Integrazione giuridica tra la Prima e la Seconda Regola.

The author explores the relationship between the "first" and the "second" Rules of the Order of Friars Minor, in the key of "juridical integration" or completion. He identifies a process of legislative maturing of a wholly new type of religious life as it was being tested in the daily experience of those professing it. In the process the author reviews, not only certain key specific elements in the Rules, but also questions of wider - indeed vast - application such as the nature of the authority exercised in religious institutes and the nature of the laws that govern them.