| In the second half of the twentieth century, historians successfully brought the history of medieval Europe's religious orders into the mainstream of medieval scholarship. No longer trapped by generalizations about their piety or their decadence, medieval religious became important players in broader histories of society, economy and culture. Yet many older assumptions continue tacitly to shape both the questions historians ask of the orders and the narratives we invoke to interpret their history. Chief among these are assumptions about religious poverty, an ideal still taken to be the driving force of religious change after 1100.; This dissertation challenges such assumptions by arguing for the centrality of personal property in the late medieval cloister. It explores how fifteenth-century women and men in every religious order enjoyed stipends from personal endowments, private rooms, food and clothing in variety and abundance. It also shows how, contrary to modern assumptions, this way of life could be reconciled with universally accepted conceptions of law and ownership.; The dissertation then shows, through a series of heretofore unidentified and unstudied fifteenth-century treatises, how suddenly, vigorously and broadly this world of personal property came under attack at the opening of the fifteenth century. Leading this attack were adherents of the “Observant Movement,” a widespread effort to reform the religious orders that quickly became one of the most important cultural energies of the Middle Ages. Too often, the Observants' rise is typically read as a natural “reforming” reaction to an equally natural “decline.” This dissertation argues instead that, in light of the cogent arguments made in property's defense, that rise must be seen as but one of many cultural possibilities, one distinct manifestation of broader cultural shifts in attitudes toward property and religion. It thus opens the way for the Observants to speak to broader issues—about the relationship between custom, written law and community, for example, about the tensions between lordly and civic sensibilities of material culture, and about the shift from religion as obligation to religion as a voluntary life of inner devotion. |
