The Juridical Lexicon of Poverty. The Ideal of Franciscan Minors and the Law in the First Century after Francis

Abstract

The Franciscan ideal of poverty did not last but a century : from the confirmation of the Regula given by pope Honorius III (1223) until the allegation of heresy that pope John XXII (1323) launched towards anyone affirming that Christ and the Apostles had never had properties nor the possession of anything. Along the hundred years that separated the two papal provisions, the legal vocabulary annexed to the conceptualization of poverty had to face the evolution of the vocabulary of the ius commune and made the attempt to add its own definition of poverty, based on the refusal of the possession of things in the complex medieval legal system.