Pope John XXII and his Franciscan Cardinal

This book provides a major reinterpretation of the medieval theological controversy over the poverty of Christ, popularized by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, but long important for intellectual, political, and legal history. Patrick Nold focuses on the early fourteenth-century cardinal, Bertrand de la Tour, a man apparently torn between the pope who was his patron and the Franciscan Order to which he had devoted his life. The discovery of Bertrand's significance undermines the conventional scholarly interpretation of this episode.