Saint Dominic and His Times

This definitive study of Saint Dominic and his life's work is told in full, brilliantly documented context of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe. An original contribution to our understanding of the life and manners of the time, and a masterful account of the founding of the Order, Saint Dominic is also a full and always interesting biography of one of the great saints of the Church, Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221). Written according to the very highest standards of historical research and scholarship, it should take its place at once as the standard life.

A key factor in the transformation of life in thirteenth-century Europe is to be found in the new religious orders that were at the same time a cause and an effect of the radical changes that took place. Directing these fountainheads of Christian activity were their foundersprovidential men who grasped intuitively (the Church would add, under grace) the needs of the age, and strove to satisfy them in a Christian manner. Among them, it was the role of Saint Dominic to provide the intellectual perspective that would enable the Church to interpret the age to itself, and to keep within the Church the energies of the human spirit, bent at the opening of the thirteenth century on raising new questions as to the relations of man to the universe in which he lived.

On these pages, Vicaire shows the type of religious society that Dominic envisioneda society influenced by the ideas then current: the popular movement to communal life; the appearance and influence of lay preachers; the demand for learned preaching to offset heretical inroads, and the evolution of the role of the local clergy as they took on some of the functions previously exercised by the episcopacy. The notion of a religious order exclusively committed to the apostolic life conceived by Dominic as a means to counteract contemporary heretical movements, fulfilled a real need in the Church.