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[ 179 ] CONCLUSION Though the plight of the Beguins of Languedoc has not been of great interest to historians until now, the larger context of the poverty controversy within the Franciscan Order within which we have found ourselves is well enough known that it has even provided the ingenious setting for two modern novels. The best known, of course, is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, set in November 1327, though the poverty controversy no doubt seems to many merely a rather lengthy and tedious introduction to the story of the mysterious killer haunting Eco’s Alpine abbey and the search for the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics.1 Nevertheless, while William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk may be Eco’s inventions, Michael of Cesena, Bonagratia of Bergamo, Ubertino da Casale, and Bernard Gui (not to mention the other representa1 Eco famously remarked “I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.” He also acknowledges that the choice of November 1327 and the poverty controversy was accidental, a mere consequence of the fact that he “needed an investigator, English if possible (intertextual quotation) with a great gift of observation and a special sensitivity in interpreting evidence. These qualities could be found only among the Franciscans, and only after Roger Bacon; furthermore, we find a developed series of signs only with the Occamites.” But as he further observes, “the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.” Postscript to the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, 1984), 13, 26, 28. [ 180 ] Conclusion tives of the two sides who meet at the abbey) are historical figures, and the distrust between the two sides depicted in the secret talks to which William of Baskerville was privy was real, though the aborted negotiations are fictional. While for Eco, the poverty controversy is little more than a setting within which his semiotic syllogisms are able to shine, for another academic-turnednovelist , G. G. Coulton, it is rather more. Coulton’s time-travel novel Friar’s Lantern takes every possible opportunity to bash the modern Roman Catholic Church and its medieval antecedents, and events of the 1320s provide ample grist for his mill.2 As Coulton’s hero, The Reverend Herbert Rashleigh , wends his tragic way from a quiet English village through the highways and byways of fourteenth-century France toward Avignon, he meets with every possible type of medieval churchman: corrupt bishops, incontinent canons, a self-satisfied friar who might as well be named Friar Tuck— and at the very last, when all hope seems lost, a saintly Spiritual Franciscan hermit and a family of warm, welcoming, and clandestine Beguins (though in the end, the enlightened Rashleigh comes to see even their devotion to their cause as fanaticism). In another work, Coulton described the persecution of the Spiritual friars and their lay followers as a prime example of “the cynical frankness with which loyalty to the first traditions of the Order was proclaimed to be heresy,”3 and in Friar’s Lantern, he clearly saw in it a delicious means to hoist the Church by its own petard.4 Historical fiction, however conscientious, provides a wonderful opportunity for the author to shape events to suit his or her agenda. While no 2 Coulton (1858–1947), a scholar whose peripatetic academic career was worthy of a gyrovague or a Goliard, was a prolific writer. Though he is now probably best known for his popular From St. Francis to Dante: A Translation of All That Is of Primary Interest in the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (London, 1906) and Medieval Panorama: The English Scene from Conquest to Reformation (New York, 1938), both many times reprinted in paperback and widely available in used bookstores, or for his more scholarly four-volume Five Centuries of Religion (Cambridge, England, 1923–1950), he was also a pamphleteer and controversialist, an opponent of Belloc and Chesterton, and a bitter enemy of Cardinal Gasquet. Among his publications are many with inflammatory titles such as Catholic Truth and Historical Truth (Cairo, [c.1906]), Inquisition and Liberty (London, 1938) and Romanism and Truth (London, 1930). His self-laudatory autobiography, Fourscore Years (Cambridge, 1943), is best supplemented by his daughter’s somewhat less than filial recollections: Sarah Campion, Father: A Portrait of G. G. Coulton at Home (London, 1948). 3 Coulton, “The Failure of the Friars,” in Ten Medieval Studies (Cambridge, 1930), 171n1. 4 Romanism and Truth, 2...

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