Constructing Dynastic Franciscan Identities in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies
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Constructing Dynastic Franciscan Identities in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies Kirsty Ann Day Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of History August 2015 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Kirsty Ann Day to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ©2015 The University of Leeds and Kirsty Ann Day i Acknowledgements First, I’m not sure that I will ever be able to thank my supervisors, Professor Emilia Jamroziak and Dr Melanie Brunner, enough for their guidance, patience, and encouragement. I should, however, like at the very least to express my gratitude for their wise insights and perspectives on my project, and for the fact that they always shared these with kindness and good humour. My thesis is much stronger than it would have been without them, and I am a far more confident academic. Dr Amanda Power sparked my interest in medieval history and all things Franciscan, and I would like to thank her for her support of my endeavours beyond my undergraduate degree, as well as for her help in devising the initial proposal for this project. Dr Marta Cobb, Dr William Flynn, and Dr Iona McCleery should be thanked here too for their valuable advice on various areas of academia. I have received financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and am very grateful for this. The research for this project was funded by the AHRC’s block-grant scholarship. The AHRC also funded my research placement in the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as part of their International Placement Scheme, as well as my archival research in Wrocław. I would like here to acknowledge also the financial support of the School of History at the University of Leeds, which has funded several of my trips to conferences and libraries. I am indebted to the staff at the following libraries for their patience and diligence: the Brotherton Library at Leeds, the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Martin Luther King Jr Public Library (Washington, DC), the Catholic University of America Library, and the Wrocław University Library. The 2013–14 cohort of the Library of Congress’s Kluge fellows and the directors of the Kluge Center should also be thanked for their insights, questions, and for making my experience of researching in DC so enjoyable. On this note, I wish to thank Lydia Angharad Morgan and Rebecca Wright in particular. Isabel Blake must also be thanked for housing me during my visits to the British Library, as well as for convincingly feigning enthusiasm in the ‘letters of the kings of Bohemia’. The Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds has provided a very supportive research environment for this project. I am grateful for the friendship and support of the IMS’s postgraduate community and wish to thank a few of them especially: Fr Matthew Beckmann ii and Dr Rene Hernandez Vera, my fellow members of ‘Team Franciscan’ (Matthew must be thanked also for reading parts of the thesis); Dr Isabella Bolognese and Dr Audrey Thorstad, by far the greatest kind of thesis companions; Genoveva Castiblanco Garcia and Richard Low, the best honorary members of the IMS; and Dr Eleanor Warren and Dr Kate Wiles, who made sure that I didn’t metamorphose into one of the enclosed subjects that I study in the process of writing this thesis. Above all others, I want to thank my parents and my sister for all that they have done for me. iii Abstract This thesis examines the construction of female Franciscan dynastic identities in Bohemia and the Polish duchies in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Franciscan studies, the evidence produced on Franciscan nuns is still treated as marginal to our understanding of the order. Histories of nuns within the order are still based on anachronistic hagiographic chronologies, which promote teleologic metanarratives that portray the experiences of the hagiographic Francis of Assisi as the norm. This androcentric bias is matched by the neglect of evidence associated with non- western-European subjects. This has occurred in part because hagiography-driven histories promote the friar who begs in Italian town squares as the default Franciscan identity, and in part because of the twentieth-century political division of Europe into a West and an East. The case studies examined in this thesis — communities of nuns that were located in Prague, Zawichost, Wrocław, Stary Sącz, and Gniezno — were not only female and Central European, they were also linked closely with the Bohemian and Polish Přemyslid and Piast dynasties. My thesis breaks down the metanarratives that have excluded Central-European nuns from the order’s history, and explains how and why the Franciscan and dynastic penitential models came together in this geographical region at this point in time. The Franciscan penitential model promoted an uncompromising renunciation of the world that would seem to have excluded the participation of ruling dynasties. However, it also encouraged people such as the Přemyslids and Piasts, in whole or part, to exchange their earthly for heavenly goods, and thus created strong links between ruling dynasties and the Franciscan order. When examined using a methodology based on sociological models of gift exchange, as opposed to one which emphasises linear progression, the evidence for my case- study communities emerges as central, not peripheral, to our understanding of the Franciscan order as a penitential movement created to save all souls. iv Contents Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................i Abstract.................................................................................................................................... iii List of illustrative material........................................................................................................vi Abbreviations...........................................................................................................................vii Note on names, titles, pronouns, and translations.................................................................. viii Introduction..............................................................................................................................1 Case studies and source material ..............................................................................................4 Geographical scope of the thesis ...............................................................................................8 Literature review and methodology...........................................................................................8 I. Reassessing the institutional development of the early Franciscan nuns as portrayed in twentieth and twenty-first century historiography.............................................................28 I.1 The evidence of Jacques de Vitry.......................................................................................29 I.2 Curial involvement 1218–1228 ..........................................................................................37 I.3 The year 1228 .....................................................................................................................56 I.4 Thomas of Celano’s Life of St Francis and the Ordo Sancti Damiani...............................62 I.5 The Order of San Damiano in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies .......................................67 I.5.1 Agnes of Bohemia and the Prague monastery.................................................................67 I.5.2 Zawichost, Wrocław, Stary Sącz and Gniezno ................................................................70 I.7 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................73 II.The treatment of the material world and the rejection of earthly ties in the early Franciscan documents ...........................................................................................................75 II.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................75 II.2 Renunciation before the Franciscans.................................................................................76 II.3 Articulating the world in the Franciscan tradition before the Regula bullata...................83 II.4 The Regula bullata and Rule for Hermitages....................................................................95 II.5 The ‘Hugolinian’ Form of Life, the Benedictine Rule, and the ‘Privilege of Poverty’ ....99 II.6 Thomas of Celano’s Life of St Francis............................................................................104 II.7 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................106 III. The sacred exchange and dynastic Franciscan identities in the records of donors and donations...............................................................................................................................109 v III.1 Transforming property: