Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal. Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (review)

225 Franciscan Studies 62 (2004) Book Reviews Patrick Nold. Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal. Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. 212 pp. Patrick Nold sets out to show the importance of Cardinal Bertrand de la Tour in the controversy of the 1320s. Subject to controversy was the poverty of Jesus Christ, the apostles, and the Franciscans. In the learned and theoretical pro and con, which cluttered the archives of the time, the papal court and the Franciscan order offered their different ideas about the poverty of Christ and his apostles; but it was the poverty of the Franciscans that mattered. More precisely, it was the cultural significance of what the Franciscans considered their poverty that mattered. They were not committing themselves to usus pauper, as they should have; they were arguing that they should be considered poor, and perfectly poor. However abundant the learning and precise the theory, the whole story turned on the fact that, whereas one pope had said they were, another was determined to say they were not. It was a non-contest from the start. In the church the pope always wins. Patrick Nold tells the story differently. By his account, a question arose about Christ’s poverty. Pope John XXII heard it and handled it, after wide consultation. He brought the question to resolution under the wise guidance of a Franciscan, Cardinal Bertrand de la Tour. de la Tour emerges as the hero of Nold’s tale. The story of the disagreement about the poverty of Jesus Christ and his apostles ends with Cum inter nonnullos in 1323. However, in 1324 John XXII’s determinations on poverty were picked up and used against him in the Sachsenhausen Appeal of 1324, as the contest between papacy and empire entered a new round. One consequence of Nold’s account stands out in bold relief: the manuscript Vat. lat. 3740 replaces the Chronica of Nicholas the Minorite as primary source for the story. For sure, the Vatican manuscript is the keystone to the book’s argument. In Chapter 1, Nold sets aside the Chronica as a useful source for what happened in 1322-1323. He adduces other sources in Chapter 2 and in particular Vat. lat. 3740. As L. Duval-Arnould has proposed, the manuscript gathers together the results of the consultation conducted 226 BOOK REVIEWS by Pope John after the question on Christ’s poverty had been referred to him. (Historians do not agree just how the question reached his desk.) Pope John’s marginal notes in the manuscript show clearly that he used it to study the question. Recently, in her study of Bonagratia of Bergamo,1 E. Wittneben has proposed a new way of looking at the Chronica. Bonagratia was the order’s procurator during Michael of Cesena’s time as minister general. The procurator conducted the order’s business with the papal curia. Well versed in both civil and canon law, Bonagratia supplied the juridical expertise needed by the order. Wittneben has a fine section on Bonagratia’s way of working. She explains how he gathered, glossed, and used legal collections, processes, reports, and treatises to produce new texts. He adapted the material at hand to produce new arguments when needed. Wittneben arrives at the conclusion that, as an extension of his method, Bonagratia stood behind the collection of material gathered in the Chronica. It is his compilation. The Chronica is less a chronicle than a brief and informed account that puts order into a collection of juridically useful texts on poverty Christian and Franciscan. It is in sum a collection of “documents pour servir,” a useful tool, wholly unworthy of Offler’s acrimony (23, note 49) and certainly not of Nold’s visceral dislike (passim). Nold devotes Chapter 3 to a close examination of Vat. lat. 3740. The manuscript has five sections. The first two contain Franciscan responses to Pope John’s request, explaining and justifying the Franciscan theory. The other three sections offer the contrary view. In 1910 F. Tocco, reading a rubric accordingly, proposed that the second section contained abbreviations of the opinions offered in the first section. Nold...