Children of Adoption - People Fas Harvard

Children of Adoption
ured in such anti-Tudor plots as the Northern Rebellion and the Archpriest
Contr~versy.'~~ They had also been prominent among the opponents
of Henry VIII, and one of the reasons he gave for dissolving
the monasteries was a fear that monks would incite the commons to
rebe1.Iz6 (Ironically, one of the primary motivations historians now accept
for the Dissolution is the very large amount of worldly property
the crown gained thereby.)
While monachal resistance to the English king in the sixteenth century
can be explained to some extent by specific historical circumstances,
the strictly monachal doctrines that one should "Call no man
father" and that one should own things only through a common God
suggest how the resistance of liberal monks to parentarchal monarchs
is a logical and ideological extension of fraternalism. In Measure for
Measure, which explores the essential ideological basis of such a conflict
as that in sixteenth-century England, the conflict between political
authority (a parentarchal and royal duke) and fraternalistic liberty
(Brothers and Sisters) is hinted in Brother Vincentio's claim concerning
Duke Vincentio that "His subject am I not" (5.1.313).
Shakespeare's choice of the Clares rather than another order for his
play highlights property relations, for the Clares' unique privilege
concerned property. One sign of the potential subversiveness of the
vow of poverty for which Clare struggled is that adherents of the
original intents of Saint Francis were accused of heresy. Church au-
thorities regarded his goal of mendicant poverty as appropriate for
eremitic but not for conventual life, and Pope John XXII eventually
passed legislation that effectively undermined it.Iz7 Clare's special privi-
lege requires that her Sisters own nothing; this creates a potentially
subversive association of monachal poverty with such begging as that
of the mendicant orders and mere rogues.Iz8
Our very word "beg" reflects a similar association. It derives from
the names Beghard and Beguine,Iz9 which denote the men's and wom-
en's components, respectively, of a lay order established in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, subject to no rule beyond the obligation to
good works and (when members lived in a religious community) to
chastity. The Beguines and Beghards originally had no vow of pov-
erty, but they fell under the influence of the mendicant orders (which
eventually subsumed many of their communities) and of various mys-
tical and heretical movements. The name Beghard thus became asso-
ciated with groups of wandering mendicants of a physically as well as
spiritually libertine bent (hence "beggar"), who were often associated