History Research

The Franciscan Rule dedicated its followers to wandering in the world as pilgrims and strangers, and they rapidly developed a precocious global network, yet the Franciscans’ contribution to global history is more complex than the story of their early global presence. Following a Rule of poverty, Franciscans voluntarily aligned themselves with the margins, refocusing concepts of distance and inverting landscapes of the strange and the familiar. Committed to becoming strangers wherever they found themselves, they developed a unique perspective on the world that enabled an ‘in oculis eorum’ (seeing as others). This article contends that the Franciscans’ socio-religious commitment to their Rule of poverty which made them strangers in this world helps explain their particular perspective on the world and its people. Using the frameworks of Renaissance history and of the Franciscan institution it connects the Franciscans’ contributions to descriptions of the people of the world and their languages between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and demonstrates that Renaissance projects not only focused upon the margins of classical texts in Europe, but a range of physical and metaphysical margins.