The Grey Friars in Oxford is book by A. G. Little. Little was an English historian, specializing in the Franciscans in medieval England. Excerpt: "The object of this work is to give an account of the outward life of the Franciscans. This might be fairly taken to include the whole activity of the friars with the exception of their contribution to scholastic philosophy; for that clearly forms a subject by itself."
The mendicant Orders had a profound impact on urban society, life and culture from the thirteenth century onwards. Being engaged in extensive and ambitious pastoral activities they depended on outside support for their material existence. Their influence extended into ecclesiastical as well as secular affairs, leading to the creation of a network of connections to different social groups and on occasion even an involvement in politics. The role of the mendicants in a medieval capital has not yet been systematically studied. A first attempt to study a city of this scale is here made for London.
John Bale (1495 - 1563) made a strong impact on the growth of English Protestant self-consciousness in the sixteenth century. He spent twenty years as a Carmelite friar, and then converted to Protestantism in the mid-1530s. Henry VIII's government enlisted Bale to write and produce plays against the Papacy; he had a decisive influence on John Foxe, and Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' (1563); and Bale's drama 'Kynge Johan' was an important link between the medieval mystery plays and the age of Shakespeare. His greatest achievement, however, was his re-telling of English history in light of the Reformation. Bale argued that England had a divine vocation to protect and defend Protestantism against Roman political subversion and non-Biblical religion. Bale's story of England as the Ònew Israel shaped the self-consciousness of the Elizabethan age, and via John Winthrop and New England in 1630 bequeathed a sense of national vocation to America as well.
One of the enduring ironies of medieval history is the fact that a group of Italian lay penitents, begging in sackcloths, led by a man who called himself simple and ignorant, turned in a short time into a very popular and respectable order, featuring cardinals and university professors among its ranks. Within a century of its foundation, the Order of Friars Minor could claim hundreds of permanent houses, schools, and libraries across Europe; indeed, alongside the Dominicans, they attracted the best minds and produced many outstanding scholars who were at the forefront of Western philosophical and religious thought. In The Poor and the Perfect, Neslihan Şenocak provides a grand narrative of this fascinating story in which the quintessential Franciscan virtue of simplicity gradually lost its place to learning, while studying came to be considered an integral part of evangelical perfection. Not surprisingly, turmoil accompanied this rise of learning in Francis's order. Şenocak shows how a constant emphasis on humility was unable to prevent the creation within the Order of a culture that increasingly saw education as a means to acquire prestige and domination. The damage to the diversity and equality among the early Franciscan community proved to be irreparable. But the consequences of this transformation went far beyond the Order: it contributed to a paradigm shift in the relationship between the clergy and the schools and eventually led to the association of learning with sanctity in the medieval world. As Şenocak demonstrates, this episode of Franciscan history is a microhistory of the rise of learning in the West.
Emanating from the tradition of the Italian hermit communities the Franciscans developed organisational structures already early in their history, allowing them to offer pastoral care on a wide scale. This process of transition led firstly to constitutional structures as defined in the order's early legislation but it also occurred within relationship networks at different levels, in the context of Church and papacy, within the different European regions and before the background of the emerging Canon Law. The term "organisation" has been given a wide definition in the articles published in this volume. They offer a survey of general issues related to the structuring and running of religious orders as well as a number of case studies. Comparisons with other mendicant orders offer an analysis of the issues in a wider context.
