Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
In March 1217 brother Dominic, a Castilian canon of the chapter of the diocese of Osma, returned to Toulouse from a visit to Rome. He, and the small community he had gathered round him, had been preaching against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc for the previous ten years. Soon after his arrival he summoned the community of canons which had just settled into their newly restored monastery to meet him. It rapidly became clear that the situation every religious dreads had arisen: the superior had an idea. The strategy involved the creation of a new religious force in Catholic Europe which was to take the form of an entirely novel religious Order. Its mission was to be wholly given over to the preaching of the Word of God. This was to take precedence over every other conventual observance. The Order was to be international; its members were to be called friars, brothers, they were to be bound to stability within the Order and not to any one particular house. They were to go wherever the needs of evangelisation and the defence of doctrine took them, living in poverty, holding no property, not even the houses in which they dwelt. They were to live out some elements of the monastic life, celebrating the divine office and the Eucharist solemnly and in common with, but without undue fussy ceremonial. They were to elect their own superiors, who in turn would be members of Provincial Chapters.
1 An excellent study of Dominican education can he found in Michèle Mulcahy ‘First the Bow is bent in Study’… Dominican Education before 1350 (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1998).
2 Monumenta diplomatica S. Dominici, ed Koudelka, Vladimir J., Monumenta Ordinis fratrum Praedicatorum historica 25. (Rome, 1966) no 115, pp. 119–20Google Scholar.
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