Boni Homines

BONI HOMINES: A name borne by several monastic brotherhoods, particularly by the Grammontensians (see Grammont, Order of), the Fratres saccati, or Sack Brethren, and an order of canons regular founded in Portugal by John Vicenza (d. 1463), physician and professor at Lisbon, afterward bishop of Lamego, and later bishop of Vizeu. In 1425 Vicenza and his followers, who had made pilgrimages throughout Portugal, received the Benedictine cloister of San Salvador in Villar de Frades. They adopted the dress and statutes of the canons regular of San Giorgio in Alga, at Venice, and received papal confirmation under this title. In another house near Lisbon they received the name Canons Regular of the Congregation of St. John the Evangelist. The Boni homines of San Salvador were later included under this title. They gradually attained a strength of fourteen houses in Portugal, and also maintained missions in India and Ethiopia.

After the Minims had come into possession of the house of the Grammontensians at Vincennes they, too, came to be called bons hommes. Even at an earlier date it seems that the Minims in Paris had been contemptuously called bons hommes. The same name was also appropriated by certain heretical sects, for instance, by the Cathari (see New Manicheans) and by the Brethren of the Free Spirit. In Florence, in the thirteenth century, the twelve men elected to restore order after the withdrawal of the Ghibellines were called buoni uomini, likewise the overseers of the thirteen city districts in Rome in the fourteenth century.