The Mendicants and the Urban Mediterranean, c.1200-1500

Jon Paul Heyne, Austin Powell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040346983
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume explores the relationship of mendicant men and women to cities and their inhabitants in the Mediterranean world, c.1200–1500. It asks questions including: what was specifically "urban" about the mendicant movement? what does it mean to think of the mendicants as an "urban phenomenon"? and was there anything common to mendicant experiences in the cities of the Mediterranean?

In addressing these questions, the volume expands our understanding of the mendicants by offering chapters that examine this religious movement within urban environments from the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, Southern France, and Italy, to the Dalmatian Coast, Aegean Islands, Egypt, and the Levant. The chapters treat a wide array of textual, artistic, and architectural sources to consider how mendicants navigated and negotiated the unique social dynamics of Mediterranean cities in their interactions with political potentates, merchants, prisoners, pilgrims, religious and intellectual elites, non?Christians, and inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. It thus offers an interdisciplinary and broad survey of mendicancy as a social?religious phenomenon of the urban Mediterranean, demonstrating that these communities can be defined by much more than their traditionally accepted roles as beggars, preachers, and teachers.

Mendicants and the Urban Mediterranean, c.1200–1500 will be of interest to scholars and students across multiple disciplines engaged in questions about medieval mendicancy, gender, urban society, inter?religious encounters, and the Mediterranean.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Purposes for a Polemical Pair: Reading Ramon Martí’s De seta Machometi and Explanatio simboli Apostolorum in Dominican Urban Contexts
• 3 Clarissan Reform, Miraculous Objects, and Shared Devotions: Portuguese Colettine Nuns within their Urban Communities
• 4 In the Cities of the Sultans: Mendicants in Egypt, c.1219–1517
• 5 “Hostile people invading the country”: Social Unrest and the Relocation of the Poor Clares in the Fourteenth-Century Midi
• 6 Postmodum autem missus Palentiam: The Urbanizing Upbringing of the Castilian Canon Domingo de Caleruega, Founder of the Order of Preachers
• 7 Immigration, Sex, and Prayer: Dominicans and Humanists in Venice, 1390–1440
• 8 Being Franciscans in Mamluk Jerusalem: Three Years in the Life of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land (1436–1438)
• 9 Mendicant Convents in the Aegean Sea: Visual and Material Impact on Urban and Insular Dynamics (13th–16th c.)
• 10 The Coordinated Development of the Mendicant Convents and City Walls of Dubrovnik
• Index