To my family for giving me life and love - Bilkent University

contact. Rosalind Brooke’s lines on Albert of Pisa, who was provincial minister
of more than five significant provinces of the Order consecutively during the
early years, points in the same direction:
“The little what we know about his attitude towards the Dominicans is
instructive in view of the later approximation of the two institutes. He
was appreciative but detached. He tried, as a Franciscan should, to
encourage friendly feeling between the two, but he was far from
regarding the Dominicans as a model that the Minors would do well to
copy.” 11
Convinced that the Dominicans cannot be used as a model, without
supporting Franciscan evidence, I have decided to disregard the Dominican
evidence entirely, and to concentrate on the reconstruction of Franciscan
educational developments solely from evidence concerning the Franciscans.
There are certainly holes in this reconstruction. However, to fill them with
Dominican evidence would not, in my opinion, be justified from a
methodological point of view. I hope the present study will serve to allow in the
future a sound comparison between the educational organizations of the two
Orders, which will reveal their differences and similarities, and give a better
answer to the question of whether it is reasonable to use a concept like
“mendicant schools”.
A second drawback of existing histories of the Franciscan model of
education has been largely to disregard its development or “evolution”. In the
discussion of many phenomena, references have been given from constitutions
over periods of 30 or 40 years, or even more, and therefore many changes have
been ignored. For example the studium philosophiae, the first foundation of
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