Conclusion

The natural tension between institutional and informal sources of power has always been a creative source of reflection and rejuvenation in Christian religious life. In the high and late Middle Ages, that tension could easily erupt into conflict, as church and state developed more intricate machineries of government, while larger sections of the population gained access to education and writing. For the church, which placed increased emphasis on teaching by clerical magisterium, informal religious life posed special problems, made even more acute in the thirteenth century by the rise of beguines and female tertiaries, which added questions of gender to the complex issues of authority and orthodoxy, knowledge of the divine, and moral purity in a material world.655 Nonetheless, some contemporaries heralded the new lay religiosity with confidence and optimism. As James of Vitry famously wrote:

We do not consider religious only those who renounce the world and go over to a religious life, but we can also call regulars all the faithful of Christ who serve the Lord under the evangelical rule and who live in an orderly way under the one highest and supreme Abbot.656

In this holistic vision, unity trumped division, and mutual influence rather than dispute was the norm. Even if historians do not share that perspective, they acknowledge that the efflorescence of informal religious life in this age helped to diffuse among broad segments of society concepts and practices that once were the purview of monks alone. By the end of the Middle Ages, a penitential ideology, the principles of asceticism and voluntary poverty, meditation on the Hours of the Passion, and of course spiritual literacy had become integral parts of lay religiosity.