The Devotio moderna and freedom of association: A case study in the medieval theory of rights

"The Devotio moderna and Freedom of Association: A Case Study in the Medieval Theory of Rights" examines documents from the 1390s--1410s involving an unprofessed lay religious group, the "Modern Devout," in an attempt to discover whether "common" medieval people ever thought of their "rights," and if so, in what terms. Taken together, these surviving legal consilia, tractates, chronicles, and Vitae paint a complicated picture of unprofessed, but religiously devout laypeople who were supported by a small network of elite jurists and churchmen in their opposition to Dominican inquisitors and in the defense of their right to form their own communal religious societies modeled after the Apostolic Church.;After being forced to concede the limitations of their situation, these people employed the rule of law, first, to establish the legitimacy of their communal households and, second, to limit their superiors' jurisdiction. They conceded that their private households constituted neither formal associations (collegia) nor a new religious order. Nevertheless, precisely because their regulations were customary, familial, and uniquely determined within each household, they argued, public jurisdiction could not be extended to regulate their private internal affairs. Following the German mystic Heinrich Suso, they redefined "religious" to refer not to a professed monastic, but rather, to anyone who was internally devout. Thus they sought to claim as "religious" folk all of the rights and privileges traditionally reserved for professed monastic orders. They also were critical of immoral and unlearned clergy. This helps explain why their appeals for ecclesiastical reform met with such resistance from their superiors, despite their avowals of theological orthodoxy.;The Modern Devout successfully fended off attacks from papal inquisitors during the 1390s, yet the assaults continued. Although never condemned, their ultimate survival was achieved only at a cost. Devout households increasingly were compelled to solicit episcopal and papal approvals and licenses, in exchange for which, over the course of the fifteenth century, most households were pressured to embrace either the Augustinian or the Franciscan Tertiary Rule, profess one or more vows, and, in many cases, accept full enclosure, thereby ending their quest for autonomy and true freedom of association.