Professor of Medieval History (Later Middle Ages) PhD project Tim Ehrmann

The dissertation project examines the mendicant mission of the 13th to 15th centuries, which led Franciscan and Dominican missionaries to the frontiers of the known world and beyond. While the Franciscans emphasized direct encounters with individuals, the Dominicans focused on dogmatic debate. In missionary practice, weaknesses in these missionary concepts quickly became apparent. Deviations from normative guidelines were often unavoidable – due, among other factors, to geographical distances, inadequate institutional support, and the necessity of adapting to local conditions. Taking this fact as its point of departure, the study explores how missionary practice and normative frameworks interacted.

The central hypothesis of the project is that (some) mendicants sent into foreign lands developed a heightened awareness of the applicability of their orders’ normative concepts. This allowed them to recognize contradictions between missionary concepts and reality and to identify areas for improvement. They sought to gain the attention of those who remained at home, to highlight conceptual weaknesses, and to propose adjustments. In doing so, they often departed from established paths of interreligious engagement and at times offered surprisingly nuanced perspectives.

These moments of reflection and subsequent reactions reveal lively negotiations over the proper course of action in the mission to non-Christians, shaped reciprocally by individuals and the collective contexts from which they emerged. The study aims to analyse the concepts developed within this framework in all their dimensions and to determine which impulses from missionary practice influenced normative discourses – and why. By adopting a comparative perspective on both orders, the project seeks to highlight the dynamic nature of negotiation processes that shaped late medieval mission strategies. This approach, combined with a more individualized perspective than has been common, promises to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of mendicant mission.