Exploring the Boundaries of Law in the Middle Ages: Franciscan Debates on Poverty, Property, and Inheritance

Abstract

The medieval Franciscans offer an instructive historical example for a general reflection on the juridical, political, and social problems of inheritance. Insisting on the imitation of the poverty of Christ, the first of the so-called mendicant orders radically challenged the foundations of late medieval society. The violent debates provoked by such an extreme position give insights into the difficulties, contradictions, paradoxes, and legal fictions connected to a change of the rules of property and inheritance. This article discusses three moments of these disputes: Francis’s renunciation of his family’s inheritance; a papal justification of Franciscan poverty; and the controversy of the poverty of Christ which broke out after 1.320. It can be shown that the Franciscans tried to overcome their critics by claiming a space beyond the boundaries of human law, but in the end did not succeed in escaping the mechanisms of inheritance.