The Late Medieval Era · 14th-15th c. · Italy, Provence
Fraticelli (Spiritual Franciscan rigorists)
Part of another tradition's story
This group's story is told as part of another tradition here, rather than as its own entry.
About This Movement
The Franciscans had argued for a century about how literally to take Francis's poverty, and in the 1310s and 20s the argument was closed by force. John XXII ordered the strictest friars to conform, had four of them burned at Marseille in 1318 for refusing, and in 1323 declared it heretical to hold that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing at all. Turning a devotional ideal into a condemned proposition. Those who would not submit became the fraticelli, 'little brothers', a name their prosecutors used as a legal category as much as a description. They survived for another century and a half in the Marches of Ancona, in Provence and in scattered Italian and Greek communities, supported by lay sympathizers. Among them the beguins of Languedoc, who venerated the burned friars as martyrs and were hunted for it. A major trial at Rome in the 1460s effectively ended them.
Sources
- Angelo Clareno, A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor (trans. Burr & Daniel, Franciscan Institute, 2005) (primary) — The Spirituals' own martyr-history of their persecution inside the order — the movement's own voice, openly partisan and hagiographic in frame. Genuine internal literature survives here, not only inquisition-era records.
- Peter of John Olivi: the usus pauper treatises and the Apocalypse commentary (condemned 1326) (primary) — The theological wellspring the rigorists carried - the intellectual layer beneath the movement.
- John XXII's bulls: Sancta Romana and Gloriosam ecclesiam (1317-18), Cum inter nonnullos (1323) (primary) — A hostile, institutional source: the papacy's own bulls constituting 'fraticelli' as a legal category and declaring the doctrine of absolute poverty heretical — the obedience-and-property rupture in the church's own words.
- Inquisition records: the Marseilles friars burned 1318; Bernard Gui's Fraticelli/beguin sections; the Languedoc beguin depositions - English access via Louisa Burnham, So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke (Cornell, 2008) (primary) — Both hostile and coerced: lay men and women who venerated the burned friars as martyrs are known almost only through their interrogations.
- David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (Penn State, 2001) (secondary) — The standard account, built on both the inside literature and the trial record.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 3 'Religious poverty and the search for perfection' (Kienzle); cf. ch. 23 'Repression and power' (Arnold) (reference) — This movement sits exactly between these two chapters' subject matter.