Founded near
the beginning of the 13th century, the fraternal orders were one of the most
successful but also controversial innovations of the late-medieval church. By 1260, fewer than fifty years after St. Francis first gathered a small band of brothers
(fratres, hence friars), there were four
such fraternal and mendicant orders- Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and
Augustinians – with many thousands of members among them, saturating the cities
and towns of western Europe and beginning to spread to distant parts of the
earth. Their business was apostolic
preaching and pastoral care.
The friars verbal powers were famous. The Dominican, the Ordo Praedictatorum, were founded specifically as a preaching order, and both they and the Franciscans developed powerful teaching techniques, including the use of anecdote, story, and fable, with broad appeal. Even the architecture of their churches was influenced by their preaching mission and its success. In cities all over Europe they built large but simple churches with little interior adornment, the naves being little more than great open spaces to accommodate the crowds that came to hear their newfangled sermons. The friar’s verbal skills were also known in another area . . .they were beginning to dominate the intellectual life of the University of Paris, as they would at other universities across Europe in the next century, and led the way in the flowering of Scholasticism with its new methods of argument and its emphasis on logic rather than theology, on Aristotle rather than Augustine. By the end of the century, in the person of such theologians as Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, John Pecham, and Duns Scotus, the friars had taken over the intellectual leadership of the church .In less than a hundred years, these new orders had also affected drastically the progress of Papal centralization, the theology and practice of confession, the growth of nominalism, the revival of classical literature, the flourishing of lay piety, the spread of missionary activity as far as the steppes of Asia and more.
Though phenomenally successful, the fraternal orders were subjected, almost from their foundation, to a widespread campaign of attack on their legitimacy and on their mendicant way of life. From the 1250s until the 16th century, they were denounced in sermon and polemic, by churchmen and academics, by monastic and secular clergy, by archbishops and heretical Lollards, in monastic chronicles and encyclopedias, in canon law summae, in Wycliffite compilations and commentaries, in Latin prose and vernacular lyric, by poets from Jean de Meun to Chaucer. In quantity, duration, and generic variety, there is nothing quite comparable to this literature of attack anywhere in the many outbursts of anticlericalism throughout the Middle Ages.
It is not just its wide range, however, that makes anti-fraternal literature of unique interest. Attacks against the friars come primarily in two normally quite disparate genres: on the one hand, anti-fraternal theology, polemical in nature and written by theologians whose professions lay within a church threatened, they said, by the new orders of friars; and on the other hand, anti-fraternal poetry, satirical in nature and written by men in the vernacular, like Langland, for the most part unconnected with the church professionally between the learned and lay literatures there was a surprising degree of continuity.
Langland’s Penetrans Domos in Piers the Plowman (@1370-90)can trace its genealogy, for example, back to a theologian writing in Paris in the 1250s. William of St Amour, a secular* master of theology at the University of Paris, attacked the friars in 1254 in an exegetical treatise that took its title from the first verse of 2 Timothy 3**, the same passage Langland alluded to a century and a quarter later. It was called De periculis novissimorum temporum (Concerning the Perils of the Last Times.) This extremely influential work not only began the long history of anti-fraternal theology; it also inaugurated a tradition of the use of the Biblical language against the friars for centuries, a language that identified them with a recurring set of Biblical malefactors- primarily the antichrists prophesied for the end of time, the false apostles of the New Law, and the Pharisees of the Old Law and described their faults in words taken from the texts of Scripture. Of that tradition, Piers Plowman is not the last but one of the most complex expressions.
This book is a history of that literary tradition and its language: its origin in the apocalyptic fears of the 1250s; its surreptitious circulation and dissemination from 13th century France to 14th century England; its symbolic conventions and canonical texts; its puzzling continuity in ecclesiastical controversy involving the friars, even when it becomes anachronistic and contradicted by history; and its striking impact on poetry, particularly of the Ricardian era, written by some of England’s greatest poets.
Anti-fraternalism, it should be said, was not solely a literary or traditional phenomena. The hypocrisy, worldliness ,and corruption that infected other elements of the church touched the friars as well, especially in the 14th century; certainly the struggle with the secular clergy was a real political battle for power, authority and income. Many of the material charges leveled at the friars were true, But as recent research into bishops’ registers and the Franciscans’ own statutes has shown, others were also clearly false. Recognition of the strain of Biblical (apocalyptic) language in anti fraternal writings will help to isolate the traditional from the local charges against the friars and to ‘separate historical fiction from historical fact.’ [as the author would somewhat dubiously have it in a macrocosmic study like this].
The friars verbal powers were famous. The Dominican, the Ordo Praedictatorum, were founded specifically as a preaching order, and both they and the Franciscans developed powerful teaching techniques, including the use of anecdote, story, and fable, with broad appeal. Even the architecture of their churches was influenced by their preaching mission and its success. In cities all over Europe they built large but simple churches with little interior adornment, the naves being little more than great open spaces to accommodate the crowds that came to hear their newfangled sermons. The friar’s verbal skills were also known in another area . . .they were beginning to dominate the intellectual life of the University of Paris, as they would at other universities across Europe in the next century, and led the way in the flowering of Scholasticism with its new methods of argument and its emphasis on logic rather than theology, on Aristotle rather than Augustine. By the end of the century, in the person of such theologians as Aquinas, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, John Pecham, and Duns Scotus, the friars had taken over the intellectual leadership of the church .In less than a hundred years, these new orders had also affected drastically the progress of Papal centralization, the theology and practice of confession, the growth of nominalism, the revival of classical literature, the flourishing of lay piety, the spread of missionary activity as far as the steppes of Asia and more.
Though phenomenally successful, the fraternal orders were subjected, almost from their foundation, to a widespread campaign of attack on their legitimacy and on their mendicant way of life. From the 1250s until the 16th century, they were denounced in sermon and polemic, by churchmen and academics, by monastic and secular clergy, by archbishops and heretical Lollards, in monastic chronicles and encyclopedias, in canon law summae, in Wycliffite compilations and commentaries, in Latin prose and vernacular lyric, by poets from Jean de Meun to Chaucer. In quantity, duration, and generic variety, there is nothing quite comparable to this literature of attack anywhere in the many outbursts of anticlericalism throughout the Middle Ages.
It is not just its wide range, however, that makes anti-fraternal literature of unique interest. Attacks against the friars come primarily in two normally quite disparate genres: on the one hand, anti-fraternal theology, polemical in nature and written by theologians whose professions lay within a church threatened, they said, by the new orders of friars; and on the other hand, anti-fraternal poetry, satirical in nature and written by men in the vernacular, like Langland, for the most part unconnected with the church professionally between the learned and lay literatures there was a surprising degree of continuity.
Langland’s Penetrans Domos in Piers the Plowman (@1370-90)can trace its genealogy, for example, back to a theologian writing in Paris in the 1250s. William of St Amour, a secular* master of theology at the University of Paris, attacked the friars in 1254 in an exegetical treatise that took its title from the first verse of 2 Timothy 3**, the same passage Langland alluded to a century and a quarter later. It was called De periculis novissimorum temporum (Concerning the Perils of the Last Times.) This extremely influential work not only began the long history of anti-fraternal theology; it also inaugurated a tradition of the use of the Biblical language against the friars for centuries, a language that identified them with a recurring set of Biblical malefactors- primarily the antichrists prophesied for the end of time, the false apostles of the New Law, and the Pharisees of the Old Law and described their faults in words taken from the texts of Scripture. Of that tradition, Piers Plowman is not the last but one of the most complex expressions.
This book is a history of that literary tradition and its language: its origin in the apocalyptic fears of the 1250s; its surreptitious circulation and dissemination from 13th century France to 14th century England; its symbolic conventions and canonical texts; its puzzling continuity in ecclesiastical controversy involving the friars, even when it becomes anachronistic and contradicted by history; and its striking impact on poetry, particularly of the Ricardian era, written by some of England’s greatest poets.
Anti-fraternalism, it should be said, was not solely a literary or traditional phenomena. The hypocrisy, worldliness ,and corruption that infected other elements of the church touched the friars as well, especially in the 14th century; certainly the struggle with the secular clergy was a real political battle for power, authority and income. Many of the material charges leveled at the friars were true, But as recent research into bishops’ registers and the Franciscans’ own statutes has shown, others were also clearly false. Recognition of the strain of Biblical (apocalyptic) language in anti fraternal writings will help to isolate the traditional from the local charges against the friars and to ‘separate historical fiction from historical fact.’ [as the author would somewhat dubiously have it in a macrocosmic study like this].
* The term secular clergy
refers to deacons and priests who are not monastics or members of a religious
institute. They are referred to also as diocesan priests or sometimes, in the
case of an archdiocese, as archdiocesan clergy.
**But know this also, that in the
last days perilous times will come.
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parent, unthankful, unholy . . .
Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from each turn away
For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts.
[ I anachronistically use the King James translation of Paul’s letter to Timothy for effect, the author does not but, after all, anti-fraternalism was a still thing in the 16th century. The ‘creep into houses’ reflects the anxiety of traditional clergy over the friars’ pastoral activities- marrying, taking confessions, attending the dying and burying the dead]
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parent, unthankful, unholy . . .
Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from each turn away
For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts.
[ I anachronistically use the King James translation of Paul’s letter to Timothy for effect, the author does not but, after all, anti-fraternalism was a still thing in the 16th century. The ‘creep into houses’ reflects the anxiety of traditional clergy over the friars’ pastoral activities- marrying, taking confessions, attending the dying and burying the dead]
The Antifraternal Tradition in
Medieval Literature by
Penn R. Szittya; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1986
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