This essay approaches the vernacular style of Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1379) through his Dominican order’s preoccupation with a properly calibrated preacher’s style. Good preachers must strike a balance to communicate their learning, but never obscurely; to speak plainly but not without grace. Thomas Waleys called this mode a grossus stilus, a simple style, and this is an aptly gross name for Daniel’s way with Middle English, as he instructs his readers in the medieval art of inspecting urine for medical diagnosis. I contextualise Daniel’s own stylistic programme (as articulated in theory in his prologue and then proved in practice in the rest of the Liber) within a long tradition of literary theorising around jargon and plain speech found across the rhetorical manuals and guides to preaching of the Dominican curriculum. While they expressed their arguments in Latin, these texts offered a theory of vernacular eloquence that – as the Liber would prove – could circulate amongst the apparently disparate fields of preaching and Middle English medicine.

The Carmelites were an unique religious Order: the only contemplative Order to owe their foundation entirely to the Crusader States. They were formed in the early thirteenth century from a group of solitaries and hermits who had gathered for safety on Mt Camel, near the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem at Acre, and absorbed into a new community by Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem. Their aim was the pursuit of a penitent life in a small regulated community in a fixed location without the burden of property ownership. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, they had made the transition to being mendicants, and although Mt Carmel remained the spiritual heart of the Order, they had founded houses in the West as well. This chapter examines the origins of the community and the process of transition, situating the Carmelites alongside other models of reform in the Crusader States.

Although Francis of Assisi never set foot in person in the Holy Land, he was associated with the Crusader States through his presence in Egypt on the Fifth Crusade. The Franciscans established priories in the Holy Land, notably at Acre but also in other centres of population, and played a significant role in the pastoral life of the Latins in the thirteenth century, at a time when monasteries were struggling to maintain their landed properties and thus to minister to rural parishes. Franciscan spirituality manifested itself through care for prisoners and in the mission field.

The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, established themselves in the Holy Land because it represented an opportunity to fulfil two of the aims of the Order: missionary activity and aiding in parochial ministry. Most of the evidence for Dominican activity in the Crusader States comes from the former, where the Order was particularly active in trying to negotiate the acceptance of the primacy of the papacy among eastern Christians. In Cyprus, where the Order also founded houses after the Latin Conquest of the 1190s, the Dominicans also fulfilled their role as monitors of Christian doctrine through acting as inquisitors, notably in relation to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Lamberto dell’Antella’s confession and the execution of five leading Florentines in August 1497 marked a watershed in Piero’s years of exile. Before that, Piero’s friends met in Florence to discuss plans to bring him back to Florence, with Lamberto as a go-between carrying messages to and fro. In the early years of his exile, Piero had described himself in letters to the government and to his cousins as a good citizen who only wanted to be treated fairly and allowed to return home. But after 1497 everyone was afraid of contagion and we have to rely on the reports of ambassadors, merchants and spies to discover his movements. They show how high the stakes were in a conflict that pitted the leading families of Florence against each other.