This monograph takes the example of the German Franciscans to examine the role of mendicant friars in social change in the late Middle Ages.

In the later Middle Ages, the mendicant friars strove to regulate a society in a process of radical change. This happened through a combination of apparently contradictory developments– the Christianisation of individual liberties on the one hand, and the simultaneous establishment of new control mechanisms on the other. The work of the early German Franciscans presented here exemplifies the dialectics of social diversification processes that shaped Europe in the Middle Ages and later.