Poveri dentro il mercato. La contabilità del convento francescano di Avignone alla fine del medioevo

Poors within the market. Book-keeping in the Franciscan convent of Avignon at the end of the Middle Ages
The analysis of the most important historiographical contributions that we can read in the book of Lenoble, L’exercice de la pauvreté, is the starting point for the discussion. Lenoble’s volume is the fruit of a large investigation on Franciscan, ecclestiastical and civic archives which give us a wider and deeper perspective in studying the economy of the Franciscan convents. We focused our attention about data presented in the registers, the composition of budgets and the different, complex meanings of administration and managing the Franciscan poverty. A voluntary poverty which was thought, observed and realized in the convent of Avignon, and on his papers, between 1359 and 1478. The discussion is enlarged along three different sides. The crucial importance of these sources for the history of the construction of pauperistic identity cultivated by the Franciscan Order. By comparison the results coming out from Lenoble’s book with the thesis that mantains the Franciscan Rule is a “human life form”, a modus vivendi “absolutely subtracted from the grip of the Right” and, at the same time, a proposal for “a use of world without any form of appropriation”. The relationship between the administration of the Minoritic poverty, the rules that shaped it and the ascetic-spiritual dimension of the Franciscanism.

Parole chiave: Gestione della povertà francescana; Realtà economiche cittadine; Credito e bilanci nei conventi francescani

Keywords: Franciscan poverty administration; Urban economy; Credit and budgets in Franciscan convents