The Minims, Their Rule, and French Religious Society at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

The mendicant Order of Minims was founded by a Calabrian hermit and healer, St. Francesco di Paola (1416-1507), who left his homeland behind in 1483 to attend to the ailing Louis XI in France at the latter’s request. They received papal approval for a new “rule” (despite the injunction of the Fourth Lateran Council against such developments in 1215) and a previously unheard-of vow (“Lenten life”), and enjoyed a growing presence across western and central Europe by the end of the founder’s life. The Minims appear hard to interpret: while they do not fit more traditional perspectives on pre-Reformation monastic “decline,” they also are not much easier to place in more recent and more positive reappraisals of late medieval reform, which have focused more on the push that reformers provided than their pull. This article emphasizes the productive religious conversations between vowed religious activists and external supporters in the period. It is argued that the Minims’ harsh and punctilious lives dovetailed tightly with the programmatic piety in favor among the pious laity of the aristocracy and the towns. Building on these foundations, the rigorous rule that they created was the product of a deep religious interaction with society, above all that which they found in France. The Minims’ evolving social connectivity and their boundary-crossing religious development meant that they were no outlier, but rather a natural focal-point within French religious society.