Early Franciscans in England: Sickness, Healing and Salvation

Peter Murray Jones

doi:10.1163/15733823-12340029

Abstract

Abstract From their first arrival in England in 1224, the Franciscans were concerned with the treatment of ill-health for both practical and spiritual reasons. Many brothers fell sick, and their illnesses required both interpretation and treatment. Some friars practised healing on their brethren and on lay patients. This article will focus on the question of the relationship between the religious vocation of the friars and the exigencies of sickness. Little evidence survives in England in the form of administrative records. But two early Franciscan writings (Tractatus de adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, and the letters of Adam Marsh OFM, d. 1259) throw significant light on attitudes to illness and practical responses.

Highlights

This article will focus on two unusual sources for the early history of the Franciscan order in England, both of which throw unexpected light on health and healing
These two thirteenth-century sources from England – the chronicle of Thomas on the coming of the friars, and the letters of Adam Marsh – though written from very different perspectives, and for very different purposes, show that medical knowledge and practice were central to the concerns of the early Franciscans
The rigours of their way of life and their calling to itinerancy perhaps made them more liable to illness than others

Summary

Introduction

This article will focus on two unusual sources for the early history of the Franciscan order in England, both of which throw unexpected light on health and healing. Other regions where the order flourished in Europe are far better documented at these official levels but do not have chronicles devoted to the early development of the province, or letter collections for individual friars These two English sources reveal that Franciscans took bodily health matters very seriously, while emphasising the spiritual significance of episodes of illness. The weighty Summa predicantium, an alphabetically ordered handbook for preachers compiled in the first half of the fourteenth century by the English Dominican John Bromyard, argues that disease is first and foremost a moral phenomenon with accidental physical manifestations, leaving no place for the physician This is directly at odds, as Ziegler points out, with the view of medicine taken by Giovanni de San Gimignano.[3] Iona McCleery’s work on the career of the Portuguese Dominican Gil de Santarem The friars mentioned in De adventu are identified with named convents or houses in English towns or cities, and the audience at collation in those same convents could take pride in their institution

Index Britanniae Scriptorum

Conclusion