ABSTRACT
Mendicant commitment to poverty has received considerable scholarly attention over the years, but more in relation to Franciscan than to Dominican tradition. A few scholars working with Dominican sermons have identified the poor of society, and generosity towards them, as a central topic to the friars’ preaching,1 but this focal choice is perhaps seen as so obvious that studies usually hasten on to more intriguing topics. Most scholarly attention regarding Dominican poverty has been devoted to the divergence between ideals and conventual possessions. Historians within the Dominican Order, such as William A. Hinnebusch and Simon Tugwell, have found it necessary to present evidence to dismiss external claims of Dominican poverty as just being an apostolic ‘gimmick’ to impress the rest of society or of being merely a copy of Francis’s contemporaneous project.2 Isnard W. Frank has dealt with how possessions and revenues were perceived by the mendicants, and how Dominican poverty regulations were gradually bent to allow continuous payments for perpetual masses connected to the increasing memoria cult.3 The problem of individual possessions and privileges enjoyed by Dominican friars has especially been addressed by Gabriel M. Löhr in the context of the Order’s own Observant reform movement in the late Middle Ages.4
