In defiance of the modern popular interest in the lives of the rich and wealthy, poverty and the poor in the Middle Ages continue to be subjects of considerable interest to medieval scholars, and thank God for that. It is likely that this continued interest is connected to the study of mendicant orders during the Middle Ages; orders whose members privileged poverty as the central feature of apostolic life. The present volume, largely the legacy of a workshop held at the Monash Center at Prato in December 2011, is largely dedicated to the place of poverty in the mendicant orders, but it also includes a section on mendicant devotion, hence the title Poverty and Devotion. The articles here display a very high standard of scholarship, and all of them present richly referenced original research. These qualities make the book an excellent contribution to the subject matter and no doubt will claim a solid place in the syllabi of graduate courses on medieval religion.
The volume is organized into three parts with a concise and well-written introduction by the editors Constant Mews and Anna Welch. The first part is titled, “Poverty and the Rule of Francis.” Constant Mews's opening essay explores how poverty has become one of the three evangelical counsels (along with chastity and obedience). He underlines how Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas consolidated the place of poverty in the three core vows of religious life. This is true, although the intellectual arguments that associated poverty with evangelical perfection were made and published before Bonaventure, as I argued elsewhere. Riccardo Saccenti writes on the reconciliatory role of the papal bull Exivi de Paradiso (1312) to heal the unrest within the Franciscan Order between what has been termed the Spiritual party and the Order's administration. Ubertino of Casale was the spokesman for the spiritual party in this council, and his concept of paupertas, presented in his famous work Arbor Vitae, is also the subject of the third article in the volume by Campion Murray. The article reveals how Ubertino used poverty as a conceptual framework to criticize contemporary society and the church. Antonio Montefusco contributes an inspiring essay that looks at the emergence of Renaissance political thought, with its new justification of civic wealth, through the lens of the famous polemical work, Little Flowers of St Francis.
The second part opens with Anna Welch's essay on the famous episode of Francis's preaching to the birds. She argues that birds model the ideal human state and behavior in their propertylessness, devotion to hearing the gospels and dependence on divine providence. Claire Renkin's article notes the frequent pairing of Francis and Magdalen in the medieval Franciscan visual imagery, and it makes a case for how Magdalen came to represent divine love, or caritas. The next essay by Earl Jeffrey Richards investigates the fascinating and often elusive subject of the interaction between the learned and popular lay religiosity through the microhistory of the emergence and rise in popularity of a prayer, the Anima Christi, presumed to have been written by the Augustinian theologian, Giles of Rome before 1315 and transmitted in the vernacular. Marika Räsänen explores an equally fascinating subject. Though the angelic doctor is always studied with respect to his intellectual stand, here Räsänen turns instead to the intense devotion to the relics of Thomas in the Southern Italian town of Priverno with its Cistercian monastery, where Thomas Aquinas died, and where he is not venerated for his intellect but his devotion to the Eucharist and the healing powers of his relics.
In the third part, the theme reverts back to poverty but this time focusing on how it was preached. Unlike the first part, however, where the focus was on the Franciscan Order, here the contributors mine the Dominican sermons, thus reminding us how much the medieval Dominicans too were invested in voluntary poverty. Anne Holloway examines the sermons by Humbert of Romans and hagiographical texts to reveal a highly complex understanding of poverty as part of a sophisticated system of virtues. Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen has the great merit of bringing the richness of evidence of Dominican preaching and landownership in the lesser-studied region of Scandinavia to the attention of scholarship, Gøgsig's article discusses how the attitude toward poverty among Dominicans of this region supported poor relief without idealizing voluntary poverty. Lidia Negoi explores the theological concept of poverty as a popular preaching tool in the late-medieval text, the Summa de abstinentia. She argues that poverty was discussed in relation to its liturgical contexts and always with a view to the audience. In the closing essay, Peter Howard turns to an important fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, the Dominican Antoninus of Florence. He discusses the ways in which Dominican theologians and churchmen like Antoninus of Florence or Henry of Rimini defined a new role for the urban wealthy by urging them to embrace a rigorous commitment to poor relief through the establishment of hospices and confraternities. As such, these churchmen made a significant contribution to the urban life of Renaissance Italy.
When asked by puzzled undergraduates why I chose to study the Middle Ages, I routinely tell them that it is the only age I know where thousands of men and women abandoned their property and chose a life of relative poverty in the face of rising materialism, and that is a phenomenon worth studying. Poverty lies at the core of understanding how the medieval differs from the modern. I hope the contributions in this volume will serve as a gateway to more research on the attitudes toward poverty in the Middle Ages. The contributors can count on a grateful and intellectually energized readership.
