Holy Poverty and the Pulpit: Locating the Indigent in English Mendicant Homiletic Discourse

Ideology, Society, and Medieval Religion: Impositions and Negotiations Seminar Series

Mendicant preaching in late medieval England was often critiqued in antifraternalist discourse and social commentary as an instrument of injustice, a tool by which the friars could direct the flow of charity towards themselves and away from the involuntary poor by excluding the latter from their ideology of holy poverty. Several modern historians have echoed this perspective, suggesting that the friars’ elevation of their specific brand of poverty was consciously self-serving, creating an adversarial relationship between the voluntary and involuntary poor which made the latter less attractive objects of charity.

This paper will challenge the assumption that the involuntary poor were excluded from English mendicant homiletic discourse on holy and deserving poverty. It argues that mendicant praedicabilia tend to conflate and imbricate the experiences of voluntary and involuntary poverty to suit their moralizing lessons, cultivating an inclusive rather than exclusionary discourse. It suggests that the involuntary poor were encouraged to participate in spiritual poverty by espousing those traits such as patience and humility that rendered the friars’ own poverty virtuous; furthermore, the involuntary poor were often portrayed in these materials as embodying such characteristics. In this way, preaching friars blurred the boundaries between the two types of poverty and endorsed the indigent as suitable charitable recipients. By highlighting the discursive thread of social justice present in praedicabilia, this paper ultimately argues that the homiletic activity of the friars not only accommodated, but likely advocated for the just and charitable treatment of the poor by would-be almsgivers and authority figures.

This seminar will last approximately 60 minutes including a Q&A.

Hannah Kirby Wood recently completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies after receiving her B.A. from McGill University and M.St. from Oriel College, Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, “Intersections of Voluntary and Involuntary Poverty: The Friars and the Lay Indigent in Late Medieval England, c.1221-1430,” for which she was awarded the Alumni Dissertation Award, examined the relationship between the mendicant orders and the poor through discursive and testamentary evidence. Her research continues to explore the ways in which religious ideologies and discourse influenced social conceptions of poverty and deservedness in the Middle Ages and early modern world. Her article “Defining Poverty” will appear in Bloomsbury’s forthcoming volume A Cultural History of Poverty in the Medieval Age, and she is in the process of polishing up an article on the place of the lay poor in Wyclif’s programme of disendowment. Hannah is currently serving as a course instructor in the History department of Acadia University and the English department of Mount Saint Vincent University, both located in Nova Scotia, Canada.

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Image: Detail of a miniature of Povrete (Poverty), in rags, with a nun and a friar looking at her. London, British Library, Royal MS 19.B.XIII, fol. 8.