This article offers the first Romanian translation of two satirical po-ems by the thirteenth-century trouvère Rutebeuf – Renart le bestourné and Sur Brichemer – together with a philological commen-tary. Composed in the aftermath of Rutebeuf’s siding with the Paris theologian Guillaume de Saint-Amour against the mendicant orders (1259–1261), the texts record the poet’s exclusion from the pat-ronage of Louis IX, whose austerity policy, encouraged by mendi-cant advisers, temporarily closed the “palace of poets” and suspend-ed public performances. Renart le bestourné mobilizes the widely known fox Renart, already a cultural commonplace, as an animal mask through which the poet castigates the king’s poorly chosen counsellors, the manipulation of royal authority and, by extension, any ruler who allows himself to be misled. Sur Brichemer, probably written around 1270, turns to another figure of the Roman de Re-nart to expose the dwindling of courtly largesse and the economy of unfulfilled promises. The study revisits the explanations advanced by Jean Dufournet, Michel Zink, Sylvie Lefèvre, Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin concerning Rutebeuf’s recourse to renardian material and ar-gues that the poet deliberately reuses a collectively owned character to universalize his social critique and to depict the intelligent writer confronted with unfavourable times. The Romanian translation fol-lows Lefèvre’s modern French version, preserves medieval proper names, updates punctuation and adds clarifying notes for thirteenth-century historical and linguistic references. In doing so, the article highlights a medieval matrix –that of the “unhappy genius” deprived of patrons – which will acquire a long afterlife in literary history.

In this paper the relations between the regular Latin clergy and the laity of Famagusta during the fourteenth century will be examined by making use of notarial deeds drawn up by Western notaries resident and working in Famagusta. The deeds in question are wills composed by Western merchants, mainly Genoese and Venetians, resident in Famagusta who left bequests to the mendicant and monastic orders of the regular Latin clergy in Famagusta and to a lesser extent in Nicosia. From an examination of these wills one can see the popularity of the religious and especially the mendicant orders, although certain questions also arise. One outstanding question is why, given the extant evidence, the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans in particular, were far more popular as beneficiaries in such wills than their monastic counterparts. In attempting to answer this question the popularity of Latin mendicant orders in the eastern Mediterranean will be discussed in a wider context, especially their relations with the Latin lay population, even though in theory their mission was to convert non-Latin Christians to Latin Christianity.

Men of God: Mendicant Orders in Colonial Mexico by Asunción Lavrin (review)

Book Review: Path to Salvation: Temporal and Spiritual Journeys by the Mendicant Orders, c.1370–1740

In summary, this literature review has offered a comprehensive exploration of the origins and evolution of medieval religious orders. We've traced the pioneering efforts of figures such as the Desert Fathers and Irish monks, who embarked on radical ascetic experiments. From these early efforts, coenobitic rules emerged, providing structured frameworks for religious life. Notably, the Rule of Benedict played a pivotal role in balancing prayer, labor, study, and moderation. The advent of mendicant orders marked a revival of religious fervor through their commitment to poverty, mobility, and dynamic preaching. The rapid expansion of religious orders was made possible by elite patronage, facilitating their spread across Europe. These orders left indelible marks on education, politics, and culture, shaping medieval life. Religious figures assumed prominent roles as counselors to rulers, influential doctrinal shapers, and builders of educational institutions. By synthesizing scholarship, this review illuminates the multifaceted journey of medieval religious orders, from their humble beginnings to their profound impact on European civilization. It underscores their significance and lays the groundwork for further research on their enduring roles.

After the severe suppression of the uprising in Madrid by the French and the abdication of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne in May 1808 a long military conflict began, which in Spanish historiography was called the War of Spanish Independence. The Catholic Church played a significant role in mobilizing the Spanish population in the face of the French invasion. Most of the clergy and monks became those representatives of the educated strata of the country’s population who did not support the plans of Napoleon and his protege, Jose I, to secularize and reform Spanish society in accordance with French ideals. Priests spoke from the pulpits of churches and cathedrals with addresses and sermons calling for a fight against the «Antichrist» Napoleon and his army, and abbots of monasteries inspired monks and novitiates to fight against the invaders with weapons in hand. Moreover, the clergy managed to justify the direct participation of the clergy in such a «crusade» against Napoleon's army, which led to the formation of «crusaders-guerrilleros», which participated in the guerrilla war against the French army on an equal basis with other Spanish guerrilleros. Representatives of monastic orders, Capuchins, Carmelites and Franciscans, who suffered most from the religious reforms of Jose I, which implied, in particular, the liquidation of monasteries and monastic and mendicant orders on the territory of the Iberian Peninsula, were especially actively involved in the Spanish guerrilla war. It was the church that became an element of unity for the Spanish population in the face of the French invasion, providing the rebels with an ideological justification for their mission to liberate Spain.

Painted polyptych altarpieces appeared on high altars in late Duecento in the churches of mendicant orders. They were characterized by a special manner of organizing visual material by juxtaposing single half-figures with each other and arranging them in rows and columns, allowing no room for narrative elements, widely used at that time in panel painting. Such narrative-free character of main altarpieces would be preserved throughout the whole period of their popularity. However, polyptychs created in late Trecento integrated narrative scenes and even entire cycles into the structure of the altarpieces, which required new approaches to composition and to the use of pictorial space. The article examines the role of narrative content in altarpieces of late Trecento and discusses the origins and development of this new style.

The series of the life of San Francisco de Asís in Santiago de Chile was requested to Cuzco in the seventeenth century, to the workshops of Basilio de Santa Cruz and Diego Quispe Tito. It has a counterpart in the city of Cusco (40 canvases) and is developed in the style of the baroque school. The Franciscan Bishop Fray Diego Humanzoro makes the order. We will analyze the first painting of the series (1/53) entitled The prophecy. Francisco appears with wings, already showing the stigmata, as if he were an angel, the spiritual heritage, which arises from the millenarian movement whose advocate is the Abbot Joaquin de Fiore, who will prophesy a new apostolic era, he era of the Holy Spirit, which would completely transform the Church with the advent of two mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. From the first would emerge Il poverello di Assisi.

In the history of the Catholic Church, various ways of implementing the consecrated life and its specific type in religious life have been revealed. To this day, there are monastic orders, cloistered orders, canons regular, hospitaller orders, mendicant orders, and congregations performing works of mercy. The author briefly presents the history of the evolution of these orders, from antiquity to the present day. The article shows how they have changed throughout history and how they undertake contemporary tasks in a new way. The nature of religious life is still the same, but, depending on the circumstances, it constantly takes new forms to implement the ideal of imitating Christ by pursuing the evangelical counsels in the present times.

Geometry of the Mexican mendicant temples and its relationship with the damage caused by the earthquake of September 19, 2017

Renate Wagner-Rieger had a keen eye for architectural typology, which in the case of the churches of the mendicant orders made her sensitive to the adoption of Cistercian models and simple building types of older and smaller religious communities. She also recognised the Franciscan three-chapel hall in rudimentary form, although without grasping its innovative significance, and she made an interesting distinction between representational and functional types in the mendicant orders, although it remains open whether this is due more to the 19th century’s understanding of style than to medieval perceptions.

Reviewed by: Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration by Bronagh Ann McShane James E. Kelly Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration. By Bronagh Ann McShane. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2022. Pp. xv, 324. $115.00. ISBN: 9781783277308.) Long considered nearly impossible due to the disparate nature of the sources, Bronagh Ann McShane has produced the first overarching study of Irish women associated with religious orders in the early modern period. Gathering evidence from mentions scattered throughout a range of materials, McShane successfully traces various forms of Irish female religious commitment from the dissolution of religious houses in the 1530s and 1540s to the end of the seventeenth century, including both those at home and in mainland Europe. Her opening two chapters consider the suppression and survival of female religious life during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries. McShane judges the reformation in Ireland to have been far less systematic than that in England, though, unlike their male equivalents, it did manage to crush institutional expressions of female religious life. Having to rely on some conjecture to draw conclusions about what happened to the women after their convents were dissolved, McShane uncovers evidence of different types of religious life being adopted, including as tertiaries affiliated to male mendicant orders, and the short-lived but pioneering Catholic Reformation experiment that was the Mná Bochta (Poor Women), who worked alongside the small Jesuit mission in an active apostolate. Fairly heavy on detailed financial records and Irish family history, these two chapters are followed by a shift in focus to look at migration, and those women who went abroad to pursue their vocations. Really hitting her stride, McShane tracks several Irish women who made the journey to mainland Europe. Some entered local convents, though a number headed to English houses established in exile, especially the Poor Clares at Gravelines. Nevertheless, a Dominican convent was [End Page 405] founded for the Irish nation at Lisbon. Intriguingly, it seems to have been markedly different from the exile English convents; both enjoyed local support, though the Irish Dominican convent appears to have been wealthier than the majority of English ones, and was a popular destination for Portuguese nun recruits as much as it was for Irish women. The final section examines the return of professed female religious life to Ireland. The slightly more tolerant 1630s witnessed a cautious return, which flourished under the Catholic confederacy of the 1640s before being crushed during the Cromwellian wars. Following the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, McShane outlines attempts at again fostering female religious life in the country that reached greater heights under the Catholic toleration that followed the accession of James II. However, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite wars halted official advancement, McShane judging, though, that it was nowhere near as traumatic as the Cromwellian period, and female religious life continued in Ireland into the eighteenth century. Tracing down these stories across a variety of sources is an impressive achievement that should not be underestimated. At times, the book's shifting focus affects its wider definitive positioning, whether to go all out for Irish national history, the history of the Catholic Reformation, or gender history. There is also a question at the book's heart: as McShane acknowledges, the formation of Irish women religious in exile English convents was "pivotal" (p. 249); yet the question of why there was not an equivalent exile movement for Irish women religious is not answered. With far greater numbers of Catholic women in Ireland, why was it that the English conventual movement was so much bigger? That this book raises such a question is testament to McShane's convincing achievement. Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700, fills an obvious gap in the scholarship and, proving that it can be done, should encourage others to work on early modern Irish women religious. James E. Kelly Durham University James E. Kelly Durham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

The paper examines the complex, multifaceted role that the settlement of Tana played for the Venetian and Genoese Republics, Byzantium, the Golden Horde, the Russian principalities, the Mendicant Orders, and long-distance trade in the Late Middle Ages. The author discusses some of the essential problems in the history of Tana, such as the relations between Venetian and Genoese settlers, between Venetian Tana and Genoese Caffa, and between the Western inhabitants of Tana and various groups of local population (Muslims, Greeks, Jews, Zich, and Circassians). It concludes that while the Venetians and the Genoese in Tana treated each other with a combination of rivalry and mistrust, they cooperated in trade to their mutual benefit and were usually able to form a united front in response to an external threat. In general, there was an intense confrontation between Venetian Tana and Genoese Caffa, but this does not seem to be the case between the Venetians and the Genoese within Tana. Other controversial issues raised in the paper include the so-called double suzerainty of the Italian settlements in Tana, the discrepancy between their economic and strategic significance and the size of the site, and the dating of the capture of Tana by the Ottomans.

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland by Crawford Gribben Kevin Hargaden (bio) Crawford Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 352 pages. 'The dominance of Christianity in Ireland was never complete and has never been uncontested' (p. 2). So begins Crawford Gribben's superb account of the history of the Irish Church. Over the course of five immensely readable chapters, Gribben takes the reader across 1600 years and demonstrates that the rise of the Church was never as stratospheric as is popularly held, both within and without the Church, and he offers solid ground to place its precipitous fall in context. This is an excellent book, which will be of value to those interested in history, Christianity, or Irish culture. In the opening chapter, Gribben tells a story familiar in rough outline to many – the conversion of Ireland in the fifth century – but with much finer detail than many of us have to hand. Patrick and Palladius, the two main figures in that early stage of conversion, are explored at length. In his introduction and then continuing in this chapter, Gribben elegantly outruns popular theories about the pre-Christian religion of the Celts. What we do know for certain is limited, but this evidence does not match the widely accepted narrative that Christianity came with a persecuting zeal against the pagan beliefs that were prevalent on the island. The conversion process advanced by assimilation rather than annihilation. 'Christians co-opted traditional legends', 'sanctified festivals' and even turned some Celtic deities 'into saints' (pp. 35–36). He also disposes of the idea that can be found in some contemporary spirituality traditions that the Irish Church understood itself as an alternative to the centralised Roman orthodoxy. In the seventh century, Columbanus could write, to Pope Boniface, that the Irish Church were disciples of Peter and Paul who 'accept nothing outside the evangelical and apostolic teaching' (p. 56). The mission appeared complete: 'Christianity had converted the Irish' suggests Gribben, 'But Christianity might also have created the Irish' (p. 56). In chapter two, Gribben charts how a religious insurgency matured into the most stable institution on the island. A noteworthy strength of the book is how Gribben demonstrates that while Ireland is definitionally peripheral from the European continent, it was never isolated (p. 16). In one fascinating aside he mentions how the partial skeleton of a barbary ape was discovered [End Page 454] at the Emain Macha site in Armagh, dating from a century before Christ (p. 24). If nothing else, this suggests that Irish people were embedded within a wider consciousness long before they joined the European Economic Area and became poster-children for economic globalization! That outward-looking stance was embraced by the Irish missionaries who moved from their local monastic strongholds into Britain and then deep into the continent. The arrival of Scandinavian pirates we now know as Vikings drew 'Ireland into extensive international networks' and, in time, 'together in the structures of a common faith' (p.69). Through Gregorian reform, the arrival of the Normans, the rise of the mendicant orders and the tumult that followed the partial solidification of English rule in Ireland, the Church stayed strong. As Churches across Europe were about to become engines of acrimony with the Reformation, in Ireland it 'existed as a genuinely incorporating body' for the different communities that shared the island (pp. 86–87). The book is about the rise and fall of Christian Ireland, not Catholic Ireland. And chapter three is a fascinating account of how we came to have our three historic Christian identities: Protestant and Dissenter along with Catholic. More is said about why the Reformation never truly took hold in Ireland, but Gribben's suggestion that a key factor was the commitment of the 'Old English families in the Pale' to stay faithful to Rome is compelling (p. 91). A striking insight in this chapter – at least to this reviewer who is a leader in a Presbyterian congregation marked by its busyness – is how dreadfully lax the early Irish Protestants were. 'The small number of committedly Protestant clergy were sometimes left with nothing to do' (p. 99). As haphazard...

Review: <i>Richard Krautheimer in Deutschland: Aus den Anfängen einer wissenschaftlichen Karriere 1925–1933</i>

In 2000, Elizabeth Hill Boone published Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of Aztecs and Mixtecs. This earlier work organized, categorized, and explained a subset of pictorial documents—specifically, histories—produced by the Nahuas and Mixtecs of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. In 2007, her Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate did the same for pictorial divinatory texts. And now Descendants of Aztec Pictography does a similar service for a third pictorial genre, what Boone has called “cultural encyclopedias.” Together, Boone's three works constitute their own kind of encyclopedia of Mexican manuscript painting by one of the field's foremost scholars.For Boone, the painted manuscripts examined here form their own special category. These documents are in many ways similar to those examined in her previous two volumes—and, indeed, some of these cultural encyclopedias received attention in her earlier work—but their content and function make them different enough to warrant their own stand-alone volume. The defining feature of these manuscripts is that they all organize information about the pre-Hispanic past into cultural categories and present it in such a way as to explain it to an outsider. The audience for all these documents was a non-Indigenous, culturally European one: either an audience in Europe or creoles in Mexico.The nine pictorial manuscripts that constitute this corpus of cultural encyclopedias range in date of composition from the early to the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, Indigenous painting had been substantially transformed, and pictorial elements were increasingly secondary to and dependent on alphabetic elements within many documents. Some of the manuscripts examined here—particularly the work overseen by friars Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán—reflect these late sixteenth-century changes. But the majority of the book is focused on early and mid-sixteenth-century manuscripts in which the paintings dominate the discourse and the alphabetic elements are dependent on and supplementary to the images.The initial chapters of this volume describe the sixteenth-century Mexican environment in which these encyclopedias were produced. They include discussions of the various graphic systems in use in Mexico in this period, the encyclopedic tradition from Europe, and the evangelization project of the mendicant orders as well as its interest in understanding pre-Hispanic Indigenous cultures. The remaining chapters examine the corpus of pictorial encyclopedias, moving chronologically. Many of these documents, particularly the late sixteenth-century work of Sahagún and Durán, will be broadly familiar to historians, though the pictorial elements of these works may not be. Others of the corpus—the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Ríos, or the Codex Tudela, for instance—are perhaps familiar but not as consistently addressed in the secondary literature. Part of the problem for historians is that these manuscripts often describe unfamiliar pre-Hispanic cultural phenomena. Another issue faced by historians is reading the often-stylized pictorial system employed to deliver the content and narrative. Boone solves both of these problems for those of us interested in the pre-Hispanic and colonial Nahuas but uncomfortable with the nonalphabetic portions of these manuscripts.This work is, as Boone describes it, a “synthetic analysis” of cultural encyclopedias, and much of the work is therefore dedicated to providing a reading of these manuscripts based on the latest research by a host of scholars (p. xiv). Boone's capacious knowledge of the texts themselves and the secondary literature on those texts is on full display here and allows her to craft a sort of guidebook to the pictorial encyclopedia genre. Her contribution with this book, then, is not a novel reading of a particular manuscript—though she does offer her own arguments and critiques of others' interpretations in many places—but rather the work that she has done to categorize, systematize, and organize these documents. Indeed, her typology of Mexican manuscript painting, of which this volume is but the latest installment, is what makes her work so foundational to the study of Nahua culture and history. The University of Texas Press is to be commended for its decision to print every page on coated paper, which allows all of Boone's many wonderful images of the cultural encyclopedias to be rendered in full color.This work, taken with her two previously published books, is an invitation to ethnohistorians to incorporate the amazing corpus of pictorial manuscripts more fully into historical and anthropological scholarship on the pre-Hispanic and colonial Nahuas. It is also an opportunity to do it in a sophisticated way that acknowledges the goals and biases of the author-painters and that allows for a nuanced reading of their work. But Boone's text is also accessible to the nonspecialist, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students will enjoy her introductions to these often-difficult sources as well.

Abstract In Richard Krautheimer in Deutschland, Ingo Herklotz explores the beginnings of Krautheimer’s academic career. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, he argues that Krautheimer’s groundbreaking essays “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture” and “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture’” reach back to his early days in Weimar Germany. Herklotz also contends that the young scholar’s early writings show a one-sided orientation toward methodological concepts of an autonomous history of style and a striving for a “German national identity”. However, neither contention seems plausible. As can be demonstrated, Krautheimer had already taken a vigorously European view on medieval architecture in his dissertation on the architecture of the mendicant orders in Germany and in his book on synagogues, and indeed realised the potential of cultural-historical context analyses early on.

Abstract This article explores the scientific travels of French members of mendicant orders in the early modern Atlantic World. The Royal Cosmographer André Thevet, the Capuchin Claude D’Abbeville and the Minim Charles Plumier demonstrate a coherent but evolving Franciscan perspective in missionary scientific observation on the colonial frontier. It argues that the Franciscan monastic tradition, the Franciscan reform movement, and the teachings of the Minim order interacted with the colonial landscape and encounters with local environments and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic and Caribbean to produce a unique tradition of natural knowledge production. This tradition culminates in the convergence of the Minim worldview with the cartographic and observational program of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the Atlantic voyages of the French Minim friar and scientific traveler Louis Feuillée at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Reviewed by: The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift Giving and Diplomacy by Michael Laver Reinier Hesselink (bio) The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift Giving and Diplomacy. By Michael Laver. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xii, 171 pages. $115.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $103.50, E-book. Having made the case, implicitly as well as explicitly, for the importance of the Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands) for the study of early modern Japan,1 I am always happy to see a new book on the Dutch in Japan, especially one that draws upon this archive and the research it has generated over the last century and a half. The Dutch, of course, were not the only Europeans to have left records that help us reconstruct certain aspects of Japanese history. The Jesuit and mendicant orders also produced an impressive number of letters in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin between the 1550s and 1630s. The letters and diaries of the members of the English factory in Hirado between 1613 and 1622 contain much valuable material on daily life in Japan as well. The importance of both these types of sources, however, pales in comparison to the volume and duration (spanning three centuries) of the letters, diaries, account books, statistics, order lists, trade analyses, etc. produced by the Dutch. What is more, these Dutch sources cover all of Asia, in the Roman sense of the word, that is, everything east of what is now Turkey. Thus, these sources allow for broad contextualization, and they often offer unexpected glimpses behind the scenes that various native record keepers would have been eager to leave unknown. Michael Laver's topic is gift giving and how it relates to the diplomacy of the Dutch in Japan. Gifts were employed on all levels of the interaction between the Dutch and their Japanese minders. In fact, Laver writes that "the entire VOC presence in Japan was an elaborate pageant meant to demonstrate Dutch submission to the authorities in Edo, and, by extension, shogunal authority in Nagasaki" (p. 35). Gifts, in other words, were the physical evidence that was continuously needed to cement the submission and continue the Dutch trade. In this account of Dutch gift giving, however, we never learn what happened to these gifts once they had been received, as the book pays no attention to how gifts appear in Japanese sources.2 Regrettably, we also do [End Page 183] not learn the details of who received what and how much. Because all gifts presented in Edo and Nagasaki were carefully calibrated as to their quantity and quality by the Japanese interpreters (people much maligned by the Dutch merchants themselves), a study concentrating on these gifts should be able to teach us much about the details of the Tokugawa hierarchy. This is not a study, however, that gives a clear analysis of the minutiae of Dutch gift giving in Japan. We are left with the author's eclectic and sometimes humorous selections of Dutch gifts divided into categories of exotic animals, works of art and craftsmanship, scientific paraphernalia, and food and drink, which correspond to his chapters 2 through 5 and in which examples from some 250 years of gift giving are knitted together. Naturally, the book's contribution to the history of the Dutch in Japan between (roughly) 1600 and 1850 will have to be judged against its use of the primary sources available in the Nationaal Archief. It is here, however, that this reviewer has found himself disappointed. The author states that this archive has been "the major archival source" for his book, but he ends the same paragraph by noting that "most of the sources for this book come from the edited versions of these archives" (p. 153), referring to excerpts made for the volumes of The Deshima Daghregisters, published in Leiden by the Institute for the History of European Expansion. Using these translations (made by people exclusively trained in Dutch paleography), however, is a recipe for disaster for those who want to use them to write Japanese history. A few instances will illustrate the problematic use of primary sources in Laver's book. Throughout the...

This work aims at publication of parchment diploma created by the chancellery of Galician Province of the Franciscan-Observant (known as Bernardines diploma is kept in the fonds of Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientifi c Library in Lviv. Scientifi c novelty. The is to introduce little-known historical source, that give us an opportunity to study the writing culture of catholic monks on Ukrainian lands. The methodology of the research is based on general scientifi c methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as principles of historism and objectivity. The methods of the archeography and sigillography are used for the publication of the supplements. The description of the document includes several elements: date and place of creation; size of the document sheet; original signatures of exponents; description of the seal (shape, material, size, legend, image). From the perspective of further studies, it is necessary to engage archival search and fi nd another diploma and similar documents created by the chancellery of Bernardine Galician Province. It gives us an opportunity to provide a comparative study of diploma and study the changes in writing culture of Bernadines in the 19 century. Conclusions. Political changes that took place after the fi rst partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 afterwards made changes in the borders of different church structures. Galician Province was created instead of Rus' Province of Bernardines. Moreover, changes took place in the economic life of the monasteries due to the new law. But in the time of Austrian rule monks used their old traditions to preserve their fi nancial goods. Parchment diploma, analyzed in the article, is dedicated to this theme. Diploma tells us about an old practice to settle monastic estates under the care of a lay person. Monks should use the services of syndyсs, as monks from the mendicant orders weren't allowed to possess property.