Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210-1323 (History Series)

The controversy in the second decade of the fourteenth century on the poverty of Christ and the apostles under John XXII must rank as one of the oddest of all medieval conflicts. For some time, the energies of the greatest scholastics in Christendom were devoted to discussing the issue: did Christ and the apostles have property in common or not?

This book is an assessment of the rise and fall within the Franciscan Order of the doctrine of the absolute poverty of Jesus Christ and the apostles. Covering the decades between 1210 - 1323, Lambert describes the doctrine as found in the mind of St. Francis and moves to Pope John XXII's condemnation of one particular form of the doctrine.

The conflict surrounding this issue was a tragedy, but eminently explicable in the light of the whole course of Franciscan history from 1210, which almost insensibly carried the Francis cans away from the inspiration of their founder and drew them into a highly artificial definition of their poverty. At the end, they were left almost friendless in a hostile Papal curia.