Ideas of poverty in late medieval Dominican preaching materials from Catalonia and Aragon

What did paupertas mean for medieval theologians and those concerned with pastoral direction and care? In order to answer this question, this chapter examines how preachers could use collections of alphabetical Distinctions (‘distinctiones’), and draw on these in practice. In brief, a collection of Distinctions is like a dictionary, arranged alphabetically, in which a word taken from the Scripture is distinguished according to the four types of biblical exegesis: literal, allegorical, anagogic and tropologic. Next, the Distinction is exemplied with biblical verses in which that word appears. While we shall look at sermons preserved in Catalan and Aragonese libraries, the genre itself was common to Latin Europe.