Sermons to the Upper Bourgeoisie by a Thirteenth Century Franciscan

‘Implantation urbaine des orders mendiants a-t-elle eu une influence sur le type de piété et de spiritualité qu’ils proposaient?’ This was one of the questions posed in theAnnalesprogramme of research on the friars and the towns, and the recent study of mendicant spirituality by Rosenwein and Little is an answer to more or less the same question. They conclude that within the period when the original ideal remained more or less intact, the preaching of the mendicants was one of a number of related responses to urban money-making. This is an excellent and stimulating study, and one of the lines of research it should stimulate is the analysis of the mendicant sermons themselves, which have survived in great numbers. A number of years spent with these sources has left me with the impression that the urban context can provide a non–trivial explanation for certain aspects only of the ‘spirituality’ of mendicant preaching, and that many of its distinctive features will have to be accounted for in other terms. Provided that we do not mistake the part for the whole, however, those elements of mendicant preaching which can be directly related to their urban environment—both economic and political—are worthy of attention in their own right, and it is with them that I am concerned here. The sermons which I will discuss illustrate the church’s effort to adapt itself to the re-emergence of a bourgeoisie, after the long centuries during which its social context was predominantly rural.