Cannibal, Scorpion, Horse, Owl: Institutional Hypocrites and the Early Fourteenth-Century Church

Abstract

The status of hypocrisy as a vice has varied historically, but analysis has tended to stress the issue in relation to individuals, rather than institutions. Taking Judith Shklar and Boccaccio as points of departure, this article explores how and why hypocrisy mattered in the context of the early fourteenth-century church. Analysing charges of hypocrisy made by and against Pope Boniface VIII at the papal Curia; Angelo Clareno within the Franciscan Order; and the later Capetian court in relation to the Roman de Fauvel allows us to see how anxiety about hypocrisy became especially acute across a range of early fourteenth institutions. Contemporaries questioned what their institutions meant and increasingly put their claims to the test, often in heightened apocalyptic terms. In and around the early fourteenth-century church, worry about institutional hypocrisy shows how responsibility was increasingly on trial.