Semester:
Offered:
This seminar will focus largely on secondary studies texts in English having to do with the origins and development of the Franciscan Order in the high Middle Ages. We will look at these studies also as a way into the social and religious worlds of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The central theme of the course meetings will be the cluster of issues surrounding poverty, the burgeoning split between the “spiritual” and “conventual” wings of the order, heresy and inquisition, apocalyptic thought and the evolution of papal attitudes towards the order. We will conclude the course by considering literary and filmic representations of some of these themes. Reports on other secondary literature will fill out our picture of the friars and their world, focusing on, among other things, the historiography of Francis of Assisi, the Dominicans, scholasticism, the rise of the universities and preaching.
Jointly Offered as Religion 1438
