Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages

The Contribution of the Hungarian Sources (c.1270-c.1530)

By (author) Marie-Madeleine de Cevins

Book cover: Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages

Extent: 365, 365 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Medieval Studies, Religious Studies

Series: Europa Sacra

Series volume number: 23

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(January 2019)

ISBN: 9782503578712

Price: $138.00

In stock

Draws on Hungarian sources of the mendicant spiritual confraternity movement in order to explore the movement’s broader significance in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.


By the late Middle Ages, mendicant spiritual confraternities had developed a bad reputation. Their spiritual status was ill-identified: somewhere between requests for intercession, necrological commemoration, and pious associations. In the hands of the mendicants, they seemed to resemble what indulgences had become in the hands of the bishops and the papacy: a bait handed out to extort funds from the faithful while offering an apparently immediate access to Paradise. Thus, like indulgences, they seem to have been gradually emptied of their substance and denounced (even before Luther) as glaring evidence of the corruption of the Roman Church. Much recent scholarship has followed this negative portrait of spiritual confraternities–unless it has conflated them with other non-spiritual confraternities, or indeed ignored them altogether. This volume draws on the abundant number of letters of confraternity available from Hungarian sources in order to provide a more nuanced picture of mendicant spiritual confraternities. It sheds new light on the links between the mendicants and their supports among the laity, and emphasises the broader significance of the confraternity movement in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.

  • By (author) Marie-Madeleine de Cevins