Resumo

BEUKES, Johann. The discourse on poverty in the central and later Middle Ages. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2022, vol.62, n.2, pp.255-275. ISSN 2224-7912.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2022/v62n2a1.

This article aims to analyse the discourse on poverty in the central and later Middle Ages. Poverty is therefore not surveyed merely as a historical-economic category but is analysed by considering idea-historical medieval views on "extreme scarcity", or the way poverty was conceptualised in these last two stages of the Middle Ages. According to this analysis, this discourse on poverty manifests itself in five distinct phases. Against the backdrop of the early medieval understanding of poverty as "contingent" - the result of one or more "accidental" factors - a first discursive development took place in the second half of the 10th century. As a result of revolutionary developments in agriculture and commerce, the "new poor" slowly developed into a "class" of agricultural and manual labourers whose socio-historical position eventually had to be drastically revised from the late 11th century. A subsequent conceptual development, predominantly theological and juridical by nature and relying on a relatively unassuming yet crucial distinction between "owner" and "servant" ('dominus and servus), replaced the articulated conceptual register of the poverty discourse of the early Middle Ages. From the 5th to the 10th centuries poverty was understood to be the result of accidens or accidental factors, but now it was reduced to a mere relation. Poverty now became a "problem" that had to be addressed as effectively as possible, employing this basic and reductionist distinction. Secondly, in the 12th century poverty was explicitly related to a "minimum matrix", which was supposed to indicate the minimum amount of arable land an individual or a group of related individuals needed for basic self-sufficiency. With this matrix, for the first time in the Middle Ages, poverty was defined in terms of the "ability to self-sustain". As a result, poverty was economised (placed in the economic sphere) in the central medieval discourse. Thirdly, in reaction to the "new poverty" of the late 12th and 13th centuries, several unconventional religious movements, such as the beguines and Waldensians, resisted this economisation. The ideal of "voluntary poverty" was posed by these groups in order to dissociate themselves from any form of material prosperity by rejecting any form of ownership and living modest lives in critical solidarity with the poor. Fourthly, this resistance was intensified by the establishment of the mendicant orders, and in particular by the Franciscan order's confrontation with the papal office regarding the order's interpretation of the relationship between ownership (dominium) and the order's factual use of goods in possession (usus facti and ordo habeat usum). In the 14th century, the Franciscan ideal of "holy voluntary poverty" came under severe criticism from the church (not least by the pope, John XXII [1244-1334, pope 1316 to 1334], himself) but later also from academic circles (notably by the Oxonian Richard FitzRalph [ca.1300-1360], in his eight-volume De pauperie salvatoris [ca. 1350-1356]). A dramatic confrontation between this oldest of the mendicant orders and the highest ecclesiastical authority ensued when, from the early 1320s, two high-profile Franciscans, William of Ockham (ca.1285-1349) and Francis of Marchia (ca.1290-ca.1344), a master of theology at the University of Paris and an outspoken opponent of John XXII, repeatedly clashed with the pope about the Franciscans' understanding of corporate scarcity or "holy voluntary poverty". Some years later FitzRalph presented his substantial philosophical and theological critique of what he called the "radicalised mendicant ideal". This work contributed significantly to the development of theories of natural rights in the later Middle Ages and in early modernity. Lastly, the creation of a 14th-century minority - "the poor" - in conjunction with the 14th-century design of several other "minorities" based on ethnic, religious and gender-sexual considerations, was the eventual result of the historical development of ideas about poverty in the central and later Middle Ages. What once was considered to be the result of involuntary and contingentfactors, then reduced to a (simplistic) relation, andfinally defined in economic terms as a "class", was thus ultimately brought under discursive control as a "minority".

Palavras-chave : central Middle Ages; Franciscans; history of ideas; holy voluntary poverty; ius commune; later Middle Ages; medieval agrarian and commercial revolution; natural rights; ordo habeat usum; Pope John XXII; poverty in the Middle Ages; usus facti.

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