original forms at a conference honoring John Fleming on the occasion of his retirement, on April 21–22, 2006. The spirit of Franciscan humility inspires me to admit that the idea was Guy Geltner’s, then a graduate student in History who took a seminar from John and whose seminar paper on antifraternalism in Jean de Meun and Chaucer was later published in Studies in Philology; but I will admit to an immediate and deeply lucid recognition of the genius of the idea. The conference itself was an intellectually stimulating occasion, and many of the attendees urged that the papers be edited in some form. I am grateful to Michael Cusato for taking over the editing of the collection when my own duties prevented me from continuing. That the conference and this festschrift should be inspired by John’s teaching and the wide appeal outside the ostensible academic specialty of his work seems appropriate and, well, poetic. D. Vance Smith Princeton University Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2008

PART ONE

FRANCISCAN EXEGESIS

FRANCIS OF ASSISI, DEACON? AN EXAMINATION OF THE CLAIMS OF THE EARLIEST FRANCISCAN SOURCES 12291235 Michael F. Cusato

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, with its call for religious communities to recover the original charism of their founders, the theme of the clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor came to be explored with great skill by the young Franciscan doctoral candidate, Lawrence Landini, O.F.M. in a landmark dissertation published in 19721 and then deepened a few years later, by the great Italian historian Raoul Manselli in an article on the generalate of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio.2 Clericalization—or the transformation of what began as a lay religious movement into an order, if not yet populated by a majority of clerics (and specifically priests) then certainly led and directed by them—is a problem most often associated with the Franciscan Order founded by one of the greatest of all lay saints, Francis of Assisi.

A Precedent: Stephen of Muret and the Order of Grandmont This problematic was not, however, unique to the Order of Friars Minor. Indeed, it had an important, if sometimes overlooked, precedent in the difficult evolution of the Order of Grandmont, founded by Stephen Muret around the year 1124 in the region north of Limoges in south central France. The original group of hermits gathered around Stephen in the forest at Muret, were laymen, like Stephen himself, eager to embrace a more intense Christian life, far from the strife and temptations

1 Lawrence C. Landini, The Causes of the Clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor, 1209–1260 in the Light of the Early Franciscan Sources, Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Facultas Historiae Ecclesiasticae (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1968). 2 Raoul Manselli, “La clericalizzazione dei Minori e san Bonaventura,” in S. Bonaventura francescano. Convegni del Centro di Studi sulla spiritualità medievale 14 (Todi: Accademia Tudertina, 1974), 181–208.

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of life in the world. As is well known, Stephen and his followers eschewed the traditional rules of religious life—those of Benedict, Basil and Augustine—desiring rather to simply follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the famous words of Stephen himself: “There is no other rule but the Gospel of Christ.”3 This was a life that ardent men of all classes, including laymen, could aspire to embrace. And yet, not long after the death of Stephen in 1125 (in fact, by the time of the death of his faithful companion, Hugh Lacerta in 1157), the community—now relocated further up the mountain at Grandmont—had begun to grow and expand, attracting a small but increasingly vocal number of clerics into its ranks. Not unlike what would happen in Franciscan history, the entrance of this group of men would ultimately have the effect of changing the original character and orientation of the community. As a result of a careful examination of the earliest literary traditions that had developed about the life and charism of the founder, the historian Maire Wilkinson has posited that the earliest expression of that tradition—what she calls the vita primitiva which was based on the sayings of the founder and the oral recollections of his lay disciples—slowly came to be changed and reshaped by these same clerics into a reading of their history more in keeping with those traditional forms of religious life sanctioned by the Church in which clerics—not laymen—held authority over the group. This is the origin of that strand of the textual tradition within Grandmontine history known as the Vita posterior.4 Although this latter reading was contested—strongly—by the Grandmontine writer, William Dandina of Saint-Sévin in his Vita beati Hugonis Lacerta, written in the 1160s, the momentum was, nevertheless, with the clerics and their recasting of the events of the life and intentions of Stephen of Muret. This is the line of interpretation evidenced in the Vita Stephani Muretensis, a decidedly clerical reading of the tradition written in 1188 or 1189 that would become the official vita of the founder. Indeed, this latter document, penned by the seventh prior of Grandmont, Gérard Ithier, represents, according to Wilkinson, the victory of the clerical party’s reworking of Stephen’s inspiration: a victory that was abetted—indeed, made possible—by the papal reform 3 Liber de doctrina vel liber sententiarum seu rationum beati viri Stephani primi patris religionis Grandmontis, prologue: “Non est alia regula nisi evangelium Christi!” 4 Maire Wilkinson dates the Vita posterior some time before the death of Hugh Lacerta in 1157. See the notes below for her various works on Grandmontine history and hagiography.

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of the community in 1186 into a community with an approved rule and whose governance had now been given over to its clerics. For it was viewed as inappropriate that an Order should be run by lay religious who would have authority—jurisdictio—over clerics. Hence, in their view, the predominant and original lay character of the Order had to be changed in order to render it legitimate in the eyes of the Church. During this process of clericalization, one of the signs of this trend, Wilkinson contends, was the appearance—already by the time of Hugh’s death in 1157—of the contention that Stephen of Muret, the lay hermit desiring to follow the Gospel, was, in fact, a deacon. This contention was made unequivocally in the Vita Stephani Muretensis of 1188, though it represented an earlier literary tradition. In this testimony, Stephen, on his deathbed, is described as being in ordine diaconatus: belonging to the order of deacons.5 William Dandina, however, had contested this assertion in his Vita Hugonis as having no basis whatsoever in the oral accounts of the life of Stephen, handed down by the early disciples, to which he himself had been privy.6 Nevertheless, the tradition of Stephen as a deacon continued to be fostered in the more literary—that is to say, clerical—versions of the life of the founder, becoming accepted into the official vita of the Order at exactly the same time that Grandmont was being realigned by the papacy as a clerical order. And in this perspective such an Order would have been established by a founder who was, allegedly, a deacon: a member of the clerical hierarchy. In short, it would seem that Stephen of Muret, originally and historically a lay hermit, was posthumously transformed into a deacon by the clerics within the Order of Grandmont in order to legitimatize the clericalization of their Order which had been underway since mid-century and crowned by the papacy in 1186, by re-making the founder into one of their own.7

5 “Vita venerabilis viri Stephani Muretensis,” in Scriptores Ordinis Grandimontensis, Corpus christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), XXXIII, 124: Tandem, finita missa, post sacram inunctionem, post receptionem corporis et sanguinis Domini, fratribus flentibus psalmosque canentibus, octogesimo aetatis suae anno, in ordine diaconatus, sexta feria, sexto Idus februarii dicens: “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum,” feliciter migravit ad Dominum. 6 For the contents of the dream, see below, 21–22. On an explication of these issues, see Maire Wilkinson, “The Vita Stephani Muretensis and the Early Life of Stephen of Muret,” Monastic Studies 1 (1990): 102–26, esp. Appendix II: “The ‘Diaconate’ of Stephen of Muret,” 123–26. 7 Maire Wilkinson, “The Vita Stephani Muretensis and the Papal Re-Constitution of the Order of Grandmont in 1186 and Thereafter,” Monastic Studies 2 (1991): 133–55.

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michael f. cusato Francis of Assisi as Deacon: The Textual Evidence

When one turns to the figure of the lay saint par excellence of the Middle Ages, Francis of Assisi, one is immediately struck by a similarly parallel and equally curious clerical association. Prescinding from the thorny issue of whether Francis and his early friars received clerical tonsures after their propositum vitae had been orally approved by Innocent III in 1209,8 I would like to address myself to the more narrow question of whether Francis was—or was not—a deacon, a member of the clerical hierarchy, as the early hagiographical sources would seem to claim he was. There are three primary testimonies that Francis was a deacon. The first and most important source—the one which serves as the model for the other two—is the famous narrative found in the Vita prima of Thomas of Celano (1 Cel 86) which tells us about the Christmas celebrated outside the city of Greccio in 1223 by Francis, his friars and other local townspeople.9 In this account, Francis is depicted as visually re-creating—with manger, straw and farm animals—that first Christmas at Bethlehem. The other accounts are derived from this primary narrative: namely, Julian of Speyer’s Legenda sancti Francisci (LJS 54)10 and Bonaventure’s Legenda maior (X:7).11 Interestingly, the Legenda versificata of Henri d’Avranches, while strictly dependent upon Celano’s text, mentions the Greccio scene but without any direct reference to Francis’s alleged diaconate. I will return to the specifics of these texts shortly. These are the most noteworthy texts—and Greccio is the only context—in which the allusion to the diaconate of Francis appears in the earliest hagiographical sources. Two other texts, which refer to the preaching of Francis, seem to imply that he might have been ordained 8 Neither account in 1 or 2 Celano of the friars’ audience before Pope Innocent III in April 1209 asking for approval of their way of life mentions any conferral of the clerical tonsure upon Francis and his brothers. This act is mentioned for the first time in AP 36 and then is picked up by 3 Soc 52. Bonaventure’s mention of the tonsure (LMj III: 10) is apparently dependent upon this latter source. According to these testimonies, the conferral of the tonsure occurred at the insistence of Cardinal John of St. Paul almost immediately after the approval of the propositum vitae by Innocent III. 9 Thomas of Celano, Vita prima sancti Francisci 86, in AF 10, 64. 10 Julian of Speyer, Vita sancti Francisci 54, in AF 10, 360–61. 11 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Legenda maior sancti Francisci X: 7, in AF 10, 604–05.

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a deacon: Anonymous of Perugia 43c and the Chronicle of Jordan of Giano. In both sources, the context is a chapter gathering of the friars (either September 1220 or May 1221, or possibly both) and probably in the presence of Hugolino dei Conti di Segni, Cardinal Protector of the Franciscan order. However, to report the fact that Francis preached— even in an official context and in the sight of a Roman cardinal—is not necessarily proof of any supposed diaconate of Francis.12 It is proof, at the very least, of a permission to preach. A more interesting (and final) reference to Francis as deacon is found, however, in the Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis minorum of Angelo Clareno written in 1324 or shortly thereafter. Here, Francis is alluded to (though not by name) as a deacon in a vision received by the author himself some time before the election of Celestine V as pope (that is, 1294). Speaking of himself in the third person, Angelo writes: In the sixth day and in the sixth hour, finding himself in the midst of many servants of God, suddenly he saw, in the center of a certain hospice, a monastery of the great name of the Madonna, where there were more than forty religious men, there was a pulpit covered with a covering. And behold there appeared a deacon dressed in levitical clothing; and there came to be put on the pulpit a book closed with seven seals. The deacon approached to open the book and opened the sixth seal to read what was contained in the sixth part . . .13

The passage then goes on to relate how the deacon saw within the book the tribulations that were to come upon the Order in the sixth age in which it was presently living. Now, strange though this testimony might seem to us (given its apocalyptic context and its dire forewarnings), the detail of Francis, identified, since the time of Bonaventure, as the Angel of the Sixth Seal and dressed as a deacon in levitical vestments (leviticis indumentis paratus), reading from the Word, nonetheless appears to have been drawn either directly from Celano’s own description of

12 AP 43c: Quando autem veniebat, exibant ei obviam processionaliter fratres omnes in capitulo congregati . . . Et eis sermonem postmodum faciebat, et celebrabat missam, et beatus Franciscus Evangelium decantabat. Jordan of Giano, Chronica, c. 16: In hoc capitulo beatus Franciscus . . . fratribus predicavit et docens virtutes et monens ad pacientiam et ad exempla mundo demonstranda. Similiter fiebat sermo ad populum et fiebat edificacio in populo et in clero. 13 Angelo Clareno, Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis minorum, ed. G. Boccali, Pubblicazioni della Biblioteca Francescana (Chiesa Nuova—Assisi) 8 (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1998), 630.

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Francis in the Greccio account or, more simply, from an assumed historical datum that Francis was a deacon.14 In either case, we have another allusion—albeit very late—to the same idea. That said, there is, however, no allusion whatsoever in Francis’s own writings that he was (or that he saw himself as) a member of the clerical hierarchy. Even when he gives great attention in his writings to the care of the Eucharist, liturgical books and churches, there is still no hint that he refers to himself as or considers himself a minister at the altar. Nor is there any allusion to an alleged diaconate of Francis in the writings of the Companions, most notably Brother Leo who, though a priest himself and a frequent companion of the saint, might have been expected to recount how Francis would have assisted him at Mass as his deacon; but he does not. In short, other than the three above-mentioned hagiographical texts and the highly symbolic text of Angelo Clareno, I can find no other text or narrative that directly asserts that Francis was a deacon. Hence, we seem to be left with only one paradigmatic text: Thomas of Celano’s account of the 1223 Christmas at Greccio, spanning chapters 84–87 in the Vita prima. What does that narrative tell us? The author states that, at a certain point during the Mass: The holy one of God [Francis] is dressed in levitical vestments, for he was a Levite, and he sings the holy Gospel in a sonorous voice. And his voice [is] a strong voice, a sweet voice, a clear voice, a sonorous voice, inviting all to the highest rewards. Then he preaches to the people standing about, and he pours forth sweet words about the nativity of the poor King and the little town of Bethlehem.15

The Latin of the two key phrases reads: induitur sanctus Dei leviticis ornamentis and quia levita erat. Now if one assumes—as most commentators assume—that the word levita is a standard Latin synonym

14 The setting of the vision would appear to be the Portiuncula rather than the church at Greccio. 15 1 Cel 86: Induitur sanctus Dei leviticis ornamentis, quia levita erat, et voce Sonora sanctum Evangelium cantat. Et quidem vox eius, vox vehemens, vox dulcis, vox cclara, voxque Sonora, cunctos invitans ad praemia summa. Praedicat deinde populo circumstanti et de nativitate pauperis Regis et Bethlehem parvula civitate melliflua eructat. At this point in his narrative, Celano switches from the past tense to the present tense—an important device not only placing the reader in the moment of the celebration but bringing the events and assertions of his account into the moment of the reader. Celano is making a critical statement here: what has occurred is not simply history but has relevance for the circumstances of the reader.

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for the word deaconus, then the case would appear to be quite simple and there would be no real question—the paucity of other supporting evidence notwithstanding—that Francis was indeed a deacon. Hence, the assertion made in Celano’s account—and those tributary from it— would seem to be clear enough: Francis was a Levite—a deacon—who, therefore, would have quite appropriately had the right and the duty to proclaim the Christmas Gospel, dressed in levitical vestments. However, if one would wish to read this account differently and thereby put into doubt this traditional if seemingly enigmatic assertion, two items from the Celanese account would need further exploration: (1) Celano’s choice and use of the Latin term levita; and (2) the connection between the assertion that Francis was a Levite and his proclamation of the Gospel. In this presentation, I am primarily going to examine the first issue. However, I would be remiss if I did not at least touch on the second. For in some respects, the second issue may well be the strongest argument for the claims in favor of the diaconate of Francis.

Francis and the Proclamation of the Gospel The report that Francis had not only read but sang the Gospel would seem to be virtually incontrovertible evidence that the Poverello must have been a deacon. By tradition, at least since the seventh and eighth centuries in the West, the proclamation of the Gospel in the context of the Roman liturgy was indeed the prerogative of deacons. Thus far, every text that I have consulted with respect to this prerogative reserves this liturgical action to the order of deacons. However, at least one author does note that this action was usually reserved to deacons, implying that there may have been occasions when others might have been allowed to exercise this privilege.16 Whether the Christmas celebration at Greccio in 1223 was just such an occasion is difficult to say. But if it were, we would need to ask: why would such an exception have been granted? Was special permission asked for and granted for laymen like Francis? Or viewed from a very different angle: were the heads of religious orders, 16

Cf. Adrian Fortescue, “Gospel in the Liturgy,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York Robert Appleton, 1909), 6: 659–63, esp. 660–61. Interestingly, the author notes that in the West, throughout the Middle Ages, the Emperor was also given the right to read or sing the Gospel at the Christmas Mass.

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even if they were lay or simply in minor orders, granted, by virtue of their office, the privilege of proclaiming the Gospel in the context of the liturgy? I am not at all certain; nor have I seen any such privilege attested to anywhere in the sources. That he preached—and continued to preach even after the restrictions imposed by canon 10 of the Fourth Lateran Council17—is not in question.18 We have quite a few testimonies of his post-Lateran preaching. The question, rather, is his proclamation of the Gospel in the context of the liturgy. Given what we know of this practice, this is admittedly a high bar to surmount if we are to read Celano’s imagery differently than we usually do. Indeed, it may even be insurmountable. The common sense explanation, therefore, is that if Francis read the Gospel and preached during the liturgy, he most surely must have been a deacon. In short, if we read Celano’s account as it presents itself to us—that is to say, literally: taking the words to mean what they appear to mean (i.e., that a levita was a deacon)—then there would be no need of any further discussion. However, my contention is that Celano ought not be read simply on this surface level. There may be other possible readings of this text which will square not only with his own more profound hagiographical intentions but also with the absence of any other corroborating evidence. To demonstrate this, we need to return to the first issue raised earlier: namely, Celano’s choice and use of the term levita in reference to Francis. Indeed, a determination of the meaning of

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Cf. for example, Rolf Zerfaβ, Der Streit um die Laienpredigt. Eine pastoralgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verständnis des Predigtamtes und zu seiner Entwicklung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 1974), 247–50. 18 Still, to my mind, this question requires further exploration. Canon 10 restricts preaching to those suitable men (viri idonei) who received a license to preach from their ordinary (i.e., the local bishop or a religious superior). However, the canon does not explicitly distinguish between doctrinal preaching and penitential preaching. In other words, were the penitential preachers of the Order of Friars Minor, whether they were in minor orders (that is, clerics) or not, restricted de facto from preaching in the years after Lateran IV? Evidence from a work like the Vita Aegidii would seem to indicate that such friars (lay companions of Francis like Giles) were indeed increasingly restricted from doing so. On this, see: Stanislao da Campagnola, “La ‘Leggenda’ di Frate Egidio d’Assisi nei secoli XIII–XV,” Francescanesimo e società cittadina: l’esempio di Perugia. Pubblicazioni del “Centro per il Collegamento degli Studi Medievali e Umanistici nell’Università di Perugia” 1 (Perugia: Tipografia Porziuncola, 1979), 113–43. But another question is this: did deacons, after Lateran IV, have a de iure right to preach at this time? Or would they have required a license to do so as well? For the implication of canon 10 is that they—like parish priests—would have had to prove that they were idonei. Hence to simply assert that Francis’s preaching at Greccio proves ipso facto that he was a deacon perhaps oversimplifies the matter.

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this word for Celano will shed light upon and oblige us to nuance the second issue that seemed so firm: namely, that Francis’s proclamation of the Gospel in the liturgy proves that he was a deacon.

Celano’s Choice of the Term levita: Two Possible Hypotheses So why does Celano use the term levita in his account? Might there be other reasons why his seemingly straightforward words ought to be read or construed differently and not be taken at face value? I can think of three possible reasons. Whereas the first two are interesting hypotheses, the third—I believe—is the most convincing and the most probable; indeed, it is the key to reading 1 Celano 86. First, is it possible that Celano was following the line of thought laid out in Gérald Ithier’s Vita Stephani Muretensis, conceding that, not unlike the Order of Grandmont, the Franciscan Order, too, was also now in the process of clericalization, in need of clerical leadership and, therefore, in need of a clerical founder? In other words, is he patterning his depiction of Francis on the depiction made in 1188 of Stephen of Muret as a deacon? This is indeed quite tempting, given the well-known problem of the clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor and given the fact that the Vita prima was an official, papallycommissioned work of hagiography. In short, this hypothesis would claim that Francis was a deacon because the Order, like Grandmont in the late 1180s, needed its founder to be a deacon. Such a bold assertion, however, would have placed the current leader of the Order, the layman John Parenti, in a rather awkward and uncomfortable position with respect to his Order. The implication would be that he, too, ought to be in the clerical hierarchy in order to legitimately govern. But this seems unlikely.19 Besides, John’s own successor, Elias of Cortona, was also a layman and, at least at the time of his election in 1232 or 1233, still very much in the good graces of Gregory IX. Hence, from the perspective of the papacy, lay leadership of the Franciscan Order does not appear to have been perceived as a pressing problem or considered to be an obstacle at this time. Moreover, the problem of the clericalization

19 Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that Celano would have seen John Parenti in such an unfavorable light.

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of the Order, while already beginning to manifest itself to some degree at the Emergency Chapter of September 1220,20 does not seem to have become a major bone of contention until the late 1230s, signaled by the deposition of Elias and the work of Haymo of Faversham in the early 1240s.21 Hence, intriguing though it may be, it seems prudent to discount Celano’s depiction of Francis as being the direct result of simply paralleling Gérald Ithier’s fictitious elevation of Stephen of Muret, another lay founder, to the order of deacons. But if Celano was not following the line of clerical interpretation represented by the Vita Stephani Muretensis, might he then have been following the opposite position in the Grandmontine hagiographical tradition advocated by William Dandina in the 1160s? We know that William contested the growing assertions among the clerics of his Order that Stephen was a deacon. To refute this, William, in his Vita Hugonis, used the tale of a vision which Hugh Lacerta was reported to have had, just prior to his death in 1157, of the deacon Stephen—that is, the first martyr of the early Church—calling him to his eternal reward. This tale had been inserted by Gérard Ithier into the collection of miracles which

20 The Emergency Chapter of 1220 (in late September) in which Francis gave up his role of active leadership of the movement which he had founded was also marked by a confrontation between Francis and an increasingly vocal group of clerics over certain decisions that had been taken during his absence in the Holy Land and over the direction of the Order being steered by these same clerics and encouraged apparently by Cardinal Hugolino. For an account of some of the issues that prompted Francis’s abrupt return from the Holy Land, see: Chronica Fratris Jordani, ed. H. Boehmer. Collection d’Études et de Documents 6 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1908), cc. 11–16. However, it should be kept in mind that, in these pages, Jordan conflates events that occurred at this Emergency Chapter with others that happened six months later at the General Chapter in May 1221. The account of the famous confrontation with the clerics is found in AC 18. 21 On the deposition of Elias, see Michael F. Cusato, “Non propheta sed profanus apostata. The Eschatological Significance of the Deposition of Brother Elias of Cortona in 1239,” in That Others May Know and Love. Essays in Honor of Zachary Hayes, O.F.M., ed. M. Cusato and F. Edward Coughlin (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1997), 255–83. However, in this article I contend that the primary—or ultimately decisive—reason for Elias’s deposition from office was the favorable eschatological position he took with respect to Frederick II, in opposition to the negative posture adopted by Gregory IX in 1239. The other issues—perceived abuses of power, lax lifestyle and opposition to the full insertion of the Order into the clerical apostolate of the Church—were contributing (but not ultimately decisive) factors in Gregory’s replacing him with the priest, Albert of Pisa. On Haymo, see the classic treatment by Rosalind B. Brooke, Early Franciscan Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), esp. chs. 8 and 9.

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was appended to his Vita Stephani Murentensis.22 Using this tale of Hugh’s vision, William cleverly fashioned a somewhat different story.23 In this account, shortly before his own death, Hugh and a companion, Guido of Miliac, had gone to receive a blessing from the fourth prior of the order, Stephen of Liciac. This done, the two men left to return home. At Muret, the two then decided to stop and attend Mass. After the recitation of Prime and shortly after the start of the Mass, Hugh suddenly saw three clerical figures at the altar: the celebrant, an assisting priest and one “in veste levitica stolaque candida inter alios.” Not quite sure what he was seeing, he asked his companion no less than three times how many figures he saw on the altar. His brother responded: two—both priests. Still perplexed, Hugh moved off to the side of the altar and positioned himself within the clerics’ choir. From this vantage point, he saw the assisting priest go to the pulpit to read the Gospel but, according to the vision, accompanied by this deacon who, then, proclaimed the Gospel. To his astonishment, Hugh recognized the voice of his founder, Stephen of Muret. However, he could not correlate the voice with the diaconal figure he saw in front of him. The moral of William’s story is that while the proclamation of the Gospel as the only rule of life was entirely consistent with Stephen, the diaconal dress and liturgical ministry were all wrong. Although Hugh heard the identifiable voice of Stephen proclaiming the Gospel, he was never actually able to visually identify the deacon dressed in levitical vestments as being Stephen himself. The implication of the dream, in William’s rendition of it, is that Stephen, by his life and profession did indeed proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ but that the growing assertion in the Grandmontine community that he was also a liturgical deacon had no merit. His presence on the altar was but a phantom, a wishful desire of certain members of the Order. William Dandida’s account, therefore, argues against the diaconate of Stephen.24 The stress in this account is not on any supposed diaconate of Stephen but upon his singular right to proclaim the Gospel since that is what he did—in word as well as in deed—in his own life as a lay follower of Christ.

22 The long version of the Vita Stephani was edited in: Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmaticorum, moralium amplissima collectio 6, ed. E. Martène (Paris: Montalant, 1724–33), 1085–87. 23 Vita Hugonis 49, in Scriptores Ordinis Grandimontensis, Corpus christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 202–03. 24 Cf. Maire Wilkinson, “The Vita Stephani Muretensis, Appendix II,” 123–26.

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The parallels to Francis are, of course, striking. But again, attractive as this hypothesis might be in some respects when applied to Francis, the parallel is considerably vitiated by the fact that Celano, different from William, depicts Francis not as a chimerical Levite but as a real and identifiable one, in voice as well as in body: “Induitur sanctus Dei leviticis ornamentis, quia levita erat.” Celano does, indeed, want to stress that Francis was a Levite—but in precisely what sense?

Francis the Levite Thus, we come back to where we started in our attempt to explain the Celanese imagery. We return to the compelling image of Francis the Levite dressed in his levitical garments. But herein lies the key. For if the depiction of Francis as a deacon is to be understood as anything other than literally true, then the text must be read from a different angle; it must be read through the lens of image and symbol. The substance of my argument will be that Celano’s depiction of Francis as a Levite is an image—more than just an historical datum—meant to convey a powerful statement about the role not only of Francis but especially of his Order which continues to live on in the Church long after his death in 1226. Indeed, the image of Francis the Levite will serve as a far more powerful image for the Franciscan Order than will any historical claim that its founder may once have been a member of the clerical hierarchy. It is well known that Pope Gregory IX commissioned Thomas of Celano to write his Vita prima in the immediate aftermath of the canonization of Francis of Assisi on 16 July 1228. Working assiduously, his legenda was published six months later on 29 February 1229. Thomas, however, since the General Chapter of 1221, had been in Germany, having been sent there on mission along with ninety other friars by this same chapter.25 He returned to Italy specifically to be present for the canonization ceremony. Hence, in order to accomplish his task as official hagiographer of the new saint, Thomas would have to rely upon the recollections of those who had known Francis better than he and to

25 It is the chronicle of Jordan of Giano (cc. 17–19) that informs us about this mission and that Celano (c. 19) was part of this impressive delegation of friars sent to Germany as a result of the Chapter of 1221.

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use those texts at his disposal, most notably the Rules and Testament of the founder, which could help him integrate the minorite vision into the official portrait of the Poverello. Besides these sources, there are two other texts that will have a particular importance with respect to the issue we are examining. Those two sources are: the Encyclical Letter of Elias, written immediately after the death of Francis in October 1226 to announce to all the friars the passing of their founder; and the bull of canonization, Mira circa nos, issued by Gregory IX on 19 July 1229, three days after the official ceremony. Both texts employ important images which Celano will both inherit and interact with as part of the early Franciscan literary legacy.

The Encyclical Letter of Brother Elias (1226) If one accepts the Encyclical Letter of Elias as authentic,26 there are several images used within the letter to note. In his fascinating monograph, From Bonaventure to Bellini, John Fleming called our attention to the fact that the Old Testament figures of Moses and Aaron came

26 There is some scholarly discussion surrounding the authenticity of the Encyclical Letter, in whole or in part, due to its first appearance in the manuscript tradition only in the early seventeenth century (1620) in the Speculum vitae beati Francisci et sociorum ejus, published by William Spoelberch. The text as we have it today was edited in Analecta francescana 10 (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1941), 523–28 (Engl. trans. in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 2 [New York: New City Press, 2000], 489–91). Jordan of Giano, Chronica, ch. 50, 45–46, however, reports the existence of such a letter informing the friars of Francis’s death, his wish that they receive his blessing and forgiveness for any faults, and the announcement about the discovery of the stigmata on his body and consequent miracles. See the discussion of the problematic in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 2 (New York: New City Press, 2000), 485–88 [hereafter FA:ED]. The most extensive recent study is by: Felice Accrocca, “La lettura (o le lettere) di frate Elia sul transito di Francesco,” Frate Francesco ns 69 (2003): 503–20. Given the richness and at times obscurity of the scriptural citations used throughout the letter, I assume that Elias was not the principal author of the text; I prefer to see the hand of Caesar of Speyer heavily involved in this as well as a number of other important early Franciscan texts. On the issue of Caesar’s involvement in the redaction of important texts within early Franciscanism, see: Michael F. Cusato, “An Unexplored Influence on the Epistola ad fideles of Francis of Assisi: the Epistola universis Christi fidelibus of Joachim of Fiore,” Franciscan Studies 62 (2003): 253–78, esp. 257–58; idem, “Commercium: From the Profane to the Sacred,” in Francis of Assisi: History, Hagiography and Hermeneutics in the Early Documents, ed. J. Hammond (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004), 179–209, esp. 188–202; and, most recently, “The Letters to the Faithful,” in Early Franciscan Sources, Vol. 1 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, forthcoming).

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to be key images in Franciscan self-understanding and iconography.27 However, it was the second figure, that of Aaron, which surprisingly played the greater role in the earliest Franciscan texts. The first such use of the figure of Aaron appears in the Encyclical Letter of Elias. Near the end of the letter, before the prescription to offer suffrages for the deceased founder, the author returns to the theme of mourning with which he had begun the letter. Here, the friars’ grief over the death of Francis is compared to that which ensued among the Israelites upon the passing of Moses and Aaron, who are described, naturally enough, as their “great leaders.”28 Hence, up to this point, the two Old Testament figures had been paired as images of grief. But shortly thereafter, it is the figure of Aaron which is singularly highlighted:29 At the same time it is right for us to weep for Francis. He who went out and came in,30 as did Aaron,31 who brought forth from his storehouse both the new and the old32 and comforted us in all our afflictions,33 has been taken from our midst.34 Now we are like orphans without a father.35

This passage operates on two levels. On one level—the literal—Elias is underscoring the profound sense of sadness experienced by the friars at the loss of their founder. On another more evocative level, however, the author is putting into play a series of images drawn from a variety of biblical texts whose import we often miss simply because we are not accustomed—as were learned medieval men and women—to thinking and perceiving through the medium of images. And, when we do notice the images, we moderns tend to read them literally rather than being evocative of deeper truths about a subject.36 27 John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), ch. 4, 99–128. 28 AF 10, par. 8, 527 (“. . . Moysen et Aaron inclytos suos”). 29 Encyclical Letter, par. 9, 527: Pium est flere Franciscum, quoniam qui egrediebatur et ingrediebatur, tamquam Aaron, et ferens nobis de thesauro suo nova et vetera et consolans nos in omni tribulatione nostra, de medio nostri sublatus est, et nunc pupilli dicimur absque patre. 30 Cf. 1 Kgs 18: 16. FA:ED, 2, 491 adds “among us” to the text which, though not in the Latin of the Encyclical, seems to have been directly borrowed by the English translator from the 1 Kings 18: 16 passage (ante eos); but see below, n. 40. 31 Heb 5: 4. 32 Matt 13: 52. 33 2 Cor 1: 4. 34 1 Cor 5: 2. 35 Lam 5: 3. 36 For another example of this hermeneutic, see Michael F. Cusato, “Of Snakes and Angels: The Mystical Experience behind the Stigmatization Narrative of 1 Celano,” in

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The Quaracchi editors tell us that the first reference in this passage— egrediebatur et ingrediebatur (“he went out and came back in”)—is a quote from 1 Kings 18:16. If accurate, the image would be referring to David (at a time when his popularity among the people presented itself as a threat to King Saul) who “went out from and returned to” his people on a variety of missions given to him by Saul.37 I am not convinced that this is the proper reference or, perhaps better, the only allusion intended by the use of these words. For the very next phrase—tamquam Aaron—belies this interpretation. One would have to believe that Elias would first have been evoking David but then attributing the action of David to Aaron. There is indeed a much simpler reading of the images: the action of “going in and coming out” actually refers, quite coherently, to the activity of Aaron who, as high priest, designated as such by Moses to minister in the Tent, is the one who would “go in and come out” again from the Holy of Holies—the innermost sanctuary of the pre-exilic Ark of the Covenant. Indeed, this same action is mentioned in the Book of Exodus 28, where we read: From among the Israelites have your brother Aaron, together with his sons, [Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar], brought to you, that they may be my priests . . .38

Then, after a long description of the clothing to be worn by the priests, last of which were the gold bells attached to the hem of the high priest’s robe, the text continues: Aaron shall wear it when ministering, that its tinkling may be heard as he goes in and comes out of (ingreditur et egreditur) the Lord’s presence in the sanctuary.39

The Latin here is important: ingreditur et egreditur. What is being evoked by the author of the Encyclical Letter, in other words, is the activity of the high priest shuttling in and out of the Holy of Holies, mediating between God and his people. In short, in the Encyclical Letter of Elias, The Stigmata of Francis of Assisi: New Studies, New Perspectives (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2006), 29–74, esp. 49–50. 37 In fact, the word order in 1 Kgs 18: 16 [= 1 Samuel in the Vulgate] is reversed, whereby the going in precedes the coming out: “Omnis autem Israel et Iuda diligebat David: ipse enim ingrediebatur et egrediebatur ante eos.” If the allusion to I Kings is correct, then the text of the Encyclical Letter as we have it has reversed the order of these verbs. 38 Ex 28: 1. 39 Ex 28: 35.

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Francis is being likened to Aaron, the high priest of Israel, not David the warrior.40 This association of the action of “going in and coming out” with the high priest Aaron (and by extension with Francis) are also confirmed by Elias’s very next words: the textual citation of the phrase tamquam Aaron from the Letter to the Hebrews 5:4. The larger context of this biblical passage is the priesthood of Jesus Christ, first in relationship to Moses, his faithful servant (in chapter 4), and then to Aaron the high priest (in chapter 5) who sinned and who then makes reparation—that is, does penance—not only for himself but for the people as well. The larger passage reads: Every high priest is taken from among the human race and made its representative before God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal patiently with erring sinners for he himself is beset by weakness and so must make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people. One does not take this honor on his own initiative but only when called by God as Aaron was (tamquam Aaron).41

Aaron represents what is called in Hebrews 7:11 the levitical priesthood (sacerdotium leviticum): that office established within pre-exilic Judaism whose functionaries were drawn from the tribe of Levi and whose role it was to mediate between God and the people. From a New Testament perspective, however, this priesthood would be superceded by the so-called priesthood of Melchizedek, the new priesthood of Jesus Christ sprung not from the family of Levi but from the tribe of Judah. Francis, according to the author of the Encyclical attributed to Elias, is said to be a minister of this new priesthood, “going in and coming out,” like Aaron before him, making intercession not merely for himself but also and especially for the people of God. In other words, Francis is visualized as going into the presence of God, doing penance for his own sins, and then coming out to call others to do the same: facere penitentiam, to live the life of penance. Francis, in short, has become the new Aaron, the high priest of the New Israel.

40 Thus, the allusion “going in and coming out” used in Elias’ encyclical is not to I Kings 18: 16, as the Quaracchi editors believed but rather to Ex 28: 35. 41 Heb 5: 1–4.

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The Bull of Canonization, Mira circa nos (1228) In his sermon for the canonization of Francis of Assisi on 16 July 1229 as reported to us in 1 Celano 125, Gregory IX chose as his primary text a passage from Sirach 50: 6–7: Like the morning star shining in the midst of the clouds and like the full moon in his own day, so too did he shine forth like a shimmering sun in the temple of God.42

This is but an excerpt of the fuller scriptural passage cited by Celano. But it is also the text that will pass into the bull of canonization, Mira circa nos, on 19 July 1229, except that there the phrase in templo Dei (Sir 50:7) will be replaced more appropriately by the phrase in ecclesia Dei. Indeed, Gregory chose this particular, if somewhat obscure, text from Sirach specifically because of the wider context of the original biblical passage, which reads: Behold Simon the high priest, the son of Onias, who in his lifetime renovated the house [of God] and in his days fortified the temple. By him the height of the Temple was established; the double building and the high walls of the Temple. In his days, the wells of water flowed out; and they were filled as the sea beyond measure. He took care of his nation and delivered it from destruction.43 He shone forth in his days like the morning star in the midst of a cloud, and as the moon at the full. And as the shimmering sun, so did he shine in the Temple of God (in templo Dei) . . .44

Gregory chose this text because of its ecclesial significance. Francis, in other words, is being likened to one whose actions had resulted in the supporting, strengthening and renewal of the Temple, that is to say, the whole Church. Indeed, Thomas of Celano will use this same text and ecclesial image of Francis in the 1240s, in his Vita secunda (or better, his Memoriale in desiderio animae), when he fashions from this same citation used by Gregory—the account of the famous dream of

42

1 Cel 125. Interestingly, the Latin Vulgate text does not contain the illuminating phrase now present in modern transcriptions and translations: “How splendid he was as he appeared from the Tent, as he came from within the veil!” (v. 5). Rather the Vulgate reads: Qui praevaluit amplificare civitatem, qui adeptus est gloriam in conversatione gentis. Et ingressum domus et atrii amplificavit. 44 Sir 50: 1–7. 43

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Innocent III who saw a little man (Francis) propping up a church—the Church—which was on the verge of collapsing. And Giotto after him will likewise use this same image, now borrowed from Celano or, more likely, Bonaventure, to depict in painted form the same idea. All will have been drawn from Gregory’s sermon and his citation of Sirach 50. What is often missed, however, is the fact that the one to whom Francis is being compared is Simon II, son of Onias II, who was high priest in Israel from 219–196 B.C., that is to say during the tumultuous period in Hebrew history when the Hellenistic ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, made his assault upon the Jewish religion. As such, Simon stands in the long (though complicated) lineage of high priests tracing their ancestry all the way back to Aaron. The text of Sirach, then, goes on to describe his liturgical functions: When he put on the robe of glory and was clothed with the perfection of power, when he went up to the holy altar, he honored the vesture of holiness. And when he took the portions out of the hands of the priests, he himself stood by the altar. And about him was the ring of his brothers (corona fratrum) . . . they stood round about him: all the sons of Aaron in their glory. And the oblation of the Lord was in their hands, before all the congregation of Israel; [. . .] Then the sons of Aaron shouted; they sounded with beaten trumpets and made a great noise to be heard for a remembrance before God. Then all the people together made haste and fell down to the earth upon their faces, to adore the Lord their God and to pray to the Almighty God, the Most High. And the singers lifted up their voices and in the great house the sound of sweet melody was increased.45

Thus, Gregory uses the image of the high priest, Simon II, a descendent of Aaron, to depict the ecclesial work of Francis: the one who renews the Church. And yet—and this is crucial—it is not Francis alone. Notice in this passage that those standing next to the high priest—the corona fratrum assisting him in his liturgical duties—are referred to as the sons of Aaron ( filii Aaron). Hence we have a priestly family gathering around the high priest, all engaged in the liturgical action. Indeed, this detail intersects with the real intent of his bull of canonization, Mira circa nos. For this magnificent bull, while praising Francis and his significance for the ecclesial community through the images of the four charismatic judges and the emphasis upon the active Leah over the more 45

Sir 50: 11b–15a; 18–20.

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contemplative Rachel,46 is intended as a statement about the ecclesial significance of Francis and his friars: that is to say, their importance for the work of the renewal of the Church. To emphasize this, Gregory chooses a biblical image that seemed perfectly apt. For not only does he choose the image of the high priest in the Aaronic line; but in most of the liturgical references in the Old Testament to Aaron—the famous passages in Exodus and Leviticus, for example47—it is almost always Aaron and his sons who appear together. In other words, the work of ecclesial renewal will not be done by the dead Francis but by his living and active confrères, the Friars Minor. Mira circa nos, therefore, represents a major statement of how the papacy of Gregory IX viewed the role of Francis and his friars in the Church: namely, through the image of the high priest and his sons.

The Vita prima of Thomas of Celano (1229) When Thomas began to draft his work of hagiography between 1228 and 1229, he, therefore, had a rich repository of images—traditional hagiographical topoi and also several compelling images of more recent vintage—to draw upon. This is the context in which we must now read the Greccio account wherein he depicts Francis as a levita. Both the Encyclical Letter of Elias and Gregory IX’s bull of canonization, Mira circa nos, each in its own way, had compared Francis of Assisi to the figure of the high priest of the Old Covenant who “goes in and comes out” of the Holy of Holies on behalf of the people of God in the New Covenant. Indeed, the Encyclical Letter makes the more direct and specific parallel with the person of Aaron, the high priest par excellence of the Old Testament. Gregory, by contrast, uses the image of a descendent of Aaron, the high priest Simon, son of Onias II, to make his point. Interestingly however, Thomas of Celano decided not to use these same images when composing his official legenda of the saint of Assisi. He chose rather to depict Francis as a levita, a Levite—the first time that this term was used as a descriptor of the Poverello in early Franciscan literature. But were not these two images—Aaron, the high priest of

46 47

BF 1, 43 (FA:ED 1, 568). Ex 28 and Lev 8.

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the tribe of Levi and the Levites—one and the same? Was not Aaron the high priest of the tribe of Levi also a Levite? The fact that they are not necessarily the same thing is the key to unraveling Celano’s choice of terms and the meaning of his depiction of Francis as a Levite in the Greccio account. In the Scriptures, Aaron, like his brother Moses, is indeed a member of the tribe of Levi. They are, in other words, in this strict ethnic sense of the term, both Levites. But what is the religious or liturgical meaning of the term? When we come to examine the meaning of the term “Levite” in the Old Testament, however, we must distinguish between the pre-exilic and post-exilic history of Israel.48 This will be crucial. For prior to the Exile, biblical tradition had it that Moses established his brother Aaron as high priest—the chief cultic figure—for the Israelite people. Prohibited, like Moses, from entering into Canaan, these cultic responsibilities passed to his sons—the sons of Aaron. These men and their progeny are called in the earlier strata of the Hebrew Scriptures “the Levites”: those priests entrusted with the sacred tasks of carrying the Ark of the Covenant, veiling and unveiling the Presence, and mediating the repentance of and forgiveness for their people. Once the Hebrews established themselves in the land of Canaan, the Levites served as the principal religious figures throughout the land, including the city of Jerusalem in the Kingdom of Judah. However, in the tumult and upheaval that marked the events leading up to the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah in the early sixth century B.C. (597–586 B.C.), the Exile in Babylonia and the eventual return of the exiles to Jerusalem in 539 B.C., it was the branch of the house of Levi centered in Jerusalem—the Zadokites—who not only began to monopolize the priestly functions from the other Levitical families in the post-exilic period but who also became the single ruling authority for Israel—both religious and civil—in the person of the high priest. This ascendancy of the priesthood—and the Priestly re-reading of Hebrew history and its institutions—marks a monumental shift in Israelite life and culture. Thus, in this post-exilic period, in terms of the cult, one must distinguish between two ranks of religious ministers: the High

48 For the following distinctions in Aaronic typology in Jewish history, I am drawing primarily on the work of: Alfred Legendre, “Lévi (tribu de),” Dictionnaire de la Bible 6 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1928), 200–13, passim; but see also Mark Leuchter, “ ‘The Levite in Your Gates’: The Deuteronomic Redefinition of Levitical Authority,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 417–36.

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Priest himself, representing the Zadokite priesthood, and those subordinate ministers who assist the High Priest in the performance of his sacred duties in the restored Temple. These latter persons are the ones who will henceforth be called “Levites” in the Priestly Tradition of the Scriptures. And if they are now considered “priests” at all, it is only in the most qualified sense of the term. For now there is but one priest: the High Priest, the distant descendent of Aaron. Moreover, if one can visualize the particular construction of the second Temple in the post-exilic period, it takes the form of three concentric circles. The innermost circle—the Holy of Holies—is the space where only the High Priest himself was allowed access. It was the place of God’s dwelling on earth and the place of sacrifice on behalf of the people. The second circle surrounding the Holy of Holies was the place reserved for the various ranks of Levites, the assistants to the High Priest. The third and outermost ring, the largest space in the Temple complex, was reserved for the rest of the Jewish people and the Gentiles. Now it was in this second, intermediate ring (corona), where the Levites moved, as it were, between the high priest and the people, mediating God’s presence and mercy to the people and bringing the praise, fidelity and repentance of the people to the chief minister of the people. And, perhaps most importantly, it is also the space where the Levites assisted the high priest in the reading out and interpreting of the Law to the people. Given this important background, we can now understand two things. First, we can see why the Latin term levita—Levite—comes to be used in the Church to describe the liturgical function of the deacon: those who assisted the priest in his sacred duties at the altar and those who assisted him in the reading of the New Law of the New and Everlasting Covenant—the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But we can also see why Celano would have chosen this image over the ones used in the Encyclical Letter of Elias and Mira circa nos which drew parallels between Francis, Aaron and—the high priesthood. For Celano knew, of course, that Francis was not a priest; he was not a member of the Catholic priesthood. Hence, for Thomas, the two images employed in those texts were not particularly apt or appropriate to the historical Francis. Celano chose instead to use the post-exilic figure of the Levites for his account at Greccio—not only because Francis might well have been a liturgical deacon but also because the image was perfectly apt for describing the role and place of Francis—and his

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friars—in the Church of his day. In Thomas’s view, Francis and his friars were indeed modern-day Levites, assistants of the priesthood in the Catholic Church, not acting in the role of the high priesthood itself. They were, in other words, mediators between the clergy and the people in the salvific work of the Church. This is an astonishing ecclesiological assertion. Celano is subtly (or perhaps not so subtly) making an ecclesiological statement about the place and role of the Friars Minor in the Church of his day. Indeed, contrary to the slowly gathering pressure from the clerics within the Franciscan Order to fashion themselves as the appropriate (perhaps even the rightful) leaders of the fraternity and to refashion the Order itself as a clerical entity, Celano is squarely asserting that the followers of Francis are but the assistants of the clergy within the mission of the Church. Hence, similar to the dynamics present in the bull Mira circa nos, the depiction of Francis has more to do with the depiction of the role of the friars in history than with the historical Francis himself. Rather, we are in the realm of symbolic imagery: like their founder Francis, depicted as a Levite subordinate to the clergy but ministering among the people, the Order, too, must now carry on the ministry of the Word as assistants of the clergy, in a subordinate and mediating role. In this light, Celano’s use of levitical imagery was not, as it was for the Grandmontine Gérald Ithier, a call for the legitimizing of the clerical leadership of the Order; nor was it a polemical image of a chimerical diaconate in order to insist on the lay status of the founder, as it was for William Dandina. No, Celano’s use of the image of the levita for Francis was truly unique in that it relied upon a post-exilic understanding of the role of Levites in Israelite society in order to underline the role of Francis and his friars as assistants to the clergy in the mission of the Church, standing within that intermediate space of the new Temple of God, the Church, and serving as mediators of the law for the instruction and spiritual benefit of the people. For that New Law of the New Covenant was nothing other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And Francis and his friars, according to Thomas, had a special, if not a unique role to play in mediating that Gospel to the men and women of the thirteenth century. Theirs was a life founded upon following the teaching and footprints—the doctrina et vestigia—of Jesus of Nazareth.49 Such was the substance of their life

49

RNB 1, v. 2.

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and of their preaching among the people. In this they were, like their founder, the indispensable assistants of the clergy, the bold proclaimers of the Gospel of Christ with sonorous voice for all to hear. Indeed, this is why, it seems to me, the Greccio account has been written in the present and not the past tense: so as to accentuate that the proclamation of the Gospel is the charge of this Order of Levites, the Friars Minor. Hence, it is no accident that Celano begins his account of the Christmas at Greccio in 1223—which is the climatic conclusion of the first part of the Vita prima—with a vivid dramatization of this same evangelical orientation of Francis—and, by extension, his friars. He states that: His highest aim, foremost desire, and greatest intention was to pay heed to the Holy Gospel in all things and through all things, to follow the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ and to imitate His footsteps completely, with all vigilance and all zeal, all the desire of his soul and all the fervor of his heart.50

What these modern-day (that is to say, medieval) Levites—this corona fratrum—mediate from their place within the New Temple of the New Covenant is the Gospel itself. And this also explains why Thomas relates a miracle that is said to have occurred that night in the breaking open of the Gospel for the people on that Christmas Eve night as a result of Francis’s preaching: The gifts of the Almighty are multiplied there and a virtuous man sees a wondrous vision. For the man saw a little child lying lifeless in the manger and he saw the holy man of God approach the child and waken him from a deep sleep. Nor is this vision unfitting, since in the hearts of many the child Jesus had been given over to oblivion. Now he is awakened and impressed on their loving memory by His own grace through his holy servant Francis.51

One can only add to Celano’s description of the work of Francis: “and his friars.” Finally, in this same perspective, it may well be possible that Celano, in the Greccio account, consciously chose not to refer to the levitical garments of Francis (and his friars) by the exact same terms used in the biblical texts that speak of the vestments of Aaron and his sons.

50

1 Cel 84. 1 Cel 86. The biblical references within the passage used by Celano are, respectively: an allusion (in the singular) to 1 Macc 5: 50 and Ps 30: 13. 51

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There the term used is either vestis/vestes or vestimentum/vestimenta.52 Rather, he chose to call the vesture of Francis ornamenta levitica. This seemingly more vague terminology, however, might in fact be a reference to a completely different text—and context—namely, 1 Maccabees 3: 44–51. Here, the context is the call made by Jonathan, the brother of Judas Maccabeus and high priest of the new line of Hasmonean leaders, to inspire the Israelites in their religious struggles against the Seleucids. We read the following: The assembly gathered together to prepare for battle and to pray and implore mercy and compassion. Jerusalem was uninhabited, like a desert; not one of her children entered in or came out (ingrederetur et egrederetur!). The sanctuary was trampled on, foreigners were in the citadel; it was a habitation of Gentiles. Joy had disappeared from Jacob and the flute and harp were silent. Thus they assembled and went to Mitzpah near Jerusalem. . . . That day they fasted and wore sackcloth; they sprinkled ashes on their heads and tore their clothes. They unrolled the scroll of the law. . . . They brought with them the priestly vestments (ornamenta sacerdotalia), the first fruits and the tithes; and they brought forward the Nazarites who had completed the time of their vows. And they cried aloud to Heaven: “What shall we do with all these men and where shall we lead them? For your sanctuary has been trampled on and profaned, and your priests are in mourning and humiliation.53

Going in and coming out; sackcloth and ashes; the opening and scrutinizing of the book of the Law; the sorry plight of the resident clergy: all of these elements are present in this reading from Maccabees and relevant to Celano’s description of the role of the Friars Minor in the Church of his day. And the term used to describe the priestly vestments worn by Jonathan is ornamenta sacerdotalia. But Celano, keen on not asserting that Francis and his Order were identical with the established priesthood of the Church, alters that designation somewhat, using the biblical image of the Levites, the assistants of the clergy, and referring to these garments more simply as ornamenta levitica—the vesture of the Levites. Hence, it is appropriate and desirable that the word chosen by Celano to describe Francis in the proclamation of the Gospel in Greccio— levita—be understood and translated not merely as deacon in its

52 53

Cf. Ex 28: 2, 3, 4 and 41; Lev 8: 2 and 30. 1 Macc 3: 44–55, passim.

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restrictive liturgical sense but rather in its broader, richer meaning as “Levites”: for that is what, according to Thomas, Francis and his friars truly were for the Church of the thirteenth century.

Francis the Deacon Celano’s use of the image of Francis-as-levita was a powerful, compelling and alternate statement about the ecclesial role of Francis and his friars in the Church of their day. Given the context of the events immediately following the death and canonization of Francis, one can understand what Thomas was attempting to do. But was this merely an image: a profound and complex construct, embedded within the official hagiographical account of the saint, meant to convey an eloquent ecclesial point at some variance with the pope himself? In other words, was the image just an image or was it also possibly connected to historical reality? Was Francis, in fact, a deacon—a member of the clerical hierarchy, after all? Stephen of Muret’s surprising transformation from lay hermit into deacon by clerical commentators on his life occurred a full fifty years after his death. By the 1180s, however, there were few, if any, disciples of the earliest days still alive to actively contest and counter such an assertion. However, the case of Francis is somewhat different. To assert—as does Thomas of Celano, a mere two or three years after the death of Francis—that he was a deacon (even through the use of a complex and multi-layered image), if he were, in fact, not, would risk direct contradiction and opposition by all who knew him and his life well. Hence, perhaps the greatest obstacle to doubting the diaconal office of Francis is this very datum: that Celano’s testimony was given in the immediate aftermath of his death within the official account of his life. It is on the strength of this datum alone that one must—even against the silence of Francis himself on the issue—assert that Francis had indeed been ordained a deacon in the Roman Church. The image was more than an image evoking an ecclesiology or ecclesial vision: it pointed to an historical reality. The question then becomes: when might this have occurred—and why? Once again, the paucity of our sources forces the historian into the realm of conjecture. However, we do have some hints in the record

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that might be fertile ground for understanding this extraordinary step in the life of Francis. Prior to Francis’s journey to the East in mid-1219, there seems to have been no firm indicator at all in the sources that would suggest that he might already have been a deacon. However, we do have one indicator after that date in the account given in the chronicle of Jordan of Giano. According to him, Francis, having been alerted while he was in the East by a certain brother to a series of troubles brewing within the Order back home, returned to Italy from the Holy Land with his friars probably in the early Fall of 1220.54 Disembarking in Venice, he apparently had determined to make his way to the papal court in order to confront certain issues that had arisen in his absence.55 It is quite probable that he passed through Bologna where he turned the friars out of a (study) house that had been set up in the city through the leadership of Peter of Staccia.56 After this incident, learning that the papal court was residing at this moment in Viterbo, he made his way there, apparently bypassing Assisi itself.57 He would eventually go to Assisi after his discussions in Viterbo in order to hold an Emergency Chapter on 29 September 1220, using the time normally reserved for a provincial chapter of the Umbrian province. His aim was to gather the friars in order to confront certain problems that had been arising within the Order and to resign his position as “minister and servant of all the friars.” We know several things had happened in Viterbo. First, Jordan tells us that he raised the various issues that had alarmed certain friars in Italy and which had prompted Francis to return in haste. Exactly how those matters were resolved is a matter of some conjecture. Second, we also know that members of the Curia—in the person of Honorius III and his cardinals—had themselves become concerned about reports concerning the immaturity of some of the friars’ recruits, their relative 54

Jordan of Giano, Chronica, 12. For example: the imposition of the Hugolinian forma vitae on most Clarian monasteries and the matter of John of Capella’s alleged desire to found an Order of lepers. The Curia, however, also had some issues it wanted to raise with Francis as well: the immaturity and wandering of some of his friars (echoed in the criticism of Jacques de Vitry in his 1220 Letter VI). 56 The exact time and itinerary of events is a matter of reconstruction on the basis of indications in the sources. For example, see that of John Moorman, A History of the Order of Friars Minor from its Origins to 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 50–51. 57 It is Jordan (14) who tells us this detail. 55

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lack of regular structures and practices customary for religious communities and the wandering of friars outside of obedience, abusing the extraordinary freedom enjoyed by these itinerant religious. Even Jacques de Vitry—someone generally sympathetic to the friars—had sent back to Europe in 1220 a less-than-glowing report about these very same issues.58 As a result, the Curia imposed upon the fraternity the obligation to submit all of their new recruits henceforth to a year of probation—a novitiate—in the famous bull of 22 September 1220, Cum secundum consilium.59 It seems that it was also at this time, in response to certain concerns raised by Rome that Francis asked for a Cardinal Protector: someone in the Curia who was both sympathetic to the friars and who would help navigate the Order through the demands of the clerical hierarchy. The encounter at Viterbo, from the perspective of the papacy and Curia, was all about bringing long-overdue order, stability and clarity to the movement inspired and led by the layman Francis of Assisi. Increasingly, they had become concerned that, for all its good intentions, this fraternity of predominantly lay followers was developing outside the bounds of established norms of traditional religious life. Lay eremitical groups have always posed problems of this kind to the Church. Indeed, whereas the Curia had established protocols and formularies for dealing with new monasteries and groups of canons asking for approval and approbation of their way of life, it is perhaps significant that they did not have a specific formulary for hermits—and itinerant ones, at that.60 Viterbo represents a watershed moment in the Church’s dealings with the nascent Order of Friars Minor. Indeed, it seems quite possible that one of the ways in which the papacy attempted to give more stability and legitimation to the Franciscan fraternity was to insist that its founder, Francis, be ordained a deacon so as to enter into the clerical hierarchy of the Church. It is, in other words, the papacy that would have asked Francis to become a deacon for the sake of his order rather than Francis requesting ordination for any personal or spiritual

58 Jacques de Vitry, Letter VI, in Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (1160/1170–1240), évêque de Saint-Jean-d’Acre. Édition critique, ed. R.B.C. Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 131–33 (Engl. trans. in: FAED 1, 580–81). 59 BF 1, no. 5, 6. 60 Dominic Monti makes this same point in his article: “The Friars Minor: An Order in the Church?” Franciscan Studies 61 (2003): 235–52, esp. 243–48.

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motivations. The impetus came not from Francis but rather from certain figures within the Church (or, more precisely, the Curia). Moreover, this was done even though Francis had received no formal theological training whatsoever! The important issue, for at least some in the Curia, was to have a member of the clerical hierarchy at the head of an established religious order. This is precisely what had occurred at the papacy’s instigation to the Grandmontines in the 1180s, resulting in the rewriting of their origins so as to recast their founder as a deacon. The elevation of the layman Stephen of Muret into the clerical hierarchy, albeit fictitious, had, as its aim, to posthumously legitimize the authority of the founder to be able to lead other clerics (as well as laymen) within the Order of Grandmont and to indelibly establish the same Order as a proper religious Order in the Church. Similar dynamics seem to have been at work in mid-September 1220 in the case of Francis of Assisi. Having been made a deacon upon the insistence of the Curia, Francis could leave Viterbo with his leadership of the movement intact, even strengthened (from the perspective of the papal court) and also armed with a variety of other mandates that Rome believed would help bring this fledgling but rapidly growing group more in line with traditional religious life in the Church. If this were indeed the moment when Francis was ordained a deacon, then it casts some light on what occurred immediately afterwards in Assisi at the Emergency Chapter. Jordan tells us that Francis preached to the people as well as to the friars. This is nothing extraordinary in itself.61 But what is most curious is that, having just had his own leadership reaffirmed and strengthened by the papacy through his diaconal ordination, Francis then goes to Assisi for this hastily-called chapter and promptly resigns his charge! This is not the moment to enter into the complexities of this momentous event in early Franciscan history. Francis’s resignation had everything to do with his rapidly declining health and the necessity of confronting those increasing numbers of clerical friars advocating new directions in the fraternity now in tension with the original forma vitae—a task for which he suddenly felt

61 An interesting question remains: given the limits recently imposed by canon 10 of Lateran IV on preachers in which the license to preach was to be restricted only to those who were trained in the rudiments of theology, could a deacon, lacking in such theological training, be allowed to proclaim the Gospel in the liturgy and yet be barred from preaching?

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himself overmatched and under-prepared. But interestingly, upon his resignation, he managed to persuade his friars to accept the leadership of Peter Catania and, after Peter’s death the following March, of Elias of Cortona. Both of these men were lay friars (and thus not members of the clerical hierarchy); but both men were also better prepared and trained to face the real problems of the order rather than the pseudo-problem of lay friars lacking ecclesiastical jurisdictio and clerical legitimation.62 What was important for Francis was the proclamation of the Gospel among the people: not merely in its liturgical sense but as the incarnation of an evangelical forma vitae, first among the friars themselves and then in the lives of all in the world.63 It is this fundamental and essential vision of life that Thomas of Celano was attempting to convey in his account of the Christmas celebration at Greccio in 1223, even in the face of clerical pressures coming from within and without his own order. If this analysis has merit, it may well be that Francis’s diaconal ordination was a somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent event in his own life. He himself never mentioned it or alluded to it in any of his writings—most of which were drafted after the events of September 1220. He did use it positively in order to publicly read, proclaim and preach the Gospel. Indeed, his proximity to the altar may even have nourished his own devotion to the mystery of the Eucharist. But to go beyond this—seeking to understand his motivation for a seemingly unusual event in his life—would take one into the realm of piety and pious conjecture. However, if the primary motivation for this event came from the papal Curia for reasons related to canonical restrictions and ecclesiastical politics, then the diaconate of Francis—whatever it might have meant for him personally—quickly came to serve more as an important and evocative symbol among the friars for the burning desire of their founder: the proclamation—in word and in deed—of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

62 The preference of the Holy See to have a friar-priest at the head of the Order was definitively realized at the General Chapter of 1239 with the deposition of the lay brother Elias and his replacement by the priest Albert of Pisa. Since that time, no lay friar has been elected as minister general of the Order of Friars Minor. 63 Hence, the motivation for his so-called Epistola ad fideles whose message was intended for “all who live in the whole world.”

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Celano’s unique and powerful image will find its way into the accounts of the life of Francis written by Julian of Speyer (1235) and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1263).64 And yet, it will not be Celano’s image of Francis the Levite that will have the most lasting effect in thirteenth-century Franciscan imagery. Rather, it is the earlier association of Francis with the figure of Aaron that will continue to evolve and deepen over the course of the century. For it should be recalled that just after the author of the Encyclical Letter of Elias had evoked the parallel between Francis and Aaron, going in and coming out of the sanctuary, he noted that he, Francis, “brought forth from his storehouse both the new and the old.”65 This is a citation from the Gospel of Matt 13.52. What is not noticed, however, is that the subject of the Gospel phrase is “every scribe who is instructed in the kingdom of heaven.” It is well known, thanks especially to the excellent work of synthesis and interpretation done by the honoree of this volume, Professor John V. Fleming, that the figure of Aaron in the Middle Ages was often depicted as a scribe: the writer of the mark of the Tau upon the lintels of the homes of those to be saved from the Avenging Angel in Exodus.66 By extension, Francis of Assisi, for whom the Tau had become the very symbol of his preaching of penance, soon came to be depicted as a New Aaron, the Tauschreiber par excellence. And eventually this association of Aaron, Francis and Tau came to be extended by Bonaventure to the belief that Francis was the Angel of the Sixth Seal bearing in his hand the sign of the living God (in Franciscan interpretation: the stigmata, the seal of the cross of Christ).67 These symbolic associations and images were meant to convey deeper truths about the workings of God’s Spirit in history, illuminated by his previous actions as recorded in the Scriptures. Professor Fleming has 64 Whether they, both clerics in Paris, understood the deeper resonances of Celano’s levitical imagery is a subject for another day. What is interesting, however, is that Henri d’Avranches, in his own version of the Greccio event, chose to repeat the reference to Francis’s proclamation of the Gospel but dropped all mention of the levitical imagery. It is difficult to say whether, unaware of Celano’s intentions in using such bold imagery, he had doubts about the actual clerical status of Francis and, therefore, decided to eliminate reference to any supposed diaconate. 65 Encyclical Letter, par. 9, 527: . . . ‘tamquam Aaron’, et ‘ferens’ nobis ‘de thesauro suo nova et vetera’ . . . 66 Cf. Ex 12: 22–23. 67 Rev 7: 2. Cf. LMj, prologue, par. 1, v. 23–25.

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taught us that the deeper truths, expressed through allegory, image and symbol, are also the truest truths. But such language always requires decoding and interpretative skill; it requires, in short, what Dr. Fleming calls, “exegesis.” As he himself wrote in his classic work, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis: . . . no more in art history than in literary criticism is there such a thing as ‘objective’ description. We may pretend that to give an account of the mere content of a poem or a painting is the discrete prologemenon to the critical deed itself, but in this we are certainly deceived; every act of description is an act of interpretation.68

In this highly interpretative essay on the content and meaning of Celano’s use of the term levita to describe Francis of Assisi, it is my hope that Professor Fleming will recognize, at least to some small degree, his own bold hermeneutic with equally satisfying results.

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Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini, 100.

TOBIT’S DOG AND THE DANGERS OF LITERALISM: WILLIAM WOODFORD O.F.M. AS CRITIC OF WYCLIFFITE EXEGESIS Alastair Minnis

During the two centuries following the death of St Francis, the order he had founded produced a remarkable number of Bible commentators of the highest rank. Alexander of Hales, John of La Rochelle, Odo Rigaldis, William of Middleton, St Bonaventure, Guibert of Tournai, Roger Bacon, Peter John Olivi, John Pecham, Nicholas of Lyre. . . . the list goes on and on. Some of Lyre’s successors, however, have been neglected or undervalued in recent scholarship—not least the Oxford Franciscan who is the subject of this paper, William Woodford (c. 1330–c. 1397). The acuity of Woodford’s attack on John Wyclif ’s literalistic theory of exegesis marks him as one of the most formidable of the evangelical doctor’s early opponents. And this academic achievement, inter alia, earns Woodford a place of distinction in the Franciscan hall of fame. As my guide in the pursuit of this argument, I have enlisted the services of a strange but faithful creature—Tobit’s dog. Tobit (or Tobias), the son of the Tobit from whom the Old Testament Book of Tobit takes its title, had a dog. We have this on good scriptural authority. The blind and impoverished Tobit sends his son to one Gabelus, “in Rages a city of the Medes” (Tobias 4:21), to recover a loan he’d given him many years before. Young Tobit is accompanied by an angel, named Raphael—and by his dog (which is unnamed):1 And Tobias went forward: and the dog followed him (Tobias 6:1).2

1 What’s in a name? In De statu innocencie, viii, Wyclif remarks that we needn’t concern ourselves unduly with speculation concerning the exact nature of the knowledge enjoyed by Eden’s inhabitants—that is as inane a question as asking the name of Tobit’s dog. Johannis Wyclif, Tractatus de mandatis divinis accedit Tractatus de statu innocencie, ed. J. Loserth and F.D. Matthew (London: Trübner, 1922), 512–14. But, as I shall argue below, in Woodford’s treatment Tobit’s dog takes on considerable significance within a critique of Wyclif ’s literalism. 2 My Biblical citations in English follow the Douay Bible, as being closest to the Latin Vulgate.

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The expedition proves successful. Not only does young Tobit recover all the money from Gabelus, but he also acquires a wife, and the gill of a magical fish which (among other wonders) restores his father’s eyesight. As young Tobit returns home to his aged parents (who have given him up for dead), his dog puts in another appearance—running ahead of the party and announcing its arrival. Then the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before; and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail (quasi nuntius adveniens blandimento suae caudae gaudebat) (Tobias 11:9).

Typical canine behavior, as any dog-lover will attest. Peter of Celle, c. 1115–1183, Bishop of Chartres 1181–83, was so taken with this account that he drew upon it in describing the behavior of Mary Magdalene, who, in order to announce the joyful news of Christ’s resurrection to the Apostles, rushed along the road showing her joy by wagging her tail (sic),3 saying, “I have seen the Lord; and these things he said to me” (John 20:18). In similar vein, Bede—who thought the behavior of Tobit’s dog was “charming”4—read the way it followed its master as an allegory of how holy preachers followed in the Lord’s footsteps, when Christ “came to save the Gentiles.” He adds that “teachers are called dogs because they defend their founder’s spiritual home, property and sheep from thieves and beasts, i.e. from unclean spirits and heretical men.”5 When he reaches the passage describing Tobit’s homecoming, Bede warns us not to undervalue the dog’s significance. “One must not dismiss with scorn the figure of this dog”6—which is, after all, the companion of an

3 . . . Maria Magdalena, tanquam canis Tobiae, qui similiter fuerat in via, quasi nuntius resurrectionis ad apostolos veniens, blandimento suae caudae gaudebat. . . . Petrus Cellensis, Sermo XVII: Feria Sexta Post Dominicam Primam Quadragesimae, Migne, Patrologia Latina 202, col. 690C. 4 Here I follow Seán Connolly’s translation of Bede’s adverb pulchre (used twice in this account) as “charmingly,” in Librum B. Patris Tobiae Allegorica Interpretatio, in Tob 11:9; Migne, Patrologia Latina 91, col. 933D; trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit and on the Canticle of Habakkuk (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 57. 5 Bede, In Tob. 6:1, cols. 927D–928A; trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 46. This may be compared with St. Gregory’s assertion that “sometimes in scripture dogs represent preachers,” who have been “chosen from among the unbelieving Jews. When they declared the truth, coming out against thieves and robbers, they were barking loudly on the Lord’s behalf.” Homilia in Evangelia, 40.2; Migne, Patrologia Latina 76, cols. 1302D–1303B; cf. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 46, n. 49. 6 Non contemnenda est figura canis hujus . . .

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angel. Reiterating his previous allegorization of dogs as preachers, Bede explains that “the reason why the dog ran ahead is that the teacher first preaches salvation,” in preparation for its Lord, “the enlightener” (illuminator), to cleanse men’s hearts. He “shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail,” because: . . . the tail which is the end ( finis) of the body suggests the end of a good work, i.e. its perfection, or at any rate the reward which is granted without end. The dog then showed his joy by wagging his tail when he saw once more his master’s homestead from which he was absent for a long time; teachers rejoice at the results of their work when they realize that by means of their ministry Judea is to be brought together again by the Lord; they rejoice at receiving an eternal reward and with this same reward common to all the elect they cheer the hearts of those they preach to when they promise them that Christ’s grace will come without delay.7

Here is clear evidence of Bede’s belief that, in the Book of Tobit, allegorical meaning “excels the mere letter as much as the fruit excels the leaves.”8 Understood spiritualiter, this text “is found to contain within it the greatest mysteries of Christ and the Church.”9 And Tobit’s dog has its part to play in the figuring of those mysteries.10

7 In Tob. 11:9, cols. 933C–934A; trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 57. Connolly provides an excellent rhetorical analysis of this passage (57, n. 111). 8 Et si quis eumdem etiam allegorice novit interpretari, quantum poma foliis, tantum interiorem ejus sensum videt simplicitati litterae praestare. In Tob., pref.; col. 923C–D; trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 39. 9 In Tob., pref., col. 923D; trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 39. 10 However, Bede also commends the literal sense of the Book of Tobit: this work is “clearly of saving benefit for its readers even in its superficial meaning (superficie litterae) inasmuch as it abounds in both the noblest examples and the noblest counsels for moral conduct” (In Tob., pref.; col. 923D, trans. Connolly, Bede on Tobit, 39). A similar affirmation of the text’s “excellent moral character” had been made by Cassiodorus (Institutiones, I.vi.4–5), as Connolly points out, whilst emphasizing Bede’s “respect for the basic, outward reading of scripture,” which “is matched by his belief in the literal truth of its narratives” (20). The text’s tropological potential was exploited by Matthew of Vendôme in producing his Tobias (c. 1182/87), a poem which attained wide currency as a grammar school “set text,” becoming one of the octo auctores—on which see the relevant comments by contributors to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38–40, 153–60. Ian Thomson and Louis Perraud attribute the success of Matthew’s poem to its “didactic morality and rhetorical artifice,” the moral themes of the Biblical text having been amplified “with occasional allegory and a moralisatio.” Take for example the point at which the elder Tobit says farewell to his son, giving him a series of commands (Tobit 4:3–21): Matthew expands this with “a gigantic ethical excursus of 469 lines,” “slightly more than one-fifth of the whole poem”; here young Tobit gets comprehensive advice on how to conduct himself not only on this expedition but in life in general, including an account of the seven deadly sins and the

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But it would seem that sometimes a dog is just . . . a dog. I cannot resist recalling Samuel Johnson’s remark, “I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.”11 The Franciscan theologian William Woodford seems also to have been capable of such thinking, at least for polemical purposes, to judge by the second of the Quattuor determinationes he wrote against Wyclif at Oxford in the period 1389–90. Woodford was writing some five years after Wyclif ’s death, in 1384. But Woodford had known him personally—as foe, certainly, and perhaps initially as friend. To quote Anne Hudson, it seems that Wyclif and Woodford had been “acquaintances in Oxford, and indeed that their relations at one stage were fairly close and apparently amicable. Comments in Woodford’s work make it clear that they were accustomed to exchange notes on matters of common interest.”12 Woodford’s opposition to Wyclif dates to 1376 at least, when he wrote a treatise De dominio civili clericorum, a refutation of Wyclif ’s views on civil dominion. It continued until around 1397 when, at the request of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, Woodford wrote a justification of the condemnation of 18 propositions extracted from Wyclif ’s work. Indeed, the Quattuor determinationes themselves seem to go back quite a long way, reflecting his early period of opposition to Wyclif. Their primary target is a (somewhat mysterious) treatise by Wyclif termed De religione. I say “mysterious” because this work seems to have evaporated as a discrete text, Wyclif having incorporated materials from it into his De civili dominio and De apostasia. According to Eric Doyle’s dating, that ur-treatise De religione was written no later than December 1376.13 The fact that Woodford was still obsessing about

Ten Commandments. Ian Thomson and Louis Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts of the Later Middle Ages: Translated Selections (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1991), 238, 240. The standard edition of the Latin poem is by Franco Munari, in Mathei Vindocinensis opera, II: Piramus et Tisbe, Milo, Epistule, Tobias, Storia e letteratura: raccolta di studi e testi 152 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1982). The original text long retained its appeal. Particularly interesting is the fact that, in the Coventry heresy trials of 1486–1522, Tobit is named as one of the books of the Bible which Lollards had in their possession; presumably these references are to portions of the Lollard Bible. Cf. Lollards of Coventry, 1486–1522, ed. and trans. Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner, Camden Fifth Series 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42. 11 Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), ii, 15. 12 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46. 13 Eric Doyle, “William Woodford, O.F.M., and John Wyclif ’s De Religione,” Speculum 52 (1977): 329–36. See further Eric Doyle, “William Woodford on Scripture

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it in 1389–90, when he produced the Quattuor determinationes, may be taken as evidence of the impact which Wyclif ’s early doctrine had on him, and of the vigor with which he reacted against it. That must suffice on issues of dating. Next, a few words on the scope of the Quattuor determinationes themselves. Their key target is the belief, which Woodford attributes to Wyclif, that present-day religion is full of human institutions and traditions which have no Biblical precedent—and therefore they should be removed, a scenario which would be quite destructive of much Catholic practice. One consequence of this dangerous doctrine is that religious orders (including the Franciscans) are an excrescence which should be cut away from the Church. In his first determination Woodford argues that the origins of the religious life may be found in apostolic times; it certainly cannot be deemed a later addition, and the founders of the various orders definitely did not sin in instituting them. The second determination, my main text in this paper, offers a reductio ad absurdum of Wyclif ’s view that every truth which is conducive to salvation is to be found in the Bible. In the third and fourth determinations, Woodford refutes Wyclif ’s views on “private religions” (i.e. orders which adulterate scriptural truth with merely human laws and traditions). And so, finally, we may focus on the second determination, the home of Tobit’s literal dog. Here Woodford attacks Wyclif ’s doctrine of scriptura sola,14 which he locates in statements like the following: As a matter of faith (ex fide) we hold that every truth is to be found in Scripture (omnis veritas est ex scriptura), and the more necessary are the truths the more openly they are expressed (ut necessarior est expressior).15

and Tradition,” Studia Historico-Ecclesiastica: Festgabe für Prof. Luchesius G. Spätling, O.F.M., ed. Isaac Vázquez, Bibliotheca Pontificii Athenaei Antoniani 19 (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1977), 481–502. 14 The meaning and significance of this doctrine remain matters of scholarly controversy. For differing views, see Paul de Vooght, Les sources de la doctrine chrétienne d’après les théologiens du XIV e siècle et du début du XV e (Bruges: Desclée, De Brouwer, 1954), esp. 184–85; Michael Hurley, “Scriptura sola: Wyclif and his Critics,” Traditio 16 (1960): 275–352; Doyle, “William Woodford on Scripture and Tradition”; and Jeremy O. Catto, William Woodford, O.F.M. (c. 1330–c. 1397) (unpub. D. Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1969), 491–502. 15 Cf. Wyclif, De apostasia, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: Trübner, 1889), 10; apparently recycled from De religione.

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As Doyle notes, a similar statement is found in the later De veritate sacrae scripturae, though here the phrase about “express” declaration is omitted: Inasmuch as all truth is in Holy Scripture, it is clear that every disputation, every signification of terms, or linguistic science (omnis terminorum significatio vel sermocinalis scientia) which does not have its origin in Holy Scripture, is profane.16

Woodford scrupulously explains his understanding of the phrase “every truth” as used by Wyclif: he believes his opponent is not talking about every truth in general, but rather every truth necessary for salvation. Furthermore, Woodford assumes that such truths are declared more or less “expressly” in the literal/historical sense of Scripture—and not in an anagogical, allegorical or tropological sense, “since by these one could not know which was catholic truth and which was not, nor that a heresy was a heresy.”17 Here Woodford accesses the notion, as frequently cited in thirteenth-century hermeneutic theory (and reiterated by the great fourteenth-century postillator Nicholas of Lyre), that “from the literal sense alone may any argument be drawn. . . .”18 To quote Thomas Aquinas’s version of this doctrine, All argument must derive from this alone, and not from what is said in the allegorical sense, as Augustine says in his letter against Vincent the Donatist.19 For no part of Holy Scripture loses any of its force because of this, for nothing necessary to faith is contained within the spiritual sense which Scripture does not openly convey elsewhere through the literal sense.20

In short, the literal sense enables certainty in argument. Woodford regards that as common ground occupied by his opponent and himself. He then offers two arguments which mark their irreconcilable differences. First, there are many truths that Christians should believe, truths which are conducive to their salvation, which are not to be found in 16 De veritate sacrae scripturae, ed. R. Buddensieg (London: Trübner, 1904), I, 138; trans. Ian Christopher Levy, John Wyclif, On the Truth of Holy Scripture, TEAMS Commentary Series (Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 112. 17 Following Doyle’s summary: “Woodford on Scripture and Tradition,” 491. 18 Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism. c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. ed. by Alastair Minnis and A. B. Scott with David Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 268; cf. 204, 242. 19 Epistola XCIII.viii.24; CSEL 24, 469–70. 20 Summa theologica, 1a 1, art. 10, ad 1um; trans. in Minnis and Scott with Wallace (eds.), Medieval Literary Theory, 242.

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the Bible. Here is how the argument works. Different truths are found in the different Gospels; in particular, St. John (who wrote his Gospel after the other Evangelists) expressed many evangelical truths not to be found in the previous Gospels. These truths did not become evangelical when John wrote them down; they became evangelical when Christ uttered them. Woodford’s denigration of mere textuality continues with the claim that, even if all the books of the New Testament were destroyed, we would still be obliged to believe the truths which Christ had uttered. After all, Christ Himself never committed anything to writing. Oral tradition may therefore be defended robustly. Several of the apostles left us nothing in writing, but their teachings were passed down by others. And so on and so forth. If some of these arguments seem familiar to Middle English scholars, it is probably because a version of them is found in Nicholas Love’s preface to his translation of the Pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi (c. 1410),21 a translation famously authorized by Archbishop Arundel himself. Some recent scholars have attacked Love’s statement for what they regard as its attempt to keep layfolk away from the solid and potentially subversive truths of Scripture itself, offering them instead establishment-pleasing hearsay and anodyne imaginings.22 Whatever the truth of that suggestion (which I, for one, regard as too simplistic), it seems quite clear that Woodford is not driving a wedge between the Biblical record and extra-Biblical tradition. Rather, as Doyle nicely puts it, Woodford understood Scripture and tradition to be intimately combined in a balanced and harmonious unity. They flow from the same unique source of all doctrine: Christ Himself. All that has been revealed is derived from the one Evangelical Source, so that Scripture and tradition form one deposit of God’s Word committed to the Church.23

Now for Woodford’s second crucial argument. The statement that certain crucial truths are not to be found in Scripture is followed by the

21 Nicholas Love’s “Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ,” ed. M.G. Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004), 10–11. 22 See in particular the comments of Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, The Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1996): 822–64 (853–54), and “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997), 85–124 (esp. 94); also Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 147–72. 23 Doyle, “Woodford on Scripture and Tradition,” 493.

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statement that certain truths, or at least facts, are found in Scripture yet are of no evident consequence for our salvation. In other words, the fact that something is explained or described with utter clarity in the literal-historical sense of Scripture does not ipso facto make it important for us. And this brings us back to Tobit’s dog: Prima ergo veritas erat haec. Non eo quo veritas est magis necessaria ad salutem . . . ipsa est expressius contenta in sacra scriptura. Patet haec primo, quia quod Deus [est] tres Personae est multo magis necessaria ad salutem quam quod Barabus erat latro vel Tobias habuit canem. Sed haec veritas ‘Deus est tres Personae’ non est ita expresse contenta in sacra scriptura sicut ista: ‘Barabus erat latro’ vel ‘Tobias habuit canem’, quia utraque istarum explicite et expresse habetur in sacra scriptura. . . . Patet haec secundo, quia quod Filius est Patri consubstantialis est veritas magis necessaria ad salutem quam quod ‘Tamar sedit in bivio’ . . .24

So, then: certain truths which are more necessary to salvation (such as, “God is three persons” or “the Son is consubstantial with the Father”) are less explicitly or expressly contained in Scripture than are the truths that Barrabas was “a notorious prisoner” (as the Douay Bible puts it; Matt 27:17),25 that “Thamar sat in the cross way” (i.e. at a crossroads; Gen 38:14),26 and that Tobit had a dog. It might be objected: read literally and historically, these passages indeed seem to have no major consequence for our salvation, but, understood morally, they may well be important—witness Bede’s interpretation of Tobit’s dog as a zealous teacher preparing the way for its Lord, or Peter of Celle’s reading of that creature’s excitement as a figure of Mary Magdalene’s eager rush to tell the good news of Christ’s resurrection. But Woodford has eliminated allegorical reading from the debate, thereby engaging with Wyclif on what he regards as his opponent’s own ground. From the literal sense alone may any argument be drawn . . . It might also be objected: Woodford claims he will take Wyclif ’s doctrine as referring only to truths which are conducive to our salvation. But such truths as “Barrabas was a notorious prisoner,” “Thamar sat at the crossroads,” and “Tobit had a dog” are not conducive to our

24

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 703, fol. 77r. Matt 27:15–26 recounts how the mob demands the release of Barrabas and the execution of Christ. 26 Like a common woman, to allure her father-in-law, Juda, into sleeping with her and impregnating her. 25

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salvation: therefore, Woodford’s argument is unfair. But this objection is ineffective. For Woodford has seized upon the principle expressed by Wyclif as ut necessarior est expressior: the more necessary a truth is to salvation, the more expressly/explicitly it is stated in Scripture. Woodford’s point is that this is patently untrue. It would be hard to find a more explicit statement than “Tobit had a dog,” yet the importance of this fact in terms of leading us towards salvation is hardly obvious. Conversely, the statement “God is three persons” is highly necessary in respect of our salvation, yet it is not quite explicitly stated in Scripture. A later critic of Wyclif, Bishop Reginald Pecock (d.c. 1460), also saw the potential of this argument. In his Repressor of Over-Much Blaming of the Clergy, Pecock devised a more racy version thereof by enumerating the many things which Wyclif ’s followers do that are not specifically mentioned in the Bible, including the wearing of breeches, cloaks and gowns; telling the time with clocks; brewing ale; singing, playing and laughing for “esement”; and using the English language to make known the Old and New Testaments to layfolk. Indeed, they might well find it difficult to sit on the privy, or get up from it, because they have to base their behavior on what is “groundid expresseli in Holy Scripture”! And Lollard women cannot find any Biblical warrant for such activities as washing, bathing or wearing coverchiefs (of silk or linen) on their heads.27 The question of Pecock’s intellectual relationship and affinities with Woodford is yet to be explored. Indeed, the number of things that remain to be done on Woodford’s behalf are legion. His Quaestiones LXXII de sacramento altaris (composed 1383/84) is of crucial importance for our understanding of Wyclif ’s Eucharistic teaching—yet it is still in manuscript, which is quite a surprise given the attention being paid to such Wycliffite doctrine in modern scholarship. Also unedited are his treatise against the Welsh Lollard Walter Brut (which survives, alas, only in a fragment)28 and his two apologetic treatises in defense of mendicancy, both of which were prompted by Wycliffism and one of which specifically addresses the famous antifraternal polemic of Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of Armagh.29 The Quattuor determinationes have

27 The Repressor of Over-Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. C. Babington, Rolls Series 19 (London: Longmans, 1860), 117–24. 28 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 3381, fols. 115r–124v. 29 Two other works are, however, available in print: Woodford’s De causis condemnacionis articulorum 18 damnatorum Johannis Wyclif was included in Edward Brown’s

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been edited, but in a thesis produced c. 1932 which is available only by courtesy of the Oxford Greyfriars. Woodford is, it would seem, suffering from a publication deficiency—further evidence of which may be found in the fact that the most substantial study of his thought, Jeremy Catto’s 1969 dissertation, remains unpublished and may be consulted only in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.30 Along with this publication deficiency has gone a comprehension deficiency, one spectacular example of which was Paul de Vooght’s contention that Woodford more or less invented the idea of scriptura sola and foisted it upon Wyclif, thereby hereticating exegetical theory which was perfectly orthodox.31 This view has comprehensively, and quite convincingly, been refuted by both Eric Doyle and Jeremy Catto. To quote Catto, Woodford “found it [i.e. a literalist sola scriptura doctrine] in De religione and he never forgot it.”32 And yet, doubts concerning Woodford’s abilities and competence have lingered. Anne Hudson has remarked that his “discussion of Wycliffite positions appears curiously blinkered and beside the point.” “The overall impression made by a reading of Woodford’s works,” she continues, “is of a large and stately warship sailing imperturbably through the night on a pre-set course which never brings it within a hundred miles of its ostensible target.”33 A wonderfully memorable statement, to be sure, but (I believe) an exaggeration at least as far as Woodford’s critique of Wycliffi te literalism is concerned.34 In my own view, the worst one can say about Woodford’s critique is that it leaves out one quite crucial, albeit somewhat paradoxical, aspect of the heretic’s hermeneutics, viz.: in Wyclif ’s thought, literalism is not to be seen as necessarily involving denigration or dismissal of the other senses of Scripture. Let me offer a brief summary of the situation as I

Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum (London: Chiswell, 1690; reprinted Tucson, AZ: Audax Press, 1967), I: 190–265, and Eric Doyle’s critical edition of the De dominio civili clericorum was published in Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 66 (1973): 49–109. 30 Catto, “William Woodford” (for the full reference see n. 14 above). 31 De Vooght, Les sources de la doctrine chrétienne, 168–200. 32 Catto, “William Woodford,” 501. De Vooght’s study was severely hampered by the fact that he did not make use of the second of Woodford’s Quattuor determinationes, which Doyle and Catto studied extensively. 33 Hudson, Premature Reformation, 48. 34 And certainly not endorsed by Ghosh, who terms Woodford’s critique at once “acute” and “attractive,” “broadly sceptical and essentially humane” (The Wycliffite Heresy, 85).

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see it. Wyclif may be regarded as having actually reaffirmed the value of the “spiritual senses” of Scripture, going against an academic trend which tended to relegate allegory to the realm of persuasive argument and preaching. This trend is writ large in Nicholas of Lyre’s mighty Postilla litteralis, where (following Thomist hermeneutics) the literal or historical sense is afforded special importance, being regarded as the sense intended by the human (though of course divinely inspired) author. As I argued in my monograph Medieval Theory of Authorship, thirteenth-century Parisian schoolmen granted this human auctor of Scripture more agency than before, as an instrumental efficient cause working under the primary efficient cause, God.35 Wyclif, I believe, was deeply uncomfortable with such developments. Moving beyond the general notion that the Bible was divinely inspired, he believed that “each syllable of Scripture is true because it is a divine emanation,” as J.A. Robson puts it in his Wyclif and the Oxford Schools.36 And because the Bible in its entirety is the single and singular Word of God, we are not permitted to dissect it, or suppose that some parts lack sufficient authority, or emphasize the diversity of human acts of authorship in ways which might seem to compromise or constrain divine authorship. It must be read in its unity and integrity according to the sense of its auctor. And that auctor is God. All the senses of Scripture, therefore, collapse into one. In a specific case we may wish to specify one as “literal” and another as “allegorical,” but all are expressions of the intention of one and the same author-God, and equally valid in the grand scheme of things (if not in syllogistic argument). Thus authorial intention becomes coterminous with the divine will, and the “human authors” of Scripture (as Lyre termed them) are subsumed in divine authorship and authority. Viewed in this light, Wycliffite literalism is inseparable from Wycliffite allegorism. These hermeneutics are complicated indeed; little wonder that they survive only partially in later Lollard thought. Particularly telling is the fact that the anonymous authors of the “General Prologue” to the Wycliffite English Bible avoided them, choosing rather to appropriate 35 Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), esp. Chapter 3. 36 Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 146. See further the crucially important discussions by Beryl Smalley, “The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif ’s Dilemma,” in Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 27 (1964): 73–89, and Ian Christopher Levy, “John Wyclif ’s Neoplatonic View of Scripture in its Christological Context,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11 (2003): 227–40.

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what Nicholas of Lyre (together with Richard FitzRalph) had to say about the senses of Scripture. There one may find, for example, the belief that from the literal sense alone may any argument be drawn; the other senses are not “authentik . . . of beleeue” unless they are grounded openly in the text of Holy Scripture at some other point.37 If Woodford may be likened to a stately warship which didn’t get within a hundred miles of its quarry, it may be added that those who took John Wyclif as their flagship were sailing a similar distance away, and paying little attention to some of their leader’s most ambitious signals. Furthermore, Woodford is perfectly capable of scoring a palpable hit. The remarks on which he focuses were certainly made by Wyclif, and his response to them is absolutely fair comment (as was the comparable response of Bishop Reginald Pecock). This level of accuracy is all the more remarkable given that Wyclif is the most elusive of targets, a thinker capable of driving forward several arguments (which may seem mismatched or even contradictory) at the same time, sometimes talking like a Thomist exegete while at other times sounding remarkably like Plotinus. In other words, the fact that Woodford does not give us the full story does not mean that the part he does tell is a misrepresentation or falsification. “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog,” declared Kafka.38 Well, maybe not all of them—but certainly some of them, as far as our understanding of Woodford’s critique of Wycliffite literalism is concerned. Clearly, “one must not dismiss with scorn the figure of this dog.”39

37 The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Earliest English Versions, made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), I: 43, 52–55. FitzRalph is named in Ch. 12 (48). On the significance of his Summa in quaestionibus Armenorum for the Wycliffite General Prologue, see Alastair Minnis, “ ‘Authorial Intention’ and ‘Literal Sense’ in the Exegetical Theories of Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif,’ ” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 75, section C, no. l (Dublin, 1975). See further the relevant discussion in the fourth chapter of my forthcoming book, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 38 Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog,” in Kafka, Complete Stories, trans. W. and E. Muir, ed. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 290. 39 To reiterate the words of Bede, as translated by Seán Connolly; cf. n. 6 above.

PART TWO

STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS

FRANCISCAN LEARNING: UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND BIBLICAL EXEGESIS William J. Courtenay

The legacy of Francis to his Order regarding learning was, at best, ambiguous. A certain amount of learning was needed for effective preaching of the gospel, but the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was more important, and the message from God to a preacher, and from a preacher to the simple faithful, could be clouded or confused by too much learning. Yet within the first generation of Franciscans there were those who believed that in order to combat heresy, to bring sinners to repentance, and to inspire the faithful, theological training in the Bible and doctrine were necessary for the Franciscan mission. The founding of convents at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge was as much out of concern for the spiritual life of an urban population, particularly those whose business carried them from town to town, as it was proximity to emerging universities. Cordeliers at Paris (arrival c. 1224, with the construction of the convent in 1230) was, like the Dominican convent of St. Jacques, located near a gate to the city, which brought travelers in and out of Paris. The same was true for the location of Grey Friars at Oxford (established in 1224, three years after the arrival of the Dominicans), which was located near the Abingdon road on the southwestern side of the town. Grey Friars at Cambridge, established in 1226, more than a decade before the arrival of the Dominicans, was located on the northeastern side of the town, where the Newmarket road entered.1 Intellectual engagement was almost immediate at Paris, where the English master of theology, Alexander of Hales, joined the Franciscan Order in 1231, bringing with him his rights and privileges as a regent

1 On the Franciscan foundations and education in England, see A.G. Little, The Grey Friars in Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892); Little, “The Franciscan School at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 19 (1926): 803–74; D.E. Sharp, Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930; reprinted New York, 1964); J.R.H. Moorman, The Grey Friars in Cambridge, 1225–1538 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).

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master, the most important of which was the right to promote candidates for the doctorate in theology. Without joining the Order, Robert Grosseteste did the same for the Franciscans at Oxford, providing them with a lector in theology from 1230 to 1235, which led to the appointment of their first master of theology, Adam Marsh, a decade or so later.2 Although earlier histories of the establishment of houses of studies at the mendicant convents of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge saw them as part of the structure of those universities—despite conflicts over their refusal to join the university-wide strike at Paris in 1229, their refusal to receive their training in arts in the faculty of arts, and eventually their privileges on preaching, hearing confessions, and burying lay benefactors in their cemeteries—more recent scholarship has stressed the independence of the educational programs of the mendicant orders, especially their lectorate programs in theology.3 The latter was an internal program for advanced training in theology of friars sent from the provinces of the order, to which they returned after a period of three to five years. The only place where the educational program of the mendicant convents interfaced with that of the university was at the level of the baccalaureate and doctorate in theology. The legislation of the mendicant orders makes clear that they viewed their house of study at Paris as the centerpiece of the educational program of each order, not as part of the university. Most students, by far, were those involved in the lectorate program, which by the early fourteenth century at Paris numbered over 100 theological students at the Franciscan convent attending lectures on the Bible and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. These students were sent to Paris from their provinces, having been chosen, in the case of the Franciscans, by the provincial minister and the provincial chapter. Each province was to send a minimum of two students to Paris for the lectorate program, and some provinces sent three: two at the expense of the order and one at the expense of the province. These students received instruction from the lecturers in the Paris convent, and after the completion of this 2 J. McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 8–12; R.W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 70–75. 3 W.J. Courtenay, “The Instructional Programme of the Mendicant Convents at Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life. Essays in Honor of Gordon Leff, ed. P. Biller and B. Dobson (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1999), 77–92; B. Roest, A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210–1517) (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

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training, they returned to their respective provinces to be lecturers in the provincial, custodial, and convent schools of the order. At some later stage, usually after many years of teaching and administrative duties in their respective provinces, two students were selected each year by the minister general and the general chapter to be sent to Paris to lecture, respectively, on the Bible and the Sentences. These were two separate appointments, and the appointment of a sententiarius (as the senior person selected was called) was the more important of the two, since only that appointment, in a sequence running two or three years in advance, was recorded in the records of the general chapter. The biblical lecturer was expected to remain at the Paris convent, lecturing on the whole of the Bible, across a two-year period, and would be known as a biblicus. Depending on when a candidate entered upon his responsibilities, he would lecture on half the Bible, either Genesis through Ecclesiasticus, or on Isaiah through the New Testament. After those two years, the biblicus might return to his province and hope that he might be chosen to return to Paris to read, that is, lecture on the Sentences. In some cases—and we simply do not have sufficient evidence to gain a complete picture—the biblicus might remain at the Paris convent, having already been designated as the sententiarius in a following year. The selection of the sententiarius, or bachelor of the Sentences, at the Paris convent was made by the minister general of the Franciscan order, with the support or consent of the general chapter. It was expected that the one so chosen had been trained in the lectorate program at Paris and had lectured for a number of years in the schools of his province. Among the Franciscans it does not appear that he had to have been a biblicus at Paris, although it was expected that he had lectured on the Bible in the schools of the order. Many of those chosen to read the Sentences at Paris were serving as provincial ministers or inquisitors at the time of their selection, which indicates that distinguished service in the order was as important as intellectual ability and scholastic training. In fact, being sent to Paris to read the Sentences and progress to the doctorate in theology was a means of credentialing members of the order for further service within the order and the church. For every John Duns Scotus, Peter Aureol, or Francis delle Marchia, there were many more Franciscan sententiarii from whom we have no writings, and whose subsequent careers were within the order or papal administration. The ratio of talented scholars to those appointed largely on the grounds of past and future service was higher at Oxford and Cambridge,

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so that in the first half of the fourteenth century we have an impressive sequence of Franciscan theologians at those two universities, while at Paris there is only a handful of important Franciscan sententiarii after the 1320s. And the number of those who wished, or whom the Order wished, to be promoted to the magisterium at Paris was so large that the patronage of the pope, at the request of the individual, the order, a prelate, or a secular prince, was used to pressure the chancellor and the masters of theology to allow candidates to read the Sentences alongside an official appointee from their order, or to read the Sentences during the summer vacation, or to be licensed and incept without waiting the normal four years as a formed bachelor between reading the Sentences and promotion as master. More often than not, mendicant candidates, including the Franciscans, became doctors of theology shortly after completing their lectures on the Sentences. Just as candidates in the mendicant orders did not move automatically from biblicus to sententiarius, so too the appointment of the senior lector or regent master at Paris was a separate appointment by the general chapter and not simply an office that a newly-licensed Franciscan master of theology inherited. In order to be recognized as a master of theology it was necessary, in addition to the license from the chancellor, to undergo inception into the faculty of theology as a master and to undertake the duties of regency: to lecture, to represent the order at meetings of the faculty of theology, and to have the right to sponsor candidates for promotion to the magisterium. Yet we find that many newly-formed Franciscan masters of theology did not remain long at Paris but were assigned or appointed to other positions within the order or the Church. Our evidence is insufficient to inform us of the number of those who spent a year as regent master after inception in contrast to those who, after a period of service elsewhere, were reassigned to that position at Paris. We have assumed that a required period of regency was an expectation of inception for mendicants, just as it was for secular theologians. But while that may often have occurred, it was by no means automatic. We need, therefore, to think of the stages of the biblical bachelor, the bachelor of the Sentences, and the regent master of theology not so much as sequential stages in the program of the faculty of theology at Paris but as separate appointments that suited the needs of each order at those specific moments in time. This revised understanding of the academic program of the mendicant orders at Paris has implications for the place of the Bible in the life of Franciscan studia, Paris included. Much has been said of the

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prominent, indeed dominant role played by mendicant theologians in commenting on the Bible in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This is the picture one derives from the foundational works of Beryl Smalley, particularly her Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.4 In fact, it would appear that, both in terms of instruction and circulated commentaries, it was the mendicant friars who dominated biblical exegesis, and primarily within a university context. Moreover, the critical apparatus of divisions of the biblical texts, concordances and indices, were primarily the work of mendicants—Dominicans foremost of all, but the Franciscans not far behind.5 It is also said that secular theologians, who like mendicant bachelors at Paris lectured on the Bible before lecturing on the Sentences, gave cursory lectures, concerned with the simple literal meaning of Scripture, while their counterparts in the mendicant orders carried the principal weight of biblical instruction, both for their own fellow friars and for others as well.6 And while all regent masters of theology, seculars as well as those in religious orders, were known as doctors of the sacred page and were expected to lecture on the Bible, the overwhelming majority of scriptural commentaries written between the second quarter of the thirteenth century and the last quarter of the fourteenth, were written by those in religious orders among whom the Dominicans and Franciscans led the way. But when did these mendicant scholars write their commentaries on books of the Bible? Was it during those two or three years as biblical bachelors at Paris, or the year of post-sentential lectures on the Bible at Oxford? Was it during the year as regent master, before a newlyappointed or newly-promoted candidate assumed that office and replaced the previous occupant? In most cases, it would appear that the 4 B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941; 2nd ed. 1952); English Friars and Antiquity (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1960); and The Gospels in the Schools, c.1100–c.1280 (London: Hambledon Press, 1985). For the late medieval period, see W.J. Courtenay, “The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations,” Church History 54 (1985): 176–87. 5 R.H. and M.A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the “Manipulus florum” of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979); Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 191–255. 6 Bert Roest, in his recent book on Franciscan education (see above, note 3), has fused the statutory evidence on seculars and mendicants to create a four-year period of biblical lectures for Franciscan bachelors as well as those in the other mendicant orders: one year of lectures on a book of the Old Testament, one year of lectures on a book of the New Testament, and two years on the Bible as a whole. That description of the Franciscan curriculum is a fiction.

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biblical commentaries of mendicant friars had only the loosest connection with medieval universities and their theological curriculum. But to understand this, we need to take a closer look at the place of the Bible in the theological curriculum of Paris and Oxford. By the early fourteenth century, the curricular requirements for premagisterial lectures on the Bible differed for secular and mendicant students. Each group was to spend two years in fulfilling this task, but secular students were to comment on only two books of the Bible, while mendicant bachelors were to cover the entire Bible during that same period. At first glance, that could be (and has been) interpreted to mean that mendicant bachelors were more deeply involved in biblical exegesis, but such is not the case. To cover half the Bible in nine months, lecturing only on legible days, meant that one could only provide a literal summary of the contents, a basic narrative that would have to be short on detail. A good example of the result of such an approach is Peter Aureol’s Compendium on the literal sense of Scripture.7 The much-vaunted emphasis on the literal meaning among mendicants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries may have been, in part, a result of not having sufficient time to do much else! Secular students, on the other hand, spent one year commenting on a book from the Old Testament and the other year commenting on a book from the New Testament, each book chosen by the student rather than assigned by a supervising master. Ideally, each chapter was to be the focus of an entire lecture. At the expense of a balanced curriculum for those attending lectures by secular bachelors, this requirement resulted in in-depth exegesis that, in addition to explaining specialized names or practices, offered ample time to explore the multiple senses of Scripture beneath the literal meaning of the text. Depending on how long the selected book, Genesis or Jonah, the gospel of John or a letter of John, the requirement for secular students allowed far more time for intensive analysis as well as exempla and analogies with contemporary life. The opportunity for biblical exegesis by regent masters, the doctors of the sacred page, also favored secular masters in contrast to the mendicants. A mendicant master in the fourteenth century remained regent for only a year, sometimes for as little as a month or two. Unlike the process of promotion among seculars, no friar could incept as a regent

7 Petrus Aureoli, O.F.M., Compendium sensus litteralis totius divinae scripturae, ed. Ph. Seeboeck (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1896).

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master without the previous regent giving up his position to the new candidate. The outgoing master could remain at the Paris convent for a time, but not as regent. Secular regents, by contrast, could remain masters indefinitely and oversee the promotion of their students without resigning their own position. In fact, a year of regency was the maximum among the mendicant orders at Paris in the fourteenth century, while secular masters remained regent, on the average, for five years or longer. Some secular regents had a teaching career at Paris that spanned thirty years or more in which their primary teaching activity was to comment on Scripture. Accordingly, it should have been the secular regents who carried the weight of biblical exegesis at Paris. But before assessing their productivity in that area, a brief look at the situation at Oxford and Cambridge is needed to balance the picture, especially in light of Beryl Smalley’s concentration on English exegesis. In contrast to Paris, the requirement of lectures on the Bible for bachelors at Oxford was to be fulfilled after lecturing on the Sentences, not before. Moreover, it did not occupy a two-year period but only one year, and was often fulfilled during the summer vacation in order to prepare oneself quickly for promotion to the magisterium. The curriculum of the theological program at Cambridge was based on that of Oxford, so that the same situation prevailed. Viewed from that perspective, the faculty of theology at the University of Paris gave far more emphasis to the Bible in its baccalaureate program than did the two English universities. Two years on the Bible followed by one year on the Sentences was the requirement at Paris, while at Oxford and Cambridge it was one year on the Sentences, followed by a few months on the Bible. From a curricular perspective, we would expect that the majority of biblical exegesis in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would have been the work of secular bachelors and masters. Nicole Bériou has brought to light the important role of Parisian secular masters of theology in preaching to the clergy and to the people in the thirteenth century.8 Was there a comparable role in biblical exegesis that has been overlooked, and if not, why not? If, as Beryl Smalley and others have argued, it was not the seculars but rather those in religious orders, particularly the mendicants, who authored commentaries on Scripture, when and in what context did they write these works, since it would

8 N. Bériou, L’avènement des maîtres de la Parole. La prédication à Paris au XIII e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1998).

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appear that the structure of theological programs at the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, did not give them much time for that activity? With very few exceptions, secular masters at Paris and Oxford in the period from 1240 to 1370 published almost nothing in the way of commentaries on Scripture. This is surprising inasmuch as those in the thirteenth century enjoyed prominence as preachers in university and parish churches, and the Bible was the main text for those sermons, along with the exempla and moralitates derived from scriptural commentaries. One can only conclude that the commentaries and manuals for biblical exegesis that had been composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were sufficient for these later masters to fulfill their tasks as lecturers and preachers without bothering to publish the lectures on the Bible that all of them were supposed to have given, and some of them must have given. Between William of Auvergne and Henry of Ghent, that is from 1240 to 1275, secular masters published very little in any of the scholastic genre, save the quodlibetal questions of Gerard d’Abbeville and the polemical, anti-mendicant treatises of William of St. Amour. Mendicant masters present us with a very different picture. The published postillae of Hugh of St. Cher, Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas were products of their magisterial years, but not precisely as regent masters. Because of the smaller number of newly-minted masters among the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, in comparison to the fourteenth, regencies in theology often lasted for several years or, as in the case of Thomas Aquinas, for two separate appointments as regent master. But their commentaries on Scripture were not the result of magisterial lectures, as has often been assumed, but the fruit of several years of study, reflection and writing (just as most scholarly books published today by university professors are the result of years of research and writing only distantly connected with the undergraduate courses they actually teach). It is difficult in most cases to date the beginning and end of the writing of a specific commentary, but one suspects that the effort was spread across several years, only one or two of which coincided with university regency. In fact, the freedom from lecturing and administrative duties that the end of regency entailed may have increased the ability of non-regent mendicant masters to produce and publish scriptural commentaries, especially since they were supported by their order and, unlike secular masters, did not need to teach in order to earn a living. Moreover, behind the name of a specific author

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to whom a work is attributed may be a larger team effort in which younger students at a convent participated under the direction of or in cooperation with a master of their order. Mendicant contributions to Scriptural exegesis, including those of the Franciscans, were products of university-trained scholars but not products of a specific academic exercise, such as the obligatory bachelor lectures on the Bible or the lectures of a regent master in theology. Finally, was there a particular Franciscan contribution to biblical studies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that distinguishes their approach from that of others? In general, I think not. Certainly Franciscan commentators do not outnumber others on particular books of the Bible, save perhaps for commentaries on the Apocalypse in the 1315 to 1335 period, building on the controversial commentary of Peter of John Olivi.9 And research on commentaries is not yet at the point where we can speak about a Franciscan predilection for certain topics less pursued by non-Franciscan commentators. One area of Franciscan biblical activity, however, does need to be noted. Just as secular theologians led the way in the development of text organization and finding tools in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the Dominicans extended their work through concordances and postillae in the thirteenth century, two Franciscans in the early decades of the fourteenth century produced highly successful works that aided biblical research and preaching. One of these was Aureol’s popular Compendium sensus litteralis totius Scripturae, completed in 1319, which survives in over 59 manuscripts and 14 early editions.10 His Compendium surveys the basic content of the Bible, much as did Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica. But in contrast to Comestor’s work, which devoted more than twice as much commentary to the Old Testament as to the New, more than two-thirds of Aureol’s Compendium is devoted to the Gospels and Epistles. Moreover, it is shaped for teaching and preaching in a new age, with a mixture of the literal and spiritual (typological and mystical) interpretations of the text. The other Franciscan contribution, of course, was Nicholas of Lyra’s magisterial Postilla litteralis and Postilla moralis, which were considered

9 Specifically, the Apocalypse commentaries by Peter Aureol, Vitalis de Furno, Ubertino da Casale, Elias Nabinalis, Henry Costesy, and John of Rupescissa. 10 Considering the importance of Peter Aureol for intellectual history and the attention he has received in the last decade, almost no work has been done on his contributions in the area of biblical studies.

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so fundamental that they were fused and added to the Glossa ordinaria as the last great gloss on Scripture.11 More work needs to be done on biblical commentaries and their place in the literature of the late Middle Ages, which Smalley explored in a limited way, primarily for early fourteenth-century England, with partiality to the Dominicans. Unfortunately, the Franciscans have not fared as well, except for Lyra. Interest in the millenarian thought of Peter of John Olivi provoked interest in his commentary on the Apocalypse and, most recently, on the Gospel of Matthew.12 But other Franciscan commentators, such as Alexander of Alessandria, Henry Costesy, and Gerard Odonis are still awaiting a first serious reading. It is one of the lasting achievements of John Fleming to have brought more attention to the Franciscan contribution to late medieval literature and its scriptural foundation. It is to be hoped that others will follow his lead.

11 All copies and editions of the multi-volume Biblia sacra in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included the gloss of Lyra. On Lyra, in addition to Smalley, see Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. P.D.W. Krey and L. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 12 D. Burr, “The Date of Petrus Iohannis Olivi’s Commentary on Matthew,” Collectanea Franciscana 46 (1976): 131–38; “Olivi, the Lectura super Apocalypsim and Franciscan Exegetical Tradition,” in Francescanesimo e cultura universitaria (Perugia: Università degli studi di Perugia, Centro di studi francescani, 1990), 115–35; Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); “Ecclesiastical Condemnation and Exegetical Theory: The Case of Olivi’s Apocalypse Commentary,” in Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegeses, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 32, ed. R.E. Lerner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 149–62; D. Flood, Peter of John Olivi on the Bible, ed. G. Gál (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1997); K. Madigan, Olivi and the Interpretation of Matthew in the High Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

USING, NOT OWNINGDUTIES, NOT RIGHTS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOME FRANCISCAN PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS Janet Coleman

There has long been an investigation, especially amongst modern political theorists, into the degree to which medieval theology and philosophy have or have not some bearing on modern conceptions of natural rights.1 Late medieval scholasticism has been thought to reveal objective and subjective natural right(s) and the modern western world is certainly filled with claims to a plurality of subjective rights. There were, in fact, different medieval traditions of rights discourse—that of civil lawyers, that of theologians to name only two. Here I want to discuss the perspectives of Franciscans, especially Franciscan theologians of the fourteenth century, and what they mean when they used the word ius. Some today think that the older natural law references to ius/iura and the post-Enlightenment reference to natural or human rights say much the same things. I happen not to think this always to be the case although certain contemporary references to human rights often rely on, unacknowledged, an earlier Christian foundation. My aim here is to focus not on what today we seem more comfortable with: the individual’s just claims to entitlements or even that subjective desires be acknowledged. Rather, I want to bring to your attention a language that was especially vibrant amongst Franciscans concerning what is owed to members of our species and how we arrive at this knowledge. My perspective, because I think it is theirs, attempts a highlighting of duties: to God, oneself and to others, simultaneously downgrading

1 Janet Coleman, “Are There Any Individual Rights or Only Duties? On the Limits of Obedience in the Avoidance of Sin According to Late Medieval and Early Modern Scholars,” in Transformations in Medieval and Early-Modern Rights Discourse, ed. V. Makinen and P. Korkman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 3–36; Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1997); Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (New York and London: Continuum, 2005).

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rights without altogether abolishing them, especially in the domain of civil law. It is acknowledged that medieval rights language developed concurrently with wider notions of liberty. Some spoke of liberties as exemptions from law while others spoke of liberty as a possession, a power of the soul capable of exercise without appeal to some higher, external human authority in the making of choices and performance of acts.2 Here, the exercise of one’s liberty was a ius, a power, taken as an inherent species-specific quality, relying on a normative conception of human nature with its moral power to pursue the good and avoid evil. This was a ius, a capacity that characterized the functional operations of the soul in reasoning and willing to act in one way or another. Generally, ius is what iustum est, what is just; ius could also refer to civil, positive and legal capacity. Can we discern a distinctive Franciscan voice in the employment of these terms? I think we can and it contrasts especially with that of their Dominican contemporaries. The Franciscan voice emerges out of their evolving perspectives, first: on the pre-lapsarian conditions of Adam and Eve; then: on what occurred after the Fall but before cities were established; and thirdly, on what politics now is for us in cities. Of course, in Gratian’s vast canon law compendium, the Decretum, we are already told of the natural community of goods by ius naturae, distinct from custom and constitutions.3 But for Franciscans, and peculiar to their vow of poverty, the burning question was whether there now is a possibility to renounce property in “cities” and still not destroy the significance of politics in the here and now. We shall have to become familiar with their distinctive and evolving understandings of different kinds of dominia, that is, dominium in the state of innocence and dominium after the Fall. The focus on this word especially as the fourteenth century progressed with increasing turmoil for the Order is a complex one. In the state of innocence, some Franciscans observed that the ius naturae was a principle of indistinct

2 Janet Coleman, “The Individual and the Medieval State,” in The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, ed. J. Coleman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–34. 3 D.8 dictum Gratiani col. 12: Differt etiam ius naturae a consuetudine et constitutione. Nam iure naturae sunt omnia communia omnibus quod non solum inter eos servatum creditur . . . CIC. I Decretum Mag. Gratiani D. 1 cap. 7 col. 2: Ius naturale est commune omnium nationum, eo quod ubique instinctu naturae, non constitutione aliqua habetur, ut . . . communis omnium possessio et omnium una libertas, acquisitio eorum quae cela, terra, marique capiuntur. . . .

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dominion (indistinctio dominiorum) or illud fuit dominium mere libertatis et perfectionis naturalis, as Francesco di Ascoli put it.4 But the distinctions of dominia familiar to us now are a consequence of the Fall and of positive, human law.5 On this view, natural law principles precede subsequent distinctions of dominia. This was a position that countered the view of many Dominicans that after the Fall the law of nature was itself, and remained, the origin of the institution of distinct property, that property divisions were secondary precepts of the natural law, otherwise theft could not be against natural law and this implied that proprietorship, even of Adam as the first proprietor, was already presupposed secundum ius naturalem. Human positive law and property ownership on this view are derived as additional conclusions from natural law premises.6 Franciscans and some Augustinian “others” took issue with this. If positive law were not to be seen as in contradiction to natural law, then Franciscans had to posit something more nuanced and be much more specific about which positive law they were speaking about: some argued that human positive legislation of the civil kind contrasts with the positive scriptural lex evangelica by which omnia sunt communia and where it is the lex evangelica that does not annul or contrast with the lex naturae. Human legislation, on the other hand, is simply approved by God but is not divinely instituted (following Augustine and the New Testament’s recognition by Christ and the apostles of the law of Caesar). The emphasis here is on a distinction between human positive law and divine positive law where, only according to the latter, the most perfect mode of living is to “have” only in common; the next best is to “have” both in common and as one’s own; and lastly habere omnia propria and this is appropriate only in particular circumstances. If there is a further, and most supreme and perfect way to live which is to have nothing either in proprio nec in communi, is this lost to us after the Fall? Yes, in the sense of it no longer being for us now a selfevident and immutable principle of non-dominating action in living communally; but there is a way that it can be restored in statu isto and 4 Francesco de Esculo: Improbatio, par 10, 154 cited in Roberto Lambertini, La povertà pensata: evoluzione storica della definizione dell’identità minoritica da Bonaventura ad Ockham, 215 n.101 (Modena: Mucchi, 2000); e.g. Francesco d’Ascoli/di Marchia, Comment. On Sent. IV d. 20, Lambertini citing the discussion by Jürgen Miethke on the Improbatio. 5 Lambertini, La povertà pensata, 215. 6 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, Q.66 a.3.

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it is by living the Franciscan life: but now it must be adopted voluntarily and this is uniquely the Franciscan mission and vow.7 Dominicans of course, believed in common dominium, a corporate ownership according to which there would still be no “mine and thine” but only “ours.” Theft would be against natural law because it would be an appropriating to the self what is common to all. But Dominicans increasingly insisted that every individual is and has ever been a (natural) proprietor, and Adam in particular was a first proprietor, even before Eve. Our first parents were not simply users in common or singly; and so, it came to be asserted that there could be no separation of use from ownership by natural law. Hence, Dominicans, like our first parents, were common owners, common proprietors and not simply common users. On the contrary, some Franciscans connected ius naturae and indistinct dominia before the Fall, to be contrasted with very distinct dominia after it, the latter not being by natural law but by convention, politics, positive law, human contrivance, all of which were the necessary calculations to solve the post-lapsarian problem of iniquity. According to Scotus (and the secular university Master Henry of Ghent twenty years before him), the natural law was suspended after the Fall so that what was once a self-evident and immutable principle, de iure naturae, the communion of goods for common use, has been revoked.8 Humans, thereafter, established proprietorship of various kinds. Hence, Franciscans were proposing a distinctive understanding of the origin of property as meum and tuum, this being, as it was for Henry of Ghent, a consequence of iniquity, which thereafter enlisted sheer amoral utility calculations to keep the peace among fallen and quarrelsome men. It was then asked whether there was any penance capable of being performed now that might override the “mine and thine” distinction and restore justice so that goods are restored to others more needy than oneself, here and now.9 Indeed, in holding on to some material good,

7 Others, of course, insisted that the principle of omnia esse communia was what was adopted after the Fall by all religious orders of monks. The secular laity lived by the distinctio dominiorum and can choose part in common and part in propria. But Franciscans attempt “having” nothing in proprio nec in communia. 8 Scotus, Ordinatio IV d. 15 q. 2 n. 3: istud praeceptum legis naturae de habendo omnia communia revocatum est post lapsum. (See below p. 83, n. 11). 9 Scotus, Ordinatio IV d. 15 q. 2 n. 3: Hic tria sunt videnda: primo unde dominia sunt distincta; ut hoc dicitur meum et illud tuum et istud est fundamentum omnis iniustitiae contrectando rem alienam et per consequens omnis iustitiae in restituendo eam.

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presuming now the convention of “mine and thine,” was there a way in which one could be seen as penitent in not making restitution and restoring goods to others? If, according to the principle of the law of nature, everything is in common anyway then perhaps restitution is not necessary because in some ultimate sense one cannot infer that each thing fully and exclusively belongs to a someone or other. The well-known and evolving debates between Franciscans and their opponents were over what poverty actually meant in practice in the sense of asking: what was the appropriate relation of human beings to material goods and to what is owed to others? Furthermore, poverty was as important to them as was humility and obedience. Poverty was part of a complex understanding of what harms the soul, and we all know that they argued that there was a duty to refuse to obey the orders even of a superior who required them to act in violation of their Rule since it was the Rule, as originally set out in Francis’s Testament, that insisted on the responsibility of the individual to avoid sin. In Franciscans having vowed an obligation to poverty the question came to be couched in terms of how restricted the use of goods was meant, in their Rule, to be: what was meant by an obligation that bound them to their vow? Was it a vow to restricted use or merely to lack of ownership? To break a vow is a mortal sin since oaths taken are to God. Had Franciscans, could Franciscans or anyone else, make vows to conduct which was indeterminate so that poverty in act was determined entirely by the individual in his own circumstance? The talented, learned and radical Franciscan, Peter John Olivi, in particular, insisted this was precisely Francis’s intention: that each Franciscan vowed to embark on a certain path towards an envisaged goal of perfection, not a series of specified things but individual acts determined by present necessities and varied circumstances.10 Franciscans were not monks after all. They were a mendicant order and did not live in fixed places. The Franciscan Rule was not Benedict’s. Indeed, it was more perfect! What always seems highlighted in Olivi’s writings is a notion of determining one’s own duty, what is obliging, and what might, if vowed but not fulfilled, lead one to mortal sin.

10

David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001); idem, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); idem, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

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Scholars normally highlight the fact that the early fourteenth-century leaders of the “conventual” Franciscan Order came to reject the views of certain “spiritual radicals,” notably the views of Olivi’s Joachite interpretation of the third age of the Church or of what usus pauper entailed, as well as rejecting Pope Nicholas III’s Exiit qui seminat. There was a shift in the understanding on the part of Franciscans from living only by bare necessities to the interpretation that Franciscans simply bind themselves to a lack of possessions and not to limited use. But this did not obliterate what was an enduring principle: the Franciscan vow is to obligations to use not to own, even consumables and this they took to be an evangelical vow from which even the pope cannot dispense. The rejection was of post-lapsarian dominia in all their subsequent distinctions. But by whose authority does one interpret either Francis’s intentions or that of Scripture as counsels to a perfect life voluntarily undertaken? Hence, numerous “difficult” Franciscans continued to engage questions about obedience to “authoritative” commands that entailed sinning and which they took to imperil their own salvation. If usus pauper was judged not to be precisely definable and hence, could not incur an obligation because it was indeterminate or not knowable beforehand to the person who vowed it, and therefore, unknowable as to whether he was capable of fulfilling it, there still remained the issue of whose discretionary power was at stake in the performance of acts? Secular university Masters of an Augustinian persuasion, like Henry of Ghent, supported the Franciscan position at the end of the thirteenth century but he also argued that we must trust our superiors even if wrong.11 However, if Francis’s Testament and his Rule were in the most simple of terms and statements of intention to obey superiors but not to compromise the purity of evangelical perfection, and if evangelical perfection was a life that could be voluntarily chosen—it was that of Christ and the apostles and, as Francis said, this is what he and his brothers sought to live,—then not even the pope could absolve anyone from his evangelical vows. Scripture, [i]on this view, provides intelligible counsels and examples to be imitated, without further gloss, for

11 Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet XII, q.31; cf. also Janet Coleman, “The Individual and the Medieval State,” in The Individual in Political Theory, 20–21. Compare Augustine, City of God, 1.26. Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, passim, highlights that it was especially Italian and Tuscan Franciscan views to elect their own superiors, and interpret the Rule as they knew it. But my intention here is to point to an epistemological, ethical argument from within the Franciscan position itself.

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the New Testament consists in the testimonies of those most worthy of belief—Christ and his apostles. And how one lives these counsels depends on each individual’s awareness of the historicity of original pronouncements and the authorial intentions behind them. Francis had been given the grace to be so inspired and to understand, having passed this on to his [o]Order in his Rule in his times.12 This meant that the Franciscan Rule was identical in intention with the Gospel. It also implied that Christ and the apostolic community lived as though in the state of first innocence where there was no distinct dominium but only usus and this was not by ius nec in re nec in usus.13 On this view, Christ and the apostles did not separate use from ownership because ownership meant nothing; they lived as though in the state of innocence and only used goods sufficient for daily survival, leaving, indeed offering, as much and as good for everyone else in need. God originally was owner and sovereign dominus and our first parents only had use of what was God’s, granted to them. In Christ’s coming his kingship was explicitly not of this world. Pre-lapsarian as well as the later apostolic possessio was not the later civil law distinction between “mine and thine.” It was precisely the civil law and the purely human distinction of private property which allowed Franciscans to renounce it since they held private possession not to be by natural law and natural law cannot be renounced.

12 Testament of St. Francis, Cotton Ms Faustina D. iv, an early English (fifteenthcentury) translation belonging to John Howell, O.F.M., in Monumenta Franciscana, I, ed. J.S. Brewer (London: Longman, 1858), Appendix VI, 562–66: “. . . And after that oure Lorde had sent too me bretherne, no man told me what I sholde doo, but that most heist and gracious Lorde shewed to me by revelacion that I shoulde lyve after the forme and the wordis of the holy gospelle. And I in fewe symple and playne wordis caused the fourme of our lyfe to be written, and our holy fadre the Pope confirmed hyt unto me and they that camme to re-seyve thro forme or maner of lyvynge departyd and distributed that they had and myght have too poure people. . . . And my bretherne must be welle ware and well advysed in ony wyse that they rescyve no churches nor dwellyne placys or ony thingis but yf they be as semythe holy pouerte the whiche in our rewle we haue vowed and promised, alweys longyng and abiding ther in those placis but as pilgryms and straungers. . . . And the bretherne shalle not say that this is a newe rewle for this ys a rehersalle or a recordynge and a remembraunce and admonicyon or exhortatioun and my testament and last wille . . . Everyone is bownde by obedience to add nothing to this . . . And I commaunde by obedience vnto all my bretherne, both clerkis and also laye bretherne, that they put or make no gloss on the rewle or on this my testament contayned in these wordis . . . you that be my bretherne shall understonde them and with holy operration and with frewtefull werkis and holy conversatione ye shalle observe and kepe them unto your lyves end.” 13 Olivi, De usu paupere, in Lambertini, La povertà pensata, 209 n. 83.

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Some Dominicans, in particular,14 rejected this reading of Genesis. Some insisted that the distinction of dominia came not from natural law, nor from human civil law, but from ius gentium. Others argued that our first parents did have dominium super cetera animalia et terre nascentia, having temporal dominium over the fish of the sea etc., and before Eve “arrived” proprium fuit non commune. After years of debate and turmoil, Pope John XXII finally affirmed that there simply was no possibility of an original separation of use from ownership by natural law, especially of consumables, before or, indeed, after the Fall: you ate, you “owned” it, it was “yours.”15 Adam was therefore, the first proprietor.16 Had he not sinned, then everything would be in common quoad dominium et proprietatem. John XXII was willing to accept that Franciscans could refuse a right to property ownership, individually and in common, but the Church wanted this conduct classified as a right of use. Franciscans insisted to the contrary. They were not criticizing property ownership since they were prepared to leave all such rights to the Church on their behalf. What they wanted to preserve for themselves was not a right of use. It was use without right. Was this some mere textual furor with horrific consequences for some of the parties concerned, they not simply being excommunicated but burnt at the stake? Were these “simply” two readings of Genesis where, for Franciscans, it was possible not only to renounce dominium in material goods but also to renounce dominium as sovereign rule over others because this was a renunciation of purely human conventions, no one being able to renounce natural law? On this emergent view, any reader of Scripture, a Francis or any of his brothers, simply lives in a progressive spiritual and experiential history, individually apply14 E.g. Durandus de San Porciano, De paupertate Christi apostolorum . . . quod primi parentes in statu innocentiae habuerunt dominium aliquarum rerum. . . . Quamvis enim ex iure naturali non sit distinctio dominiorum, ut unus possit dicere hoc est meum vel hoc est tuum, quia hic distinctio est de iure gentium, tamen ex solo iure naturali communitas hominum habet dominium super cetera animalia et terre nascentia. See text in Jürgen Miethke, “Das Votum De paupertate Christi et Apostolorum des Durandus von Santo Porciano im theoretischen Armutsstreit. Eine dominikanische Position in der Diskussion um die franziskanische Armut (1322/3),” in Vera lex historiae. Studien zu mittelalterlichen Quellen. Festschrift for Dietrich Kurze zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 1. Januar 1993, ed. S. Jenks, J. Sarnowski, and M.-L. Laudage (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993), 149–96. 15 Cf. Ad conditorem canonum and Cum inter nonnullos. See the important discussion of many of these issues in Patrick Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Controversy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 16 Cf. John XXII, Quia vir reprobus, BF V, 408–49.

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ing intentional first principles voluntarily to acts and circumstances here and now. Hence, whatever kind of dominium Adam had before original sin it was a completely different kind from the one human beings had in post-lapsarian conditions. What was being proposed by some Franciscans in reflecting on their Rule, their vow, and Scripture as meant to be applied in the circumstances, displayed a massively individualist interpretative thrust in the living of a Christian life of virtue. The “individualism” was, indeed, recognized but it was seen as heretical, as contumacy, as irrationality. It was to clash momentously with the views of John XXII and those who advised him, not least on what obedience and obligation meant, not simply for Franciscans, or for members of all religious orders, but generally. John XXII said that obedience was dominium of the mind and soul in the performance of duties consequent on a vow.17 He said that it was up to superiors to define how practices were to be measured in the circumstances, even to reverse the laws of their predecessors if the superior judges them harmful in the circumstances. He insisted that no religious Rule was identical with the Gospel. Franciscans, however, couched obedience and obligation in more circumscribed and limited terms: no one could be obliged, even by the pope, to violate an evangelical vow. This contravened evangelical liberty, an inalienable ius, a “right” consequent on an obligation, granted by Christ to all individual Christians to survive, and help others in reciprocity to do the same especially when anyone was in dire need. Where the papal position and that of the earlier university Master, Henry of Ghent, had insisted that the Holy Spirit leads the church to an increasing knowledge but always under the guidance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Franciscans did not. Instead, for them, truth was not to be had by institutional authority; it was per se nota or known in experience by every individual. And in the Franciscan insistence to focus on the conventional institution of distincta dominia as human positive law, as an effect of human will alone, this will—even before the Flood—having been exhibited as a lapsed cupidity, per iniquitatem, we get the division of the earth from human will and not from the divine will. What God has done, after the Fall, is to attribute to human beings a power, a ius, and an authority of administration and regulation of the world. He does not tell us that this need be by

17 Quorumdam exigit and Ad conditorem canonum as discussed in Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 196–202.

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property division. This is a purely human convention and it is expedient in the circumstances. Politics, civic foundings and maintenance, are merely matters of utility. The immensely talented Oxford Franciscan, William of Ockham, eventually became embroiled in his Order’s defense with Michael of Cesena, the General Minister of the Order. The specific political issues he and others engaged will not be recounted here. But well before Ockham’s “political moment,” he was already using his university logic to support a reading of historical, authoritative, indeed Scriptural texts with a Franciscan sensitivity to “suppositio impropria,” warning of the dangers that would result from analyzing terms and propositions de virtute sermonis and without regard for the usum loquendi if anyone sought to understand the intentions of a (past) author in his own times. It was pointed out many years ago,18 that whatever were perceived to be the later dangers, in the Paris arts faculty, of Ockhamist followers, Ockham was, in fact, the enemy of those who were opposed to an awareness of all figurative language, metaphors or words ex usu loquendi. Even in his school textbook, the Summa logicae he had argued that an author’s intentions in his text could only be secured by not thinking that every term had one single, timeless and univocal meaning. It was the job of any reader to seek the author’s intentions to determine what he meant by the words he used.19 Ockham was heir to a fourteenth-century Franciscan development that marked the end of an earlier platonism with its innate ideas as a theory of truth and knowledge. He was not alone in understanding God as transcendent and that God had willed that we be given our own ways to find the truth as an object of natural human intelligence as it is “now.”20 18 William J. Courtenay, “The Reception of Ockham’s Thought at the University of Paris,” in Preuve et raisons à l’université de Paris: logique, ontologie et théologie au XIV e siècle, ed. Z. Kaluza and P. Vignaux (Paris: Vrin, 1984), 43–64. For the best discussion of Ockham, see Marilyn McCord Adams, “William of Ockham: Voluntarist or Naturalist,” in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, ed. J.F. Wippel, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 219–48. 19 Ockham, Summae logicae, ed. G. Gál (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1974), De suppositione impropria, Pt I c. 77, 237: Et ideo multum est considerandum quanto terminus et propositio accipitur de virtute sermonis et quando secundum usum loquentium vel secundum intentionem auctorum et hoc quia vix invenitur aliquod vocabulum quin in diversis locis librorum philosophorum et Sanctorum et auctorum aequivoce accipiatur; et hoc penes aliquem modum aequivocationis. Et ideo volentes accipere semper vocabulum univoce et uno modo frequenter errant circa intentiones auctorum et inquisitionem veritatis, cum fere omnia vocabula aequivoce accipiantur. 20 Like Henry of Ghent, Olivi, and Scotus, Ockham wanted to establish how the human mind, now, can arrive at truth and certain knowledge without some direct,

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When Ockham engaged the Genesis text to support his Order’s reading of the pre-lapsarian condition of Adam and Eve he engaged this method. He was well within what had by then become the standard Franciscan argument, not appealing to radical Spirituals or Joachites but to an established tradition in his Order when he used the language of liberties and ius/iura as concessions by some higher authority: especially from God or nature. Neither princes nor popes could remove these “rights” or powers or liberties. Hence, St. Francis was correct in his interpretation of Scripture when he understood that Christ and the apostles did not own, but simply used the world. Human beings have a natural power or “right” of use from God before any subsequent human legal or positive rights of possession which men in communities thereafter established. Our capacity for right reason, recta ratio, does not imply that dominium was granted eternally to human beings but it does allow us to know that we were granted usus. Ownership or possession in law is the result of the Fall and human will. When Ockham recapitulates the pre-lapsarian conditions and powers of Adam and Eve he quite traditionally says that they had perfect nonproprietary power over all things, ruling with right reason and not by coercion. Fallen nature, however, requires coercion; and dominium was established for utility and peace and made “concrete” in positive

divine illumination that some thought was the meaning of Augustine’s texts on whether we have a direct knowledge of God through a particular intervention of divine truth. Augustine had come to be elevated by Franciscans as the author who officially countered the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Like Olivi, when interpreting Augustine’s De Trinitate VIII [Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, III, ed. B. Jansen (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1926): Appendix: Quaestiones de Deo cognoscendo, 455–554], Ockham rejected a literal interpretation of Augustine and substituted an historical reading: God is the principle of our knowledge but is not the object of that knowledge, now. More explicitly for Olivi, illumination cannot be philosophically sustained because it attributes to our knowing excessive properties, insufficiently distinguishing what is the work of human beings and what of God. Instead, we should interpret Augustine not as having intended that we already have eternal principles, truths and rules as a prior, pre-condition of our knowledge of created things. Without going down the route of those who, like Dominicans, interpret Augustine by using Aristotle and Arabizing commentaries, or those who accept Plato’s doctrine of perfect, innate formal knowledge or species, Olivi insisted that we should establish epistemologically what it is possible for us to know and how, in statu isto. See Camille Bérubé, “Olivi, critique de Bonaventure et d’Henri de Gand,” Studies Honoring Ignatius C. Brady, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1976), 57–121. For further comments on the epistemology of Olivi and Ockham see the excursus at the end of the article.

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civil law.21 The idea of perfection before the Fall is now expressed by natural law that is in us which lets us know through our experiences, and reasoning based on our experiences, that we have powers to use the world for survival without owning any part of it. Only God has rightful ownership/dominium of creation. Hence, after the Fall but before kings were established, men voluntarily divided up things saying this is mine a iure humano. Possession and ownership of material things are logical conclusions of experience of our iniquity, now.22 The grounds for political legitimacy, then, are not sacred: they are conventional, utilitarian conclusions based on the historicity of acts of human will and reasoning in the circumstances.23 For Ockham, reason is central to an exercise of our natural liberty, “right,” power. But what king of reason is recta ratio? What is its relation to a good will if an action is to be morally right? He insisted, famously, that one’s will is not necessarily determined by another created cause than the will itself, and he rejected the position that our will is determined by a judgment of reason as to the goodness of the willed act. He says we can will what is bad, even if willing what recta ratio suggests is essential to a good will. But in our present post-lapsarian state, we can and do will against the precepts of reason and we know this from our very experience. Ockham’s political understanding comes out of this, not least because what we owe to others, what we know or should know about our obligations to others, and even why and how we know what 21 Cf. Ockham, De imperatorem et pontificum potestate. See the discussion in Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 169–98. 22 Ockham, Opus nonaginta dierum, chs. 26–28, 88, 93. 23 See Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights, esp. chapters 3 and 4, discussing disputes in Ockham scholarship on the relation between his voluntarism and his rationalism. Oakley observes that Ockham did not “abandon a commitment to the idea that there exists a natural law accessible to the right reason of all men and prescribing for their living objective moral norms. What his voluntarism entailed was not the abandonment of that traditional commitment to the existence of a natural and objective moral order but, rather, a crucial shift in the understanding of the nature and grounding of that natural order” and it should be further observed, with consequences into the seventeenth century and the writings of Hobbes and Locke (cf. page 99). The issue turns on Ockham’s focus on the divine freedom and omnipotence, de potentia absoluta, and concomitantly with the radical contingency of all created forms of order, presumed hypothetically to be stabilized de potentia ordinata. The suggestion is that Ockham should not simply be read as having an imposed doctrine of natural law, countering the other medieval alternative: an immanent natural law springing from the very nature of things. His position is more complicated, perhaps too complicated, as witnessed by followers who made what they will of his ethics and his epistemology.

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others are owed of a share in the common good, objectively, we do not infallibly and necessarily will to do or perform. This is related to what he and other Franciscans especially argued, following Augustine, concerning what, here in these times, we are capable of loving. Augustine plays a central role in shaping this argument: is there anything that is to be loved in and for itself as supremely good, and are we capable of making this distinction and acting on it, from which flows all other kinds of objects of our love that are not in and for themselves but are to be used (material goods) or used and loved (honor, political and moral justice in particular acts)? Ockham insists that intentions are central to all moral acts and they reveal an individual’s habitual orientation to what is intrinsically valuable. Behind this is a religious, theologically-expressed view about directive divine command in divine positive law but this does not override each individual’s need to be committed to his own moral judgments and acts that are independent of divine law precepts or commands. Here is where our natural right reason is engaged and where politics comes in again. Ockham distinguished between a positive and non-positive moral science in his now much discussed Quodlibets.24 Positive moral science contains human and divine laws that oblige a person to pursue or avoid what is commanded or prohibited by a superior with the authority to legislate. But non-positive moral science is something a priori and prior to what jurists and legislators might discuss. Non-positive moral science is what directs human acts apart from any superior’s precepts, be it a Church superior or a civil magistrate. The earlier observation concerning the radically individualist thrust in the Franciscan position emerges here, again, in the moment of application of the precepts of a vow to individual circumstances. Non-positive moral science enables this through the way that principles are known to us, either per se nota or in experience, and thereby directs our acts. Ockham further announces that positive moral science, of divine or civil jurisprudence, is not demonstrative. But non-positive moral science is demonstrative in that it deduces conclusions (syllogistically) from principles known by every human individual, known per se or in experience. This is how we know natural law precepts, that is, what the will ought to conform itself to as recta ratio and these consist in precepts like: avoid evil and

24 Ockham, Quodlibet II, q. 14 in O Th IX, 176–78. See the discussion in McCord Adams, “William of Ockham: Voluntarist or Naturalist,” 233–42.

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sin. This non-positive moral science is certain, at least as certain as anything can be for us, since every individual has a greater experience of his own acts than of those of others or of other things. Recta ratio discerns right and wrong as well as the means to them. Recta ratio is a common knowledge and not an exclusive capacity of the learned or powerful. What is now “natural” is simply what accords with natural reason and the bottom line for Franciscans is that even in our world, after the Fall, what is naturally reasonable is framed by the obligation to survive and to aid others, as God’s individual creatures, in their survival (by begging and labor), each using the world for one’s daily needs. That which is used is an individual decision of will and, in the Franciscan case, realizes natural equity. According to Ockham, the unity of the Franciscan [o]Order is a conceptual collection of such individuals, a concept; but the reality is only individuals who vow individual poverty, and thus, being a community of individuals with a Rule, each applies it in his own circumstances. Even Henry of Ghent,25 in supporting Franciscan poverty, insisted that in the state of innocence there were no individual strong property rights at all. Rather, because we were originally created as God’s, the “owner’s,” [and hence,] we are, in consequence, heirs to a common possession for use. Henry defended a post-lapsarian person’s power to renounce temporal goods but always with the proviso that he recognize his obligation to maintain his own family and his own life. It is a moral wrong to give up all possession—he does not use the language of rights. If one decides to give up wealth and instead to beg, one can maintain one’s duty to stay alive better, Henry says, by recognizing one’s obligation to give back something in return, e.g., praying for others in addition to begging. Does Ockham’s non-positive moral science indicate to us that we have ab initio powers over material things like discrete property or is it only that we have communal use?26 Do we know from non-positive moral science that we have duties to display the right intentions and to act well rather than ill towards others and the created world? 25 Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet IV, q. 20; Quodlibet V. q. 30. See Coleman in Transformations, 13–19. 26 Opus nonaginta dierum ch. 4, in Opera Politica I, ed. H.S. Offler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 333. Ockham writes: Sed licita potestas utendi communissima est potestas utendi, quam Deus in primis parentibus post peccatum vel ante toti humano generi dedit; ergo omni dominio amoto et nullo alio obstantem stante tali potestate utendi, potest usus facti esse licitus.

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Should we then speak of grounding our moral powers either in positive or non-positive morality? Ockham grounds our moral powers in non-positive morality. Of course, politically and by the lawyers’ positive moral science we do have “rights,” accorded or ascribed, and in foro externo, to own and use, and we have commanded obligations to be fair and keep the peace amongst our neighbors. But can we speak of non-positive “natural rights” of ownership and use? Some modern commentators27 think we can but the Franciscan position presented here indicates the opposite. Ockham uses the language of what is licita potestas utendi communissima as a potestas utendi. How do we know this now? By recta ratio, ex dictamine rationis naturalis convincitur.28 Ockham was following the by then standard Franciscan position against John XXII, saying that only God was the original dominus, owner and sovereign creator and ruler. It was not the author of creation’s intention to grant dominium, as we now understand it, to Adam and Eve. The power to appropriate material things and the arrangement of common or collective ownership/dominium was not the perfect pre-lapsarian position. Appropriation and a conscious awareness of what natural equity might require came after the Fall, and was caused by iniquity and its conclusions, even prior to the setting up of kings and emperors. We see this most clearly in Ockham’s III Dialogus 2.1.15 where he discusses three types of what McGrade translates (unusually) as “natural right” but which I, and others, translate as “natural precepts” or natural law.29 1) The first kind of natural precept or natural law is the self-evident first principles of

27 A.S. McGrade, “Right(s) in Ockham: A Reasonable Vision of Politics,” in Transformations, 63–94. 28 Opus nonaginta dierum ch. 14, in Opera Politica, II, 435, ll.200: Et si quaeratur unde ergo habuerunt primi parentes talem potestatem appropriandi res temporales, quam non habuerunt ante peccatum, dicunt isti quod habuerunt illam potestatem ex natura corrupta. Quia ex dictamine rationis naturalis convincitur quod expedit posse peccantibus quod etiam habeant potestatem appropriandi sibi, nisi aliqui eorum eadem potestate sponte se privent, ita quod nullus debet in principio cogi talem potestatem dimittere. Ex isto patet quod, esto quod in primis parentibus in principio non fuerit usus facti ab omni dominio separatus quoad res usu consumptibilis, tamen in utroque ipsorum talis usus fuisset ab omni proprietate separatus . . . et isto modo certum est quod tunc nulla fuit proprietas. Et ex isto sequitur quod licet dominum ex iure positivo introductum sit idem quod proprietas, dominium tamen, si debet vocari dominium, quod competit absque omni iure positivo, divino et humano, non est idem quod proprietas. 29 See the revised text of the Dialogus in H.S. Offler, “The Three Modes of Natural Law in Ockham: A Revision of the Text,” Franciscan Studies 37 (1977): 207–18. McGrade, in Transformations signals in notes 25 and 36 he is adopting this “unusual” translation.

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morality which are indubitable; 2) Then, there are inferences from these first, indubitable principles and these are similarly indubitable; 3) There are further inferences from the inferences.30 The first and second kinds of precepts or inferences from them are known even by the less learned. Ockham writes that even if we have never before thought of them, such natural precepts/principles occur to us immediately whenever we are obliged to do or omit something in accordance with them, unless we will, as we of course can, to proceed to act or omit such act without any deliberation and rule of reason. Should we do the latter, however, we are not acting by natural recta ratio. Ockham says that anyone can immediately and without great study know the self-evident principles and also the inferences from them and there is no excuse for ignorance. But the third kind of natural precepts or laws that are inferences from the inferences show many experts to be in disagreement, and ignorance of this third kind of natural law or precept is generally excusable. This analysis comes during Ockham’s discussion of what a civil governor or emperor should apply himself to. He should apply himself to acquiring a knowledge of the third kind of natural law precepts because his own prudent judgment will allow him to make decisions on what is, in the circumstances, excusable or not.31 But the first and second kinds of natural precepts he need not study because they will easily occur to 30 Olivi held to unquestionable first principles—derived from revelation, revealed as principles, caused by God and not proved by reason, giving us an affective certainty of their truth; other principles held as conclusions necessarily are deduced from first principles; a third set of principles are held on opinion based on probable argument. Olivi insists as did Ockham on the natural light of intellect being joined to us from the beginning of our condition—and I take this to be a post-lapsarian reference. Through the natural light of intellect and without any argumentation, we know first principles and from these we infer some conclusions necessarily and others only probably. In the latter case, we are capable of error. But it does not follow that the light of intellect itself is not from God or that it is in itself false. See Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 83 and as given in the Latin n. 45: Olivi’s Lectura super Isaiam, 197–98, 359–60. 31 For an interesting discussion of the relation between the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and the Franciscan dissidents he “supported,” see Hans-Joachim Schmidt, “Povertà e politica. I frati degli Ordini mendicanti alla corte imperiale nel XIV secolo,” in Ordini religiosi e società politica in Italia e Germania nei secoli XIV e XV, ed. G. Chittolini and K. Elm, Istituto trentino di cultura: Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Quaderni 56 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 373–417. Schmidt rightly observes that Ludwig changed positions to suit his politically expedient needs; his support for Franciscan “erudites” at his court at Munich and elsewhere was not strong; and their role was as propagandists and interpreters of imperial aspirations for a very brief period. It was those with juridical rather than theological knowledge who were important to the emperor and these were never mendicants because Franciscans

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him when necessary. Ockham later makes it clear that each and every individual has a notion that he is by nature free, having an inalienable moral intentional freedom as a rational deliberator with a will to do or not to do what is rational. This is universally true and foundationally self-evident as a principle, per se nota, and hence, immutable. The three modes of kinds of natural law, as understood, he says, in his own times, drawing on canon law and various historical texts, include the first: which are natural precepts in conformity with natural reason that never fails, and include “do not commit adultery” and “do not lie.” Note that this is post-lapsarian and not pre-lapsarian where adultery and lying would have been inconceivable. Natural law is also taken to mean that which is observed by those who use natural equity and without following any custom or human legislation, another postlapsarian necessary conclusion inferred per experientiam and before the establishment of governments. This natural equity seems to be a power of reasoning which serves as a rational readjustment for human weaknesses and experiences of them. In the pre-lapsarian condition, before the Fall, conclusions from that perfect experience would not have required that men draw natural equity conclusions about what is justly owed to each and all because in the original state, all things would have been common, neither commonly nor individually possessed or owned as we now understand these terms. Before the Fall there would have been no need to consider what each is owed because Adam and Eve would have been living according to natural reason as divine law. And if, after the Fall, all had lived according to recta ratio suited to conditions before customs and civil laws were established, then the inferences drawn would have been that all things should be common and nothing owned, either in common or individually, and no government would have been required. But since it was not experienced to be the case that after the Fall all lived according to natural equity, then ownership, both as common property and as individual property was introduced as a positive, civil law remedy to their iniquity. Can anyone, voluntarily, return to a natural equity frame of mind, now? In the Opus nonaginta dierum (ch. 65), Ockham defends the Franciscan mode of using temporal things by referring to a ius poli, as distinguished from the ius fori of civil law courts. Ius poli, the law or

in particular, with their poverty ideal and their religious mission, were opposed to the study of the law.

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right of heaven, and not that of the Garden of Eden, is natural equity in harmony with recta ratio and without any human or divine positive law ordinances, i.e., without the state or Church as they are in this world.32 Franciscans can, then, voluntarily choose to live according to this ius poli alone and without positive meum and tuum: they can be legally rightless. What civil meum and tuum now does is to limit the postlapsarian and recognized common “right” for use but this must be capable of being overridden in cases of extreme need. Since the Church now lives in times where property has been established, both in common and individually, those who wish to imitate the natural equity condition have to, and can, reject all forms of “rights” and ownership voluntarily. What this seems to indicate, quite explosively, given earlier Franciscan insistence that their [o]Order, in imitating Christ and the apostles, were imitating pre-lapsarian conditions, is that Ockham rejects Olivi’s interpretation here. Hence, no one can return to the Garden of Eden, not even the Franciscans. And furthermore, Christ, with his apostles, could only manage, in history, a voluntary natural equity, accepting Caesar’s laws but also living together by a law of caritas, the

32 Opus nonaginta dierum, in Opera Politica II, ch. 65, 574 (and note all the citations from Augustine), ll.76–77: Ius autem poli vocatur aequitas naturalis, quae absque omni ordinatione humana et etiam divina pure positiva est consona rationi rectae, sive sit consona rationi rectae pure naturali, sive sit consona rationi recta acceptae ex illis, quae sunt nobis divinitus revelata. Propter quod hoc ius aliquando vocatur ius naturale quia omne ius naturale pertinet ad ius poli. Aliquando vocatur ius divinum, quia multa sunt consona rationi recta acceptae ex illis quae sunt nobis divinitas revelata, quae non sunt consona rationi pure naturali: sicut consonum est rationi rectae acceptae ex credibilibus quod Evangelium praedicantes, saltem, qui non habent unde sustententur aliunde, de bonis illorum, quibus praedicant, sustententur; hoc tamen per rationem puram naturalem probari non potest: sicut per talem rationem probari sufficienter non potest quod illa, quae praedicant, sunt vera, utilia et necessaria illis, quibus praedicant. It is not at all clear that Ockham is referring to a personal revelation from God to one creature, but rather to what is revealed to each and all through Scripture, which, if they are literate, or hear it preached, constitutes a body of common belief “as reasonable.” Also see Brian Tierney, “Languages of Rights: William of Ockham: ius poli and ius fori,” in The Idea of Natural Rights, 118–30 for a brilliant discussion of Ockham’s relation to John XXII’s canon law pronouncements with less of the theological, Augustinian and scriptural interpretation than I am here proposing is Ockham’s real intention: that is, to go beyond, even to correct, the Ordinary Gloss to the Decretum on ius poli. Hence, ius poli for Ockham is nothing other than a power conformed to right reason without any compact. In short, most discussions seem to have left out the crucial, scriptural moment for Franciscans: after the Fall, but before customs and contracts and civil law were established.

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ius poli. Salvation in heaven, as Augustine insisted in the City of God XXII, is not a return to the Garden of Eden but a post-historical true city with a ius poli.

Excursus on the Epistemology of Olivi and Ockham Human intelligence, as created and now fallen, cannot be so perfect as to judge and understand with absolute certitude. We have, as a consequence of God’s creation a natural light of intelligence that does proceed from the divine will. But we cannot attribute to our intellect an innate knowing because, if ideal reasons were already present in the mind then it would be sufficient that someone turns towards them to have an immediate knowledge of truth and therefore, of God. But God is transcendent and not known “immediately.” Instead, it is by the natural light of the intellect that anyone can arrive at common knowledge of being and first principles, and by these he can come to a knowledge of God, necessarily being aided in this by sensible, exterior things and by our natural perception of them. We have an intuition of an individual and of the existent but [contra Scotus] there is neither a common nature nor a universal as a direct object of intelligence. The truth of necessary propositions is therefore a negative truth in the sense that universal affirmative propositions are in reality modal propositions de impossibili. A necessary proposition, e.g., that the human person is a rational animal, should be taken to mean that it is impossible for there to exist a person that is not a rational animal. Unlike God, we suppose the hypothetical existence of a subject and our definitions only have existence in the mind that thinks them. What for us is necessary is that a relation is perceived by our intelligence between one subject and an attribute, whether these are real or hypothetical. Hence, without knowing God as an object of intellect, nor as a formal principle in the ordinary order of things here, God does not create a species of divine things in us: instead, we form these ourselves from what we perceive of things in created nature. What then are moral rules for Olivi? They are not real things; they are the mind that thinks them and they do not imply that in natural things there is the kind of necessity, immutability and eternality simpliciter et absolute. Rather, first principles and necessary propositions for us are necessary only secundum quid et conditionaliter, i.e., are hypothetically

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certain. We cannot know God and the Trinity by a reason that is a univocal similitude of God, as a species or genus, which is the way we do know the humanity of Christ. But we can know God and the Trinity by something that has an analogue resemblance: this is Christ as master and sovereign and teacher of our intelligence proposing objects in creation to our intellects. So for us, the truth in propositions are signs of the object signified, and the role of terms is as signs of our concepts, and the role of concepts is as signs of things. These are the relations that our natural intelligence discerns and establishes between objects as it knows them and they are not manifested in anyway other than by the natural light of our intelligence, aided by efficient or occasional concurrences of created things. See Camille Bérubé, “Olivi, critique de Bonaventure et d’Henri de Gand,” in Studies Honoring Ignatius C. Brady, O.F.M. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1976), 57–121.

LANGLAND AND THE FRANCISCANS ON DOMINIUM Lawrence M. Clopper

As early as its first print, by Crowley in 1555, Piers Plowman was tagged, among other things, as an anti-mendicant poem written by the proto-Protestant Langland (Crowley’s formulation) on the grounds that Langland’s attacks on the institution of the church and on the clergy, but especially on the friars, looked much like those of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century.1 John Bale, who shared this view of the poem, asserted in the first edition of his bibliography of English writers that the author of Piers Plowman was John Wyclif, the reformer and subsequently condemned heretic and the most virulent attacker of the mendicants in the later English Middle Ages.2 By the second edition Bale had gotten more reliable information, some of which is similar to the few other documents that we have referring to Langland, and changed his ascription to William or Robert Langland.3 But he could not give up Wyclif, so he added that Langland was one of Wyclif ’s first followers. This is ludicrous, of course, if for no other reason than that the first version of Piers Plowman was finished about 1365 and the second about 1377 whereas Wyclif did not make his break with the mendicants until sometime between 1379 and 1381.4

1 J.N. King, “Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman: A Tudor Apocalypse,” Modern Philology 73 (1976): 342–52, and J.R. Thome and Marie-Claire Uhart, “Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986): 248–54. 2 Illvstrium maioris Britanniae scriptorvm (Wesel: Theoderic Plantaenus, 1548), fol. 157r. 3 Scriptorvm Illustrium maioris Brytannie quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant . . . (Basel: Ioannem Oporiunum, 1557?), 474. For a discussion of the early documents referring to Langland, see George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965); and Ralph Hanna III, William Langland, Authors of the Middle Ages 3 (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1993). 4 For the dates of the versions of Piers, see George Kane, “The Text,” in A Companion to “Piers Plowman,” ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 175–200; for Wyclif and the friars, see his De apostasia (completed ca. 1381 according to Williell R. Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983], 64–65); and Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 152–54.

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Since it is clear that Crowley did not understand the poem—he thought Piers was the visionary, for example—and that Bale’s comments are without merit, perhaps one should be skeptical of the foundations laid by these two commentators. There is, in addition, one set of details that suggests that Langland’s Piers Plowman is not simply an anti-fraternal work: Langland frequently incorporates charges made by Richard FitzRalph, the best-known English critic of the mendicants prior to Wyclif, but omits others and rejects some altogether.5 FitzRalph had sued in the curia for the revocation of papal privileges granted to the mendicant orders: the right to preach, the right to cure of souls, and the right of sepulture. FitzRalph’s concern was jurisdictional and institutional: when the friars exercised these privileges, they were usurping the traditional rights of the secular clergy and in some instances acting without the approval of the bishop, who was the person through whose office these rights were granted to the secular clergy. In his De defensio curatorum he also charged that the Franciscans preached the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles in defiance of John XXII’s condemnation of the mendicant theses.6 Langland is critical of mendicant abuses of care of souls and right of sepulture, but he only attacks mendicant preaching if it is done for profit. Anima makes the case for mendicant (I think specifically Franciscan) preaching if it follows Francis’s admonition that sermons should be brief and intended to call people to repentance by teaching moral precepts and the basic elements of the faith.7 I suggest that Langland’s stance is like that of Bonaventure 5 De defensio curatorum, in Melchior Goldast, Monarchia s. romani imperii, 3 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlaganstalt, 1960). On FitzRalph, see Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 349–451; and Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 123–51. For Langland’s use of FitzRalph, see Lawrence M. Clopper, “ ‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 58–63, 70–82. 6 Cum inter nonnullos: Quum inter nonnullos viros scholasticos saepe contingat in dubium revocari, utrum pertinaciter affirmare, Redemptorem nostrum ac Dominum Iesum Christum eiusque Apostolos in speciali non habuisse aliqua, nec in communi etiam, haereticum sit censensum. In Corpus iuris canonici (=CIC), eds. Emil Albert Friedberg and Aemilius Ludwig Richter, 2 vols. (Leipzig: ex officina Bernhardi Tauchnitz, 1879–81), 2: 1225–29. 7 Compare Anima’s statement (PP.15.70–79) with Francis’s in the Rule of 1223, cap. 9. And see Clopper, ‘Songes,’ 74–77. Missing from Piers are charges common in external critiques of the orders; for example, there is no accusation that they steal children or claim judicial immunity from the ecclesiastical hierarchy nor that they handle money against their rule, nor use bursarii as intercessors for collecting money and goods.

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and John Pecham, the Franciscan Archbishop of Canterbury, insofar as both record instances of laxity in the Franciscan and other mendicant orders—often the same ones their critics complained of. Thus FitzRalph, though more obviously Bonaventure and Pecham, point to fraternal laxities in the interests of reform.8 The suppression of parts of FitzRalph’s critique of the friars and the fact that numerous scholars—Burdach, Bloomfield, Donaldson and more recent ones—have listed positive images of friars or of Franciscan ideals in the poem (but without addressing the issue of why they are there) ought to make us wonder whether our assumptions about Piers, like those of Crowley or Bale, are faulty or erroneous in our reading of Piers simply as an anti-fraternal text.9

The Franciscan Position This paper attempts to describe Langland’s position on dominium, one that, I will argue, supports the claim that, in imitation of Christ and his disciples, the Franciscans had no dominium either personally or in common. This teaching on Franciscan poverty was shared by all individuals or groups within the order whether they were rigorists such as Ubertino da Casale and Angelo Clareno, more moderate brothers such as Peter John Olivi, or moderates such as Bonaventure and John Pecham. Having dominium means to have ownership of or power over something, whether land or material goods.10 A person who has dominium

Chaucer’s Summoner’s opening remarks are centered on this latter practice. See John V. Fleming, “The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 688–700. 8 FitzRalph had good relations with the friars from his youth but then suddenly turned against them c. 1350 (Walsh, FitzRalph, 172, 349–50). He begins his De defensio curatorum with the assertion that he will provide evidence and counsel that the friars should be brought to the purity of their founding (Goldast, 1391); he does not suggest, as Wyclif did, they should be abolished. For a list of abuses their opponents pointed to and that needed remedy, see Bonaventure, Epistle 1, Epistolae officiales, in Opera omnia, ed. College of St. Bonaventure, 10 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902), 8:468–69; and Pecham, Tractatus Tres de Paupertate, ed. C.L. Kingsford, A.G. Little, and F. Tocco (Aberdeen: Typis Academicis, 1910), 63–66. 9 For a list of such scholars, see Clopper, ‘Songes,’ 15–19. 10 The discussion that follows is based on Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. Burns (Cambridge:

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of something can retain dominium and give another possession and use or simply the use of something (usufruct). If the dominus retains dominium of those things in someone else’s possession or those put to another’s use, he may resume them at will, and the properties would have to be returned without damage to their substance.11 Civil dominium and property rights, at least theoretically, are relatively simple matters; however, the question whether prelates or other clerics may have dominium is more problematic.12 It was possible, through a variety of maneuvers, to transfer, to alienate lands to corporations such as monasteries, but noble donors tended to retain some sort of dominium or certain rights such as that to name the abbot, in exchange for prayers from the community who were said to hold the properties in common in imitation of the members of the early church described in Acts 4:32–35.13 Another question was who had dominium of the secular church’s temporalia and the rights attached to them. According to canon law, all temporalia given to the church were held in common by the ecclesiastical community or corporation however defined. But many asserted that the higher clergy were only administrators: the goods of the church constituted Christ’s treasury and superfluities were required to be distributed to those in need.14

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 607–48; Malcolm D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order: 1210–1323 (London: S.P.C.K., 1961); Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997); and Virpi Mäkinen, Property Rights in the Late Medieval Discussion on Franciscan Poverty, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, Bibliotheca 3 (Louvain: Peeters, 2001). 11 Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” 612. 12 Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” 619–20 and “The Two Jurisdictions: Theological and Legal Justification of Church Property in the Thirteenth Century,” in Church and Wealth, ed. W. Shields and D. Woods, Studies in Church History 24 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 75–110. 13 My statement is accurate, but the subject is complex because at times royal statutes and civil or canon law were in opposition to one another. For a succinct discussion, see Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 230–45. 14 Coleman, “Two Jurisdictions,” 75–110. See Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), 39–44. Langland has various spokespersons say that Christ’s “goods” are held for the poor (Piers C.17.67–71 [“goddes goodes,” “cristes [tresor]”); B.9.89 (“cristes good”); 15.104 (clergy should be “curteise of cristes goodes”); B.15.244–46 (“cristes patrymonye”); and cf. B.15.570–76. In the Disendowment statement, Anima says that “knighthood” and the “commons” should dispossess the bishops of their “lordshipe of londes” if “possession” hinders them in their duties (B.15.553–67). Most citations here and below are from Piers Plowman: The B Version (=K-D), ed. G. Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press,

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Commentators on civil and canon law established the basic meanings of the words I have introduced thus far; questions, however, often arose concerning who had which rights and what the nature of the right was. The words defining property rights were put to new stress—along with questions of a variety of other kinds of rights—during the debates about the mendicant life. A crucial point of contention was the Franciscan claim not to have dominium of anything either personally or in common. No one had asserted this before. It was predicated on the fact that, as the Franciscans understood it, Christ and the Apostles lived itinerant lives in which they were dependent upon others for their necessities: food, drink, clothing and shelter.15 Francis evoked this apostolic life in chapter 2 of the Rule of 1223, the Regula Bullata, but especially in chapter six, when he declared that the brothers were to appropriate nothing of their own, neither house, nor place nor anything at all.16 Gregory IX, who had been the first Cardinal Protector of the order and a friend of Francis, issued the bull Quo elongati (1230) which ruled that the provision against appropriation was to be understood as follows: “we decree that property may be possessed neither individually nor in common. However, the brotherhood may have the use of equipment or books and such other moveable property as is permitted, and that the individual brothers may use these things at the discretion of the general and provincial ministers.”17 The important distinction is that between dominium and use. Gregory did not specify exactly how this was to work in any canonical or civilly legal sense, perhaps because he was aware of the early Franciscan position that dominium of things given to the order for its use remained with the donor.18 But

1975). The remainder are from Piers Plowman: The C version (=R-K), ed. G. Russell and G. Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1997). 15 Bonaventure, Apologia pauperum 7.5, 22, 32–4, in Opera omnia 8:233–330. Tierney, Natural Rights, 94–97. 16 Chapter 2 says that before anyone may enter the order, the ministers should explain what Si vis perfectus esse means. Chapter 6 says, Fratres nihil sibi approprient, nec domum, nec locum, nec aliquam rem, sed tamquam peregrini et advenae in hoc saeculo in paupertate, et humilitate Domino famulantes, vadant pro eleemosyna confidenter. Luke Wadding, Annales minorum 2, ed. P. Joseph Maria Fonseca (Quaracchi: Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1931), 73–77. 17 Latin text in Herbert Grundmann, “Die Bulle ‘Quo elongati’ Papst Gregors IX,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 54 (1961): 1–25. The translations here and below, as noted, are from Francis of Assisi: Early Documents (=FA:ED), ed. R.J. Armstrong, O.F.M. et al., 3 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1999–2001), 1, 573. 18 Gregory asserts the principle in Quo elongati. It is exemplified in Thomas of Celano’s second life of Francis, Bk. 2, cap. 27; FA:ED 2, 285–86. The Franciscans

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growing problems within the order brought the brothers back to the pope, in this case Innocent IV, who also had been Cardinal Protector. In Ordinem vestrum (1245) he too asserted that the Franciscans had no dominium of anything either individually or in common, and then went on to elaborate the things of which the brothers might have use. When he came to the matter of dominium, he ruled that “the right, ownership, and dominion of such immobile and mobile goods belong immediately to the church itself [that is, the Roman papacy], except for those cases in which donors or grantors have expressly reserved these property rights and dominium to themselves.”19 These two bulls were private communications to the order insofar as they responded specifically to requests from the Franciscans for clarifications of their rule and life and thus were not relevant to other regular orders or the clergy in general. As debates within the Franciscan order and in polemics from outside the mendicant orders intensified, Pope Nicholas III, who also had been the Franciscan Cardinal Protector, issued the bull Exiit qui seminat (1279) whose purpose was to settle these matters once and for all; indeed, at the end of this lengthy bull he declared it forbidden “for anyone whomsoever to infringe upon what we have clarified, ordained, conceded, regulated, supplemented, endorsed, formally approved and enacted in this document, or rashly dare to oppose it. If anyone presume to attempt this, let him know that he shall incur the anger of almighty God and of his holy Apostles Peter and Paul.”20 He endorsed the proposition that the Franciscans had no dominium either personally or in common. Up to the papacy of John XXII (1316–34), therefore, the Franciscan theses on the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles, as well as of their own observance of these were deemed orthodox.

did not invent this rationale. From the twelfth century onward, a trustee could hold property and grant the use of land and its profits to a corporate body (Berman, Law and Revolution, 235, 239). 19 FA:ED 2, 777. 20 Friedberg, CIC 2: 1109–21 (FA:ED 3, 763–64). Clement V in Exivi de paradiso (1312) repeated Nicholas’s prohibitions (Friedberg, CIC 2: 1193–1200).

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The Anti-Mendicant Position Most medieval commentators seem to have agreed, no matter how they phrased it, that one could renounce dominium, possession or usufruct, yet in times of necessity, one still retained the right (ius) to those things essential to the preservation of life—food, drink, clothing, and shelter. The Franciscans agreed in principle, but they argued that this was not a right: God by means of natural or divine law made the necessities of life common to all and thus there was no legal or civil right attached to them.21 The distinction between the two positions is significant because if one has a right to necessities, then one also has dominium once they are received or taken. The Franciscans denied that there was any transferal of dominium. In the early 1320s John XXII issued bulls repudiating, among other things, this fundamental element in the Franciscan theory of poverty.22 John depended on arguments regarding consumables, the principal ones of which were provided by his Dominican advisors, especially Hervaeus Natalis, General Master of the Dominican order, but which had been deployed by others in earlier debates. The issue arose from the common understanding of property rights: when a dominus invested someone with possession or usufruct, it was understood that if land or use of it were resumed, it had to be returned in the condition in which it had been given. But what if the gift were food, drink or clothing, which would be consumed and therefore none of which could be returned in its original condition? John argued, as had others, that when someone gave food to a friar, he transferred dominium along with the food; consequently, the Franciscans could not argue that they had nothing personally or in common. If you ate the apple, it was yours. The focus of these debates turned increasingly to an analysis of “use.” Discussions of use had occurred before they became enmeshed in the mendicant/secular disputes, but now it was necessary to distinguish among a variety of rights and uses: right of use, use of right, simple

21 Bonaventure said that with regard to temporal goods, one could renounce dominium, possession and usufruct but not the simple use of necessities that preserve life. Then he cited the Rule, ch. 6 in the matter of appropriating nothing (Apol. paup. 11.5 and 11). 22 Ad conditorem, and later Cum inter nonnullos (Friedberg, CIC 2: 1229–30); Lambert, Franciscan Poverty, 208–46; Tierney, Natural Rights, 96–97, 153–59. For Hervaeus Natalis, O.P., see Lambert, 227, 241–42; and Tierney, 104–07.

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use, simple use in fact. The discussion ranged widely—not to mention wildly: what were the conditions in Eden? Did Adam alone or did Adam and Eve together have dominium or did they have only simple use?23 Most canonists and apologists agreed that property and the origins of property rights were a consequence of the fall, but not how and when these things arose nor whether they were good or bad in themselves. It was commonly thought that God established property rights in order to sustain his creation through the stability provided by lordship or regnancy and that he provided a sufficiency of necessary things for all people in order to preserve their lives.24 One significant question was whether the taking of necessities in extreme conditions was a right or a provision instituted by God through natural or divine law. Everyone seemed to agree that in life-threatening situations a person could take necessities from a person who had dominium of them without infringing any law; that is, the taker should not be considered a thief if he were acting to preserve his life, for “need has no law.”25 The opponents of the Franciscans said the needy and poor had a right—that is, some kind of legal or lawful claim to necessities even if those things were owned by someone else—but the Franciscans responded that God, through natural, that is, divine law ensured there were sufficient things to preserve life and that these were common to all in times of need.26 The distinction is between some kind of right and simple use, the latter of

23 Tierney, Natural Rights, 132–85. The discussion at some point turned on the meaning of “dominion” in the passage in Genesis when God confers “dominion” to Adam over all that he had created. Some, John XXII for example, argued that Adam had “dominion” and therefore dominium in Paradise. Generally, these are treated as separate terms, as I note below. The Franciscans insisted that Adam and Eve had only simple use. John Oakley, “John XXII and Franciscan Innocence,” Franciscan Studies 46 (1986): 217–26. 24 Bonaventure, Apol. paup. 11: 6–11; Tierney, Natural Rights, 146. 25 The principle that need is a justification for begging or receiving necessities is succinctly stated in Langland’s Pardon scene (B.7.65–69, 84–85). The maxim “need has no law” is a commonplace and absolutely orthodox as it can be found in Gregory IX, Decretales, bk. 5, tit. 41, cap. 4 (CIC 2, 927); Aquinas, Summa Theologia II-I, q. 66, art. 7; Bonaventure, Apol. paup. 10:13; and FitzRalph (cited by Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 269–70). Discussion in Tierney, Natural Rights, 70–75. Nede cites the principle in Piers B.20.10, and see the elaboration in 20.35–50. 26 William of Ockham, Opus nonaginta dierum (=OND), in Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Politica, ed. H.S. Offler et al., 2 vols. (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1963, 1974), 1: 301–04. OND is a lengthy response to John XXII’s Quia vir reprobus (1329), which contained a detailed argument against the Franciscan theses on poverty. And see Tierney, Natural Rights, 69, 78–87 (on Henry of Ghent) and 118–30 (on William of Ockham).

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which is not a right in any positive, legal sense. The Franciscans went further to distinguish simple use from simple use in fact, the latter term meaning that not only were they without dominium of anything but that they followed a more severe form of voluntary deprivation than that of the involuntary poor who had simple use of necessities.27

Langland on Dominium Although there is a lot of Latin in Piers Plowman, Langland did not use the Latin terms for property rights that I have discussed. His English terms for dominium are “possessioun” and “lordschipe,” the latter of which he frequently uses in alliteration with “lande.”28 This fortuitous link is appropriate because in discussions of dominium the subject of concern often is land even though one may have dominium of any kind of material good. “Lordship,” however, need not refer only to property rights; it may also mean “dominion” as we often use it today to mean the power of someone to rule a territory. In such a situation the sovereign may have dominion but be without dominium of some or many properties within his realm. Langland also uses “possessioun” in a general or larger sense to refer to dominium of material goods.29 Piers Plowman opens with a self-confessed wanderer and idler who quickly falls into a dream state in which he sees a tower on a “toft,” a dungeon in a dale beneath and in between a “fair feeld ful of folk.” He focuses on this field of folk and their various labors and occupations until, in Passus 1, Dame Holy Church descends from the tower and points him back to the folk who are largely busying themselves with things of this world rather than with, she says, the “oother heuene.” Then the Dreamer asks a series of questions to which Dame Holy Church responds with something like a catechism that explains basic Christian tenets along with some embellishments. The Dreamer’s first

27 Ockham, OND 1.303: the simple user has merely “use of right” or “use in fact” without ownership or any legal right (see Tierney, Natural Rights, 36–37, 94–95, and 146–47). The discussion of consumables derives from Bonaventure and was incorporated into Nicholas III’s Exiit qui seminat. 28 E.g. B.10.14, 14.263, 16.240, 20.251; C.16.160. 29 Richard Firth Green has told me that “possession” is not an English equivalent of dominium; rather, it is a civil legal term. Langland seems to use “possession” to indicate ownership, but I think his concept of “ownership” contains that of “lordship” (=dominium; see B.11.276, 12.250, 14.271–3, 15.563).

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question is “What does this mean?” The “this” asks for an explication of the three-fold scene that he first saw (1.1–2). Dame Holy Church says that Treuthe, who created all people and who desires that everyone act according to his word, dwells in the tower. Because God created man with a fleshly body, she continues, he also made provision for bodily necessities in commune to all: And þerfore he hiȝte þe erþe to helpe yow echone Of wollene, of lynnen, of liflode at nede (my emphasis) In mesurable manere to make yow at ese; And comaunded of his curteisie in commune þree þynges (my emphasis); Are none nedfulle but þo; and nempne hem I þynke And rekene hem by reson: reherce þow hem after. That oon [is] vesture from [chele] þee to saue; [That oþer is] mete at meel for mysese of þiselue; And drynke whan þ[ee] drie[þ] (1.17–25).

Dame Holy Church names the three necessities that God provides to sustain life; however, Langland has her use a precise phrase, “in commune,” to indicate that these are common to all in need.30 She does not suggest these things are in common by any right. Later in the poem a voice breaks into the text to repudiate the contrary thesis that “alle þinges vnder heuene ouȝte to ben in commune” (B.20.276).31 The speaker denounces the teaching: “He lyeþ, as I leue, þat to þe lewed so precheþ, / For god made to men a lawe and Moyses it tauȝte: / Non concupisces rem proximi tui.” The speaker attributes this false teaching to friars who, out of envy, have gone to school to learn logic and law and to preach to men about Plato and to prove it by Seneca (B.20.273–79). But his is not a simple anti-fraternal comment; it is quite specific because when Conscience, a bishop who is the heir of Piers, allows the friars to enter Unity (the Church), he stipulates that it is conditional upon their leaving “logic” and learning to love because Francis and Dominic left 30 Nede confirms the statement (B.20.10–19) on the grounds that taking the three necessities is licit under natural law (“lawe of kynde”). And see 6.221, 7.121–35, and 11.278–89 on God’s provision. Also Patience says to Haukyn that “here (is) liflode ynogh, if oure bileue be trewe. / For lent neuere was lif but liflode were shapen, / Wherof or wherfore or wherby to libbe” (B.14.38–40). The context for the statement is in lines 36–64. The category “vesture” or clothing (“wollene” or “lynnen”) was understood also as a term for shelter. 31 Canonists and glossators uniformly asserted the principle that in necessity “all was common to all.” The Franciscans argued that only the necessities of life were common to all. Tierney, Natural Rights, 58–75.

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“boþe lond and scole” out of love in order to be holy (B.20.244–52). The opposition is between those who sophistically argue that all things are in common to all at times of need, which would imply some kind of dominium, and those such as Dame Holy Church who say that only the three necessities for life are common to all. The latter position, that only necessities are common to all, reflects that of the Franciscans even though Conscience erroneously attributes it to the Dominicans as well. Moreover, neither Dominic nor his brothers left “scole” or intended to do so. Dame Holy Church has not finished answering the Dreamer’s first question, what his vision means, before he unexpectedly goes off in another direction to ask: “Ac þe moneie [on] þis molde þat men so faste holdeþ / Tel me to whom þat tresour appendeþ.” (1.44–45). Middle English “appenden” is a legal term meaning something that belongs to someone as a possession or right (MED sb1). The logical relationship between the second and first question is: if there are necessities common to all, then to whom does money belong? Who has dominium of or the legal right to money? Dame Holy Church cites the instance when the people in the temple held a coin in front of Christ and asked if they should worship Caesar (this is Langland’s version). Langland’s Christ says they should look at the writing and the image on the coin. Then Dame Holy Church quotes “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Langland has altered the narrative: in Matt 22:15–22, the question centers on whether it is lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. The significance of this confrontation comes up often in the mendicant debates because those who were opposed to the mendicants read the incident as Christ’s acknowledgement that taxes were to be paid to the legal authorities; therefore, these commentators concluded that Christ and the disciples would have to have had money to pay the tribute and thus they had dominium of some things.32 When we read Langland’s version of the event, it would seem to take “Render unto Caesar” rather literally. Given the question posed—to whom does the money of the world belong?—the answer would seem to be “to Caesar,”

32 This is one point in a larger discourse involving payment of tribute, the apostles’ purse, and other biblical references that might suggest Christ and the apostles had possessions. See FitzRalph, Def. cur., 1402, on Reddite Caesari and tribute; Bonaventure’s defense of the purse, Apol. paup. 1.6 and 7.35; and the Dominican Hervaeus Natalis’s insistence that Christ and the Apostles had dominium of some things (Liber de paupertate Christi et apostolorum q.3).

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that is, to the ruler, lord or emperor, the ultimate temporal dispenser of lands and the goods derived from them. Discussions of the origins of property rights asked whether private ownership of lands (dominium) was an immediate consequence of the fall or whether it was the result of settlement as the population grew larger and took possession of lands by residence, or whether it was established by positive (man-made) law in order to create stability among men.33 In the commentaries of the canonists and the civil lawyers as well as in those of the participants in the mendicant debates, the figure of Abraham was often invoked on this issue of the origins of dominium of land.34 Genesis 13 says that originally Abraham and Lot shared lands for their flocks but that antagonism grew between the servants who guarded the sheep; as a consequence, Abraham decided that he and Lot should divide the land between the two of them in order to separate the antagonists. This action reads very much as if private ownership came from settlement (occupying a place) or first claim and subsequent division. Then the Lord appears to Abraham to say that he will give him and his seed all the land that he can see in all directions (Gen 13:15; see also Gen 13:17). God’s gift to Abraham not only conveys dominium to him but sanctions personal ownership of things. This event is alluded to in Piers during the Dreamer’s conversation with Abraham, who is also the personification of Faith. Abraham says that because of his firm faith, he was given land and lordship: Myn affiaunce and my feiþ is ferme in þis bileue For hymself bihiȝte to me and to myn issue boþe Lond and lordshipe and lif wiþouten ende (16.238–40).

However, dominium, land and lordship, is taken away from Abraham’s descendents at the Crucifixion because they would not believe in Jesus: And ye, lurdaynes, han ylost for lif shal haue þe maistrye; And youre fraunchise þat fre was fallen is in þraldom; And ye, cherles, and youre children cheue shulle [ye] neuere, [Ne] haue lordshipe in londe ne no lond tilye, But [as] barayne be and [by] vsurie [libben], Which is lif þat oure lord in alle lawes acurseþ (B.18.102–7).

33

Tierney, Natural Rights, 132–69. Tierney, Natural Rights, 144–45 (Abraham’s and Lot’s division of land), 155 (grant of lands to Abraham), 165 (Ockham versus John XXII on origin of property rights). 34

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This assertion, which is by no means unusual in the Middle Ages, indicates that under the New Law legitimate ownership of land and lordship was taken from the “Jewes” and transferred by God the Father to Jesus and through him to Christians.35 That there is no stigma to be attached to land or lordship is anticipated by Dame Holy Church when she says that King David, who had lands, dubbed knights in imitation of the archetypal ordering of angels in heaven (1.98–10). The Abraham-passage describes the origins and the proper nature of dominium of lands and goods; however, these incidents and others like them do not address the question whether one can—not may, but can—repudiate dominium of all things. The Franciscans claimed that they could and did; indeed, the commentary on the Franciscan rule written by the Four Masters provided a kind of ur-text on the matter that was repeated in subsequent commentaries: Ad quod videtur dicendum, quod cum sit duplex necessitas paupertatis evangelicae, sicut dicunt sancti, paupertas imperfecta (my emphasis), quae cum paupertate spiritus nihil retinet superfluum temporale, sed solum retinet quod est necessitatis; alia vero est paupertas perfecta (my emphasis), quae cum paupertate spiritus nec superfluum nec necessarium vitae retinet tanquam proprium, sed ex Dei provisione pendet, quae paupertas dicitur mendicitatis. Haec videtur paupertas fratrum minorum, quae hic determinatur . . . Unde etiam additur: Vadant pro elemosina confidenter36 [There are two forms of evangelical poverty: imperfect poverty which, with poverty of spirit, retains no temporal superfluities but only that which is necessary; and perfect poverty which, with poverty of spirit, retains neither superfluities nor the necessities of life as one’s own but depends upon God’s provision. This poverty is called mendicity. This is the poverty of the brothers minor, as a consequence of which they are told to go seek alms with confidence.]

Note the distinction: “imperfect poverty” refers to the repudiation of superfluities for the possession of necessities in common, as monks, secular clerics and the other three mendicant orders do, whereas “perfect

35

Langland makes a similar point in Conscience’s sermon on Jesus as Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest (19: 26–32); the passage contrasts the Jews who became thralls and churls at the Crucifixion with the followers of Jesus who became free men. 36 Expositio quatuor magistrorum super regulam fratrum minorum (1241–1242), ed. P. Livarius Oliger, O.F.M. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950), 157–58.

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poverty” constitutes having no possessions at all.37 “Perfect poverty” is the “poverty of the brothers minor.”38 Langland employs other vocabulary that suggests he promotes the Franciscan understanding of “perfect poverty.” He frequently uses the word “lene” to refer to any act of charity or to the transmission of goods to those poor who are in need—but from whom there is no expectation of restitution.39 Dame Holy Church says of the clergy: For þouȝ ye be trewe of youre tonge and treweliche wynne, And as chaste as a child þat in chirche wepeþ, But yf ye louen leelly and lene þe pouere, [Of ] swich good as god sent . . . you will have no merit in heaven (B.1.179–82).

But the matter is made more crucial in a statement by an unidentified speaker who breaks into the First Inner Dream to say: Whoso loueþ noȝt, leue me, he lyueþ in deeþ deyinge. And þat alle manere men, enemyes and frendes, Loue hir eyþer ooþer, and lene hem as hemselue. (my emphasis) Whoso leneþ noȝt he loueþ noȝt, [lord] woot þe soþe, (my emphasis) [And] comaundeþ ech creature to conformen hym to louye And [souereynly] pouere peple; hir preieres maye vs helpe. [For] oure Ioye and oure [Iuel], Iesu crist of heuene, In a pouere mannes apparaille pursue[þ] vs euere, And lokeþ on vs in hir liknesse and þat wiþ louely chere To knowen vs by oure kynde herte and castynge of oure eiȝen, Wheiþer we loue þe lordes here bifore þe lord of blisse (11: 177–88).

The speaker states the conditions for salvation. First one must love one’s friends and enemies as one loves oneself. But, he adds, another effective means to that goal is to show love to and to “lene” to the poor, because Jesus Christ came in the apparel of poverty and resides

37 It should be noted that “imperfect” does not have a negative sense here. See Bonaventure Apol. paup. 2.14 where he insists that lesser degrees (e.g., marriage) are not imperfect or sinful but merely lesser. 38 The collocation “perfect poverty” is peculiar to the Franciscans and indicates, as the Four Masters say, that the Franciscans are without dominium of anything either individually or in common. See Bonaventure, Apol. paup. 7: 40 and Breviloquium 5: 6–7, and Clopper, “Songes,” 88–93 and 233–38. “Perfect poverty” is not to be confused with “poverty of perfection,” a condition of the clerical life no matter whether secular or religious. 39 Similar statements are made by Piers, with regard to the “nedy and þe naked” (B.6:15–18); Wit (B.9:202–04); and Dame Study (B.10:202–04).

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in those who are poor now. Jesus knows the intention in each man’s heart and judges according to whether a person looks to the poor or to lords rather than to the “lord of blisse.” The casting of the eyes reveals the true intent of a person’s “kynde herte.” It is not immediately clear what Langland means by the word “lene” since the term is equivocal: it may mean either “lend” or “give,” the latter of which itself is equivocal. “Lenen,” to lend or to give use of something to someone means that the lender retains dominium and may resume it. “Lene” is a deliberate choice. Langland could have made his meaning clearer by using the word “give,” which has a stronger sense of alienation of something. But he did not. Langland uses the word “give” fairly consistently in recounting actions similar to those defined by Conscience when he makes the distinction between the two kinds of Mede. At the end of Mede’s response to Conscience, the king says that “Mede is worþi . . . þe maistrie to haue,” Conscience repudiates his assertion: Ther are two manere of Medes, my lord, [bi] youre leue. That oon god of his grace [gyueþ] in his blisse To [hem] þat [werchen wel] while þei ben here. ..................................................... (But) Ther is [a] Mede mesurelees þat maistres desireþ; To mayntene mysdoers Mede þei take (and shall pay bitterly for it.) .............................. That laborers and lowe [lewede] folk taken of hire maistres It is no manere Mede but a mesurable hire. In marchaundise is no Mede, I may it wel auowe; It is a permutacion apertly, a penyworþ for anoþer (B.3:231–58).

The distinction that Conscience makes is that, as opposed to bribery, there is legitimate payment for services or goods. The last section of the quote succinctly states Langland’s view of the worldly economy: in the world there is to be an equivalency (“mesurable hire”) between the value of labor or goods and that immediate payment is to be made for them.40 In the middle section “maistres” is used in a pejorative sense to

40 Langland makes another distinction that parallels in some respects Conscience’s assertion. Piers says that the Lord is the “presteste paiere þat pouere men knoweþ” because He pays at the end of each day (B.5:551–52). C.3:299–308 explains the significance of the time of payment: those who are paid pre manibus (beforehand) are “Harlotes and horres,” the rich, etc., whereas laborers who work for good men are paid

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refer to those who protect “mysdoers.” This transaction is “mesurelees” because more has been paid for something than its value or because the payment is illicit. Positive uses of “lene” recall this strict worldly economy except in cases in which payment is a spiritual good freely given or is the instrument by which one may hope to attain salvation. Some examples of the positive uses of “lene” are those that involve God giving something to men and women for their use (the necessities of life [B.14.39]) or to aid them in achieving some good (B.9.108) or reminders that things are only lent to man by God (B.10.63). There is a frequent admonition that persons must “lene” to those in need (B.1.181). Langland uses the alliterative pair “lene” and “loue” to express the idea that the two must be linked if they are going to be effective as one means of restitution of those things which one has acquired (B.7.77). One without the other is null. When Langland uses “lene” in the context of aiding those in need, he means “lend” rather than “give outright.” This act of lending does not confer dominium on the recipient, nor in this case does the lender have any expectation that the thing will be returned because the material good will be consumed to satisfy necessity. The positive senses of “gyue” include gifts that are material such as goods given to lords and the rich so that they can fulfill their functions (B.5.293); or spiritual such as the power for clergy to give absolution for sincere confession (B.12:111); or God’s gift of a soul (B.9:47) and mental faculties such as “wit” and “reson,” which are potential instruments to guide people to salvation (B.12:272); or the occupations men use, which are the Gifts of the Holy Spirit (B.19:225–57) or, most important, the grace of God (B.9:48). Grace is a gift; it is neither earned nor lent. Langland’s negative uses of “give” invariably refer to illicit transactions: inappropriate alienations of property, bribes, gifts of money for something such as absolution or the saying of a mass. These gifts are made with the expectation that some other (“mesurelees”) thing will be given in return as opposed to restoring the thing or its equivalent. In all these instances the giver transfers dominium to a recipient, but the gift disrupts the worldly and celestial economies because it cannot

once the labor is finished—because “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (=“mercede”; Luke 10:7). “Mercede” comes from the Apostolic counsels that Christ gave when he sent his followers out into the world (vs. 3–9).

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or will not be restored. The narrator says that Liar “[gaf ] pardoun” for money (B.2.225); and Fauel (=Deceit) tells Guile to “gyu[e] gold al aboute,” but especially to Notaries, to which the Dreamer adds that when the “gold was ygyue,” thanks were made to Fals and Fauel “for hire faire ȝiftes” (2.144–50). When Mede is brought to court, she immediately “gaf . . . /Coupes of clene gold and coppes of siluer” to her clerical supporters (B.3:21–22). Later Clergy says one should not “ȝyue lond” (alienate it) to “Religiouse þat han no rouþe þouȝ it reyne on hir Auters” (10:317–18). The Dreamer says that at the Millenium friars will give copes to Antichrist (B.20:58). Since Langland’s use of “give” is so clearly separated into the positive gifts of God and the Holy Spirit and the just works of men as opposed to those illicit transactions in which one person gives something in expectation of receiving some other thing, I think we may say that when Langland uses the word “lene” with regard to charitable acts in general and to specific instances of aiding the legitimate poor, he implies that “lene” means “lend”—without any expectation that the thing lent will be returned in any material form.41 Under ordinary circumstances one may give something by transferring dominium or by retaining dominium and giving another use. In any event someone has to have dominium or someone must act as pledge for those things lent. Someone who acts as pledge in a legal sense secures an unpaid debt; he must make good that which is owed should the person whom he represents cannot or will not make restitution. In Middle English one word commonly used for this function is “borwe” (“pledge” or “surety”; MED, sb.1–2). Someone stands “borwe” for another person’s debts or actions. In Langland’s poem Christ or God stands “borwe” or “borgh” for the poor who cannot make restitution.42 In the following passage Langland plays on the fact that “borwe” can mean “borwe” (a pledge) as well as “borrow” (taking a loan). The statement comes from a lengthy discussion of begging and poverty in the pardon scene:

41 I should make clear that not all usages of “lene” in themselves are positive; there are some passages in which the verb is used, but it is quite clear that the transaction is illicit (for example, B.5:241, 244, 247, 250; 10:43; and 13:388). 42 Christ stands “borwe” for or pays for those who cannot make restitution (B.11:192– 96). C.12:107 is a variant of the B-reading. Conscience says he will stand “borwe” for the friars’ necessities as long as they follow their rule (B.20:248–50). B.15:312 says that friars’ alms are borrowed. They have no dominium attached to them.

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lawrence m. clopper And he þat biddeþ borweþ and bryngeþ hymself in dette. For beggeres borwen euermo and hir borgh is god almyȝty ......... Forþi biddeþ noȝt, ye beggeres, but if ye haue nede (7.81–84).

The lender who retains dominium of a thing does not incur debt in the transaction because dominium is indifferent; that is, it is neither good nor bad in itself but only in its use. Indeed, the lender who “leneþ” things to the poor who are in need makes restitution for his own debt or at least part of it (B.11:195–96; 14:145–54; 14:295–96). And God stands as assurer (“borwe”) for the poor who cannot make restitution but, as Samaritan-Charity adds, for whom “sorwe is satisfaccion for [swich] þat may noȝt paie” (B.17:320). I think we can see here Langland’s response to the issue of consumables. He asserts the Franciscan position on two grounds: that Christ stands “borwe” for the poor and that God out of his grace made necessities—food, drink, clothing and shelter—common to all. This gift falls under divine or natural, not positive or man-made law, or as Langland phrases it, the gifts are made according to the “lawe of kynde” (B.6:221, 20:18). Therefore, the legitimate poor have no dominium either personally or in common of those necessities they receive no matter how they receive them. This is the Franciscan position as phrased in the commentary of the Four Masters: perfect, as opposed to imperfect poverty is to have no dominium of material goods either personally or in common.

PART THREE

FRANCISCAN CRITICS AND CRITICS OF THE FRANCISCANS

WILLIAM OF ST. AMOUR’S DE PERICULIS NOVISSIMORUM TEMPORUM: A FALSE START TO MEDIEVAL ANTIFRATERNALISM?* G. Geltner

In the gallery of medieval antifraternal authors, no figure features more prominently than that of William of St. Amour, the “Hammer of the Friars.”1 Master of theology at Paris in the 1250s, at the height of the mendicants’ so-called golden age, William led an audacious assault on the friars which would resonate down the centuries, despite the utter failure of his own campaign. Indeed, it is probably as a literary fountainhead rather than an able ecclesiologist that William earned his fame.2 It is in this sense that the relations between his magnum opus, De periculis novissimorum temporum (On the Dangers of the Last Times, written in 1256), and his putative followers require fuller elucidation. For the appropriation of Williamine arguments and topoi was in no way as straightforward as is often thought. It was John Fleming who pioneered this observation in his 1966 article, “The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale.”3 And although scholars continue to debate the nature of medieval antifraternalism (as this very volume demonstrates; see especially the contributions by Lawrence Clopper and Penn Szittya), it has become increasingly difficult to draw a straight line between the acidic polemics of the mid-thirteenth century and later confrontations, whether literary, doctrinal, or physical, between mendicants and their various antagonists.

* This essay develops several observations made in my broader study, William of Saint Amour’s De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Introduction, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations 8 (Louvain: Peeters, 2008) [henceforth DP], which is the source of all quotations from the treatise. 1 C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 234; Gérard Sivery, Saint Louis et son siècle (Paris: Tallendier, 1983), 487–91. 2 John V. Fleming, “The Friars and Medieval English Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 354. 3 Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 688–700.

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The present essay contributes to this debate by arguing that what sets William apart from the vast majority of the friars’ pre-Reformation critics, including the most avid among them, are the objectives of his disparagement rather than his rhetoric. For William denied the orthodoxy of religious mendicancy tout court4—a position that was rare prior to the religious revolutions of the early sixteenth century. By contrast, most contemporary and later critics, whether professional theologians, satirists, or less learned members of medieval society, sought to curb or simply protest the friars’ access to worldly power and privileges, not abolish the orders themselves. These fundamentally different attitudes, however, are often ignored or undeservedly ironed out in modern discussions of medieval antifraternalism.5 Thus, examining the relations between William’s ecclesiology and the positions advanced by later critics affords a more nuanced understanding of prevailing attitudes toward medieval friars.

1. De periculis novissimorum temporum: Religious Mendicancy Delegitimized The immediate context for the publication of De periculis is easily traced to the heated debates between mendicant theologians and their allies, on one hand, and the Parisian secular masters and their supporters, on the other, in the mid-thirteenth century. The events, generally known as the University Quarrels, were sparked by the second cessation of teaching at the university in 1253, following the brutalization of several students by the local night watch. The university suspended its activities to protest what it claimed was gratuitous violence. Yet the measure failed to win the immediate cooperation of the popular mendicant studia. The friars’ cool response was construed by some secular masters as a repeated display of their lack of collegiality in the aftermath of the university’s Great Dispersion in 1229, during which the friars gained a lucrative chair in theology. And the sentiment was only exacerbated

4 William never criticized Franciscan life per se, nor did he distinguish among the mendicant orders, despite their different comportments in the context of the University Quarrels. 5 Notably, Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. ch. 2; and Michael Robson, The Franciscans in the Middle Ages (London: The Boydell Press, 2007), 4 and ch. 13.

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by the Dominicans’ demand to secure their now threatened possession of a second theology chair if they were to participate in the strike. In the ensuing conflagration the secular masters, headed by William of St. Amour, appealed to the papal curia and its delegates to eject the mendicant masters from the corporate university body. The antimendicant party was quick to point out that the friars had no place at the university to begin with. This was a particularly delicate point in the case of the Franciscans, whose founder, a self-professed simplex et idiota, strongly opposed the Minorites’ pursuit of formal learning. Even the Dominican Order, which was ideologically committed to the study of theology and canon law, conceived of advanced studies merely as an act of “bending a bow,” a preparatory stage to their preaching missions.6 Yet by the middle of the thirteenth century, mendicant masters and students were playing an ever-greater role in urban higher education, including the occupation of chairs at the faculty of theology, the crown jewel of the University of Paris. The apparent discrepancy between the friars’ theory and practice in the realm of letters, as well as the contrast between their professed humility and opportunism in the context of the strike, marked them in their opponents’ eyes as hypocrites. The accusation was strong enough, yet William personally did not stop there. As the parties continued to litigate in various venues, he took to the pulpit and the quill, claiming that the friars were false Apostles who abused their confessing privileges, and then moved to brand all religious mendicants as nothing less than heretical harbingers of the Antichrist: Thus it appears from the above who are penetrators of homes and who are the false; it even appears that through such men the dangers of the last times will threaten or already are threatening the entire church.7

The apparently outrageous allegations, however, were linked in a curious way to a recent scandal in the Franciscan Order. Among the “incriminating” evidence at William’s disposal was a compilation known as the Introductorius in evangelium eternum (Introduction to the Eternal Gospel ). The work, published in 1254 by the Franciscan Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, then residing in Paris, intended to advance one side in an internal debate regarding the correct 6 M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study . . .”: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998). 7 DP, 59.

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way of interpreting the Minorites’ Rule. Although the Introductorius was factional, unauthorized, and generally tangential to the tensions between secular and mendicant professors, it contained several inflammatory observations, which William readily exploited. As its title suggests, the treatise drew on the writings of Abbot Joachim of Fiore, a venerated exegete, visionary, and monastic reformer who died in 1202, that is, before the foundation of any mendicant order. Joachim propounded a revolutionary theology of history in which three ages unfold: that of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this scheme, the latter age, or status, would be the culmination of the Godhead’s work on earth, ushering in a new and complete “spiritual” understanding of divine truth: an eternal gospel. Importantly, he also claimed that this approaching era would be exemplified by the lives of “new men” (novi viri). Despite Joachim’s own elusiveness and ambiguity, his Franciscan followers in particular insisted on a literal interpretation of the terms “eternal gospel” and “new men,” identifying the abbot’s works as the former and their own order as the latter. The Franciscan compilers of the Introductorius also established 1260 as the year in which the new age would commence, that is, six years thence. The publication of the Introductorius could not have come at a worse time for the Parisian mendicants. And although the work was condemned, ordered to be burned, and its authors severely punished, the antimendicant party employed it to demonstrate that all friars were apocalyptic forerunners of the Antichrist. As William put it in the eighth chapter of De periculis, which enumerates several signs of the Antichrist’s approach, The second sign is that, already in the year of the Lord twelve hundred and fifty-four, that teaching which will be preached in the time of the Antichrist, namely, the aforesaid Eternal Gospel, was publicly submitted for examination in Paris. . . . Whence it is certain that it would already be preached unless something prevented it. . . . The seventh sign is that, with the approaching consummation of the era, certain men, who in the church seem most zealous for the faith and appear to love Christ greatly, will cast off the gospel of Christ and adhere to the Eternal Gospel, which entirely overwhelms Christ’s faith. Whence the love of many, by which the Word of God is guarded, will entirely abate.8

8

DP, 77–79 and 83.

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The special eschatological role allocated to the friars by the Introductorius, as well as what could be construed as a gross devaluation of the Bible, played into the antimendicant party’s hands. In a sense, De periculis is a complete reversal of (and some would say a parody on) the arguments advanced by the Introductorius. How, William would repeatedly ask, could such hypocrites blatantly subvert the order of the church and not be recognized as false apostles and the harbingers of the Antichrist? He who cannot see that these signs are already present in the church is evidently asleep. Whence let him follow the Apostle’s counsel, I Thes 5[:6], let us not sleep, but be vigilant. Be vigilant, therefore, just men, I Cor 15[:34], and through the aforesaid signs, which already appear, you will see that the end of the era is near, and that the sorrow, which will come to pass in the time of the Antichrist, already begins.9

That the friars were degenerate, however, was merely symptomatic. To William’s mind, the orders’ very existence posed the more serious threat to the ordained hierarchy of the church, not due to their comportment, but because they occupied a place outside the two, divinely ordained components of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, namely the clergy (prefigured by the apostolic community) and monks (prefigured by the early disciples). The influential scheme was originally developed by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and Celestial Hierarchy (early sixth century), and constituted formal doctrine by the twelfth century. In the words of Gratian, cited in De periculis: For, since we recognized that there are no more than two orders among the disciples, that is, twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples, whence this third order emerged we do not know. And what lacks a reason must be extirpated.10

There is little doubt that the new mendicant orders fit awkwardly into this scheme. Yet their success and popularity undermined the importance of the accepted division of labor in the church. It was this threat to the roles of the secular clergy and the institution of monasticism that William found particularly disturbing. In this sense, weaving the friars’ advent and modus operandi into an apocalyptic narrative was

9

DP, 83. DP, 53; citing Gratian, Concordia discordantium canonum, pt. I, dist. 68, c. v §1, in Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols., ed. Emil Friedberg (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879–1881), 1: 255. 10

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merely an effective rhetorical tool, a means to an end. Theoretically, it would have mattered little if the friars amended their ways; it was their unjustified existence that threatened the ordained church hierarchy, however anachronistically it was construed by William. Ironically, by appropriating a binary apocalyptic narrative, which distinguished neatly between the sons of light and darkness (as did the Introductorius), William precipitated his own downfall. The friars’ many powerful allies, including Pope Alexander IV (a former Cardinal Protector of the Franciscan Order) and King Louis IX of France (St. Louis), found their own association with the Antichrist too outlandish to bear. Soon after the publication of De periculis in March or April of 1256, and following a series of public sermons to the same effect, the Capetian ruler identified William as an obstacle to reconciliation between the disputing parties and dispatched the treatise to be examined at the papal court. Six months later the work was condemned by a designated commission, which ordered—but never thoroughly implemented—the destruction of all its copies. William was exiled to his native St. Amour in Burgundy, technically outside Capetian jurisdiction, and his collaborators were forced to recant or resign. These actions effectively dissolved the antimendicant party and concluded the first—and, in a sense, only—chapter in the history of medieval antifraternalism.

2. Critiques of Friars after William of St. Amour William found no legitimate place for the new mendicant orders in the hierarchy of the church. His ecclesiology, as developed in De periculis and elsewhere, aimed at the orders’ abolition, not rehabilitation. Thus, exposing the friars’ hypocrisy and moral laxity was a means to a radically different end than reform. But did William’s nominal followers throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries share the same perspective? The remainder of this essay is an examination of three forms of criticisms of medieval friars, as expressed in contemporary belles-lettres, theology, and more palpable social actions.

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Literary Critiques

De periculis may have been William’s swan song, but it had an enthusiastic following. The treatise repeatedly echoes in thirteenth-century and later literature, from the poetry of Rutebeuf and Jean de Meun, to the tales of Boccaccio and Franco Sachetti, to the writings of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and others.11 Williamine topoi circulated in Europe throughout the Renaissance, for instance, with Rabelais and in Machiavelli’s Clizia, and well into the early modern period, from Thomassin, Bossuet, and Olier, to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. And more or less informed allegations of the friars’ corruption and worldliness continue to flourish in our times, from Blackadder’s Friar Bellows to the “roasting” of prominent comedians at the New York Friars Club. The frequent recourse to William’s works by authors who openly criticized the mendicant orders accounts for his reputation as the wellspring of antifraternal literature. Yet there appears to be a wide range of approaches to his legacy. To take one famous example, the Parisian poet Rutebeuf, William’s contemporary and partisan, was originally an avid supporter of mendicant religiosity.12 Later, however, he strove to defend his exiled friend and the secular masters’ cause by inveighing against what he believed was a corrupted movement. But Rutebeuf scarcely maintained William’s categorical objection to organized mendicancy, for his tirades focused on the secular masters’ enemies rather than on the friars generally.13 Other writers developed several of William’s themes in ways that abandoned the original context of De periculis as well as its main thrust. Notable among these are Jean de Meun, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The friar-characters featuring in the Roman de la Rose (Faus Semblant), the Decameron (Fra Cipolla and “Fra” Tedaldo), and the Summoner’s Tale (Friar John) are engaged in a much broader social critique than that present in William’s works. They are, moreover, experiments in the fabrication of Cretan-liar characters, which their 11 For a full bibliography see DP, 32–33; and Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta, Anticlerical Satire in Medieval Portuguese Literature (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 12 Rutebeuf, “Le dit des Cordeliers,” in Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, 2 vols., ed. E. Faral and J. Bastin (Paris: Picard, 1959–60), 1: 231–37. 13 See Edward Billings Ham, Rutebeuf and Louis IX, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 42 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962).

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authors employed to comment, among other themes, on the meaning of art and poetry and their complex relation to reality.14 In any case, scholars have long abandoned the quest for the “real” men behind these characters. Indeed, Jean Batany and Jill Mann underscored the enormous debt of antifraternal literature to the long-standing conventions of estate satire—the former arguing that friars are often indistinguishable from monks or clergymen in generic protests against corruption;15 the latter asserting that “[f ]ar from drawing new inspiration from real life, Chaucer seems to have been most stimulated by the possibility of exploiting a rich literary tradition” in his treatment of monks and friars.16 More recently, Lawrence Clopper turned a dominant interpretation of Piers Plowman virtually on its head by demonstrating that Langland’s sincere concerns about religious mendicancy, especially regarding the Franciscan Order, reflect the friars’ departure from their founder’s ideals rather than a wish to see them eradicated.17 If so, what Penn Szittya and others have dubbed “the medieval antifraternal tradition” shares much common ground with numerous homegrown critics, from Joachimite Franciscans and their Spiritual successors, to undisputedly orthodox disciplinarians such as Bonaventure and Humbert of Romans—all of whom decried the friars’ fallenness in unambiguous terms and for the stated purpose of their improvement, not elimination. The idealist-reformist approach to religious mendicancy evident in some medieval satire discloses the real chasm between William of St. 14 See G. Geltner, “Faux Semblants. Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 357–80; Nicholas Havely, “Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Friars,” in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. P. Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 249–68. 15 “L’image des franciscains dans les ‘Revues d’États’ du XIIIe au XVIe siècle,” in Mouvements franciscains et société française XII e–X e siècles, ed. A. Vauchez (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 61–74. 16 Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 17; adding (39), “As with the Monk, Chaucer seems to have more ends in view than moral criticism of the character he is describing.” The view is corroborated by Odber de Baubeta, Anticlerical Satire, esp. 1–58. And see Arnold Williams, “Chaucer and the Friars,” Speculum 28 (1953): 499–513; Fleming, “The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale”; Havely, “Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Friars”; idem, “Chaucer’s Friar and Merchant,” Chaucer Review 13 (1978–89): 337–45. 17 Lawrence M. Clopper, “Songes of Rechelesnesse”: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Clopper summarizes his main argument in “Langland’s Persona: An Anatomy of the Mendicant Orders,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. S. Justice and K. Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 144–84.

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Amour and many of his literary successors: given William’s absolute denial of the mendicants’ orthodoxy, including what must have been a jarring dismissal of St. Francis’s and St. Dominic’s lives as exemplary, it is clear that he made no distinction between mendicants and mendicancy. Accordingly, he never envisaged the history of the mendicant orders as one of continuous decline from an original golden age, as did later critics, including many members of the orders themselves. 2.2

Theological Critiques

While writers of fiction employed friar-characters in the service of moral satire, theologians tended to engage more discrete doctrinal issues.18 Major scholastic thinkers, from Gerard of Abbeville and Nicolas of Lisieux, William’s partisans at Paris, to Henry of Ghent, John of Pouilly, and Jean d’Anneux, to Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, underscored the friars’ fallen state, challenged mendicant privileges, and called for the orders’ reform—sometimes by frequent and explicit reference to William’s works. But to what extent was such recourse either uniform or in keeping with William’s own reactionary ecclesiology? For the first few decades following William’s banishment, his original collaborators avoided using arguments that challenged the legitimacy of organized religious mendicancy. Instead, they chose to focus their energies on defining evangelical perfection and on limiting or eliminating individual privileges given to the mendicants, such as confession, preaching, and burial rights.19 Decades later, even a staunch supporter of John XXII such as Jean d’Anneux, in his Filios enutrivi (1328), aimed at curbing the Franciscans’ privileges, not abolishing the order,

18 Beyond the bibliography in DP, 33–34, see Andrea Tabarroni, Paupertas Christi et apostolorum: l’ideale francescano in discussione (1322–1324) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1990). The textual point of departure for most pro-mendicant writers after Bonaventure and Aquinas was Manus que contra Omnipotentem tenditur, probably written by the Franciscan Thomas of York. See Max Bierbaum, Bettelorden und Weltgeistlichkeit an der Universität Paris. Texte und Untersuchungen zum literarischen Armuts- und Exemtionsstreit des 13. Jahrhunderts (1255–1272), Franziskanische Studien 2. Beiheft (Münster: Aschendorff, 1920), 36–168; and Franz Pelster, “Der Traktat ‘Manus que contra Omnipotentem tenditur’ und sein Verfasser,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 15 (1923): 3–22. 19 See Sophronius Clasen, Der hl. Bonaventura und das Mendikantentum. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte des Pariser Mendikantenstreites (1252–1272), Franziskanische Forschungen 7 (Werl/Westfalen: Verlag Franziskus-Druckerei, 1940), 1–12.

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however much it was founded on certain errors.20 On the other hand, English critics such as FitzRalph and Wyclif (despite the latter’s initial sympathy) had no qualms about reviving William’s radical ecclesiology, the former underscoring the incongruence of mendicant orders with church hierarchy, the latter denying the very legitimacy of such a hierarchy in the first place. Both demanded the orders’ abolition, be it de facto or de jure—FitzRalph through calling for their total submission to the ordained ecclesiastical hierarchy, Wyclif by demanding their eradication along with the visible church. Thus it seems that, from a century’s distance and in different circumstances, William’s English followers in particular perpetuated anew his fundamental doctrines, a tendency also evident in James le Palmer’s Omne bonum, a late fourteenth-century compilation replete with antifraternal lore.21 Nonetheless, these examples appear from a broader perspective to be important but extreme responses. And what accounts for their centrality in the modern study of the phenomenon has more to do with later developments, not prevalent medieval attitudes. The antifraternal polemics of FitzRalph, Wyclif, and the latter’s followers were often inscribed into a teleological narrative of English anticlericalism that prepared the way for the English Reformation.22 A comparable search for origins in pre-Hussite central Europe and among pre-Lutheran German theologians led early Protestant scholars to tie Williamine antipapal and antifraternal arguments with the religious revolutions of the early sixteenth century. In fact, we owe the first printed edition of two of William’s sermons (1555) and the publication of his collected works (1632) to just such efforts.23 On the other hand,

20 The treatise is edited in Susanne Starcke-Neumann, Johannes von Anneux. Ein Fürstenmahner und Mendikantengegner in der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Mammendorf: Septem Artes, 1996), 213–53. 21 Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1996), 1: 46–47; Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 67–81 and Appendices A and B. Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), lays a particular emphasis on contextual discontinuities between the antifraternal literatures of the thirteenth and late-fourteenth centuries. 22 See Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 349–451. 23 Antilogia papae, hoc est, De corrupto ecclesiae statu & totius cleri papistici peruersitate . . . (Basel: I. Oporini, 1555), 5–137; Guillielmi de S. Amore Opera omnia quae reperiri potuerunt . . . (Coûtances: Alitophilos, 1632; reprinted Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms, 1997).

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more rigorous approaches to the regional dissemination of William’s works (and those of his late-medieval followers) remain a desideratum. With the exception of Vlastimil Kybal’s work on Matthew of Janov and Geoffrey Dipple’s study of Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, and despite the abundance of manuscript evidence, there exists no full study of the transmission of William’s works across central Europe.24 There is likewise no examination of the extent to which William may have influenced “proto-reformers” such as Konrad of Megenberg, Konrad of Waldhäusen, and Jan Milíč of Kromĕříž.25 And a similar lacuna (perhaps reflecting the subject’s irrelevance) exists concerning the Near East and Scandinavia. In any case, there is little evidence for a continuous tradition linking William of St. Amour’s reactionary ecclesiology to the prominent role supposedly played by antifraternalism and anticlericalism in the making of the Protestant Reformation. In the final account, the extent to which William of St. Amour inspired medieval antifraternal belletristics and theology fundamentally depends on how strictly we define this literature in keeping with William’s own ideas about the pursuit of religious mendicancy. Such an evaluation, in turn, is contingent upon a better understanding of William’s professed or alleged followers, whether poets, storytellers, polemicists, or professional theologians. On a wider scale still, particular works of medieval fiction that are generally reputed as antifraternal deserve more detailed studies that may increase our understanding of their broader cultural reception.26 While most of this research is still to be done, there is little evidence of a body of antifraternal literature committed to the stated ecclesiological goals of De periculis, namely abolishing the mendicant orders.

24 See Matthiae de Janov Regulae Veteris et Novi Testamenti, ed. Vlastimil Kybal, 6 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagner University, 1908–11), 3: 252–314; Geoffrey L. Dipple, Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996). 25 See Christopher Ocker, “Contempt for Friars and Contempt for Jews in LateMedieval Germany,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. S.J. McMichael and S.E. Myers (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 145–46. 26 As has been done, for instance, by Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism; Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Geltner, “Faux Semblants,” 365–69, 377–78.

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There is yet another, little-studied aspect of medieval attitudes toward mendicants, namely instances of physical aggression against them. Although there is no shortage of documented assaults on friars by Catholics (as distinguished from heretics, Muslims, and Jews), there has been no attempt to treat such events systematically. The final section fills no such lacuna, but rather offers a cursory view of such phenomena, and then proceeds to examine whether they share any common ground, and to what extent they exemplify or stem from Williamine ecclesiology. Violence against friars can be interpreted as a palpable expression of popular or individual resentment of the brethren’s activities or general standing. Yet the extant records rarely clarify the express goals and backgrounds of such attacks. One available point of departure is the friars’ involvement in persecuting heretics in regions such as Lombardy and Languedoc. It comes as little surprise that the activities of friars as inquisitors engendered substantial antagonism among heterodox Christians.27 But violence occasionally erupted even when local communities were generally in favor of the inquisitors’ presence, as attested by two distinct but interrelated cases in late-thirteenth-century Italy. In 1279, Parmese citizens responded to the burning of the maid of a convicted heretic by storming the local Dominican convent and killing one of the friars.28 What these men were disputing, apparently, was not the Inquisition’s presence, but the verdict of guilt by association which befell the maid. The friars in this case were collectively punished for the abuses of a few, and when they left the city in protest many citizens were clearly satisfied. Indeed, the Parmese were willing to bear an interdict for nearly eight years before asking the friars to return. A decade later, a crowd gathered at Bologna to witness the burning of Giuliano and Bompietro, two convicted heretics, became outraged at the Dominican inquisitors’ refusal to allow one of the condemned men

27 Carol Lansing, Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 28 Salimbene de Adam, Cronaca, ed. Giuseppe Scalia, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CXXV–CXXV A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998–1999), 733–37; Anonymous, Chronicon parmese ab anno mxxxvii usque ad annum mcccxxxviii, ed. Giuliano Bonazzi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores IX pt. ix (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1902), 35–36.

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to confess his sins and die a reconciled Christian. The uproar nearly turned into a mob-assault on the friars, but was eventually quelled. According to testimonies gathered in the immediate aftermath of the incident, members of the crowd openly expressed their desire to expel the Dominicans, “as was done in Parma.”29 The same confessions disclose that the Bolognese had by then harbored many grudges against the local inquisitors, but it was only in denying a convicted heretic his last chance to return into the fold of orthodoxy that the friars sparked a dangerous insurrection. Expelling friars from cities (or leaving them little choice but to depart) is attested elsewhere even outside the context of inquisitorial activities. One famous example comes from Strasbourg, and dates to the 1280s. There, the tensions revolved around the friars’ access to urban property, rates of taxation, and methods of recruiting new members. The Franciscan convent eventually obeyed the commune’s legislation on the matter, but the local Dominicans refused to cooperate. Soon the legal confrontation turned into a physical one, as some citizens blockaded the male convent, leaving the brothers with the choice of expulsion or starvation. Several ecclesiastical dignitaries, including the papal legate to the region, were understandably outraged, and an interdict closely followed. But many residents came to see the legate’s response as an infringement of urban liberties by the church. Friars were soon targeted throughout the region, and years of diplomacy would pass before the interdict was lifted and the friars could return to occupy their convent.30 Other instances disclose the occasionally prosaic nature of aggression aimed at friars. In 1362, fra Tommaso Aiutamichristo of Pisa, a Dominican subprior, precipitated a little stampede through the local convent after admitting a relative of his into the convent late at night for medical treatment. Tommaso was apparently misled. Upon opening the gate, a group of men, including the relative and another injured person, rushed into the compound seeking shelter from an angry mob.

29 Bologna, Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, Ms. B. 1856 (antica 16*-gg-1–l), fol. 42v. And see Eugenio Dupré-Theseider, “L’eresia a Bologna nei tempi di Dante,” in Mondo cittadino e movimenti ereticali nel Medio Evo (saggi) (Bologna: Pàtron, 1978), 261–315, esp. 287–96; Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 433–56. 30 Sandrine Turck, Les dominicains à Strasbourg entre prêche, prière et mendicité 1224–1420 (Strasbourg: Société Savante d’Alsace, 2002), 39–45.

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The latter soon appeared, broke into the convent, and conducted a violent search for the hiding group.31 In 1398, Ludovico Cittadini of San Miniato, then residing in Lucca, argued with fra Benedetto of Castro Fiorentino, an Augustinian Hermit, and then seized and beat him with a stone for an unmentioned reason.32 Other friars were victimized by robbers, both in and out of mendicant convents.33 In sum, friars were no strangers to violent hostility.34 Yet it is doubtful whether such cases merit being dubbed antifraternalism. Indeed, it is difficult to tie violent assaults against friars to attitudes that would remain faithful to the ecclesiology of William of St. Amour. This is not to deny that some members of late-medieval society sought the orders’ abolition, even if not on ecclesiological grounds. However, the available documentation suggests that the goals and motivations in these and other instances departed from William of St. Amour’s ecclesiology. This, in turn, raises the question of whether such a literal definition of antifraternalism (or indeed the term itself ) is useful for studying the range of negative attitudes toward religious mendicancy in the late Middle Ages. Sharp rhetoric and sharp blows may certainly attest contemporary dissatisfaction with the mendicants’ discipline (or lack thereof ), or bear witness to contemporary society’s intolerance in general, but they provide little evidence of a common desire to see the friars eradicated. The radical quest for the friars’ abolition, at least by a fervent few, would recommence in the early sixteenth century, nearly three-hundred years after the singular campaign led by William of St. Amour.

31 Archivio Arcivescovile di Pisa, Atti Straordinari 8, fol. 80r–v (14 February 1362). Parallel cases are noted by Jens Röhrkasten, The Mendicant Houses of Medieval London, 1221–1539 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 190–92. 32 Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Sentenze e Bandi 94, fol. 15v (5 May 1398). For earlier cases see Archivio Diocesano di Lucca, Processi Criminali 17, fols. 102r–103v (11 August–8 November 1361); 41, fol. 55r (29 May 1391). 33 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitano del Popolo 1002 bis, fol. 50r (31 January 1377); Jens Röhrkasten, Die englischen Kronzeugen, 1130–1330 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990), 348–49. 34 Dupré-Thesieder, “L’eresia a Bologna nei tempi di Dante,” 261–315; and see my forthcoming Blotting the Elect: A Social History of Antifraternalism.

HISTORY AS PROPHECY: ANGELO CLARENO’S CHRONICLE AS A SPIRITUAL FRANCISCAN APOCALYPSE David Burr

Angelo Clareno’s Chronicle of the Seven Tribulations of the Franciscan Order is undoubtedly the most famous of his works. It is widely used by historians and has been edited six times in the modern period, although it has been available in English translation only since 2005.1 One should hardly be surprised that historians like it. Angelo describes himself as narrating “the past tribulations in the order.”2 Thus, he apparently thinks he is writing a historical narrative, and a very dramatic one at that: a chronicle of the continuous battle between a small group of friars who remained faithful to Francis’s original ideal and the majority of brothers (including most of the leaders) who betrayed that ideal in an effort to make the order a success by worldly standards. Angelo portrays this battle as beginning in Francis’s own time and continuing through the 1320s, when he is writing. The controversy, as Angelo describes it, provides a unifying theme and a narrative framework for his description of Franciscan history to his own time; and modern historians, while recognizing that Angelo cannot be accepted at face value, have found him very difficult to resist. Should they try harder, though? How far can we really trust Angelo?

1 The most recent and best editions are Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. G. Boccali (Assisi: Porziuncula, 1999); and Historia septem tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. O. Rossini (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1999). The English translation is A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, ed. and trans. D. Burr and E.R. Daniel (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005). This article will cite the Boccali edition and the English translation. Citations for the Boccali edition are to the verses not pages; citations for the English translation refer to pages. 2 Lib. chron., 6:158–61; Chronicle, 190–91.

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Certainly Angelo’s treatment of Francis is heavily influenced by what he takes from the so-called “Leo sources.”3 They provide him with what he sees as the major theme in Franciscan history from Francis’s time to his own, the conflict between those few brothers who attempt to follow Francis’s rule and the mass of so-called Franciscans who wear the prescribed clothing and live in houses designated as Franciscan, yet have forsaken Francis to seek success by worldly standards. Measuring the order by those standards involves encouraging university education, involvement in parish ministry, acceptance of prestigious ecclesiastical positions, and the like. In the process, friars compromise the poverty and humility prescribed by the rule. Another element derived from the Leo sources is Angelo’s tendency to see “the ministers” as heavily responsible for this fall from grace. It is they who want to lower the bar and create a bigger, less demanding order. It is they who want to engage in worldly power games and revise the order to fit their ambitions. It is they who seek the pope’s aid in accomplishing these objectives. Thanks to Angelo’s use of the Leo sources, a sense of foreboding haunts his picture of the primitive order. The contest between Francis and the ministers began early, while Francis was in the East, and it continued throughout the period of his formal leadership. He surrendered that leadership because he saw that he had lost influence over the brothers. Even after he resigned, he would have been willing to continue guiding the order if the brothers had wished to accept his direction, but they did not. And, forewarned by Christ, he foresaw that things would get worse, much worse. Even after Angelo proceeds beyond Francis’s death and speaks of what he considers the second tribulation, the basic themes established in the early part continue to shape the narrative. Immediately after Francis, the malfeasance of “the ministers” is incarnated in a single general minister, Elias; and we see, not only a continuing slide into relaxation of the original standards, but also the first serious persecution of those who insist on adhering to those standards. This persecution is aimed

3 For discussion of the Leo sources as well as the role both Angelo and Ubertino da Casale play in consideration of them see especially Edith Pàsztor, “Frate Leone testimone di San Francesco,” Collectanea Franciscana 50 (1980): 35–84.

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primarily at Francis’s original companions, and Elias gains permission to attack them by misleading the pope, a tactic we will see repeated periodically from this point on. This leitmotif—Franciscan leaders lying to popes in order to gain their support against Francis’s truly zealous followers—continues throughout the chronicle and allows Angelo to blame decay on the Franciscan leaders while portraying the popes as, at worst, gullible enablers. When we look at who was being persecuted and why, we learn another valuable lesson about the chronicle: its specifics are often oddly unsupported by what we know from other sources. Elias had enemies and eventually lost to them, leaving those enemies to shape his posthumous reputation. Salimbene and Angelo are witnesses to how negative that reputation became in time; yet when we compare their critiques, we find that they differ in important ways. Both portray a man who lived in a notably un-Franciscan manner, but some of the specifics seem to point in diametrically opposed directions. For example, Salimbene criticizes Elias for admitting too many lay brothers and giving them leadership roles when, in Salimbene’s opinion, authority should be safely in the hands of the educated, priestly faction, although he does cite Elias’s encouragement of education in the order as practically the only good thing about him. Angelo, arguing for continuance of the pattern that obtained in the early order, inevitably becomes a champion of the lay element and continually portrays enthusiasm about university education as a major capitulation to worldly ambitions. His description of Elias’s position on this score (in fact, of Elias’s intentions in general) remains remarkably vague, leaving us with the impression that he knew little about the period. In fact, he is even wrong about where Elias fit within the succession of leaders immediately following Francis.4 Angelo is very specific in describing how Elias persecuted the companions, but not in a way that inspires much confidence. He tells us how Caesar of Speyer was imprisoned and then killed, Anthony of Padua beaten, and Bernard of Quintavalle forced to go into hiding. None of these three stories is mentioned by anyone except Angelo. Where did he get them? What were his sources for this part of the

4 Angelo thinks that when Francis stepped down as leader, Elias was elected minister general. In reality, Elias was Francis’s vicar from 1221–1226, then vicar general from 1226 until 1227, when John Parenti was elected to be the first minister general. Elias was not elected minister general until 1232. Later Angelo further scrambles the order by fitting John Parenti’s generalate in after that of Albert of Pisa (1239–1240).

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chronicle? He tells us more than once that he personally heard the early companions talk about the primitive order. At one point, speaking of the persecution during Elias’s generalate, he says that “those who suffered them, the founder’s companions—Giles, Angelo and others who survived—described these tribulations in my hearing.”5 Far from answering our question, these words simply inspire new ones, since we know that Angelo died in 1337. Francis’s companion Angelo Tancredi is thought to have died in 1258, while his companion Giles of Assisi died in 1262. Moreover, Angelo says he heard several of the companions. Unless Angelo 1) thinks he heard Angelo Tancredi and Giles but really didn’t, or 2) is lying, we must assume that he was born early enough to have been in the order before Angelo, Giles and other companions died; and perhaps also that he was a sufficiently mature brother by ca. 1258 to leave Ancona and go where he would encounter several of them. That would seem to suggest that he could have been in his early 90s when he died, and, more important for our purposes, that he was in his mid-70s when he wrote the chronicle sometime in the 1320s. If he wrote this as an old man remembering conversations he heard close to seventy years earlier, he would have had ample opportunity to bend them into conformity with what Felice Accrocca describes as his “historically reductive vision” of Franciscan history in which “the complexity and multiplicity of factors which influenced its evolution” are ignored and it is reduced to a simple struggle between rigor and laxity.6 Nor do the problems abate as the narrative moves through the decades. The third tribulation, which covers the generalate of Crescentius of Iesi (1244–1247), reinforces our sense that Angelo is imposing a remarkably simplistic pattern on Franciscan history. In fact, almost the same pattern is repeated. The ministers, intent on making the order look like the world in general, seek bigger and better houses, more members, more education, and heavier involvement in the life of the church; while Francis’s companions, now old, protest. And the drama plays out in the same way. The minister general lies to the pope about the disgruntled minority and the pope believes him, allowing the minister general to have his way with them.

5 6

Lib. chron., 2:168. In his introduction to Lib. chron., 42–43.

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Angelo is hardly making all this up. We know Crescentius had trouble with zealots in the province of Ancona. What we do not know is whether it was the sort of trouble Angelo suggests, or whether Angelo is projecting the problems of his own time onto the 1240s. When we arrive at the fourth tribulation, featuring John of Parma, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino and the scandal of the Eternal Gospel, we have a better chance of answering that question because we are able to check much of what Angelo says against other sources, particularly Salimbene, who knew both John and Gerard personally. Here again comparison with Salimbene brings us no closer to trusting Angelo. Salimbene presents John as a good minister general, an ardent reformer admired by the pope, whose tragic flaw consisted of deep affection for Joachite apocalypticism. Once the order was compromised by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino and the scandal of the Eternal Gospel, John had to resign not only because the scandal occurred on his watch but also because he himself remained stubbornly committed to Joachism.7 Angelo, on the other hand, reads John’s generalate in terms of his own sense of “the ministers” as a group constantly seeking to undermine Francis’s intention. He agrees with Salimbene in seeing John as a good example of Franciscan poverty and humility and in recognizing that adherence to Joachim had a role in John’s fall, but he departs from Salimbene in picturing John as opposed by the ministers precisely because he tried to keep the order faithful to Francis’s intention (whereas Salimbene sees no great problem on this score) and in presenting the controversy about Joachim as one over Joachim’s orthodoxy on the trinity rather than over his apocalyptic speculation. The fifth tribulation brings us to Angelo’s early years as a Franciscan, and in describing the controversy in the province of Ancona during that period he is describing his own experiences. One might hope that he can be trusted on this score, but he is still narrating events that took place four or five decades earlier; nor is there any equivalent of Salimbene against whom we can check his story. Certainly here again his story revolves around a simplistic distinction between two conflicting programs for the order that he portrays as remaining more or less

7 See my comments in The Spiritual Franciscans (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 29–32, or Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 14–21, where I observe that Salimbene’s view is supported by other sources. Note that Angelo never actually identifies his Gerard with Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, but that must be the person he has in mind.

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constant throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; and when Angelo turns from Ancona to southern France and Peter John Olivi, who was more or less his contemporary, the problems begin to accumulate rapidly. This section of his chronicle deserves more attention than it has received, but certainly anyone familiar with the substantial documentary evidence concerning Olivi will conclude that much of what Angelo says here is bristling with difficulties. With the fifth tribulation the spotlight again swings back to Angelo and his colleagues, recounting their brief moment of triumph when Celestine V made them a separate order, followed by the dramatic reversal of Celestine’s resignation, Boniface VIII’s persecution of the group, and their flight to Greece. No other source covers these events and thus we can hardly assert that Angelo’s narrative is wrong, although it does seem intentionally evasive at times. The sixth tribulation covers Clement V’s unsuccessful attempt to effect a reconciliation between the two parties in the order, followed by John XXII’s effort to solve it by intervening on the side of the Franciscan leaders. Angelo was in Avignon from 1311 to 1318 and thus in a position to witness these events. He also had access to inside information through his protector, the cardinal Giacomo Colonna. We can also assess his account in the light of the remarkable paper trails these events generated, and nothing found in these other sources seems to contradict what we learn from Angelo, although his work provides material lacking in other documents. I have argued elsewhere that, if we can trust Angelo’s story at any point, we can trust it here.8 In the final analysis, though, it is hard to avoid concluding that, judged as narrative history, Angelo’s chronicle has serious limitations. But should it be seen only as narrative history? We might at least ask whether the chronicle should be evaluated in terms of some other genre. Our starting point might be Gian Luca Potestà. In what is undoubtedly the best book ever written on Angelo, he devotes one chapter to the Chronicle, and entitles it “Prophecy and Martyrdom in the Chronicle.” Here we have two possibilities worth examining.

8 “John XXII and the Spirituals: Is Angelo Telling the Truth?” Franciscan Studies 63 (2005): 271–87. There is a seventh tribulation which contains the controversy between John XXII and leaders of the order over the nature of Franciscan poverty, a controversy that continues even as Angelo is writing—but we need not consider it here, for by that point Angelo is not very interested and moves quickly on.

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The Chronicle as Martyrology There is much to be said for considering the chronicle a martyrology. It centers on a series of tribulations suffered by the small group within the order that has attempted to remain true to Francis’s original ideal. Their story stretches from Francis and his original companions to Angelo and those for whom he is writing. That group has consistently lost its argument with the great mass of brothers who have set the standards actually followed by the order. The story as Angelo tells it involves not only defeat but a good deal of genuine persecution running from Elias’s attacks on Francis’s companions to the attempted suppression of the spirituals and beguines in southern France and of Angelo’s group in Italy. Like any good martyrology, the chronicle devotes substantial space to naming people and telling their stories. “These,” it says in eff ect, “are your heroes, the models you should emulate.” The idea of composing a martyrology was hardly a strange one in the early fourteenth century. An inquisitorial sentence of 1322 tells us that a French beguine named Pierre Doumergue composed a litany containing, alongside canonically valid saints, the names of around seventy beguine martyrs.9 We can assume that the list contained the names of all beguines executed to that date, or at least all those known to Pierre.10 Pierre’s list is worth pondering. In placing the names of all executed beguines alongside those of canonized saints, he was adopting a bigtent approach to beguine sainthood. Others were more discriminating. They wanted to differentiate between those beguines who had been martyred and those who had simply been executed. We find such a 9 Philippus a Limborch, Historia inquisitionis cui subjungitur Liber sententiarum inquisitionis tholosanae [hereafter Limborch, Liber sententiarum] (Amsterdam: Henricus Wetstenius, 1692), 385. 10 This assumption receives rough confirmation from the testimony of another beguine named Bernarda who, confessing in March 1322, speaks of three burned at Narbonne on one occasion and twenty-one on another; of seventeen who died at Lunel; of two killed at Béziers in one sentencing and seven in another; of two specific people “and some others” executed at Capestang, and of unspecified numbers burned at Lodève. Cf. Limborch, Liber sententiarum, 313. Thus, according to Bernarda’s count, a minimum of sixty had died by that point. An anonymous document that we can date between November 1324 and February 1326 says 82 have been executed by that date. MS Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 4190, 40r. See also the martyrology discussed at length in the conclusion of Louisa Burnham’s fine book, So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 189–93. It lists over 100 martyrs, although the list of burnings becomes sporadic after around 1323.

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distinction in the 1322 process of Pierre Tort.11 In the course of his interrogation, the inquisitor asked Pierre what he thought of the four Franciscans burned at Marseilles in 1318. Were they heretics or glorious martyrs? It was clearly a question designed to separate the sheep from the goats, or, more precisely, the obdurate goats from the repentant ones. Pierre had no trouble with that one. They were, he said, glorious martyrs now in heaven. Later, the inquisitor asked the same question about the beguines who had been burned. Here again the binary form of the question should have elicited one of two responses. Instead, it produced a remarkable guided tour of beguine executions in which Pierre announced that those condemned at Béziers were glorious martyrs; those condemned at Pézenas and in the second group burned at Narbonne were genuine heretics; but, as for those burned at Capestang, at Lunel, and in the first group executed at Narbonne, he simply could not say because he was not there and had no reliable information on the matter. Willingness to discriminate was hardly limited to Pierre, although it took different forms in other testimonies. The important point for our purposes, however, is that the beguines saw some or all of those executed by the inquisition as martyrs. The identification was so widespread among beguines that Bernard Gui emphasizes it in his manual for inquisitors,12 and inquisitorial processes regularly included a question or two asking the beguines to commit themselves on the matter. It seems safe to conclude that those whom the beguines considered martyrs were people who lived well and then died well at the hands of the inquisitors. When we turn to Angelo’s Chronicle, we find something notably different. While he speaks constantly of persecution in the chronicle, the

11 Limborch, Liber sententiarum, 325–29. Pierre’s confession is one of a group of thirteen, some undated and some dated 1321. Another of the undated ones is that of Marie de Serra, which will be considered later. Pierre, Marie and some of the confessions dated 1321 all refer to the May 1318 execution of the four spiritual Franciscans at Marseilles as having taken place four years earlier. The confessions dated 1321 are all from before Easter, so it was probably 1321 by their reckoning and 1322 by ours. In fact, two confessions including Marie’s (Ibid., 313, 314, 318) refer to executions which, according to Richard Emery, Heresy and Inquisition in Narbonne (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 132f., occurred on February 28, 1322. On Pierre, see my “Did the Beguines Understand Olivi?” in Pierre de Jean Olivi (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999), 309–18. On the beguines in general, see Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, chs. 9–10. 12 Bernardus Guidonis, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1886), 270–71.

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words “martyr” and “martyrdom” are used only thirteen times, and in only one case is the word used of someone who died at the hands of “the ministers.”13 Moreover, of the many zealots mentioned by Angelo in the chronicle, he tells us that several died of cruel treatment, but the only ones he describes as actually being executed were the four French spirituals burned at the stake in 1318, and Angelo does not refer to them as martyrs.14 Is Angelo really uninterested in martyrdom, then? Is Potestà using the wrong word? Possibly not. In the first place, one has to ask who the martyr in Angelo’s Chronicle actually is. Here we take stock of a theme that appears in the work of most major Spiritual Franciscans, that of Francis’s death and resurrection. Various Spirituals meant various things by it, and Angelo seems to use it in an entirely symbolic sense. The crucifixion and future resurrection that Angelo explores is mainly that of the Franciscan life as defined by the rule and Testament. Individuals become important insofar as they are the actors through which that passion story is played out.15 Thus individual Spirituals can participate in the martyrdom simply by being on the losing side. Angelo spreads his net more widely than that, though. Here we arrive at three uses of the word “martyrdom” which occur on a single page early in the Chronicle and encapsulate a complex thought pattern. Angelo begins by speaking of “those apostles and martyrs and fathers . . . who lived in faith and charity for Christ rather than for themselves.” Here the word “martyr,” placed in juxtaposition to “apostle” and “father,” seems to denote those executed in the early Church; yet Angelo goes on to speak of the entire group as going about dressed in sheep and goat skins, needy and afflicted, and undergoing torments “so that they could securely enter heaven with the martyr’s palm.”16

13 Viz., Caesar of Speyer. Angelo says four times that Caesar received the crown of martyrdom. Lib. chron., 2:104–111. 14 Lib. Chron., 6:431–43. He also briefly mentions the beguines and tells us that “they killed some” (Lib. chron., 7:1–7), but he does not specifically say who killed them and he does not call them martyrs. 15 Such is reflected not only in Lib. chron. but also in passages from Angelo’s letters like Opera: I. Epistole, (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1980), 74f., 78. 16 The whole passage in Lib. chron., P: 273–75: Nam apostoli et martyres et patres illi qui nudi Deo extra saeculum servierunt fide et caritate Christo et non sibi vivebant, exempla Christi testimonium quasi nubem aeterni refrigerii ante oculos habentes, qui circuierunt in melotis et in pellibus caprinis, egentes, afflicti, angustiati, quibus dignus non erat mundus. Nam omnes sancti quanta passi sunt tormenta, ut securi pervenirent ad regnum cum palma martyrii! (Chronicle, 19–20).

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david burr For to share in Christ’s suffering, condemnations, infirmities and wants, to be abandoned to the persecutions of demons and men, to be proved and examined through tribulation as if by fire, is to be worthy of joining the saints reigning with Christ in heaven.17

Angelo then notes that “at this time we are afflicted and tempted in order that, proved by patience, we can come to Christ with the martyr’s palm.” In these few lines, he has covered Church history from the apostles to himself and in the process suggested an extended sense of martyrdom encompassing not only those killed for their faith but all those who for Christ’s sake patiently bear suffering, physical or mental. The martyr’s palm is awarded not only to the historical martyrs but to the desert fathers and ultimately to those in Angelo’s own group who persevere. It is their reward for sharing Christ’s passion. In this sense Francis is the most eminent Franciscan martyr, and all his true sons are martyrs as well.18

The Chronicle as Apocalypse To say this much is to suggest that, while Angelo is not interested enough in the word “martyr” to use it often, martyrdom in an extended sense does play some role in his sense of what has befallen the order. When we turn to the other word used by Potestà, prophecy, we find ourselves in a very different situation. One possible way of looking at Angelo’s project is to see him as writing an apocalypse of sorts, which means more than simply indulging in apocalyptic speculation. What he presents is not simply a future scenario based on an interpretation of apocalyptic literature—Peter John Olivi does that in his commentary on the book of Revelation—but is itself an apocalypse insofar as it reflects the style of apocalypses with which Angelo himself was familiar. These include the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 24–25 and its parallels in Luke and Mark, the book of Daniel, the book of Revelation, and a series of pseudepigraphal works current in his own time.

17 Lib. chron., P: 276: Communicare enim Christi passionibus, et in tentationibus et infirmitatibus et necessitatibus et persecutionibus daemonum et hominum derelinqui, et probari et examinari in camino tribulationum quasi per ignem est, et per patientiam annumerari sancti regnantibus cum Christo in regno caelorum . . . 18 On Francis as martyr, see Lib. chron., Prol.: 387–92.

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A word of caution is in order. The word “apocalypse” is being used here as we would employ it, not as Angelo would employ it. He would not have recognized some genre called “apocalypse,” although he would have acknowledged one called “prophecy.” The important thing here is that what Angelo offers in his chronicle is structurally similar to what we find in the book of Daniel. The latter offers a minimal story frame that holds together a series of anecdotes, many of them involving dreams or visions and their interpretations. In Angelo’s case, the frame story is more important, presenting as it does the history of the Franciscan order to his own time, or at least the history of the running battle within the order between those faithful to Francis’s original ideal and those who want to make the order a success in worldly terms. Within this frame story Angelo narrates a series of visions presenting the transcendent significance of the order and its ultimate fate. Angelo stays within what had become a standard medieval interpretation of world history as divided into seven ages, the sixth of which comprises the age of the Church, which is itself divided into seven periods. That much can be found in various Apocalypse commentaries written at the time. Angelo’s contribution is to divide the sixth period of Church history, running from Francis’s time to his own, into seven tribulations, thus making the sixth period of church history commensurate with the rise and fall of the Franciscan order. At the end of the sixth period, after the order lives through its seventh tribulation, Christ will accomplish the rebirth of the Franciscan rule and the vindication of those true friars who have suffered throughout the tribulations. Much of this is established early in the chronicle through a series of visionary experiences. On the first page, Christ appears to Francis and explains what his first-century mission was all about. His address is immediately followed by a second appearance in which he explains the significance of Francis’s new order. Shortly thereafter, Francis speaks to five of his companions in secret, telling them how Christ has commissioned him. Then Francis himself miraculously appears in a fiery chariot, apparently to the brothers as a whole, in what Angelo describes as a “vision shown to them from heaven.”19 That calls for some interpretation, so Francis returns in normal mode, comforts his group, and prophesies. He tells them the order will increase, but many of the new recruits will not be up to the rigors of the Franciscan rule

19

Ibid., 13.

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and will bend the order to the pursuit of worldly ends. In this address, Francis is explicit about the abuses that will corrupt the order. They are precisely the ones Angelo himself sees in his own day.20 A few brothers will remain faithful to Francis’s original goal, but the others will scandalize the laity by their carnal lives. Thus even before we leave the Prologue—in fact, before Francis and his disciples have even asked Innocent III for permission to form an order21—we already know the basic course of Franciscan history from Francis’s time to Angelo’s. We have heard about the formation and decay of the order both from Christ and from Francis, but neither has said anything concerning its eventual reform.22 That soon occurs, however, when Francis is visited by an angel with a gold head, silver arms and chest, bronze stomach, iron legs and clay feet, a variant on the statue in Daniel 2:32f. The angel explains that he symbolizes “the beginning, middle and end of your religion until the birth of the reform of Christ’s life and of the ecclesiastical state.”23 In the process of interpreting this obvious image of Franciscan decline, Angelo works in a reference to Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael in Genesis,24 employing it in such a way as to divide the Franciscan order into two groups, only one of which can be considered Francis’s spiritual heir.25 In short, Angelo recognizes a true order within the fallen order. How will this true order claim its inheritance during the coming reform? The angel’s reference to “the end of days, when the religion that you founded will give birth”26 and the earlier reference to “the birth of the reform of Christ’s life and the ecclesiastical state” suggest that the

20 At ibid., 38, we again see Francis “predicting” the very evil practices Angelo sees in his own day. 21 Events at the curia fit neatly into this visionary context. The pope offers Francis some opposition, but two cardinals are moved by the spirit of God to support Francis, then Innocent has his dream of a collapsing Lateran church supported by a poor man. 22 Francis’s address to his disciples predicting future decline ends, not with any notice of future reform, but with a notice of future judgment: the image of a fisherman casting his net, pulling out his catch, saving the few good fish, and casting the rest on the beach for the birds to devour. 23 Lib. chron., P: 312: . . . initium, progressum et finem significat, quae habitura est tua religio usque ad tempus partus eius et reformationem Christi vitae et ecclesiastici status. (Chronicle, 22). 24 Cf. Gen. 20–25. 25 Chronicle, 22. 26 Lib. chron., P: 331: . . . in fine dierum [Dan 12, 13], quando ad partum venerit per te fundata religio. (Chronicle, 24).

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angel expects a new, reformed order and Church to be born out of the righteous remnant of the Franciscan order. Francis is “filled with heartfelt grief ” at learning of the fall awaiting his brethren, but in yet another appearance Christ promises that he will protect the righteous remnant. “Even if your religion should decrease to only three brothers, it will remain unmoved even to the end of the world.”27 Shortly thereafter, Christ underlines this message by sending another angel who tells Francis roughly the same thing. Francis shares all these things with his inner circle,28 but he is hardly the only one receiving visions. From his time on, many of the great figures in the movement are visited with prophetic insight concerning the future.29 Once Angelo moves into the period after Francis’s death, the prophetic visions slow down as Angelo turns to narrating how the prophecies were realized, but they still occur among Francis’s true disciples. James of Massa had a vision predicting how Bonaventure, once he became minister general, would persecute his predecessor, John of Parma.30 Here again we have a reference to the reform that will follow. The story of James’s vision is part of a little collection of reports concerning visions that occurred around the same time, several of them dealing with the decay and reform of the order. Brother Borromeo, for example, is said to have prophesied in an allegory (which Angelo thoughtfully omits, settling instead for its meaning) that at the end the order would be divided into three parts. The first, as he said, would consist of the few perfect imitators of Saint Francis. The second would be composed of those who fled him, turning to earthly delights and the nurturing of flesh and blood. The third part would consist of those who neither fought nor fled, but merely waited for the war to

27

Lib. chron., P: 347: et si ad numerum trium devenerit religio tua, inconcussa tamen usque ad finem saeculi meo munere permanebit. (Chronicle, 25). 28 Chronicle, 27. 29 A certain priest, a friend of Francis, receives a vision of Satan’s court, at which plans are laid to subvert the order from within (cf. ibid., 47–49). At ibid., 115, Angelo notes that “the revelations to Saint Francis concerning the brothers’ fall from perfection and their ultimate reform, as well as those mercifully granted to others among the first brothers—Giles, James of Osimo, James of Massa, Brother Hugh of Digne, Borromeo and others—concur on this point.” 30 Ibid., 118–20. James’s vision is also related in the Fioretti. Note that it involves the destruction of a tree, but with the promise of later rebirth. Thus, it is vaguely reminiscent of Daniel 4.

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cease. Each group would come to a different end and receive a different retribution.31 Hugh of Digne, another of James’s contemporaries, is also said to have prophesied that the order would be divided,32 while John of Parma himself is credited with having predicted three things. First, there will be a reform according to the spirit of the founder, with pure and simple observance of the Rule and Testament. Thus, there will necessarily be a division between those who wish to observe the Rule and Testament and those who wish to live according to the papal privileges and declarations which they have procured for themselves. But before this occurs, there will be, in the second place, a conflict of tongues in which the pipes of dogma will be sounded, leading to a dispersion. After the dispersion there will be, in the third place, a gathering of the holy poor. God will visit that group with his light and make known to them what is to be done. From that point on, the way of reform will be clear to them. They will all taste a single thing and think the same way. They will unanimously seek to rise to more perfect things. None will seek his own, but rather what is to the greater praise of Jesus Christ as well as what involves more profound humility, higher poverty and greater peace. For each and every one of them will seek and taste those things which are above, not those which are earthly.33

These passages strike a number of themes common to apocalyptic writings. Here we find an abandonment of any interest in exploring the complexities and ambiguities of human interaction in favor of a stark contrast between the forces of light and those of darkness; we

31 Ibid., 121. He goes on to say, “The first will dine with the king and share with him in his kingdom. The second will be knocked about in various ways and finally, locked up in prison, will be punished even more. The third group will also be knocked about a great deal because they were timid, but Christ will not include them among the apostates. He will instead leave them alone, considering them to be already judged and belonging to neither of the other two groups.” 32 Ibid., 121–22. 33 Lib. chron., 4: 250–58: primum scilicet, in spiritu fundatoris sub observantia regulae et testamenti pura et simplici fiet reformatio. Unde opertet quod divisio fiat inter illos qui volunt testamentum et regulam servare, et eos qui volunt vivere cum privilegiis et declarationibus, quas sibi procuraverunt. Sed antequam hoc impleatur, conflictus secundo linguarum fiet, et tangentur fistulae dogmatum, et post haec dispersio, et post dispersionem congregatio visitabit Deus lumine suo et de agendis certificabuntur, et ex tunc reformatio et reformationis modus erit eis patens et clarus. Denique unum ex tunc sapient omnes et idem sentient, et unanimiter omnes studebunt ad perfectiora consurgere, et non quaeret unusquisque quod suum est, sed quae Iesu Christi et maioris laudis eius et profundioris humilitatis et altioris paupertatis et pacis. Omnes etiam et singuli quaerent et sapient quae sursum sunt, et non quae super terram. (Chronicle, 122–23). John’s prophecy is cited again at Chronicle, 182.

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have a sense that these two forces are not merely opposed but at war; and we have the expectation of a new period in which the victorious children of light establish a regime of peace and piety. The language, too, is evocative of apocalyptic works. Ex eventu prophecies blend into genuine prediction in which straightforward, intelligible assertion is mixed with opaque suggestion.34 In fact, from here on Angelo himself provides us with regular doses of opaque suggestion in his summaries of the various tribulations. He closes the fourth tribulation by saying, among other things, that: It was as if an iron rod of malice, hatred, indignation, rancor and vengeance had been placed in the hands of a strong man agitated by the heat of wine and led about in a circle, striking out on all sides against those within reach, inflicting wounds that were deep, cruel and incapable of being healed. The dead went without burial. Those who fled wasted away because of fear. They died of hunger. What had gone before was stricken from the memory of the new generation, who announced with great fanfare that they had returned to the customs of the past, reaching to prior things, having changed from the southerly wind to a northern one.35

At times, Angelo suddenly becomes almost dithyrambic: Prison, iron, black lead, pen, paper, lightening, thunder, fire, rapid motion, false witness, a brother who supplants, a judge who hates, the division of the light, the intersecting night, earth, wind, blood, and dispersion of the flock, all remain fixed in silence yet shout out, recall the past and show 36 what is to come as if it were present.

34 The whole thing may also be reminiscent of earlier apocalyptic works inasmuch as the prophecies are placed in the mouths of eminent figures who probably never said anything of the kind, although here one must be careful. Hugh of Digne and John of Parma were respected leaders in their time, but they were also enthusiastic Joachite apocalyptic thinkers, and, while we can afford to wonder whether either of them predicted things on the basis of visions they themselves received, it is all too easy to imagine them predicting any number of occurrences based on a Joachite interpretation of scripture. 35 Lib. chron., 4: 340–42: Quasi virga ferrea livoris, odii, indignationis, rancoris et vindictae in manu potentis, agitati a calore vini, circumducta in gyro undique plagavit quos accinxit plaga profunda et insanabili et crudeli; mortuis non fuit sepultura, fugientes contabuerunt formidine et fame perierunt, a memoria novorum priora erasa sunt, et converti ad ea quae retro sunt, ad priora extendi—mutato meridiei cursu in aquilonem—esse, tubis insonuerunt. (Chronicle, 127–28). 36 Lib. chron., 5: 102–03, 104b: Carcer, ferrum, plumbum nigrum, penna, charta, fulgur, tonitrua, ignis, motus velox, testis falsus, frater supplantans, iudex odiens, divisio lucis, nox intersecans, terra, flatus, sanguis et dispersio gregis, omnia silentio fixa manendo clamant, revocant praeterita, ventura praesentia monstrant . . . soli testimonium suo tempore dabunt. (Chronicle, 137).

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He then names a few more things and adds, “These alone will give testimony to the sun in his time.”37 So far, Angelo has offered little in the way of dates. All that changes toward the end of his fifth tribulation, when he reports yet another vision by “a certain person.” He leads into it with the comment that: the fifth tribulation of the order had a particular end in the death of the holy man Peter John [Olivi], in the removal of the illustrious Brother Raymond Geoffroi from the office of general minister, and in the renunciation and death of the Lord Pope Celestine V . . . . Nevertheless, as far as the remainders of that tribulation are concerned, they clearly had a more general end in the persecution cruelly launched against the aforesaid man [Olivi] by John of Murrovalle and by all the brothers in the province of Provence who opposed Peter John, . . . as well as in the persecutions suf38 fered by Brother Liberato with his companions.

In other words, it ended in one sense in the 1290s, but it continued in another sense until the death of John of Murrovalle in 1312. That a period can end at different times in different senses seems familiar to anyone who has read Joachim of Fiore or Peter John Olivi, who treat their periodization in much the same way. Angelo goes on to say that this sense of the fifth tribulation lasting until 1312 is by no means contrary “to what a certain person is said to have received from an angel of the Lord before the election of Lord Celestine, namely that for twenty-eight years after his renunciation a great tribulation would take place,”39 for the following tribulation can occur while the preceding one is still in progress. This idea of overlapping periods is also familiar to readers of Joachim and Olivi.40

37 Much of what Angelo says in such passages makes sense, but it requires a great deal of work. His reference to the sun is probably an allusion to Peter John Olivi, whom he has just been describing as the sun, but he could hardly have been unaware that the word would also invoke thoughts of both Francis and Christ. 38 Lib. chron., 5: 703–06a: Licet quemdam particularem finem in morte sancti viri Petri Iohannis et in depositione praeclari viri fratris Raymundi Gaufridi a generalatus officio et in renuntiatione et morte domini papae Caelestini quinta ordinis habuerit tribulatio . . . nihilominus illius tribulationis reliquias in vexationibus, quas frater Iohannes de Murro cum ceteris aemulis praefati viri [Peter John] fratribus de provincia Provinciae crudeliter intulit . . . et in persecutionibus quas frater Liberatus cum sociis . . . sustinuit . . . (Chronicle, 176–77). 39 Lib. chron., 5: 707–08: Nec est contraria haec sententia illi, quam quidam ante electionem domini Caelestini ab angelo Domini dicitur accepisse, videlicet quod ab ipsius abrenuntiatione usque ad annos vigintiocto sequentes magna tribulatio durationem esset habitura . . . (Chronicle, 177). 40 At this point Angelo states explicitly that all seven tribulations of the order will take place within the sixth period of Church history. Gian Luca Potestà, “La duplice

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Angelo now launches into a description of a vision which itself evokes other, earlier apocalyptic visions, involving as it does visionary presence in a great hall, the presentation of a book accompanied by priestly ceremony, and the opening of a sixth seal so that a deacon can read what is contained in that part of the book. Having set the scene, however, Angelo refuses to take us very far into it, announcing instead that “perhaps it is better to be silent than to say anything about events occurring at the end of the twenty-eight years or thereabouts, incidents pertaining to the sixth tribulation.”41 The deacon apparently felt the same.42 Angelo says he described what was written there “better by silence than by speech, and better by lamentation than by writing.” What follows heavily involves narrating events, but with an occasional break here and there for a prophetic bulletin. At one point Angelo seems to announce that the coming reform will be effected by a holy pope.43 At another he informs us that Fra Dolcino was foreseen by “a servant of God in a land beyond the sea” and by Francis (although he may be implying that Francis was that “servant of God”).44 Finally, in his last such utterance, right at the end of the seventh tribulation, Angelo comes as close as he will ever come to providing a timetable. He says: After twenty-eight solar revolutions of years have been attributed to the labors of the sixth wheel of the animate circle of the poor pilgrim reproved in judgment, with nine more added to the seventh revolution of the same wheel, the dawn of a new time will be seen with a holy change for the better. Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, will shine forth.45

Obviously the twenty-eight years represent the sixth tribulation which, as we have seen, runs from 1294 to 1322. The additional nine years, if

redazione della Historia septem tribulationum di Angelo Clareno,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 38 (2002): 11–12, argues that Angelo is describing his own vision at this point. He also assumes that the recipient is different from the recipient of the one from an angel, although the text seems ambiguous on that point. 41 Lib. chron., 5: 723: Quare de his quae facta sunt in fine illorum vigintiocto annorum et prope, ad tribulationem sextam pertinentibus, forsan melius est tacere quam aliquid dicere, quia sermonibus multis explicari nequirent . . . (Chronicle, 178). 42 Chronicle, 182. Angelo again refers to the sixth tribulation ending twenty-eight years after Celestine V’s resignation. 43 Ibid., 182. 44 Ibid., 184–85. 45 Lib. chron., 7: 83–85a: Denique, .xxviij. annorum revolutionibus ac tributis laboribus revolutionis sextae rotae circuli animalis pauperis viatoris in iudicium reprobati, superadditis novem ad eiusdem rotae revolutionem septimam distinguendam alterius temporis aurora, cum sancta in melius immutatione, clarebit rex regum, et Dominus dominantium, Christus . . . (Chronicle, 219).

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they represent all of the seventh tribulation, would mean that the great reform is scheduled to begin around 1331. Most of the prophecies in the chronicle are focused directly on the Franciscan order. It is a history/prophecy of the sixth period of church history, which extends from Francis to the rebirth of the Franciscan rule. Surprisingly little use is made of traditional apocalyptic imagery like Antichrist and the beast, although it appears from time to time, as when, in the process of describing the sixth tribulation, Angelo evokes the ultimate battle between Christ and the beast and seems to suggest that it marks the transition to a more or less Joachite third age, although he may intend to say nothing of the sort.46 This passage, one of the most sustained apocalyptic excursions in the chronicle, says a great deal about the nature of Angelo’s project. At times he may be willing to suggest what looks very much like a timetable, but in the long run his chronicle is more Sybilline than Olivian, more interested in being suggestive than in constructing a coherent apocalyptic scenario. We emerge from it once again reassured that the decline of the Franciscan order will be followed by its reform and that the good friars persecuted in the present will be granted peace in the near future. But we have little sense of how all this will be correlated with the Antichrist or even with the battle between Christ and the beast, which is said to be followed by an age of peace. Are they the same events described in two different ways, and will the age of peace, too, begin around 1331, or will the Franciscan reform be part of a penultimate peace, one more station on the way to the final apocalyptic struggle and final earthly peace? Angelo does not say, nor, perhaps, does he even think he knows. Earlier, in one of the several almost incantatory passages strewn throughout his chronicle, Angelo alludes, as we have seen, to “prison, iron, black lead,” and a variety of other things. All of these, he says: remain fixed in silence yet shout out, recall the past and show what is to come as if it were present . . . . These will give testimony . . . . Now only a few give it who abandon time and their senses when the spirit blows. And they see things certain yet invisible to the senses, through openings momentarily lit by a flash of lightning. These retain a fixed sense of the end and thus do not hesitate or think the time will be long.47

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Chronicle, 192–95. Lib. chron., 5: 102c, 104b–107: . . . omnia silentio fixa manendo clamant, revocant praeterita, ventura praesentia monstrant . . . testimonium suo tempore dabunt. Dant nunc sed pauci, qui tempus et sensus flante spiritu linquunt, et in momento lustrante fulgaris 47

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That is perhaps not a bad description of what Angelo thinks he himself is doing. His narrative of spiritual Franciscan tribulation is punctuated by a series of fragmentary, discontinuous, visionary utterances that illuminate the past, present and future significance of the concrete events he records, like a series of lightning bolts momentarily illuminating a landscape. There is some variation in what is revealed, but also substantial overlap, the same general pattern being displayed in bits and pieces, over and over.

The Question of a Double Redaction The Chronicle, then, is a narrative history, but this narrative serves as the frame holding together a series of prophecies. If Gian Luca Potestà is correct, Angelo wrote the Chronicle in two stages. He wrote a good deal of it in 1314 at the request of his protector, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, in order to provide material Giacomo and other sympathetic cardinals could use in defending the Spirituals; then he brought the work up to date sometime in the 1320s,48 altering the pre-1314 section only slightly.49 At that point he was writing for colleagues living in small groups scattered throughout central Italy, the spiritual heirs of the Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine, a very different audience, and thus he wrote with a very different purpose. The Chronicle as apocalypse seems more suited to Angelo’s second audience than to his first. The friars are to be encouraged by the fact that Christ himself has not only vouched for the Franciscan rule and the interpretation of it advanced by Angelo and others, he has also promised that history is

igne, certa—sed invisa sensu—per foramina vident. Hi fixi manent in veritate finis, et ideo non haesitant nec computant tempora longa. (Chronicle, 137). 48 Estimates of the terminus post quem vary, but there is general agreement that the work probably alludes to the imprisonment of Bonagrazia da Bergamo in 1323 (Lib. chron., 7: 54; Chronicle, 217). 49 Potestà, “La duplice redazione,” 1–38, argues that the first redaction was probably completed in the spring or summer of 1314, the last period in which Angelo could hope that Clement V, who died in April 1314, would be succeeded by an angelic pope who would reform the church, possibly his patron Giacomo Colonna. He thinks Angelo probably resumed work on the chronicle in 1323. In any case, Felice Accrocca, “Filii carnis—filii spiritus: il Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis Minorum,” in Angelo Clareno Francescano (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi aull’alto medioevo, 2007), 49–90, presents strong arguments against Potestà’s theory of a double redaction, and the question remains open.

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on their side. No matter how small the righteous remnant becomes, it will eventually triumph. Is the prophetic, apocalyptic bent of the work, then, a product of the later redaction? Perhaps, but the text as it stands gives us no reason to think so. In the work as we have it, the prophetic elements guide the work right from the beginning. To imagine a work without them is equivalent to imagining a very different work.

TWO VIEWS OF JOHN XXII AS A HERETICAL POPE Patrick Nold

Pope John XXII was both a lover and a critic of the Order of Friars Minor, and medieval Franciscan views of him were similarly ambivalent. The primary encounter friars had with this pope was in the (presumably positive) context of liturgical prayer: his canonization bull for Louis of Toulouse, Sol oriens, supplies the readings for the office on the saint’s feast found in all Franciscan breviaries after 1317;1 breviaries and missals often have material by or about this pope instituting the universal observance of the Feast of Corpus Christi2 and of Trinity Sunday;3 and numerous Franciscan liturgical books contain indulgenced prayers attributed to John XXII such as the Hours of the Cross4 or the Anima Christi.5 Beyond the realm of devotion, when the Franciscans were attacked over mendicant privileges in the fourteenth century, John XXII’s bull Vas electionis condemning the errors of the secular master Jean de Pouilly was a useful text to have to hand.6 And John’s bulls on poverty—however acerbic—were loyally copied out 1 E.g. In s. Ludovici episcopi et conf. Oratio. Deus qui Ecclesiam. Lc. 1. Iohannes episcopus . . . MS Naples BN VI. F. 20, fol. 320; see Cesare Cenci, Manoscritti francescani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, 2 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1971), 1: 354; In s. Ludovici episcopi et conf. Lectiones leguntur de privilegio d. Iohannis xxii. Lc. 1 Iohannes episcopus MS Naples BN VI. F. 21, fol. 400; Cenci, Manoscritti francescani, 1: 355. 2 E.g. Rubrica corpus Christi. Iohannes episcopus . . . MS Naples BN VII. G. 66, fol. 74v; Cenci, Manoscritti francescani, 2: 624. 3 Scito autem quod anno Domini M CCC tricesimo primo, dominus Johannes XXIIus, de consilio fratrum suorum, ordinavit et statuit quod deinceps Romana et universalis ecclesia faceret festum solempnissimum de superbenedicta Trinitate divinarum personarum et divine essentie unitate in tribus divinis personis (MS Toulouse BM 343, fol. 132r). 4 E.g. Incipit officium de cruce domini nostri Iesu Christi compositum per d. Iohannem papam MS Naples BN VI. F. 34, fol. 176v–177v; Cenci, Manoscritti francescani 1: 365. 5 E.g. Oratio pape Iohannis xxii. Anima Xristi sanctifica me . . . (MS Rome Biblioteca Angelica MS 2216, fol. 3r; described in C. Cenci, Bibliotheca manuscripta ad Sacrum Conventum Assisiensem (Assisi: Casa Editrice Francescana, 1981), 1: 246. 6 See, for example, the Franciscan miscellany in MS Dublin Trinity College 350 in Marvin L. Colker, Trinity College Library Dublin: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts, 2 vols. (Aldershot, UK: Published for Trinity College Library, Dublin by Scolar Press, 1991), 1: 743–46.

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in Bullarium manuscripts alongside previous papal constitutions like Nicholas III’s Exiit qui seminat or Clement V’s Exivi de Paradiso.7 A systematic consideration of the circulation of texts attributed to John XXII in Franciscan manuscripts might offset the negative impression derived from the sources surrounding the poverty controversies of his reign which tend to cast him in the role of an “erring pope.” But, for better or for worse, it is the views of these contemporary sources that have exercised a determinative influence on John XXII’s reputation and on the assessment of his place in the history of the Order of Friars Minor. Such sources can be divided, grosso modo, into two groups which correspond to the two poverty controversies of the pontificate: the Spirituals and the Michaelists. What follows is a brief survey of the treatment of John XXII by each group and a consideration of their historical significance in light of recent scholarship. Among the sources emanating from the ambit of the Franciscan Spirituals, the most important is surely Angelo Clareno’s History of the Seven Tribulations of the Franciscan Order.8 As an eyewitness to events in Avignon in 1317, Angelo paints a remarkably life-like portrait of Pope John XXII. The dynamic of his History also provides a clear contextual framework for understanding the “tribulation” shaking the Order at the beginning of the pontificate: the ancient factionalism of a rigorist minority victimized by lax superiors had become a full-blown schism in Southern France during the twenty-seven-month interregnum after the death Clement V in 1314. Unlike previous pontiffs who tended to be “at worst gullible and at best well-meaning but ineffectual,” John was (in Angelo’s eyes and in David Burr’s words) “nobody’s patsy”; he “was fully informed as to what was going on amongst the Franciscans” and “pursues an independent strategy of his own devising” which is to summon the Spirituals to a hearing but not to listen to what their leaders had to say.9 Angelo’s representation of John as an independent actor, however, tends to minimize the fact that the pope was actually

7

E.g. MS Naples BN VII. G. 26; see Cenci, Manoscritti francescani, 2: 583. See A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, trans. D. Burr and E.R. Daniel (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005); Historia septem tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. O. Rossini (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1999); Liber Chronicarum sive Tribulationum ordinis minorum, ed. G. Boccali (Assisi: Porziuncula, 1999). 9 David Burr, “John XXII and the Spirituals. Is Angelo Clareno Telling the Truth?” Franciscan Studies 63 (2005): 271–87. 8

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responding to a series of legal appeals from the Franciscans.10 Angelo also hints that, for all his independence, John XXII was influenced by the misinformation of the Order’s leadership in deciding the case.11 Perhaps for this reason, blame for persecution following the papal judgment in Quorundam exigit is placed on the leadership of the Order rather than on the pope himself.12 One result of the persecution of the Spirituals and their lay followers, the Beguines, is a series of sources very different to Angelo’s narrative History: the inquisitorial testimonies preserved, for example, in the Vatican Archives,13 the Doat Collection in Paris,14 or the Liber Sententiarum of Bernard Gui, O.P.15 Scholars have made profitable use of this material to reconstruct the beliefs of Spirituals and Beguines.16 But since

10 This point comes out very clearly in Eva Luise Wittneben, Bonagratia von Bergamo: Franziskanerjurist und Wortführer seines Ordens im Streit mit Papst Johannes XXII. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 17–84. 11 Liber Chronicarum, 6: 333, 710: Interea fratres petitiones suas dederunt summo pontifici, infinitas diffamationes et impositiones continentes et paucas valde veritates vel nullas pie et recte propositas . . . et abhorruit summus pontifex gravia mala et facinora et haereses quae fratres de praefatis omnibus scribebant. Et volens fratrum petitionibus tamquam piis et iustis in parte satisfacere ac eorum preces admittere, primo de Fraticellis exaudivit eos, et verbo et scripto statum cassavit et annullavit. 12 Liber Chronicarum, 7: 1, 743: Postquam vero de suis secundum voluntatem suam victoriam fecerunt, conversi sunt ad faciendam vindictam de quibuscumque personis diligentibus eos et in eis devotionem habentibus, sive saecularibus, sive Beguinis, sive Fraticellis, sive hominibus, per se et per alios, sitientes vindictam potius quam correctionem. Angelo’s references to John later in the History and in his letters are, in Gian Luca Potestà’s phrase, “prudently indeterminate” (G.L. Potestà, Angelo Clareno dai Poveri Eremiti ai Fraticelli [Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1990], 283). For a review of the references, see David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after St. Francis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 279–313. 13 E.g. Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 September8 December 1319, ed. A. Friedlander (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996). 14 Raoul Manselli worked extensively with this material and published some of it in the appendices to his book Spirituali e Beghini in Provenza (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1959). 15 Le Livre des Sentences de l’Inquisiteur Bernard Gui 1308–1323, Sources d’histoire médiévale 30, ed. A. Pales-Gobilliard (Paris: CNRS, 2002). 16 In addition to Manselli, Spirituali e Beghini, see Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250–c. 1450 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), I: 212–30; Robert E. Lerner, “Writing and Resistance among Beguins of Languedoc and Catalonia,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. P. Biller and A. Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186–204; Louisa Burnham, “Les franciscains spirituels et les béguins du Midi,” in Le pays cathare: les religions médiévales et leurs expressions méridionales, ed. J. Berlioz (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 147–60; Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 213–59; James B. Given, “The Béguins in

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papal authority played a central role in such beliefs, the sources also constitute an important witness to the historical figure of John XXII: they both show how he was perceived by Franciscan contemporaries during the early part of his pontificate and, more importantly, provide a crucial link between his two fundamental Franciscan constitutions, Quorundam exigit (1317) and Cum inter nonnullos (1323). Quorundam exigit is not nearly as famous or notorious as John’s later constitution of the Apostolic poverty controversy.17 It was issued in October 1317, thirteen months after his election as pope and the series of hearings in Avignon described by Angelo Clareno in his Chronicle. Quorundam exigit was, in essence, a restatement of what Clement V had laid down in Exivi de paradiso on two grey areas in the Franciscan Rule: first, what constituted shabbiness (vilitas) with regard to the Franciscan habit, and second, what constituted a necessity wherein Franciscans could keep consumable goods in common. Clement had decreed that the Franciscan habit should be shabby and that friars should not have stores of consumables, but in both cases he granted superiors the power to make exceptions based on local conditions.18 John restated only the latter part of Clement’s decision and added that friars who disagreed with the judgment of their superiors on these matters must not accuse them of violating the Franciscan Rule. In short, Quorundam exigit denied the Spirituals’ appeal to the Holy See and to individual conscience on the observance of poverty in the Order. Immediately after the issuing of Quorundam exigit, the General Minister of the Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, gathered the rebel Spirituals together to ask whether they were willing to obey him on the form of the Franciscan habit and their local superiors in the matter of stores of consumables, and, if not, whether the pope had the power and authority to command and order the things that he did in Quorun-

Bernard Gui’s Liber Sententiarum,” in Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, ed. C. Bruschi and P. Biller (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2002), 147–61; Louisa Burnham, “Reliques et résistance chez les Béguins de Languedoc,” in Annales du Midi 118 (2006): 353–68. 17 For the text, see Bullarium Franciscanum V, ed. C. Eubel (Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1898), 128 n. 289. The best scholarly treatment of it is Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 200–04. 18 Ibid., 150: “Clement manages to have some usus pauperes within the vow and to have specific requirements as well, but only by making such requirements the responsibility of those in authority . . . In practical terms, Clement’s solution means that the average friar’s obligation is to obey the rule as interpreted by those in authority.”

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dam exigit.19 The second, elliptically-phrased question was designed to make obedience a doctrinal matter so that rebellious Spirituals would be treated as heretics (something for which leading members of the Community like Bonagrazia of Bergamo had been pushing). Accordingly, those who answered “no” to both questions were, at Pope John’s instruction, handed over to a Franciscan inquisitor.20 The inquisitor, after getting the written endorsement of a group of theologians21 and the oral approval of John XXII himself,22 condemned four Spirituals as heretics and handed them over to be burned in May 1318. The following year lay supporters of the Franciscans began to fall victim to

19 The interrogations are printed in Manselli, Spirituali e Beghini, 291–96. The second question is the crucial one: utrum credant quod dominus papa habeat auctoritatem et potestatem precipiendi et mandandi ea que in predicta eius littera continentur (295). 20 See John’s letter of 6 November 1317 to the Inquisitor Michael Lemoine, O.F.M., Super omnia desiderabilia (BF v. 293). There is some evidence that John was hesitant about taking this step but was convinced by Bonagrazia of Bergamo. See the third-hand testimony reported in the Decalogus Evangelicae Paupertatis in connection with the Chapter of Paris in 1329: ipse dominus Iohannes quondam XXII retulit et dixit expresse coram sex Ministris euntibus Parisius pro capitulo generali, ut ab alico eorum ego publice audivi, asserens quod non tam impetrata, quam quasi violenter importunis instantiis et suggestionibus extorta fuerat per memoratum Bonamgratiam licentia seu auctoritas contra illos fratres taliter procedendi (M. Bihl, “Fraticelli cuiusdam ‘Decalogus evangelice paupertatis’ an. 1340–2 conscriptus,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 32 (1939): 279–411 at 391. The Decalogus follows in the tradition of Angelo Clareno’s History of putting the blame for the persecution on the leadership of the Order. 21 Quaeritur utrum isti articuli infra scripti et quilibet eorum sint haeretici judicandi . . . secundus quod Dominus Papa non habuit nec habet quandam potestatem nec auctoritatem faciendi constitutionem quam de consilio cardinalium fecit, quae incipit: Quorundam . . . Tertius. Item quod nec Papae nec praelatis dicti ordinis obediendum est in his quae in praefata constitutione contenta sunt contra consilium Christi et dictam regulam contra quae Papa non potest (J.D. Mansi, Stephani Baluzii Tutelensis Miscellanea Novo Ordine Digesta [Lucca, 1756–62], 2: 272–76). Because this text was printed in Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Chatelain (Paris: Delalain, 1891), 2: no. 760, many scholars thought that the questions originated with John XXII, see Sylvain Piron, “Un cahier de travail de l’inquisiteur Jean de Beaune,” in Oliviana, posted online 27 June 2006. URL http://oliviana.revues.org/document26.html. 22 Sed, quod maius est, procuravimus quod per aliquos dominos cardinales fuit predictis pestiferis legitime facta fides quod prefatus sanctissimus et dominus dominus Iohannes papa in consistorio dominorum cardinalium, lecto coram eo predicto publico instrumento in quo continebantur confessiones per eos facte coram prefato generali ministro, oraculo vive vocis dixit ipsas eorum confessiones esse hereticas et eos sicut hereticos, et fautores eorum sicut fautores hereticorum censendos fore et etiam fore iudicandos. (Michael Monachus, “Inquisitoris sententia contra combustos in Massilia,” Oliviana, posted online 27 June 2006. URL http://oliviana.revues.org/document36.html; see also Baluze-Mansi, Miscellanea, ii. 248).

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Dominican Inquisitors: three were burned in Narbonne in October 1319, starting a persecution that would peak in 1322.23 Because the persecution hinged on a denial of papal authority, the figure of John XXII looms large in these sources. In the testimony of the Beguines from 1321–22, the bull Quorundam exigit is not named but simply referred to as “the constitution on granaries and cellars.” One Beguine, Raimond du Bosc, summarizes the importance of this text: Because the Friars Minor, called Spirituals, who held the convents of Narbonne and Béziers, said that they could find the necessities for daily life on any given day, they therefore did not need to have granaries or cellars or to store grain and wine. As far as the aforementioned friars were concerned, the dispensation given through the constitution of the lord pope [Quorundam exigit], that the Friars Minor could have granaries and cellars or could store grain and wheat, and even the constitution itself, was unjust and they ought not to be held to obey the lord pope in this matter, nor should they obey, and if they do obey, they sin.24

Here Raymond only implicitly addresses the question of whether the pope had the power to make such a decretal in the first place. Other Beguines were more explicit and typically responded—just as the four Spirituals burned in Marseilles had—that the pope exceeded his authority in conceding granaries and cellars to the friars.25 The use of the verb dispensare by Raymond and by many others to describe the pope’s action in Quorundam exigit is telling: John was supposed to have dispensed Franciscans from their vow of poverty by conceding communal

23 Jean-Louis Biget, “Culte et rayonnement de Pierre Déjean Olieu en Languedoc au début du XIVe siècle,” in Pierre de Jean Olivi (1248–1298): pensée scolastique, dissidence spirituelle et société. Actes du colloque de Narbonne (mars 1998), ed. A. Boureau and S. Piron (Paris: Vrin, 1999), 277–308 at 297 suggests that the number of executions declined after this year. For a comprehensive list of the Beguines and their fates, see Louisa Burnham, “A Prosopography of the Beguines and Spiritual Friars of Languedoc,” Oliviana, posted online 27 June 2006. URL: http://oliviana.revues. org/document37.html. 24 Raimond du Bosc, Le Livre des Sentences, 1300: Item quia fratres Minores, qui tunc conventum Narbonensem et Bitterrensem, vocati Spirituales, dicebant quod ipsi poterant invenire necessaria vite sue pro qualibet die et quod non indigebant granariis vel cellariis vel quod congregarent bladum et vinum. Dispensacio facta per constitutionem domini pape quod fratres Minores possint habere granaria vel cellaria seu congregare bladum et vinum, quoad predictos fratres fuit injusta, et etiam constitucio, nec tenebantur nec debebant obedire in hoc domino pape, et si obedivissent, peccasent. . . . 25 Raimond d’Antusan, ibid., 1344: Item credidit et credebat quod papa non posset facere constitucionem per quam concederet fratribus Minoribus quod possent habere cellaria vel granaria ad conservandum bladum vel vinum in conmuni pro victu suo.

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property to them.26 This was not the language of the decretal nor of the condemnation sentence of the four Spirituals, but the terminology of the academic discussion about whether the pope could dispense religious from their vows, and specifically the Franciscan vow of poverty with the usus pauper that Peter of John Olivi and his Spiritual followers envisioned it entailed.27 Pope John had been careful to underscore in Quorundam exigit that he was not giving a new dispensation to the friars to have cellars and granaries, since Clement V had already made such an allowance in the case of necessity. Nevertheless, this is precisely how his bull was interpreted: partly because Olivi’s theories supplied a looking-glass through which John XXII was viewed28 and partly because the practical result of the pope’s decision would be the common possession of consumables for the friars of Béziers and Narbonne who had lost their appeal against their superiors. Some Beguines believed that John had sinned or erred in making Quorundam exigit,29 others thought that he had become a heretic30 and ceased to be pope,31 and still others applied Olivi’s apocalyptic figure of the mystical Antichrist to John on this account.32 Another practical result of Quorundam exigit—and one that certainly colored its interpretation—was persecution, and fault for this was quite sensibly laid at the feet of John XXII. For some, the pope erred or acted unjustly when he delivered the Spirituals into the

26 E.g. Mathieu Terré, ibid., 1376: Item dixit se credidisse quod papa non poterat dispensare quod fratres Minores haberent granaria et cellaria quia hoc est contra votum paupertatis fratrum Minorum. 27 I.e. “Queritur an Papa possit in omni voto dispensare, et specialiter an in votis evangelicis,” in Petri Iohannis Olivi Quaestiones de Romano Pontifice, ed. M. Bartoli (Grottaferrata: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 2002), 134. 28 On this, see David Burr, “Did the Beguines Understand Olivi?” in Pierre de Jean Olivi (1248–1298), 309–18. 29 E.g. Pierre Tort, Le Livre des Sentences, 1404: Dixit se credidisse quod dominus papa faciendo dictam constitucionem peccavit et male fecit. 30 E.g. Pierre Morès, ibid., 1314: Item credidit esse hereticos dominum papam qui concessit fratribus minoribus habere granaria et cellaria, et omnes qui hoc procuraverunt. 31 E.g. Bernard Gui, Sermo 12 September 1322, ibid., 1614–16: Petrus Hospitalis . . . Item credidit et adhuc credit Romanam ecclesiam nunc non habere papam, set credit vacare papatum, quia licet dominus papa XXIIus qui nunc est, a principio fuerit verus papa, tamen modo non est nec fuit, sed desiit esse papa ex quo fecit dictam constitucionem et perseveravit et adhuc perseverat eam pertinactier sustinendo. 32 E.g. Guillaume Ros, ibid., 1360: Item quod dominus papa Johannes XXIIus, faciendo constitucionem seu declaracionem quod fratres Minores possent habere granaria et cellaria ad conservandum bladum et vinum in conmuni, fecit injuste et contra regulam sancti Francisci, et in hoc condemnavit paupertatem et vitam et Evangelium Jhesu Christi et fecit factum Anti-Christale et fuit factus misticus Anti-Christus, preparator vie majoris Anti-Christi, sed hoc ultimum ipse non credidit.

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hands of their superiors33 or the inquisitor;34 for others, it was the actual condemnation and burning of the four Spirituals or of the Beguines that made him a heretic and/or the mystical Antichrist.35 While John was most often held directly responsible for the persecution, at other times his remoteness from the proceedings gave space for equivocation about his intentions: the pope only became a heretic if, fully informed about the beliefs of the friars, he still consented to their execution—that is to say, if he had not been deceived by inquisitors.36 What this Beguine testimony reveals is a variety of negative opinions about John XXII; behind the image of an erring pope, there lay divergent and sometimes equivocal assessments of culpability and crime. But, more than that, this 1321–22 material provides an underappreciated historical context for John XXII’s actions in the Apostolic poverty controversy of 1322–23. It is easy to see Quorundam exigit, with its insistence on obedience over the Franciscan Rule’s minutiae, such as the shabbiness of the habit and stores of grain and wine, as dealing with practical matters and thus only tangentially related to the “theoretical” controversy over the poverty of Christ in the 1320s. But a direct connection can be observed in the constitution’s interpretation by Beguines when they were questioned by Dominican inquisitors like Bernard Gui. John XXII had de facto conceded communal property to the friars in his constitution—something considered by the Spirituals and Beguines to be against the Franciscan Rule’s vow of poverty (with its usus pauper) and the Apostolic example on which it is based. In so doing, and in persecuting the Spirituals and the Beguines who opposed this, John condemned evangelical poverty, and by denying that Christ

33 Guillaume Ros, ibid., 1360: Item quod dominus papa Johannes XXIIus fecit inique et injuste et maliciose quando tradidit fratres Minores de conventu Narbonensi et Biterrensi qui volebant servare paupertatem et puritatem regule sancti Francisci in potestate aliorum fratrum Minorum qui tenebant communitatem ordinis et presequebantur eos. 34 Bernard de Na Jaime, ibid., 1332: Item dixit se credidisse quod dominus papa Johannes XXII qui mandavit vel consenciit quod dicti Beguini velut heretici condempnarentur erraverat et errasset, nescit tamen si credidit quod erraret in fide vel quod hereticus esset. 35 E.g. Pierre Gaustaud, ibid., 1389: Item credidit quod predictus dominus papa Johannes XXIIus factus fuit hereticus quando consentiit quod contra dictos fratres qui nolebant obedire procederent tanquam contra hereticus . . . Item credidit diem de dicto domino papa quod factus fuit hereticus quando consentiit et sustinuit quod Beguini . . . fuerunt condempnati tamquam heretici. 36 E.g. Bernarde de Cintegabelle, ibid., 1352: Item credidit et credebat quod prelati et inquisitores qui condemnaverunt ipsos et dominus papa, si consenserat in hoc, male fecerant et injuste et dampnarentur nisi super hoc peniterent.

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and the Apostles had nothing either individually or in common, John erred and became a heretic. This last accusation is conventionally associated with the Michaelist Franciscans, and their writings are the second group of contemporary Franciscan sources that disapprove of John XXII. The two leaders, Michael of Cesena and Bonagrazia of Bergamo, had been deeply involved in engineering the persecution of the Spirituals in the first years of the pontificate and their own later portrait of the pope closely resembles that of their adversaries. The foundational Michaelist text is the Appellatio in forma maiori, a 1328 appeal against Pope John to all Christendom signed by Michael, ghostwritten by Bonagrazia, and inspired by Olivi;37 the text was composed after a clandestine flight from Avignon to Italy where their future patron, Ludwig of Bavaria, had deposed John XXII in absentia from the papal throne that same year. Their appeal justified these actions by arguing that John XXII had become a heretic some years previously with his constitution Cum inter nonnullos (and, to a lesser extent, Ad conditorem canonum). John was alleged to have contradicted a doctrine of the Church—that Christ and the Apostles had nothing either individually or in common except for a “simple use of fact” of goods—embodied in Exiit qui seminat, Nicholas III’s 1279 declaration on the Franciscan Rule. The Appellatio’s account of John’s manifestation of heresy reached its mature form in the Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite38—more a collection of papal bulls and Michaelist tracts prefaced with interpretative introductions than a real chronicle—which serves historians as the primary guide to the Apostolic poverty controversy in much the same way that Angelo Clareno’s History supplies a narrative for the persecution of the Spirituals. But the Chronicle is not nearly as good as Angelo’s History in providing either a life-like picture of John XXII or a framework for understanding his actions. The work begins abruptly in the second half of 1321, making an almost complete break from the four year campaign against Franciscan dissidents, and it situates

37 The text can be found in Nicolaus Minorita: Chronica, ed. G. Gál and D. Flood (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1996), 227–424. For a detailed theoretical analysis, see Wittneben, Bonagratia von Bergamo, 290–349. 38 For this work, see Wittneben, Bonagratia von Bergamo, 353–79; also Jürgen Miethke, “Der erste vollständige Druck der sogennanten ‘Chronik des Nikolaus Minorita’ (von 1330/1338). Bemerkungen zur Präsentation eines ‘Farbbuches’ des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 54 (1998): 623–42.

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John’s subsequent constitutions within the narrative of an entirely new controversy. The Chronicle starts with a Dominican Inquisitor, Jean de Beaune, ready to condemn a Beguine who “asserted, amongst other things, that Christ and the Apostles, following the way of perfection, did not have anything by right of property or dominium either individually or in common.”39 The Beguine is suddenly defended by a Franciscan lector, Berengar Talon, who cites Exiit qui seminat and, when asked to recant by the inquisitor, appeals to the Holy See. Pope John XXII, however, wished to “define the opposite of what had been defined” in the bull of Nicholas III, so he had the Franciscan arrested in Avignon and publicly asked the question: whether it was heretical to assert that Christ and the Apostles did not have anything either individually or in common.40 The Chronicle’s narrative thus places Exiit qui seminat and its contradiction at the center of a conflict between pope and Franciscans over the property rights of Christ and the Apostles. The Appellatio in forma maiori, followed by the Chronicle, stresses that John’s hostile intentions towards Exiit qui seminat and the Franciscan Order were made clear in his bull of 26 March 1322: Quia nonnumquam. The opening words of the text are then quoted: Because sometimes what in a conjecture one believes will be useful, subsequent experience shows to be harmful, it should not be judged blameworthy if a legislator of canons applies himself to revoke, modify, or suspend canons, issued by himself or his predecessors.41

This statement at first glance seems a persuasive piece of evidence for the Michaelist claim that John was targeting Exiit, but the problem with the citation is that it is missing the words “or anything contained in these canons,”42 a qualifier that makes John’s statement a more modest one. 39 Chronica, 62; The passage of the Appellatio in forma maiori, from which the beginning of the Chronicle derives, makes no mention of property rights: qui beguinus adserebat quod Christus et apostoli non habuerunt aliquid in speciali nec etiam in communi (Chronica, 309). 40 Chronica, 63: Volens igitur dictus dominus Ioannes papa de dicta quaestione et quibusdam aliis definire oppositum eorum quae in dicta decretali Exiit exstitit definitum. 41 Chronica, 64–65; Appellatio in forma maiori, 312: Quia nonnunquam quod coniectura profuturum credidit subsequens experientia nociuus ostendit, non debet reprehensibile, si canonum conditor canones a se uel suis predecessoribus editos reuocare modificare uel suspendere studeat. 42 Uel aliqua in eisdem contenta canonibus, in Extrauagantes Iohannis XXII, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, ed. J. Tarrant, Series B, Corpus Collectionum 6 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1983), 217–18.

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The omitted phrase is, in fact, directly relevant to the content of Quia nonnumquam itself which revokes a minor provision in Exiit qui seminat dealing with church discipline: the excommunication sentence forbidding the discussion of matters related to the Franciscan Rule. The second time Quia nonnumquam is cited in the Appellatio in forma maiori two full phrases are omitted in the citation: in the first John notes that “words can have many meanings . . . and it is not easy to read and understand perfectly Exiit qui seminat, while avoiding its adjoining penalties. . . .”43 Recalled here is Nicholas III’s referral of questions about his text to the Holy See. The second omission from John’s bull states that the excommunication sentence is lifted “while We hold a consistory in the presence of Our brothers, the many Archbishops, Bishops, and prelates, not to mention the many doctors of both laws and masters of theology.”44 This passage reveals the practical purpose of Quia nonnumquam: to facilitate a debate of experts in Avignon on ambiguous matters related to Franciscan and Apostolic poverty by revoking Nicholas III’s prohibition on discussion. The Appellatio in forma maiori was meant to convince the world that John was a heretic who needed to be brought to trial before a General Council of the Church. It (along with the document collection called the Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite) can therefore be said to represent a “case for the prosecution” and, like many such cases, the story of crime told is a partial one. An even greater limitation to these sources, however, is their tendency to manipulate the evidence (as above) to fortify the case against the Pope.45 Their historical narrative—starting with John’s intentions in 1322 and running through a selective account of events until 1328—is tightly tailored to the requirements of their theoretical polemic. Within this construction, there was little room for a debate on Apostolic poverty in 1322 because the matter needed to have been settled definitively and unambiguously by Exiit 43 Extrauagantes, 219–20: Quodque sub eadem littera sepe latet multiplex intellectus, necnon esse difficile uolentibus constitutionem predictam perfecte legere ac intelligere penas adiectas in constitutione huiusmodi deuitare. 44 Extrauagantes, 219–20: In fratrum nostrorum ac multorum archiepiscoporum et episcoporum et aliorum prelatorum, necnon multorum professorum utriusque iuris et multorum sacre theologie magistrorum praesentia, dum consistorium teneremus. 45 I investigate some cases of apparent misrepresentation from the Appellatio in forma maiori in “Thomas of Braunceston O.M./O.P.,” Kirchenbild und Spiritualität: Dominikanische Beiträge zur Ekklesiologie und zum kirchlichen Leben im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Ulrich Horst OP zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. T. Prügl and Marianne Schlosser (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 179–95.

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qui seminat. Additionally, if the charge of heresy against the pope was to be convincing, John’s constitutions had to be the product of a single individual with a reprobus sensus and the heretical opinion expressed in them distinctly his own. Thus, the potential counsel and consent of the cardinals or any wider process of consultation at the curia that might mitigate the pope’s culpability for the content of his bulls needed to be either downplayed or explained away.46 Recent historical research has shown that there was, in fact, an exceptional amount of deliberation in 1322–23 at the Roman curia; several consistories were held where the question of whether Christ and the Apostles had nothing either individually or in common was debated. Written opinions were solicited and received from the over sixty cardinals, bishops, and masters of theology present in Avignon at the time; these texts were then recopied into what is now MS Vatican BAV vat. lat. 3740, a manuscript studied and annotated by John XXII in the preparation of his bulls Ad conditorem canonum and Cum inter nonnullos. While this process of consultation may not have been an exercise in collegiality or collaborative decision-making, there is nonetheless no reason to suppose that the opinions offered to the pope were disingenuous or that John XXII did not take into consideration what was said—all the more because the influence of certain consilia in the manuscript (such as those of the Franciscan Cardinal Bertrand de la Tour) can be clearly detected in the text of the pope’s constitutions.47 The Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite and the Appellatio in forma maiori provide a history of the Apostolic poverty controversy which unequivocally represents John XXII as a heretical tyrant. They supply the pope with an intention in 1322—“to define the opposite of those things already defined in Exiit qui seminat”—that is no more than their fundamental accusation against him. Historians have long recognized that this account, taken on its own, is unsatisfying.48 To compensate, they turned to other sources and worked back from 1322, searching

46 The last six paragraphs recapitulate arguments made in my Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 21–22. 47 Ibid. 48 E.g. Thomas Turley, “John XXII and the Franciscans: A Reappraisal,” in Popes, Teachers and Canon Law in the Middle Ages, ed. J.R. Sweeney and S. Chodorow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 74–88 at 86 n. 41: “This seems to be the source of much of the confusion regarding Pope John’s motives in questioning the Franciscan Poverty doctrine.”

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for the origins of John’s alleged antipathy towards Exiit qui seminat. Joseph Koch first proposed the hypothesis that it was the report of the theological commission on Peter of John Olivi’s Apocalypse Commentary that formed John’s opinion: the committee, which had been appointed by John at the beginning of his reign in connection with the Spirituals’ case, noted that Olivi’s identification of the Franciscan Rule and the Gospel was heretical if understood literally, but correct if understood in the way that Exiit qui seminat has associated the two. The decretal thus stood in the way of a condemnation of Olivi’s commentary.49 Subsequent scholars found this theory too tidy and posited a somewhat looser connection between the process against Olivi’s commentary and the apostolic poverty controversy; they suggest that this report50 and/or another by Guiu Terreni O.Carm. and Pierre de la Palud O.P. on an Olivi-inspired Catalan tract brought to John’s attention the similarity of the theological claims of the Spirituals and Beguines to beliefs held by the Order as a whole and backed up by Nicholas III’s bull.51 After this intellectual epiphany sometime in 1319, John looked for an occasion to

49 Josef Koch, “Der Prozess gegen die Postille Olivis zur Apokalypse,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 5 (1933): 302–15; Restated in Gál and Flood, Chronica, 52–53: “This led the pope to see a connection between the Lectura, Franciscan poverty, and Exiit qui seminat.” Sylvain Piron, “Censures et condamnation de Pierre de Jean Olivi: enquête dans les marges du Vatican,” in Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Âge 118/2 (2006): 313–73 at 372 is skeptical of such an explicit link and makes the case for a Beguin connection on which my own account builds (see notes 53, 58, 59, 62, 77 below). 50 Malcolm Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210–1323 (London: SPCK, 1961), 222–23; Leff, Heresy in the Middle Ages I, 161 n. 2; Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 174–75; Malcolm Lambert, “The Franciscan Crisis under John XXII,” Franciscan Studies 32 (1972): 123–43; James Heft, John XXII and Papal Teaching Authority (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1986), 25–26; David Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 244–47. 51 Turley, “John XXII and the Franciscans,” 81–84; Andrea Tabarroni, Paupertas Christi et Apostolorum: L’ideale francescano in discussione (1322–24) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1990), 14–20; Jean Dunbabin, A Hound of God: Pierre de la Palud and the Fourteenth-Century Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Malcolm Lambert, Franciscan Poverty, 2nd ed. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1998), 237–38; Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 266–67; Wittneben, Bonagratia von Bergamo, 108; Michael Robson, The Franciscans in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 132.

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act and finally found it when Berengar Talon’s case came before him in 1321: the appeal of the Franciscan lector functioned as a pretext.52 But there are good grounds for thinking that it was more than that and for taking the context of the persecution of the Beguines seriously. The appeal against the Dominican Inquisitor came out of a 1321 process in Narbonne which reached its conclusion on 28 February 1322 with the handing over of twenty-one Beguines to be burned.53 Two days previously, on 26 February 1322, John had written to all the bishops in the South of France, stating that he had heard troubling things about some members of the Third Order of St. Francis: they disputed certain articles of faith, sacraments, and the Apostolic plenitude of power. Because of the danger posed to simple souls, John, therefore, asked the bishops to gather the members together and examine them.54 This letter can be paired with a recently-discovered constitution from earlier in the month (19 February) which altered Supra montem, Nicholas IV’s Rule for the Franciscan Third Order, by specifying that prospective candidates must be vetted by their local bishop for doctrinal soundness.55 The evidence suggests that comprehensive measures against Beguine unorthodoxy were being taken when John XXII began consulting experts on whether it was heretical to assert that Christ and the Apostles did not have anything in common. Many scholars have pointed out that the heresy of the Beguines came down almost entirely to a denial of papal authority.56 Likewise, they

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E.g. Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 175: “. . . a routine appeal to the curia would not in itself explain the pope’s eagerness to turn the affair into a cause célèbre. The appeal of John of Belna [sic] was at most the occasion, not the reason for the pope’s action.” 53 See Richard Emery, Heresy and Inquisition in Narbonne (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 132–33; Sylvain Piron, “Un cahier de travail.” D. Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 244, notes that by 1322 there had been perhaps as many as seventy Beguines executed in the three years of persecution. 54 BF v. no. 462: In huiusmodi ordine tertio sunt nonnullae sexus utriusque personae . . . de articulis fidei, de sacramentis ecclesiae, de apostolicae potestatis plenitudine, ac in quantum claves eiusdem ecclesiae se extendit, altercari et disputare. See the comments of Manselli, Spirituali e Beghini, 214: “Una decisione di tale gravità . . . mostra l’esatto peso del pericolo che Giovanni XXII vedeva ergersi contra di sè.” 55 Josep Perarnau, “La butlla desconeguda de Joan XXII ‘Ut vester religionis ager’ (Avinyó, 19 de febrer de 1322) sobre l’examen dels aspirants al Terç Orde de S. Francesco,” Estudios franciscanos 83 (1982): 307–10. Bernard Gui alludes to the contents of this bull in Manuel de l’inquisiteur, ed. G. Mollat (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1964), i, 156. 56 Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans, 246: “In a curious way then inquisitorial action against the Spiritual Franciscans and against the Beguins resembled that against antipapal Ghibellines in Italy during the same period. There too the charge of heresy was

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have highlighted the contemporary uncertainty surrounding this “new” heresy. Bernard Gui, O.P. in his Liber sententiarum, for example, took exceptional measures to justify his judgments against the Beguines in 1322.57 Similarly, an undated text (probably from around 1320) specifies that John XXII himself had received a query from a bishop asking that the heresy be explained; the pope delegated the inquisitor Jean de Beaune, O.P. to respond to the questions.58 The appeal of Berengar Talon against Jean de Beaune which began the Apostolic poverty controversy is itself a dramatization of such uncertainty.59 And it is important to note that the statement from this appeal which the pope then presented to his consultants in March 1322, “that Christ and the Apostles did not have anything either individually or in common,” was not the random formulation of any single Beguine but a notably frequent statement in 1321–22, at least if the Liber sententiarum of Bernard Gui, O.P. is to be trusted.60 In fact, Gui seems to have considered it the fundamental

partly based on the assumption that disobedience implied a denial of papal authority and thus a denial of the Nicene Creed”; Jean Chiffoleau, “L’Inquisition franciscaine en Provence,” in Frati Minori e inquisizione: Atti del XXXIII Convegno internazionale Assisi, 6–8 ottobre 2005 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2006), 153–284 at 260: “Ce ne sont pas leurs positions dogmatiques ou leur style de vie qui sont d’abord condamnés, c’est leur refus de reconnaître la pleine valeur des décisions souveraines prises par Jean XXII.” 57 Given, “The Béguines in Bernard Gui’s Liber Sententiarum,” notes, regarding the case of two men who were sent to the stake in September 1322, “the unusual sentence in Gui’s register . . . where he sets about constructing an argument against the views of the Beguines” (154–55). Pales-Gobilliard remarks on the structure of the Liber sententiarum as a whole: “Contrairement à celles condamnant les Cathares, les sentences à l’encontre des Béguins sont précédées de dépositions conséquentes. En raison de la nouveauté de ces doctrines, les notaires de l’Inquisition ont consigné dans le livre des sentences et probablement, à la requête de Bernard Gui, l’intégralité de leurs aveux” (54). 58 Baluze-Mansi, ii. 274: Quaestiones aut dubia quae circa illa quae sunt fidei oriuntur ad sedem apostolicam pertinet interpretari, declarare et etiam amputare. Quamobrem ipsa sedes est semper in huiusmodi consulenda. Verum quia scripsistis quod vobis scriptum fuerant per Dominum Episcopum Ludovensem de voluntate et mandato Domini nostri summi Pontificis quod in dubiis quae scripsistis recurreretis ad Inquisitores Carcassonae vel Tolosae, ea quae mihi videntur super infrascriptis articulis seu dubiis per vos transmissis respondeo, salva semper diffinitione et iudicio sedis eiusdam et si quid secus aut aliter in responsionibus meis appareret vel inveniretur, illud totum et totaliter eius iudicio derelinquo. A text found in Jean of Beaune’s notebook which Piron hypothesizes (“Un cahier de travail”) was completed during his Narbonne process of 1321. See also Piron, “Censures et condamnation de Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 361–63. 59 This is the point of Piron, “Censures et condamnation de Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 364. 60 Consider the following statements all taken from Bernard Gui’s General Sermon from 4 and 5 July 1322 which collects material from the previous year; Raymond du Bosc, Le Livre des Sentences, 1302: Item credidit quod dominus Christi et apostoli nichil habuerunt nec in proprio nec in conmuni; Pierre Morès, ibid., 1324: Item credidit et

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error of the Beguines since he lists it first in his section devoted to the subject in The Inquisitor’s Manual.61 When viewed in the context of intense persecution, doctrinal uncertainty, and renewed papal activity, John’s reaction to the extraordinary appeal of Berengar Talon might be seen less in terms of an ulterior motive (viz., to overturn Exiit) than a straightforward one: to have a recurrent and fundamental Beguine statement, which had been generated as a consequence of Quorundam exigit, distinguished from orthodox belief and officially condemned. Perhaps it was not so much the intellectual apprehension of a problematic idea from a theological report that motivated the pope as the practical realization through a legal appeal of the dangerous doctrinal situation on the ground.62 What seems to have been particularly troubling was the implication (drawn out by at least one Beguine63 and by the pope himself )64 that if Christ and the Apostles did indeed have nothing individually or in common, then those who thought that they had common property might be

credebat quod Christus et apostoli nichil habuerunt in proprio nec in conmuni, et quod apostoli non potuerunt habere aliquid in conmuni sine diminucione perfeccionis eorum et sine peccato; Bernard de Na Jaima, ibid., 1334: Item dixit se credidisse quod dominus Jesus Christus et apostoli nunquam habuerunt aliquid in communi; Raimond d’Antusan, ibid., 1346: Item credidit et credebat ipse et alii Beguini quod Christus et apostoli nichil habuerunt in proprio vel in conmuni; Guillaume Ros, ibid., 1358: Articuli autem sunt isti, videlicet quod Christus et apostoli non habuerunt aliquid in proprio vel in conmuni; Pierre Calvet, ibid., 1370: Item quod Christus et apostoli non habuerunt aliquid in proprio vel communi, et de hoc ipse dubitabat, quia audiverat dici quod Judas portabat loculos; Raimond Esteve, ibid., 1388: Item credidit et tenuit quod Christus et apostoli nichil habuerunt nec in proprio nec in conmuni. 61 Manuel de l’inquisiteur, i. 118: Sequitur de articulis erroneis aut scismaticis aut temerariis aut falsis Bequinorum predictorum et sequacium eorumdem—In primis itaque dicunt et asserunt illi qui a vulgo Bequini nominatur . . . se credere et tenere quod Dominus Jhesus Christus, in quantum fuit homo, et eius apostoli nichil habuerunt in proprio nec etiam in communi. 62 Or, as Piron, “Censures et condamnation de Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 372, puts it: “. . . le pape aurait été exaspéré de voir revenir devant lui, quatre ans plus tard, un dossier qu’il croyait réglé et auquel il aurait alors décidé d’apporter une response plus générale.” 63 Mathieu Terré, Le Livre des Sentences, 1380: Item se dixit se credidisse quod Dominus Jhesu Christus, quamdiu vixerit in mundo, nichil habuit in proprio nec in conmuni, et quod majoris perfeccionis est nichil omnino habere quam aliquid habere, credens quod quicumque teneret et crederet contrarium hereticus esset. 64 Cf. The account of the consistory debate on 6 March 1322 where the pope addresses the defenders of the poverty of Christ: “Arise brother Arnaud and repeat those inane and presumptuous things you said a little earlier when you made us all heretics” (Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal, 16); “Speak as you did the other day when you made all these people heretics” (ibid., 17). My italics.

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heretics—a group of believers that would have comprised much of the Church of the day and of the past as well. The best evidence for John’s intentions are, naturally, his own writings.65 Despite having been studied intensively by scholars for their theoretical content, his bulls can still be revealing historically, especially in their largely-neglected draft form. For example, the definitive text of Cum inter nonnullos begins: Since among some scholarly men it has frequently been called into doubt, with various and contrary opinions being advanced, whether to affirm obstinately that our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ and His Apostles did not have anything, either individually or in common, should be condemned as heretical, we wish to put an end to this argument.66

The bull was promulgated in November 1323, some twenty months after John first posed the question to experts; its image of a papal determinatio resolving an academic disagreement reflects both the extensive debate that had just occurred at the papal court and, more distantly, the Secular-Mendicant and Franciscan-Dominican controversies of the thirteenth century. But, in the undated draft version of Cum inter nonnullos in MS BAV Vat. Lat. 3740,67 John XXII does not locate his condemnation within a distinctively academic context: the “some” (nonnullos) are not identified as men of learning (viros scholasticos) nor does it state that the pope wants to put an end to an old argument (concertationi finem imponere). Instead, the pope simply notes that a struggle (certaminis) over the deeds or facts of Christ’s poverty might supply an occasion for people to err and to attribute to Christ and the Apostles either what is not suitable or what should suitably be denied.68

65 These include his annotations to manuscripts: see ibid., 165–69. For MS Vatican BAV Vat. Lat. 3740; for MS Vatican BAV Borghese 242, see Patrick Nold, “Pope John XXII’s Annotations on the Franciscan Rule: Content and Contexts,” Franciscan Studies 65 (2007): 295–324. 66 Extrauagantes, 255–57: Cum inter nonnullos scolasticos sepe contingat in dubium reuocari utrum pertinaciter affirmare Redemptorem nostrum et dominum Iesum Christum et eiusque apostolos in speciali non habuisse aliqua nec in communi etiam hereticum sit censendum, diuersis diuersa et adversa sentientibus circa illud, nos, huic concertationi finem imponere cupientes. . . . 67 See Louis Duval-Arnould, “La constitution ‘Cum inter nonnullos’ de Jean XXII,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 77 (1984): 406–20. 68 Duval-Arnould, “La constitution,” 418: “Cum inter nonnullos perceperimus in dubium revocari utrum sit hereticum dicere nichil in speciali vel in communi Christum eiusque apostolos habuisse, diversis diversa sencientibus circa illud, nos ne occasione dicti

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In both the draft and final redactions of Cum inter nonnullos, the first paragraph condemns the unqualified statement that Christ and the Apostles did not have anything either individually or in common as a direct contradiction of Scripture. Academically, this condemnation was uncontroversial since what really mattered was how the term “to have” was defined, yet it makes sense in the context of the Beguine statements found in the Liber sententiarum of Bernard Gui mentioned above.69 Likewise, the primitive version of Cum inter nonnullos seems to be firmly grounded in such a context when it says that the statement “ought to be considered erroneous and henceforth heretical, if a pertinacious defense should be attached to it.”70 The second part of Cum inter nonnullos builds on the first and concerns the rights of Christ and the Apostles: it underwent a radical revision over the course of 1323 and would be the focal point of the later debate with the Michaelists over the contradiction of Exiit qui seminat. However, when placed against the backdrop of the curial consilia and the need for a basic condemnation, the definitive version seems to approximate a consensus statement of learned opinion about the minimum rights which Christ and the Apostles must have enjoyed over their goods given the testimony of Scripture: of using, consuming, selling, giving away, and acquiring things.71 Shortly after the promulgation of Cum inter nonnullos, John XXII sent it to several bishops asking that his new text be studied at the centers of learning within their jurisdiction: specifically at Padua, Montpellier, and Rome.72 The letter which introduces the constitution provides a raison d’être different from that found in the text itself: John explains to the bishops that he has been led to promulgate this declaration on the counsel of his cardinals “against a few curiosi who lately ‘being more wise than it behoveth’ have undermined the teaching of the Apostle in

certaminis circa praemissorum gesta uel facta quempiam errare contingat ipsisque quod non congruit uel quod congruit denegari, de fratrum nostrorum consilio, hoc perpetuo declaramus edicto premissum dictum…”. Italicized words appear in the final version. 69 Cf. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty, 259: “The first doctrine to be condemned is the undifferentiated thesis of the Languedoc Beguine . . . Taken literally, this was hardly sense”; see also Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal, 172–73. 70 Duval-Arnould, “La constitution,” 419: Fore censendum erroneum, ac deinceps hereticum si deffensionem pertinacem adiungi contingeret dicto tali. In the definitive version, the wording is changed to “pertinacem assertionem.” 71 On this point, see Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal, 125–37, 173–74. 72 See Duval-Arnould, “La constitution,” 411–14.

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pertinaciously asserting things that are opposed to the Catholic faith and repugnant to the teachings of the Fathers.”73 The curiosi to which John refers are almost certainly the Spirituals and Beguines; the pope had used the same scriptural passage from Romans [12:3] to describe the Spirituals in Quorundam exigit74 and he also alluded to it in his February 1322 letter to the Southern French bishops about unorthodox Beguines.75 John XXII had also made a veiled reference to the Spiritual Franciscans in his first redaction of Ad conditorem canonum (December 1322). In this bull John discontinued the practical arrangement whereby the Holy See held the dominium of the Franciscan goods. One of the reasons originally offered for making the Order have communal property de iure was that the Holy See’s retention of dominium harmed the Franciscans by providing occasion for dangerous schisms to arise, with more costly dangers to follow. Significantly, John noted that up until that point an end had not been given to these dangers nor could this even be hoped for so long as the arrangement remained.76 Michael of Cesena and Bonagrazia of Bergamo initially interpreted John’s constitutions as being directed against the Spirituals and Olivi’s concept of usus pauper, and as being reconcilable with Exiit qui seminat.77 When they finally broke with the pope in 1328, their interpretation changed. The Spirituals were removed from the picture and John’s bulls became the broadside of a heretical pope on Exiit qui seminat and on the entire Franciscan Order. Relying on sources like the Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite which encourage such a reading, scholarship has largely echoed the Michaelist story. But there is evidence, both textual and contextual, to suggest that their original interpretation was at least

73 Ibid., 413: Nuper adversus nonnullos curiosos, ‘plus sapere quam oporteat’ contra doctrinam apostoli molientes, pertinaciter affirmantes quedam catholice fidei obvia et sanctorum patrum doctrine repugnantia et adversa quandam declaratoriam constitutionem de fratrum nostrorum consilio duximus promulgandam. . . . 74 Quorundam exigit, BF V no. 289: Ex fratribus antedicti ordinibus ‘plus sapere quam oporteat sapere’ novarum adinventiones ambiguitatem. . . . 75 BF V no. 462: . . . postmodum ex humanae malignitate naturae, quae semper ad vetita labitur et plus quaerit sapere quam oportet, in perniciosos revolvuntur errores animarum perniciem parituros, ad Romani pontificis providentiam errores ipsos non pertransire silentio . . . . 76 Chronica, 86: Nocuit insuper dictis fratribus retentio ante dicta, cum eius occasione inter fratres eiusdem Ordinis periculosa suborta fuerint schismata, dispendiosa pericula subsecuta, quibus hactenus dari finis non potuit nec speratur quod ad illum ipsa durante valeat perveniri; see Nold, Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal, 157. 77 See Wittneben, Bonagratia von Bergamo, 194–279; Piron, “Censures et condamnation de Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 365–71.

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partially correct: that the Spirituals and Beguines were still on John’s mind in 1322–23 and that his bulls were more reactions intended to address old problems than provocations starting new ones. A full account of John XXII’s intervention in the history of the Order of Friars Minor which integrates all the material mentioned above needs to be written. This brief investigation into the treatment of the pope in contemporary Franciscan sources has synthesized some of the results of recent research, but it has largely limited itself to a tale of two bulls, Quorundam exigit and Cum inter nonnullos, and their unfavorable reception. Both texts generated sources that accused John XXII of being an erring or heretical pope over poverty: the inquisitorial testimony of the persecuted Spirituals or Beguines and the polemical literature of the Michaelists. Historians have tended to treat these bulls and sources separately, as part of discrete Franciscan controversies. But a closer look at the material juxtaposed reveals some indication of a connection. And, from this perspective, it is striking that John’s bulls Ad conditorem canonum and Cum inter nonnullos do in theory exactly what the Beguines had been accusing the pope of having previously done in practice with Quorundam exigit: making the Franciscans have property in common, foremost consumable goods, and condemning the absolute poverty of Christ. Whether this was an intention of John XXII or a mere coincidence is for future scholars to judge.

KICKING THE HABIT: THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE FRIARS IN A FOURTEENTHCENTURY ENCYCLOPEDIA Penn Szittya

Shelved in the Royal Collection of the British Library is a massive, four volume encyclopedia, which titles itself immodestly but only slightly inaccurately Omne Bonum.1 Written in England between 1360 and 1375, in the generation of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, its four volumes contain over one thousand three hundred and fifty articles. They are written on over 1100 parchment folios, 2200 pages, each measuring 18 by 12 inches, that is, large enough so that each octavo gathering constitutes the skin of a single sheep. It would have taken 140 head of sheep to provide the skins for this ambitious and ostentatiously expensive project. Some of the illuminations in this encyclopedia are quite spectacular. The book begins with a series of three sumptuous paintings connected with the Beatific Vision of God. The first illustrates the Instruments of the Passion, the Arma Christi, such as the spear, sponge, crown of thorns, dice, forceps, flails, wounds (Fig. 1).2 This painting is accompanied by an exhortation to meditate on the Arma Christi and to recite a prayer to the Holy Face, depicted in the center. In that respect, this painting is only a preface to the next page, which shows the vision of God experienced by Saints Benedict and Paul, who in turn are adored by a secular man and woman in the panel below (Fig. 2).3 There is a visionary hierarchy implicit in the arrangement. St. Benedict was privileged to see the soul of Bishop Germanus being raised to heaven, as recounted in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and that soul is in the drawing at the top of the page. St. Paul himself was raised to the Third Heaven in the well-known vision of II Corinthians 12 and saw God face to face, not through reflection. The visions

1 2 3

British Library Royal 6 E VI and 6 E VII. BL Royal 6 E VI, fol. 15, reproduced by courtesy of the British Library. BL Royal 6 E VI, fol. 16, reproduced by courtesy of the British Library.

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Fig. 1. The Instruments of the Passion, the Arma Christi.

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Fig. 2. The vision of God experienced by Saints Benedict and Paul, who in turn are adored by a secular man and woman in the panel below.

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of these two saints, the compiler explains, offer a model for meditation by the faithful and hold out the possibility of their own experience of the Beatific Vision. The third painting, on the next page of the encyclopedia, shows the Beatific Vision itself, as experienced by the souls of the faithful after their purification (Fig. 3).4 The text above the painting is the Constitution of Benedict XII, dated 1336, in which he confirmed that the Beatific Vision, “plain, clear, and open,” would be the reward of purified souls, “even before the resumption of their bodies and the general judgment.” At the bottom is a rendering of such a “plain, clear, and open” Beatific Vision together with the rewarded souls. This sumptuous and omnivorous work is particularly remarkable because we know who made it. It is a unique autograph compilation, and as the preface makes clear, a private text: privately financed, privately compiled, privately and personally written. That may be the main reason that it is extant in only one copy, the author’s own. Its author was a London bureaucrat who rose to high office in the royal civil service in the 1360s and 1370s. His name was James le Palmer, as Lucy Freeman Sandler proved some ten years ago.5 James le Palmer was the son of a prominent and well-to-do London mercer. His father owned property in several London parishes and he also held the lease of a manor in Middlesex. By 1359 James had been appointed King’s clerk in the Exchequer. Soon he became one of the clerks assigned to the Clerk of the Great Roll, otherwise known as the Engrosser. It was the Engrosser’s duty to maintain the Great Roll of the Exchequer, the Pipe Roll. The Pipe Roll was the record of the annual accounting by the Sheriffs from each county of revenues owed to the king. At sessions of the Exchequer called for this purpose in London, the sheriffs rendered their accounts orally to the Treasurer of England, and the Treasurer dictated to the Engrosser, who recorded—or rather whose teams of clerks recorded—the account on sheets already prepared with the proper headings. Although he began as simply one of the many drudges in this branch of the Exchequer bureaucracy, by 1368 James le Palmer was himself elevated to the high office of the Engrosser. As

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BL Royal 6 E VI, fol 16v, reproduced by courtesy of the British Library. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller, 1996). 5

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Fig. 3. The Beatific Vision.

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these offices were lifetime appointments, James was still the Clerk of the Great Roll when he died in 1375.6 What gives this short biography particular salience is that James le Palmer was a man who moved in the same intellectual and professional circles within the royal bureaucracy as his better-known contemporaries: Geoffrey Chaucer, who was Controller of Customs and later Clerk of the King’s Works; Thomas Hoccleve, who was Clerk of the Privy Seal; Thomas Usk, who was a legal scribe; perhaps even William Langland whose precise affiliations remain a matter of speculation. Recently, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice have suggested that the royal civil service, both in London and Dublin, “was a first home of the vernacular literary culture of Langland’s and Chaucer’s generation and that the activities of those bureaucrats participating in it were substantially, and not just accidentally, literary.”7 They propose that within the royal bureaucracy, in the London offices of the Exchequer, Chancery and the Privy Seal there was a coterie readership for English writing—and obviously from the evidence of Omne Bonum, Latin writing as well. For that reason, the 2200 pages of Omne Bonum are a gold mine of information about the interests and proclivities of the intellectual circles near Chaucer and Gower and Langland—their scholarly curiosity, their desire for comprehensive knowledge, their interest in tools of information retrieval, their aesthetics, their moral seriousness, their familiarity, indeed fascination with the law, including canon law, with which they worked every day, and with summae of many different kinds of subject matter, from nature, theology, and law. Almost none of the content of Omne bonum is original to James le Palmer. He was a compiler, not an author, taking excerpts from a vast array of sources in accordance with books that were available to him. He was interested in natural history—storks, frogs, insects, worms, air—for which he drew primarily on Bartholomeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum. He was highly interested in sin, for example in a long article on adultery, gathered from canon law compilations like the Martiniana and the Summa Summarum. Other articles concern Gluttony, Dice Playing, and Vain Glory, also taken from canon law sources and from the Manipulus Florum. He was very interested 6

For these and other biographical details, see Sandler, Omne Bonum, 1: 20–29. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literature I (1997): 59–84. 7

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in clerical life, particularly abuses of clerical status and decorum. He compiled articles on Worldly and Claustral Abuses and on Clerics, with a subsection devoted to Married Clerks. He was curious about crafts like painting and carpentry, drawing on Bartholomaeus and the Opus Imperfectum. He was obsessed with law, as in a long article on Lex, and fascinated with legal procedure, like alienation and contestation, citing the Decretals, Monaldus’ and Hostiensis’ summae of canon law, the Speculum Iudiciale, and other canon law sources. He was keenly interested in questions of morality, for example, in Conscience and in the improving of the moral life, for example by flagellation, in an article taken from the Catholicon and Guido of Basio’s Rosarium decreti. He was interested in sacraments, like baptism. He was worried about eschatology, and so includes an article on Antichrist and Astrology. He was profoundly interested in disease, for example, in articles on teeth, brain disease, communion for the sick, plague, and death. He was only modestly interested in history and historical figures, for example, Constantine, one of the few historical figures to whom an article is dedicated. He was fascinated by questions of authority, for example, in articles on papal auctoritas, education, including school discipline, and the creation of the soul. Among the most persistent and surprising patterns in James’s encyclopedia is an obsessive hostility to the mendicant friars. Thirteen widely scattered articles contain lengthy excerpts challenging the friars’ privileges and institutional status. They are attacked in articles on Absolution, Worldly and Claustral Abuses, Adulation, Apostles, Consensus, Almsgiving, Shame, Pharisees, Women, the End of the World, Flight, and Christ. Here, however, I want to focus on a single article in Omne bonum and on what it can tell us about why an Exchequer official would have such a passionate hostility to the friars. James created only one article devoted exclusively to the friars, entitled Fratres mendicantes. Its importance can be partly measured by magnitude: out of 1350 articles in the work as a whole, only eighteen are longer. This article on friars is longer than the articles on God, on Good (in an encyclopedia titled “All Good”), longer than the articles on the soul, on baptism, war, charity, heresy, man, or the pope. The longest article in the entire compilation is devoted to Christ—twenty-two folios long. But even there, the friars make a surprising appearance: three fifths of the article on Christ is devoted to the question of whether Christ begged and is extracted from

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the antimendicant arguments of two vehement critics of the friars, Jean d’Anneux and Archbishop Richard FitzRalph. The article on Fratres mendicantes (fols. 154r–161v) is particularly conspicuous because upon close examination we can see that it was originally prepared as a free-standing booklet—sixteen pages, eight folios, in other words exactly one octavo, or the skin of one sheep, folded in the usual way so that it constituted a single gathering. That the article was written separately from the rest of the work is demonstrated by the fact that as soon as it ends, it seems to begin all over again. On the two folios following the booklet, in a second article also titled Fratres mendicantes (fol. 162r–v), James repeats, with minor variation, the first nine sections of the article just finished, but without rubrics. Whatever else this gaffe tells us, it at least suggests that the two articles were undertaken chronologically and physically at some distance from each other. The shorter one appears to be simply an article like other articles in Omne bonum, but the booklet looks to be separately, perhaps even independently, conceived and created, and designed to fill out exactly one octavo gathering. This situation may reveal something of James’s working method in putting together this encyclopedia, that is, he created looseleaf gatherings, not necessarily in chronological or alphabetical order and only later sewed them together to make his large book. In a later era this might be called a pamphlet, and would have been intended for independent circulation with polemical intent. Whether or not James’s booklet circulated at all, however, is impossible to say. The Fratres mendicantes booklet received particularly sumptuous treatment. The hand is noticeably larger and the rulings more spacious than in the surrounding articles. And the article is heavily and unusually rubricated—thirty-seven numbered sections, each with its own rubric. Elsewhere, the longer articles in Omne Bonum have at most five or six rubrics and no numbers. Indeed the booklet is so elaborate that one might call it a miniature encyclopedia of the friars, a booklet within the book whose features it replicates. In the appendix, I have supplied the entire list of rubrics, together with a brief indication of the sources of the material that James excerpted under each heading. These rubrics are of special interest because they represent the rarely heard voice of James le Palmer himself. Otherwise, the rest of the article on Fratres, like the rest of the encyclopedia, consists of excerpts compiled from the works of other writers.

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Why would an Exchequer official or the Controller of Customs or a legal clerk like William Langland have such an oppositional attitude toward the friars? And what was his purpose in lavishing such attention on his antifraternal booklet? We can only infer an answer. And I am convinced at the outset that the extraordinary elaborateness of the effort argues against what might be the easiest, if the most elusive, answer, namely, that James le Palmer bore some friar or friars a personal grudge. I would like instead to offer three hypotheses. The first is that James le Palmer’s unstated goal here was the compilation of a historical record. This is suggested by the nature and order of his sources, as you can see from the list appended to this article. Arranged as they are, his excerpts represent a sampling of major arguments by significant players in four of the most egregious episodes in the 150 years of antifraternal controversy, and in roughly historical order. After a brief summation of their legislated rights and restrictions in Sections 1 and 2—in effect, a legal introduction—James’s booklet highlights four significant phases of controversy over the friars. First come excerpts from the Franciscan Rule of 1223 (fol. 154v). This foundational text is, for James, the first antifraternal document. It is the standard by which contemporary friars were found wanting and their legitimacy questioned. After a short excursion into canon law, James turns to a second phase of antifraternal ferment, the controversies at the University of Paris in the 1250s, represented by the writings of the famous antifraternal theologian, William of St. Amour (fols. 155v–157v).8 The third phase coincides with the clash of Pope John XXII and the Franciscans in the 1320s, culminating in the flight of Michael of Cesena and his followers to the emperor Louis of Bavaria, who named as the “True” pope a friar, Peter of Corbaria (fols. 158r–159r). One response came from a Parisian theologian at Avignon and an ally of John XXII, Jean d’Anneux, who wrote an antifraternal treatise beginning, Filios enutrivi, dated roughly 1328 and excerpted here. It is supplemented at the very end of the booklet by a treatise against mendicancy, also written in the 1320s, by another Parisian theologian, this one an Englishman who was later to become Chancellor of St. Paul’s in London, Thomas de Wilton

8 On William of St. Amour, see M.-M. Dufeil, Guillaume de Saint-Amour et la polémique universitaire parisienne, 1250–1259 (Paris: Picard, 1972) and my Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 11–61.

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(fol. 161v).9 The fourth phase of antifraternal history for James is even closer to home, and begins to suggest how he might have become so hostile to the friars (fols. 159v–160v). In London in 1356–57, the Irish Archbishop Richard FitzRalph preached a series of contentious and highly visible sermons against the friars, including some at St. Paul’s Cross. These sermons achieved great notoriety and circulated in writing; it is even possible that James could have heard them delivered. He was certainly in London and already in the king’s service in 1357. That same year, in Avignon, FitzRalph had preached against the friars at the papal court in Avignon, and published his Defensio curatorum, which achieved wide circulation throughout Europe. Furthermore, when in London, FitzRalph stayed in the intellectually prominent households of a group of high-ranking English clergymen, including Bishop John Grandisson and Bishop Richard de Bury. James le Palmer, as a resident in the nearby collegiate lodgings for Exchequer clerks, could easily have mingled with these households. FitzRalph was something of a hero in London in the 1350s, and it is therefore only natural that James should draw his culminating arguments against the friars from the controversial Archbishop of Armagh.10 James’s little booklet, therefore, is not a series of random attacks on the friars; it tells a story, sketches a history. In that respect, it accords with both the daily business and the intellectual interests of James’s vocational circles. The business of the Exchequer and other offices within the civil service was history. In his work, James le Palmer, Engrosser and Keeper of the Great Roll, was a documentary historian of relations between the king and his people, as were the clerks in Chancery who recorded letters patent and letters close, or the clerks of the King’s Bench. One of the primary functions of bureaucracy was historical memory, and it is no accident that highly trained, intellectually capable and curious civil servants would come away from their work with a heightened sense of the importance of history to political and cultural life.

9 On this phase, see Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: the Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250–c. 1450 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), I: 139–66, 238–55; and Malcolm D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty (London: SPCK, 1961), 208–46. On Jean d’Anneux and Thomas de Wilton, see my Antifraternal Tradition, 81–99. 10 On FitzRalph, see Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-century Scholar and Primate: Archbishop Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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A second hypothesis: James and his fellow clerks were intensely interested in law, as one can easily see by leafing through the topics James was focused on elsewhere. In fact his longest articles, apart from Fratres mendicantes, are often on legal subjects from both common law and canon law: advocatus, arbiter (judge), citacio (legal citation), Inquisicio (a legal investigation), Instrumentum (legal instrument or charter), Irregularitas (disobedience of canon law), Iudex, Iudicium, Iuramentum (oath), Legate, Lex and so forth. I hardly need to note that a similar fascination with law has been amply documented in the works of Chaucer, Langland, and Hoccleve.11 As for the friars, much ecclesiastical legislation after 1250 was dedicated to bringing their relationship to their colleagues and competitors in the Church within the purview of canon law. This must be why James begins his treament of Fratres mendicantes with an excerpt from one of the great canon law summae of the fourteenth century, William of Pagula’s Summa summarum, and why he intersperses his narrative with other selections from the Glossators of canon law. Like so many antifraternal writers, he focuses on the issue of the friars’ privileges, literally, “private laws,” illegitimate rights made especially for them in violation of ancient ecclesiological principles, giving them the papally endowed power to usurp some of the functions originally ordained for parish priests: especially preaching, but also confession, baptism, burial, and so forth. Many of James’s rubrics dwell on the monstrous privileges conceded to the friars: sections i and ii from William of Pagula; from William of St. Amour, sections xi, xii, xiii, xvi; from Jean d’Anneux, section xxii; from FitzRalph, sections xxviii–xxx. As with their obsession with history, however, the bureaucrats’ fascination with the law extends beyond their professional engagement with it in their daily work and is not narrowly legalistic. Law, says a medieval commonplace, is one of the ordering principles of the universe: Lex, id est, ratio. This idea bore with great particularity upon the structure of authority in the Church, whose order reflected or rather was God’s law. It is very clear that one of James’s (and his authorities’) primary anxieties about the friars was that, as unprecedented and extraordinary

11 See for example, Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1988); John Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988) and Literature and Law in the Middle Ages: A Bibliography of Scholarship (New York: Garland, 1984); Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

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orders, they were outside the law. They were an extracurricular intrusion in the ordered and ancient structure of the Church; in their very existence, completely apart from any aberrant behavior, they violated the rational hierarchical order of authority. This view came into being because the friars were an institutional and structural novelty as a religious order. Though religious like monks and governed by a Rule, they differed in key respects: they were not cloistered, they wandered; they were religious, yet their mission resembled the apostolic mission of the clergy in preaching, conversion, confession; and unlike any other order in the 1200 years of the Church, they did not earn a living either by the work of their hands or by ecclesiastical endowment, they begged. Most of all they were a structural novelty, and therefore deeply troubling. They had been brought into being as papal orders, responsible to papal authority alone, and therefore not subject to the discipline and order that the modern church inherited from the twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples. The friars had no place in the ancient pyramid of authority that descended from Pope to Archbishop to Bishop to parish priest. In institutional terms, they were placeless—one might even say homeless. In that sense, as an ecclesiological concept—extracurricular, extraecclesiastical, beyond received boundaries, structurally beyond episcopal control—the friars were monstrous. It is exactly this monstrosity that James’s fellow Londoner and clerk, William Langland, had in mind when he described the friars as “unnumbered, and not under Notaries seal,” that is, without a knowable place, a determinate number, within the organization of the Church. In that respect they embody, for James and his fellow clerks, exactly the kind of threat embodied a few years later by a different group of wanderers who similarly seemed to have no place in an ordered society: the rebels of 1381. That brings me to hypothesis number three: Labor. The Exchequer bureaucrats obviously were not the authors of the Protestant ethic, but they did in fact place a great deal of value on labor—not necessarily proletarian labor, not just agricultural and craft labor but productive work for the good of mankind, which embraced the work of priests and bishops, of canon lawyers and merchants, and in fact the written work of men like themselves who labored in the vineyards of the royal bureaucracy in and around Westminster and St. Paul’s. Those who did not labor, those who did not work, were a threat to the integrity of society—hence the uproar in the 1370s and 1380s about the threat to English society of vagrants and able-bodied beggars, culminating in legislation against vagrants in Parliament in 1376 and 1388. Parlia-

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mentary legislation of the period does not lump together the itinerant friars with the itinerant agricultural laborer, but it is clear that James le Palmer and Langland, and probably Chaucer, would have. Both were anathema to those who believed that productive work was necessary for the good of society, because both were able-bodied beggars. Langland’s poem returns repeatedly to the problem of the able-bodied beggar, embodied not only in the unproductive workers in the field full of folk, but also in the itinerant dreamer who dresses and acts like them, and finally in the friars who wander in and out of the poem and the church, begging for a living because they do not have what Langland calls a “fyndyng.” Likewise, James’s selections in his antifraternal booklet dwell again and again on the illegitimacy and active harm done by the friars’ begging: from the Franciscan Rule, section vi “How friars ought to labor”; from William of St. Amour, section xv, they should not be “otiose and wandering in the world,” and also sections xvii–xix, “what dangers proceed from begging and that it is not permitted to able-bodied men to beg”; and from Thomas de Wilton, section xxxvii “against the mendicant friars running around the country and . . . idle, not laboring with their hands.” These then are three possible reasons we find the Clerk of the Great Roll in the office of the Exchequer spending his time, energy, and money on an elaborate booklet against the friars in his private encyclopedia. James le Palmer’s love of order and hierarchy is palpable, and undergirded by the belief that their origin is divine, as the paintings that begin his encyclopedic book demonstrate. James’s vocation in the civil service, like Chaucer’s, Langland’s and Hoccleve’s, caused him to value history as cultural memory, law as an ordering principle, and productive labor as the foundation of society. In egregious ways, and quite apart from the sins of individual members of the orders, the friars’ very existence represented a challenge to these values, and their history a record of danger to order in the world.

APPENDIX

The Rubrics of the article “Fratres mendicantes” BL Royal 6 E VII, fols. 154–161 from William of Pagula, Summa Summarum (1320) i Concerning certain privileges conceded to the Dominican and Franciscan friars; and their customs and pleasures and how they were at first and how they are now and how they do harm to the rectors of the church and how they inject themselves without being called . . . and whether they live according to the Gospel and whether they are in a state of perfection. ii To what the Dominicans and Franciscans are held and what they are forbidden to do. from the Franciscan Rule (1223) iii Franciscans who live according to their Rule ought to wear poor rags, nor is it permitted to them to judge other men who are wellclothed. iv How the Franciscans go through the world and how they do not go on horseback unless forced by necessity. v Franciscans ought not to receive money, neither directly nor indirectly through an intermediary. vi How friars ought to labor and how they ought not to appropriate for themselves either a house or any other thing. from Canon Law Glosses vii Why mendicant friars are more avaricious and desire more greatly to be exalted than others and whether they sin mortally in seeking dignities. [William of Monte Lauduno, Apparatus septimi libri (1319)] viii Mendicant friars ought not to interject themselves into temporal affairs. [William Durandus, Speculum iudiciale (1276)] ix Now follows how friars do not live in these days according to the highest poverty: as may be proved reasonably, that their words do not match their deeds.

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from William of St. Amour, De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum (1255) x Those who seek a state of perfection, like the mendicant friars, and who seek temporal honor, love themselves more than God. xi The mendicant friars are not sent nor rightly chosen by the Church and therefore how they are entered into the Church of God is not known, as below. xii How the friars doing and seeking the offices of the rectors and prelates are outside the bounds of charity. xiii How religious, and especially the mendicants, are more able to harm the Church of God, feigning an appearance of piety and holy religion. xiv Now follows how the mendicant friars have such power in the Church of God in these days and how they are intimate with princes and magnates and lords. xv The apostle prohibits those who choose a state of perfection from being otiose and from wandering about the world, in the last chapter of Romans. xvi Why the mendicant friars preach willingly and, as indicated below, surely for money; and therefore why prelates who have the care of souls and who are able to live from the Gospel hinder such friars who inject themselves into preaching. xvii Now see, friars, what dangers proceed from begging and that it is not permitted to able-bodied men to beg. xviii Now see, you friars, that Christ did not beg and whoever asserts that Christ begged is a heretic. xix It is not permitted to give alms to the mendicant friars who are able-bodied and strong enough to do corporal labor, nor to any ablebodied persons who are able to do corporal labor. xx Mendicant friars preaching for gain or ostentation, and commending themselves in their preaching, or impugning prelates, or infringing upon the rights and privileges of curates, are not true preachers but pseudo and false preachers; and through what signs such false preachers can be recognized, see below. [William of St. Amour, Collectiones] from Jean d’Anneux, Filios enutrivi (1328) xxi Mendicant friars bring the gravest harm to the prelates of the Church, both the great and the small, and they void the text of holy scripture.

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xxii Now follows about the ingratitude of the Franciscans toward Pope John XXII who gave them privileges and exalted them from the dust and how they made Friar Peter of Corbaria of their order a new pseudo-Pope and allied themselves with the Bavarian [the Emperor Louis], contrary to the faith of the Church. xxiii Concerning the most pernicious presumption of the Franciscans and against whom they presumed, as below. xxiv Around the end of the Old Law rose up the hypocrite Pharisees, who opposed Christ. Thus around the end of the new law have arisen the mendicant friars, similar to them, opposing the prelates and curates of the Church. xxv Concerning the vice of ingratitude and concerning the ingratitude of the Franciscans. xxvi How Pope John XXII complained about the mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans. xxvii How the mendicant friars are described and why they are said to be the worst generation. from Richard FitzRalph, Defensio Curatorum (1357) xxviii Friars procuring privileges incur the sin of disobedience. xxix Friars procuring privileges are seen to have committed the sin of avarice. xxx A license from the pope does not excuse the friars from obedience and from rule, as St. Bernard proves below. xxxi Now follows a response against the Franciscans who say they are not bound to the mandate of Francis contained in his testament, as is seen fully below. xxxii The Dominicans and Franciscans and other mendicant friars are not able to hold property. from Canon Law xxxiii Innocent IV taught and commanded all mendicant friars to exhort in their preaching and confessions, and to preach to all publicly that they may give tithes without diminishing their chances to be saved, and that if they don’t give tithes, they cannot be saved. [Guido of Baysieux, Rosarium (c. 1300)]

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xxxiv Friars are interpreted in many and diverse ways, as below. [Rosarium] xxxv Now remains to be seen to what the Franciscans and other friars are obliged by the text of the Clementines in the chapter Exivi de paradiso, although they do not do so. [Clementines (1312)] xxxvi Similarly it is noted in the chapter Exivi de paradiso, concerning the rejection of legates sent to the friars. [Clementines] from Thomas de Wilton, Questio on able-bodied begging (c. 1327) xxxvii How the blessed Bernard spoke against the mendicant friars running around the country and frequenting the courts of magnates and, idle, not laboring with their hands.

“SI SIND ALL GLICHSNER”: ANTIFRATERNALISM IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE GERMAN LITERATURE Geoffrey Dipple

The portrayal of the mendicant orders in The Devil’s Net, an early fifteenth-century didactic poem from the region around Lake Constance, is one immediately familiar to students of medieval antifraternal literature.1 The poem takes the form of a dialogue between a hermit and the devil in which the vices of various social orders are attacked before members of those orders are hauled off to hell in the devil’s net. The charges leveled against the friars in it echo those encountered in such prominent critics of the friars as Chaucer and Jean de Meun, suggesting that criticism of the mendicant orders was as lively in the German-speaking lands as it was elsewhere in western Europe. This perception is reinforced by vernacular propaganda from the early years of the Protestant Reformation which plays on some of the most virulent antifraternal themes in medieval literature. While antifraternalism and criticism of the friars in medieval English and French literature have been studied extensively, the same cannot be said for the treatment of them in the literature of medieval Germany.2 The present study seeks to fill this lacuna in research into medieval literature with an overview of antifraternal themes in German literature from the time of the friars’ arrival in the German-speaking lands until the appearance of The Devil’s Net and Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools in the fifteenth century and the polemics of Renaissance humanists and Protestant Reformers in the early sixteenth. It notes where antifraternal themes appear and where,

1 Des Teufels Netz: Satirisch-didaktisches Gedicht aus der ersten Hälfte des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. K.A. Barack (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1863; reprint ed. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1968), 446–49. 2 For example, Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), has focused his research on English and French traditions and Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), has concentrated largely on French, English and Italian sources.

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sometimes surprisingly, they do not appear, and it suggests possible social and political reasons for the apparent idiosyncracies of the German antifraternal tradition. It is intended, then, as an introduction to more detailed research into antifraternal themes in medieval German literature and into the possible roots of Reformation antifraternalism. Like so many other works in the antifraternal tradition, The Devil’s Net charges: “Si sind all glichsner”3 (they are all hypocrites) calling to mind such memorable characters as the friars Ipocresie and Flaterie in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, Frere Flaterere in Piers Plowman or Faus Semblant in the Roman de la Rose. As scholars of medieval antifraternal literature have indicated, the roots of this characterization go back to polemics developed against the friars in their conflicts with secular masters at the University of Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century.4 Penn Szittya has highlighted the importance in those controversies of William of St. Amour’s biblical exegesis and its adaptability in subsequent polemics. St. Amour’s attack is built around identifying the friars with three biblical analogues: the Pharisees, the false apostles at the time of Paul, and the antichristi or false prophets of the last days. The literary type of the Pharisee derives from an exegesis of Matthew 23, with its chorus: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” In the subsequent tradition, the association of the friars with the Pharisees often amounted to a paraphrase of this text.5 At Paris the immediate point of contention was the control of the theological faculty by the mendicants, and the key to St. Amour’s exegesis is the identification of the academic titles of the mendicant masters with the claim that the Pharisees desired to be called master and Christ’s denunciation of this in Matthew 23:7–10.6 The Devil’s Net does not identify the friars as Pharisees, but it does charge them with presenting themselves “masterfully,”

3

Teufels Netz, 176: Si sind all glichsner von der art, Wie vil bücher si hand gelart Und biegends hin und wider. 4 See especially, Arnold Williams, “Chaucer and the Friars,” Speculum 28 (1953): 499–513; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 37–54; Penn R. Szittya, ‘Caimes Kynde’: The Friars and the Exegetical Origins of Medieval Antifraternalism (Unpub. Ph.D. thesis: Cornell University, 1971), 18–77. 5 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, especially 34–41, 184, 201–07. 6 Ibid., 35–37. See also, Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 39–40.

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an activity it ties to their attendance at the schools and equates with sitting on Moses’ seat, likely in reference to Matthew 23:2.7 As with much of the criticism of the friars in medieval literature, The Devil’s Net is less concerned with events at the universities, and it focuses more on the threats the friars posed to the pastoral roles of the parochial clergy. Critics of the friars frequently identified them as false prophets or false apostles who, through preaching and the confessional, led people away from their duly constituted pastors, the parish priests.8 The Devil’s Net charges: Now the same preachers come To draw the people to them with their teaching And tell them many things about God, So that one brings them money and lays it on the altar And must confess to and confide in them.9

Also in line with other literary attacks on the friars, here charges of spiritual seduction feed into charges of sexual seduction and assumptions that the friars are especially prone to lechery and sexual immorality.10 According to St. Amour and many other antifraternal authors not only did the usurpation of the pastoral roles of the parish priests lead the faithful astray, it also allowed the friars to live illegitimately from the gospel. In The Devil’s Net, as elsewhere, this accusation is tied directly to the mendicancy of the friars:

7

Des Teufels Netz, 172–73: Wenn aber ainr von schuol kompt ... Und macht denn ain grosz stimm, Die ist so zornig und so grimm, Und stelt sich gar maisterlich, Nieman ist denn sin gelich; ... Also sitzt er uff Moyses stuol Und tribt so ain grossen wuol. 8 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 47–52, 57–61. See also Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 37–39, 47–50. 9 Des Teufels Netz, 173–74: Nun kummend die selben prediger Die lüt zuo in bringen mit ir ler Und in vil von got sagen, Das man in das gelt zem altar tuot tragen Und in muos bichten und jehen. 10 Williams, “Chaucer and the Friars,” 512; Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 58–60; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 40–41; Des Teufels Netz, 166–67.

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Our poem also charges that the friars hawk false letters of indulgence which “[have] seen neither pope nor Rome.”12 And more firmly in line with other antifraternal works it asserts that “ . . . they are always on the lookout,/ To see when a rich man falls ill,” suggesting that they are particularly interested in the pastoral needs of the wealthy, for obviously mercenary reasons.13 The Devil’s Net hardly reproduces the extent or virulence of St. Amour’s attack on the friars. It lacks the clear and pressing eschatological framework of the Parisian polemics as well as their detailed theological underpinnings. And yet, as an important example of estates satire in medieval German literature,14 its characterization of the friars suggests the existence of an antifraternal tradition there similar to that in the literatures of other western European nations. 11 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 47–54; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 45–47; Des Teufels Netz, 170–71: So denn die terminierer uslauffend, Die tuond denn die warhait verkauffen Zuo den geburen und maiger Umb kaes, smalz und aiger. Affter dem land Da tribends so boes valsch list, Wie si die lüt tuond schetzen Mit irem valschen swetzen. 12 Des Teufels Netz, 171: Vil applas tuond si davon geben: Das ist als verloren leben. Es sind als erlogne maer, Wie sis sagend hin und her: Der brief gesach nie babst noch Rom. 13 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 37–39; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 50–53; Des Teufels Netz, 174: Darzuo hand si vil grosz spehen, Wo ain richer krank lit. 14 On the significance of this poem in medieval German estates satire, see Hellmut Rosenfeld, “Die Entwicklung der Ständesatire im Mittelalter,” in Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 71 (1951/52): 200.

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Insofar as scholars have reflected on this topic, they have tended to assume that consistent animosity existed between friars and poets in medieval Germany. For example, Erwin Gudde suggested that there was almost universal hatred for the friars among thirteenth-century German poets because of the friars’ ties with the papacy and their denunciations of secular poetry.15 Certainly, early relations between the friars and the parochial clergy, the allies of so many antifraternal poets elsewhere, were not auspicious. The first appearance of the friars in German-speaking lands seems not to have been a cause for celebration among the secular clergy. In 1225 a parish priest in Cologne complained that the friars were “wielding their sickles in the harvests of others.” Similar confrontations between friars and parochial clergy or local bishops occurred in a number of German localities.16 In Cologne the practical threat posed by the friars was reinforced by eschatological concerns. Among the most influential prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen in the Middle Ages was a warning to the Cologne clergy of their impending chastisement, resulting in part from the activities of a new group of heretics. These heretics, whom she identified with pseudo-prophets of the last days, would be recognizable by their feigned piety, asceticism, poverty and mendicancy. Apparently, the Cologne clergy took her warnings to heart. When the Dominicans arrived in the city in 1220, and the Franciscans in 1222, their poverty, asceticism and commitment to the evangelical life appeared to fit the prophecy, and they were shunned by the local clergy and condemned as pseudo-prophets.17 However, after the initial period of distrust, relations between the friars and the secular clergy in Cologne and elsewhere seem to have settled down. John Freed has suggested that German bishops, even partisans of the Hohenstaufen emperors, were patronizing the friars as allies in their fight against heresy in the first half of the thirteenth century. Furthermore, he argues that assumptions about constant enmity in this period between the emperors and the friars as agents of the papacy need to be revised.18

15 Erwin Gustav Gudde, Social Conflicts in Medieval German Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 26 n. 65. 16 John B. Freed, The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1977), 35–38. 17 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Hildegard of Bingen and Anti-Mendicant Propaganda,” Traditio 43 (1987): 386–99; Freed, The Friars and German Society, 88–91. 18 Freed, The Friars and German Society, 35–37, 88–91, 135–50.

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Freed’s conclusions appear to be confirmed in German literature from the first half of the thirteenth century. The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries witnessed a flowering of German literature, which included the appearance of didactic and political lyric.19 Furthermore, in the twelfth century and after, satires of the clergy were “immensely popular” in German literature and in Latin literature written in the German-speaking lands. The papal-imperial power struggles at the turn of the century further encouraged widespread satire of the papacy.20 In this context, one would assume that the friars might been drawn into disrepute in a case of guilt by association. However, there is no literary evidence suggesting this was the case. Walther von der Vogelweide, widely regarded as the father of political lyric in medieval German literature,21 was consistently an imperial partisan in the contest between emperor and pope. His most important political works were written before the appearance of the friars in Germany,22 but even when Walther did react to political events in his poems composed after their arrival—for example, in his denunciation of the murder of Archbishop Engelbrecht of Cologne in 1225 and his reaction to Frederick II’s excommunication by Gregory IX in 1227—no mention is made of the friars.23 Instead, the earliest direct reference in thirteenth-century German literature to contention involving the friars—in this case to secularmendicant conflicts—likely appears in the poem Auron’s Pfennig. Probably composed around 1239, this is one of the oldest elements of the Wartburgkrieg or Sängerskrieg auf der Wartburg, ostensibly the account of a poets’ competition at the famed Thuringian castle. Auron’s Pfennig is, in fact, an extended attack on clerical simony. Clerical sale of sacraments to the laity is, however, opposed by the “preaching monks”—both

19 Olive Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric, 1150–1300: The Development of Its Themes and Forms in Their European Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 182. 20 John A. Yunck, The Lineage of Lady Mead: The Development of Medieval Venality Satire (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 275–76. 21 Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric 1150–1300, 210; Karen W. Klein, The Partisan Voice: A Study of the Political Lyric in France and Germany, 1180–1230 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 11. 22 Klein, The Partisan Voice, 152–90. Klein claims that Walther’s poems reveal two periods of intense political engagement, from 1198–1205 (the Reichston) and from 1212–1213 (the Ottenton and Unmutston). See Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide, ed. Karl Lachmann, 13th ed., rev. H. Kuhn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965), 9–11, 13–15, 44–46. 23 Lachmann, Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide, 119–20; Klein, The Partisan Voice, 188.

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Dominicans and Franciscans have been suggested as the identity of this group. Consistently throughout the poem the “preaching monks” are portrayed in a positive light, maintaining their stance against clerical deception and greed, even in the face of threats that their cloisters will founder and their begging sacks will remain empty.24 A somewhat different picture of the friars emerges in the poems of Reinmar von Zweter, a student of Walther’s who carried on his tradition of political poetry.25 Reinmar was less consistently an imperial partisan than Walther, but a pervasive anti-papalism, and even an anticlericalism, runs through many of his poems.26 This stance is particularly evident in Reinmar’s earliest political poems written between 1227 and 1229, possibly in response to the excommunication of Frederick II.27 In one of these poems Reinmar launches into an attack on the hovemünchen and clösterrittern, the “courtly monks” and “cloistered knights.”28 In a reading of this poem that has cast a long shadow over subsequent interpretations, Gustav Roethe identified the clösterrittern as likely the Knights of St. John and the hovemünchen as the new mendicant orders. Roethe went on to suggest that Reinmar’s opposition to the friars derived from the roles they played in Gregory IX’s campaign against the emperor: that they served on diplomatic missions for the pope, disseminated news of the emperor’s excommunication, and through bulls and letters of indulgence did more damage to the imperial cause than that caused by papal troops.29 However, Freed’s revision of our understanding of imperial-mendicant relations in the first half of the thirteenth century calls into question these conclusions. Freed claims that the friars still enjoyed the patronage of pro-Hohenstaufen bishops even after the first excommunication of Frederick II in 1227, and that the friars largely ignored his

24 Der Wartburgkrieg, ed. and trans. K. Simrock (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J.G. Cott’ascher Verlag, 1858), 146–47, 152–55; on the possible identity of the “preaching monks,” see ibid., 293. 25 Die Gedichte Reinmars von Zweter, ed. G. Roethe (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1887; reprint Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1967), 21–22. 26 Ibid., 24–33, 38–42, 474–79; Ulrich Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters (Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1974), 344–45. 27 On the context in which these poems were written, see Roethe, Gedichte Reinmars, 24–40. 28 Ibid., 476. 29 Ibid., 29–30. As examples of the ongoing influence of Roethe’s interpretation, see Gudde, Social Conflicts in Medieval German Poetry, 26, and Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 62.

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second excommunication in 1239.30 The poem itself calls into question an interpretation that it directly reflects imperial politics. Certainly, the appellation “courtly monks,” if designating the friars here, suggests that they had political connections that Reinmar viewed as improper. However, the poem’s primary criticism of both the “courtly monks” and the “cloistered knights” is that they do not fit the traditional definition of members of a religious order. Reinmar likens these new religious orders to a creature that is half fish and half man. He then asserts: “But a fish is a fish and a man is a man, at least as I see it,” and he concludes that monks belong in cloisters and knights in courts.31 Clearly, if the “courtly monks” are the friars, and I think this is a pretty safe identification, this poem contains a sharp critique of their political influence and connections, but there is no direct indication of a specific political agenda being pursued by them. Furthermore, no direct connection is made between the appearance of these new “mixed creatures” and the last days, nor are they identified with biblical types of the enemies of the Gospel as in the prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen or later in the polemics of William of St. Amour. Elsewhere in Reinmar’s corpus the clergy are identified as hypocrites and clearly eschatological themes appear, but nowhere are the friars singled out in those poems.32 In the end, then, Reinmar appears to have had at best passing interest in the friars as political actors in the first half of the thirteenth century. In this he was not unique. His own student, Bruder Wernher, develops political themes, sometimes in an eschatological context, but includes in them no specific denunciations of the friars.33 According to Freed the place and roles of the friars in imperial politics changed drastically in the second half of the thirteenth century, especially after Innocent IV’s excommunication of Frederick II at the Council of Lyons in 1245. The pope’s use of both the Dominicans and the Franciscans in his subsequent campaign against the emperor alienated them from the largely pro-Hohenstaufen burghers. This was likely an important reason for the slowed expansion of the mendicant orders in Germany around mid-century. And the status of the friars continued 30

Freed, The Friars and German Society, 138–50. Roethe, Gedichte Reinmars, 476. 32 Ibid., 54, 58–61, 482–83. 33 Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 344–45. On the relationship between Reinmar and Bruder Wernher, see Roethe, Gedichte Reinmars, 36–37; idem, “Die Gedichte Reinmars von Zweter,” in Mittelhochdeutsche Spruchdichtung, ed. H. Moser (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 74. 31

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to deteriorate throughout the second half of the century as a result of continued meddling in imperial politics and escalating tensions with the secular clergy over pastoral roles.34 The changed perception of the friars is reflected in Latin poetry of the age, especially in the work of the poet known only as Der Marner. Like Reinmar von Zweter, Der Marner was a student of Walther von der Vogelweide and he composed primarily vernacular poems, but it is only in a Latin poem from around 1250 that he voices significant criticisms of friars.35 There he treats the appearance of new religious orders—specific mention is made of Franciscans, Magdelenes and Paulines—as part of the death pains of the church in the final age of the world. The Franciscans, then, are attacked in an explicitly eschatological context, and some of the charges leveled against them are reminiscent of those in St. Amour’s writings: they are greedy and desirous of honors; they seek out the domiciles of the wealthy so that they will be fed luxurious foods and wine; they prefer to hear the confessions of the wealthy, presumably from mercenary motives; and they frequently preach in the market place to be praised by men. However, some of the other charges made against them recall more Reinmar von Zweter’s treatment of the “courtly monks.” Der Marner explicitly identifies these new orders as only the most recent stage in the degeneration of the monastic ideal since the days of the desert fathers. Regularly, he contrasts their activities with those of true monks: they are rarely in their cells, and are always running about; when they seek out the castles of the wealthy, they shun the cloisters; the delicate foods given them by the wealthy allow them to disdain the more modest traditional fare of monks; and their frequent preaching in the market place is contrasted with their infrequent appearance in choir.36 On the basis of her research into medieval Latin lyric Helga Schüppert has concluded that criticisms of the friars similar to Der Marner’s accompanied them for the remainder of the thirteenth century.37 It appears that many of these criticisms grew out of intra-clerical, and

34

Freed, The Friars and German Society, 36–37, 150–70. On dating the composition of this work, see Der Marner, ed. P. Strauch (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1876; reprint ed., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1965), 194. 36 Strauch, Der Marner, 194–96. On charges that the friars sought out the homes of the wealthy in St. Amour’s polemics against them, see Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 37–38. 37 Helga Schüppert, Kirchenkritik in der lateinischen Lyrik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), 110, 132–37, 145–48. 35

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even intra-fraternal, rivalries. For example, a poem, likely written by a Dominican in the later thirteenth century, takes to task the other mendicant orders, along with the clergy generally, for serving Venus and Mammon. The Franciscans bring great joy to the Devil through their sacrifices to hell and the Augustinians have contributed to his triumph through their usurpation of the preaching office.38 Ironically, then, some of the most damning criticism of the mendicant orders appears to have come from other mendicants. A number of scholars of medieval estates satire have commented that charges against social groups which appear in Latin literature with any frequency eventually reappear in vernacular literature.39 In Germany in the second half of the thirteenth century this seems to have not been the case. Quite likely the clerical authors of these Latin poems did not want to air their differences before the laity.40 Given the conflicts involving the friars in the early fourteenth century, both in Germany and elsewhere, one would assume that they would become natural lightening rods for criticism in vernacular literature. From the attacks on mendicant privileges by Jean de Pouilly and Jean d’Anneaux to John XXII’s assault on the Franciscan Spirituals and their eventual involvement in the conflict between the pope and emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, friars were at the center of many major disputes of the age. In Germany, particularly important was the involvement of the Franciscan Spirituals in the conflict between pope and emperor. Latin polemical literature flourished in this context, but this was accompanied by surprisingly little political poetry in the vernacular.41 Not surprisingly, there is little mention of the mendicant orders in this context. One exception to this trend appears in the work of Frauenlob, who is regarded along with Walther von der Vogelweide as one of the sharpest critics of the papacy among medieval German poets.42 Although he died in 1318, before the conflict between Ludwig the Bavarian and John XXII reached its fullest development, some of Frauenlob’s poems reflect the growing tension between the pope and emperor. Within this context, the friars, specifically the Franciscans, come under scrutiny in 38 Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersmann, 1963), 60–61, 69. 39 Yunck, The Lineage of Lady Mead, 274; Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 9. 40 Schüppert, Kirchenkritik in der lateinischen Lyrik, 33. 41 Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 324, 356 42 Ibid., 532.

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the poem For shame, Minorite order, which holds up the teachings of Francis as a standard by which to criticize the practices of contemporary Franciscans.43 Professor Szittya has observed that from the 1260s on the Franciscan rule had been used frequently by their critics to measure the decline of the order.44 However, in this case it is as likely that Frauenlob was taking sides in the conflict that was tearing the Franciscan order apart as he was denouncing it in toto. The only other reference to the friars I have found in German literature of the early fourteenth century is in the work of Der Kanzler. Here the criticism follows Reinmar von Zweter in identifying the friars as a debased form of monasticism.45 A more detailed reflection on the place of the friars in the conflict between pope and emperor comes from a doctrinal rather than a poetic source, the Latin tract Lamentation of the Church in Germany by Konrad von Megenberg. Konrad wrote this work while teaching in Paris in 1337. On 1 January 1338 he presented it to the papal chaplain Johannes de Piscibus in Avignon as part of a petition for a benefice. This appeal failed and the following autumn he presented a revised version of this work to the papal legate Arnald de Verdello in Germany. In this second version, the supplicatory tone of the work gives way to a more reproachful and accusing tone.46 Konrad’s work is concerned in the first instance with the conflict between the pope and emperor—its lengthy first part discusses that conflict and then urges reconciliation between these two lights of Christendom. However, the second part focuses on the role of clerical dishonesty, especially of the mendicant orders, in perpetuating disunity in Christendom. Here many of the resentments of the secular clergy against the friars come to the fore.47 Some of the accusations against the friars seem rather generic: there are thieves among them, jealousy is rampant within the orders, the friars have bellies swollen like Bacchus’ tankards from their feasting and carousing, and their priors are

43

Ibid., 175–76. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 73. 45 Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 159–60. 46 On the writing and characterization of this work, see Konrad von Megenberg, Klagelied der Kirche über Deutschland (Planctus Ecclesiae in Germaniam), ed. H. Kusch (Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1956), X, LV–LVIII; Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 319 n. 3, 400. 47 Sigmund Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kämpfe zwischen Staat und Kirche (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1874; reprinted., New York: Burt Franklin, 1961), 289. 44

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concerned only with their cash boxes.48 However, other charges suggest possible connections to the broader antifraternal tradition, and ultimately to the exegesis of St. Amour. Like the false prophets and false apostles of scripture who pervert the gospel and are unwilling to submit their teachings to legitimate scrutiny, the friars are belligerent and argumentative. This is especially evident in recent controversies about apostolic poverty and the beatific vision from the pontificates of John XXII and Benedict XII.49 Konrad also complains about the excessive numbers of the friars.50 However, Konrad’s debt to the literature of secular-mendicant controversies is probably clearest in his description of a showdown between the friars and the secular clergy at the funeral of a rich man. A dispute over who has a right to the corpse, and consequently burial dues and bequests, leads to open fisticuffs and ultimately to the friars stealing the corpse from the graveyard of the parish church under the cover of darkness.51 The friars found themselves in a no less contentious environment in the second half of the fourteenth century. This was the golden age of antifraternal agitation in England, and there are good reasons to expect a similar appearance of antifraternal sentiment in German literature. Scattered evidence suggests that conflicts between the friars and other members of the first estate were common in this period.52 As well, it appears that other Latin sources were reinforcing the image of the friar portrayed by Konrad. Surviving manuscripts indicate that the works of Richard FitzRalph, a vocal critic of the friars at Oxford, London and Avignon during the 1350s, were popular in the German-speaking lands as were a number of Latin poems which included bitter satires of the friars.53 Yet there is little evidence that these treatments of the friars 48

Klagelied, 108–11, 122–23. Klagelied, 108–09, 112–13. 50 Ibid., 106–09. Cf. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 221–30. 51 Klagelied, 118–23. For examples of this charge elsewhere in medieval literature, see Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 41, 51 and 231 n. 134; Des Teufels Netz, 174. 52 See, for example, Christopher Ocker, Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life, c. 1310–1374, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 83/5 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1993), 58, 72–75, 87–89. 53 On FitzRalph’s conflict with the friars, see especially Carolly Erickson, “Th e Fourteenth-Century Franciscans and their Critics,” Franciscan Studies 35 (1975): 107–35 and 36 (1976): 108–47; Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 349–451; James Doyne Dawson, “Richard FitzRalph and the Fourteenth-Century Poverty Controversies,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34 (1983): 315–44; Janet Coleman, 49

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were translated into the vernacular literature of the age. The explanation of this fact may lie in the realm of local politics. Ulrich Müller has suggested that a central political theme in German poetry between 1347 and 1410 was conflicts within the cities of the empire, especially conflicts between burghers and their bishops.54 Studies of relations between the mendicant orders and burghers in the late medieval German cities suggest there were reasonably close and harmonious connections between these two groups.55 Likely, then, anticlerical sentiment was directed against the bishops and their clergy, and the burghers tended to look on the friars as their natural allies. There is some evidence, however, that antifraternal themes flourished in at least some genres of vernacular poetry in Germany in the early fifteenth century. In addition to The Devil’s Net a 1410 Lucifer Letter was sufficiently popular in north Germany to be recopied numerous times in the fifteenth century.56 In it themes familiar from The Devil’s Net and other antifraternal literature reappear. A chief characteristic of the friars is their hypocrisy: they are brothers in name, but not in fact; and for the sake of Christ they have renounced not worldly luxuries and comforts, but work and cares. The poem also hints at the basis for criticism of the mendicants in their conflicts with the secular clergy when it indicates that the friars will grant easy penance for the most

“FitzRalph’s Antimendicant ‘Proposicio’ (1350) and the Politics of the Papal Curia at Avignon,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 376–90. For the details of the popularity of his writings on the continent, see Jean-Phillipe Genet, “The Dissemination of Manuscripts Relating to English Political Thought in the Fourteenth Century,” in England and Her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1989), 217–37. A good example of a Latin poem satirizing the friars which survives in numerous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts from Germany is the expanded version of Nigel de Longchamps’ Speculum Stultorum. For the treatment of the friars in this work, see Nigel de Longchamps, Speculum Stultorum, edited with an Introduction and Notes by J.H. Mozley and R.R. Raymo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 183–88. On the dissemination of this and other Latin works critical of the friars in Germany, see Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 43, 46, 48 n. 125, 50, 51 n. 33, 225 n. 66, 226 n. 68, 227 n. 80, 228 n. 91, 231 n. 133, 232 n. 139, 298, 305; Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 74–75. 54 Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 357–58. 55 See Norbert Hecker, Bettelorden und Bürgertum: Konflikt und Kooperation in deutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981), esp. 95–98. 56 Both The Devil’s Net and the Lucifer Letter are significant expansions of earlier, likely fourteenth-century, poems. See Rosenfeld, “Die Entwicklung der Ständesatire im Mittelalter,” 200, and Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 66. The extent to which criticism of the friars in them is the result of fifteenth-century additions to the texts is unclear.

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serious sins. As a result, the friars have the foremost places in Satan’s palace and are in the front ranks of his chosen followers.57 The apparent popularity of this Devil’s literature in early fifteenth century Germany suggests criticism of the friars had an audience there as it did in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. However, in Germany antifraternal themes appear not to have been picked up in other forms of estates satire. Between 1440 and 1466 German poetry was dominated by the work of Michel Beheim. Among the important themes in Beheim’s work is reflection on the miserable condition of the church,58 and clerical vices and shortcomings are criticized in a number of his poems. However, in all of this he fails to single out the mendicant orders for particular criticism, nor does he apply specifically to them the characteristics so often associated with them in the antifraternal tradition. In some cases the friars are identified as hypocrites, but only in the context of applying this characteristic to the monks and nuns more generally, or to the clergy as a whole.59 Even in the poem On the Devil’s Daughters, whose proximity in form to The Devil’s Net would suggest it as a natural place to pillory the friars, criticism of them is only part of more general criticism of the first estate. In line with traditional treatments of this topic, Beheim has the Devil’s daughter, “Hypocrisy,” married to the clergy as a whole, not just to the friars.60 Furthermore, Beheim refuses to take advantage of other obvious opportunities to single out the friars for criticism. In several poems focusing on the end times, including one specifically dealing with the prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen, the clergy are warned of the consequences of their dissolute lives, but no reference is made to the friars, either as a specific group among the clergy or as heretical chastisers of them as in Hildegard’s letter to the Cologne priests.61 In a lengthy poem specifically on the Antichrist no mention is made of the mendicants as his minions. And in two parables of wolves in monks’ 57

As quoted in Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 70. Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 361. 59 Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, ed. H. Gille and I. Spriewald, 3 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968–1972), II: 355–61, especially 359. 60 Ibid., III: 276–83, especially 278–79. On other uses of this theme in German literature, see Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 87. 61 Gille and Spriewald, Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, I: 367–83, 390–96, 424–28. On the importance of Hildegard’s prophecies in subsequent antifraternal literature, see Kerby-Fulton, “Hildegard of Bingen and Anti-Mendicant Propaganda,” 389, 392–99 and Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, 24. 58

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clothing they are not singled out from the endowed orders.62 Finally, in a detailed explanation of Matthew 23, there is no direct identification of the friars with the scribes and Pharisees.63 In 1494 Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, one of the most influential satires in German literature, was published. Lively debate continues about whether this work belongs more in the world of the Renaissance humanists or that of the didactic poetry of medieval Germany. However, most scholars do agree that Brant’s work grew out of the medieval tradition of estates satire.64 In it, as in much medieval German literature, the friars are usually criticized only as a part of a group that includes other members of the first estate.65 There is no debate, however, about Erasmus of Rotterdam’s place in the Renaissance. Interestingly, in Erasmus’ Latin works the friars are singled out for criticism, often in terms familiar from the medieval antifraternal tradition: their exercise of the offices of preaching and the confessional are denounced as the sources of undue influence over the laity, and in the latter case as an opportunity to prey on unsuspecting women; their mendicancy is described as an exploitation of the gospel for personal gain; and their pursuit of university degrees and their preference for the homes of the wealthy are at odds with their profession.66 It seems, then, that the patterns we have observed in criticism of the friars in the literature of the Middle Ages in central Europe carried on into the Renaissance; the friars are fair game in Latin works intended for the clerical or educated elite, but in vernacular literature authors shied away from attacking them specifically.

62

Gille and Spriewald, Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, II: 774–87; I: 100–04. Ibid., II: 57–59. 64 Rosenfeld, “Die Entwicklung der Ständesatire im Mittelalter,” 206–07; Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 90; James Overfield, “Germany,” in The Renaissance in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 108. 65 Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, ed. H.-J. Mähl (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1964), 219, 221–25, 265–69, 284–85, 337–38. Cf. Christopher Ocker, “‘Rechte Arme’ und ‘Bettler Orden:’ Eine neue Sicht der Armut und die Delegitimierung der Bettelmönche,” in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, ed. B. Jussen and C. Koslofsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999), 131–34. 66 See Erasmus’s comments in Funus, The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. C.R. Thompson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 362; and in Praise of Folly, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27: Literary and Educational Writings, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), V: 131–35. 63

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A little over a decade ago I suggested, largely on the basis of evidence from The Devil’s Net, that a lively tradition of criticism of the friars in medieval German literature laid the groundwork for attacks on them in the early years of the Protestant Reformation.67 The present study suggests that tradition was not as prevalent as I had assumed. If I may be permitted the luxury of speculation, I think important reasons for this may lie in the realms of imperial and local politics as well as the social positions of both the friars and their critics. With the possible exception of a period during the second half of the thirteenth century, the mendicant orders as a whole managed to avoid being identified as partisans of an unpopular papacy. Probably more importantly, the friars appeared as allies against episcopal authority of the urban elements of society to whom the poet-minstrels also appealed. Furthermore, although implacable foes of the mendicant preachers, and in important ways competitors with them for the attention of urban audiences, vernacular poets shared with the friars important social roles and performative techniques.68 As a result, both friars and poets occupied social space on the margins of the urban environment, and both groups had to be careful about how they attempted to discredit each other. However, the portrayal of the friars in German vernacular literature changes dramatically with the coming of the Protestant Reformation. The religious reformers of sixteenth-century Germany, many of whom were apostates from the mendicant orders, highlighted the threats the friars posed to the pastoral activities of parish priests, and they emphasized the connections between the friars and a papacy they claimed had been fleecing Germany for far too long. In this they may have been provided further ammunition by German humanists who accused the friars of undermining traditional religion and virtues by introducing corrupt customs, especially from Italy.69 But, in the end, they relied most fully on translating into the vernacular criticisms of the friars that were common in Latin literature in Germany for much of the later Middle Ages.

67 Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). 68 Maria Dobozy, Re-Membering the Present: The Medieval German Poet-Minstrel in Cultural Context (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). 69 See Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktion einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 300–01, 338.

PART FOUR

FRANCISCAN LEGACIES

IMITATIO FRANCISCI: THE INFLUENCE OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI ON LATE MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS LIFE Lester K. Little

I The history of the imitatio Christi reached a high point, perhaps its culmination, in the life of Francis of Assisi, a dramatic case of abstraction transformed into action. The case made by Bonaventure and Bartholomew of Pisa arguing that Francis’s life had conformed with that of Jesus gained wide acceptance within Franciscan circles; indeed for them Francis had been transformed into Jesus.1 In the words of the Franciscan author of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, “with such ardor did he (Francis) change himself that he became almost one with Him and tried to follow Him as completely as possible in all virtues, and when he was finally complete and perfect in Jesus, by the impression of the sacred stigmata he was transformed into Him.”2 The logical extension of these views was that Francis came to be regarded as an, or the, other Christ: Franciscus alter Christus.3 Strong assertions about the Christ-like qualities of holy people had been made before Francis’s time and have continued to be made since, but the rhetoric of the merging of the lives of Francis and Jesus is without parallel. Of course 1 Bonaventure, The Major Legend of Saint Francis in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. R.J. Armstrong, J.A.W. Hellmann, and W.J. Short, 3 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1999), 2: 613, 631, 642; hereafter FA:ED. Bartholomew of Pisa, De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu auctore Bartolomaeo de Pisa, 2 vols., Analecta Francescana 4–5 (Quaracchi: Collegio di San Bonaventura, 1906–12). The fame of Francis extended beyond Franciscan circles to be sure, but Roberto Rusconi has rightly cautioned in a private communication against exaggerating public awareness of Francis’s life and achievements, however remarkable. 2 Meditations on the Life of Christ, ed. and trans. R.B. Green and I. Ragusa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 3. A variant reading of the phrase “became almost one with Him” is “became almost His image.” 3 The Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions, 6.1, 18.27 in FA:ED 3: 448, 473; Stanislao da Campagnola, L’angelo del sesto sigillo e l’ “alter Christus”: genesi e sviluppo di due temi francescani nei secoli XIII–XIV (Rome: Laurentianum—Antonianum, 1971); H.W. van Os, “St. Francis of Assisi as a Second Christ in Early Italian Painting,” Simiolus, Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 7 (1974): 115–32.

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there were dissenters, starting with Francis, who, besides resorting to standard formulas of extreme humility when referring to himself in his few writings, by all accounts did indeed live in abject poverty and simplicity.4 Moreover, not everyone accepted the reports of Francis receiving the stigmata, and members of the secular clergy as well as some secular university masters, faced with unwelcome competition from the friars, stirred up antipathy against the newcomers.5 For some Christian Humanists as well as for the Protestant reformers, the entire cult of the saints was anathema, and the claim that one of these was another Christ was blasphemy.6 But three centuries later Protestant scholars were among those who took the lead in the quest for the historical Francis, perhaps helping his reputation to survive the effects of de-Christianization. For Oscar Wilde, who produced a stunning éloge of Jesus as precursor of the Romantic Movement, Francis was the only Christian who came after Christ.7 Explaining the Francis-phenomenon is less easy than listing some of its key expressions. The problem, put simply, is that the component elements of his spirituality were not new with him, whereas the totality of them in a single individual was new. One fruitful approach would be to review the history of the theme of imitatio Christi up to the time of Francis. The study of this theme by Giles Constable starts out from a distinction in New Testament vocabulary between sequi (to follow) and imitare (to imitate), as well as between the tendencies to equate these two terms in some cases and to distinguish between them in others. The former tendency was reinforced by Augustine’s question: “For what

4 For his view of holy or saintly persons, see Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum S. Francisci. The Writings of Leo, Rufino and Angelo, Companions of St. Francis, 104, ed. and trans. R.B. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 272–73. 5 André Vauchez, “Les stigmates de saint François et leurs détracteurs dans les derniers siècles du Moyen Age,” in his Religion et société dans l’Occident médiéval (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980), 139–69; M.-M. Dufeil, Guillaume de Saint-Amour et la polémique universitaire parisienne, 1250–59 (Paris: Picard, 1972); see the essay by Penn Szittya in this volume as well as his The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 6 In addition to the essay by Geoffrey Dipple in this volume, see his Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzberg and the Campaign Against the Friars (Ashgate, UK: Scolar Press–Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996); van Os, “St. Francis,” 116; John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini, An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 12. 7 O. Wilde, De Profundis, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. I. Small, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2: 184. Note also the title of a German biography of Saint Francis: Adolf Holl, The Last Christian, trans. P. Heinegg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980).

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is to follow except to imitate (Quid est enim sequi nisi imitare)? Constable shows, though, that these closely allied concepts were not always identical, starting right in the New Testament. The subsequent history that he traces is marked by the coexistence in every age of multiple, conflicting views and an absence of sharp turns that mark the substitution of one prevailing view by another. Still, Constable discerns in the early Church “a predominant emphasis on salvation and the future, and imitation was thought to involve man’s being rather than his doing, what he was rather than what he did.” The leading imitators were the martyrs, whose place after the end of the persecutions was taken by monks and nuns. Besides differences over time there were essential differences between East and West even though here again there were no sharply drawn boundaries. The Greek fathers so stressed the divinity of Christ over his humanity that they saw imitation as mainly a process of divination or deification, whereas western spiritual writers emphasized far more the ideal of imitating Christ’s humanity. The human Christ of the predominately Germanic age was a mighty king and/or judge, Old Testament in style and mentality, and definitely not imagined as suffering pain or humiliation.8 Undoubtedly the most marked shift in this entire history is precisely in the nature of the human Christ in the Latin West between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, a shift as slow but ultimately as determined and evident as a sea-change, especially from our vantage point of between eight and ten centuries later. The incarnate Christ’s earthly life, especially the sufferings He endured, became the new focal points of devotion, the new models to follow. Furthermore, while the saints had for long offered models of conduct (and of course have never entirely ceased to do so), “the ideal of imitating Christ in all respects deepened in the eleventh century into a passionate devotion to His humanity that increasingly excluded other models.”9 The closely related ideal of living the vita apostolica underwent a parallel change. By the very fact that this notion referred to a group of people, and that what in one light defined the Apostles was that they were followers, the ideal of living an apostolic life was a more corporate or less individual matter than the imitation of Christ and similarly was less demanding. The way it was practiced in the monastic life became 8

Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–248 for the entire essay, and in this paragraph: 146–50, 154, 160, 169. 9 Ibid., 170, 179.

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subject to criticism on such grounds as changing definitions of poverty and more attention to how the Apostles actually lived.10 Two centuries of breathtaking spiritual innovation and experimentation from Peter Damian to Francis ended forever the monastic monopoly on religious life, indeed gave a new definition to the concept of religion itself. Monastic reformers and hermits and wandering preachers and newly energized sectors of the laity pushed back the boundaries of devotion, practice, and discipline. The new forms of devotion included the veneration of the cross, the crucifix, the blood, pain and suffering of Jesus, a greatly expanded devotion to Mary and her infant Son, and far more individual prayer. All this had in common an astonishing literalism that fostered a spirituality of imitating every last detail of the life of Jesus.11 By 1200 there remained little new to imitate except Jesus’ birth and His death, lacunae filled by Francis with his staging of the Nativity scene before a crèche, and towards the end of his life with his becoming one of a small number of individuals to receive the stigmata.12 In matters of practicing the religious life, the main development was the move away from cloisters out into society in order to engage in the dual activities that characterized the life of the Apostles, namely begging and preaching. The underpinning of these changes was a new approach to discipline that challenged both the magisterial authority of bishops and the primacy of religious rules. Indeed the single most radical notion to emerge from this ferment was Stephen of Muret’s view of religious authority. Using straightforward language worthy of the Abbé Sieyès or Thomas Paine, he identified the gospel as the only religious rule and declared that those who followed it are the truly religious.13 The point was still far from accepted two centuries later. At that time, the voice of Christ heard by Francis insisted on the literal following of Scripture by calling out each of the phrases ad litteram and sine glossa three times. And although Francis himself glossed a 10 Ibid., 169; Karl Bösl, “Potens und Pauper. Begriffsgeschichtliche Studien zur gesellschaftlichen Differenzierung im frühen Mittelalter und zum ‘Pauperismus’ des Hochmittelalters,” in Alteuropa und die moderne Gesellschaft: Festschrift für O. Brünner, ed. A. Bergengruen and L. Deike (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), 60–87; Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages. An Essay in Social History, trans. A. Goldhammer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 11 Constable, Three Studies, 170, 174–92, 201–07. 12 Ibid., 216–17. 13 M.-D. Chenu, “The Evangelical Awakening,” in his Nature, Man, and Society: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. J. Taylor and L.K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 239.

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passage of Scripture just once in his life as far as we know, the point of that gloss was against glossing.14 Not everyone favored the new devotions or new ways of life, but the newness that raised the strongest opposition was in the area of discipline. To cite just one essential case, that of Valdes of Lyons, we see the limits of relying exclusively upon scriptural authority. Valdes and Francis were similar in background, social circumstances, and receptivity to prevailing social, cultural messages. Yet Valdes defied episcopal authority by preaching without a bishop’s permission and accordingly got condemned by the papacy, and his following remained small because of repression.15 Francis, on the other hand, compromised with the prevailing political reality of obedience to clerical authority, received papal encouragement, and started a movement that developed into a huge international order with some 1,400 convents, all of them urban and together capable of functioning as a highly efficacious propaganda machine. Each individual in this movement was a member of the entire order rather than of a particular house, meaning that the friars, because of their order’s hierarchical structure and their own mobility within it, established a vast communications network.16 In this truly extraordinary way all of the major spiritual and institutional innovations of two centuries, including the harsh lessons of their limits, came together in the life of Francis. With the widespread belief that Francis had achieved a perfect religious life as no one else had ever done in the past, the imitatio Christi could not go on as before. Henceforth, anyone aspiring to imitate Christ was to some extent unavoidably imitating Francis. Clare of Assisi’s spiritual life and ideals represent a case in point, and what is more, a much contested case. While in fact a follower of Francis—she was even referred to in early Franciscan writings as emulatrix sancti Francisci—she wrote of her desire and intention to 14 The passage is really about the observance of the rule, but the voice of Christ was also heard to say that there was nothing in the rule that was not his, i.e., nothing that was not from the Gospels. Robert Brentano, “Francis of Assisi’s Gloss of Matthew 6:34,” in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca, 7 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983), 1:37–38. Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum S. Francisci, 5, 113, 94–95, 286–87. 15 In case one has doubts about early Waldensian history, see Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?” Past and Present 192 (2006): 3–33. 16 Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, 10 vols. (Rome: Edizione Paoline, 1973–2003), 4:468–92; Jacques Le Goff, Héros du Moyen Age: le Saint et le Roi (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1207–59.

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be a follower of Christ. She credited Francis with providing a model for following Christ and she exhorted her sisters to follow that model. But in the views of Clare’s spirituality expressed by later interpreters, not incidentally all of them males, the model she strove to follow was no longer Christ but Mary. Such views derived from a conceptual framework in which gender distinctions mattered mightily and, not surprisingly, males were regarded as superior to females. By the late fourteenth century, writings about Francis and Clare were consistent in putting forth Christ as a model for men to follow and yet Mary as a model for women.17 The literalism that had so thoroughly driven the concept of imitatio Christi, and that of the vita apostolica as well, apparently rendered difficult to imagine their application to women in the same way as to men. The strict enclosure imposed upon Clare and her sisters, a matter in which Francis had a hand, it need be said, made clear that in the Franciscan scheme of things the new kind of literal imitation of Christ and the Apostles was not for women. Still, in the Order of Apostles, which flourished in several northern Italian cities during the 1260s and 70s with considerable support from the clergy and the laity alike, the Sisters wandered and begged just as the Brothers did. However, the experience of the Apostles exposed the limits of social tolerance, for when their leader Gerardo Segarelli was denounced as a heretic and executed and the entire movement fell from grace, it was the Franciscan and Dominican Orders that led the attack.18 In those once radical but increasingly moderate orders, no matter what the rhetoric said, a religious woman’s place was to be in a cloister. The same point is clear in Dominic’s letter to his female followers in Madrid, which was really all about enclosure: “If until the present you have not had a place in which to live your religious life, now you can no longer be excused because by the grace of God you have buildings suitable enough for living the religious life. . . . Let none go out through the gate and no one enter except the bishop or some prelate for the sake of preaching

17 Catherine M. Mooney, “Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Mariae? Clare of Assisi and Her Interpreters,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. C.M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 52–77, 207–20, esp. 57–60, 63, 70–71, 75. 18 Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement I, ed. W.C. Jordan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004): 126–27, 485–90. Brian R. Carniello, “Gerardo Segarelli as the Anti-Francis: Mendicant Rivalry and Heresy in Medieval Italy, 1260–1300,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57 (2006): 226–51.

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or making a visitation.”19 A cloistered life by any other name was a cloistered life. Having treated Francis as a point of arrival in the history of the imitatio Christi, and taken note of how some writers sought to restrain access to this religious ideal, we can now turn to taking him as a point of departure for the imitatio Francisci. To be sure, no such concept existed and yet there did exist a Francis effect and what follow are attempts at identifying a few of its manifestations within the confines of the religious life: one concerning Benedict by Benedictines, one concerning Dominic by Dominicans, one concerning Mary Magdalene by Franciscans, and finally one concerning the Holy Family, again by Franciscans.

II Even in the Bel Paese, Subiaco is an exceptionally beautiful place. In the mountains some thirty miles east of Rome, there is a small town of that name at an altitude of about 1200 feet and then beyond and above it two Benedictine monasteries, first the Abbey of St. Scholastica and then up at an altitude of 1800 feet, the Abbey of St. Benedict. Just as at another site famous in Italian monastic history, Camaldoli, the only sound one hears there regularly, day and night, is that of the rushing water in mountain streams. Little wonder that the Emperor Nero chose to have a palace built at Subiaco on a lake, an artificial lake that Roman engineers made for him by damming the Aniene River.20 Incorporated in the upper monastery is a cave believed to be the one in which St. Benedict lived for three years between his sojourn in Rome and his final move to Montecassino. The cave, known as the Sacro Speco, has the oldest association of any part of the two monasteries, and it is this direct tie with the holy man of the sixth century that may give the casual visitor a first impression that St. Benedict’s is considerably older than St. Scholastica’s, the latter with its Romanesque cloister and bell tower. But such an impression would be utterly misleading. St. Scholastica’s is almost certainly founded upon the site of one of the twelve small monastic communities organized, according to Gregory

19 Early Dominicans: Selected Writings, ed. S. Tugwell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 394. 20 Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, 9: 538–41.

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the Great, by St. Benedict. For us the claim that there were twelve of these communities, each with an abbot and twelve monks, strains our belief. Yet solid documentary evidence of the presence of a religious community begins with a privilege given by Pope Leo IV (847–55) to the monastery of Sts. Sylvester, Benedict and Scholastica, meaning the lower and at the time only monastery, the one now called St. Scholastica. The same pope had an altar erected up at Benedict’s cave, dedicated to Sts. Benedict and Scholastica, and another in the “shepherd’s cave” immediately under it, this one dedicated to St. Sylvester. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a few hermits lived up there near the caves. They were fed and clothed by the community down below, and brought back there when ill or too frail for the rigors of the eremitical life.21 Such a combination of a monastery high in the mountains with a dependent hermitage still higher up was precisely the arrangement established at Camaldoli in the eleventh century. In the meantime the name of St. Sylvester was dropped from the name of the monastery, henceforth variously known as Sts. Benedict and Scholastica, or even just St. Benedict. Towards the close of the twelfth century and during the early thirteenth century, a small, mostly vertical cult center was built into the side of the mountain that incorporated both the shepherd’s cave and Benedict’s. Space for a few monks to live at this holy site was provided; two tiny churches, one on top of the other, were built; and then in the second half of the thirteenth century, a considerable horizontal extension was added to the shrine to accommodate several additional monks, who were henceforth governed by a prior who was named by and responsible to the abbot down below. Only starting in the fifteenth century did the two places come to be considered two monasteries, each with its own abbot, and they accordingly received separate names, St. Scholastica for the older, lower house, and St. Benedict for the house built higher up on the mountain to incorporate the Sacro Speco.22 While monastic and other churches were commonly built at the burial places of saints or for the martyrs among them at the sites of their martyrdom, it was not common practice in the Latin West, as it was in the Greek East, to build religious edifices upon sites related to

21 I monasteri benedettini di Subiaco, ed. C. Giumelli (Milan: Cinisello Balsamo, 1982), 16, 75. 22 Ibid., 75–94.

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events or noteworthy moments in their lives. It could not have been otherwise where the earliest generations of Christians were concerned. But through the experience of much more contact with the East in the age of the Crusades, this kind of shrine-building ad memoriam was adopted here and there in the West, the building incorporating Benedict’s cave being a case in point.23 The major shrine to Benedict was, of course, at Montecassino, where he and his sister were buried and where the communal life governed by the rule he composed was observed and celebrated, whereas the monastery at Subiaco, variously and in various combinations named for Sylvester, Benedict, or Scholastica, was until the end of the twelfth century surely an important monastery, albeit one among several others. But in the following century Subiaco was transformed: a great new emphasis was placed upon the early eremitical phase of Benedict’s career by incorporating his cave into a shrine and by rendering him far better known through the latest methods of image-making. Starting in about 1280, the Roman painter Consolo was brought in to execute a series of frescoes of scenes from the life of St. Benedict in the lower church of the new shrine. This was twenty years after the start of the fresco cycle of the life of Francis in the lower church at Assisi, but a century and more before other cycles depicting scenes from the life of Benedict were painted by Aretino in the sacristy of San Miniato in Florence, by Sodoma in the Orange-Trees Cloister of the Badia Fiorentina, or by Signorelli in the Great Cloister at Monte Oliveto Maggiore outside of Siena.24 In addition to a fresco of the Madonna and Child with angels, which he signed, and a panel showing St. Benedict kneeling, Consolo illustrated episodes taken out of Gregory the Great’s Life of Benedict, in particular the miracle of the earthenware sieve that broke during Benedict’s stop at Affile between Rome and Subiaco, his robing by St. Romano, and his withdrawal into the grotto at Subiaco to pray. Artists from Consolo’s workshop were increasingly involved

23 Ibid., 84–87; Marina Righetti Tosti Croce, “Monachesimo medievale e architettura monastica,” in Dall’eremo al cenobio: la civiltà monastica in Italia dalle origini all’età di Dante (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1987), 519–20; André Grabar, Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique, 2 vols. (Paris: Collège de France, 1946), vol. 1. 24 Serena Romano, La basilica di San Francesco ad Assisi: Pittori, botteghe, strategie narrative (Rome: Viella, 2001), 15–48. On the iconography of St. Benedict, see Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 24 vols. (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella Pontificia Università lateranense, 1961–1970), 2: 1179–84.

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in this project as it moved on, still in the lower church, to the rescue of Brother Placido from drowning, the offering of poisoned bread to Benedict plus the carrying off of that bread by crows, and the miracle of the blade of a pruning hook accidentally flung into the lake by a Goth.25 They also painted the two vaulted ceilings of the lower church. In one vault, the figure of Christ is in the very center. In the four corners there are four archangels, while along the four sides there are Paul and three apostles, Peter, Andrew, and John. In the other vault, Benedict is in the center. In the corners there are two popes, Gregory and Sylvester, and two bishops, while on the four sides there are four monks, three with books and one with a scroll. The creation at Subiaco of this fresco cycle with scenes from the life of St. Benedict and of the painted ceiling vaults above them just a few years after various artists undertook a similar project at Assisi, and at about the same time that Giotto started to work there, implies, on the basis of subject matter alone, that persons at Subiaco were making a concerted effort to imitate some of what was going on at Assisi. The timing of this effort points to the reign of a particularly capable administrator, Abbot Bartholomew, between 1286 and 96, although no text tells us that he or anyone else had a conscious plan to transform Subiaco into another Assisi.26 Stylistic analysis is another matter. Serena Romano has made a minute study of the entire corpus of frescoes at Subiaco, building, of course, upon the work of her predecessors but chiding them all for ignoring the circumstances in which that corpus was produced, circumstances in particular that could help explain subtle but certain stylistic developments observed in the progression of scenes. Upon getting to the scenes of the rescue of Brother Placido, the poisoned bread and the Goth, Romano sees a new mentality at work, one that exploits the irregular spaces and rearranges the decorative motifs more imaginatively, that conceives of walls as surfaces that can reveal thickness and volume, that introduces perspective into arches, and especially that organizes the wall with medallion-like portraits of Benedict and Scholastica in such a way that one “could not not presuppose a knowledge of the east or rose-window wall (controfacciata) of the upper basilica at 25 I monasteri, 95–202, especially 120–31; A. Tomei on painting at Subiaco in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, 11: 30–33; and on Consolo, Guglielmo Matthiae and Francesco Gandolfo, Pittura romana del Medioevo, secoli XI–XIV (Rome: Palombi, 1988), 219–24. 26 I monasteri, 134–35; Romano, La basilica di San Francesco, 226–27.

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Assisi.” What she perceives at this point in the Subiaco cycle is not a traumatic break; indeed she sees continuity of painters throughout, but “the painters were executing and translating the directions of someone who, compared with them, had at his command a more up-to-date, more modern culture.” She sees in the execution of the Subiaco cycle an ambitious attempt to display the stories of the life of St. Benedict in a way that demonstrates a deliberate choice to respond to the challenge launched by the Franciscans, who were confident that the stories broadcast at Assisi were helping to crystallize and underscore the myth of a founder of an order that seemed so much better adapted to the times than the Benedictine one.27 Benedict of Nursia lived six and a half centuries earlier than Francis of Assisi. But just as the very notion of a “Benedictine” Order came about only well after the establishment of the Order of Friars Minor, so also the monastic community at the Sacro Speco sponsored a new presentation to the world of their founder as a Benedictus alter Franciscus to proclaim a rejuvenated sense of their history, identity, and purpose.

III Turning now to the Dominicans, let us leave aside the influences concerning corporate ideals and governance that passed in either direction between the two major mendicant orders so as to concentrate exclusively on the figure of St. Dominic. As with Francis, the life of Dominic led to the production of several biographies, but the parallel histories of these two sets of biographies have little else in common.28 The lives of Francis, for all their differences, are vibrant with inspiration and excitement. There is an audacious freshness and simplicity about the person they all portray, a clarity of purpose, too, except during the painful conversion crisis he underwent, suspended as he was between the comfortably-off, sociable, and socially ambitious adolescent that his upbringing had made of him and the well-focused, inspiring religious leader that he was to become. Moreover, the lives of Francis served the

27 Serena Romano, Eclissi di Roma: pittura murale a Roma e nel Lazio da Bonifacio VIII a Martino V (1295–1431) (Rome: Àrgos, 1992), 127–33. 28 Cf. Luigi Canetti, L’invenzione della memoria: Il culto e l’immagine di Domenico nella storia dei primi frati Predicatori (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1996).

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factions among his followers to justify their own identities and actions in quarrels, more or less civil, with their competitors. And as the tactics of those quarrels included the suppression by some factions of versions of the saint’s life they did not like, modern students of Francis found themselves faced with a roughly century-long task of unraveling the tangled history of those lives. By the time, say, of the early work of Rosalind Brooke in the 1960s and 70s, it was finally possible for experts in that field to give a confidently sure view of such long-troubling questions as authorship, chronological order, or filiations and borrowings within the corpus of biographies of Francis.29 By contrast, the biographies of Dominic attracted little attention. Indeed Christopher Brooke gave the appearance of having been a good sport for writing up the far less colorful and in general less problematic history of Dominic’s biographical tradition. The one major problem he could not escape turned out to be the biographies’—and their subject’s—dullness.30 Writing a historiographical review of other scholar’s explanations for the dullness of Dominic cannot have been a very energizing experience. But Brooke is himself very sharp on the question of how each of the saints might have influenced the other. It is perhaps true to say that those who approach the problem through the study of Francis have generally assumed that Francis influenced Dominic, as (they usually feel) he must interest any sensitive person who comes in contact with him. Those whose first interest lies in Dominic have generally denied all influence or at least been minimizers . . . . Students of Francis always feel, no doubt, that the marked development in Dominic’s idea of poverty in his later years owed something to Francis. But strict ideas of poverty lay in the atmosphere they breathed, and Dominic went further than the Waldensians or the Cathar perfecti with whom he had so long disputed. The idea that the right way to deal with heretics was to ignore them, to walk all over Christendom—and beyond—and that the right way to run an order was to abdicate: these were much more original notions, and in their pursuit Dominic (consciously or unconsciously) was imitating Francis.31

29 Rosalind B. Brooke, “The Lives of St. Francis of Assisi,” in Latin Biography, ed. A. Dorey (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 177–98, and now see the summary of decades of her work: The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 30 C.N.L. Brooke, “St. Dominic and His First Biographer,” in his Medieval Church and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 215–16. 31 Ibid., 228–29.

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Brooke also cleverly turns the notion of influence on its head by recalling the view of one early Franciscan, Albert of Pisa, who advised his brothers to be grateful to the Preachers for occasionally showing them what not to do. And “there are reasons,” according to Brooke, “for thinking that Dominic may have returned the compliment by deliberately avoiding some of the most striking characteristics, such as the disorderliness, of the Franciscan movement.”32 Whatever the reasons, after Dominic’s death in 1221 his followers appear to have been little interested in memorializing their founder. Over a decade passed before the realization, by some Dominicans, that the memory of their order’s early history was fading induced Jordan of Saxony to compose his life of Dominic. Dull it may have been, it and its successors, written by Peter Ferrand, Constantine of Orvieto, Humbert of Romans, et al., but these all contain some lively episodes and miracle stories. One such episode that first appeared in Constantine of Orvieto’s version has to do with Dominic going to Rome to seek papal approval of his new order. The wheels of the papal bureaucracy turned slowly, so like most petitioners at the papal court Dominic faced a long wait. However, in Constantine’s account, Pope Innocent dreamt that he saw the Lateran basilica starting to collapse but then noticed a figure, who turned out to be Dominic, holding up the tottering building. “The pope prudently recognized its meaning and without delay commended the man of God’s proposal.”33 This is a familiar story, except that in the versions usually told or depicted the protagonist is Francis. Its first appearance in Franciscan writing was in the second life of Francis by Thomas of Celano, written roughly at the same time as Constantine’s life of Dominic, 1246–47.34 The first extant representation of the pope’s dream was the one painted by the Master of St. Francis in the lower church at Assisi in about 1260; the next was carved by Nicola Pisano along with other scenes from Dominic’s life on the saint’s marble sarcophagus for the new Dominican church at Bologna in 1267.35

32

Ibid., 229. Constantine, Legenda 21, ed. H.-C. Scheeben in Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum historia, 33 vols. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1935), 16: 301–02. 34 Thomas of Celano, The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul (the second life), 1:11 in FA:ED, 2: 256. 35 William R. Cook, Images of St. Francis of Assisi in Painting, Sculpture and Glass from the earliest Images to ca. 1320 in Italy. A Catalogue, Italian Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999), 49–60; Anita F. Moskowitz, Nicola Pisano’s 33

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Given that the two versions of the story of the pope’s dream, one in which the savior of the collapsing church is Francis and the other in which it is Dominic, appeared at very nearly the same time, the issue of which of these two versions had the story first may be not only difficult to resolve but perhaps also moot because of the chance of their being an earlier source or an altogether different explanation. Two scholars, one from each of the great mendicant orders, have recently advanced theories of how the story originated. Michael Cusato suggests that the likely source is the bull Mira circa nos by which Pope Gregory IX proclaimed Francis a saint in July 1228. Its main theme is that in times of great trouble God sends an emissary “even at the eleventh hour” to save the afflicted, as when Shamgar rescued Israel by slaying six hundred Philistines, or when Samson destroyed the temple of the Philistines in the midst of their feasting. “For behold, at the eleventh hour he raised up his servant Francis . . . [and] when Francis heard the voice of his beloved calling within him he rose up without delay. Like another Samson, with God’s help he broke the power that tied him to the seductive world.” The weapon used by Francis that corresponded to the jawbone of an ass wielded by Samson was preaching. So went the biblical analogy constructed by Gregory; it does not provide a direct source for the papal dream but certainly makes the point that Francis was a man sent by God to save the church in a moment of its dire need. Meanwhile the Dominican scholar Simon Tugwell reaches the same conclusion but via a different route. He points out first that the Franciscan version is probably closer to the original form of the story since it claims merely that the pope saw a religious man, “small and despised” (modicus et despectus), in his dream, and only later, when Francis came to petition him, interpreted this dream as foretelling the appearance of Francis before him. Tugwell then reasons that “if it had been claimed that Francis as such appeared in the pope’s dream, this would not necessarily have stopped the Dominicans taking the story over and changing the name, but it surely would have been mentioned more explicitly by Celano. Conversely if the original story was that the

Arca di San Domenico and Its Legacy (University Park, PA: [Published for the College Art Association by] The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 11–12 and f. 28; and Joanna Cannon, “Dating the Frescoes by the Maestro di San Francesco at Assisi,” Burlington Magazine 124 (1982): 65–69.

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pope had specifically seen Dominic in his dream, the Franciscans would have substituted an equally explicit vision of Francis.”36 The earliest extant portrait of Dominic is on the central panel of what is supposed to have been a triptych; it is dated as probably during the 1250s and is located at Harvard University in the Fogg Art Museum. Judged derivative of the earliest representations of Francis, the head on it was modernized twice during the thirteenth century (c. 1260 and again c. 1280–85), each time in an attempt to keep up with changing depictions of Francis. The missing side panels presumably had a number of episodes from Dominic’s life, as on such famous works concerning Francis as those in Pecia (1235) or in Santa Croce in Florence (c. 1255).37 The earliest such multi-scene work devoted to Dominic now extant owes much to these earlier works portraying Francis (Fig. 1). It has a central panel with a full-length portrait of Dominic thought to date from the final two decades of the thirteenth century. The two side panels, each with six scenes from the saint’s life, appear to have been added a decade or two later. The work originated in Gaeta, then was for a long time in the church of St. Peter Martyr in Naples, and is now in the Capodimonte Museum. It has attracted very little attention from art historians, although in recent years a somewhat tenuous attribution has been made to a minor painter named Giovanni da Taranto, who is known to have worked in both Bari and Naples in the years around 1300. One startling oddity is that in the large, central panel Dominic’s robe is painted a decidedly Franciscan brown, an error not repeated in the side panels. In that same central panel there are two tiny figures of

36 For opinions not backed up by reasons on which version “stole” from the other, see Chiara Frugoni, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 283 and 312, n. 105, and Serena Romano, “Domenico de Guzman,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1991–2002), 5:703. The suggestion of Michael Cusato was put forth at the Princeton symposium in honor of John Fleming on April 22, 2006, following a comment by Giles Constable that such ideas were in the air at that time so that a search for “the original version” would perhaps not be profitable. For Mira circa nos, see Bullarium Francescanum, ed. J. Sbaralea, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1759–68) 4: 42–44; and trans. in FA:ED 1: 565–69. For Simon Tugwell’s views, see his “Notes on the Life of St. Dominic,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 65 (1995): 5–165, esp. 10–11. 37 C. Gomez-Moreno, E.H. Jones, A.K. Wheelock, Jr., and M. Meiss, “A Sienese St. Dominic Modernized Twice in the Thirteenth Century,” Art Bulletin 51 (1969): 363–72.

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friars, also dressed in brown, helping to hold up a gospel book, whose open pages say: “Euntes in mundum universum predicate.”38 The most striking side panel is the one showing Pope Innocent III asleep and dreaming, while in the dream itself Dominic shoulders the massive weight of St. John in the Lateran (Fig. 2). In the third scene, which follows those of his birth and boyhood, Dominic is shown as a student at Palencia (already dressed as a Dominican), specifically when there was a famine in the region and he sold his books and gave the proceeds to the poor. This is not something that Francis did—after all he eschewed possession even of a breviary—but it is a solidly Franciscan message. On the left side of the panel Dominic stands before a high counter handing over a few books while the man seated behind the bench counts out some money in return. On the right side Dominic faces a group of child-sized individuals with out-stretched hands. They are of course not children but poor people, to whom he is handing the money. The sources for these scenes are not all Franciscan. The mother’s vision of the dog comes from the life of Bernard of Clairvaux. The resuscitation of the mason crushed by a collapsing wall comes from the life of Benedict of Nursia, and so on. The twelve side-panel scenes are based on passages found here and there in the Dominic biographies, but all twelve were included in James of Voragine’s account of Dominic’s life in the Golden Legend.39 The two great founder-saints sometimes appear together, as on either side of a Madonna and Child in a painting from c. 1270 in the Yale Museum.40 As for the supposed meeting between Francis and Dominic,

38 Ibid., 365–66 and fig. 17; Museo di Capodimonte (a Touring Club Italiano guide), ed. M. Utili (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 2002), 254. Note that in the color reproduction on that page the two side panels are placed on the wrong sides of the center panel. The date of this work in Naples is noteworthy since the St. Dominic altarpiece (central panel with the saint plus eight side panels with scenes of his life) done by Francesco Traini in 1345 for St. Catherine’s in Pisa is regarded by many as the first of its kind; see William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 58–59: “it is certain that [images of St. Dominic in Dominican churches] did not show St. Dominic as the main subject of an altarpiece before Traini’s painting.” The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from Smith College for getting and being able to reproduce the photographs that appear in this essay. 39 James of Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W.G. Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2: 44–58; for the pope’s dream, 46. The good Dominican bishop did not mention any papal dream in his version of the life of Francis, 2: 220–30. 40 Gomez-Moreno, et al., “Sienese St. Dominic,” 364 and fig. 14; Cook, Images of St. Francis, 135–36.

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an account of which first appeared in a Franciscan work, Thomas of Celano’s second biography of Francis, it nonetheless seems likely that the younger and always smaller Order of Preachers had more of a need for such a meeting than did the Franciscans.41 The Dominicans, once over their slow start, were not shy. They produced a view of Jesus that Richard Newhauser has called “Jesus as the First Dominican.”42 And then there is the scene of the miracle by which Dominic’s prayers brought an abundant supply of fresh bread to a table that just moments before was bare. This became an ideal theme for paintings on Dominican refectory walls, with a dinner table placed horizontally, no one seated on the near, or viewers’, side but with brothers arranged on the far side facing the viewers, with a haloed Dominic in the middle. Such paintings of this scene as those by Leandro Bassani for the Convent of Saints Giovanni and Paolo in Venice (now in the Correr Museum) and by Antonio André for the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro, Portugal (now in the Museum of Aveiro), or Nicola Pisano’s rendition of it in marble on Dominic’s tomb, cannot fail to suggest a link in viewers’ minds with the Last Supper.43 The Dominican propagandists went quite far, considering the raw material they had to work with and their late start. Salimbene told a story that refers to the time before they got started, to 1233, near the end of the thirteen-year period between the death of Dominic and his canonization. Although Salimbene’s chronicle is very well known, historians of the friars have shied away from citing this story, allowing

41 Thomas of Celano, Remembrance of the Desire 2:110 in FA:ED 2:342–43. Kaspar Elm, “Franziskus und Dominikus: Wirkung und Antriebskräfte zweier Ordensstifter,” Saeculum 23 (1972): 127–47. 42 Richard Newhauser, “Jesus as the First Dominican? Reflections on a Sub-theme in the Exemplary Literature of Some Thirteenth-Century Preachers,” in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, ed. K. Emery, Jr. and J. Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 238–55. 43 Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 4:727–34, esp. 730; L. Alberton Vinco Da Sesso, Jacopo Bassano: I Dal Ponte: una dinastia di pittori: opere nel Veneto; The Dal Ponte: A Dynasty of Painters, Work in the Venetian Region (Bassano del Grappa: Ghedina & Tassotti, 1992), 98–99; Museum of Aveiro, inv. #88/A. Fra Angelico also painted this scene at least three times (now in Paris, Stuttgart, and Cortona), most notably in the predella of his altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin for San Domenico at Fiesole, one of the works Napolean had carried off to Paris and that remains in the Louvre. See James Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 215–16, pl. 127, fig. 42e; and Laurence B. Kantor and Pia Palladino, Fra Angelico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 217–20, figs. 74, 130, cat. 37C.

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Fig. 1. St. Dominic and Scenes from his Legend, attributed to Giovanni da Taranto, c. 1300. Naples, Capodimonte Museum. Photo: Alinari Archive, Florence.

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Fig. 2. Detail of Figure 1. Pope Innocent III dreams that Dominic shores up the collapsing church of St. John in the Lateran. Photo: Alinari Archive, Florence.

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their seriousness to blind them to the wisdom that wit, and sometimes only wit, can convey. The simple story is that in 1233 Salimbene heard the bishop of Modena preach in Lyons. This bishop, aware that Francis had been canonized in just under three years from the time of his death and, as Salimbene told it, very sympathetic with the Dominicans, exhorted them about Dominic, saying, “The Friars Minor have their saint, and you ought to have one, too, even if you have to make him out of straw.”44 What the preachers needed in other words was a Dominicus alter Franciscus.

IV A most complex and curious route taken by the Francis effect involved the interpretation of Mary Magdalene, which eventually doubled back upon the image of Francis himself. One can find it in Katherine Jansen’s book The Making of the Magdalene, in particular the section entitled “The Mendicant Magdalene.”45 There had of course already been, to imitate Jansen’s phrasing, an evangelical Magdalene (egregious sinner, model penitent who washed Christ’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, the first person to see the resurrected Christ, and recipient of a charge from Him to announce His resurrection to the Apostles) and also a Provence and Vézelay Magdalene (evangelizer of the Gauls, contemplative hermit in her final years, and, from the twelfth century at the latest, holder of the title apostola apostolorum, presumably a reference to that charge given her by Christ).46 Such, in very brief, was the composite Magdalene at the time the great adventure of the friars began. In Franciscan writing, first things came first: they made of her a rich heiress who gave away all of her worldly goods to the poor. She kept her beautiful hair, though, which permitted her to cover herself even while naked in following the naked Christ. They wrote in admiration and detail of her evangelizing missions: in particular her preaching, her destroying of idols, and her baptizing of 44 Cronica fratris Salimbene de Adam ordinis minorum, MGH, SS, 32: 72; The Chronicle of Salimbene, trans. J.L. Baird, G. Baglivi, and J.R. Kane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 40 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), 49–50. 45 Katherine L. Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47–142. 46 Ibid., 21, 46, 62.

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converts. For the agony she went through in witnessing the crucifixion they considered her to have been crucified and martyred. They made her a model for lay people, especially for doing penance, and they taught how one could, by exercising empathy, weeping, and compassion at the foot of the cross, become a second Magdalene; they provided instructions in other words for imitatio Magdalenae.47 Most curious of all was that Franciscan writers, having made of the Magdalene a holy person based in many particulars upon the model of Francis, made Francis into a second Magdalene. When Francis lived at a hermitage near Rieti in 1221, he often worshipped in a small mountainside chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. In encouraging followers to live an eremitical life, he himself recommended Mary Magdalene as a model worthy of emulation. And an anonymous Franciscan wrote that Francis lived “far from the world and unknown to all people, just like one reads about Mary Magdalene. . . .” Thus the Magdalene is invoked in this case as the example that Francis followed in following Christ. His heirs memorialized and perpetuated this facet of Francis’s devotion by the construction and decoration with frescoes by Giotto of the Magdalene Chapel in the basilica at Assisi.48

V Finally, for the Francis-effect on the Holy Family, we turn to the Meditations on the Life of Christ, a work of devotional literature written by a Franciscan friar for a Poor Clare in the closing years of the thirteenth century. Over two hundred manuscript copies, of which a few written in Latin but most in various vernacular languages, in different versions as well, still exist, and nearly twenty of these have illustrations. Its diffusion and popularity is comparable to that of the Golden Legend. The main thread of the book is the familiar narrative of the life of Christ, a composite tale based on the gospels into which, however, the author without embarrassment or apology inserted details not found in Scripture. For example, when the Holy Family arrived in Egypt they

47

Ibid., 82, 79, 90, 92. Ibid., 68, 138–42. For the Magdalene Chapel, see Brooke, The Image of St. Francis, 436, figs. 96–101, and Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Giotto (New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1995), 272–303. Marilyn Lavin kindly reminded me of the relevance of this chapel for the argument I was presenting. 48

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rented a small house at Heliopolis and stayed there for seven years, or, to cite another instance, we learn that “Christ preferred His mother’s cooking to angelic fare.”49 The author also drew freely upon a vast number of spiritual writings, most notably those of St. Bernard and other Cistercians.50 The author’s approach is to set a scene and encourage the reader to contemplate it, and then to enter into it and become part of it, for example by helping Joseph and Mary carry the Baby on their long trek to Egypt.51 By this empathetic approach the devout reader is supposed to associate herself or himself with members of the Holy Family. The reader is asked to imagine being present at the Sermon on the Mount and to linger afterwards. “Watch the Lord Jesus descend together with the disciples, speaking familiarly with them, and as they walk on the road, see how this group of simple people follows, not in careful, orderly fashion, but like chickens following the hen, so that they might better hear Him, each one trying to come close to Him.”52 The very premise of the work is a challenge to the reader, for in the first paragraph we are told, in words cited already at the start of this essay, that Francis had been successful at this kind of devotion, becoming “finally complete and perfect in Jesus” and thus “transformed into Him.” Of course the ultimate model here is Jesus, but just as surely the approach one is admonished to follow is that of Francis. In certain cases, at the risk of taking an almost absurdly literal approach, the advice to go visit the manger to adore the Holy Child once a day during the Nativity season proposes doing something that Jesus did not do nor ever could have done, while it was something that Francis not only did but gained the reputation of having originated.53 The most remarkable passages in this work, in the present context, are those dealing with poverty. The poverty (as well as humility) of the Holy Family is stressed in virtually every passage. Joseph and Mary walked to Bethlehem because they were poor, in spite of her being on the verge of giving birth. They did not stay in a humble stall because there was no room at the inn, but like the earliest Franciscans at the start of their urban apostolate they stayed in a cave because they were

49 50 51 52 53

Meditations, xxii. Ibid., xxi–xxxiii. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 154–55. Ibid., 54–55.

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poor. A short while after the Child was born, the Magi came “with a great multitude and a noble following to the vicinity of the cave.”54 After greetings were exchanged and the kings’ acts of devotion made before the Child, finally, having received great comfort, they offered gold, incense, and myrrh. Opening the strong-boxes and ordering a rug spread at the feet of the Lord Jesus, each one offered Him gifts in great quantities, as otherwise, for a small gift, they would not have needed to open their treasuries but their seneschals would easily have had it at hand.55

This stress upon the great quantity of the royal gifts was another of our author’s embellishments, as were the questions he raised after relating the exchange of farewells and the departure of the kings: What would you have done with the gold they offered, which was of great value? Did the poverty-stricken lady keep it for herself, her old husband, and the little Child, that they might have the means to live, to spend or to save or to buy houses, fields, vineyards? God forbid that those devoted to poverty should concern themselves with these things. Since the Lady deeply longed for poverty and understood the desire of the Child, who taught her inwardly as well as showing His desire by signs, perhaps by turning His face away from the gold in disdain, she distributed everything to the poor within a few days.56

Moving ahead to when Jesus was twelve years old and stayed behind at the Temple in Jerusalem when His parents left to return home to Nazareth, we learn that for those three nights Jesus went to a hostel where He ate and slept with the poor.57 In just one more passage chosen from among several, the author appears to despair of ever being able “to follow the Lord Jesus in poverty perfectly,” and he promises to explain himself with “a new and beautiful reason.” Put simply, the reason is that Jesus “assumed not only the pain of poverty but also its shame.” A fuller explanation might go like this. Voluntary poverty taken for God is considered, and is, virtuous; it is not considered shameful but on the contrary honorable. The poverty of Jesus, however, was not so considered, because his contemporaries did not know that He was voluntarily poor. Since “poverty from necessity produces shame and contempt,” and since “He was without a home 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 31, 32, 50–51. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 51–52. Ibid., 92.

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and possessions or any goods, and everyone knew this, He was the more despised.”58 The key here, to put the matter in slightly different terms, is the view that Jesus combined voluntary poverty with voluntary humility, the latter, it so happened, masking the former. Here then we have arrived full circle at Christus alter Franciscus, the Francis of the Fioretti, as when he was answering the insistent questions of his companions about the true nature of happiness.59

VI To sum up, we have seen a few of the many places one could look for followers of Christ who were inspired by the example of St. Francis. In searching for others, though, one should not prejudge where they will be found. Membership in the Franciscan Order, for example, provides us no guarantee of Francis-like comportment, as a glance at Chaucer’s friar, “a wanton one and merry,” will remind us. A “noble pillar to his order” to be sure, yet “sweetly he heard his penitents at shrift/ With pleasant absolution, for a gift,/ He was an easy man in penance-giving/ Where he could hope to make a decent living.”60 Few if any groups, on the other hand, opposed the friars more vigorously than the secular clergy, yet we would be hard put in our search to find a better exemplar of Francis-like evangelism than Chaucer’s parson, “A holy-minded man of good renown . . . and poor . . .,/ Yet he was rich in holy thought and work/ He also was a learned man, a clerk,/ Who truly knew Christ’s gospel and would preach it/ Devoutly to parishioners, and teach it./ Christ and His twelve apostles and their lore/ He taught, but followed it himself before.”61 John Fleming has referred to this imagery of the good parson as deriving from a wellestablished vocabulary of ascetic commonplaces.62 The vocabulary was indeed well-established and the human profile traced by this particular combination of images belonged unmistakably and for good reason to the century and a half since Francis. 58

Ibid., 234–35. Deeds of Blessed Francis, 7; and The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, 8 in FA:ED 3:449–50, 579–81. 60 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. N. Coghill (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977), General Prologue, lines 208, 214, 221–24. 61 Ibid., lines 477–82, 527–28. 62 J.V. Fleming, “Muses of the Monastery,” Speculum 78 (2003): 1071. 59

LOUIS IX: PREACHING TO FRANCISCAN AND DOMINICAN BROTHERS AND NUNS William Chester Jordan

Medieval kings, at least those who reigned in the High Middle Ages, portrayed themselves as defenders of the Church and the Catholic faithful, and clergy developed practices that effectively treated them as special laymen, akin to some extent, to the priests themselves. These practices were tamer in the later Middle Ages than they had been in the earlier period. The papacy’s overall victory in the Investiture Controversy in the late eleventh and twelfth century had succeeded in rendering kings laymen, but it had not stripped them of all their spiritual aura or claims to hallowed status.1 Indeed, it is even unclear how this would have been possible in realms where the ruler was anointed after the manner of the ancient Israelite kings, Saul, David, Solomon and their successors. The forms of unction, the type of oil employed, and even the particular parts of the body that were anointed might be changed under papal pressure after the Investiture Controversy in order to emphasize the distinction between clerical and royal consecration, but the king remained the anointed of the lord (christus domini). And in France, which I will be focusing on, the inferences that were drawn from this fact were numerous and powerful. To a certain degree these inferences were shared by the publicists of anointed kings in other traditions, but it is also probably the case, for Latin Christendom at least, that French royalists made more claims more often on this basis than the propagandists of other royal lines.

1 For various interpretations of the Investiture Controversy in recent literature and various assessments of the papacy’s success, see Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Mary Stroll, Symbols as Power: The Papacy Following the Investiture Contest (Leiden: Brill, 1991); Stefan Beulertz, Das Verbot der Laieninvestitur (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1991); Johannes Laudage, Gregorianische Reform und Investiturstreit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Wilfried Hartmann, Der Investiturstreit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1993).

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Thus, students like Jacques Le Goff have found it deeply revealing but not particularly surprising that the French kings took communion in both kinds, like the clergy, at their coronation (though not thereafter), and that the vestments used in different stages of the coronation mimicked the vestments of clerics.2 And, of course, the greatest miracle associated with French kingship (though also not uniquely so, since the English kings also claimed the power) was the capacity to heal the disease of scrofula (morbus regis) by mere touch. In the French case, it became the custom from the fourteenth century on to manifest this power for the first time in each reign in the little village of Corbeny, a suburb to the northwest of the coronation city, Reims. There crowds gathered to receive the royal blessing immediately after the coronation and anointment.3 Louis IX (1226–1270) touched for scrofula in the thirteenth century—and, indeed, probably at Corbeny—though in his case right before going on crusade in 1248, rather than as a twelve-year old boy more than twenty years before at his coronation.4 One priestly practice, however, that has not typically been associated with the French kings of the High Middle Ages is formal preaching. We have now been reminded vigorously, thanks to the works of Darleen Pryds, Suzanne Cawsey and Samantha Kelly, that “a few” kings in Latin Christendom did occasionally preach to the Catholic faithful in formal settings, and, though the phenomenon was “not extensive,” they did so in a manner that often cannot be distinguished from settings and styles which we would associate with the preaching of bishops and friars.5 That is to say, we encounter kings not simply exhorting their

2

Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 831. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 832, and, more generally, Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. Anderson (London and Montreal: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973). For relatively recent treatments (with some challenges to Bloch’s interpretations), see Frank Barlow, “The King’s Evil,” English Historical Review 95 (1980): 3–27, and idem, “Morbus Regius: The Royal Disease,” in Medieval Studies in Honour of Avrom Saltman, ed. Bat-Sheva Albert, et al. (Ramat-Gan, IS: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1995), 53–66. See also, Darleen Pryds, The King Embodies the Word: Robert d’Anjou and the Politics of Preaching (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 17. 4 Barlow, “King’s Evil,” 3–27. Cf. Donna Sadler, “Lessons Fit for a King: The Sculptural Program of the Verso of the West Façade of Reims Cathedral,” Arte medievale 9 (1995): 64, 67 n. 102. 5 Darleen Pryds, The King Embodies the Word; Suzanne Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda: Royal Eloquence and the Crown of Aragon c. 1200–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Samantha Kelly, The New Solomon: Robert of Naples (1309–1343) and Fourteenth-Century Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 2003). The quoted phrases are from Pryds’s book, ix, 17. 3

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counselors or haranguing their troops, but offering the equivalent of sermons of pastoral care, solicitude and advice in sacred spaces.6 And, in addition to this, their actions reveal that they thought this sort of activity was an extremely important aspect of their public personae. Suzanne Cawsey’s book, Kingship and Propaganda: Royal Eloquence and the Crown of Aragon c. 1200–1450, published in 2002, devotes a good fifty pages to the Aragonese kings’ sermonizing—this by monarchs who, given the federative nature of their domains, were in many ways as distinctly un-sacral and certainly un-thaumaturgic as the Castilian kings studied by Teofilo Ruiz.7 Samantha Kelly, complementing the work of Darleen Pryds of a few years earlier (The King Embodies the Word: Robert d’Anjou and the Politics of Preaching), has showcased the behavior and similar practices of King Robert of Naples in her book, The New Solomon: Robert of Naples (1309–1343) and Fourteenth-Century Kingship, published in 2003. Indeed, over two hundred fifty of that king’s sermons have been preserved.8 In general, however, because of the hostility of clerical reformers and their successors down the centuries, who detested the practice as a usurpation of the “priestly office,” preaching by kings remained uncommon.9 Robert of Naples’ many sermons, therefore, constitute a genuine aberration. Nonetheless, it is largely because of Samantha Kelly that I have undertaken this project. For it was during the final stages of her revisions of her dissertation for publication that we met, and she asked me whether Louis IX, Saint Louis, ever formally preached. I replied that I simply did not know, although there was certainly no mention of any such activity in Joinville’s Life of the king.10 At the time, I did provide what very little information I could on the subject; taken together, this information from other texts and studies seemed more suggestive than

6

For examples, see Pryds, The King Embodies the Word, 15–16. On the constitutional, administrative and political cultures and history of Aragon, see Thomas Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), and Marta Van Landingham, Transforming the State: King, Court, and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon, 1213–1387 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002). For the emblematic Castilian case, see Teofilo Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 134–46. 8 Kelly, New Solomon, 73. 9 The quotation is from Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda, 52, and repeats the sentiments of Alvarus Pelagius, the fourteenth-century scholar-bishop of Silves. 10 Cf. Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ed. and trans. Jacques Monfrin (Paris: Garnier, 1995). 7

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definitive, more like a repertory of metaphors than of literal descriptions of the king’s behavior.11 Moreover, it is also true that during our exchange I did not think that Louis IX would have preached. Scholars who have studied royal preaching, like Suzanne Cawsey, are even more emphatic: France was “the most notable exception” to the generalization that at least one king preached in the course of the Middle Ages. The only other realm for which she could find no royal sermonizers was Portugal.12 And anyone who reads my published work on the king would rightly conclude, as Darleen Pryds did, that Louis IX did not preach.13 To be sure, he loved good sermons.14 He loved to share their message with others or invite others to listen with him.15 The most famous interchange between him and the English king, his brother-in-law Henry III (1216–1272), involved Louis encouraging Henry to listen to more sermons for their edifying content. Henry, on his part, preferred hearing mass, and the one and only time I believe he one-upped Louis IX, he somewhat denigrated sermons by saying to the French ruler that he (Henry) preferred to see an old friend rather than merely hear good news about him.16 The mass—the real presence of Christ in the sacrificial Host—trumped even the most edifying homily. Yet Louis IX’s love of sermons, which does not appear to have been diminished or in any way affected by the English king’s put-down, did not make me think that he would assume the character of a preacher, except in a mildly metaphorical way. As the father of his people, the whole of his governance was an exhortation in favor of virtue. To this extent, he could be said to be like a paterfamilias urging his sons and daughters to moral action or a preacher encouraging his flock towards

11

Kelly, New Solomon, 246–47 n. 15. Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda, 58 n. 29. 13 Pryds, The King Embodies the Word, 15 n. 36. 14 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 61, 212, 465, 535, 592–93, 617, 748–49, 776. 15 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 429–30 and 494 (on this last page Le Goff discusses the incident in Joinville’s Vie in which Louis holds up the giving of a sermon so his friend, who has somewhat angered him by willfully leaving a religious service in order to welcome the queen, could hear the whole homily; obviously more is going on here than just royal delight in sermonizing). 16 The incident and text from which it has been recovered is discussed in David Carpenter, “The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX,” Thirteenth-Century England 10 (2005): 26. See also Le Goff, Saint Louis, 465–66. 12

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good behavior.17 Yet, that is a far cry from offering formal homilies in sacred spaces, as bishops and other clergy did. Moreover, his presence among crusade preachers trying to get people to take the cross, though it can loosely be called preaching the crusade, for he undoubtedly expressed his support for the message of the crusade homilists in religious and exhortatory language, was not genuine sermonizing. Suggestive, yes, as Christoph Maier has shown, but it hardly constituted formal preaching.18 And even critics and condemners of royal preaching accepted the legitimacy of a king indulging in simple exhortation as long as he did not claim to be formally preaching.19 A better case can perhaps be made for an incident at Vézelay on his way to AiguesMortes for departure on his first crusade in 1248. After worshiping at the church with the Brothers, [Louis IX] set out benches for them all to sit on, but the king sat on the ground in the dust (for the church was not paved), as I [the Franciscan chronicler Salimbene is the author of this report] saw with my own eyes. And he called to us, saying, “Come to me, my dearest brothers, and hear my words.” So we made a circle around him on the ground, and his brothers [of his family] did likewise.20

A sermon? Or just another example of Louis’s penchant for informal conversation that was and is so well-known and so often vexed those who thought the king should be more formal rather than less?21 Finally, there is some very curious evidence about Louis IX’s attitude towards lay preaching in general. It is well known that the king was a big supporter of the beghards and beguines, laymen and laywomen who led devout communitarian though non-cloistered and non-professed lives in the towns of northern France as well as throughout the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and parts of southern Europe. He gave them

17 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 599, 601–03, and 776 (Louis characterized by Le Goff as a prédicateur amateur). 18 Christoph Maier, “Civilis ac pia regis Francorum deceptio: Louis IX as Crusade Preacher,” in Dei Gesta per Francos: Études sur les Croisades dédiées à Jean Richard, ed. M. Balard, et al. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 57–63. 19 Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda, 52–53. 20 I have used the English of the team of translators led by Joseph Baird, The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), 216. 21 Cf. William Chester Jordan, “The Case of Saint Louis,” Viator 19 (1988): 212–14.

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property and otherwise endowed them.22 He also liked and energetically supported the two largest mendicant orders, Dominicans and Franciscans, as well as their smaller evangelical counterparts.23 I mean the Order of Sack Friars, the Order of Crutched Friars, and the like, many of which would be reined in later—but, one must emphasize, only after the saint’s death—owing to the jealousy of other orders or papal concern over effective control of them.24 The various mendicant orders were licensed to preach, and Louis IX was an enthusiast of their efforts. But there is no evidence to my knowledge that he endorsed lay preaching: other forms of lay devotion like those practiced by the beghards and beguines, yes; lay preaching, even by these sorts of people, no.25 Perhaps because of his knowledge of and concern with the Waldensians, Louis IX suspected that lay preaching had too great a potential to lead to heresy for it to be tolerated let alone encouraged. True, not all the Waldensians broke with the church; and even some who did were reconciled and were subsequently permitted to preach under episcopal license. But others refused to submit to the church’s yoke.26 It was people like these, deemed heretics, whom the medieval inquisitions of heretical depravity, with Louis IX’s firm support, were rooting out of his southern lands.27 This perception of the danger of lay preaching may also explain the curious evidence I referred to. In Frances Andrews’s 1999 book on The Early Humiliati, the author explains that attempts were made to expand Humiliati houses beyond

22 William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 185, 189. 23 Jordan, Louis IX, 184–89. 24 For his support of these groups, see Jordan, Louis IX, 189–90. For their suppression after his death by prohibiting them from accepting novices, see Richard Emery, “The Friars of the Sack,” Speculum 18 (1943): 326–27. 25 How extensive lay preaching among the beghards and beguines was remains an unanswered question; I have not seen the “sermons of the Mistress of Paris’s Grand Béguinage” which Sweetman refers to as being preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale française, Latin 16481 and 16482 (Robert Sweetman, “Preaching,” in Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. W. Kibler and G. Zinn [New York and London: Garland, 1995], 756). 26 Extensive treatment in English in several essays may be found in Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530: Between a Religious Order and a Church (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001). 27 In the 1240s, inquisitors of heretical depravity received formal commissions to extirpate the heresy of Waldensianism; see Mark Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 45. There is also valuable information and discussion in James Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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northern Italy in the thirteenth century. Pope Alexander IV (1254–1261) himself encouraged the expansion. He did so because he thought it was in the best interests of the Church. But the Humiliati were tainted by their history. They had begun as lay preachers and were suspicious to some observers until (and in some cases even after) the popes recognized their orthodoxy and legitimacy. Indeed, the Humiliati became a steadily more clericalized order over time, clearly in an eff ort to distance themselves from guilt by association with the thitherto very similar Waldensians.28 But this similarity with the Waldensians and, perhaps, an apprehension on Louis IX’s part that the Humiliati of his time might go the way of the unreconciled Waldensians made him wary of letting them spread into France. At least, this is how I interpret the king’s chilly inaction when the pope, in letters of introduction for promoters of the movement, urged him and the French bishops in 1258 “to allow the Humiliati to settle in the kingdom of France. The pope describe[d] their praiseworthy life and activities, acquiring food by the labor of their own hands, giving alms, receiving guests and preaching the word of God.”29 The royal answer, judging both from the absence of any support being given the Humiliati and from their abject failure to spread into France, was a clear no.30 This scenario, if accurate, raises the possibility, although it technically draws on an argument from silence, that Louis IX was not only consistently but profoundly uneasy about laymen preaching. Nevertheless, Samantha Kelly’s question alerted me to the necessity to revisit the sources to see if there was any indication that the king was willing to put aside this hesitation for one particular and very special layman, namely, himself. Is there, then, any evidence of Louis IX as a preacher in a literal sense? It turns out that there is. Let me offer the two clearest illustrations that I now know of. The first comes from evidence presented in a study that I recommended to Samantha Kelly and that is included in a book of essays edited by Carolyn Muessig, published in 1998, and titled Medieval

28 Frances Andrews, The Early Humiliati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), addresses all these issues; her study is the most up-to-date and comprehensive in English. 29 Andrews, Early Humiliati, 251 and Appendix 1, nos. 116–17. 30 Alternatively, the letters to the king and his bishops may never have been sent, which is Frances Andrews’s opinion (Early Humiliati, 251), but this seems unlikely to me. They were either presented, given back, returned to Italy, and later filed away or authentic copies were given to the king and his episcopal advisers, in which case the surviving letters (in Italy) ought to be treated as copies made by the papal chancery for the Humiliati’s records.

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Monastic Preaching. The essay in question, by Regina Schiewer, discusses and translates a German-language exemplum from a sermon for nuns dated roughly to the year 1300.31 The Dominican preacher and author of the exemplum alleged that he had eyewitness knowledge of the event he described in the exemplum; and it seems quite certain that the central character in the event was Louis IX, an identification that Schiewer accepts as well. I quote from her translation of the exemplum. I remember [the preacher wrote] a word spoken by the king of France, the most Christian sovereign Christianity ever had in its time. He had the custom, that every Lent he came to our house [the Dominican Friary] in Paris, and took the novices and placed them all in front of him, sometimes as many as fifty, and preached to them. And among other words, he said this word: “Dear children, praise our Lord and do not pine for the joys of the world. I have been king for forty years and have had more joys than all of you together, that I know. And in all my days, I did not spend one full day, that was not mingled with deep sorrow.” I [the preacher continued, after quoting the king’s words] never forgot these words. Since the worldly joy of such a great lord was mingled in such a way, dear children, remember this, and do not pine for the worldly joys.32

This scene, recalled by the Dominican friar, may have an echo in a lost piece of tapestry art inventoried in 1616 at the sacristy or trésor of the church of Saint-Martin of Saint-Valéry in which Louis IX appears standing in front of the chair reserved for the preacher.33 What makes me more willing to accept the veracity of this report now is the evidence for another sermon. This second example comes from a letter dated 4 December 1282.34 It was written by Agnès de Harcourt, 31 Regina Schiewer, “Sermons for Nuns of the Dominican Observant Movement,” in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. C. Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 75–92. 32 Schiewer, “Sermons for Nuns,” 84: Ich gedench ains worts das sprach der chünig von frankreich der christenist fürst was den dye christenhait ye gewan pei iren zeyten. Der het ainen syten das er albeg in der vasten ze Paris in unser haus chom und nam denn dye nouitzen und setzt sy all für sich der etwenn fünffzig was und predigat yn und undern andern worten sprach er diese wort ‘liebe chind lobet onsern herren und lasst ewch nit iamern nach der wellt freyd Ich pin vierczig iar chünig gewesen und han mer freyd gehebt dan ir allsampnet das ways ich Und in allen meinen tagen do vertraib ich nie ganczen tag er wär vermischet mit herczenleycher betrubt.’ Dis wortes vergas ich nye Seyt das ainen allso grosem herren weltleych frewd allso vermisscht was Liebe chind hier an gedenkt und lat ewch nit iameren nach der wellt freyd. 33 Adrien Huguet, “Inventaire des ornements de l’église de Saint-Valéry, en 1616,” Bulletin de la Société d’émulation d’Abbeville, (1922–1924), 59–60. 34 The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt: The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis IX and Longchamp, ed. and trans. S. Field (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 46–49.

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the abbess of the Franciscan nunnery of the Humility of Our Lady, situated at Longchamp on the outskirts of old Paris, and usually referred to by the place name, Longchamp. This was a foundation undertaken by Louis’s saintly sister, Blessed Isabelle of France, and with his eager encouragement. Agnès was Isabelle’s close personal friend and the author of a biography/hagiography of her in vernacular French, possibly the earliest vernacular biography of a woman written by another woman in the post-classical Western tradition. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the king’s sister did not become a Franciscan nun at Longchamp, but it was she who drafted the rule and seems thereafter to have been very active in the governance of the nunnery and had her own apartments there. She was also buried there in the nuns’ habit. This occurred shortly before Louis IX departed on his second crusade to Tunis in 1270, where he, too, died; but before he left France, he attended his sister’s burial.35 In 1282 the official investigations into Louis’s candidacy for canonization took place.36 And it is a good bet that this letter was submitted to the papally-authorized investigating commission that was sitting at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis to receive evidence of the king’s holy life.37 In her letter to the commission Agnès recalled the ceremony of dedication of Longchamp, in which the king, his queen, their oldest son, and the king’s sister, the founder, took part. Three white doves happened to come to rest on a nearby perch during the ceremony, which the royal family and a number of the nuns, including Agnès, regarded as a sign that the Holy Trinity blessed the foundation of the nunnery.38 And then Agnès added, in the translation of the Old French published by Sean Field in 2004, Our same very reverend and holy father, Monseigneur the king Louis, was most devoutly present when we entered into religion and enclosed us. And soon after, he entered among us, as he could enter there according to our rule by permission of Monseigneur the pope. And Madame Isabelle, his good sister, our holy mother, accompanied him. We were gathered together before him in chapter. He seated himself right down on our level, and he gave the first sermon and teaching that we had had

35 Field summarizes all these matters quite efficiently in his introduction to the Writings of Agnes of Harcourt. 36 See the collection (with modern French renderings of the bulk of the surviving records) in Louis Carolus-Barré, Le Procès de canonisation de saint Louis (1272–1297): Essai de reconstitution (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994). 37 Writings of Agnes of Harcourt, 12–13. 38 Writings of Agnes of Harcourt, 46–47.

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william chester jordan since we had entered there, and he said that we ought to take as our example Monseigneur Saint Francis and Madame Saint Clare and other saints who lived with such sanctity and perfection, and that we should begin so high that the others who would come after us would not be able to equal us, and that we should be a mirror to all the other women of religion and lead such a life that the others could take it as a good example. And then and at other times he said many good words to us that would be lengthy to recount.39

So, in the first—the German recollection—we have the king being remembered as preaching to Dominican novices who were themselves on the road to becoming professional preachers. One of these was so inspired by Louis that he constructed an exemplary story around the experience and used it to encourage a much later audience of nuns to deal with the vicissitudes of joy and sadness. Equally significant, he reported that this was not a one-shot affair on the king’s part. Starting at some date in his reign, Louis visited the Dominican Friary of Paris each and every Lent in order to deliver a homily to the novices. The similarity is striking in Agnès’s report. The king, she wrote, gave so many homilies (her phrase is “then and at other times”) that it would take a lot of space to relate them—evidently too much space, because she did not relate them. If these reports are accurate, then Louis IX made it a custom to preach to at least two groups of Dominican friars and Franciscan nuns in their convents in and near Paris. Why? What did he think he was accomplishing? And why did he appear to think that he was the appropriate and very special layperson to engage in such activity? But a preliminary question needs to be faced first: are these texts genuinely describing royal preaching?

39 Writings of Agnes of Harcourt, 46–49: Icellui nostre tres reverend et saint pere monseigneur le roy Loÿs fut present moult devotement quant nous entrasmes en la religion et nous encloist. Et assez tost aprez il entrapar devers nous, si comme il y pouoit entrer parmy nostre ruyle par le congié de monseigneur le pape. Et ma dame Ysabel sa bonne seur, nostre saincte mere, fut en sa compaignie. Nous fusmes ensemble devant lui en chapitre. Il se asset abuse bas come onus, et onus fist le premier sermon et enseignement que nous eussions eu puis que nous y estions entrees, et disoit que nous devions prendre exemple a monseigneur saint François et a madame saincte Clere et aux aultres sains qui vesquirent si sainctement et si parfaictement, et que nous devions commencier si hault que les autres qui vendroient aprés nous n’y peussent attaindre, et que nous devions estre mirouer a toutes les autres femmes de religion et mener telle vie que les autres y peussent prendre bon exemple. Et adonc et autres fois il nous dist moult de bonnes paroles qui longues seroient a raconter.

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Unlike the sermons of Robert of Anjou studied by Darleen Pryds and Samantha Kelly, these homilies certainly do not appear to constitute what is sometimes, if somewhat misleadingly, called scholastic preaching on a theme or biblical verse.40 Louis IX was sufficiently learned or was thought to be sufficiently learned to do something like scholastic preaching, as an anecdote about him indicates. The king, in attendance at a sermon, watched as a preacher also in attendance interrupted the speaker to correct one of his interpretations. Louis then joined the dispute and corrected the corrector. He had a volume of Saint Augustine’s work fetched to prove that he and the homilist were correct.41 But despite this kind of evidence, I think one must readily admit that Louis IX’s sermons to the Dominican novices and the Franciscan nuns were, as far as one can tell, scholastic neither in structure nor in the use of rigidly formulaic locutions. Whether most medieval sermons were in fact of the highly mannered and learned type can be doubted in any case: written texts, especially model sermon collections, tend to preserve the more formal products of the genre and thus render our first impressions misleading as to the underlying reality.42 Indeed, I think that most medieval sermons were probably even looser than homilies in liberal mainstream churches today, which quite often make only the merest gesture to the gospel lesson proper for the Sunday. Typical medieval sermons were perhaps most like the fireand-brimstone harangues in evangelical churches or the exhortations, in less hell-focused churches, to good behavior and trust in God. The thematic inspiration in the thirteenth century could come from a topical allusion to a saint (Clare, say, or Francis) or a striking incident (like those three doves). If most medieval sermons were of this sort, then Louis IX’s words fit the category. The fact that the authors of the texts that mention his behavior use the same words that other contemporary authors use to describe formal sermons (German, predigat; French, sermon et enseignement) persuades me to consider Louis’s encouraging and cautionary messages to the Dominican novices of Paris and the

40 On the scholastic and/or highly complex nature of Robert’s sermons, see Kelly, New Solomon, 246–50. On whether scholastic is the proper term, there are good words in David D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 7, 163–80. 41 Cf. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 494. 42 Cf. D’Avray, Preaching of the Friars, 6.

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nuns of Longchamp as sermons as well. They have what may be called a “family resemblance.”43 Who did Louis IX think he was? He certainly recognized that he was a sinful Christian. He publicly acknowledged as much on several different occasions, especially after the failure of his first crusade. Peccatis nostris exigentibus—this was the conventional phrase he used when he described that setback in a letter sent to France soon after the disaster.44 He used a more personal tone later: “If I alone could bear the opprobrium and adversity and my sins did not redound upon the universal Church, I could endure with equanimity. But woe is me; by me all Christendom has been confused.”45 So, Louis IX was a sinner, an acknowledged sinner. He may never have confessed to a mortal sin, but he avoided the hubris of thinking that his personal merit and effort were sufficient to keep him from sinning.46 But the fact that all human beings were miserable sinners did not take away from the fact that miserable sinners had spiritual gifts, bestowed on them by the Creator. In Louis IX’s case—and as he himself saw it—these gifts were closely tied to the dignity of kingship, indeed, to the fact that he was an anointed king, a fact that necessitated that he exercise power and fulfill obligations that were not the common responsibility of ordinary human beings. He loved the Church so much—and particularly the mendicant orders—that he would have abdicated had it not been for the fact that he had undergone the holy unction of royal consecration in the coronation rite.47 He reminded his son, in words he allegedly penned with his own hand as instructions on kingship, that the sacred anointment would require of him, his son, when the time came and he assumed the crown, the most strenuous effort at virtuous rulership and that negligence in this regard was tantamount to a rejection of his very humanity.48 That is the force of the statement the

43

Cf. Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda, 55, who invokes Anscar Zawart’s phrasing to the effect that the word sermon defines a series of texts and allocutions united by a “family resemblance.” 44 Discussed by Jordan (with citations), Louis IX, 127. 45 Cited and discussed in Jordan, Louis IX, 133. 46 The allegation that he never committed a mortal sin originated with his confessor Geoffroy de Beaulieu in a memoir prepared in advance of the formal questioning of witnesses in the canonization process; cf. Carolus-Barré, Procès de canonisation, 32. 47 Jordan, Louis IX, 129–30. 48 Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ch. 739 (on Louis’s alleged writing of these Teachings with his own hand, an assertion whose accuracy has long been doubted), and see Carolus-Barré, Procès de canonisation, 63 ch. 14 (long text of the Teachings) on the

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king made to the effect that he would rather a Scot rule in France than his son rule badly (Car vraiement je ameraie miex que un Escot venist d’Escoce et gouvernast le peuple du royaume bien et loialment que que tu le gouvernasses mal apertement).49 This was an invitation to a world turned upside down, for Franks, proverbially, were to rule Scots, not the other way around.50 Louis IX would rather an alien, who tried to rule well (loialment), succeed him and have power over the Franks than his son by ruling wickedly repudiate the gift of God granted by holy unction, a gift that made the king by grace the anointed of the Lord, christus domini. This is also the force of other comments the king made during the period of the baronial crisis in England from 1258 to 1265. The barons had seized power effectively from 1258, and they had imposed on King Henry III any number of reforms to which the king gave formal consent (until the pope permitted him to withdraw it).51 Louis IX on at least two occasions in this period expressed his opinion on limiting the authority of an anointed king by the barons. The more famous of these was the Mise or Award of Amiens of 23 January 1264.52 The French king had been asked to arbitrate the disagreements between Henry and his baronial opposition in order to prevent civil war. The Mise was a point by point rejection of every action the barons had taken to bridle the king, and it conceded only grudgingly that older customary constraints, meaning Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, continued to have the force of law. The barons rejected the arbitrated judgment on the

centrality of being worthy of the unction. The critical edition is David O’Connell’s Teachings of Saint Louis: A Critical Text (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). 49 Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, ch. 21. 50 David Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and Its Contacts with Christendom, c. 1215–1545, I: Religion, Culture and Commerce (East Linton, UK: Tuckwell Press, 2001), 269–70; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 105. 51 The classic collection of documents and the classic study are R.F. Treharne (with I.J. Sanders), ed., Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), and R.F. Treharne, The Baronial Plan of Reform, 1258–1263 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). More recent work includes Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), with references to work since Treharne’s publications. 52 For Louis IX’s political philosophy as expressed in the Mise, see Charles Wood, “The Mise of Amiens and Saint Louis’ Theory of Kingship,” French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 300–10.

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basis that the French king had exceeded his mandate: he was not to decide whether the barons had the right to impose constraints on the English monarch but which constraints seemed consistent with overall good governance. Louis’s view was that none was, not because of their substantive content but because of how they were imposed—against the will of an anointed king. Later that year, on 12 August 1264, the barons, under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, had the upper hand in a situation that by then had turned violent, and King Henry III in order to save the remnants of his kingship and assure the safety of hostages in his barons’ hands agreed to further restraints on the independent exercise of his royal authority. His capitulation, which only very temporarily restored calm, is sometimes called the Peace of Canterbury.53 When Louis IX heard of Simon de Montfort’s imposition of the Peace of Canterbury and the limited conception of royal authority to which Henry III had to agree, he is reported to have said that “he would rather break clods behind a plow than have this sort of kingly rule” (quod mallet post aratrum glebas frangere, quam huiusmodi principatum habere).54 That is to say, it was better being a peasant than an anointed king who suffered his regal office to be reduced in this manner. Kings were quite special kinds of aristocrats and may have risen above the common prejudices of that class, but they—and in this case Louis—intended a statement like this to emphasize the chasm between the unfettered royal dignity and the peasant’s brutal, degraded life. To be sure, at his symbolic best, the peasant, especially as plowman, was more than a boorish drudge; he was the literal support of society, whose work was often stereotyped as representing the dignity that comes from supporting Christendom, at its symbolic best.55 So maybe this is what Louis meant: there was more spiritual dignity in a common plowman who did the job he was supposed to do than there was in a king who promised not to do his job in order merely to retain his regal title.

53 Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 194–96. 54 J.R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 295. 55 In general on representations of the medieval peasant, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), specifically 133–56 on aristocratic prejudices, and 33–35, 66, 223–29, on the varied spiritual meanings associated with the plow and the plowman.

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Thus, to Louis IX, anointed kingship was a sacred or at least semisacred office that both gave him special authority and demanded actions that were otherwise wholly inappropriate to other men (or people). In some cases, these other men were constituted of all other men; in others, by all other laymen. To this extent, might not have felt anything strange at all about preaching since other kings had preached before and continued to preach, without believing themselves to be violating the settlement that ended the crisis over lay investiture. (We could compare him to his nephew again, Robert of Naples, whose preaching, in Samantha Kelly’s words, “imbued [him] with a sacral aura . . . fitting to his royal status.”56) Or, perhaps, Louis IX persuaded himself that he was merely exhorting people who needed exhortation and not formally offering sermons at all. Yet, even if he did not consider what he was doing to be formal preaching, it seems clear enough, as I suggested earlier, that those who observed him and heard him regarded what he was doing as a kind of preaching and used the appropriate words to describe what he did as preaching. But, then, why preach to (or exhort) the Dominicans and Franciscans? It is possible, of course, that the evidence is misleading and that Louis IX preached to (or exhorted in a preacherly manner) all kinds of religious and lay folk and not just in and near Paris. For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that the evidence is not too skewed, namely, that the king’s well-documented special fondness for the mendicant orders led him to think of himself as something akin to them, as a preacher himself. Moreover, he may have associated a somewhat more open attitude about religious observance with them. Not that they were lax—not at all. He admired the intensity of their devotional practices. But he also loved the Cistercians and wanted very much to be treated as one of them, too.57 In the cloistered and highly structured societies of the monasteries, however, Louis IX was very much more an outsider than he was with respect to the mendicants and their convents. He asked permission, as if it could be denied, to receive the Cistercian abbot of Chaalis’s nightly blessing when he visited there—the same the abbot gave to all his monks.58 He imitated cloistered monks in something like

56

Kelly, New Solomon, 247. Cf. William Chester Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 38 (with additional citations). 58 For the incident and its representativeness, see Le Goff, Saint Louis, 618. 57

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formal submission when he visited their monasteries.59 Mendicant piety attracted him in different ways.60 As he said, in a witticism that belied his incapacity as an anointed king to forego the kingship, he might have abdicated, but he would not have been able to decide whether to become a Dominican or Franciscan.61 So, he stayed at his job. He simply modified the job description, as it were, by incorporating giving sermons to members of both orders. A further question is why the king’s preaching never made it into the official list of virtues making the case for his sainthood, since it is at least mentioned in passing in Agnès de Harcourt’s letter to the investigatory commission? The answer to this, I think, is fairly obvious, since royal preaching, up to this time, was rare, and ecclesiastical conservatives regarded preaching as largely incompatible with the status of a layman. Those considering the candidacy of Louis IX for inclusion in the list of saints, most of whom were religious conservatives who also blocked his enrollment at the rank of martyr (he had not died in passive resignation under a direct and personal threat of death), would not identify this minor and problematic characteristic of his life as a virtue that contributed to his sanctity.62 Or they would have preferred to interpret what he did as informal exhortation rather than formal preaching and thus completely finesse the issue. Finally, why men and women as his audience? I do not know with the certainty I would like to bring to this topic, but it is interesting to speculate that his unalloyed admiration and respect for his mother and sister had something to do with his appreciation of the intellectual and spiritual ability of women.63 And, let us recall that when Louis IX chose to give Teachings to his son on how to be a good Christian king, he 59 Cf. William Chester Jordan, “The Representation of Monastic-Lay Relations in the Canonization Records for Louis IX,” in Religious and Laity in Western Europe 1000–1500: Interaction, Negotiation and Power, ed. Janet Burton and Emilia Jamroziak (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 225–39. 60 Cf. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 746–50. 61 Cf. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 332, for his skepticism about whether this report actually captures Louis’s state of mind at any time in his reign. My use of the word “witticism” is intended to convey the same skepticism, despite Louis’s fondness for the two largest mendicant orders. 62 On the debate over Louis’s “martyrdom,” see William Jordan, “Honouring Saint Louis in a Small Town,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 266–67. 63 On his admiration of and respect for his mother and sister, see Jordan, Louis IX, 3–13, and idem, “Isabelle of France and Religious Devotion at the Court of Louis IX,” in Capetian Women, ed. Kathleen Nolan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 209–23.

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chose also to bestow Instructions on his daughter on how to be a good Christian woman.64 The gender equilibrium here is a subject that could bear more looking into. In any case, just as his children, male and female, patently constituted the most appropriate audience for his parental exhortations, it was precisely Dominican brothers and Franciscan nuns who might most appreciate and be appropriate for the king’s preacherly advice. “Brother Louis, Brother Louis” (Frater Ludovicus) he overheard his servants calling him when on occasion they made fun of his devotions.65 “Louis the friar” the old woman spat out who lost a case in the royal court and wanted to impugn the king’s decision: he acted more like a friar than a ruler.66 Or, the poet Rutebeuf’s and the polemicist Guillaume de Saint-Amour’s sneering words at the king’s evident over-susceptibility to mendicant ideas and mendicant forms of devotion.67 All of these slurs, if you will, make even more sense when one thinks of the king as embodying still another form—the essential core—of mendicant identity, preaching, if only to a very restricted set of the faithful. Despite generations of mendicant apologists asserting the contrary, Louis IX was not a mendicant tertiary.68 But he was perhaps—and more profoundly—a category of mendicant sui generis, “le prédicateur royal de France.”

64 David O’Connell, Teachings. The Instructions are edited in idem, The Instructions of Saint Louis: A Critical Text (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). A modern French rendering is in idem, Les Propos de saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 191–94. 65 G.G. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante: A Translation from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221–1288), 2nd ed. (London: D. Nutt, 1907), 405. 66 Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, Vie de saint Louis, in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed., M. Bouquet et al., 24 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie royale [nationale, impériale], 1738–1904), 20: 106. 67 Julia Bastin and Edmond Faral, eds., Onze poèmes [de Rutebeuf] concernant la Croisade (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1946), 31–32; Edward Ham, Rutebeuf and Louis IX (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 13–14. For a genre contextualization of this usage of satire by Rutebeuf, see Sophia Menache and Jeannine Horowitz, “Quand le rire devient grinçant: la satire politique aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Le Moyen âge 102 (1996): 444. On Guillaume de Saint-Amour, the most comprehensive treatment is that of M.-M. Dufeil, Guillaume de Saint-Amour et la polémique universitaire parisienne, 1250–1259 (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1972). 68 Jordan, Louis IX, 185.

PREACHING AS PLAYWRITING: A SEMIDRAMATIC SERMON OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY Katherine L. Jansen

Donna del Paradiso, lo tuo figliolo è preso, Iesù Cristo beato. Accurre, donna e vide che la gente l’allide; credo che lo s’occide, tanto l’ò flagellato Lady, Queen of Heaven, they have taken your son; Hurry, come and see— they’re beating Him, Whipping Him brutally; they will kill Him.1

Written at the end of the thirteenth century, Jacopone da Todi’s lauda, “Donna del Paradiso” was one of the most beloved vernacular poems of the later medieval period. In the passage cited above, Jacopone imagines the disconsolate words of the messenger who, on Good Friday, delivers the news to the swooning Virgin Mary that Christ has been arrested. It is well-known that laude were sung or recited rhythmically by laudesi companies whose central devotional practice was to sing the praises of the Lord and his saints. What perhaps is less well-known is that the text of the “Donna del Paradiso,” along with other vernacular laude, often became the centerpiece for sacred oratory of the friars of the fifteenth century, the subject of this paper. The study of medieval sermons has a long and distinguished history, one which only recently has turned to consider preaching as performance, with due attention to the exchange between preacher and

1 I cite the edition by Franco Mancini, Laude (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1974), 201. The translation is from Jacopone da Todi, The Lauds, trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 278.

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audience.2 Then, as now, the sermon was a ritualized event in which the preacher tried to soften hardened hearts or move people to action. On occasion, it could provide an afternoon’s entertainment. In either case, the preacher used his pulpit and what we would call a repertoire of performance techniques to transmit his message to as wide an audience as possible. In 1977, John Fleming memorably termed this “pulpit drama.”3 “Semi-dramatic” sermons with laude embedded at their dramatic core most certainly contributed to transforming preaching events into dramatic performances in the late medieval and early modern periods.4 The great practitioners of this genre were preachers of the Franciscan Observant Reform movement. Focusing on a semi-dramatic sermon of Roberto Caracciolo (d. 1495), a leading light of this movement, this paper analyzes the text in its performative context.5 The Observant Franciscans, no less than their early brethren, preached conversion to penance, the subject matter of most medieval sermons. The penitential life was a broad complex of ideas including conversion from sin, accompanied by acts of repentance, expiation, self-mortification and charity, not infrequently held together by the bonds of voluntary poverty.6 Preachers envisioned the penitential path as a permanent process, a life’s work, which called for constant vigilance and attentiveness to the pitfalls and temptations offered up

2 The great repertoire from which modern research on sermons and preaching has proceeded is Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1150–1350, ed. J.B. Schneyer, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 43, 11 vols. (Münster-Westfalen: Aschendorf, 1969–1990). For a recent synthesis on the state of research in the field, see The Sermon, ed. B.M. Kienzle, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 81–83 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). For recent scholarship on performance and preaching, see Beverly Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and their Performance: Theory and Record,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 189–224; and Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Italian Pulpits: Preaching, Art, and Spectacle,” in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1600, ed. K.L. Jansen and M. Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 3 John V. Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 126. 4 On this genre, see Vincenzo de Bartholomaeis, Origini della poesia drammatica italiana, 2nd ed. (Turin: S.E.I., 1952), 326–30, who seems to have been the originator of the term. 5 For a thorough introduction to the works of Caracciolo, also known as Roberto da Lecce, see Roberto Caracciolo: Opere in volgare, ed. Enzo Esposito; intro. R. Mordenti (Galatina: Congedo, 1993). There is a summary of his life at 47–50 and a comprehensive bibliography at 66–73. 6 One of the best works on the subject is Giovanna Casagrande, Religiosità penitenziale e città al tempo dei comuni (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1995).

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in the urban centers of economic life. These included indulging in sumptuous wardrobes, lustful behavior, sodomy, usury, witchcraft and sorcery, a catalogue of sins made famous by Bernardino da Siena’s fireand-brimstone sermons denouncing them.7 That Bernardino’s sermons continue to sizzle on the page some six hundred years after the fact is in no small part due to the talent of their composer, but it is also because of the felicitous circumstances of their preservation. Delivered in the vernacular and recorded as such by various hands including those of confraternity members, notaries, and interested lay people, the resulting transcription of sermons—reportationes—are the priceless records of sermons performed in front of live audiences that get us as close as possible to the sometimes carnivalesque atmosphere of late medieval preaching events. For, in addition to the text of the sermon, the reporter often included remarks on the preacher’s gestures, the sound or tone of his voice, the audience’s response (not always flattering), the location and date of the event, and occasionally even a comment or two on the weather. In addition to those of Bernardino da Siena, many of the sermons of the early fifteenth-century Observants such as Giacomo della Marca, Giovanni da Capestrano, and Vicente Ferrer, O.P. are preserved likewise, and it is through these reportationes that historians have begun to reconstruct not just the words of sermons but the atmosphere of the preaching event itself: its performance.8 By the early fifteenth century, the urban public was a sophisticated audience, not without certain expectations, especially in relation to the form of the sermon, the sermo modernus, also called the “scholastic sermon,” which was characterized by its structure around a thema, usually a scriptural verse, which was then divided into three or four parts, which, each in turn, developed an aspect of the theme. The sermon

7 For Bernardino’s use of these topics in particular, see Franco Mormondo, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 8 Bernardino’s 1425 cycle of sermons at Siena, for example, were recorded in two redactions: one in Latin, the other in Italian. See Carlo Delcorno, “La diffrazione del testo omiletico. Osservazioni sulle doppie ‘reportationes’ delle prediche bernardiane,” in Dal pulpito alla navata. La Predicazione medievale nella sua recezione da parte degli ascoltatori (secc. XIIII–XV) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1989), 47–79. For the Franciscans see Donato Gallo, “Predicatori francescani nella cattedrale di Padova durante il Quattrocento,” in Predicazione francescana e società veneta nel Quattrocento: committenza, ascolto, ricezione (Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani, 1995), 159–89. For Ferrer, see Manuel Ambrosio Sánchez Sánchez, “Vernacular Preaching in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan,” in The Sermon, ed. B. Kienzle, 831–33.

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generally signaled at its outset its divisions and how elaboration would proceed. In vernacular modern sermons such as those in Middle English and Anglo-French, as well as in Latin exemplars, those divisions often rhymed, pointing to their probable usage as mnemonic devices for preacher and audience alike. The preacher’s initial broadcast of the architecture of the sermon, its rhymed parts, and its reliance on auctoritates and exempla, for constructing an argument created a familiar structure which assisted audience reception of the message. Indeed, so familiar was the modern sermon’s structure that by the end of the medieval period the great Valencian preacher Vicente Ferrer could playfully tease his listeners, “Do you want the auctoritas now? Do you want the auctoritas now?”9 But familiarity with the sermon form may also have worked against the reception of the message so preachers had to develop ancillary means to underscore their themes. Audiences needed convincing and preachers used every resource in their theatrical grab-bag to do so. Sometimes they commented on the public art known to urban audiences as did Bernardino when he explicated Lorenzetti’s frescoes on Good Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena or the same painter’s mural depicting the four winds located in the chapter hall at Sant’Agostino.10 Other times they gestured to the crucifix hanging in the apse to make their point, but preachers could also be far more theatrical when the occasion warranted it. In the thirteenth century, Berthold of Regensberg created an enduring bit of stage business when he lit a bonfire of vanities, encouraging his audience—female members in particular—to stoke the flames with their hairpieces, combs, veils, all vain superfluities.11 Bonfires were such an effective technique of rousing an audience to repentance that at the end of the fifteenth century, Savonarola was still using the spectacle of a bonfire for the same ends, but the catalogue of vanities had now grown very long indeed. Among

9 Sánchez Sánchez, “Vernacular Preaching,” in The Sermon, ed. B. Kienzle, 805–06. 10 For the Palazzo Pubblico frescoes, see Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari (Predicazione, Siena 1425), ed. Ciro Cannarozzi, O.F.M., 2 vols. (Florence: E. Rinaldi, 1958), vol. 2, sermon XL, 266. For the four winds, Bernardino da Siena, Prediche sul Campo di Siena, 1427, ed. C. Delcorno (Milan: Rusconi, 1989), sermon II, 126–32. 11 A sermon translated by G.G. Coulton in Ray C. Petry, No Uncertain Sound: Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), 213.

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the items cast into Savonarola’s fires were paintings by Sandro Botticelli, a devoted follower of the Dominican firebrand.12 Although bonfires were also amongst the weapons in Bernardino’s preaching arsenal, he is most associated with the holy tavoletta, a panel inscribed with the YHS, the initials of the holy name of Jesus. The golden monograph set on a blue field, encircled by a radiant sun was designed by Bernardino himself and used theatrically as a talisman to solicit audience participation in his preaching events. At the climax of his sermons, Bernardino sometimes brandished the tavoletta, at the sight of which his audience took their cue to kneel down, uncover their heads, and weep in reverence. Another of his calculated ploys to engage an audience’s response was to have them spit every time he mentioned the name of the devil. “Sputa” he would shout after every invocation of the devil’s name. Knowing full well that minds often wandered, Bernardino went after the body too, inviting—or better demanding—the active, kinesthetic participation of his audience in his sermons.13 As preaching events developed into spectacles, so the theater of preaching evolved to accommodate the diffusion of the word. Early on, as we learn from Salimbene, Berthold of Regensberg festooned his preaching platforms with pennants that served double-duty as both decoration and wind-indicators, informing audience members where to position themselves for the optimal audio experience. Sensitivity to acoustics was an imperative shaping mendicant architecture which sought to organize space to privilege the spoken word. The friars’ “preaching barns” testify to the architectural notion that function begets form. These enormous halls, built to hold a vast crowd, were often single wide spaces, but from any point within the words of the preacher were meant to be heard effortlessly.14 Naturally, preachers did not always have the luxury of preaching in acoustically designed 12 A still useful introduction is Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 13 For descriptions of Bernardino’s preaching events see, Cynthia L. Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and His Audience (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 67–79. 14 On mendicant architecture, see A.M. Romanini, “L’architettura degli Ordini Mendicanti: nuove prospettive di interpretazione,” in Storia della città 111 (1978): 5–15 and Antonio Cadei, “È possible scrivere una storia della architettura mendicante? Appunti per l’area padano-veneta,” in Tommaso da Modena e il suo tempo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studi per il VI Centenario della morte, Treviso, 31 agosto–3 settembre 1979 (Treviso: Comitato per le celebrazione, 1980), 337–62.

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spaces, they had to preach wherever an audience congregated and that often meant outdoors in marketplaces, granges, fields, and in Italy, in public squares. If the cathedral had an external pulpit, such as the one at Perugia, itinerant preachers might be given permission by the bishop to use it, but most often they made due with portable wooden pulpits and scaffolds, assembled on the spot for the occasion. The average sermon lasted about an hour, though some of the superpreachers spun out their performances to last hours on end. Giovanni da Capestrano, who, early in his career was assigned as Bernardino da Siena’s preaching companion, testified at the impending saint’s canonization process that Bernardino could preach for four to five hours at a time. Vicente Ferrer seems to have broken all records by preaching what can only be termed a six-hour marathon.15 Thus, by the fifteenth century all the techniques of pulpit theater, which brought preacher and audience together into a collaborative venture, transformed the diffusion of the word into a performance, sometimes even a sacred performance, especially when it was accompanied by miracles. In 1372, the sermons of the Carmelite preacher, Frei Afonso Abelho (Abello) made the rains stop in Évora, while Vicente Ferrer’s preaching was so efficacious that it brought an end to drought in Mallorca.16 Late medieval revivalist preachers had so ratcheted up the horizon of expectation of their audiences, that now the public had almost come to expect thaumaturgy of their super-preachers and seldom did they disappoint. Both Bernardino da Siena and Giovanni da Capestrano were known for producing miraculous healings at their preaching events, the latter even using the relics of the former to effect them. Audiences, then, regarded certain preachers as holy men, whose repertoire often included mediation not only of the sacred word but also of sacred power. But, of course, not all preachers could claim the gift of thaumaturgy. Instead they relied on the art of dramaturgy. Despite Alain of Lille’s advice contained in his Ars praedicandi, that preachers should not engage in buffoonery or cheap antics, that counsel often as not went unheeded, especially by the fifteenth century, the age of the super-star

15

For Bernardino, see Carlo Delcorno, “Medieval Preaching in Italy (1200–1500),” in The Sermon, ed. B.M. Kienzle, 449–559, at 467; for Vicente Ferrer, see Sánchez, “Vernacular Preaching,” in Ibid., 778. 16 Ibid., 779.

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preachers.17 Vicente Ferrer used tears, pregnant pauses, and grand gestures to great effect. He even sang popular songs, if only to denounce them. John Fleming and David L. Jeffrey have alerted us to the presence of songs, religious lyrics, and laude in Franciscan devotional literature. They and others have also explored the relationship of this literature to sacred drama.18 What has received less attention is the preacher’s place in this transmission and use of such literary knowledge, the topic to which we will now turn. During Lent and Holy Week, the busiest oratorical season of the year, Italian preachers often experimented with a genre known as the “semi-dramatic sermon.” It was a sermon punctuated here and there with theatrical action, which most often consisted of a simple recitation of vernacular poetry. The poetry could be recited either as a monologue or a dialogue, the preacher performing either one, two, or even multiple roles. As indicated earlier, one of the favored texts in these sermons was the Umbrian poet, Jacopone da Todi’s “Donna del Paradiso.” Preachers played variations on Jacopone’s lauda: they used it in whole or in part, they recited it alone or with a chorus, sometimes, they even had the lauda set to music. Another technique was to alternate it with verses of other poems such La Passione, a popular lauda by the Sienese poet, Niccolò Cicerchia. Most dramatically, Italian preachers used the laude as theatrical scripts to stage sacre rappresentazioni. Roberto Caracciolo’s Good Friday sermon entitled, Sermo de acerbissima Passione Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, written in the mid-fifteenth century is one of a number of examples from the Franciscan Observant repertoire that spotlights vernacular laudesi poetry.19 Roberto’s use of the multi-voiced lauda transforms the ordinary sermon into a dramatic literary performance meant to activate the emotions of the faithful at a crucial moment in the Christian liturgical calendar. In order to highlight

17

Ars praedicandi, in Patrologia latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 210, cols. 109–35. Fleming, An Introduction, 177–89; and David L. Jeffrey, The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). 19 Although many of Caracciolo’s Latin and vernacular sermons were published in multiple editions beginning in his lifetime, this sermon exists only in manuscript. It is found in MS I.2.6 in the Biblioteca Comunale Paroniana in Rieti, fols. 68r–89r, an autograph manuscript. Cesare Cenci, O.F.M. has analyzed and described the manuscript in detail in “Un codice di Rieti e fr. Roberto da Lecce,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 59 (1966): 85–104. Cenci argues that according to internal references, the manuscript should be dated to 1453, not long after the fall of Constantinople. On this sermon in particular see Maria A. Mastronardi, “Tradizione retorica e ‘actio’ giullaresca in un sermone semidrammatico del Quattrocento,” Lares 56 (1990): 587–602. 18

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how the drama, the poetry, and the architecture of Roberto’s sermon work together, it will be useful to quote at length passages of the sermon that incorporate the vernacular laude. In what follows, the sermon enacts the Passion drama, beginning at Bethany when the Virgin Mary and the other women learn of Judas’s betrayal of Christ. The drama begins with Latin stage directions indicating that John enters, greets the Virgin, noting her pallid complexion. He then genuflects, addressing her thus: O donna del paradiso, per te l’angeli hanno riso, lo inimico sta conquiso per lo tuo figlio incarnato20 O Lady of Heaven Because of your incarnate son, The angels have smiled on you, But the enemy is about to overcome him.

Overcome with grief, the Virgin answers: Questo com essere potria de Jesù sperança mia, che non fece mai follia et null’averia pensato?21 How could this be? What could not be thought Jesus my hope, who has done no wrong.

The Latin stage directions, scribbled (then crossed out) next to the Madonna’s reply, note that “Then the Mother of God runs into the arms of the Magdalen and the other women.” Here, because Jacopone’s “Donna del Paradiso” had scripted nothing for Mary Magdalen, Roberto inserts a verse of Niccolò Cicerchia’s La Passione. Weeping, the Magdalen laments: Oymè Juda, perché hai tu venduto El mio maestro egregio, Che se io dolente l’avesse saputo Che venduto lo havessi cotal preçço,

20 MS Rieti I.2.6, fol. 76v. Three more verses follow. The translations here are mine. 21 Ibid.

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Ciòche ne havessi chiesto haveresti havuto. Oymè tu eri del sancto collegio. Lunction mia ad Iesù da te vista Dà morte a llui, et la matre fa trista.22 Woe onto you, Judas, Why have you sold my beloved Master? If I had only known that you would sell him at such a price Whatever you had asked, you would have had. Woe onto you–you were of the holy circle. You witnessed me anointing Jesus!

After another emotional exchange between John and Mary, the little group leaves Bethany, weeping and clinging to each other for support. The passage culminates in Mary’s sorrowful lament addressed to her son from Jacopone’s “Donna del Paradiso”: O Ihesù dolce figliuolo, O figlio, amoroso giglio, Figlio chi dà consiglio al mio cor sconsolato? O figliuol mio, ochi iocundi Figliuol perchè me te nascondi? Perchè non rispondi 23 al pecto che te ha lactato? O Jesus, sweet son, O son, my beloved lily, My son, who will give solace to my desolate heart? O my son, with the laughing eyes, Son, why do you hide yourself from me? Why do you not answer the breast that nursed you?

A number of scholars, including Mastronardi, believe that in this semidramatic sermon, Roberto voiced all the roles himself in a spectacular piece of ventriloquism. The laude, both performed and preserved in the vernacular, which were embedded (and rubricated) at the heart of the sermon, were used to animate the scriptural events Roberto was

22

Ibid., fol. 77r. For an edition of Niccolò Cicerchia’s La Passione, see Cantari religiosi senesi del Trecento: Neri Pagliaresi, Fra Felice Tancredi da Massa, Niccolò Cicerchia, ed. Giorgio Varanini (Bari: Laterza, 1965), 309–79. 23 Ibid.

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explicating in his preaching. Thus this new genre of sermon rolled together sacred performance and homiletical exegesis, fusing together image, word, and gesture in a spectacular new way.24 Given the performative aspects of these texts it seems only fitting that performance theory should be brought to bear upon them. Performance theory, as I understand it, seeks to explicate the relationship between performer and audience through the analysis of speech, gesture, space and audience, all of which are to some degree recoverable in our text. The arc of dramatic analysis moves from the speech and gesture of the performer to encompass the collectivity of audience reception and the transformed space in which that response occurs. In thinking about the preacher’s words, we might begin by following Beverly Kienzle’s lead by examining the work of performance theorists who have built on J.L. Austin’s “speech act theory” that distinguished between three types of speech acts: 1) locutionary utterances that are declarative; 2) illocutionary, those that illicit a response, and 3) perlocutionary or performative, those which achieve their effect.25 Roberto Caracciolo’s semi-dramatic sermon sought to animate the faith of his listeners. In meditating on the Virgin Mary’s grief for her son who died for the sins of humankind, one’s conscience was meant to be pricked into the expiation of one’s own sins. And the Easter season was of course the period in which confession was to be made, catalyzing this inner transformation.26 Thus in Austin’s terms, if confession had been made

24 Since this paper was first delivered in 2006, I have done further research on both this sermon and manuscript. Following Cenci’s lead, I now think that this sermon may have been something even more than a semi-dramatic sermon. It is possible that this sermon may have been the recorded version of an event that Roberto staged in the city of Perugia on Good Friday, 1448 and perhaps elsewhere in subsequent years. That preaching event is described in the Chronicle of the City of Perugia, which furnishes us with a priceless description of Roberto’s Lenten preaching in that year. The chronicle, also known as the Diario del Graziani, has been published by Ariodante Fabretti, “Cronaca della città di Perugia dal 1309–1491, nota come Diario del Graziani,” Archivio storico italiano, series. I 16/1 (1850): 597–601. I presented those findings at a conference in honor of Christopher Brooke, held at Queen Mary, University of London in June, 2007 and am preparing the paper for publication. 25 Beverly Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and their Performance: Theory and Record,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 189–224. Her discussion of performance theory is found at 189–94. 26 In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council had mandated annual confession. Still the best treatment is Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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and proper penance performed as a result of the sermon, the goal of Roberto’s illocutionary speech act would have been realized. But performance theorists are interested in more than individual responses; they are interested in the collectivity of reception conditioned by action in the here and now. They are interested in the transformative potential of performances. Toward this end we must distinguish between types of performance. Is it a ritual performance? Is it a theatrical performance? Or is it something in-between? In the former, transformation of some type is the objective (i.e., the host is transformed into the body of Christ); in the latter, although transformation may occur, the goal is more modest, usually aiming at entertainment or pleasure. Given that the preachers of the Observant movement were clearly carrying on a balancing act between “entertainment and efficacy,”27 pulpit theater seems to have fused together two such performance types to create something new, something in-between. It was a hybrid genre that reached out to touch the souls in the audience through sacred representation; but performed at Eastertide semi-dramatic sermons aimed at nothing less than a transformation of the human heart.

27 For discussion of Richard Schechner’s concept of the “efficacy-efficiency braid,” see Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and their Performance,” 92.

INDEX

Aaron 21, 22, 22n28, 22n29, 23, 24, 26–29, 31, 38, 38n65 Abbé Sieyès 198 Abraham 96–97, 130 Ad conditorem 91n22, 150, 158 Adam Marsh 56 Aelred of Rievaulx 6 Agnès de Harcourt 226, 226n34, 227nn35–39 Alain of Lille Anne Hudson 44, 44n12, 50 Albert 62 Albert of Pisa 37n62, 137n4, 204 Alexander IV 110, 224 Alexander of Alessandria 64 Alexander of Hales 55 Alfred Kazin 5 Angel of the Sixth Seal 13, 38 Angelo Clareno xiii, 13, 13n13, 14, 87, 135n40, 137n49, 140n9, 141n12, 142 Angelo Tancredi 122 Angela of Foligno 6 Anonymous of Perugia 13 Anthony of Padua 121 Appellatio in forma maiori 147, 148, 148n39, 148n41, 149, 149n45, 150 Apocalypse Commentary xiii, 64n12, 151, 151n50 Aretino 203 Arma Christi 159 Arnald de Verdello 187 Ars praedicandi 242, 243n17 Augustine 1, 10, 46, 67, 70n11, 75n20, 77, 82n32, 83 Auron’s Pfennig 182 Austin friars 3 Bartholomeus Anglicus 164 Bartholomew of Pisa 195, 195n1 Basil 10 Bede 42, 43, 52n39 Beghards 223, 224, 224n25 Beguine 125, 125n10, 126, 144, 146, 148, 152–54, 156, 156n69 Benedetto of Castro Fiorentino 116 Benedict XII 162, 188 Benedict 10, 159, 201–03, 203n24, 204, 205, 210

Berengar Talon 148, 153–54 Bernard of Clairvaux 210 Bernard of Quintavelle 121 Bernard Gui 126, 141, 141n15, 145n31, 146, 152n55, 153, 153n57, 156 Bernardino da Siena 239, 240n10, 242 Berthold of Regensberg 240, 241 Bertrand de la Tour xv, 72n15, 150, 150n46 Beryl Smalley 51n36, 59, 61 Beverly Kienzle 238n2, 246n25 Biblicus 57, 58 Boethius 1 Bonagrazia of Bergamo 143, 143n20, 147, 157 Bonaventure 2, 3, 4, 9, 12, 12n11, 13, 26, 38, 41, 62, 75n20, 84, 86, 87, 87n8, 89n15, 91n21, 92nn24–25, 92n27, 96nn37–38, 112, 113n18, 131, 195, 195n1 Boniface VIII 124 Borromeo 131, 131n29 Breviloquium 96n38 Brother Leo 14, 120, 120n3, 196n4 Brother Liberato 134 Brother Placido 204 Bruder Wernher 184, 184n33 Caesar of Speyer 21n26, 121, 127n13 Camaldoli 201–02 Carmelites 3 Carolyn Muessig 225, 226n31, 238n2, 246n25 Celestial Hierarchy 109 Celestine V 13, 124, 134 Chaucer xv, 1, 5–6, 111–12, 112n14, 112n16, 159, 164, 169, 169n11, 171, 177, 177n2, 178n4, 178n6, 179n8, 179nn10–11, 179n13, 186n39, 188n51, 189n53, 218n60 Christoph Maier 223, 223n18 Christopher Brooke 206, 246n24 Christopher Columbus 1 Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite 149, 150, 157 Chronicle of the Seven Tribulations of the Franciscan Order 119, 119nn1–2, 122nn5–6, 128nn17–18,

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130n23, 130n25, 130n26, 131n27, 131n28, 132n33, 133nn35–36, 134nn38–39, 135n41, 135n42, 135n45, 136n46, 136n47, 137n48, 137n49 Cicero 1 Cistercians 4 Clare of Assisi 200, 200n17 Clement V 90n20, 137n49, 140, 142, 145 Clericalization 9, 9n1, 9n2, 11, 17 Clizia 111 Compendium sensus litteralis totius Scripturae 63 Consolo 203, 204n25 Constantine of Orvieto 207 Cordeliers 55, 111n12 Council of Lyons 184 Crescentius of Iesi 122 Cronaca 116n28, 246n24 Cum inter nonnullos 72n15, 86n6, 91n22, 142, 147, 150, 155, 155nn66–68, 156, 158 Cum secundum consilium 35 Dante 4, 117n29, 118n34, 203n23, 235n65 Darleen Pryds 220, 220n3, 220n5, 221–22, 229 David (King) 23, 23n37, 24, 97 David Burr ix, 119n1, 140 D.W. Robertson 1, 5 De apostasia 44, 45n15, 85n4 De civili dominio 44 De defensio curatorum 86, 86n5, 87n8 Decretum 66, 66n3, 82n32 De dominio civili clericorum 44, 50n29 De periculis novissimorum temporum 105, 106, 173 De proprietatibus rerum 164 De religione 44, 44n13, 45n15, 50 Deacon 9, 11–16, 16n18, 17, 18, 18n18, 19–20, 29, 33–36, 36n61, 135 Decameron 111 Decretals 165 Defensio curatorum 86, 86n5, 87n8, 168, 174 Der Kanzler 187 Der Marner 185, 185nn35–36 Desert Fathers 4, 128, 185 Dialogues 159 Dionysius the Pseudo-Areapagite 109 Doctor Faustus 111 Dolcino 135

Dominic 94–95, 201, 205–06, 206n30, 207–09, 209nn36–37, 210, 210n38, 210n40, 211, 213–14 Dominicans 3–4, 55, 59, 63–64, 67–68, 72, 75n20, 95, 107, 117, 172, 174, 181–82, 184, 201, 201n19, 205, 207–08, 211, 211n42, 214, 224, 233 Donna del Paradiso 237, 243–45 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 86, 109, 116, 173 Elias of Cortona 17, 18n21, 37 Elias Nabinalis 63n9 Elijah 3 Elisha 3 Encyclical Letter of Elias 21–23, 27, 29, 38 Engelbrecht of Cologne 182 Erasmus 1 Eric Doyle 44n13, 50 Erwin Gudde 181 Eucharist 14, 37 Exiit qui seminat 70, 90, 93n27, 140, 147–51, 151n49, 156–57 Exivi de paradiso 90n20, 140, 142, 175 Expositio quatuor magistrorum super regulam fratrum minorum 97n36 Filios enutrivi 113, 167, 173 Fioretti 131n30, 218 For shame, Minorite order 187 Four Masters 97, 98n38, 102 Fourth Lateran Council 16, 246n26 Fradenburg 2 Francesco di Ascoli 67 Francis of Assisi 2, 9, 12, 20, 21n26, 25, 27, 35–36, 38–39, 195, 195n3, 205, 206n29 Francis delle Marchia 57 Franco Sachetti 111 Fratres mendicantes 165–68, 169, 172 Frauenlob 186–87 Frederick II 18n21, 183–84 Frei Afonso Abelho 242 Freud 2 Gabelus 41–42 Gerard of Borgo San Donnino 107, 123, 123n7 Gerard d’Abbeville 62, 113 Gérard Ithier 10, 30 Gerard Odonis 64 Gerardo Segarelli 200, 200n18

index Germanus 159 Giles of Assisi 122 Giles Constable 196, 209n36 Giacomo Colonna 124, 137, 137n49 Giacomo della Marca 239 Gian Luca Potestà 124, 127–28 Giotto 26, 204, 209n36, 215, 215n48 Giovanni Boccacio 111, 112n14 Giovanni da Capestrano 239, 242 Giovanni da Taranto 209, 212 Glossa ordinaria 64 Golden Legend 210, 210n39, 215 Grandmont 9, 10, 11, 11n7, 17, 36 Gratian 109, 109n10 Greccio 12, 14, 14n14, 15–16, 27–29, 31–32, 37, 38n64 Gregory IX 17, 18n21, 20–21, 25, 27, 89, 92n25, 182, 208 Gregory the Great 159 Grey Friars 55, 55n1 Guido of Miliac 19 Guiu Terreni 151 Gustav Roethe 183, 183n25 Guilliaume de Lorris 1 Haymo of Faversham 18 Helga Schüppert 185, 185n37, 186n40 Henri d’Avranches 12, 38n64 Henry III 222, 222n16, 231–32 Henry of Ghent 62, 68, 70, 70n11, 73, 74n20, 78, 78n25, 92n26, 113 Henry Costesy 63n9, 64 Hervaeus Natalis 91, 91n22, 95n32 Hildegard of Bingen 18, 181n17, 184, 190, 190n61 Historia Scholastica 63 Honorius III 34 Hostiensis 165 Hugh of Digne 131n29, 132, 133n34 Hugh of St. Cher 62 Hugh Lacerta 10, 10n4, 18 Huglino dei Conti di Segni 13. See also Gregory IX Humbert of Romans 112, 207 Humiliati 224–25, 225nn28–30 Innocent III 12, 12n8, 26, 130, 210, 213 Innocent IV 90, 174 Introductorius in evangelium eternum 107, 108–09 Isaac 130 Isabelle of France 226n34, 227, 234n63 Ishmael 130

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J.A. Robson 51 Jacopone da Todi 237n1 Jacques de Vitry 34n55, 35, 35n58 Jacques Le Goff 220, 220nn2–3 James of Massa 131, 131n29 James of Osimo 131n29 James of Voragine 210n39 James le Palmer 114, 162, 164, 166–68, 171 Jan Milíc of Kromeriz 115 Jean d’Anneux 113, 114n20, 168n9, 169, 173 Jean de Beaune 143n21, 148, 153 Jean de Meun 1, 6, 111, 112n14, 177 Jean de Pouilly 139, 186 Jeremy Catto 49n29, 50, 50n30, n32 Joachim of Fiore 21n26, 108, 134 Johan Eberlin von Günzburg 115, 115n24 Johannes de Piscibus 187 John XXII 72, 72nn15–16, 73, 79, 90, 91, 92n23, 96n34, 113, 124n8, 139–40, 140n9, 141–43, 143n21, 144–48, 150, 150nn46–48, 151nn50–51, 152–53, 154n64, 155–56, 156nn69, 71, 157n76, 158, 167, 174, 186, 188 John of Murrovalle 134 John of Parma 123, 131–32, 133n34 John of Pouilly 113 John of Rupescissa 63n9 John Bale 85 John Duns Scotus 57 John Freed 181, 181n16, 181n18, 183, 183n30, 184, 185n34 John Grandisson 168 John Parenti 17, 17n19, 121n4 John Pecham 41, 87 John Witherspoon 2 John Wyclif 41, 44n13, 46n16, 51n36, 52, 52n37, 85, 113 Jonathan Edwards 2 Jordan of Giano 13, 13n12, 20n25, 21n26, 34, 34n54 Jordan of Saxony 207 Joseph 151 Joseph Koch 216 Judas 32, 154n60, 245 Julian of Speyer 12, 12n10, 38 Katherine Jansen 214, 214n45 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton 112n17, 164, 164n7, 181n17 King Saul 23

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Knights of St. John 183 Konrad of Megenberg 115 Konrad of Waldhäusen 115 Lamentation of the Church in Germany 187 La Passione 243–44, 245n22 La Verna 3 Lawrence Landini 9 Leandro Bassani 211 Leo IV 202 Liber chronicarum sive tribulationum Ordinis minorum 13, 13n13, 119n1, 137n49, 140n8 Liber Sententiarum 10, 125nn9–10, 126n11, 141, 153, 153n57, 156 Life of Benedict 203, 210 Limoges 9 Lot 96 Louis IX (King) x, 111n13, 110, 220–22, 222n16, 223, 223nn18, 22, 224, 224nn23–24, 225, 226, 226n34, 227–30, 230nn44, 45, 47, 231–34, 234nn59, 63, 235, 235nn67–68 Louis of Toulouse 139 Louis W. Fairchild 3 Lucifer Letter 189, 189n56 Lucy Freeman Sandler 114n21, 162, 162n5 Ludovico Cittadini of San Miniato 118 Ludwig of Bavaria 80n31, 147 Luis Vaz de Camões 1 Machiavelli 111 Maire Wilkinson 10, 10n4, 11, 11n6–7, 19n24 Manipulus Florum 164 Marlowe 111 Maria A. Mastronardi 243n19 Martha 4 Martiniana 164 Mary 198, 200, 216, 237, 244–45 Mary Magdalene 42, 201, 214–15 Master of St. Francis 207 Matthew of Janov 115, 115n24 Meditationes vitae Christi 47 Memoriale in desiderio animae 25 Michael of Cesena 74, 142, 147, 157, 167 Michael Cusato ix, 6, 208, 209n36 Mira circa nos 21, 25–27, 29–30, 208, 209n36 Mise of Amiens 231, 231n52 Monaldus 165

Moses 21–22, 24, 28, 178 Mt. Carmel 3 Niccolò Cicerchia 243–44, 245n22 Nicholas III 90, 148–49, 151 Nicholas IV 152 Nicholas of Lisieux 113 Nicholas of Lyre 41, 46, 52 Nicholas Love 47, 47n21 Nicola Pisano 207, 207n35 Nicole Bériou 61, 61n8 Omne bonum 114, 114n21, 159, 162n5, 164, 164n6, 165–66 On the Devil’s Daughters 190 Opus Imperfectum 165 Opus nonaginta dierum 76n22, 78n26, 79n28, 81, 82n32, 92n266 Order of Apostles 200 Order of Crutched Friars 224 Order of Friars Minor vii, 9, 9n1, 16n18, 17, 34n56, 35, 37n62, 139–40, 158, 205 Order of Sack Friars 224, 224n24 Ordinem vestrum 90 Ovid 1 Paul 90, 159, 178, 206 Paul de Vooght 45n14 Pearl 1 Peter Aureol 57, 63n9–10 Peter Catania 37 Peter Comestor 63 Peter Damian 198 Peter Ferrand 207 Peter John Olivi 41, 69, 87, 124, 128, 134, 134n37 Peter of Celle 42 Peter of Corbaria 167, 174 Peter Lombard 56 Piers Plowman x, 85, 85nn1, 3–4, 86, 88n14, 93, 112, 114n21, 115n26 Pierre de la Palud 151, 151n51 Pierre Doumergue 125 Pierre Tort 126, 145n29 Plato 94 Plotinus 52 Postilla litteralis 51, 63 Postilla moralis 63 Propositum vitae 12, 12n8 Quaestiones LXXII de sacramento altaris 49 Quattuor determinationes 44–45, 49, 50n32

index Questio on able-bodied begging 175 Quia nonnumquam 148–49 Quo elongati 89, 89nn17–18 Quodlibets 77 Quorundam exigit 141–42, 144–46, 154, 157n74, 158 Rabelais 111 Raphael 41 Raimond du Bosc 144, 144n24 Raoul Manselli 9, 9n2 Raymond Geoffroi 134 Reason and the Lover 2 Regina Schiewer 225, 226n31 Reginald Pecock 49, 52 Regula bullata 89 Reinmar von Zweter 183, 185, 187 Repressor of Over-Much Blaming of the Clergy 49, 49n27 Richard de Bury 168 Richard FitzRalph 49, 52, 52n37, 86, 86n5, 113, 114n22, 166, 168, 168n10, 174, 188, 188n53 Richard Newhauser 211 Robert of Anjou 229 Robert of Naples 220n5, 221, 233 Robert Grosseteste 56, 56n2 Robert Hollander 1 Robert Langland 99. See also William Langland Robert K. Root 5 Roberto Caracciolo 238, 238n5 Roman de la Rose 1, 2n1, 109, 178 Romano 203 Rosalind Brooke 206 Rosarium decreti 165 Rutebeuf 111, 111nn12–13, 235n67 St. Jacques 55 Salimbene de Adam 116n28, 214n44, 223n20 Samantha Kelly 220, 220n5, 221, 225, 229 Samuel Johnson 44 Sandro Botticelli 241 Sängerskrieg auf der Wartburg 182 Saul 219, 231 Savonarola 240, 241n12 Scholastica 201–04 Sean Field 226n34, 227 Sebastian Brant 191n65 Second Vatican Council 9 Seneca 94 Sentences 56–59, 61, 141n15, 144n24, 145n29, 153n57, 153n60, 154n63

253

Sententiarius 57–58 Serena Romano 204 Sermo de acerbissima Passione Domini Nostri Iesu Christi 243 Ship of Fools 177, 191 Signorelli 203 Simon de Montfort 232, 232n54 Simon Tugwell 206, 207n36 Sodoma 203 Sol oriens 139 Solomon 219 Stephen of Liciac 19 Stephen of Muret 10, 11, 11n6, 17–19, 36 Studia 58, 104 Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages 59, 59n4 Summa logicae 74, 74n19 Summa Summarum 164, 169, 172 Supra montem 152 Suzanne Cawsey 220n5, 221, 221n9, 222, 222n12 Sylvester 202–04 Tau 38 Tavoletta 241 Teofilo Ruiz 221, 221n7 The Devil’s Net 177–80 The Dream of the Rood 1 The Inquisitor’s Manual 154 Thomas of Celano 12, 12nn8–9, 14, 20, 25, 27, 33, 207, 207n34, 211n41 Thomas de Wilton 167, 168n9, 171, 175 Thomas Aquinas 4, 62 Thomas Arundel 44, 47 Thomas Hoccleve 164, 169 Thomas Paine 196 Thomas Usk 164 Tobias 41, 42, 43n10, 48 Tommaso Aiutamichristo of Pisa 117 Troilus and Criseyde 1 Ubertino da Casale 2, 63n9, 87, 120n3 Ulrich Müller 189, 189n54, 190n58 Usus pauper 70, 145–46, 157 Valdes of Lyons (Waldensians) 199 Vas electionis 139 Vicente Ferrer 239–40, 242, 242n15, 243 Vincent the Donatist 46 Virgil 1 Vita beati Hugonis Lacerta 10

254

index

Vita prima 12, 12n9, 14, 17, 20, 31 Vita secunda 25. See also Memoriale in desiderio animae Vita Stephani Muretensis 10, 11, 11nn6–7, 17–18, 19n24 Vitalis de Furno 63n9 Walter Brut 49 Walther von der Vogelweide 182, 185–86 William of Auvergne 62 William of Ockham 74, 74n18, 77n24, 82n32, 92n26

William of Pagula 169, 172 William of St. Amour ix, 62, 105, 107, 115, 118, 167, 167n8, 169, 171, 173, 184 William Dandina 10, 11, 18, 30 William Langland 85n3, 159, 164, 167, 170 William Morris 1 William Woodford 41, 44, 44n13, 45n13, 50n30, 50n32 Woodrow Wilson 2 Wyclif and the Oxford Schools 51, 51n36

THE MEDIEVAL FRANCISCANS General Editor STEVEN J. MCMICHAEL ISSN: 1572-6991

1. COOK, W.R. (ed.). Art of the Franciscan Order in Italy. 2005. ISBN 90 04 13167 1 2. McMICHAEL, S.J. and MYERS, S.E. (eds.). Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. 2004. ISBN 90 04 11398 3 3. CASCIANI, S. (ed.). Dante and the Franciscans. 2006. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15495 7, ISBN-10: 90 04 15495 7 4. JOHNSON, T.J. (ed.). Franciscans at Prayer. 2007. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15699 9, ISBN-10: 90 04 15699 2 5. KNOX, L.S. Creating Clare of Assisi. Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16651 6 6. CUSATO, M.F. and GELTNER, G. (eds.). Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life. Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17630 0