Between the spiritual and liturgical ideals of religious communities and orders on the one hand, and their structures of governance on the other, lies the ill-defined terrain of practice and organisation. How the Franciscans negotiated this terrain, which includes career structures within the order, questions arising from the assimilation of religious groups into their environment, and non-liturgical routines, is the subject of this collection of essays. The collection encompasses inter alia individual foundations in England and Flanders, the process of provincial foundation in Ireland and Prussia, Franciscan educational organisation, interactions with the royal court of Naples, the internal workings of friaries, family networks and papal responses to perceived structural flaws in the order. Although the emphasis is very firmly on the Franciscans, the collection includes a few essays that consider other mendicant orders.

The genesis of the volume came at sessions held at the 2007 International Medieval Congress at Leeds – that birthplace of so many summertime academic dreams. As is the case with most such volumes, it includes some writing that is thought-provoking and incisive, some that presents dense and highly informative scholarship, and some that appears, at least in this company, rather inconsequential. Rather than enumerate the fifteen individual papers, this review will draw attention to a few of the main themes explored by the authors as they emerge across the volume, and as they struck this reviewer.

One of the most fundamental of these – so obvious that it is rarely addressed – is aired in two thoughtful essays, by Jens Röhrkasten and Annette Kehnel, on communication in the early Franciscan order. Of necessity, much of this was by word of mouth, and entailed the growth of informal networks and the communication of anecdotal information among communities and individuals. The quality of these networks is one index of the difference between the success of the Friars Minor and the failure of numerous other reform enterprises of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As Jens Röhrkasten observes, part of Francis's originality as a reformer lay in the use he made of letter-writing. Departing from monastic epistolary traditions, he used the letter as a means of direct pastoral instruction to far-flung groups of followers. The role of formal education among the Franciscans is addressed in a re-statement by Bert Roest of one of the themes of his book on Franciscan schooling, namely that the educational framework of the order was established early and was always an integral part of its structure.Footnote ¹ Some peculiarities of Franciscan learning in the early fifteenth century are revealed in Bronach Kane's essay on Michael Dawnay, a Yorkshire Franciscan with interests in astronomy and astrology. Kane's study shows not only how varied was the range of intellectual interests among Minors in provincial houses but also how individual friars continued to maintain links to their families and kin long after their profession. The parochial and episcopal context of the Franciscans is addressed in a number of essays, notably Paul Trio's on the establishment of the mendicants in Ypres, which he finds conforms to the pattern of suburban rather than city-centre foundation, Michael Robson's study of the varied roles undertaken by Franciscans for the people of Lincoln in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and Jürgen Sarnowsky's comparison between Franciscan and Dominican activities in Prussia. Niav Gallagher's survey of the Irish Franciscan province shows how easily friars could be caught up in political events: the English government, not without some cause, suspected that native Irish recruits to the order were actively supporting Scottish resistance to the English crown. The papers by Melanie Brunner and Lars-Anne Dannenberg both address the question of papal influence on mendicant structures. Brunner's examination of John xxii's role in the ‘poverty crisis’ among the Franciscans in the 1320s and 1330s argues that behind the papal intervention lay the perception that the Franciscans had made difficulties for themselves through a failure of structural organisation, and that the crisis was in essence an organisational rather than a theological one. In contrast, Dannenberg examines how a series of papal interventions resulted in the creation of the Augustinian Hermits by papal fiat in 1256. Gert Melville, although ostensibly very different in his subject matter, also addresses the question of internal structure. He finds the reasons for the lack of division in the Dominican order in what he calls ‘system rationality’. Unlike other orders, he argues, the Dominicans defined from the start an identity based on the functional criterion of preaching, to which all other activities were subordinated. This enabled them to develop a principle of authority that was not subject to changing trends or to the decisions of successive chapters. In a collection largely devoted to the Franciscans, this is a provocative essay, implying as it does a contrast between Dominican ‘success’ and the loss of coherence manifested in the split among the Franciscans in the fourteenth century. It would be unfair to the subject and to the volume to allow the impression conveyed by such a contrast to be the hallmark of this collection of essays. Above all, these essays show the diversity and adaptability of the mendicants in meeting both the spiritual needs of lay Christendom and the organisational demands of the pastoral ministry from the early thirteenth century to the fifteenth.

The other essays, on which there is insufficient space to comment, are by Hans-Joachim Schmidt (on mendicant provincial organisation), Richard Copsey (on the provincial chapters of the English Carmelites), Cristina Andenna (on noble patronage of women's convents in Naples), and Ludovic Viallet (on the formal role of the ‘guardian’ of Franciscan houses in the fifteenth century).