The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order 1209–1310 by Neslihan Senocak (review)

The vexed matter of the appropriateness of theological studies divided the followers of il poverello d’Assisi from the 1220s and found expression in the carefully crafted passages in the hagiographical tradition and the expostulations of reformers, including Peter of John Olivi, Iacopone da Todi, Ubertino da Casale, and Angelo da Clareno. The emergence of the Franciscan Order’s theological schools forms the basis of this compelling new monograph by a young scholar: Neslihan Senocak, assistant professor of history at Columbia University. Senocak brings a sure-footedness and assurance to a question that has separated historians along partisan lines. For example, some English historians of the order were deemed too sympathetic to the writings of Paul Sabatier. Similarly, the temptation to interpret Franciscan history along the lines of the widening rift between the Friars Minor Conventual and the Friars of the Observant reform has bedevilled historiography. Franciscan apologists, hagiographers, and chroniclers yoked the pursuit of theological studies to the ministry of preaching. This apologetic spirit, for example, pervades St. Bonaventure’s Letter in Response to an Unknown Master. Contemporary observers were more inclined to view clerical education as an aid to the friars’ ministry rather than a betrayal of the ideals of St. Francis. Certain forms of the apostolate demanded significant levels of theological literacy, a feature that was all the more necessary when friars engaged in dialogue and disputation with heretics in northern Italy and southern France. Senocak deftly moves through the early Franciscan history to show that the movement was gaining in social, ecclesiastical, and academic respectability through the caliber of its novices; this is how Roger Bacon describes the luster that Alexander of Hales, a wealthy regent master of theology at the University of Paris, brought to le grand couvent de Cordeliers de Paris about 1236. An air of triumphalism is glimpsed in the accounts of the clothing of scholars, monks, secular priests, abbots, and bishops. The admission of such distinguished novices undoubtedly led to hubris on the part of some Franciscan historians whose proclivity to emphasize the successes achieved by their order was accentuated by the mendicant controversies, beginning in the 1250s at Paris. Senocak persuasively shows that the friars recruited graduates capable of filling the senior posts in provinces and custodies. This explanation accords with the plea for reform launched by Ubertino da Casale, who asserted that the order was not being well served by an educated elite more familiar with the university than the hermitage. It is one of the ironies of Franciscan history that the search for suitably qualified vocations began with the defenestration of Elias of Cortona, the first minister general to be removed from office by the pope. The transformation of the order is reflected in the two vitae of Francis composed by Thomas of Celano. From 1240 the order was led for the first time by a friar, Haymo of Faversham, who had not met the saint of Assisi. Moreover, he set a new pattern for the ministers general because he combined priesthood and a university education with the promotion of high standards of evangelical poverty. His successors in the later thirteenth century were ordained graduates, generally from the University of Paris.

This book teems with good and sensible explanations of the place of theological study in the order. The last part looks at the polemics raging around the friars’ use of books and the formation of their conventual libraries. Senocak weighs the reforming views of Ubertino da Casale against the information from the nascent Franciscan libraries; the abuses that he targeted were real rather than imaginary and were mirrored in the order’s general and provincial constitutions. This is an excellent book for which Senocak is to be warmly commended.