The purpose and intention of this handbook is to offer an analysis of the term mendicancy and to present an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to the phenomenon of religious mendicancy in the central and later middle ages. It provides a contextualized guide that will introduce the central issues in contemporary scholarship regarding the mendicant orders. This project approaches the controversies from a multitude of angles and unites in one volume the insights of different disciplines such as social and intellectual history, literary analysis, and theology.