This is a fine, fine book, worth reading for its contributions to scholarship, and deserving a discussion of its conceptual framework. To summarise it chapter-by-chapter would be tedious; this review will therefore limit itself to highlighting its strong points and pondering, alas too briefly, on its theoretical limitations.
Notwithstanding the title, Bain reaches back to late antique and early medieval commentaries, which enable him to show how far twelfth- and thirteenth-century exegesis was different. During the Middle Ages, the several Gospel passages dealing with wealth and poverty tended to be commented upon independently of one another. They thus had their own traditions of interpretation, and provided different models for different status groups, including clerics, monks, laymen and the actual poor. Exegesis very much erased the latter group until the twelfth century, which was also the point when voluntary poverty was ‘invented’. In the earlier period, an individual monk's renunciation of wealth signalled obedience and grounded lordship in heaven. Poverty was not in itself a value, for what mattered was the inner attitude to possession, nor were the actual poor a real topic. Clerical possession, from initially being allowed, soon became a right.
In the twelfth century the category of the ‘voluntary poor’ makes an appearance (the Cistercians in particular so self-define themselves) and upon this ground a claim to superiority vis-à-vis older monasticism and powerful laymen. Simultaneously, the schools insist anew on actual poverty (including Christ's), and yet extend the approval of clerical administration of wealth to rich laymen. In dialogue with Giacomo Todeschini, Bain reveals that while high medieval Gospel exegesis did approve of the management of wealth, it nowhere promoted the increase of wealth. No pre-Calvinist capitalism here, then.
Bain oscillates between his school's neo-Marxist synthesis (more on this later) and precise awareness of diversity in learned medieval exegesis. Franciscan and Dominican exegetical understandings of poverty, wealth and charitable giving, which are here presented convincingly, could not be more different from one another. Franciscans were radical in their rejection of possessions; they identified themselves de facto as the sole legitimate recipients of charitable giving and tended to forget the real needy (here Bain agrees with Kenneth Wolf's polemical The poverty of riches); and they placed a clear barrier between themselves as a elite with ‘authority’ (here, as too often, Bain also speaks of ‘domination’) and the laity. Dominicans also claimed superiority, but more along a continuum that did not separate them from the laity; and they were more accepting of wealth.
Another substantial thesis of this book is that Gospel exegesis was not a laboratory for new positions; it tended rather to refract those elaborated in other genres. Its audience was principally an internal, clerical one (one wonders then about how this meshes with the thesis that exegesis prepared positions for preaching). Even for Peter the Chanter (whom historians consider the most radical Parisian moral theologian), Gospel commentaries focused on ‘the distinction between clergy and laity, more than [on] any in-depth reflection on what sort of lending laymen might be permitted’ (p. 298). ‘Distinction’ (here we come to the critique): in what this reviewer considers a form of risky incest between Bourdieu's sociology and medieval intellectuals' practice, the scholastic art of finely parsing out the meaning of words and texts, distinctio, served consciously the aim of keeping the status barrier between clerics (or monks) and the laity, the French distinction [sociale]. Like Dominique Iogna-Prat and his circle, Bain had better think again about the nature of ‘domination’ and ‘system’, and distinguish [sic] more carefully between willed, explicit strategies and the (potential) effects of a discourse in the Foucaldian sense of the term. Bain, for instance, posits an intentional combination of ‘protection’ and ‘guilt-trip induction (culpabilisation)’ (p. 276), ensuring domination. More tentatively, Bain states first that the priority given in the thirteenth century to ‘spiritual alms’ (for example, baptism, conversion, self-judgement) over material alms reduces the importance of physical acts of mercy, because ‘the point is to strengthen the place of the Church [which dispenses these ‘spiritual’ mercies] in society’ (p. 322); in the following sentences, however, this ‘stake’ (‘enjeu’) no longer sounds intentional. On another topic, Bain writes that ‘one of the consequences if not stake (enjeu)’ of an interest in distinguishing voluntary and involuntary poor. Consequences and stakes are indeed not the same; we have here a revealing moment that puts the finger on this book's slippage between systemic results and what is (to unpack here the French term enjeu) waged and put in play.
Bain, on the basis of excellent textual analysis, and with reliable results, has chosen to force his conclusions into the Marxist structuralist model initially suggested, and brilliantly so, by Alain Guerreau, and since then pushed by Iogna-Prat's circle. Variations among exegetes all become variations within a single, unitary ideological structure and with a single aim – to preserve the domination of the ‘ecclesial institution’. Given that the ecclesia was par excellence the medieval form for totality, this is either false or self-evident. A longer review would be necessary to discuss this model's limits and major weaknesses; let it just be said here that it impoverishes the ideological diversity that Bain himself documents and that it is guided by a hermeneutics of suspicion. The reviewer's dissenting opinion, however, does not diminish his appreciation for the quality of this work and the substantial results therein presented.
