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Chapter  Illicit Religion: The Case of Friar Matthew Grabow, O.P. John Van Engen Medieval religion acted inherently as a monopoly. For contemporaries this seemed broadly self-evident, a part of the cultural landscape, the Christian church claiming truth in matters divine and human, the Roman church authenticity in upholding it. We today may find those who dissented more interesting, and so seek out evidence of resistance on the micro level even while conceding the macro. But medieval Christendom was defined only in part by notions of center and periphery. This was a socioreligious complex rife with internal rivalries, multilayered and multiregional . That sprang from a fundamental reality. Since the Christian religion laid claim to all, even indirectly to Jews, all had a stake in its definition, even if all were not equally positioned to compete for its rights and privileges . At nearly every social level, then, what counted as licit or illicit religion counted enormously, and became contested ever more selfconsciously from the twelfth century onward, be it a university teaching or a devout practice. Equally contested, or even more, were monopolistic claims to represent or regulate religion, whether by a bishop, a guild of masters, a religious order, or a pious society. This chapter explores one such contestation at the turn of the fifteenth century. The Modern-Day Devout —active in the Low Countries from the s, made up of women and men, laypeople and secular clerics, canons and canonesses—strove to emulate anew the early Christian community of Jerusalem, especially in its community of goods. They established communal households independent of the formal poverty professed in corporate religious orders.1 They met resistance from local churchmen and aldermen and an inquisitor. One critic, a Dominican friar, deployed monopolistic claims to declare their religion illicit , only to have his own stance finally declared illicit. Those who formally separated from society by taking vows had  John Van Engen claimed for centuries to represent religion in its perfection; hence the professed were said to enter ‘‘religion’’ and be ‘‘the religious,’’ a wordplay retained in most Continental languages. In a society, however, with nearly all christened at birth and so obliged by religious duty, church lawyers came to see things more complexly, suggesting a layered definition, here as it appears in Antonino of Florence in the mid-fifteenth century, going back at least to Johannes Andreae in the early fourteenth. Religion referred, they said, to all who offered up the worship owed the true God, thus all the christened (totam christianitatem); but more especially those who acted upon it with deeds, all good Christians (uniuersitatem bonorum christianorum ); then even more specially the clerical estate, persons so dedicated; and strictly (strictissimo) those who submitted by vow to a superior and dedicated themselves wholly to God. They inhabited the estate of religion (status religionis).2 These categories corresponded to widespread social and cultural perceptions, namely, of all the baptized, the specially virtuous, clerics, and the professed, the first two subject to civil law, the last two to ecclesiastical. But already in the thirteenth century Cardinal Hostiensis recognized that some laypeople lived more religiously (arctiorem et sanctiorem) than others, meaning not just more virtuously but in a more religion-like form—thus widows or hospitalers or recluses, all present in Italian towns. These too, he opined, might be called ‘‘religious’’ in an extended sense (largo modo dicitur religiosus).3 In northern Europe ‘‘beguines’’ (meaning in actuality religious women of varying persuasions and practices) tested this notion, their entire estate banned c.  in Cum de quibusdam, along with any who ‘‘set up conventicles ’’ (Ad nostrum), only to have the ‘‘worthy’’ among them given a reprieve by Ratio recta in  in the face of large-scale protests. Aided by these confusions in papal law and protected by local patrons, beguines, despite narrative commonplaces to the contrary, persisted throughout the fourteenth century in hundreds and thousands,  houses (!) in Reichstein’s Germany and more than  in Simon’s southern Low Countries (‘‘Belgium’’).4 Two generations later, between the s and s, a cadre of Dominican inquisitors in the German Empire pursued anew groups they reckoned long since banned, now including women seeking cover as Franciscan tertiaries.5 Allied with bishops, parish rectors, and town aldermen, these friar-inquisitors sometimes gained the upper hand,6 in part a result of mounting discontent with ‘‘able-bodied beggars,’’ meaning healthy women (and a few men) who lived off alms. A new burgher outlook may also have been at...

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