The Lord is my Portion: Religious Poverty and Canon Law in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Little attention has been paid to how canon law interpreted religious poverty, an influential ideal in twelfth and thirteenth-century Christian Europe. Given that many involved in the apostolic poverty movement were educated in canon law, this omission needs to be addressed. Gratian held a reformist view, advocating for a secular clergy largely without private property, but subsequent canonists abandoned this ideal as impractical, confining poverty to monks and canons regular. This weakening of the ideal continued as Decretalists gradually allowed popes to relax vows of poverty. This canonistic trend is vital context for later doctrinal conflicts around apostolic poverty.