Flood, David, ed., Peter Olivi's Rule Commentary (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1972).

Text name(s):

Number of pages of primary source text: 187

Medieval Author(s): Peter John Olivi

Dates: 1280 - 1290

Archival Reference:

Original Language(s): Latin;

Translation: Original language included.

Translation Comments:

Geopolitical Region(s): Europe;

County/Region:

Apparatus: Index Bibliography Introduction

Comments:

The Franciscan order, founded in the early 13th century by St. Francis of Assisi, began as an order devoted to a life of poverty, begging, and preaching. Over the years, however, as the order accumulated wealth and prestige, its members came to differ on the issue of poverty: the majority, known as Conventuals, had come to terms with the order’s wealth and lived a stable, if still impoverished, lifestyle; the Spirituals, a more radical wing of the order, argued that for the religious to possess any wealth at all was antithetical to both Francis’ teaching and Christ’s. Pier John Olivi (in Latin, Petrus Ioannis Olivi) was a theologian and Spiritual who advocated a stricter understanding of poverty; he was later accused and condemned as a heretic. Contained in this volume is an edition of Peter John Olivi’s Rule Commentary, which considers questions of apostolic poverty, and the interpretation of the rule in the context of the 1280s, which saw the radical upheaval of the Franciscan order.

Introduction Summary:

The editor’s lengthy (110 pp) introduction provides a succinct overview of scholarship on Olivi, including the seminal works of Ehrle, as well as the increasing number of studies which consider Olivi as a thinker. The editor summarizes the contents of the rule commentary, and provides a discussion of the textual history, as well as of the manuscripts in which the text survives, and upon which this edition is based. He also places the rule commentary in the larger context of Olivi’s Quaestiones de Perfectione Evangelica, which are similar in tone and content to the Rule commentary, as well as of the genre of Rule commentary in the Franciscan order, and the order’s fortunes in the 1280s.

Cataloger: MCB