"Poor of Christ" Not So Poor: A Paradox of the Cathar Heresy
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper explores the relationship between the ideal and the practice of voluntary poverty among dissenting preachers in the 12th to 14th-century Europe who called themselves “Good Men” and were labeled as “Cathars” or simply “heretics”. I argue that the “Good Men” used the ideal of poverty and of the “apostolic life” in their self-presentation narratives but at the same time, quite paradoxically, they had very progressive attitudes to money and profit. Indeed, they practiced a specific “religious” moneymaking, sometimes in quite assertive ways. To explain this paradox, I refer to the developmental theory presented by Lester K. Little in his Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London: Paul Elek, 1978). |
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