Église, richesse et pauvreté dans l'Occident médiéval: l'exégèse des Évangiles aux XIIe-XIIIe siècles

This work studies the calls to poverty and the warnings against wealth that appear frequently in Biblical texts, and the way these ideas are reflected in European society of the 12th and 13th centuries. Above all, the author is interested in the elaboration by monks and clerics of the ideal of voluntary poverty. How was this discourse articulated against the background of social realities? Did the exaltation of poverty result in the hostility of the wealthy? In the condemnation of lucrative activities? In a reconsideration of the image of the poor? This work suggests that this was not the case, and that instead, the essential preoccupation of these exegetical writers was to place the church at the heart of society, at the center of the exchange of both material and spiritual goods, and to focus attention on the rich, even at the risk of forgetting the poor.