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Toward the close of the fourteenth century the Dutch mystic and revival preacher Gerhard Groote inaugurated in the Low Countries the religious movement known as the Devotio Moderna or the New Piety. Forced into silence by his enemies among the clergy, the popular preacher was devoting himself to the problems of giving permanent form and organization to his scattered groups of followers when death prematurely ended his career in 1384. But the small circles of pious men and women who under his inspiration had begun to practice the common life in imitation (so they believed) of the Christians of New Testament times, found a capable leader in Florentius Radewyns, the trusted friend and disciple of Groote and the leader of the Deventer circle of Groote's followers. In 1386 some of this group, with Rade-wyn's approval, founded the monastery of Windesheim, near Zwolle. This act constituted a definite division of the Devotio Moderna into two branches. One, with Windesheim as center, became monastic in character and was knolwn after 1395 as the Congregation of the Augustinian Canons Regular of Windesheim, The other, which reflected more nearly the ideals of Groote, continued the non-monastic traditions of the parent house in Deventer and took the name of the Brethren of the Common Life. The Congregation of Windesheim spread rapidly and numbered in the course of the fifteenth century many houses in the Low Countries and in Germany. The Brethren of the Common Life, on the other hand, because of their refusal to take monastic vows and because of their insistence upon manual labor as the chief means of financial support, encountered determined opposition from the regular clergy and therefore could not rival the development of their more acceptable brothers of Windesheim.

La clerecía regular desempeñó un papel de primer orden en los conflictos de la Castilla bajomedieval. Este artículo analiza el papel de las comunidades religiosas en los conflictos internos y guerras exteriores de la Corona, tanto su presencia en las mismas del lado de uno de los dos bandos en litigio, como su papel de árbitros en las disputas. Abordaremos también la contribución económica de los monasterios y conventos a la causa bélica, así como el papel intercesor que desempeñaron algunos religiosos u objetos litúrgicos albergados en ciertos monasterios. Finalmente, nos referiremos al empleo de los edificios monásticos y conventuales como lugares de refugio y asilo durante las contiendas, la firma de acuerdos en sus muros o su empleo para la construcción de bastidas y otras infraestructuras bélicas necesarias para llevar a cabo las campañas.

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

When the members of the First Estate elected their deputies to the Estates General, they did so for the most part in one stage, like the nobles. The parish priests, almost all of whom were commoners in their social origins, met with the bishops in an assembly for the electoral district (bailliage or senechaussee), to write a cahier expressing their wishes and elect the deputies who were to carry this document to the Estates General. At this electoral meeting were also delgates from communities of regular clergy and from the canons.

The archives of French Catholic secular women's orders have been known to historical scholars, if at all, as an inaccessible treasure or as a forbidding labyrinth. Now a guide to them has become availableCharles Molette's Guide des sources de l'histoire des congregations feminines franraises de vie active (Paris: editions de Paris, 1974), and it will be an indispensable tool to scholars interested in the history of French education, social work, Catholic proselytism, and delivery of health care. The French diocesan archives were inventoried in the 1960s, and a guide published in 1971 (Jacques Gadille, Guide des archives diocesaines frangaises [Paris, 1971]), but work on secular archival material lagged. The holdings of secular women's orders, the Abbe Molette believed, were most urgently in need of a survey, for the lack of qualified personnel-the lack of a scholarly appreciation of their holdings, in fact-threatened the loss of these treasures to the fireplace, the dustbin, the mice. Some 400 secular women's orders, with about 100,000 members, now hold the keys to this historic source material. In the preface to Molette's volume Guy Dubosq, director general of French Archives, appeals to religious houses and persons to preserve their documents, considered as private property since the separation of Church and state, to inventory them, and to render them accessible to scholars. He promises the government's "perfectly objective collaboration" to ensure the preservation of this segment of the "historic French patrimony." In Molette's Guide an "Historical Introduction" of 100 pages precedes the 270-page "Sources and Bibliography." This learned introduction explains the astounding multiplicity and variety of active women's orders in France. In 1860, for example, "there were 4,932 communities attached to 922 authorized congregations, . . . and 2,870 unauthorized communities attached to some 250 unauthorized congregations." Local initiative in founding orders was encouraged throughout the centuries by men of the regular clergy, members of