Overview

The present study examines the conception of poverty in the early medieval period. It especially focuses on the poor relief by the Merovingian bishops and particularly on the religious and legal foundations of their care. Drawing on contemporaneous historiographical, hagiographical as well as epigraphical source material, this study concludes that the concept of poverty is kept surprisingly open and is in part even deliberately broadened to provide the bishops with numerous argumentative avenues to legitimize their power with recurse to their care activities. The measures of episcopal care for the poor that can thereby be delineated is shown to exceed any of the traditional exempla and are revealed to be an essential component of early medieval episcopal rule.

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9783799567732

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