The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis

Preface

P R E F A C E DURING THE LAST FEW DECADES, scholars have shown substantial interest in the spiritual Franciscans. The result has been a number of books and articles , most of them on specific problems or figures. A single volume covering the entire movement now seems desirable. A topic like the spiritual Franciscans presents its own difficulties when it comes to deciding how narrowly the limits should be set. It is not easy to decide precisely what one means by the term and whether it can be applied to a single identifiable group. I will spend some time agonizing over these matters in the course of the book and see no reason why I should do so at length in the preface as well, but some introductory remarks seem necessary. It should be noted at the outset that the term “spiritual Franciscans” as normally employed today is largely a construct of modern historians. Inquisitors in the 1320s could speak of “the spirituals” as a well-defined group in southern France who had just been put in their place by John XXII.1 The label hardly came into existence at that point. A 1316 document accused zealots in the order of insisting that they be called fratres spirituales, although the zealots themselves denied the charge in their response.2 Whatever they thought they were denying , it would have been inaccurate for them to claim that they never used such terms to describe themselves. In late 1310 or early 1311, during the round of accusations and counteraccusations leading up to the Council of Vienne, Ubertino da Casale could protest that strictures in the Franciscan rule against wearing shoes were being ignored by all “except a few who are called spirituales .”3 Called such by whom, though—themselves or their detractors? Shortly thereafter Ubertino provided an answer. Leaders of the order, he said, required brothers to wear more luxurious clothing than the rule allowed and subjected them to persecution if they protested, “nor can such spiritual men [viri spirituales ] find peace among the brothers.”4 In response, Franciscan leaders insisted that the truly spiritual were honored, but not “some who pretend to be spiritual ” yet “under the guise of the spirit act insolently.”5 PREFACE Obviously, by this point, the term had become a party label applied to a group of rigorists in the order, and that label was used not only by those who opposed the group but also by those within it. Yet it is hard to go further back and still find the term used in quite this fashion. Even in the mass of polemical literature generated in 1310–12, the term was used only sporadically. Ubertino da Casale, in his defense of the zealots, was more likely to describe his faction simply as those who were trying to observe the Franciscan vow. Others—referring to the group that Ubertino was defending—were likely to call them “Ubertino and his associates from the province of Provence” or simply “Ubertino and his adherents.”6 The term “spiritual” was certainly used before the first decade of the fourteenth century. As we will see, it had roots in the Franciscan rule as well as Joachite apocalyptic thought and was employed throughout the thirteenth century. Toward the end of the century, Petrus Iohannis Olivi tied it to an existing faction when he suggested that he and his contemporaries stood at the beginning of a contest pitting a small group of viri spirituales against the forces of carnality—and he was not the first to use the term in that way. The problem comes when we try to relate that theoretical faction described by Olivi to a concrete group that labeled itself (and was labeled by others) as “spirituals,” as was the case with those rigorists of 1310–12. We find thirteenthcentury rigorists, and we find some of them described as pretending to be more spiritual than others, but we will see that such evidence is rendered problematic by the fact that it is found in substantially later documents that may reflect later terminology.7 In short, we can speak of the “spiritual Franciscans” from the early fourteenth century on and enjoy at least some degree of confidence that we are using a category that would have made sense to those in the order at that time, but we should have remarkably less confidence that this would have been the case in the thirteenth century. Why use the term “spiritual Franciscans” at all...