medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I passed this on to my partner who specializes in the early Dominicans
in Greece. His comments are below.
We have just received offprints of a major paper of his, published a
year ago. There are a few as-yet unassigned offprints we are glad to
send to people who need to know about 13thC Dominicans.
Pierre A. MacKay. "St. Mary of the Dominicans: The Monastery of the
Fratres Praedicatores in Negropont," /Benetia-Euboia- apo ton Egripo
sto Negroponte/ (Venice-Athens, 2006), 125-156 & 8 figs.
DW
>
>
>
> In many of the orders of post-12th cent. foundation, unlike their
> older predecessors, the names prior and priory don't imply dependence
> on an abbot and abbey, but rather the rejection of abbacy and its
> quasi-episcopal character for simpler forms of organization and more
> low-key ideas of religious authority: e.g. various of the 12c.
> eremitical communities (including Carthusians, who have priors but
> adopted the proper name "cartusia" for the houses), and the 13c.
> mendicants (Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites &c.). St Francis
> wanted superiors called "ministers" rather than priors, but the
> organisational principles are the same.
>
> And because these orders are organised as federations of houses rather
> than as autonomous units like abbeys, local priors are subject to a
> prior provincial (for the geographical province) and the prior general
> (for the whole order), whom the Franciscans call the minister general
> and the Dominicans the master general in order to maintain a level of
> satisfactory complexity and difficulty of simple explanation. However,
> the lower superiors in these orders are not "subject to" higher
> superiors in quite the same way as officers in a monastery to the
> abbot, as at each level of organization the prior and the
> corresponding chapter (local/provincial/general) has a defined area of
> competence and the superiors a limited term of office. This is usually
> taken to reflect broadly the same sorts of trends in social
> organization as are reflected in the development of the medieval
> communes etc.
>
> On 08/04/07, *jbugslag* <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
> culture
>
> > Interestingly, all
> > Premonstratensian houses are abbeys, whereas most Augustinian
> (black
> > canons) ones are priories.
>
> John,
> Does this mean that they looked to a particular abbey as their
> "mother house"? It is my
> understanding that a priory must exist under an abbey, but perhaps
> I'm mistaken. Any
> clarification of this point would be appreciated.
> Cheers,
> Jim Bugslag
>
This message was forwarded to me by Diana Wright, because of my
recent concentration on the early years of the Dominicans.
My reaction to it is:
Priory seems to have become a loosely defined term and, as such, was
useful for all the mendicants, who needed to avoid the limitations
placed on new orders by the 4th Lateran council. The Dominicans, who
set the tone and provided the model, preferred the term "House" and made
it very clear that they did not consider themselves monks and certainly
did not think of their centers as abbeys.
They began by following the practices of the Augustinian Canons Regular
(and did so well before the formation of the Augustinian friars). In
each of the relatively few towns they colonized, they reserved small and
mean dwellings attached to an unassuming church (ecclesia fratrum) as
places of spiritual retreat. (At St. Eustorgius in Milan, they lived
for years in the ruins of a roofless deserted church, sheltering in
tents supported by the nave columns.) These were not abbeys,
monasteries, or even convents, and use of them by the friars was by
consent of the donor, since St Dominic was absolutely firm about owning
property. Not even the institution (and far less any individual) could
own land or buildings. Dominic once tore up a deed that had been given
in good faith to the house at Bologna.
The Dominicans, and following their model the other mendicants, accepted
a hierarchy of rules and of rule-making bodies, but not of persons (such
as abbots) or houses. Everyone might be aware that Bologna and Paris
were more equal than the other houses, but the authority of the Chapter
General if it met in Poland was precisely equal to that of one that met
in Bologna or Paris. Even the extreme reformer, Humbert de Romans, was
constrained to act as the enforcer of decisions of the Chapters General,
and truly serious punishments were always brought before the annual
meetings of that body.
In their earliest days, the Dominicans really did own nothing at all, so
that "control" of one house by another was not easy to visualize.
Obviously, they ended up as posessors of property, but one wonders just
how they managed to justify it to themselves.
Pierre MacKay
http://angiolello.net
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