Neslihan Şenocak's question here is “why and how the Franciscans, despite having their origins in a simple and predominantly lay brotherhood, embraced scholastic learning (2).” For Şenocak this “embrace,” with its implied reversal, is central to the history of the Franciscans in their first century. It took effect rapidly. Francis himself (d. 1226) conceived his brotherhood as a diverse, non-hierarchical and non-monastic community of laymen and clerics united in a poverty both individual and collective; for him, to encourage the pursuit of learning would have divided and undermined that community. But others challenged his conception as early as 1219, when during his absence in the East his vicars tried to give the brotherhood a more traditionally monastic shape and discipline. The Order's provincial ministers were then already emerging as a distinct administrative class that would assume literacy as a prerequisite for membership. Before long candidates for administrative positions in the Order had to be already holding the teaching office of “lector.” At the same time there emerged a system of Franciscan schools or studia, the most advanced of which trained the lectors, including those at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge. Already the academic friar Haymo of Faversham, minister general from 1240 to 1244, epitomized the transformation of the Order into an organization of ”respectable well-educated priests (75).” This transformation changed the Franciscan ideal itself from one of radically non-hierarchical community to one of “evangelical perfection,” a notion that encouraged, even assumed, erudition in the scriptures and consequently the privileging of those who possessed it. In this light, the reforming friars who critiqued the Order from mid-century onward, including both the mainstream Bonaventure the radical Ubertino of Casale, assumed this shared ideal, and had as their target not the pursuit of learning itself, but rather the abuses arising from ambition or from a lack of humility.

What lay behind this early transformation of the Order? Contrary to a common assumption, Şenocak argues that what drove the Franciscan push for learning was not the supposed need to equip friars to preach. The schools in Paris, for instance, took little interest in preaching to the laity in the early decades of the thirteenth century, and would not have helped the friars in their pastoral task, and yet this was exactly when the friars began to attach themselves there. Also the friars who became masters in the schools produced a “very diverse output (146)” of theological and philosophical work, much of it not relevant to preaching or pastoral work. She acknowledges that from the middle of the thirteenth century the situation changed, and Bonaventure, for example, could make the link explicit between learning and preaching in a letter written in 1244–45. But she points out that Bonaventure even then was not arguing for that link to be established, but rather assumed it to be in place. The die had already been cast. As for what had cast it–that is, what originally motivated the friars' embrace of learning—she sees as crucial the ministers' “preoccupation with friars' prestige and respectability within society, ” in reaction against the social disreputability, the “absence of dignity (160–61),” of the early Franciscan movement. “The easiest and fastest way to increase the prestige of an order . . . was to attract men of great learning (162),” a strategy that tapped into the widespread clerical desire for advanced study and golden opportunity that the order presented for fulfilling it, not incidentally at a bargain price. She attempts to suggest that the contradiction of Francis's views on learning may have been from ignorance, since these appear mainly in the Leonine writings which probably began to be known only the mid-1240s, too late to change the direction by then established. But be that as it may, for Şenocak the embrace of learning constitutes, in effect anyway, a repudiation of Francis' conception of the movement he founded.

This is a careful and learned study. Şenocak knows the sources and does a good job of arguing her case. It is in a spirit of respect for what she has done that I register my one major reservation, namely that in placing institutional “prestige” at the motivational heart of the Order's history, Şenocak marginalizes the theological issues at stake, or anyway declines to engage them as theological issues. Her prologue frames her approach in terms (in part) of the “Franciscan question,” the project, set in motion by Paul Sabatier, of sorting out the sources for the life of Francis for biographical validity. She, like many others, wants to escape from what Raoul Manselli called the “magic circle” of that project, that is the set of assumptions that it reinforced and perpetuated, especially the tendency to read back into the thirteenth century the later distinction between the Spirituals and the Community—a distinction rooted in an essentially theological question about the nature of religious authority, and accordingly about the ways in which the Spirit finds expression in concrete forms of life in Christian society. In avoiding that distinction, Şenocak re-conceptualizes the Franciscans' motivations in non-theological terms, as concerns about institutional reputation and self-interest. That these were major concerns is clear enough. But are they separable, finally, from those theological convictions and tensions that appear to us in, for example, the sources for Francis's life? I think here of Manselli himself, who thought deeply about these issues. To escape from the magic circle was for him not to move away from but rather through it—without anachronistically assuming the results of later developments, but still keeping in focus those questions of religious authority expressed by Francis's life and vision, finding them at issue within Francis himself, and within those followers whom one might otherwise be tempted to group prematurely into parties. Şenocak's way out of the circle may be too easy.