The Franciscans in the Middle Ages (review)

Author of a favorably reviewed book on Saint Francis, Michael Robson here attacks the larger subject of the Franciscans in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. He brings to the task an impressive command of the primary and secondary sources. The book is brimming with data, all of it relevant to the story of how the order developed as well as how it affected and was affected by medieval society as a whole. Robson traces his topic over a long period and throughout western Europe as well as in the east. (The second and third orders play a relatively minor role in his story, however.)

If Robson is generous with data, he is less so with analysis. For example, he devotes a chapter to Bonaventure and in the process summarizes a number of his works. He includes a three-page summary of the Legenda maior but makes no serious attempt to describe how it resembles or differs from earlier writings on the saint and what those differences suggest. Robson comments that "historians now shy away from the concept that he was the second founder of the order" but does not explain why they ever thought of Bonaventure as such or why that view is now questioned.

Again, Robson gives a five-page summary of Angelo Clareno's chronicle, which he describes as providing "a solid foundation for the historical development of the reform movement among the friars." He qualifies this judgment by citing some of its more obvious errors, but the question of Angelo's reliability goes much deeper than that. Indeed, it is arguable that throughout the chronicle, Angelo is artfully bending the facts to turn Franciscan history into a rather simplistic morality play.

Again, Robson devotes substantial attention to the Observants, and that is all to the good; but how, precisely, did their goals compare with those pursued by earlier reformers like Angelo Clareno, Ubertino da Casale, and Olivi? The point here is that Franciscan history is not simply the story of lax elements in the order diverging from a generally static view of what Franciscan life entailed, while reformers sought to bring the order back into conformity with that view. On the contrary, even the greatest of reformers—indeed, even contemporaries like Angelo, Ubertino, and Olivi—differed in their sense of what Franciscans should be doing. Reform was their goal, but they meant different things by it, and the same could be said of the Observants. Franciscan history was characterized by a continuing debate as to what fidelity to the Franciscan ideal really involved, a debate influenced not only by individual participants' reading of Francis' original intention but also by their sense of how that intention should be weighed against changing circumstances. The debate was not only among those we normally label "reformers," like the spirituals and later the Observants. Others whom we too easily categorize as "the community" or "the conventuals" also had varying positions to defend, and they too need to be heard.

Asking Robson to address these matters in addition to doing what he does so well is probably asking more than one should expect of any human being, but I would certainly like to know what he has to say.