Tesoro della santissima povertà : o elogio da pobreza nos Fioretti de São Francisco (Séc. XIV)

Abstract

This article addresses poverty in the context of 14th century Franciscanism. The research takes as raw material the Fioretti of San Francisco, a set of short stories about Saint Francis and its followers, of unknown authorship. The objective is to raise, classify and interpret the thematization of poverty in the reports of visions and apparitions present in the sources. The approach took as inspiration the "thick description" as formulated by Cliford Geertz (1973) and applied to historical sources by Robert Darnton (1984). In the approach, the notion of representation, formulated by the French historian Roger Chartier (1991), was used. The contribution made showed that: poverty is a capital issue in the Fioretti of São Francisco; the exaltation of poverty present in the Fioretti can be interpreted as a component of medieval Christian imagery and the traditions that influenced it; on the other hand, it is a contestation of the emerging bourgeois values, with the function of promoting one of the capital values of the Franciscan Order