A canon from Castile: The early life of St. Dominic of Osma (1170/4--1207)

At the death of his superior in 1207, Dominic of Osma was just another canon from a cathedral in the Kingdom of Castile. He had served in his cathedral chapter for a little less than a decade, but already had traveled to Denmark on official royal missions and been part of a major reform of his home diocese of Osma. At his own death in 1221, Dominic had changed Latin Christendom forever. His Order of Preachers would in time be populated by men like Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and the (in)famous inquisitors Bernard Gui and Tomas de Torquemada; his Order would change the world. For all of the hagiographies of Dominic, little is definitively known about his early life. For all of the modern scholarship dedicated to the Dominicans, little is definitively known about the founder of that Order. This MA thesis aims to fill those gaps. The study will be a reconstruction of St. Dominic's pre-missionizing days (that is, before 1207). To achieve this task, the study will employ modern scholarship to reconstruct those parts of Dominic's life which the sources only suggest and reference in passing. The reconstruction of Dominic's life is a crucial task and will aid considerably in reappraisals of the early Order of Preachers and especially in estimations of the orthodox catholic presence in the Languedoc before and during the Albigensian Crusade.