Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

344 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

the inﬂuences of the Mediterranean. On the whole they fared better with their

non-Jewish neighbors than did the Ashkenazim, but it would be a mistake to

picture them enjoying lives of tolerated ease. The Jewish quarters of southern cities

were usually less segregated than their northern counterparts; they existed more

often as zones of legal jurisdiction than as walled-off and gated enclosures. Jews

moved freely through the south—though seldom alone if they could manage it,

for safety’s sake—and non-Jews passed through and did business in Jewish calls

(as many of these districts were named). Many local governments passed laws

restricting or even forbidding Christian interactions with Jews, as did the local

churches, but people ignored these strictures whenever it pleased them: Christians

and Jews frequently entered into business partnerships, consulted each others’

physicians and jurists, played together as children, shopped in each others’ mar-

kets, and studied each others’ writings. Indeed one of the chief hallmarks of Se-

phardic cultural life was its awareness of and interest in the intellectual and artistic

developments taking place throughout the Mediterranean. The Sephardim excelled

in lyric poetry, music, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy.

The greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, Moses ben Maimon (1135–

1204, known in the west as Maimonides), came from an eminent family of scholars,

rabbis, and judges in Seville, but he had to ﬂee central Spain after the arrival of

the ’Almohads. He traveled throughout the Mediterranean before ﬁnally settling

in Cairo and setting to work on his extraordinarily voluminous writings, which

range from biblical exegesis to legal study, science, medicine, and philosophy, all

of which betray his familiarity with developments in the Christian and Islamic

schools of the time. His Letter to Yemen, written in 1172, includes a brief biograph-

ical introduction.

I am a simple scholar from Spain whose former high station has been brought

low by exile. For even though I have always dedicated myself to studying the

commandments of the Lord I have failed to attain the great learning possessed

by my ancestors. Evil times and suffering have overtaken my family and we

have not been able to live in peace. We have had much labor but little rest—

and how could I study the Torah when I was constantly being expelled from

city after city and country after country? Nevertheless I tried to follow in the

paths of those who have reaped before me, picking up whatever grains of

learning I could, whether ripe and plump or withered and decayed. Only now

I have found a place of refuge.

From that refuge Maimonides produced a dazzling amount of scholarship, the

most signiﬁcant being the Mishneh Torah (a vast compilation of Jewish law with

commentary), the Guide for the Perplexed (an analysis of the relationship between

reason and faith, focusing especially upon the contrast between the God of the

Hebrew Scriptures and the understanding of the divine power as known to the

pagan Greeks), and the Book of Commandments (his effort to enumerate the tradi-

tional 613 commandments given to mankind by the Lord). Maimonides wrote

almost all his works in Arabic (only the Mishneh Torah was composed in Hebrew,

among his major works), and his use of Arabic reﬂects the Sephardic openness to

non-Jewish culture—after all, he had learned most of his philosophy by reading

the works of the Greeks as prepared by their Arabic commentators—and the gen-

eral preeminence of Arabic philosophy and science prior to the establishment of

the Latin universities.

To sum up the character of medieval cities, they were boisterous places indeed,

with all the admirable and regrettable qualities that spring from boisterousness.

DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 345

Despite their shortcomings, cities remained popular places; as the Middle Ages

progressed, the migration of country dwellers consistently picked up pace. Cities

offered higher degrees of legal and social freedom, a chance to learn a trade and

make money, a means to an education, and a vibrant religious and cultural life.

Their popular appeal was, if anything, too great for their own good, since the

mass movement of people into cities inadvertently created some of the conditions

that would make the catastrophes of the fourteenth century possible.

UESTION OF

ITERACY

The question of popular literacy in the Middle Ages is a difﬁcult one to answer

since there is no clear way of studying it. The mere existence of written materials

from any time period, even the vastly increased existence of them hardly proves

anything.

What does it mean to be literate, anyway? Is a society a literate one if

it can read, but doesn’t? These questions become even more difﬁcult when we turn

to the past. Medieval people are frequently described in legal documents as being

either literatus or illiteratus, and sciens or idiota (meaning “literate,” “illiterate,”

“knowledgeable,” and “uneducated,” respectively)—but it is unclear whether

these terms refer to the ability to read, the ability to read and write, the ability to

read and/or write in Latin as well as the vernacular, or the ability to read and/or

write in only the vernacular. Sometimes the documents appear to describe the ability

to speak Latin without suggesting anything at all about the ability to read it or

write it. At other times the terms appear to describe the extent of a person’s formal

education—whether or not someone has attended a university or not, or has com-

pleted a degree or not—rather than the person’s capabilities vis-a`-vis a written

page of text. For all these reasons, medieval literacy remains a particularly difﬁcult

issue to study.

The best answer to the question of how widespread literacy was, is probably

“Further than most people think prior to studying the Middle Ages, and less than

most people think after studying them for a while.” Certainly in the early medieval

centuries—that is, in the era of the pre-Carolingian Germanic kingdoms—the abil-

ity to read was seldom to be found; hardly anyone who was not a monk could

read—and few enough of the monks could. The Carolingian Renaissance marked

an important turning point, but less in terms of the number of literate people than

in the simple standardization of monastic curricula, the preservation and circula-

tion of texts, and the regularization of orthography. These developments provided

a ﬁrm basis for later advances in literacy. Most peasants continued to be illiterate

until the thirteenth century, and to have a shaky speaking knowledge of Latin.

They of course spoke their vernaculars in day-to-day living, and probably knew

only enough Latin to follow what the priest was saying during the Mass and to

recite their prayers and creeds (the priests’ sermons were invariably delivered in

the vernacular). The rise of peasant freeholding in the twelfth century probably

did the most to extend peasant literacy; since their freedom depended on written

privileges and deeds, it was very much in their interest to be able to know what

the documents said. But this was a very limited reading ability. Chances are that

no more than a handful of peasants in any given rural village could read. Peasants

15. In the United States today, for example, books are available in enormous quantities in libraries and

bookstores everywhere, yet only 2 percent of all adult Americans read books with any degree of regu-

larity; moreover, one-third of the children in the United States are raised in homes that do not have

books, and video stores outnumber bookstores and public libraries by quite a high degree.

346 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

certainly understood the signiﬁcance of written texts and recognized their author-

itative value, but the actual ability to read them probably eluded most rural folks

until well into the thirteenth century.

The cities were a different matter. Conducting most business, and certainly

anything involved with long-distance trade and credit, was virtually impossible

without knowing how to read and write. The rise of urban schools, and the great

number of itinerant scholars who hired themselves out as tutors, gives clear evi-

dence of increased literacy. Giovanni Villani, the chronicler of fourteenth-century

Florence, proudly notes that his city has six municipally run schools that excel in

teaching reading and basic mathematics and that they have an average of eight to

ten thousand students enrolled in them annually. Merchant guilds frequently stip-

ulated that a school diploma and a proven capacity to read, write, and perform

mathematical calculations in Latin were prerequisites for membership. Merchants,

ﬁnanciers, and city councilmen in northern cities like Hamburg and Munich fre-

quently established scholarships for local youths to ensure their university edu-

cation. By the thirteenth century, it seems safe to suggest that at least ten percent

of the adult urban populace throughout Europe could read and write well, and

could do so in both Latin and the vernacular, and that another ten percent could

probably read and write at a very basic level. But some parts of Europe had better-

educated populations than others. England and the Crown of Aragon seem to have

had the highest literacy levels among large states in absolute numbers, although

smaller polities like Venice and Bruges probably surpassed them proportionally.

Roughly half of all German city councilors had some degree of university edu-

cation by the early fourteenth century, yet it was not uncommon to ﬁnd urban

councils and courts in which the only literate magistrate was the scribe who wrote

up the council’s actions. Records have been found from thirteenth-century Sicily,

for example, in which court proceedings were dated to the wrong year, under the

reign of the wrong king, under the auspices of illiterate judges, performed by

idiotae lawyers, and attested to by witnesses who could not sign their names to

the settlements they were witnessing—all in the same document. Among women,

few at the artisanal level knew how to read beyond an elementary level, but the

wives and daughters of merchants were often very well educated in areas like

literature and music, and were comfortable reading in either Latin or their ver-

nacular tongue. Some schooling in letters was available for women who could

afford it at abbey schools run by Poor Clares, the female wing of the Franciscan

Order, at some beguinages, and in some hospices (most notably those run by

Cathar heretics in areas around Toulouse). Medieval universities, of course, were

all-male enclaves that excluded women from higher learning.

At the twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval zenith, in other words, Latin

Europe was decidedly a text-based society, one in which the written word became

authoritative, and it was well on its way to becoming a truly literate society as

well. If not everyone knew how to read, most at least valued the ability and envied

those who had it.

IVES OF THE

-S

-R

ICH AND THE

-S

-F

AMOUS

But everyone knew about sex. The Church talked about it incessantly; poets sang

about it; physicians wrote about it and prescribed all manner of ways to do it.

DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 347

Prostitutes made it available in every city, town, and village. And anyone who has

ever spent time working on a farm knows that sex is everywhere every day.

Medieval people were less prudish about sex than we moderns usually think.

It is true that the Church tried hard to promote chastity as the ideal that all Chris-

tians should strive for, whether they were married or not, and that it fulminated

loudly and often against the sins of the ﬂesh. Legal systems and social codes also

strove to control sexual behavior—less so, perhaps, for moral reasons than for

practical ones such as concerns over inheritances, property interests, household

organization, social status, and public health, all of which were affected by peo-

ples’ sexual activity. The dominant, normative ideas about sex and sexuality came

of course from the Church. From the time of the Church Fathers on, the dangers

of sex were a consistent theme of Sunday sermons, Church decrees, and theological

treatises.

But there is an irony in this, since Jesus himself said very little about

sex, or at least the writers of the Gospels felt that his teachings on sex were not

of sufﬁcient import to write down in great number. The Gospels do quote him

saying that celibacy is a gift from God and that whoever can receive this gift

should do so. But it was far from clear whether a statement like that necessarily

meant that all sex is intrinsically evil, or that any particular type of sexual activity

was more or less pleasing in God’s eyes than another. Jesus may have lived an

abstinent life—but did that mean that those who believed in him had to do the

same? His own chosen favorites, the twelve apostles, were not universally sexless.

St. Peter himself had a wife.

The simple truth is that most of the sexual morals associated with early and

medieval Christianity were pagan in origin.

Christianity simply adapted itself to

a set of cultural ethics already in place, and it was able to do so precisely because

Jesus seems not to have considered the issue to be all that signiﬁcant. He appears

to have had more important things on his mind (such as money: He comments

more directly on money than on any other aspect of daily human life). From

where, then, did the western European emphasis on virginity, married heterosex-

ual intercourse, the avoidance of masturbation, the disapproval of homosexual

activity, the horror of prostitution, and the danger of sexual proﬂigacy come? The

answer is: the pagan Romans and the pre-Christian Germans. Despite the well-

known stories of orgies at the imperial court and the supposedly Olympian sexual

appetites of rulers like Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero—not to mention some of their

wives and daughters—the Roman world was actually renowned for its sexual

modesty. That, in fact, is why some of their writers paid so much attention to the

sexual exploits of the ruling class: The rulers’ actions were completely out of step

with the values of the common culture. The early Germans brought with them

16. A Carolingian bishop in Orle´ans was once asked by a parishioner when he and his wife should

absolutely abstain from sexual intercourse in order to remain in a state of spiritual grace. The bishop

suggested a moratorium on sex at least on every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday; on every ﬁve-day

stretch prior to the couple’s receiving of communion; on the eve of all the major feasts of the ecclesiastical

year (and then on the feast days themselves, naturally); throughout the eight-day vigil prior to Pentecost;

and throughout the entire forty-day seasons of Advent and Lent. In addition, intercourse was to be

avoided during the wife’s menstrual period. This meant abstaining from sexual activity between 200

and 250 days of each calendar year. We do not know the parishioner’s response.

17. Matthew 8:14–15 describes Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever.

18. Consider the cases of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, two of the principal architects of the Christian

code of sexual ethics: Both of them were horriﬁed by and disgusted with their own sexual proﬂigacy

before they became Christians. They then simply cast a Christian veneer onto their preexisting system of

values.

348 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

into western Europe a near mania about controlling sex. Their societies placed

high premiums on modesty and virginity, strict heterosexuality, and married ﬁ-

delity (although they did allow for the practice of concubinage, but largely to keep

in check the dangerous predilection for promiscuity). Certain circles in Roman

society allowed for some types of homosexuality, but the culture on the whole

disapproved of it. Early Germanic laws are unforgiving on the subject.

Church doctrine about sexual matters began to coalesce during the fourth and

ﬁfth centuries—precisely during the period when the Roman, Germanic, and

Christian cultures confronted one another en masse. The very general principles

laid out in the Gospels easily accorded with the detailed Roman and Germanic

sexual codes, and Christian teaching became far more speciﬁc in regard to what

it approved of and what it condemned. But then as now, there was always a

difference between what the Church preached and the State proclaimed, and what

people actually did. The history of sex cannot be written from the law codes alone.

But since medieval people did not leave diaries ﬁlled with intimate details of their

sexual lives for us to read—out of scholarly interest alone, of course—we must

try to reconstruct those lives from whatever material is at hand.

Medical writings provide one viewpoint, and in fact a rather consistent one.

Whether the writer was an early female physician like Trotula or a later male one

like Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311), moderate sexual activity was regarded as a boon

to health for both men and women, but excessive activity was deemed dangerous.

Sex literally drained the body not only of reproductive ﬂuids but also of the fun-

damental humors that comprise our very being. Physicians warned especially

against the harmful effects this draining had on men; since women received the

ﬂuids that men expended in sex, they were invigorated by the activity. A sexually

voracious woman, it was widely believed, could literally drain the life out of a

man, given enough time. On the other hand, the fundamental danger presented

to women was the pregnancy that resulted from sex. Giving birth was an abso-

lutely life-risking experience. Since women in the Middle Ages often married soon

after they reached puberty, it was common that a woman’s ﬁrst experience of

pregnancy and childbirth occurred when she was only ﬁfteen or sixteen. The strain

of childbirth on a body that was itself often still a child’s had the expected result:

a high mortality rate. It has been estimated that as many as one out of every three

medieval women died in their ﬁrst childbirthing.

The children fared little better:

As many as one out of every four children died before their ﬁrst birthday.

Medical writings often describe methods of contraception, but they could only

describe them, since recommending them would violate the teachings of the

Church. The most common method was coitus interruptus,

but other methods

included primitive cervical caps made from clumps of wool or cotton soaked in

honey, condoms made from animal tissue, and herbal formulas designed to pre-

vent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterus.

Sexual activity was ideally conﬁned to husbands and wives, but not exclu-

sively. Concubinage remained widespread and legal into the tenth century and

was not uncommon into the eleventh. Prostitution provided another avenue for

sex, especially after the urban revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

19. Those who survived tended, not surprisingly, to be physically vigorous enough to repeat the pro-

cess. Ample evidence exists of women of all classes giving birth to ten or more children in the course

of a lifetime; but these were the survivors. In general, mortality rates for both the mothers and their

offspring increased the further north one looked.

20. At last, a piece of Latin I don’t have to translate for you!

DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 349

Medieval society had complicated attitudes about prostitution; they hardly ap-

proved of the practice from a moral point of view, but their moral view had little

to do with the notion of sex per se. What they feared above all about prostitution,

apart from the spread of certain diseases, was its likelihood to result in miscege-

nation—the mixing of the races. The children borne by prostitutes had unknown

fathers, so it was impossible to know for certain the ethnicity of anyone. As pros-

titution ﬂourished in the cities, the problem grew apace. If you were a decent

hard-working merchant in Bremen, there was no way to know for sure if the

decent-looking civic ofﬁcial who asked for your daughter’s hand in marriage did

not have, somewhere in his genetic background, a trace of peasant blood, or a

criminal’s blood, or Jewish blood, or the blood of a leper. This question of paternity

is why cities tried hard to regulate prostitution: Some, for example, established

separate prostitution houses for the use of different ethnic, religious, and social

groups. As a public health measure, there were always separate prostitution

houses for lepers (the women who worked in them were those who had already

contracted leprosy).

In the countryside, absolute chastity prior to marriage was not the norm. One

problem in trying to make chastity the norm was the shortage of priests, for even

after marriage became a sacrament in 1215, most country-dwellers did not see a

priest much more than once a year, and many went many years without seeing

one. (The long interdicts frequently imposed on kingdoms by the popes from

Innocent III on down did not help matters.) Thus peasant couples commonly lived

together for years before marrying and the children they produced were consid-

ered legitimate. Even among young women, virginity until marriage was not al-

ways absolutely expected; in fact a young woman’s having a baby out of wedlock

sometimes increased her value on the local marriage market, since it dispelled any

doubts about her fertility. And fertility was a widespread concern. A rural society

needed lots of children to share the labor, and the high mortality rate of children

meant that women had to produce as many children as possible; but apart from

the physical hardship of teenage motherhood, the lean diet of most peasants also

meant that most would-be mothers did not receive the nutrients they needed in

order to be fertile. So-called barren women abounded in the Middle Ages, and

diet was the chief factor for most of them.

Male sterility was often considered a spiritual rather than a physical problem,

especially when it occurred to a young man. Popular folk beliefs attributed male

sterility to spells cast by demons and spirits, and it was treated by counterspells,

incantations, and potions. But a man’s sterility did not negate his marriage,

whereas a woman’s barrenness was legal cause for the husband to divorce her.

Male impotence was a different matter. A wife could sue for divorce if her mate

was impotent—but the courts required proof of his impotence, for which they

usually appointed one or two local prostitutes to try to stimulate him into arousal,

while a court notary watched.

The Middle Ages was hardly a paradise of carnal delights, but neither was it

puritanical in its attitudes or actions. Unless one became a professed cleric vowed

to chastity, sex was not something to be denied, squelched, and obliterated from

life; it was, however, a powerful, and hence potentially disrupting, force in society.

This meant that it needed to be regulated and managed, like everything else in

life. But given such regulation, sex was for the most part regarded by society as

natural.

350 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

UGGESTING

EADING

Texts

Benjamin of Tudela. Itinerary.

Maimonides. Book of the Commandments.

———. Guide for the Perplexed.

———. Mishneh Torah.

Salimbene. Chronicle.

Villani, Giovanni. Chronicle.

Walter of Henley. On Husbandry.

Source Anthologies

Amt, Emilie. Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (1993).

Dean, Trevor. The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (2000).

Harvey, P. D. A. Manorial Records (1984).

Lopez, Robert S., and Irving W. Raymond. Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (1997).

Murray, Jacqueline. Love, Marriage, and the Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader (2001).

Studies

Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993).

Bennett, Judith M. A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295–1344 (1999).

Bizaguet, Armand. The Dawn of Modern Banking (1979).

Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from

the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980).

———. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity

to the Renaissance (1988).

Brooke, Christopher. The Medieval Idea of Marriage (1989).

Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987).

Burns, Robert I., S. J. Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Crusader Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (1983).

Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (1993).

Duby, Georges. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1968).

———. The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (1983).

Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–

1520 (1989).

Elliott, Dyan. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (1993).

Epstein, Steven. Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–1250 (1984).

Hanawalt, Barbara A. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (1993).

———. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (1986).

Herlihy, David. Medieval Households (1985).

Howell, Martha C. Women, Productivity, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (1986).

Jones, Philip. The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (1997).

Karras, Ruth Mazo. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1996).

Liu, Xinru. Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200

(1999).

DAILY LIFE AT THE MEDIEVAL ZENITH 351

Mirrer, Louise. Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (1996).

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996).

Paterson, Linda M. The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–c. 1300 (1993).

Payer, Pierre J. The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (1993).

Piponnier, Franc¸oise, and Perrine Mane. Dress in the Middle Ages (1998).

Reyerson, Kathryn L. Business, Banking, and Finance in Medieval Montpellier (1985).

Ro¨ sener, Werner. Peasants in the Middle Ages (1992).

Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages (1990).

———. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (1983).

Swanson, Heather. Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (1989).

352

CHAPTER 16

HANGES IN

ELIGIOUS

IFE

eligious life reached its peak in the thirteenth century. The soaring cathe-

drals that dominated the landscape were built with passion as well as

stone, and the high emotional pitch that attended their construction spilled out

into the streets, so to speak, in mass popular processions, in crowds huddled

around market-place preachers, and in large-scale pilgrimages to holy sites. Ser-

mons, songs, and popular art celebrated a new emotionalism that emphasized

God’s mercy; Christ was transformed from the angry judge of earlier centuries

into a loving savior still very much at work in the world as evidenced by his

continued reappearance in the mystical visions granted to his followers. Most orig-

inally of all, Christ’s mother Mary came almost to center stage in popular devotion.

She had always been a prominent ﬁgure in western Christian belief, but until the

twelfth century she had never received the attention she had long enjoyed in the

Orthodox east. Worshipers made up for this delay by granting Mary a centrality

in devotional life that was extraordinary; at times she appeared almost to displace

her Son in people’s hearts.

One hallmark of late medieval piety was its popular emphasis on imitatio

Christi, or “the imitation of Christ.” By the hundreds of thousands, if not more,

pious faithful set out not only to believe in Christ and live by his precepts but

actually to emulate his lifestyle. Religious confraternities existed by the handful in

almost every city of any size: Guilds practiced congregational worship and orga-

nized charity; beguinages bulged with new aspirants; pilgrimage routes swelled

with chanting crowds of penitents; and market squares ﬁlled with popular preach-

ers calling believers to renounce their sinful lives and take up the cross of reform

and salvation. Renouncing their own wealth, property, and position, preachers

traveled the city streets and rural countrysides in small groups, evangelizing as

much by their example as by their words. The leading Church ﬁgures in this

movement were the mendicant orders that were established by the dozen. The best

known, then and now, were the Dominicans and the Franciscans, but the idea they

represented proved to be so popular that other groups sprang up so quickly and

in such great numbers that the Church ﬁnally felt compelled at the Fourth Lateran

Council (1215) to forbid the establishment of any new monastic or clerical rules.

The movement was in danger of getting out of hand.

What motivated most of these people was the conviction that the Church

needed help. Society was developing so quickly, with rising populations every-

where and with demands for spiritual and social services keeping pace, that the

Church’s resources were stretched thin. Try as it might, it simply could not reach

all the people who yearned for spiritual instruction and guidance. The mendicants

felt that the Church, in becoming fully established, had also become static, and

the plenitudo of its potestatis left it in the distressing situation of administering the

CHANGES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 353

world rather than ministering to it. The mendicants therefore envisioned them-

selves as itinerant clerics free of the parish church and the remote monastery; they

wanted to be church-less servants of the Church, meaning that they wanted to

avoid the deepening mundane responsibilities of the other clergy—tasks like tend-

ing to the parish church building and schools, overseeing curricula, organizing

festivals, raising money for various causes, and all the other things that a parish

church did on the days between its Sunday services. The mendicants wanted only

to bring the faith to the people, no matter where the people were. Not everyone

could attend a parish church with regularity; especially in the countryside where

many churches were unstaffed. Must these people be left alone? The mendicants

wanted to travel as Christ and his apostles had done, preach as they had done,

tend to the sick as they had done. They did not seek to challenge or supplant the

established clergy but only to assist them. But as is often the case when people

receive assistants they have not requested, friction often arose between the estab-

lished clerics and the popular new mendicants.

The impetus for these Church changes—a heightened emotionalism, a hu-

manized Christ, a prominent Mary, the imitatio Christi, and the rise of the men-

dicant orders—came from the populace just as the impetus for the Gregorian Re-

form had done. As medieval conﬁdence and prosperity reached their peak, the

faithful poured their spiritual energy into a new theology of love that stressed

kindness and mercy, penitence and forgiveness, and the desire to know God better

by imitating the life of His Son. As a sign of His approval of this enthusiasm, God

rewarded many of those who led the reform with wave after wave of mystical

visions that gave the believers a foretaste of the transcendence of paradise. Al-

though always cautious about unchecked popular enthusiasms, the Church re-

sponded to popular demands and desires by endorsing the new emphasis of God’s

mercy to the penitent, by advocating (within limits) the imitatio Christi, and by

recognizing and encouraging the mendicants. By championing the opening up of

the mendicant orders to women, in afﬁliated orders rather than as an intrinsic part

of the main order, the Church provided women with an opportunity to serve as

representatives of the Church in the world, and tapped into a long-unused re-

source of energy, skill, and dedication.

MPORTANCE OF

EING

ENITENT

It may seem ironic that this wave of celebrating God’s love coincided with a strong

new emphasis on penitence. Sermons by parish clergy and mendicant preachers

alike called people to sorrowful repentance as often as they urged hearers to rejoice

in God’s love. Devotions like confession, praying the rosary, and performing the

Stations of the Cross became regular features of religious life. But the importance

of penitence and the celebration of God’s loving-kindness went hand in hand. The

widespread popular assumption of the early Middle Ages, as discussed in Chapter

4, was that in all likelihood only professed monks and nuns would receive eternal

life since they were the one people who devoted themselves entirely to God; the

stern judging Christ of that era demanded no less. Most others need not apply.

This belief had never been an ofﬁcial doctrine of the Church, but since most

Churchmen in those centuries were in fact monks, the majority would probably

have gone along with the belief. At some point in the “great change” of the tenth

and eleventh centuries, however, popular assumptions began to reﬂect a more

optimistic attitude that God will reward all those who strive after good and show