Guardians of the Threshold. The Minor Friars as guarantors of social perimeter (13th century)

Abstract

The contribution analyses Minor Friars’ role in pacifying the civitas. Minor Friars’ charisma appeared as an antidote to scandalum and a preliminary to the readmission of the townspeople inside the circuit of the fides. This particular disposition, which was used by Franciscan texts since the beginning to substantiate the fratres’ sanctity, is connected to their capacity to offer themselves as successful civic mediators, even though they were a religious group, then an Order, whose distinguishing feature consisted in their ecclesiological and social inferiority (minoritas). The reasons for such an attitude can be traced back to Minor Friars’ political ability to try out their closeness to the ecclesial and urban power connecting it to the experimentation of the perimeter of the civitas, which was patent even from the location of the first settlements: from the social viewpoint, this experimentation expressed itself in contact with the pauperes, the marginal and the wicked. Thus, Minor Friars became an element of composition of different social poles managing to mediate the relation between fama and infamia, between potentes and pauperes