So over at my cute little podcast We’re Not So Different we are currently running a book club for patrons. As a part of this I am rereading the classic The Name of the Rose, which has made me realise one of the arcane pieces of knowledge I possess as a powerful mage medieval historian is an understanding of the mendicant orders, or the begging orders, and I thought it might be helpful to impart it here so you know what I am always going on about. Also you can then read Eco on a nerdier level or whatever.
The mendicant orders came into being as a part of what we call the vita apostolica movement. This does what your rudimentary latin indicates – the idea was that the holiest thing you could do is try to emulate the lives of the apostles. You may wonder what makes this different from just being a plain old regular monk, a Benedictine, for example. I am glad I made you wonder that. So basically regular ass monks were trying to devote themselves to what Augustine referred to as vocatur ad otium – a life of vocation to the contemplation of God. As a part of this monks engaged with ora et labore or prayer and work, so that they could bring greater glory to God through their actions.[1] A key part of this is retreating from the regular world, where all the sinning and fighting and sex was happening. So they created monasteries where they could be away from everything and get down to praying and gardening and making books. Cool.
Now the thing about this life is it looks very very tempting in medieval Europe. Do monks pray? Yeah they do. Do they work? Also yea. However, the work they are doing a lot of time is pretty sweet. Making books? Awesome. Maybe you run the kitchens? Sweet, good food time. Anyway the point is this attracts people who like academic stuff, usually from the upper classes. It is expected that if you join a monastic order probably you are gonna bring some cash with you to help out the order while you learn your place. So the orders get a lot of money from people in the upper classes of society because that’s where they stash their nerd kids if they don’t want to do the whole getting married thing.
Now if you have stashed your nerd kid in a monastery there is also another benefit – the idea that you have a holy person continuously praying for your soul. And the thing is medieval rich people have a great many reasons to want someone doing that – most notably that it is super unethical how they got their money, and they know that. So they want people praying for them 24/7 so they don’t go to hell for that whole “oppressing the poor” thing that they were doing. Now if it is great to have a monk kid who is doing that for you, it would be even better if you had a whole monastery doing it. How do you achieve this? By giving said monastery a bunch of money and land in your will and say it is contingent upon them saying masses for your soul. This becomes very popular – a sort of get out of jail free card for rich jerks who behaved poorly in life.
So over the medieval period suddenly these holy guys who were meant to be away from the rest of the world are incredibly rich and major power brokers and landlords. They do be working still, but it’s a lot more “I make beer and books” and a lot less “I do my own ploughing.” They are taking in rents. They have their own serfs. It’s not a great look for a bunch of supposedly religious people.
This same pattern was repeating itself in the Church more generally, and by the time you hit the high medieval period and the papacy has consolidated legal power this is starting to grate on regular people who are paying for all of this with the sweat of their brow. Why are they out toiling in the field so Lord Foppington’s son can illustrate manuscripts and drink wine? Why are they paying huge tithes so that the local Bishop can live finer than they will ever imagine? And what were the paying all this money for when the clergy weren’t even hooking them up with sermons, or the basic sacraments?
All of those religious things that the clergy are meant to do fall under the umbrella of what we call “pastoral care” more generally. The idea here was that the Church was responsible for providing sermons and religious instruction to the laity, something which had been getting more and more difficult, what with a rise in the population and also a rise in the “fuck it, I do not feel like preaching today” attitude of the very rich clergy. To combat this the Church got together and held a meeting, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, where it reminded all the clergy, and Bishops in to do their jobs and give their little sermons, as well as access to necessary sacraments such as confession and the Eucharist.[2] But what if they didn’t want to still? Or just didn’t? Well, that’s how you get mendicants.
. Their deal is that they sorta agree with the objections of the regular people, and think that a holy thing to do is to strip the whole fine living thing way way back. There was rather a lot of not wanting to hold personal property, but holding property in common, like the imagined the apostles had done. Moreover, rather than attempting to retreat from the world, like other monks, they instead wanted to become involved with it. They wanted to preach to the regular people who were paying all that money to the Church but still felt as though they lacked proper religious intervention, and in particular, sermons.[3] The idea then was that after a mendicant preached a sermon, the grateful people who heard it would hook them up with something to eat, or some money to buy something to eat. This wasn’t seen as accumulating property, but instead as a sort of gift exchange.
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They had noticed a pretty good gap in the market here and began to organise themselves. When we say mendicants, there are a bunch of different flavours, but there are four main groups that are probably the most important to know about. The first group to crop up were the Carmelites, or the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. These guys were a bit old school, and their deal was the re-established a monastery on mount Carmel around 1150 or so, near where an Orthodox monastery had been destroyed in 614. By 1220 they were speaking Latin (as opposed to Greek) and trying to very specifically be like the prophet Elijah. Living in caves in the desert! Preaching! Such and such! Thing is pretty shortly thereafter they were then pushed out by the Muslim reoccupation of the area following the dissolution of the crusader states, and they went back to Europe bringing their hermit energy. And well, uh, there’s not very many caves in deserts in Europe? Or at least not ones that had the same vibe. And the Pope, Innocent III (1161-1216) (one of our more lawyerly Popes) basically bullied them into becoming preachers because he was absolutely not going to sign off on an order that was just bugging out in a niche somewhere. Anyway they were way more about continuing to exist, and decided that they would go chill in cities, do the commune thing, and help out the regular folks. Cute.[4]
The thing is they got the idea/ were bullied into the idea of preaching because of another group of preachers who started doing their thing later, but were always about the preaching life – the Franciscans or the Order of the Friars Minor. These guys were founded in 1209 by reformed fuck boy St Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226). You know yer man there – preaching to the animals, vegetarian diet, no owning your own stuff, stigmata. All the hits! People absolutely loved this, myself included. Having said that the Church itself was like “Are these guys talking smack about my several jeweled robes?” and the Franciscans had to be like, “Uhhhh no! That’s like cool for you. And we can be poor enough for the two of us?” Allegedly Innocent III then had a dream one night that St Peter’s was falling down and St Francis was holding it up, preventing it from falling down. This convinced him, and he signed off on the order. These guys are one of the more academic orders in that they felt like a good way to be a poor preacher was to get a university degree. (Look, no comment, OK?) This way people would receive the best possible sermons. Anyway, you find a lot of these guys around Paris getting into academic shouting matches with each other as a result.[5]
But still people wanted different flavours – enter the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans in 1216. They were founded by St Dominic (1170-1221), who saw what the Franciscans were doing and was like, “That’s cool, but going to university to be a nerd and do sermons is not enough. We want to do both the book making AND the sermon preaching.” So Dominicans have what we refer to as a “mixed” spirituality. They might switch back and forth from the scriptorium making books, and going out to make sure the people in the world were getting those sweet sweet sermons. They also specifically wanted to get involved with preaching to the heretics, and in particular the good men and women of Languedoc, aka the Cathars. This … didn’t really get anywhere, though a couple of people ended up joining the order which was cute. What was less cute is they gained a reputation for being able to find heresy everywhere and would be the go to people you called if you needed an inquisitor. So, you get interesting Dominicans like Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), and in the early modern period you get straight up evil ones like Tomás de Torquemada (1420-1498). (I mean if you said Aquinas and also Dominic were evil I would also be like, yeah I get it, but hey ho.) The point is, it’s a real mixed bag.[6]
Finally, you get your Augustinians who came together in 1244. These guys were real Italian with it, and basically it was a way of gloming a bunch of people who were trying to live under the rule of St Augustine of Hippo in Tuscany, into, well, an orderly order. This was referred to as the Grand Union. People really liked the historical links to St Augustine because it gave it all a certain pizazz, and before you know it there were Augustinians all over the Holy Roman Empire.[7] These guys, quite famously, are the ones who gave rise to Martin Luther (1483-1536), which I am sure they absolutely hate.
Now because there were so many flavours of mendicants popping up, eventually the Church was like, “Thank you that is enough people pointing out our hypocrisy, and also I think the sermons thing is covered.” So in 1274 they got together at the Second Council of Lyon to establish that you could only have these four flavours of mendicant as well as their subsidiary orders for women. No more inventing new ways to be broke and hanging out with broke people. That’s enough.
The entire thing would be very cute a) had inquisitors not become involved and b) if by the fourteenth century all these orders hadn’t amassed massive amounts of money and property, just like the people they were complaining about when they started. But hey ho! It’s all part of the grand and ongoing boom and bust cycle of the medieval Church, and it helps to understand why everyone is so mad all the time. Regardless, we stan St Francis. Thank you.
But I promise you there is a reason to know all this other than just like, knowing your pokemon types or whatever. The reason these groups are important is that preaching in the middle ages was essentially a form of mass media.[8] It works a little something like this: one guy gives a sermon. If you do it to a crowd that is a few hundred people who might hear it, take it to heart and tell other people about it. That’s mass communication vector one. The second is that these guys weren’t just preaching from nothing – they often wrote down model sermons that other preachers could then use to give the same sermon elsewhere. Now you are talking to another hundred people. And another hundred. And another. Everyone who has those models can say the same thing again, elsewhere. They could even be doing it after you, the original sermon writer had died. So you could be spreading your ideas not just across, town, but across borders and even time. And we have tonnes of these sermon collections which survive to us, which is testament to the fact that people really wanted that stuff. So, it worked.
So then, we need to know about the mendicants because they were some of the biggest opinion makers and ideas sharers of the high and late medieval period. They’re the equivalent of medieval influencers, but for God. Allegedly. At any rate now you know what medieval people are always on about and also you know that Friar Tuck was a Franciscan. Great job all a
[1] Jean Leclercq, Otia monastica: études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen âge (Rome: Herder, 1963).
[2] David d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons defused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 15–16.
[3] This is a very quick and dirty rehash of a complex subject! If you want more and have German I recommend Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketserei, den Bettelorden un der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, (2nd edn, Hildesheim : Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961).
[4] On the Carmelites, I like Peter-Thomas Rohrbach, Journey to Carith: The Sources and Story of the Discalced Carmelites, (Washington D.C.: Patrick A. O’Boyle, 2015, Reprint.)
[5] A great book on the Franciscans and their deal is Neslihan Şenocak, The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209-1310, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.)
[6] On the medieval Dominicans one of the classics is R. F. Bennett, The Early Dominicans: Studies in Thirteenth-Century Dominican History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937).
[7] For the Augustinians you can check out Blbino Rano, Augustinian Origins, Charism, and SpiritualityAugustinian Origins, Charism, and Spirituality, (Darby, PA: DIANE Publishing Company, 2013).
[8] d’Avray, The Preaching, p. 248.
For more general explainers, see:
Let me explain something to you: periodisation and the middle ages
For more on preaching, see:
On sermons and the vernacular
On Prague, preaching, and brothels
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© Eleanor Janega, 2024
Going Medieval 