The Fourteenth-Century Franciscans and Their Critics

THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCISCANS AND THEIR CRITICS I. The Order's Growth and Character Historians of the Franciscan Order have written about the period between the mid-fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries as an adjunct to two peripheral themes: the rise of the Observants and the Great Schism. Conscious of the parallel development of the Observants , some have seen in Conventual history little beyond the decadence and decline that inevitably precede a reform movement.1 Those who have studied the Franciscan involvement in the schism, on the other hand, have either overlooked the Order's internal history entirely or have subordinated it to the broader subject of Minorite participation in church history.2 Writing on Conventual history after 1350, J. R. H. Moorman, David Knowles, A. G. Little and 1 Riccardo Pratesi, for example, in "Francesco Micheli del Padovano, di Firenze, teólogo ed umanista francescano del sec. XV," Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 47 and 48 (1954 and 1955), refers to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as an era of "slackness" and "decadence" in the Order, and points to the insubordination, strife and violence of the friars, along with their ambition for offices, as evidence of this. 2 In a pair of complementary articles, "Die avignonesische Obedienz der Mendikanterorden zur Zeit des grossen Schismas," in Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte, I and II, and "Die avignonesische Obedienz im Franziskanerorden zur Zeit des grossen abendländischen Schismas," in Franziskanische Studien, I (1914), 165-192, 312-327 and 479-490, Konrad Eubel edited and commented on documents illustrating the history of the Clementine friars during the schism. Otto Hüttebräuker, Der Minoritenorden zur Zeit des Grossen Schismas (Berlin, 1893), is limited to an appreciation of structural changes in the Order and a survey of benefits conferred on the Minorites by the Urbanist and Clementine popes. However, he does recognize in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries "the most important and far-reaching period in the Order's history after the early thirteenth century," and concludes that, because of the even closer ties with the papacy created during the schism, the Franciscan Order consciously underwent a tremendous revitalization and advance, which assured its predominant position in the fifteenth century. ??8CAROLLY ERICKSON others gave an important emphasis to the anti-mendicant literature of the period. And, although they make allowances for exaggeration in degree in the works of the friars' critics, they largely accept their allegations in kind. Too often the abundant anti-mendicant literature of these years has been used to prove flagrant laxness among the Conventuals by historians who have then argued that this corruption itself accounts for the copious writings against the friars. Moorman repeats the accusations in the critical treatises largely without comment, despite his acquaintance with much of the documentary evidence from within the Order.3 Knowles points to the "spirit of the age" as one cause of the fourteenth-century criticism of the mendicants, and notes that historians' dark view of the period after 1350 has been influenced by their estimates of the psychological and demographic effects of the plague of 1348-49.4 The assumption of an inevitable link between falling population and spiritual decline has distorted the interpretation of fourteenth-century history. In Studies in English Franciscan History, A. G. Little was ambivalent in his use of the satirical and polemical literature against the friars, now acknowledging its validity, now adopting a skeptical attitude toward it.5 In an important article on the mendicant-clerical disputes of the fourteenth century, Père Hugolin Lippens shed new light on anti-mendicant criticism. Stressing the clergy's reliance on custom and that of the mendicants on written law, he showed that jurisdictional clashes and written polemic between the two groups were all but inevitable.6 By contrast, G. M. Trevelyan, who wrote a good deal about the friars in his England in the Age of Wyclif, was only too happy to use the claims of Wyclif and other opponents of the friars to make a case against them, and freely admitted his reliance on the critical literature: In the attempt that I have made in this chapter to give some representation...