The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England

Introduction

Introduction In 1206 the man who would become St. Francis of Assisi was brought before the bishop to face punishment for his increasingly disruptive behavior . The stories of the saint’s life famously record how Francis’s father , a prosperous cloth merchant, sought legal recourse in response to his son’s actions. After giving away his own belongings, Francis took cloth from his father’s shop, sold it, and eventually threw the proceeds out of a church window. Though he eventually recovered the money, Francis’s father sought retribution for his son’s careless and rebellious conduct, and he insisted that Francis be stripped of his inheritance. While Francis replied willingly to his father’s demands, his acquiescence entailed a further challenge to earthly authority and the possessions on which it depended. In the presence of his father, the bishop, and those gathered at the court, Francis “took off and threw down all his clothes and returned them to his father. He did not even keep his trousers on, and he was completely stripped bare before everyone.”1 In this dramatic act Francis inaugurated a conception of poverty that would become a hallmark of religious life in the Middle Ages. Evoking the image of Jesus as a naked and persecuted figure, Francis transformed poverty into a sacred ideal performed in imitation of Christ. This theological premise embodied the saint’s own commitment to simplicity, for it defined poverty in the plainest of terms: to be poor was to share in the perfection of Christ himself. 1 Yet, once institutionalized, this straightforward philosophy would provoke a massive controversy, and antifraternal writers came to dispute the legitimacy of voluntary poverty and its effects on both the church and the lay community.2 As I shall discuss later, these debates are obviously central to the poverty controversies of the Middle Ages, but they also remain significant in modern scholarship on poverty, revealing an essential lesson about the fundamental ambiguity of poverty, especially as a force in the medieval period. Whether exploring the economic situation of medieval Assisi or the consequences of globalization in the present day, writers have continued to invoke Francis, but they have done so in utterly divergent ways. Such opinions are worth consideration because they illustrate how a claim of poverty, even if articulated with apparent straightforwardness, bears no direct relationship to material reality. As a result, its precise meaning and its ethical implications become a source of interpretive conflict. The enduring nature of such conflicts is evident in the work of modern writers who have continued to debate the significance of Francis’s legacy, revealing its particular ethical stakes for the twenty-first century. Some have condemned the Franciscan ideal as a form of economic exploitation , while others have praised it as a sacred practice that undermines such oppression. Kenneth Wolf, for example, has recently criticized Francis’s conception of poverty, arguing that it constituted another form of power and prestige for the rich. He concentrates on the specifically voluntary nature of Franciscan poverty to consider how its claims of sanctity very likely had negative effects on those who did not choose to be poor: Francis’s extreme love of poverty, pursued for the sake of his own spiritual progress . . . potentially made the lives of those suffering from involuntary poverty even more difficult. For one thing, Francis could not help but attract the attention of almsgivers, many of whom appreciated the vicarious spiritual advantages of supporting him in his quest for perfect poverty, as opposed to trying to alleviate the poverty of someone who did not want to be poor. Second, if the kind of “spiritual economy” that Francis epitomized, based as it was on deliberate divestment from this world and investment in 2 The Claims of Poverty the next, required that Christians have something invested in this world in the first place, how were the poor expected to compete with the rich for entrance into the next life? Wolf answers his own question by exposing what he sees as Franciscanism ’s utter disregard for the spiritual welfare of the involuntary poor: “in a religious tradition where sacrifice meant little or nothing unless it was undertaken voluntarily, it was not at all obvious how the plight of the poor poor (as opposed to the formerly rich poor) was to be alleviated in the next world.”3 In this account...