In 1234, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) called for a crusade to exterminate heretics in Bosnia, a call that he would repeat in 1238. In this chapter, I argue that the Bosnian crusade(s) of the 1230s was/were launched not against the adherents of a particular doctrine but against a place, one which was thought to be an especial incubator of heretical…[Read more]

This chapter examines how historians of the Franciscan order have created androcentric and teleological histories of the order based on hagiographic narratives of origin, and shows how we might better understand these hagiographic texts as products of the contexts in which they were produced.

In this chapter, I complicate the image of women religious as either authoritative and agentive or submissive and oppressed, with reference to the relationships between royal women, the papacy, and the Franciscan order in Bohemia and the Polish duchies. Using the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century evidence for these relationships, I argue…[Read more]