Franciscan Studies

538 BOOK REVIEWS of chaplains resulted in bequests; some chaplains chose to be buried in the Greyfriars, reflecting patterns elsewhere in the English province. The loss of the English province’s once rich libraries and archives during the religious revolution of the sixteenth century generally reduces historians to a reliance on a range of external sources, such as the papal records, the episcopal registers, the probate registers, the wardrobe accounts, chronicles and miscelleaneous sources. Despite these limitations, Dr Röhrkasten has assembled a vast amount of material and is to be warmly commended on his reconstruction of aspects of the friars’ lives, ministry and economy. This monograph teems with many and varied illustrations of the friars’ lives in the capital city. The varied sources are interpreted judiciously and explained with clarity. The study, which is enriched by its awareness of patterns among the different mendicant communities, is to be allocated a place among the best monographs regarding the mendicants and should be ranked alongside Dr Andrew Little’s The Grey Friars in Oxford. St Edmund’s College, Cambridge MICHAEL ROBSON, OFM CONV. Bert Roest. Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent. (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 117) Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004. Pages: XXI + 673. Some scholars have a particular talent to synthesize large amounts of information and provide amazing research tools for others. Bert Roest is among those. In 2000, he published A History of Franciscan Education (c.1210-1517) as the eleventh volume of the series Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2000. Pages: X + 405). Four years later, Bert Roest has given us a volume of some seven hundred pages on the literature of religious instruction in the Franciscan Order from the early thirteenth century to the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It is sufficient to look at the 62 pages of bibliography of secondary sources, the 24 pages of index of authors, and the 27 pages of index of works to note that the documentation covered in this book is quite impressive. BOOK REVIEWS 539 In his own words, the author intends “to present a more comprehensive overview of late medieval and Renaissance texts of religious instruction” (p. XIV), considering that this book comes somewhat as a supplement to his history of Franciscan education, which was intentionally limited to education in the classroom. With the “massive amount of material” (p. XV) presented in his new publication, Bert Roest hopes “to provide scholars with another tool to develop a more sensitive interpretative template for the religious transitions between the medieval and the early modern period” (p. XX). Even though experts may and probably will find lacunas or outdated information in some particular field, one cannot deny that the author has achieved his goal of suscitating new studies by offering historians of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance a new instrumentum laboris. The material of the book is organized in eight chapters. Chapter One (p. 1-119) takes a look at Franciscan preaching, viewed as religious instruction, from the beginning of the Franciscan movement in the thirteenth century to the contributions of the Observants , the Conventuals and the Capuchins. Chapter Two (p. 120-205) examines the rules, rule commentaries, and constitutions (local, provincial and general) of the Franciscan orders : Friars Minor, Poor Clares and Tertiaries. Chapter Three (p. 206-29) studies the development of regulations and treatises for the initial formation of novices. Although this chapter is relatively short, it is worth noting how the Capuchin Order, from its beginnings, dedicated much attention and regulations to the religious instruction of postulants and novices. Chapter Four (p. 230-313) turns to the pastoral ministry of the Franciscan friars, focusing on works of religious instruction par excellence , Franciscan catechisms. It also includes a look at a tradition initiated by Francis of Assisi himself and continued by others: religious poetry – the laude – as religious instruction. Chapter Five (p. 314-55) addresses another part of the Friars’ pastoral ministry and studies the confession handbooks or manuals to help confessors in the practice of their ministry and the repentant sinners in the preparation of their confession. Chapter Six (p. 356-73...