a scandalous and libellous book against the Mendicants. Yet this gradually died out, and the final act of the quarrel is seen in an epistle of Alexander's, December 3, 1260, authorizing the Bishop of Paris to absolve those who had incurred excommunication by keeping copies of St. Amour's book, on their surrendering them to be burned, the number of these " rebels " apparently being quite large. Still St. Amour remained steadfast in exile. He was allowed to return to Paris by Clement IV. who ascended the papal throne in 1264, and in 1266 he sent to the pontiff another book on the same theme. Clement had hastened, in 1265, to proclaim his good-will to the Mendicant Orders by a bull in which he confirmed in the amplest manner their independence of the bishops, and, as was inevitable, he rejected St. Amour's new book as filled with the old virus. William died in 1272, obstinate and unrepentant, and was honorably buried in his native village of St. Amour, though he is reputed as a heretic by all good Dominicans and Franciscans.[1]
The embers of the controversy had been rekindled in 1269 by an anonymous Franciscan who assailed St. Amour's book. Gerald of Abbeville, who is ranked with Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Robert of Sorbonne, as one of the four chief theologians of the age, replied with an attack on the doctrine of poverty and a defence of the ownership of property. Bonaventura rejoined with his "Apologia Pauperum," an eloquent defence of poverty, and the Franciscan annalists relate with natural glee how Gerard was so overcome by his adversary's logic that, under the vengeance of God, he lost the
- ↑ Ripoll I. 346, 348, 349, 352-3, 372, 375-9.— Waddingi Annal. ann. 1256, No. 38; ann. 1257, No. 1-4, 6; ann. 1259, No. 3-6; ann. 1260, No. 10.— Clement. PP. IV. Bull. Virtute conspicuos, ann. 1265. — Dupin, Bib. des Auteurs Éccles. T. X.
eh. vii.
When, in 1632, an edition ot St. Amour's works was published in Constance (Paris) the Dominicans had sufficient influence with Louis XIII. to obtain its suppression in a savage edict. All the copies were seized : to retain one was punishable with a fine of three thousand livres, and it was declared a capital offence for a bookseller to have a single copy for sale (Mosheim de Beghardis, p. 27). The "Pericula Novissimorum Temporum" had, however, been printed, with two of St. Amour's sermons, by Wolfgang of Weissenburg in his "Antilogia Papae," Basle, 1555, and this was reprinted in London in 1688, and embodied by Brown in his edition of the "Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum" in 1690.
