Mendicants on the Margins

Mendicant orders of friars were a powerful religious movement devoted to poverty and preaching; they emerged in the early thirteenth century during the time of rapid urbanisation in western Europe and in the context of Church reforms. In 2018 a group of international scholars gathered at University College Cork to address the topic of marginalities in the current studies on mendicantism, and the volume is an outcome of that symposium. The ten essays in the collection investigate geographical, social and historiographical marginalities with regard to mendicant orders. The contributors represent disciplines of archaeology, art history, history, Irish and gender studies, with their topics geographically spanning across Europe. This thematically focused volume combines a variety of approaches and disciplines to create makes a valuable contribution to the field of mendicant studies.