Franciscan Friars Research Articles

La frontera que nos une : proyecto para educar al bárbaro, México, 1807

Fuertemente influenciado por las ideas ilustradas que circulaban por las colonias hispanoamericanas a fines del siglo XVIII, y por el contacto con misioneros europeos procedentes de Asia, un hermano franciscano elaboró un proyecto para establecer un colegio de misiones dónde educar al indio bárbaro de las Provincias Internas de la Nueva España. En ese mismo colegio habría cabida para niños provenientes de la China y de otras naciones asiáticas. El artículo revisa los planteamientos del religioso que justificaban su ambicioso proyecto, y los antecedentes socio-históricos que lo respaldaron. Uno de los ángulos fundamentales se centró sobre el contacto entre las distintas culturas y los beneficios que se obtendrían por el mismo. Con la invasión napoleónica de España y los movimientos independentistas de las colonias españolas, la realización del proyecto peligró, pero la iniciativa fue reflejo de una necesidad real de educar y civilizar al bárbaro.

Campaigns to Capture Young Minds: A Look at Early Attempts in Colonial Mexico and New France to Remold Amerindians

Both French and Spanish authorities saw the education of Amerindians as an essential tool in assimilating them to European ways. Both groups thought that the natives were either uneducated, and therefore clean slates for new teachings, or else sufficiently capable of understanding the superiority of foreign ways. In either case, education was the necessary vehicle for turning the natives towards European habits and norms of behaviour. The approach of each group was different. The Spanish, through the Franciscans, were able to take over an existing system, altering it to suit their own needs. They therefore devised a sophisticated system of institutions quickly, establishing a college by 1536. These efforts enjoyed a huge initial success, largely because the natives in their defeat experienced little difficulty in substituting one set of authority figures for another set already found wanting. The French were not conquerers, and did not face a native society in crisis, as had the Spanish. The French Franciscan friars also initiated christianizing education quickly after first settlement, but the Jesuits superceded them within two decades. The natives agreed to their ministrations because the French made it a condition of trade. Huron society differed radically from that of the Mexico, in its egalitarian structure and flexible institutions. The Huron, an unconquered people in a transitional phase of social and economic life, treated the missionaries as guests and often dictated the conditions of contact. In spite of quite different circumstances, the educational efforts of both groups seem to have reached a similar conclusion: native groups were neither as maleable nor as easy to assimilate as the Europeans had thought.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (review)

Reviewed by: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Alan Armstrong The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the Elizabethan Theatre, Ashland, Oregon. June 8–October 7, 2005. Directed by James Edmondson. Set by Richard L. Hay. Costumes by Marie Anne Chiment. Lighting by Robert Peterson. Sound by Todd Barton. Fights by John Sipes. With Demetra Pittman/Robynn Rodriguez (Chorus), Jonathan Haugen (Doctor Faustus), Ray Porter (Mephistophilis), Shad Willingham (Wagner), Juan Rivera LeBron (Robin), Julia Pace Mitchell (Good Angel), Catherine Lynn Davis (Evil Angel), Kenneth Albers (Valdes), Abdul Salaam El Razzac (Cornelius), Brent Harris (Lucifer), James J. Peck (Beelzebub), Josiah Phillips (Pope Adrian), Laura Morache (Lechery, Helen of Troy), Sarah Rutan (Envy, Old Woman), Tyrone Wilson (Second Scholar, Gluttony) and others. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival waited twenty-five years to begin performing the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. After a 1960 performance of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, OSF went on to produce plays by Jonson, Marlowe, Dekker, Beaumont, Ford, and Tourneur, until a fine 1993 production of Webster's The White Devil failed to fill the Elizabethan Theatre on weeknights. OSF has since avoided Shakespeare's contemporaries altogether, judging even Shakespeare plays with numbers in their titles to be better box-office bets than plays that lacked his name. On learning that Artistic Director Libby Appel would break the drought by including a Marlowe play in the 2005 repertory, I was disappointed that Doctor Faustus (a play already staged by OSF, in 1979) had gotten the nod rather than Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, or Edward II. But the production realized by the company's actors, designers, and director James Edmondson (an actor in the 1979 OSF production) richly justified the choice. From the outset the show's technical demands taxed the resources of a repertory company even as large as OSF, with ten other plays in various stages of production. Nineteen people took part in the design meeting to determine how to build the show. Edmondson decided early on to scratch the horse-courser and leg-stealing scenes and to cut much of the Benvolio/Frederick material for want of actors (despite a cast of twenty-six). Five devils were pulled because of costume-shop limitations, and only in rehearsal did it become apparent that the production had exceeded the resources needed for the "headless Faustus" scene, which Edmondson reluctantly cut. Audiences watching Doctor Faustus were delighted nevertheless by special effects which shared the exuberant spirit of the play's original staging, with its roaring devils, firecrackers, artificial thunder and lightning, and Henslowe's dragon-machine. The production turned the center-stage trap into a frightening Hell mouth, from which a fiery glow and billowing smoke emanated. To thin the congealing blood Faustus needed to sign his fatal pact, Mephistophilis casually shot a flame from his hand. The production used its enormous, spectacular dragon to represent not Lucifer but Mephistophilis in his first hideous apparition, before he [End Page 78] returned in the guise of a Franciscan friar. The equally astonishing Lucifer, appearing on the balcony with Mephistopheles and Beelzebub, above, looked like a rock star, resplendent in Rod Stewart hair, a feathery white cape, mid-thigh white boots, and an enormous lime-green codpiece. The Good and Evil Angels, too, appeared initially in alcoves above the stage, like paired, static illustrations in a medieval diptych. A few actors created the impression of a large swarm of agile devils, as menacing as the smaller raptors in a Jurassic Park movie. Their fancifully varied costumes, in darker hues of brown and green with leather masks and scattered hints of fur, tails, and oversized ears, shared a bestial theme. Several of these actors doubled as the Seven Deadly Sins, in equally ingenious costumes unified by vivid gold, yellow, and brown fabrics. The dress of mortal characters also pleased the eye with splashes of brilliant color, such as the red robes of the Roman cardinals and the ermine-shouldered dark purple cape of Pope Adrian, trimmed like his glittering crown in gold and colorful jewels. Faustus, too, appeared occasionally in a richly embroidered gown, but his basic costume was black trousers and jacket and white...

The Franciscans and the Scottish Wars of Independence: an Irish perspective

The intention of this paper is to examine the role of the Franciscans in the Scottish Wars of Independence. Many of the studies relating to this period have been confined to either the political or ecclesiastical arena. They also choose to treat the individual countries of the British Isles in an unconnected fashion. This paper is intended to redress the balance, using the involvement of the Franciscan friars in Ireland and Scotland to study political events on either side of the Irish Sea. By examining the actions of diverse nationalities belonging to a single order I hope to establish why the Franciscans saw fit to involve themselves in either the nativist or royalist causes and to determine it was purely race that dictated their actions when their countrymen went to war.

18th-century Peru

If all modern performance of early music may be regarded as an ‘invention of tradition’, this is particularly true of Son de los Diablos: tonadas afro-hispanas del Perú (Alpha 507, rec 2003), recorded by Diana Baroni and Sapukái. Popular songs collected in the late 18th century by Don Balthasar Jaime Martínez de Compañón, Bishop of Trujillo (on Peru's northern coast), are here refracted through the lens of modern-day Afro-Peruvian music, itself a tradition self-consciously reinvented by Peruvian musicians and intellectuals in the 1950s. It is perhaps precisely because all Afro-Peruvian music has been reconstructed that the musicians on this recording are able to move so seamlessly and convincingly between Compañón's tonadas and the modern songs like No, Valentín (popularized by Susana Baca) with which they are interspersed on this recording. In this respect this disc is both hard to categorize, reflecting and connecting past and present practices, and unusual, in that the older tradition is actually better documented—thanks to the Enlightenment zeal of the Peruvian bishop—than the more recent, which had died out long before its mid-20th-century revival. Approaching it as an ‘early music’ recording, I was somewhat unconvinced by the opening: it has become a cliché to begin programmes with Bocanegra's Hanacpachap, and it is not clear that this Andean hymn dating from 1631 has a place in a recording of late 18th-century (and later) coastal popular music. Such a place is sought by erroneously describing the work as a ‘traditional Indian melody’, when it was probably composed by the Franciscan friar who published it, and certainly has much more in common with Spanish villancicos than Andean songs. But the first bars of the following Tonada El Congo swept away my doubts. This simple song, a mere skeleton on the pages of Compañón's collection, springs to life in the hands of Sapukái, Diana Baroni's sensual voice soaring over the plucked strings and percussion, the interplay between solo and chorus bringing out the African as well as the Hispanic features of the music. The disc never flags from this moment on, unfolding in the diversity of styles and colours so evident in the drawings and song titles of the Peruvian source, yet with the same coherence in overall design. By the late 18th century, after two and a half centuries of cultural mixing, hybrid popular cultures had emerged in Peru, and these are reflected in the dances that Compañón illustrates; similarly, in this recording, Spanish musical influences contrast, overlap and combine with African and indigenous, coastal with Andean. Hispanic harmonic structures, provided by harp and guitar, are fleshed out with the African-derived rhythms of cajón and batá, and highland influences are pronounced in the pentatonic melodies and Andean instrumentation (panpipes, quena, charango) of the cachua, yaraví and the Tonada El Diamante.

The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society

The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society

The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification

The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification

Kozep-Europa harca a torok ellen a 16 szazad elso feleben [The Central Europeans' Struggle with the Turks during the Former Half of the Sixteenth Century] (review)

Reviewed by: Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század első felében [The Central-Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the former half of the sixteenth century] Z. J. Kosztolnyik Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század első felében [The Central-Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the former half of the sixteenth century]. Edited by István Zombori. (Budapest: METEM. 2004. Pp. 219.) When the new Ottoman sultan, Mohammed II (the Conqueror, 1451–1481) occupied Constantinople in 1453, he intended to draw Europe, especially Central Europe, under his sway. Although three years later Christian armies led by the Hungarian Regent, John Hunyadi, and the Franciscan friar, John Capistrano, thoroughly defeated the Turks at Belgrade, European leaders neglected to prepare for a final confrontation with the Turk for several decades, and by 1521, Sultan Suleiman I was able to occupy Belgrade; sensing the weakness of domestic leadership in countries north of the Danube, he invaded Hungary in 1526 and demolished the medieval Hungarian kingdom at Mohács. The Ottomans besieged, but could not conquer Vienna; however, the Magyar capital Buda passed under permanent Turkish rule in 1541, and the major portion of the country remained under Ottoman occupation until the end of the seventeenth century. Consequently, the Turks presented a steady threat to Bohemia, the Austrian territories of Steyermark and Carinthia, and, through their allies with Crimean Tartars, also to Poland. Taking a common military front of resistance toward the Turk would have served the mutual interests of the peoples in Central Europe. The authors of the ten essays collected in this volume emphasize this common interest as they evaluate the sequence of events during the cited time period. Their works are divided in three groups by the editor of the volume. In the first group of essays—"The Turks: a new threat to Central Europe"—Pál Fodor discusses relations between Hungary and the Ottoman empire from 1390 to [End Page 526] 1533, using primary sources—in Turkish and in Magyar—and recent studies. Sándor Papp analyzes the beginnings of Magyar-Turkish contacts from the mid-fourteenth century to 1540. He goes into detail on events in Balkan politics, including the bloody confrontation in 1371 at the Marica stream, where the Christian forces suffered defeat (an engagement, from which even the Hungarian king, Louis the Great, 1342–1382, only miraculously escaped). And yet, the author explained that Ottoman diplomacy treated the Hungarian court with respect and on equal terms until 1526. Ilona Czaman´ska places Polish-Turkish relations in the former half of the 1500's under microscopic examination; in her short but precise study she argues that the Polish court seriously considered confronting the Turks through military means, especially after the nephew of King Sigismund I (of Poland, 1506–1548), the nine-year-old Louis II, ascended to the Hungarian throne in 1516. On the other hand, the Slovak Vladimír Segesš rationalizes in philosophical terms the sometimes logical, sometimes really mindless, background of the wars fought with the Turks as he views those battles from a triangular aspect in terms of time, space, and mobility. The four studies that form the second part of the book deal with the co-ordinated Polish-Habsburg effort to stand up to the Turk. András Kubinyi opens this section with his exemplarily detailed and thoroughly researched study, painting, as you will, a historic fresco of the role played by members of the mighty Magyar aristocracy, how they reacted to the Ottoman threat to their country in the age of Jagiello kings, 1490–1526. Although his piece relies quite heavily on his earlier works published in Hungarian and in German—as, e.g., "Historische Skizze Ungarns in der Jagiellonenzeit," in his König und Volk im spätmittelalterlichen Ungarn (Herne, 1998), pp. 322–368, or, his essay, "Königtum, Stände und Regierungen am Ende des Mittelalters in Ungarn," in his Matthias Corvinus. Die Regierung eines Königreichs in Ostmitteleuropa, 1458–90 (Herne, 1999), pp. 216–237, just as Kubinyi refers to his study [in Hungarian], "The role held by the Church in...

Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Carmel Davis Montford, Angela, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (History of Medicine in Context), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004; cloth; pp. xiv, 302; 20 b/w illustrations; RRP £57.50; ISBN 0754636976. Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries addresses a gap in the study of medieval medicine and, for the most part, acts as a worthy complement to such excellent studies on monastic involvement in the medieval medical sphere as Barbara Harvey's Living and Dying in England 1100-1540: the Monastic Experience (1993). Angela Montford draws on a variety of early Franciscan and Dominican sources but centres her study on the Orders in Bologna, making particular use of '[t]wo account books [which] make up the documents Ms. 238/7573 (1331-43) and 239/7574 (1350-57) [and which] record[ ] some of the receipts and the expenditure of the Dominican convent of S. Domenico, Bologna, in the mid-fourteenth century' (p. 16). [End Page 246] The concentration on mendicant involvement, which Montford handles convincingly in the second part of the book, is downplayed in the early chapters in order 'to remind the reader of the original aims and ethos of the Orders of friars, including their intentions toward the sick, and to demonstrate the nature and extent of their interaction with contemporary urban society' (p. 2). Though this tack provides an overview of the mendicant Orders' attitudes to health and sickness, it succeeds in demonstrating only that which commonsense would suggest to most readers. That is, that there was little to differentiate friars' attitudes from those of the general populous. The point, then, is that, whilst providing a reasonable summary of the subject, these chapters offer no surprises for the specialist scholar. Similarly, a later chapter on the plague, although acknowledging records from account books of the convents of S. Francesco and S. Domenico, is too general to be of real use. The true value of Montford's work is revealed in Chapter Five: 'The Decline of the frater medicus'. Here the author presents an engaging argument that builds on a consideration of the problems that arose when friars interacted with secular patients. Anxiety about conflict between a friar's medical and pastoral duties in the community is shown to have been exacerbated by the rise in university-trained medici and a growing awareness of the harm that could be done by unlicensed practitioners. This resulted in the 'need for fratres physici to have permission [to practice medicine] … from 1273' (p.120). Montford demonstrates that the growing concern over medical friars attending secular patients was, in no small way, associated with the generalized Dominican concern about friars ministering to women. This, of course, says at least as much about sexual attitudes among religious of the time as it does about medical practice but whatever the exact nature of the reasons for the restrictions, Montford establishes an association between the decline in the medical friar and the rise of the secular medical practitioner. The author's argument here, together with the following chapter's focus on 'Secular Medical Practitioners' and their interactions with the friars, provide important insights into the transfer of medical 'power' into the hands of university-trained, secular physicians. In Chapter Nine, Montford's examination of the account books of the apothecary, Diotaiuti de Cecco da Sassoletta, showing his dealings with both the Dominican and Franciscan friars, results in one of the most interesting sections of the whole book. She demonstrates, for example, that the purchased amounts and combinations of particular herbs were related to specific medicinal applications by the friars. Evidence is given for the way in which the friars used such apothecary-purchased [End Page 247] items as resins, sugars, roots, plants, simples and compounds. One of the striking examples of a frequently-purchased compound is manuschristi which included in its constituents, gold and pearls. The most popular surgical procedures performed at both S. Domenico and S. Francesco convents are the subject of Chapter Ten and the details make intriguing reading. Balneotherapy is also examined and Montford notes the distinction...

In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of the Extirpattion of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatán, 1573–1579

“My dear spiritual brothers and fathers, you whose relationship to me is closer than that of my own blood. . . . Even though my present position as Bishop might appear to separate me from you, I swear that it cannot divide me from you, because I have and always will be a son of our Father Saint Francis. . . . Now that I have returned, I come to you not as bishop, but rather as a son of this holy province into whose brotherhood I once again seek to incorporate myself. . . .” —Fray Diego de Landa, October 1573 (Spoken before the Franciscan congregation of friars in Mérida upon his arrival as the second bishop of Yucatán) “And of the idolatries that there were, I say that those who have procured to discover these idolatries and expose them and with great zeal for the honor of God those who look for idolatry and denounce it to the judges so that they can be punished, they are none other than the same religious friars of the order of Saint Francis . . .” —Bishop of Yucatán, Diego Vazquez de Mercado, 1603 On the afternoon of June 15, 1574, the conflict between the Franciscan Order and the local governor of the province of Yucatán intensified. A heated controversy had emerged between the recently appointed bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, and the provincial governor, Francisco Velázquez de Gijón. On that afternoon, the dean of the cathedral of Mérida, Licenciado Cristobal de Miranda, went to the home of the provincial governor with a message from the bishop. The governor had recently received an order of excommunication issued by the bishop for his actions against several Franciscan friars.

In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of the Extirpattion of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatán, 1573–1579

“My dear spiritual brothers and fathers, you whose relationship to me is closer than that of my own blood. . . . Even though my present position as Bishop might appear to separate me from you, I swear that it cannot divide me from you, because I have and always will be a son of our Father Saint Francis. . . . Now that I have returned, I come to you not as bishop, but rather as a son of this holy province into whose brotherhood I once again seek to incorporate myself. . . .” —Fray Diego de Landa, October 1573 (Spoken before the Franciscan congregation of friars in Mérida upon his arrival as the second bishop of Yucatán)“And of the idolatries that there were, I say that those who have procured to discover these idolatries and expose them and with great zeal for the honor of God those who look for idolatry and denounce it to the judges so that they can be punished, they are none other than the same religious friars of the order of Saint Francis . . .” —Bishop of Yucatán, Diego Vazquez de Mercado, 1603On the afternoon of June 15, 1574, the conflict between the Franciscan Order and the local governor of the province of Yucatán intensified. A heated controversy had emerged between the recently appointed bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, and the provincial governor, Francisco Velázquez de Gijón. On that afternoon, the dean of the cathedral of Mérida, Licenciado Cristobal de Miranda, went to the home of the provincial governor with a message from the bishop. The governor had recently received an order of excommunication issued by the bishop for his actions against several Franciscan friars.

Missionaries and Moralization for the Franciscan Province of Santa Elena: The Dilemma of an Exported Reform

The exact date on which the first Franciscan friars arrived in Cuba remains unknown, but it was certainly during an early phase of the conquest. Regardless of the exact moment in which the friars disembarked on the island, it is important to note that it marked the beginning of a long history, a history almost condemned to obscurity and from time to time the object of harsh criticism and impassioned indulgence, and more often recorded through partial constructions than through investigation and reasoning. Perhaps because of the complexity of its peculiarities and/or for certain socio-political determining factors that will not be analyzed at this time, Cuba has been one of the marginalized territories of the American ecclesiastical historiography. Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in ecclesiastical themes has grown incrementally among some scholars who, striving to fill the voids, have opened new lines of research and venture to investigate the older documents of the archive.

Missionaries and Moralization for the Franciscan Province of Santa Elena: The Dilemma of an Exported Reform

The exact date on which the first Franciscan friars arrived in Cuba remains unknown, but it was certainly during an early phase of the conquest. Regardless of the exact moment in which the friars disembarked on the island, it is important to note that it marked the beginning of a long history, a history almost condemned to obscurity and from time to time the object of harsh criticism and impassioned indulgence, and more often recorded through partial constructions than through investigation and reasoning. Perhaps because of the complexity of its peculiarities and/or for certain socio-political determining factors that will not be analyzed at this time, Cuba has been one of the marginalized territories of the American ecclesiastical historiography. Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in ecclesiastical themes has grown incrementally among some scholars who, striving to fill the voids, have opened new lines of research and venture to investigate the older documents of the archive.

Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent (review)

538 BOOK REVIEWS of chaplains resulted in bequests; some chaplains chose to be buried in the Greyfriars, reflecting patterns elsewhere in the English province. The loss of the English province’s once rich libraries and archives during the religious revolution of the sixteenth century generally reduces historians to a reliance on a range of external sources, such as the papal records, the episcopal registers, the probate registers, the wardrobe accounts, chronicles and miscelleaneous sources. Despite these limitations, Dr Röhrkasten has assembled a vast amount of material and is to be warmly commended on his reconstruction of aspects of the friars’ lives, ministry and economy. This monograph teems with many and varied illustrations of the friars’ lives in the capital city. The varied sources are interpreted judiciously and explained with clarity. The study, which is enriched by its awareness of patterns among the different mendicant communities, is to be allocated a place among the best monographs regarding the mendicants and should be ranked alongside Dr Andrew Little’s The Grey Friars in Oxford. St Edmund’s College, Cambridge MICHAEL ROBSON, OFM CONV. Bert Roest. Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent. (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 117) Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004. Pages: XXI + 673. Some scholars have a particular talent to synthesize large amounts of information and provide amazing research tools for others. Bert Roest is among those. In 2000, he published A History of Franciscan Education (c.1210-1517) as the eleventh volume of the series Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2000. Pages: X + 405). Four years later, Bert Roest has given us a volume of some seven hundred pages on the literature of religious instruction in the Franciscan Order from the early thirteenth century to the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It is sufficient to look at the 62 pages of bibliography of secondary sources, the 24 pages of index of authors, and the 27 pages of index of works to note that the documentation covered in this book is quite impressive. BOOK REVIEWS 539 In his own words, the author intends “to present a more comprehensive overview of late medieval and Renaissance texts of religious instruction” (p. XIV), considering that this book comes somewhat as a supplement to his history of Franciscan education, which was intentionally limited to education in the classroom. With the “massive amount of material” (p. XV) presented in his new publication, Bert Roest hopes “to provide scholars with another tool to develop a more sensitive interpretative template for the religious transitions between the medieval and the early modern period” (p. XX). Even though experts may and probably will find lacunas or outdated information in some particular field, one cannot deny that the author has achieved his goal of suscitating new studies by offering historians of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance a new instrumentum laboris. The material of the book is organized in eight chapters. Chapter One (p. 1-119) takes a look at Franciscan preaching, viewed as religious instruction, from the beginning of the Franciscan movement in the thirteenth century to the contributions of the Observants , the Conventuals and the Capuchins. Chapter Two (p. 120-205) examines the rules, rule commentaries, and constitutions (local, provincial and general) of the Franciscan orders : Friars Minor, Poor Clares and Tertiaries. Chapter Three (p. 206-29) studies the development of regulations and treatises for the initial formation of novices. Although this chapter is relatively short, it is worth noting how the Capuchin Order, from its beginnings, dedicated much attention and regulations to the religious instruction of postulants and novices. Chapter Four (p. 230-313) turns to the pastoral ministry of the Franciscan friars, focusing on works of religious instruction par excellence , Franciscan catechisms. It also includes a look at a tradition initiated by Francis of Assisi himself and continued by others: religious poetry – the laude – as religious instruction. Chapter Five (p. 314-55) addresses another part of the Friars’ pastoral ministry and studies the confession handbooks or manuals to help confessors in the practice of their ministry and the repentant sinners in the preparation of their confession. Chapter Six (p. 356-73...

The Narrative Tradition of the Medieval Franciscan Friars On the British Isles. Introduction to the Sources

The Narrative Tradition of the Medieval Franciscan Friars On the British Isles. Introduction to the Sources

The Friars Go to War: Mendicant Military Chaplains, 1216-c. 1300

The mendicant orders, particularly the Franciscans and Dominicans, have received enormous scholarly attention, virtually from their inception in 1210 and 1216, respectively, regarding a wide range of topics, but particularly their activities as preachers, teachers, advisors, and missionaries.1 Somewhat less attention has been paid to the role of the mendicants as confessors, particularly confessors to non-aristocratic or royal lay people.2 This lacuna in scholarship regarding the mendicant orders is particularly evident in the consideration of Franciscan and Dominican friars as military chaplains. This study sheds light on an important yet insufficiently appreciated aspect of mendicant pastoral activity during the first century of the Franciscan and Dominican orders.3 Background Military pastoral care, that is, the religious support provided to soldiers by priests, played an exceptionally important role in the conduct of warfare in both Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, particularly for the maintenance of morale and discipline.4 In the late Roman Empire and its western successor states, pastoral duties largely fell to bishops and a small cadre of priests who celebrated Mass, carried relics, interceded with God on behalf of the army, and preached to the troops.5 By the mid-eighth century, however, new religious practices in the West imposed on military commanders the need to recruit far larger numbers of priests to serve as chaplains in their armies. The old rite of penance, which permitted Christians to confess their sins only once in a lifetime, gradually was superseded by the practice of repeatable confession. This development in church teaching, which can be traced over a three-century period, culminated in the wide acceptance of repeatable confession as an acceptable rite.6 The establishment of this new institutionalized interpretation of confession is marked first in the British Isles and then on the continent during the late seventh and early eighth century by the extensive production and diffusion of penitential manuals, sometimes described by scholars as tariff books. These handbooks for priests, many of which were produced expressly for parish clergy, set out long lists of sins and appropriate penances for each, thereby emphasizing the renewable nature of the rite.7 It was now possible for soldiers to confess their sins before every battle and thereby face the enemy with a clear conscience and a clean soul.8 But this new military pastoral responsibility brought with it the need to recruit far larger numbers of priests to serve in the army than had been the case previously. A bishop and a few priests were sufficient in the armies of the Late Empire and early Middle Ages to celebrate Mass, preach, and even pray. To hear the confessions of thousands, or even tens of thousands of soldiers, however, was far beyond the capabilities of the few clerics attached to the armies of the fourth through the early eighth century. The necessity of recruiting far larger numbers of priests to serve as military chaplains was enunciated clearly in 742 by Carloman, the Carolingian Mayor of the Palace. At a synodal assembly, called the Concilium Germanum by scholars, Carloman, acting in concert with Boniface, the papal legate to the Frankish court, instituted the requirement that every unit commander in the army have on staff a capellanus capable of hearing confessions and assigning penances.9 From this point onward, including up the present, armies in the Christian West have recruited large numbers of priests to serve as military chaplains.10 It is one of the noteworthy aspects of medieval religious history that Carloman's leading role in the establishment of requirements for the provision of pastoral care was recapitulated throughout the early and high Middle Ages by secular rather than ecclesiastical figures. Even in periods of papal strength, the bishops of Rome remained largely silent about the need to provide soldiers with pastoral care, even in the context of the crusades. …

Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History by Amy Hollywood (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 791 Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference,and the Demands ofHistory. By Amy Hollywood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xvi + 320pp. $19. ISBN 0-226-34952-7. In this engaging and original analysis of works by Bataille, Beauvoir, Lacan, and Iri? garay,Amy Hollywood explores the figureof the mystic in writers who?implicitly or otherwise?recognize its association with female empowerment. The text opens with the screams of thirteenth-century mystic Angela of Foligno, experiencing a moment of extreme union with Christ in the church of St Francis in Assisi. Considered at first to be in the throes of demonic possession, she subsequently convinced a Franciscan friar,who transcribed her witness accounts, that she was in intense communication with God and her screams were due to his unwelcome withdrawal. The emotional process at work here, of extreme experience followed by desolation, or what Holly? wood calls 'intensifying spirals of abjection and ecstasy' (p. 12), has appealed to a number of twentieth-century thinkers, who have incorporated their own fascination with emotional, bodily, and excessive forms of mysticism into their philosophical work. In exploring the possibilities mysticism holds for overcoming the boundaries of self and other, for subverting the distinction between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, or body and soul, and for the unusual form of agency and voice it offers to women, mysticism speaks enticingly to a number of modern theoretical preoccupations. Hollywood deftly mines this rich seam of critical thought, producing a series of convincing and lucid analyses of some key French thinkers who work surprisingly well in tandem. The result is a compelling and illuminating text, which offersexciting new perspectives on well-known theorists. There are some genuinely intriguing insights here: for instance, the recognition that psychoanalysis and mys? ticism share a similarly doubled structure?both are founded upon a language and an experience of (divine) presence, but both equally subvert that unity through the positing of an unassimilable remainder, a mystical affect that goes beyond 'the all' (p. 153); or the understanding that witnessing, in Bataille, is profoundly ambiguous, encapsulating the ethical desire to experience the other's suffering,but also the relentless and solipsistic desire forself-shattering ecstasy. The readings ofthe divine in texts by Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir are also masterful, weaving their way through complex intertwinings of mysticism, belief, the body, and sexual difference. In short, this is an excellent volume; continually provocative and consistently accessible, it offersan array of illuminating and refreshingly differentcritiques. St John's College, Cambridge Victoria Best A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions. By Akane Kawakami. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. 166 pp. ?32.95 (pbk 15.95). ISBN 0-85323-526-0 (pbk 0-85323-536-8). The picture of Modiano to emerge from Akane Kawakami's study is of a rather withdrawn figure, a writer who is suspicious and even dismissive of 'high literature' and especially ofthe academic interest itgenerates. Almost as a response to this attitude his own work has yet to receive any lengthy,serious critical attention from the academic establishment in France. Not only is he dismissed by many as a 'popular novelist', but he is seen to be a writer who consciously reworks his themes and situations to produce 'le roman Modiano', ensuring himself high sales and a permanent place in the best-sellers' list (p. 111). Certainly Modiano's presence on the literary scene by the early twenty-firstcentury is undeniable; to date he has produced twenty novels, numerous short stories, filmscenarios, and children's books, and ifan observation by Alain Robbe-Grillet in an Apostrophes programme from a few years back is to be ...

Liturgical Expressions of Episcopal Power: Juan de Palafox y Mendoza and Tridentine Reform in Colonial Mexico

When the Minister of Culture for the State of Puebla, Hector Azar, organized the 350th anniversary festivities for the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in 1996, he included a concert of epigraphs and sonnets set to classical music in the city's cathedral. Employing an ancient form of the Church's liturgical psalmody,1 Azar replaced scriptural psalms with several lines taken from poetry written by the seventeenth-century bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, whose donation of books to the city in 1646 established the first public library in colonial Mexico. With a full accompaniment of string, percussion, woodwind, and brass instruments to provide music for the Salmodia Palafoxiana, Azar and the Coro del Benemerito Institute Normal del Estado transformed a few lines of the bishop's poetry into quasi-liturgy. Perhaps Bishop Palafox would have disapproved of substituting his poetic metaphors for biblical verse, but this probably never crossed the minds of the city's residents and visitors who gathered around the bishop's cenotaph to attend the concert. The first antiphon, however, evokes quite nicely Palafox's liturgical sensibilities: Today the sun of wounded love, the new shepherd comes to be.2 The new shepherd is the resurrected, triumphant Christ who gives light to his flock. And, to the shepherd of Puebla and his seventeenth-century flock, Christ's real presence in the bread and wine was instituted each time a priest celebrated the Mass. Liturgy as a sacramental rite imbued with cultural meaning has escaped the scholarly purview of most historians of colonial Latin America. Deciphering discrete portions of ecclesiastical texts in Latin or italicized scriptural citations located in the margins of ceremonials appears more suited to the canon lawyer or liturgist. Moreover, despite the historical centrality of the Mass, as well as of the seven sacraments, to Catholic culture, historians have examined almost every other dimension of the colonial Catholic experience except liturgy and prayer.3 Perhaps scholars view the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, or Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum4 as officiai prayers of the institutional Church, whose significance remained hidden behind complicated Latin syntax that parishioners (and not a few clergymen too) failed to grasp. Even Bishop Palafox might have agreed in part with this view. Moreover, the mundane features of the Mass, rosary, and other liturgical rites and rituals, with their scripted formulas and responses, seem to demonstrate, on the surface, something less spectacular, less ideological than the extravagant religious and civic processions of Corpus Christi or Holy Week, for example, that so marked urban society in colonial Mexico. Recent contributions to the new cultural history of Mexico provide theoretical and conceptual frameworks that interpret rituals and ceremonies within the context of power relations, popular culture, and resistance.5 Some historians have demonstrated how Spaniards used rituals to help establish their authority and legitimize colonial rule through language and ceremony. Ritual is seen as the medium for rulers to act out the drama of their power, while daily life itself is suffused with ritual performances that reinforce social hierarchies.6 The festival of Corpus Christi in seventeenth-century Mexico City has received some scholarly attention in recent years, and illustrates this turn to cultural history in Mexican studies. Indians and Spaniards, guilds and cofradias (confraternities), parishioners and priests, participated in festivities that expressed political as well as religious sentiment. The principal focus of such studies, however, tends to emphasize procession-as-spectacle and its uses as a tool of hegemonic control and institutional legitimization.7 The centrality of the Blessed Sacrament in Catholic worship and the liturgical dimensions of the procession are less evident. When, in 1692, the celebrations turned riotous, two Franciscan friars hoisted the Blessed Sacrament in the air, presumably in its sacred container, the monstrance, in an effort to calm passions and return tranquility to the city. …

Circulation of Books in the Medieval Franciscan Order: Attitude, Methods, and Critics

One of the significant advantages that the Franciscan friars had over their secular colleagues in the medieval intellectual domain was easy access to books. Not only did the order establish well‐endowed libraries, but also facilitated the circulation of books among the friars who were involved in preaching and studying. The notes on Franciscan manuscripts indicating a loan or a borrower, the library inventories, together with the constitutional evidence reveal some interesting practices in this respect. Although it was the nature of scholastic teaching that necessitated private use, and hence the assignment of books, the practice nevertheless remained unpopular with the faction in the order known as the Spirituals. They saw it as the cause of the multiplication of books, thereby a serious breach in the order's creed of evangelical poverty. The circulation of books nevertheless continued with increasing momentum and was one of the issues responsible for the schism in the order.

Thomas Aquinas and the Early Franciscan School on the Agent Intellect

This paper deals with the differences between the concept of the agent intellect in Thomas Aquinas and in the early Franciscan school with a focus on St. Bonaventure. While according to Aquinas the agent intellect is the faculty of the human soul, in the thought of Alexander of Hales, John of La Rochelle and St. Bonaventure it has a double or even a triple meaning. In the Franciscan Masters the agent intellect is simultaneously considered as a faculty of the human soul but also as God himself and in John of La Rochelle as an angelic intelligence, too. This comparison could be useful in a new interpretation of the Condemnation of 1277 where the proposition on the separate agent intellect is also considered. It seems that the condemnation of this proposition 118 is in accord with the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. What is actually being condemned here is the doctrine, partially held by the Franciscan friars, who are traditionally considered as initiators of the Condemnation.