Focusing on the theme of property and community, this study offers a new account of the origins of fifteenth-century Observant reform in the monasteries and canonries of the southern Empire. Through close readings of unpublished texts, it traces how ideas about reformed community emerged, both beyond and within the religious orders, in the era of the Council of Constance. Focusing on reform among monks and canons in Bavaria and Austria to 1450, it then shows how those ideas were applied in practice, through reforming visitation and through a devotional culture steeped in the a oenew pietya of the day. These considerations allow the Observant Movement to offer fresh perspectives on the history religious community, reform, and the church in the fifteenth century.

Ever since the time of Francis of Assisi, a commitment to voluntary poverty has been a controversial aspect of religious life. This volume explores the interaction between poverty and religious devotion in the mendicant orders between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. While poverty has often been perceived more as a Franciscan than as a Dominican emphasis, this volume considers its role within a broader movement of evangelical renewal associated with the mendicant transformation of religious life. At a time of increased economic prosperity, reformers within the Church sought new ways of encouraging identification with the person of Christ. This volume considers the paradoxical tension between voluntary poverty as a way of emulating Christ and involuntary poverty as situation demanding a response from those with the means to help the poor. Drawing on history, literature and visual arts, it explores how the mendicant orders continued to transform religious life into the time of the renaissance. The papers in this volume are organised under three headings, prefaced with an introductory essay by the editors: Poverty and the Rule of Francis, exploring the interpretation of poverty in the Franciscan Order; Devotional Cultures, considering aspects of devotional life fostered by mendicant religious communities, Franciscan, Augustinian and Dominican; Preaching Poverty, on the way poverty was promoted and practiced within the Dominican Order in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.

This is a revised edition of a seminal work on the nature of underdevelopment. It includes a new foreword and appendixes on the significance of plantations to Third World economies and the contribution that George Beckford made to Caribbean economic thought.

The author describes his vision for an innovative business model that would combine the power of free markets with a quest for a more humane, egalitarian world that could help alleviate world poverty, inequality, and other social problems.

A treatise on the questions of why poverty accompanies economic and technological progress and why economies exhibit a tendency toward cyclical boom and bust. George uses history and deductive logic to argue for a radical solution focusing on the capture of economic rent from natural resource and land titles.