ABSTRACT
In the communal spiritual lives of the Franciscans, voluntary poverty has long been considered as a central theme.1 While there have been a few studies of the importance of poverty to the early Dominicans, there has been comparatively little examination of how poverty worked within the Order, particularly in terms of a lived preaching vocation.2 Explorations of both the day-to-day practice of mendicancy and the pursuit of apostolic poverty as an ideal tend to fall into a narrative of the early Preachers that focuses on their education and theological training rather than their preaching.3 The Order of Preachers is often distinguished from the Friars Minor by its relative lack of involvement in mendicancy. Discussions of apostolic poverty are limited to the theological disputation or treated as a ‘tactic’ in their preaching.4 Yet it is reductive to speak of preaching as a simple trajectory for the Order. There was a difficult negotiation of the way preaching interacted with multiple identities throughout all levels of the Order, in which the term ‘poverty’ was used in various ways within a complex, pre-existing discourse. The aim of this chapter is to explore a number of representations of poverty within the act of preaching, as drawn from the exemplary sources of the Order of Preachers.
