dawn of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the mendicant* orders—the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose members (often called friars) stepped out from the cloister and, like the first generations of ascetics, took to wandering in towns and countryside, ministering and preaching and begging for alms to sustain themselves. Monasticism was in a sense returning to its roots—with a welter of different approaches, suited to local tastes and the whim of devout and sometimes eccentric individuals who sought their own idiosyncratic relationship with God and did not feel the need to sign up to a
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