Reginald of Orleans

Reginald of Orleans, also called Reginald of Saint-Gilles, was a French cleric and Dominican friar of the early thirteenth century, counted among the first generation of the Order of Preachers. His exact year and place of birth are not recorded in contemporary documents; later tradition places his origin either at Orleans or at Saint-Gilles in Languedoc, and assigns his birth to around the 1180s. By the time he appears in the historical record he was already a doctor of canon law and a teacher associated with the University of Paris. He held the dignity of dean of the chapter of the collegiate church of Saint-Aignan in Orleans, a position that placed him among the notable secular clergy of the French kingdom. Sources close to the early Dominicans, above all the Libellus of Blessed Jordan of Saxony, describe him as a man of impressive learning, physical presence, and oratorical power, who nonetheless lived with notable personal austerity before he ever took the habit of a mendicant.

In 1218 Reginald was in Rome, according to the same early accounts on his way to or from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There he was introduced to Dominic of Caleruega, founder of the Order of Preachers, through the good offices of Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, the future Pope Gregory IX. Shortly after this meeting Reginald was stricken with a severe fever that those around him believed would be fatal. The Dominican narrative tradition, already formed within a few years of the events, relates that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him as he lay ill, together with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Cecilia. In the vision she is said to have anointed him and to have shown or given him the white scapular that would become part of the Dominican habit. He recovered, attributed his cure to this intervention, and asked to be received into the new order. Dominic himself clothed him in the habit. The story of the vision later became one of the principal legendary explanations for the adoption of the white scapular by the Friars Preachers.

Once professed, Reginald was sent to Bologna, then a major center of legal studies and a city in which the Dominicans were seeking to establish themselves. His preaching there was described as extraordinarily effective. Crowds came to hear him, and a number of students and masters entered the order, among them Jordan of Saxony, who would succeed Dominic as Master of the Order and who later wrote the principal surviving account of Reginald's life. From Bologna he was assigned to Paris as prior of the convent of Saint-Jacques, the house that served as the order's principal studium in France and that stood in close relation to the university. In Paris as in Bologna he continued to preach and to attract vocations, helping to consolidate the Dominican presence in one of the chief intellectual centers of Latin Christendom.

Reginald's time in the order was short. He died in Paris in 1220, only about two years after his profession, and was buried at the convent of Saint-Jacques. Despite the brevity of his Dominican career, the early brethren regarded him as a model of the conversion of a distinguished secular clerk to the apostolic life of preaching and poverty. He was venerated as a blessed within the Order of Preachers from an early date; his cult did not rest on a later papal canonization of the formal type that became standard in subsequent centuries. The Dominican liturgical calendar commemorates him on 12 February. Modern historical knowledge of his life depends almost entirely on Jordan of Saxony's Libellus and on the subsequent Dominican hagiographical tradition that elaborated the Roman vision and the Bolognese and Parisian ministries. For that reason many precise details of his birth, family, and early career remain unknown, even while his role in the first expansion of the Order of Preachers is securely attested.