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

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. and trans. Regis J. Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short, 3 vols. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999–2001), 1:193. 2. On the Franciscan order, its philosophy of poverty, and early antifraternal conflicts, see the earlier and later rules of St. Francis, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 1:63–86, 99–106; Malcolm Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210–1323 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1998), 221–69; Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 1:51–167; Janet Coleman, “Property and Poverty,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns, 607–48 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988), 630; James Doyne Dawson, “William of Saint-Amour and the Apostolic Tradition,” Medieval Studies 70 (1978): 223–38; Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 11–61; and Takashi Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 1, which offers the helpful reminder that the Franciscan theory of poverty was not “monolithic and immutable” (38). 3. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Poverty of Riches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 413. Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, “The Marxist Premodern,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 3 (2004): 463–71, at 470n6, remark that this tribute to Francis is perhaps surprising given the other influential perspective that Francis’s poverty worked to endorse a protocapitalist ideology. See, for example, Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Kellie Robertson , The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 190–93, also briefly discusses the problems with Hardt and Negri’s nostalgia for the medieval past. 296 5. On changing conceptions of poverty in relation to antifraternal discourse or the labor statutes, see David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), chap. 1; Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 282–85, 290, 315, 319; Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C-Version Autobiography and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Stephen Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, 208–317 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Maria Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor: Class or Status Group?” in Culture, Ideology and Politics, ed. Ralph Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, 160–75 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Bertha Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Laborers during the First Decade after the Black Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908); Frank Rexroth, Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 1; Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 31–33, 71–72; and Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 3. 6. These are terms employed respectively by Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views,” 166, and Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity , 35. See also Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in PreIndustrial Europe, trans. James Coonan (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 52. George Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), chap. 5, sees seeds of this changing attitude toward labor in the thirteenth century when the church began to “secularize” labor, “creating for [its] practitioners a separate identity within Christian culture” (138). On new conceptions of sloth as a sin opposed to labor, see Nicola Masciandaro, The Voice of the Hammer : The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 117–20. 7. Louise Fradenburg, “Needful Things,” in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, 49–67 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57. On poverty as a representational sign in Piers Plowman, see David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), chap. 5. 8. “Claim,” v., Oxford English Dictionary, 2.a. 9...