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The Bible and Rights in the Franciscan Disputes Over Poverty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Gordon Leff
Gordon Leff*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

Among the more far-reaching consequences of the disputes over absolute poverty in the Franciscan Order was the emergence of a doctrine of natural rights. Or rather conflicting doctrines, drawn from conflicting interpretations of the life of Christ and the apostles, which crystallized in the debates between Pope John XXII and members of the Order in the 1320s and 1330s over Christ’s absolute poverty. Both the Pope, in denying that Christ had ever lived in absolute poverty, and his Franciscan opponents, who upheld the Franciscan doctrine that he had, arrived at rival conceptions of the rights involved in either possessing or renouncing temporal things.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 4: The Bible in the Medieval World , 1985 , pp. 225 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1985 

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References

1 For an account of these events and the development of the Order, see Brooke, R.B., Early Franciscan Government (Cambridge, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lambert, M.D., Franciscan Poverty (London, 1961)Google Scholar; and Leff, G., Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, 1967)Google Scholar, i, chs 1 and 2, and further references there to citations which follow.

2 Discussed in Leff, Heresy, pp. 83-97.

3 Ibid., p. 90.

4 Ibid., p. 93.

5 Ibid., pp. 94-5.

6 Ibid., pp. 97-100.

7 Ibid., pp. 163-6, 241-9.

8 Ibid., pp. 165-6.

9 Ibid., pp. 241-9.

10 Ibid., pp. 239-49.

11 Tuck, R., Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who was the first to recognize an issue of rights in these disputes, although I disagree with his interpretation of Duns Scotus as the originator of this particular doctrine.

12 Leff, Heresy, i, p. 240.

13 Ibid., pp. 249-53 and Leff, G., William of Ockham (Manchester, 1975), pp. 618–9.Google Scholar

14 Opus Nonaginta Dierum, ed. H.S. Offler, Opera Politica, ii (Manchester, 1963), ch. 14, p. 432; Leff, ibid., p. 626.

15 Opus Nonaginta Dierum, ch. 65, pp. 573-5; Leff, ibid., pp. 620-3.

16 Dialogus, III, II, bk iii, ch. 6, Opera Plurima, i (Lyon, 1494, reprinted London, 1962), f. 263vb; Leff, ibid., pp. 622-3.

17 Opus Nonaginta Dierum, ch. 88, pp. 656-7; Leff, ibid., pp. 626-7.

18 Leff, ibid., pp. 616-17, 638-40.