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1. Francis and Beginnings Francis of Assisi was born in 1181/82, died on October 3, 1226, and was canonized on July 15, 1228; his feast day is October 4. Baptized Giovanni, he was the son of a cloth merchant, Pietro Bernardone, who knew France well through business journeys and thus called his son Francesco. He was expected to carry on his father’s trade but preferred to seek social advancement. A crisis in his life led him to renounce the world in 1206 and to gather a brotherhood around him. Innoce…

From the 13th century male and female tertiaries have existed within religious orders. They are a closely related “third,” or lay, order (besides the “first” and “second” orders, usually referring respectively to orders of men and of women; Clergy and Laity). They came into being in the 12th and 13th centuries when popular religious movements grew up in the towns. They are parallel to the 12th-century conversi (i.e., lay brothers) of the older orders, but adapted now to the city orders, especially the mendicants, which became common from 1200 onward. Tertiarie…

The Inquisition (13th-19th cent.) was a process developed by the Latin church to detect and judge baptized heretics and their supporters so as to protect the divine world order and the eternal salvation of believers. It was a typical manifestation of medieval church history (Middle Ages 2) and came under criticism in principle from humanism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, which was later accepted by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Efforts focused on torture to secure “voluntary” confess…

Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola (1491–1556) was the founder and first general of the Society of Jesus (1541–56), the Jesuits. As a Basque nobleman, Ignatius underwent a courtly-knightly education (1506–16), then served from 1518 as an officer of the viceroy of Navarre. On May 20, 1521, his leg was shattered during the French siege of Pamplona, and while recovering at Castle Loyola, he read religious writings (esp. the Vita Christi by Ludolf of Saxony, also biographies of saints) and experienced the initial religious turn of mind that would lead him to his future call…

[German Version] OP (c. 1261/1262–1331). From 1307 to 1323, he was inquisitor of Toulouse, from 1324 bishop of Lodève (Languedoc). He was a theological teacher and a productive author (hagiographer, historiographer). His Practica officii inquisitionis (written 1314–1324) sometimes offers precise information concerning the doctrines and the mentality of the heretics in the situation of persecution and attests to the beginnings of the extension of the inquisition to popular superstitions (sorcery). Kurt-Victor Selge Bibliography Bernard Gui et son monde, CFan 16, 1981.

[German Version] (1857: baron; Aug 25, 1791, Korbach – Nov 28, 1860, Bonn) was a Prussian scholar and diplomat (1818–1838 in Rome, 1839–1841 in Bern, 1841–1854 in London) who, after the Revolution of 1848, attempted to promote the development of more liberal church and state policies in close contact with England. Bunsen was a highly educated liberal with an ambitious vision which he only partially succeeding in realizing (English-Prussian ¶ Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841, a critical revision of the Luther Bible for the congr…

[German Version] Since c. 1180, Albigenses has been an occasional special designation for the Cathari who appeared in the city of Albi, then employed more generally for all the Cathari in the southern French duchy of Toulouse, esp. since the “Albigensian Crusade” of 1209–1249, which resulted in the reestablishment of the sovereignty of the French king over the Languedoc until 1229. Remnants of the Cathars continued to exist in the Pyrenees until c. 1320, although they were no longer called Albigenses. Kurt-Victor Selge Bibliography P. Belperron, La croisade contre les Albigeois e…

[German Version] (died after 1535), an Observant Franciscan, was made lector of Scripture of their Leipzig monastery in 1520 and guardian of Halle in 1524. From 1529 to 1532, he served as provincial of the Saxon Province of the Holy Cross. He traveled to Rome in 1523 and 1526. In 1520, he published his Super apostolica sede, entering the controversy over the papal primacy and the nature of the church that had been unleashed by the Leipzig disputation. The work attracted attackers (including A. K…

[German Version] (Adamians). A type of heretic encountered in Early Church authors that corresponds to no historically identifiable persons. Since Epiphanius, it refers primarily to nude worship in subterranean cult sites called “Paradise.” The primal purity presumably sought after had ascetic significance, also certain eschatological elements, but was underst…

[German Version] (UB; from 1828, the University of Friedrich-Wilhelm, since 1949, Humboldt University [HUB]) was founded in 1809 and began offering classes in 1810/1811. In 1879, a Technical College (since 1946, Technical University, TU) was founded, and in 1948, during the Berlin blockade, the “Free University” (FU). The new “General Educational Institute in …