Die diskoers oor armoede in die sentrale en latere Middeleeue

The discourse on poverty in the central and later Middle Ages This article aims to analyse the discourse on poverty in the central and later Middle Ages. Poverty is therefore not surveyed merely as a historical-economic category but is analysed by considering idea-historical medieval views on “extreme scarcity”, or the way poverty was conceptualised in these last two stages of the Middle Ages. According to this analysis, this discourse on poverty manifests itself in five distinct phases. Against the backdrop of the early medieval understanding of poverty as “contingent” – the result of one or more “accidental” factors – a first discursive development took place in the second half of the 10th century. As a result of revolutionary developments in agriculture and commerce, the “new poor” slowly developed into a “class” of agricultural and manual labourers whose socio-historical position eventually had to be drastically revised from the late 11th century. A subsequent conceptual development, predominantly theological and juridical by nature and relying on a relatively unassuming yet crucial distinction between “owner” and “servant” ( dominus and servus ), replaced the articulated conceptual register of the poverty discourse of the early Middle Ages. From the 5th to the 10th centuries poverty was understood to be the result of accidens or accidental factors, but now it was reduced to a mere relation. Poverty now became a “problem” that had to be addressed as effectively as possible, employing this basic and reductionist distinction. Secondly, indicate group of individuals considerations, was the eventual result of the historical development of ideas about poverty in the central and later Middle Ages. What once was considered to be the result of involuntary and contingent factors, then reduced to a (simplistic) relation, and finally defined in economic terms as a “class”, was thus ultimately brought under discursive control as a “minority”.