14

Mendicant Orders in Conflict

Struggles over Poverty and Observance

Two passages in Birgitta’s revelations leveled sharp criticisms against the two largest mendicant orders. Both the Dominicans and the Franciscans faced the accusation that many among them had fallen away from the values of their founders. Mary thus complained to Birgitta that under her broad mantle of protection there had come to be found fewer sons of Dominic than in his lifetime; most had chosen to follow the lax way that led to the devil. Only a few still followed the humble footsteps of Dominic. Pride, lust for honor, and arrogance reigned among them instead. They strove after episcopal office, relaxed the strictures of their fasts, wore refined clothing, and had buildings bathed in splendor, even though their rule prohibited all superfluity.¹ Mary also sternly accused the Franciscans, saying that the devil had turned many of them “from humility to pride, from reasoned poverty to greed, from true obedience to self-reliance.” They hoarded gold secretly and against their rule, and they concerned themselves with study so that they could earn “honors and dignities” in the Order, thereby enjoying still more material comforts.²

The fact that some one hundred years after the euphoric words of Vincent of Beauvais, noted above, these two orders could be criticized in this way offers an occasion to turn from the story of the rich growth of new communities in the later Middle Ages to consider the progress of the Franciscans and Dominicans, who at the beginning of the era had transformed the entire framework of the vita religiosa in a way that was as full of promise as it was self-confident.

The almost explosive spread of the settlements of these two orders, noted above, is the story of a success that was both immediate and unchecked. From the thirteenth century on, Franciscans and Dominicans were leaders in pressing forward with missions. They served as ambassadors, advisers, confessors, and tutors of the powerful, whether secular and spiritual rulers or rich merchants and patricians,³ for whom they carried out charitable work and with whose help all might find their way through the famous eye of the needle and on to salvation (Mark 10:25). But above all, both orders served the common people through their preaching and pastoral care in the cities—an activity sustained by their right, as orders exempt from the authority of local bishops, to dispense the sacraments regardless of established parochial structures. Their only competition in that context came after a time from the other mendicant orders, especially smaller ones such as the Carmelites or Augustinian Hermits, as well as from those approved congregations of hermits best described as “urbanites” (urbanite), as contemporaries often called them.

Mendicant friars were visible nearly everywhere.⁴ Their monastery was the world (so it had been said metaphorically), and they made their way into it, moving beyond the walls of their own communities and churches to beg and to proclaim the word of God in the streets and plazas of the cities. A Franciscan like Berthold of Regensburg (1201–1272), who traveled across Europe, who drew thousands everywhere he went, who preached about the sins of every rank of society, and who called all to contrition and repentance with his sharp words, became a hero to the masses.⁵ To Benedictines like Richer of Sens, who remained hidden behind monastery walls, such a life lived “among the people” must have seemed perverse. Richer wrote in around 1270, astonished at how the friars could settle in the cities, where immorality and profit reigned and where worldly affairs flourished.⁶ But the mendicants went into the cities precisely for that reason, since it was there that so many more sinners could be found and converted by the word of God.⁷ City dwellers, in turn, were deeply touched that men of God on that mission would pay them notice and take so much care for their souls—and this, moreover, on behalf of the official church rather than as suspicious, freelance zealots (there were many of these too in the urban environment) on the hunt for heretics.⁸

Dominicans (and to a lesser extent also Franciscans) were deployed as inquisitors against heretics, to be sure.⁹ In fact their success was such that soon a play on words came to call them the domini canes (the “dogs of the Lord”). The phrase is captured visibly on the walls of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where Dominicans stand guard along the border between the church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven.

But there was another side to the story. Success fostered pride and a drive for still more success, as Birgitta’s revelations would later lament. Some among the mendicant orders lost their way as they became accustomed to incomes, with money that “was begged for in greed, carelessly accepted, and still more carelessly used,” as the Franciscan minister general Bonaventure (1221–1274) warned in light of the behavior of his fellow friars.¹⁰ Above all, success was dangerous because of the envy it fostered. All across Europe, parish clergy increasingly voiced their concerns to their bishops. Priests faced a serious loss of surplice fees—fees charged for marriages, baptisms, and burials. They had also to fight the competition of so many indulgences offered in mendicant churches and saw the testamentary donations of their parishioners lost to Dominicans, Franciscans, and others.¹¹ More and more the intransigent position became standard: pastoral care was only to be carried out within the jurisdiction of the parish, even if this practice cut against the papacy’s policy of promoting the mendicant orders.

These tensions came sharply to the fore in a place where both sides were active: the University of Paris.¹² In 1252 the professors there who were secular clergy sought to revoke the right that the Dominicans and Franciscans had won to occupy two teaching chairs each, insisting that each be granted only one. For the mendicant orders it was a call to arms that threatened the core of their existence, because their high standards of pastoral care required a university education. In this respect, the Franciscans had followed the lead of the Dominicans. To limit their access to study undermined their pastoral mission—but that was precisely the intention of their opponents.

In 1255, through the intervention of Alexander IV, the mendicants prevailed. Although the Franciscans gave up the second university chair, the secular clergy’s faction fought on. In the following year their spokesman, William of Saint Amour,¹³ composed a massive polemic, “On the Dangers of the Last Days.” In it he contested any right the mendicant orders claimed to offering pastoral care—and thereby their right to sustain themselves from it. Shortly thereafter William raised the stakes and came to attack begging itself as illegitimate, since religious were to live only from the work of their hands according to the words of Paul: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (2 Thess 3:10). To become poor for the sake of Christ was honorable; to be an able-bodied beggar was despicable and sinful.¹⁴ This attack called the justification for the existence of the Franciscans and Dominicans even more deeply into question. Their leaders therefore rose in opposition, offering up the most spirited defenders they could muster: Bonaventure (1221–1274)¹⁵ for the Franciscans and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)¹⁶ for the Dominicans. Convinced by their arguments yet also concerned to preserve established papal policy, Pope Alexander IV condemned William’s work and repulsed his attack.

Hardly twenty years later the themes of this “Paris mendicant controversy,” as it has come to be called, emerged once again. Papal decrees had been able partially to dampen but not to extinguish the fires of controversy. In 1274, the Council of Lyon was set to begin. In preparation the papal Curia entertained a remarkable number of petitions, many of them concerned with the affairs of the religious orders. Alongside petitions from the former Dominican master general Humbert of Romans (1194–1277)¹⁷ and the Franciscan and Parisian theologian Guibert of Tournais (1200–1284),¹⁸ Bruno of Schauenburg, bishop of Olomouc (in Moravia),¹⁹ offered his own contribution to the discussion surrounding the mendicant orders. He pled anew on behalf of the secular clergy that the mendicants’ rights be curtailed and that the bishops take a stronger stand, especially with regard to the founding of new communities. The Franciscans and Dominicans were protected by their strong position with the pope. But since the council was also concerned, as was noted above, to gauge the implementation of the decrees of Lateran IV, other mendicant orders found themselves in great danger. They stood in competition not only with the secular clergy but also with the two great mendicant orders.

One of the most successful of these orders, alongside the Franciscans and Dominicans, was the so-called Friars of the Sack, which had been founded by Raymond Athenulfi in Southern France in 1248.²⁰ Even though it numbered over one hundred communities by 1274 and had been both approved and granted preaching rights by Popes Innocent IV and Alexander IV in 1251 and 1255, respectively, it fell victim to episcopal polemic and was disbanded by the council. The Carmelites and Augustinian Hermits remained on the waiting list, so to speak, until the uncertainty over their legal foundations could be clarified. Only in 1298 did Pope Boniface VIII definitively resolve the issues, ruling that both orders would retain their legitimacy because they had been founded before the Fourth Lateran Council.²¹ The struggle to construct a deeper past that reached beyond memory had been worthwhile; the spiritual sons of Elijah and Augustine could not be simply wished away.

The Dominicans emerged from this struggle for existence in a stronger position. The situation for the Franciscans, in contrast, was much more precarious—the fundamental question of voluntary poverty had remained unresolved from the Parisian conflict down to the close of the council. The issue was not only essential to their religious identity; during that era it was also more and more a point of constant internal dissension that gravely threatened the Order.

The roots of that conflict had already been laid amid the controversy over Francis’s burial and the annulment of his Testament. The first divergences from the Poverello’s vision of poverty had already been allowed by then, until Innocent IV clarified the issue in 1245 with the legal fiction that all property of the Order was to be owned by the Roman church.²² There was opposition to that kind of thinking within the Order from the beginning. It drew from the Joachimite tradition to articulate the ideal of a purity of spirit reached through poverty. Even the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, as was noted above, had placed his trust in that vision. As a consequence Bonaventure, as minister general at the time of the Parisian controversies, had both to defend Franciscan justifications for poverty and also to fight against those in the Order who believed in a future that was both without a propertied church and led by Franciscans.

After extended consultation, Pope Nicholas III (earlier cardinal protector of the Franciscans) issued the decree Exiit qui seminat in 1279.²³ With it he hoped to bring all of the conflicting positions more closely into harmony. He defended evangelical poverty as an indispensable foundation for the Order and once again differentiated decisively between ownership and rights of use. He thereby allowed the Order moderate use (usus moderatus) of what had become its rich accumulation of monasteries, churches, and other properties. The adherents of strict poverty were bitterly disappointed. They feared a further decline in discipline, something that had in fact already been palpable soon after Bonaventure’s death.²⁴

In the southern French figure Peter John Olivi (1247/48–1298),²⁵ a disciple of Bonaventure, the Order’s greatest theologian, the defenders of poverty found a decisive and intellectually refined advocate. Olivi’s spiritual aim was, by way of contemplative immersion in God, to approach the evangelical perfection that the Joachimite tradition said could be realized in the third age of the Holy Spirit. In the poverty of Francis, he saw the possibility of laying the foundations for that age and of being set free from all worldly ties. He called for more than a moderate use of poverty; he required what he called usus pauper, a “poor use” that was restricted to only those things most necessary for survival. Because the majority of the Order, the “community,” saw his stance as all too extreme, Olivi was forced to defend himself at the general chapter of Montpellier in 1287. But no one was able to bring him to renounce his views. On the contrary, his circle of supporters began to grow rapidly, and soon a transregional movement had taken shape within the Order. Its adherents came to be called the Spirituals.²⁶

The election of Peter of Morrone as Pope Celestine V brought hope above all to an Italian faction under the leadership of Angelo Clareno (ca. 1245–1337), who came to be the herald of the movement, so to speak, with his work On the Seven Tribulations of the Minorites (De VII tribulationibus Ordinis minorum).²⁷ But Celestine’s successor Boniface VIII then revoked Angelo’s permission to found his own branch of the Order. Under the designation “The Poor Hermits of Lord Celestine” (Pauperes Eremiti Domini Coelestini), Angelo would have established the Testament and the Rule of Francis as the only legitimate normative foundation for the Franciscan life and would have brought about a remarkable, consequential reversal of the usual evolution from hermit to mendicant. Many Spirituals, Angelo Clareno among them, thus chose to retreat into solitude, especially in southern Italy; there, as so-called Fraticelli, they were constantly hounded by inquisition.²⁸

Ubertino of Casale (1259–ca. 1328),²⁹ a disciple of Olivi, took over after his teacher’s death in 1298. The tensions in the Order had already begun to sharpen when in 1295 Boniface VIII deposed the minister general and Spiritual sympathizer Raymond Gaufredi. Ubertino depicted the pope as the Antichrist, as the “first beast” of the Apocalypse. Others subsequently declared Nicholas III a heretic because he had interpreted the Rule of Francis, whereas according to the Poverello Francis it was the word of Christ. Even Olivi had already warned against such an extreme position.

But under Clement V, who was already holding court in Avignon, the scales seemed to tip in the direction of the Spirituals, and the pope wanted to move decisively to restore unity to the Order. Ubertino had written a treatise on the depraved state of the Order. It brought him into the public fray, and in fact it earned him a papal audience. But since no solution could be reached internally, in 1312 the arguments were aired before the Council of Vienne (the same gathering that later oversaw the dissolution of the Templars).³⁰ Now the debates over Franciscan poverty had become an affair for all of Western Christendom. The council seems to have decided on a more strict interpretation of the issue. It established explicitly that the brothers, by virtue of their vows, were to be bound to “strict or poor uses [ad arctos usus seu pauperes] of those things that are expressly noted in the Rule.”³¹ Accordingly, the Order’s communities were not allowed to accept bequests or own vineyards, and they were to erect only plain buildings. The theological question of how the poverty of the Franciscans related to the poverty of Christ—a point Francis himself would never have even considered worthy of reflection—was excluded, and mutual accusations of heresy were forbidden. But this was precisely the most virulent problem of the day, and what might at first have appeared to the Franciscans as a victory after a brief time suddenly became a tragedy.

Pope John XXII, who came to the papal throne in 1316, took a sharply hostile stance against the Spirituals.³² When by 1316 tensions had turned to physical altercations between hostile parties in both Provence and eastern Languedoc, the new minister general Michael of Cesena (1270–1342)³³ had a few ringleaders from among the Spirituals brought before the pope in Avignon. They were handed over to inquisitors in Marseilles; four remained firm in their convictions and were burned in 1318.

But the drama did not end there. In 1321 and 1322 the Curia engaged in a debate over the question of Christ’s poverty that had been passed over at Vienne. The Franciscan Order as a whole feared a hostile papal decision, and at its general chapter in Rimini in 1322 it therefore adopted the position that the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles was orthodox Catholic doctrine. The pope saw immediately how that position undermined the legitimacy of both the propertied church and his own position as vicar of Christ. The debate had thus returned to where it had earlier been decided, in favor of the message of Francis: all that was needed to be poor and to follow a poor Christ was to live according to the Gospel. John XXII, however, disagreed with the Poverello. He declared the Franciscan claim that Christ had been without possessions to be heretical. He also now forced the Franciscans to own their property and absolved the Holy See of the responsibility for owning any of the Franciscans’ goods. All that Innocent IV’s fiction had allowed the Roman church to hold in trust after 1245 now flowed back to the Franciscans, who suddenly found themselves, in legal terms, extremely wealthy.

The struggle continued until the death of John XXII in 1334.³⁴ Michael of Cesena and other Franciscans, among them the famous scholastic philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, made their way to Munich and gave their allegiance to the most crucial political opponent of the pope, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian.³⁵ The overwhelming majority of leading Franciscans, however, submitted themselves to John XXII, and in 1329 they elected a general minister who would be loyal to him.

Despite the reforms undertaken by Benedict XII (a subject to be discussed in the next chapter) a number of forces contributed to a further decline in the Order’s discipline: a relaxation of the ideal of poverty, the all-too-powerful influence of local urban environments on the affairs of local communities, and the confusion unleashed on the orders by the Great Schism of the West, which divided both the church and the religious orders for several decades, from 1378 to the Council of Constance in 1414/15. But the ideal of living out the poverty of Christ was never entirely extinguished.³⁶ From the end of the fourteenth century a movement emerged that sought once again to adhere strictly to the Rule of Francis, thus a movement of strict observance. Under that name, and with the powerful leadership of figures like Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), a new Franciscan family, the Observants, began to separate itself out and to develop its own hierarchy. Soon its houses numbered in the hundreds. Beginning in the time of the Council of Constance (1414–1418) and later bolstered by the privileges of Eugene IV in 1446, this family won institutional independence from the traditional Franciscan community, the so-called Conventuals.

__________

¹ Sanctae Birgittae Revelaciones, ed. Birger Bergh et al. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967–2002), 3.17–18. English trans. Denis Michael Searby, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–2012).

² Revelaciones 7.20.

³ Jörg Oberste, “Gesellschaft und Individuum in der Seelsorge der Mendikanten. Die Predigten Humberts de Romanis ( 1277) an städtische Oberschichten,” in Das Eigene und das Ganze, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 497–527.

⁴ Ramona Sickert, Wenn Klosterbrüder (Münster: LIT, 2006), and on the mendicant sermon 87–112.

⁵ Peter Segl, “Berthold von Regensburg—Prediger (1210–1272),” in Berühmte Regensburger. Lebensbilder aus zwei Jahrtausenden, ed. Karlheinz Dietz and Gerhard H. Waldherr (Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 1997), 79–88; Georg Steer, “Bettelorden-Predigt als ‘Massenmedium,’” in Literarische Interessenbildung im Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 314–36.

⁶ Richeri Gesta Senoniensis Ecclesiae von Sens, MGH SS 25, 306.

⁷ Humbert de Romanis, De eruditione praedicatorum, II. De modo prompte cudendi sermones circa omne hominum et negotiorum genus, ed. Marguerin La Bigne, Maxima bibliotheca veterum patrum, vol. 25 (Lyon, 1677), no. 72, 491–92.

⁸ Bernhard Stüdeli, Minoritenniederlassungen und mittelalterliche Stadt (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde, 1969); Norbert Hecker, Bettelorden und Bürgertum (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1981); Ingo Ulpts, “Die Mendikanten als Konkurrenz zum Weltklerus zwischen Gehorsamsgebot und päpstlicher Exemption,” Wissenschaft und Weisheit 66 (2003): 190–227; Jacques Le Goff, “Apostolat mendiant et fait urbain dans la France médiévale. L’implantation des ordres mendicants,” in Jacques Le Goff, Héros du Moyen Âge, le saint et le roi (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1207–26; Jens Röhrkasten, “The Early Franciscans and the Towns and Cities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, ed. Michael Robson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178–92.

⁹ Praedicatores Inquisitores, vol. 1, The Dominicans and the Mediaeval Inquisition: Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition (Rome; 23–25 février 2002) (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 2004). See also Christine Ames, Righteous Persecution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and (for a later period) Michael Tavuzzi, Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

¹⁰ Max Bierbaum, Bettelorden und Weltgeistlichkeit an der Universität Paris: Texte und Untersuchungen zum literarischen Armuts- und Exemtionsstreit des 13. Jahrhunderts (1255–1272), Ep. Officiales 1.2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1916), 245.

¹¹ Sickert, Wenn Klosterbrüder, 123–24. For exemplary structures, see Arnold L. Williams, “Relations between the Mendicant Friars and the Regular Clergy in England in the Later Fourteenth Century,” in Annuale Mediaevale 1 (1960): 22–95; Jens Röhrkasten, The Mendicant Houses of Medieval London: 1221–1539 (Münster: LIT, 2004), 257–76, 317–30; Robert N. Swanson, “The ‘Mendicant Problem’ in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life; Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff, ed. Peter Biller and Richard B. Dobson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1999), 217–38.

¹² Bierbaum, Bettelorden und Weltgeistlichkeit; Anastasius van den Wyngaert, “Querelles du clergé séculier et des ordres mendiants à l’université de Paris au XIII^e siècle,” La France Franciscaine 5 (1922): 257–81, 369–97.

¹³ Michel-Marie Dufeil, Guillaume de Saint-Amour et la polémique universitaire parisienne, 1250–1259 (Paris: Picard, 1972); Sita Steckel, “Ein brennendes Feuer in meiner Brust. Prophetische Autorschaft und polemische Autorisierungsstrategien Guillaumes de Saint-Amour im Pariser Bettelordenstreit (1256),” in Prophetie und Autorschaft. Charisma, Heilsversprechen und Gefährdung, ed. Christel Meier and Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 129–68.

¹⁴ Ulrich Horst, Wege in die Nachfolge Christi. Die Theologie des Ordensstandes nach Thomas von Aquin (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 57–58.

¹⁵ Christopher M. Cullen, Bonaventure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Timothy J. Johnson, The Soul in Ascent: Bonaventure on Poverty, Prayer, and Union with God (Quincy, IL: Francisco Press, 2001).

¹⁶ Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Maximilian Forschner, Thomas von Aquin (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006).

¹⁷ Humbertus de Romanis, “Opusculum Tripartitum,” in Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum, ed. Ortwin Gratius and Edward Brown (London, 1690), 2:185–29.

¹⁸ Guibert de Tournai, “Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae,” ed. Autbert Stroick, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 24 (1931): 36–62.

¹⁹ Bruno von Holstein-Schauenburg, “Relatio de statu Ecclesiae in regno Alemannie,” in MGH Constitutiones III, 589–94; Sickert, Wenn Klosterbrüder, 78–81.

²⁰ Kaspar Elm, “Ausbreitung, Wirksamkeit und Ende der provençalischen Sackbrüder (Fratres de Poenitentia Jesu Christi) in Deutschland und den Niederlanden. Ein Beitrag zur kurialen und konziliaren Ordenspolitik des 13. Jahrhunderts,” in Elm, Vitasfratrum, ed. Dieter Berg (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde, 1994), 67–120; Frances Andrews, The Other Friars (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006), 175–223.

²¹ On the Carmelites, see Bullarium Carmelitanum (Rome, 1715), 1:48–49. On the Augustinian Hermits, see Bullarium eremitarum sancti Augustini (Rome, 1628), 44.

²² Bull “Ordinem vestrum,” ed. Bullarium Franciscanum (Rome, 1754), 1:400–402. On the following, see Helmut Feld, Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 455–63.

²³ Bull “Exiit qui seminat,” Bullarium Franciscanum 3:404–17.

²⁴ On the following, see David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Feld, Franziskus von Assisi, 486–501; Jürgen Miethke, “Der ‘theoretische Armutstreit’ im 14. Jahrhundert. Papst und Franziskanerorden im Konflikt um die Armut,” in Gelobte Armut, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 243–84. On Franciscan self-understanding in the early years, see Thomas Ertl, Religion und Disziplin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006); on the juridical discussion over the position of the Minorites in the time thereafter, see Andrea Bartocci, Ereditare in povertà. Le successioni a favore dei frati minori e la scienza giuridica nell‘età avignonese (1309–1376) (Naples: Jovene editore, 2009).

²⁵ Pierre de Jean Olivi—philosophe et théologien, ed. Catherine König-Pralong (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010).

²⁶ Dieter Berg, “Spiritualismus und Fundamentalismus,” in Konfessionelle Pluralität als Herausforderung, ed. Joachim Bahlcke et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 35–54; David Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

²⁷ Angelo Clareno Francescano (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2007).

²⁸ Gian Luca Potestà, Angelo Clareno. Dai poveri eremiti ai fraticelli (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1990).

²⁹ Charles T. Davis, “Ubertino da Casale and His Conception of Altissima Paupertas,” Studi medievali 22 (1981): 1–56.

³⁰ Alain Demurger, Der letzte Templer: Leben und Sterben des Grossmeisters Jacques de Molay (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005); Malcom Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

³¹ Josef Wohlmuth, ed., Dekrete der ökumenischen Konzilien, vol. 2, Konzilien des Mittelalters (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 400.

³² On the following, see Feld, Franziskus von Assisi, 496–501; Jürgen Miethke, “Papst Johannes XXII. und der Armutstreit,” in Angelo Clareno Francescano, 263–313.

³³ Roberto Lambertini, “Das Geld und sein Gebrauch. Pecunia im Streit zwischen Michael von Cesena und Papst Johannes XXII,” in Geld im Mittelalter. Wahrnehmung—Bewertung—Symbolik, ed. Klaus Grubmüller and Markus Stock (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), 216–43.

³⁴ See Filippo Sedda, Veritatem sapientis animus non recusat. Testo fraticellesco sulla povertà contro Giovanni XXII. Studio ed edizione critica (Rome: Antonianum, 2008); Melanie Brunner, “Pope John XXII and the Franciscan Ideal of Absolute Poverty,” PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2010, http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk./1095.

³⁵ Michael Menzel, “Weltstadt mit Geist? Marsilius von Padua, Michael von Cesena, Bonogratia von Bergamo und Wilhelm von Ockham in München,” in Bayern und Italien: Kontinuität und Wandel ihrer traditionellen Bindungen, ed. Hans-Michael Körner and Florian Schuller (Lindenberg: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 88–102.

³⁶ Duncan B. Nimmo, “The Franciscan Regular Observance: The Culmination of Medieval Franciscan Reform,” in Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, ed. Kaspar Elm (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 189–205. See also Nimmo’s full-length study Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order: From Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins, 2nd ed. (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1995).