This biography explores the most significant thinker of his time in his various contexts, including his family, his education and formation, as a mendicant and Dominican friar, as a mystic, as a saint.

The purpose and intention of this handbook is to offer an analysis of the term mendicancy and to present an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to the phenomenon of religious mendicancy in the central and later middle ages. It provides a contextualized guide that will introduce the central issues in contemporary scholarship regarding the mendicant orders. This project approaches the controversies from a multitude of angles and unites in one volume the insights of different disciplines such as social and intellectual history, (...) literary analysis, and theology. (shrink)