Place, Person, and Prayer in the Summa Halensis

: This essay argues that oratio in the Summa Halensis is best understood via the Franciscan appropriation of locus , which served in the construction and confir-mation of their communal identity in the mid-thirteenth century. The question of their place in the church and the world was subject to intense discussion both inside and outside the Minorite Order. The shift to urban convents was influenced by the monastic paradigm, but this transition did not erase the peripatetic impulse common to the Franciscan worldview. The friars preserved the concept of human beings as viatores due to several factors, including the hagiographical accounts of their founder, the rapid expansion of convents, and their diplomatic and missionary travels. In the Summa Halensis , Parisian friars engaged two philosophical-theological themes to secure the peripatetic underpinnings of their foundational story regardless of their urban emplacement. The first focused on ontological poverty, which foregrounds the movement from non-being into being as the journey into God. The second was the utilization of locus to determine the place of human beings during this passage from non-being into being. This effort reflected the friars ’ project of identification and emplacement during period of institutional transition preceding the generalate of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. exem-plum