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Hello. Quote, just as it's better to light up others than to shine alone, it is better to share the fruits of one's contemplation with others than to contemplate in solitude.

Thus, St. Thomas Aquinas describes his vocation not only as a teacher but also as a Dominican friar and philosopher at the University of Paris.

In the 13th century, the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were a great force for change in Catholic Europe.

They thrived in the emerging towns and cities of the high middle ages, leading crusades and changing the way the church dealt with heretics.

These two orders were also responsible for reconciling classical and Christian philosophy. Their studies of Aristotle and Islamic scholars paved the way for the Renaissance. They changed the curriculum at the Universes of Paris and Oxford.

So how did these orders come to dominate the spiritual and academic life of the 13th century? How did they manage to accumulate such huge wealth while professing allegiance to lives of poverty?

With me to discuss the grey fries and the black fries, is Henrietta Leiser, medieval historian and fellow of St. Peter's College Oxford, Antony Kenny, philosopher and former master of Baylor College Oxford, and Alexander Murray, medieval historian and emeritus fellow of University College Oxford.

Henrietta Leiser, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, their grey fries and the black fries were the first mendicant orders in the Catholic church. How did they emerge?

They emerge from a background of a totally changed Europe which has become much more city-based rather than agriculturally focused.

They don't, of course, come out of the blue. I mean, it seems as if that's the case, but actually from the late 10th century, I think one can say, the traditional Benedictine where life had increasingly been challenged.

This was no longer seen as appropriate really for the needs of this new mercantile class.

The traditional Benedictine life being.

Being based very much on big, rural monasteries and which were no longer appropriate, which didn't really serve the needs of the laity.

From the late 10th century on, you've got itinerant preachers who want to suggest a different way of life, one which is less focused on vicarious party and more really encouraging people to become penitents, to find their own way of living a Christian life.

It's in the world that you no longer have to need, you don't have to leave the world in longer to become a good Christian. You can do it yourself with guidance and it's precisely that guidance that the mendicants try to provide.

It's interesting to probe just a bit more at the roots of that, because you have these great ambits, the Sistertians, the Benedictine.

And they were part of the Sistertians were farmers and they were part of the world in that sense meeting other farmers and so on and so forth.

And so was there anything else springing this need forward? Is there a recovery of belief in the gospels or something?

Well, of course the Sistertians themselves are in a way, a break away from the Benedictine monasteries of the kind of 9th and 10th century.

The Sistertians of paradoxical order in the same way that the mendicants become, because the Sistertians originally try to leave wealth behind them to set up in rural places and they become very rich as sheep farmers, but that isn't really their original intention.

And they too, like the mendicants, are much more concerned with the individual seeking salvation rather than being a great order that is simply praying for the needs of others.

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