Thomas of Cantimpré
The last part of his life was dedicated to preaching and he undertook missions throughout the Brabant, Germany, Belgium and France: for his great success in this field, Thomas was also honored with the title of "Preacher General".
A minor work – only 105 lines – is the Hymnus de beato Jordano, written in honor of the blessed Jordan of Saxony (died 1237), a key figure of the Dominican Order.
While the passages on bees and allegorical interpretations are taken (as the author himself recounts[7]) from 'other books', Thomas takes up the matter of each exemplum "from his own experience or from contemporary oral, religious or secular sources".
With the exception of Vita Joannis abbatis primi monasterii Cantimpratensis – composed between 1224 and 1228[17] and relating to the founder and first abbot of the abbey of Cantimpré – Thomas writes mystical biographies on holy women, all linked to the territory of modern Belgium.
His mystic hagiographical works therefore represent a corpus of texts, composed roughly between 1231 and 1248, which appears as "a florilegium of lives of the holy women living around Liège":[18] through this set of hagiographic works, Thomas of Cantimpré offers "a mirror of the complexity and fluidity of the forms of religious life of the diocese of Liège".
Marie of Oignies is in fact one of the most famous beguines: she belonged to those "small republics of semi-religious women [...] protected but together controlled by the ecclesiastical authorities [...] for the creativity of their religious and devotional practices".
With this c work, he aims at proposing an ideal of Christian life: under the emblem of Marie of Oignies, in fact, the author seeks to convey how "evil is not identifiable only in infidels and heretics, but it nestles in the hearts and in the very bosom of Christianitas".
In the figure of Christina, he again sought to represent an ideal, in this case an "extreme and rarefaction model of perfection, [which] reproposes, after a millennial pause, the mystical horizons of holy madness".
[27] The 'historical' value of this Life is profoundly doubtful (as can be seen also from the comparison with the information that Jacques de Vitry gives on Christina in the Prologue of the aforementioned Vita B. Mariae Oigniensis[26]) but on the literary level for this type of texts does not count so much the 'historical' truth, but rather the model of sanctity that emerges from the work.
The Vita Margaritae was composed on commission[30] by the Dominican preacher Sigieri da Lilla certainly before 1244,[31] but probably long before that year: in fact, the tone of the story gives a "feeling of proximity and immediacy".
[32] From the impression that is given in the work, it is clear that through the figure of Margeret Thomas sought to propose an ideal of feminine devotion according to the Dominican vision; in the Life dedicated to her, in fact, Margaret represents the evidence that "female perfection is expressed in silence, in prayer and in submission".
[27] We do not want to propose a need for isolation: the blessed is indeed – again coherently with the Dominican ideals – deeply "tied to the new reality of the presence of the Preachers in cities".
[27] Here Thomas of Cantimpré clearly expresses the Dominican conception of the centrality of the female presence, which "has an irreplaceable value for the success of the mission",[33] just as stated, in the same years, by the "Master General of the Order Jordan of Saxony".
), Les frères Prêcheurs et le mouvement dévot en Flandre au XIIIe siècle, in «Archivium Fratrum Praedicatorum», XVIII, 1948, pp.
