The High Medieval Era · 1216-1300 · Toulouse, Paris, Bologna
The Dominican Order
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About This Movement
Dominic de Guzmán was a Spanish cathedral canon who, travelling through Languedoc, concluded that the church was losing the argument with dissenters because its own preachers arrived on horseback with baggage while their opponents walked and fasted. His answer was an order built backwards from a purpose: friars trained in theology, living poor and mobile, whose stated reason for existing was preaching. Approved in 1216, the Order of Preachers wrote itself a constitution of unusual sophistication — elected superiors, representative chapters, and a clause stating that the rule did not bind under sin, so that it could never get in the way of study — and planted itself immediately in the new universities at Paris and Bologna. Its convents of women, in the German lands especially, became one of the very few settings in medieval Europe where women wrote theology and were read.
Sources
- Simon Tugwell (ed.), Early Dominicans: Selected Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1982) (primary) — Jordan of Saxony's Libellus, the Nine Ways of Prayer, Humbert of Romans' Treatise on the Formation of Preachers, and the early constitutions in an appendix.
- The canonization process of St Dominic (Bologna and Toulouse, 1233), in F. C. Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents (1964) (primary) — Friars and lay witnesses under oath on what Dominic actually did.
- Jordan of Saxony, letters to Diana d'Andalo (trans. Gerald Vann, To Heaven with Diana!, 1960) (primary) — The master general's correspondence with the Bologna nuns - the order's women's side and its interior register.
- Gerard de Frachet, Vitae Fratrum (Lives of the Brethren, c. 1260) (primary) — Communal self-portrait in anecdote: dormitory, road, deathbed - ordinary texture. English translation: Conway, 1924.
- M. Michele Mulchahey, 'First the Bow is Bent in Study': Dominican Education before 1350 (PIMS, 1998) (secondary) — The formation system as system.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 4 (McGuire); cf. ch. 9 'The Word and its diffusion' (Jansen) (reference) — Preaching is the order's reason for existing.