Gattung:
Aufsatz
Autor/Herausgeber:
Thomas O'Brien
 
Normierte Form: O'Brien, Thomas [Thomas O'Brien]
Titel:
Options for the poor in twelfth and thirteenth-century Europe

Normierte Form:

Zeitschrift:
Horizons : the journal of the College Theology Society
Gattung:
31
Heft:
2
Erscheinungsjahr:
2004
Seiten:
302-321
Schlagwörter:
Armut - Waldensische Auffassung - 1100-1300
Armutsbewegungen - Mittelalter
Franziskaner - Auffassung der Armut - 1200-1300
Freiwilliger Armut
Humiliaten

Zusammenfassung/Kommentar:

 ABSTRACT

This essay uses the lens of the "preferential option for the poor" to examine the unprecedented turn to poverty by religious movements in late twelfth and early thirteenth-century Western Europe. Three movements are selected from the many and various movements espousing poverty: the Humiliati, the Waldensians, and the Franciscans. The Humiliati developed a communal lifestyle that, in key ways, reflected the emerging urban working class. The Waldensians embraced a radical poverty that rejected all forms of property, but they were progressively marginalized from Catholicism and eventually became targets of the Inquisition. The Franciscans adopted a very similar sort of radical poverty, but their communities ultimately would be assimilated into mainstream Catholicism. The essay places these movements into a dialogue with the contemporary notion of the "preferential option for the poor" in order to discover the ways they might inform and illuminate one another.