This book provides, for the first time, an exhaustive discussion of the Franciscan production of texts of religious instruction during the later medieval period (c. 1210-c. 1550). In eight chapters, it introduces the reader to the most important Franciscan sermon cycles, the Franciscan guidelines for living the life of evangelical perfection, the many Franciscan novice training manuals, the Franciscan catechisms and confession manuals, the Franciscan output of liturgical handbooks, the large number of Franciscan texts containing more wide-ranging forms of religious edification, and Franciscan prayer guides. This book provides medievalists and Renaissance scholars alike with a new tool to assess the intellectual and religious transformations between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, and contributes to the current re-interpretation of the late medieval pastoral revolution.

This rich volume by an interdisciplinary group of American and European scholars offers an innovative portrait of the complex formation of clerical and confessional identities within the context of the radically changed religious and political situations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

Providing an in-depth analysis of the virtues of evangelical life according to three major Franciscan authors, this book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the virtues functioned as central, organizing elements in early Franciscan literature and instruction.

This volume deals with the transformative force of Observant reforms during the long fifteenth century, and with the massive literary output by Observant religious, a token of a profound pastoral professionalization that provided religious and lay people alike with encompassing models of religious perfection, as well as with new tools to shape their religious identity. The essays in this work contend that these models and tools had an ongoing effect far into the sixteenth century (on all sides of the emerging confessional divide). At the same time, the controversies surrounding Observant reforms resulted in new sensibilities with regard to religious practices and religious nomenclature, which would fuel many of the early sixteenth-century controversies. Contributors are Michele Camaioni, Anna Campbell, Fabrizio Conti, Anna Dlabačová, Sylvie Duval, Koen Goudriaan, Emily Michelson, Alison More, Bert Roest, Anne Thayer, Johanneke Uphoff, Alessandro Vanoli, Ludovic Viallet, and Martina Wehrli-Johns.

Music in Early Franciscan Thought is an interdisciplinary study exploring the broad relevance of music in Franciscan hagiography, art, theology, philosophy, and preaching between the founding of the Order in 1210 and 1300—a period covering their rapid ascendancy in medieval society as an Order of clerics. The book covers representations of music in visual and literary hagiography, the inspiration of Pope Innocent III, and the formative writings of William of Middleton and David von Augsburg. Later chapters examine the science and practice of music and its relevance to the ministry of preaching through the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and Juan Gil de Zamora.

Franciscans in sixteenth-century New Spain were deeply ambivalent about their mission work. Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first archbishop of Mexico, begged the king to find someone else to do his job so that he could go home. Fray Juan de Ribas, one of the original twelve 'apostles of Mexico' and a founding pillar of the church in New Spain, later fled with eleven other friars into the wilderness to escape the demands of building that church. Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta, having returned from an important preaching tour in New Spain, wrote to his superior that he did not want to enlist again, and that the only way he would return to the mission field was if God dragged him by the hair. This discontent was widespread, grew stronger with time, and carried important consequences for the friars' interactions with indigenous peoples, their Catholic co-laborers, and colonial society at large. This book examines that discontent and seeks to explain why the exhilaration of joining such a 'glorious' enterprise so often gave way to grinding discontent. The core argument is that, despite St. Francis's own longing to do mission work, his followers in New Spain found that effective evangelization in a frontier context was fundamentally incompatible with their core spirituality. Bringing together two streams of historiography that have rarely overlapped - spirituality and missions - this book marks a strong contribution to the history of spirituality in both Latin America and Europe, as well as to the growing fields of transatlantic and world history.

Looks at the life of Francis of Assisi and explores how his heritage influenced the apostolic activities of his followers.