exercise pastoral care of each monastery of Dominican nuns. This heavy pastoral
investment in the care of the order’s sisters caused anxiety among male Dominicans from
time to time. Anxiety reached a peak during the master-generalship of Conrad of
Wildeshausen (1242–52), when there was a concerted effort to dissociate the order from
its female wing. In the end, the weight assigned to the antiquity of Prouille and the
monastery of St. Sixtus in Rome, Dominic’s clear commitment to the women of these
communities, and the strict enclosure they practiced carried the day. By 1285, a Third
Order of lay Dominicans was added, who lived as much as possible in terms of the rule
and ordinances of the order, placing themselves under the spiritual direction of the Friars
Preachers.
In France, as in other parts of Europe, Dominicans showed a marked predilection for
large conventual communities. Saint-Jacques at Paris, for example, counted 120 brothers
only a few years (1223) after its foundation (1218). This predilection meant that there
developed considerably fewer convents than were to be found in the Franciscan order, the
Dominicans’ closest analogue. Moreover, it meant that Dominicans preferred large urban
centers. A medieval Latin verse had it that:
Bernardus valles, montes Benedictus amabat, Oppida Franciscus, celebres
Dominicus urbes.(“Bernard loved the valleys, Benedict the mountains. Francis the towns, Dominic the
great cities.”) In the province of France, the Dominicans had by 1250 established
themselves at Paris, Lille, Arras, Valenciennes, Amiens, Saint-Quentin, Rouen, Beauvais,
Reims, Verdun, Metz, Toul, Besançon, Langres, Troyes, Caen, Lisieux, Coutances,
Nantes, Dinan, Dijon, Le Mans, Angers, Tours, La Rochelle, Poitiers, Clermont, Lyon,
Lausanne, and Bourges. In the province of Provence, they established themselves at
Bordeaux, Bayonne, Périgueux, Limoges, Cahors, Béziers, Carcassone, Perpignan,
Narbonne, Montpellier, Le Puy, Valence, Avignon, Toulouse, Marseille, and Nice.
Dominican urban preferences were so pronounced that some have thought to be able to
follow the pattern of urbanization in 13th-century France by following the expansion of
the order.
The medieval history of the southern province is dominated by struggle with the
Cathar and Waldensian sects. Provence was home to an extraordinary number of
Dominican preachers throughout the 13th and 14th centuries; and preachers of
extraordinary gifts were essential to the task of disputing heretics effectively, since they
were not limited to the region assigned their home convent. They could go wherever
there were heretics to preach to and dispute. Popes consistently commissioned inquisitors
for southern France from the time that Gregory IX (r. 1227–34) established the papal
Inquisition (1233). Early on, popes began to favor mendicant friars for the task,
especially Dominicans. Southern France thus saw a constant stream of Dominican papal
inquisitors; one of the most scholarly Dominicans from the southern French provinces,
Bernard Gui, produced not only careful historical research but also one of the most
influential inquisitorial manuals.
In the province of France, i.e., the northern province, the Dominican experience was
rather different, being dominated by study and the looming specter of its most cel-ebrated
convent, Saint-Jacques at Paris. This is not to say that there was any lack of spiritual
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 574