The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West 1107042097, 9781107042094

Citation preview

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The Ca mbridge History of

M E D I E VA L M O NA S T I C I S M I N T H E L AT I N   W E S T Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West Volume I traces Christian monasticism from its origins in Late Antiquity down to the eleventh century. Exploring the remarkable diver­ sity of monastic life as experienced by both women and men, the essays reflect the latest discoveries found in textual, material, and archaeological evidence. Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West Volume II examines the trajectory of monasticism from the reforms of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries to the late medieval period. It covers all aspects of the monastic experience, including spirituality, liturgy, economy, and patronage. The volume also offers new insights into gender issues and considers the inter­ play between monastic ideals and lay religious movements. ALISO N I . BEA C H is Professor of Medieval History at University of St Andrews. She is author of The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2017) and Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004). ISABELLE C O C HELI N is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is co-editor of the series Disciplina Monastica (Brepols) and several volumes including Medieval Lifecycles: Continuity and Change (2013) and From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny – Du coeur de la nuit à la fin du jour: les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Age (2005)

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THE NEW CA MBRIDGE HISTOR Y OF

M E D I E VA L M O NA S T I C I S M I N T H E L AT I N W E S T

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intel­ lectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic. L I S T OF VOL U MES: Volume I: Origins to the Eleventh Century EDITED B Y : Al i s on I . B e ac h an d I sa b e l l e Co ch e l i n Volume II: The High and Late Middle Ages EDITED B Y : Al i s on I . B e ac h an d I sa b e l l e Co ch e l i n

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THE CAMBRIDGE H I S TO RY O F

M E D I E VA L M O NA S T I C I S M I N T H E L AT I N   W E S T *

Edited by

ALISON I. BEACH The University of St Andrews and

ISABELLE COCHELIN University of Toronto

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University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, U S A 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–​321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi –​110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-​04/​06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042094 DOI: 10.1017/​9781107323742 © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. I SB N  –​ 2 Volume Set 978-​1-​107-​04211-​7 Hardback I SB N –​ Volume I 978-​1-​107-​04209-​4 Hardback I SB N –​ Volume II 978-​1-​107-​04210-​0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of UR Ls for external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures  page ix List of Contributors  xi Acknowledgments  xiii List of Abbreviations  xv

1. General Introduction  1 Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Co chelin

Part I

THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY 2. The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism  19 Albrecht Diem and Claudia   Rapp 3. Re-​Reading Monastic Traditions: Monks and Nuns, East and West, from the Origins to c. 750  40 Anne -​M arie H elvétius, with the collabor ation of Michel Kaplan, Anne Boud’hors, Muriel Debié, and Bénédicte Lesieur 4. The Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries  73 Darlene L. Bro oks Hedstrom and Hendrik   Dey

5. Egyptian Nuns in Late Antiquity as Exemplars  97 Maria Chiar a   Giorda 6. Psalmody and Prayer in Early Monasticism  112 Peter Jeffery,  OblSB v

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7. Heterodoxy and Monasticism around the Mediterranean Sea  128 David   Br akke 8. The Invention of Western Monastic Literature: Texts and Communities  144 Roberto Alciati 9. Monastic Rules (Fourth to Ninth Century)  162 Albrecht Diem and Philip Rousseau 10. Social Plurality and Monastic Diversity in Late Antique Hispania (Sixth to Eighth Century)  195 Pablo C. Díaz 11. Female House Ascetics from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century  213 Eliana Magnani 12. The Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries in Italy and France (Second Half of the Fourth Century to the Eighth Century)  232 Sébastien Bully and Eleonor a Destefanis 13. Nuns and Monks at Work: Equality or Distinction between the Sexes? A Study of Frankish Monasteries from the Sixth to the Tenth Century  258 Isabelle  Réal 14. Ascetic Prayer for the Dead in the Early Medieval West  278 Gordon Blennemann 15. Monastic Identity in Early Medieval Ireland  297 Lisa M. Bitel 16. Constructing Monastic Space in the Early and Central Medieval West (Fifth to Twelfth Century)  317 Michel Lauwers 17. The Economy of Byzantine Monasteries  340 Michel  Kaplan vi

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Contents

Part II

THE CAROLINGIANS TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURY 18. The Historiography of Central Medieval Western Monasticism  365 Felice Lifshitz 19. Sources for the History of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (c. 800–​1100)  382 Scott G. Bruce 20. Questions of Monastic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy and Sicily (c. 500–​1200)  399 Valerie Ramseyer 21. Discerning “Reform” in Monastic Liturgy (c. 750–​1050)  415 Jesse D. Billett 22. Monasticism, Reform, and Authority in the Carolingian Era  432 Rutger   Kr amer 23. Carolingian Monastic Schools and Reform  450 John J. Contreni 24. Monastic Economics in the Carolingian Age  466 Jean -​ Pierre Devroey 25. Missions on the Northern and Eastern Frontiers, c. 700–​1100  485 Janneke Raaijmakers 26. Minsters and Monasticism in Anglo-​Saxon England  502 Christopher Andrew   Jones 27. Monastic Art and Architecture, c. 700–​1100: Material and Immaterial Worlds  519 Adam S. Cohen 28. Monastic Daily Life (c. 750–​1100): A Tight Community Shielded by an Outer Court  542 Isabelle Co chelin vii

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29. The Double Monastery as a Historiographical Problem (Fourth to Twelfth Century)  561 Alison I. Beach and Andr a Juganaru 30. Interactions between Monks and the Lay Nobility (from the Carolingian Era through the Eleventh Century)  579 Isabelle  Rosé 31. Monastic Reform from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century  599 Steven Vanderputten 32. Monastic Canon Law in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Centuries  618 Christof  Rolker 33. Eastern Influence on Western Monasticism, 850–​1050  631 John   Howe

Part III

THE LONG TWELFTH CENTURY 34. Historiographical Approaches to Monasticism in the Long Twelfth Century  649 John Van  Engen 35. Sources for Monasticism in the Long Twelfth Century  667 Lauren  Mancia 36. Hermitism in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries  684 Kathryn Jasper and John   Howe 37. Monastic Theologies, c. 1050–​1200  697 Constant J. Mews 38. Monastic Preaching and the Sermon in Medieval Latin Christendom to the Twelfth Century  710 Timothy M. Baker and Beverly Kienzle

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39. The Mass in Monastic Practice: Nuns and Ordained Monks, c. 400–​1200  729 Fiona J. Griffiths 40. Reclusion in the Middle Ages  747 Paulette L’Hermite -​ Leclercq 41. Similarities and Differences between Monks and Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century  766 Ursula Vones -​ Liebenstein 42. The Institutionalization of Religious Orders (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)  783 Gert Melville 43. Gender and Monastic Liturgy in the Latin West (High and Late Middle Ages)  803 Gisela Muschiol 44. Monastic Landscapes  816 Hedwig Rö ckelein 45. Later Monastic Economies  831 Constance A. Berman 46. Nobility and Monastic Patronage: The View from Outside the Monastery  848 Jonathan R. Lyon 47. The Medical Role of Monasteries in the Latin West, c. 1050–​1300  865 Elma Brenner 48. East-​Central European Monasticism: Between East and West?  882 Emilia Jamroziak

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49. Monasticism, Colonization, and Ethnic Tension in Late Medieval Ireland  901 Colmán Ó Clabaigh

Part IV

FORMS OF MONASTICISM IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 50. Late Medieval Monasticism: Historiography and Prospects  923 Elisabeth Lusset and Bert   Roest 51. Sources of Late Medieval Monasticism  941 Cécile  Caby 52. Monastic Liturgy, 1100–​1500: Continuity and Performance  958 Susan Boynton 53. Books and Libraries within Monasteries  975 Eva Schlotheuber and John T. McQuillen

54. Art in Monastic Churches of Western Europe from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century  998 Alex andr a Gajewski and Stefanie Seeberg 55. Lay Brothers and Sisters in the High and Late Middle Ages  1027 Megan Cassidy -​ W elch 56. Female Religious Life in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries  1039 Cristina Andenna 57. Striving for Religious Perfection in the Lay World of Northern Europe  1057 Alison More and Anneke B. Mulder -​B akker 58. Monks and the Universities, c. 1200–​1500  1074 James G. Clar k

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59. Bishops, Canon Law, and the Religious, c. 1140–​1350  1093 Tristan   Sharp 60. Daily Life in Late Medieval Monasteries  1109 Christian D. Knudsen 61. Monastic Preaching, c. 1350–​1545  1125 James G. Clark and Kate E. Bush 62. Research on Monasticism in the German Tradition  1140 Sigrid Hirbodian 63. Satirical Depictions of Monastic Life  1154 Sita Steckel 64. A Crisis of Late Medieval Monasticism?  1171 Bert   Roest Index  1191

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Figures

1.1 South Wall of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Church of the Trinity), Constance 1.2 Augustine gives the Rule of St. Augustine to the Regular Canons, Dreifaltigkeitskirche, Constance 4.1 Map of selected monastic sites, East and West. Map by David Jaeger 12.1 Map of selected monastic sites in Italy and France, fifth to eighth century. Map by Eleanora Destefanis and Sébastien Bully; infographics by David Vuillermoz 16.1 Drawing of the monastery of Vivarium in a copy of Cassiodorus’ Institutiones, following Kassel, Hess. Landesbibl., MS Theol. 2° 29, fol. 27v 16.2 Reconstitution of the monastic complex of San Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy in the ninth century, according to Federico Marazzi. Drawing by Simona Carracillo 16.3 Engraving of the monastic complex of Centula/​Saint-​Riquier, from a drawing by Paul Petau (1612), reproducing a miniature from the eleventh century 16.4 Plan of St. Gall, St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1092 16.5 The “sacred ban” around the Abbey of Cluny defined by Pope Urban II in 1095, according to D. Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, Xe–​XVe siècle (Lyon, 2001), 164 16.6 Inventory-​plan of the abbey of Marmoutier (Alsace) in the mid-​twelfth century, according to an eighteenth-​century copy, following C.-​E. Perrin, Essai sur la fortune immobilière de l’abbaye alsacienne de Marmoutier aux Xe et XIe siècles (Strasbourg, 1935), 8 27.1 Vigila the Scribe. Codex Albeldensis, El Escorial, Biblioteca del Escorial MS d.I.2, fol. XXIIv. Photo © Patrimonio Nacional 27.2 Mathilda-Otto Cross. Essen Treasury. Photo by Jens Nober (Essen) © Domschatz Essen 27.3 Abbot Epiphanius, San Vincenzo al Volturno, crypt interior. Photo AGF Srl /​Alamy Stock Photo 27.4 Reconstruction of the church of Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon, 1001–​18 (C. Malone) 27.5 Hrabanus Maurus before the Cross. In honorem sanctae crucis, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 652 fol. 33v. Photo © ÖNB Vienna

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page 2 3 74 234 320 326 327 329 336

337 520 524 528 532 537

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Figures 30.1 Heiric of Auxerre’s vision of society (second half of the ninth century). Diagram by I. Rosé 30.2 Odo of Cluny’s vision of society (first half of the tenth century). Diagram by I. Rosé 30.3 Abbo of Fleury’s vision of society (c. 1000). Diagram by I. Rosé 30.4 Odilo of Cluny’s vision of society (c. 1000). Diagram by I. Rosé 53.1 Western wall of the library room above the twelfth-​century sacristy of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Godehard, Hildesheim, with fifteenth-​century library signatures (F and G). Diözesanmuseum Hildesheim, Datenerfassungsbogen 4a 53.2 Manuscript containing sermons of the Franciscan friar Bernardinus of Siena (fourteenth/​early fifteenth century, Dombibliothek Hildesheim, St God. 34), with signature of St. Godehard Library F 44. The signature was changed to F 85 in the course of the fifteenth century, when the body of spiritual literature expanded dramatically 53.3 Lunette with library signature F, St. Godehard library room 54.1 Metal gilt altar frontal, Basel. Musée de Cluny, Paris 54.2 Textile crown with embroidered medallions (crown of the nuns), first half of twelfth century, Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, inv. no. 5257, 2009 (photo: Christoph von Viràg) 54.3 Retable (altar shrine) (Schloss Braunfels), Madonna and Child (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich), Wings (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), c. 1330, for the main altar of the former church of the Premonstratensian Monastery in Altenberg-​an-​der-​Lahn © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

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593 595 596 596

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990 991 1008 1013

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Contributors

Roberto Alciati, University of Florence Cristina Andenna, TU Dresden Timothy M. Baker, Dartmouth College Constance A. Berman, University of Iowa (emerita) Alison I. Beach, The University of St Andrews Jesse D. Billett, Trinity College, University of Toronto Lisa M. Bitel, University of Southern California Gordon Blennemann, University of Montreal Anne Boud’hors, CNRS (Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique) IRHT (Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes) Susan Boynton, Columbia University David Brakke, The Ohio State University Elma Brenner, Wellcome Collection, London Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Wittenberg University Scott G. Bruce, Fordham University Sébastien Bully, CNRS-UMR 6298 ARTEHIS Kate E. Bush, independent scholar Cécile Caby, University Lumière Lyon 2 and CNRS-UMR 5648 Megan Cassidy-​Welch, The University of Queensland James G. Clark, University of Exeter Isabelle Cochelin, University of Toronto Adam S. Cohen, University of Toronto John J. Contreni, Purdue University (emeritus) Muriel Debié, EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études) Eleonora Destefanis, University of Eastern Piedmont Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Free University of Brussels Hendrik Dey, Hunter College, CUNY

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Contributors Pablo C. Díaz, University of Salamanca Albrecht Diem, Syracuse University Alexandra Gajewski, The Burlington Magazine and Institute of Historical Research, London Maria Chiara Giorda, Roma Tre University Fiona J. Griffiths, Stanford University Anne-​Marie Helvétius, University of Paris 8 Sigrid Hirbodian, University of Tübingen John Howe, Texas Tech University Emilia Jamroziak, University of Leeds Kathryn Jasper, Illinois State University Peter Jeffery, OblSB, University of Notre-Dame Christopher Andrew Jones, The Ohio State University Andra Juganaru, Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest Michel Kaplan, University of Paris 1 (emeritus) Beverly Kienzle, Harvard Divinity School (emerita) Christian D. Knudsen, Sheridan College Rutger Kramer, Radboud University Michel Lauwers, University of Côte d’Azur, CNRS, CEPAM Bénédicte Lesieur, Lycée Jacques Prévert de Longjumeau Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, University of Paris 4 (emerita) Felice Lifshitz, University of Alberta Jonathan R. Lyon, University of Chicago Elisabeth Lusset, CNRS LAMOP Eliana Magnani, CNRS LAMOP (Laboratoire de médiévistique occidentale de Paris) Lauren Mancia, Brooklyn College, CUNY John T. McQuillen,The Morgan Library & Museum Gert Melville, TU Dresden Constant J. Mews, Monash University Alison More, The University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker, University of Groningen (emerita) Gisela Muschiol, University of Bonn Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, Glenstal Abbey Janneke Raaijmakers, Utrecht University Valerie Ramseyer, Wellesley College

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Contributors Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences Isabelle Réal, University of Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès and Laboratoire FRAMESPA (Toulouse) Hedwig Röckelein, University of Göttingen Bert Roest, Radboud University Christof  Rolker, University of Bamberg Isabelle Rosé, University of Rennes 2 and Laboratoire Tempora (EA 7468) Philip Rousseau, The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC Eva Schlotheuber, University of Düsseldorf Stefanie Seeberg, Grassi Museum for Applied Arts Tristan Sharp, University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto Sita Steckel, University of Münster John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame (emeritus) Steven Vanderputten, Ghent University Ursula Vones-​Liebenstein, independent scholar

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Acknowledgments

The History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West has been a work of community from start to finish, and we are indebted to many colleagues who have helped to give shape and direction to this ambitious project. Special thanks are due to our editorial board  –​Albrecht Diem, Claudia Rapp, and Bert Roest –​who have been so generous with their suggestions and critical feedback throughout the project. We are also especially grateful to Giles Constable, who read and critiqued several versions of the original proposal for the volumes. With his characteristic grace, Giles resisted our repeated attempts to persuade him to contribute, instead persuading us that a new generation of scholars is ready to take center stage. We also benefitted immeasurably from the comments of the three outside readers solicited by Cambridge, and particularly from the push by one to give more weight to the social and economic contexts of monasticism. This sound advice proved decisive for the project. We would also like to thank Tristan Sharp for his insightful comments on the proposal, and Henrietta Leyser, Joseph Goering, and Jeffery Hamburger for their suggestions for contributors on a wide range of topics. We have done our best to fill the gaps in coverage pointed out by these generous colleagues, and we hope that those we were unable to fill –​ monastic engagement in the crusades, for example, and regular and secular canonesses –​will attract scholarly attention rather than criticism. The College of Arts & Sciences at The Ohio State University generously provided funding for a workshop in Germany in the summer of 2014. The hospitality of Bärbel Wilhelm and her staff at the beautiful monastery of Heiligkreuztal, a former house of Cistercian nuns in what is now Baden-​ Württemberg (Germany), was matched by the collegiality and engagement of the gathered authors and graduate students. During our two days at Heiligkreuztal, we critiqued drafts, debated terms, and discussed the direc­ tion for the next stage of the project. Thanks are due also to our student

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assistant, Eliza Jaeger, who served as both translator and logistical assistant on the ground at the workshop. In the autumn of 2014, the students in Isabelle’s graduate seminar on “Monastic Identities” at the University of Toronto read and critiqued many of the articles, offering vital feedback on the clarity and usefulness of each from the perspective of one of our key target audiences. Special thanks to Eun Seon (Ludia) Bae, Alexandra Bauer, Alessia Berardi, Lochin Brouillard, Sister Parousia Clemens, Brianna Daigneault, Celeste de Blois, Delan Hamasoor, Jared Johnson, Joseph Koczera SJ, Matthew Mattingly OSB, Trevor A. Mattis II, Bridget Riley, Robert Smith, Lane Springer, Nora Thorburn, and Hannah Wood. Shannon Turner Li, Frank McGough, Kyle Shimoda, and Samuel Sutherland, doctoral students at The Ohio State University, also provided helpful comments and feedback on a number of articles at various stages in the project. If these scholars-​in-​training are any indication, then the future of monastic studies is in good hands. There are also many others who have helped in various ways to bring this project to light. Emily Spangler at Cambridge University Press first had the idea that the time was right for a major new overview of medieval monasti­ cism. Her enthusiasm for the project has been matched by that of Beatrice Rehl, our managing editor at Cambridge, who has supported and pushed us in just the right measure as the project has moved from idea to reality. During Alison’s summer teaching in Constance in 2014, Anne Diekjobst and Michael Hohlstein arranged a tour of the Augustinian Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Church of the Trinity) with Harald Derschka, introducing her to the won­ derful frescos that frame the introduction to these volumes. Harald and Anne deserve particular thanks for their heroic efforts at photographing these little-​ known and difficult-​to-​capture images. David Jaeger has been a source of support throughout the project, from preparing a memorable dinner matched by great wine during one of our initial planning meetings in Bonn, to cre­ ating the map that accompanies the article by Darlene Brooks Hedstrom and Hendrik Dey. Bert Roest was a calm force in the background, always encour­ aging and ready to help, including driving thousands of kilometers to visit potential sites for our workshop. Thanks are also due to Emily Cochelin, who complains that she has visited far too many monasteries for her young age. Finally, we would like to thank the community of more than eighty authors who worked tirelessly through seemingly endless rounds of editorial comments and peer reviews, for their collegiality and patience as we worked together to bring this project to completion.

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Abbreviations

Word abbreviations c.    circa d. date of death (died in) f.     date of foundation (founded in) fl.   flourished during/​around fol. folio r.     regnal dates

Abbreviations of primary sources (with available editions and English translations) Hildemar, Hildemar of Corbie or of Civate, Expositio Regulae ab Expositio regulae   Hildemaro tradita et nunc primum typis mandata in Vita et Regula SS. P. Benedicti una cum Expositione Regulae, ed. Rupert Mittermüller (Regensburg, New York, and Cincinnati, 1880) Updated edition and English translation: http://​ hildemar.org/​(date of last access: 31 August 2018) Mansi Giovanni Domenico Mansi, and others, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 53 vols. (Florence, 1759–​1767; Venice, 1769–​1798; Paris, 1901–​1927) RA “The Rule of Augustine (Masculine Version),” in The Rule of Saint Augustine, ed. Tarsicius J.  van Bavel and trans. Raymond Canning (Kalamazoo, MI, 1996) RB Regula Benedicti, ed. and trans. (into French) Jean Neufville and Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 181–​2 Regula Benedicti, ed. Rudolf Hanslik, CSEL 75, 2nd ed. English translations: xxi

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Abbreviations

RCaeV

RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry; associate eds. Imogene Baker et  al. (Collegeville, MN, 1981) The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA, 2011) The Rule of St Benedict, trans. Carolinne White (New York, 2008) Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad virgines, ed. and trans. (into French) Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, SC 354,  35–​272 English translation:  Caesarius of Arles. The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction, ed. Maria McCarthy (Washington, DC, 1960)

Abbreviations for journals and series AASS

AA SS OSB Annales ESC BHL

BHG

BnF BUCEMA

CCCM CCM CCSG CCSL

Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Socii Bollandiani. 68 vols. (Antwerp and Brussels, 1643–​1940) Other editions: Venice, 1734–​70, and Paris, 1863–​70 Acta Sanctorum ordinis S. Benedictini, ed. Jean Mabillon. 9 vols. (Paris, 1668–​1701; 2nd ed. Venice, 1733–​40) Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (Brussels, 1898–​9; reprint 1992) Novum Supplementum, ed. H. Fros. (Brussels, 1986) Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, ed. F. Halkin (Brussels, 1957) Novum Auctarium (Brussels, 1984) Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Bulletin du Centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre, https://​ journals.openedition.org/​cem/​ (date of last access:  31 August 2018) Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout, 1971–​) Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, ed. Kassius Hallinger et al. (Siegburg, 1963–​) Corpus Christianorum. Series Graeca (Turnhout, 1977–​) Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (Turnhout, 1953–​)

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newgenprepdf

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Abbreviations

CSEL HAM JEH JMH MEFRM MGH Capit. MGH Capit. Episc. MGH Concilia MGH DKarl MGH Epistolae MGH Ep. sel. MGH Fontes MGH LL MGH SRG MGH SRG n.s. MGH SS MGH SS RM PG

PL SC

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1866–​) Hortus Artium Medievalium Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of Medieval History Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Moyen Âge Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Capitularia regum Francorum Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Capitula episcoporum Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Concilia Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Diplomata Pippin, Karlmann und Karl der Grosse Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Epistolae (in Quarto) Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Epistolae selectum in usum scholarum Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Fontes iurs Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum separatim editi Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Leges (in Folio) Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum Nova Series Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores (in Folio) Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum Patrologia Graeca [Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca], ed. Jacques-​Paul Migne, 161 vols. (Paris, 1857–​66) Patrologia Latina [Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina], ed. Jacques-​Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–​91) Sources Chrétiennes, 569 vols. (Paris, 1941–​)

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General Introduction Al i s on I . B each a n d Isa b e l l e Co ch elin, editors Between January of 1417 and the last session of the great Council of Constance (1414–​18) in April of 1418, Sigismund of Luxemburg (d. 1437), King of Germany, Hungary, and Croatia, was quartered intermittently at the House of Augustinian Hermits (f. 1268) in the southern part of the old city. The honor of hosting the king—​the defensor ecclesiae—​along with much of his vast retinue, must have come at great cost both to the community and to the townsfolk of Constance. Perhaps in recognition of this effort and expense, and surely aware that the Augustinians’ church had not yet been fully restored in the wake of a devastating fire in 1398, Sigismund arranged for the impressive sum of 1,400 guilders to be paid to three local artists—​Heinrich Grübel, Kaspar Sünder, and Johann Lederhoser—​to paint the nave of the monastery church. Work on the frescoes began in July of 1417, and by September the job was complete.1 The three painters created a three-​register visual program along the south, west, and north walls of the church. The lower register comprises a series of images of saints, enthroned in the pendentives between the arcades. The upper register, at the level of the clerestory, was decorated with images (mainly destroyed by later modifications to the church) of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. In the middle register, groups of four or five kneeling men are framed by eighteen double and thirty-​seven single painted arches; the men in each cluster, depicted in the habit of a particular religious order, gesture toward a standing figure who represents the author of the rule of that order

Harald Derschka, “Die Wandbilder in der Konstanzer Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Augustinerkirche): Entstehung, Wiederentdeckung und Deutung,” in Das Konstanzer Konzil. Essays, ed. Karl-​Heinz Braun et al. (Stuttgart, 2013), 204–​9; and Harald Derschka, Die Konzilsfresken der Dreifaltigkeitskirche Konstanz (Lindenberg, 2015).

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Figure 1.1  South Wall of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Church of the Trinity), Constance.

(see Figure 1.1). Together, the images of this middle register recount the history of Western monasticism, from the ancient desert in the East down to the present day, from the point of view of a community of late medieval Augustinian Hermits. The story begins at the east end of the south wall of the nave with Paul of Thebes (d. c. 342) and Antony (d. 356), alongside Pachomius (d. 348) and Basil (d. 379). Directly following these great men comes Augustine (d. 430), who stands in his episcopal regalia and hands a scroll representing the so-​called Rule of St. Augustine (RA) to a group of five suppliant Augustinian hermits. The bishop is depicted again under the next set of painted arches, this time with the Regular Canons of St. Augustine (see Figure  1.2). The succession of groups that follow the RA continues with the Dominicans and proceeds chronologically down the south wall, across the western wall, and into the first ten arches of the north wall. It is only at the end of this visual procession of groups following the RA that we first encounter Benedict of Nursia (d. c.  540), leading communities of monks who followed the Rule of 2

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Figure 1.2  Augustine gives the Rule of St. Augustine to the Regular Canons, Dreifaltigkeit­ skirche, Constance.

St. Benedict (RB). The Franciscans and Carmelites constitute the last groups, at the east end of the north wall. This visual history of monasticism makes a clear if somewhat unusual claim about monastic identity; it is the Augustinians who are the most direct heirs of the Desert Fathers. Perhaps the community was emboldened by a pronouncement that Pope John XXII (r. 1316–​34) had issued just two years earlier, stating that the regular canons of Kreuzlingen (just south of Constance) merited a more prominent place in liturgical processions than the Benedictines of Petershausen (across the Rhine from the city), owing to the greater antiquity of their order.2 As the followers of an ancient rule, they held a place of greatest importance in the history of monasticism. Even though For the text of this as-​yet unpublished pronouncement and its interpretation, see Harald Derschka, “Die geistlichen Gemeinschaften in der Stadt Konstanz zur Zeit des Konzils: Stifte, Klöster, Schwesternhäuser,” Das Delphinbuch 13 (forthcoming 2019).

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the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine had only been founded in 1254, they had themselves painted standing in an unbroken tradition, via the RA, with the most ancient ideals of Christian retreat into the desert. Benedict and the RB came later, and their connection to the sources of monastic tradition was depicted as more remote.3 It was certainly no coincidence that this visual argument was painted onto the walls of an Augustinian church only a few months after representatives of some 133 German Benedictine abbeys had convened a meeting of the German provincial chapter of the Benedictine Order at the monastery of Petershausen, just across the Rhine from the city, at which questions of reform and identity (including the return to a common habit and tonsure, as well as to dormitories and strict enclosure) were prominent on the agenda.4

Order-​Based Monastic History and Its Legacy The beginning of the story transmitted in the Constance frescoes is consonant in many ways with histories of monasticism in the Latin West handed down by generations of monastic historians who were themselves monks. While the intellectual achievements of these scholars are massive and essential, we must be ready, when necessary, to reject some of the fundamental premises on which they based their historical analysis. Our approach has been to question any aspect of this traditional approach that is not sound, to keep what is good, and to present the new questions and new answers that emerge. Their story traditionally begins with Antony as the father of monasticism. Antony’s form of monasticism is generally classified as eremitical, soon followed by the emergence of communal, or cenobitic, monasticism at the initiative of Pachomius and then of Basil. The wisdom and ways of these few great men was subsequently handed down, as the frescoes show, into a succession of (primarily and sometimes exclusively) male orders, even though the hierarchy and even the list of orders varies. This focus on orders and institutions is, in part, a reflection of early modern and modern monastic historiography:  much of the foundational scholarly work on medieval monasticism—​“great historical enterprises” with origins in the seventeenth century—​was undertaken by monks with a keen interest in, and from the perspective of, their respective orders.5 Individuals or groups Derschka, “Die Wandbilder in der Konstanzer Dreifaltigkeitskirche,” 208–​9. Philip H. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance: 1414–​1418 (Leiden, 1994), 155–​7. 5 David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963). 3

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marginal to, or entirely outside the perceived order structure of, the monastic world only began to receive more attention in the second half of the twentieth century, as a growing number of secular scholars began to approach monastic history from a broader range of perspectives. Another issue at hand is that earlier generations of monk-​historians often approached the topic ahistorically—​ assuming that the fundamentals of monasticism had remained more or less the same since the time of the Desert Fathers. This static definition, combined with the production of compartmentalized historiographies produced by institutionalized orders—​reflected clearly in the clustering of the various groups under separate arches in the Constance frescoes—​tends to obscure the astonishing vitality and diversity of monastic life through spaces and across centuries. The articles that comprise these two volumes represent a different, less teleological, approach. We have chosen not to organize our book with separate sections devoted to the Cluniacs, Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and so on. First, there is already a wealth of excellent studies and overviews that focus on individual monastic families or orders. Second, monastic orders only started to emerge in the twelfth century, quite late in the medieval history of monasticism. For most of the Middle Ages, religious communities were organized individually—​ even if some were or became dependencies of others (like so many controlled by Cluny in the eleventh century). For this reason, we have encouraged our authors to speak of “black monks” or “traditional monasticism” rather than of “Benedictines” or “Benedictine monasticism” before the late Middle Ages. In the Carolingian Empire, especially after the Council of Aachen (816–​17), and often much later in other areas, most monasteries did follow the RB; but using the term “Benedictine” to describe them before the formation of a Benedictine Order properly speaking tends to give the impression of a unity and uniformity that did not yet exist. The expression “black monks” appeared from the early twelfth century on to distinguish traditional monks from the Cistercians, who wore white habits.

Integrating Women into the Narrative Nowhere is the legacy of order-​based monastic history clearer or more problematic than in the historiography of medieval religious women. Much of the scholarship on feminae religiosae has focused on their inclusion in—​or exclusion from—​various orders. The limited research on women associated with the Premonstratensian Order, for example, while conceding that Norbert himself had had female followers whom he settled in cenobitic houses connected 5

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to male communities, generally takes for granted that the men of the order would have experienced any female presence within their institutions as a burden to be put off at the first opportunity. For example, Joseph E. Jansen, an early twentieth-​century Premonstratensian, cited the “inconveniences” of female presence as the motivation for official pronouncements, such as the 1140 decree of the Chapter General of the order that called for the separation of dual-​sex communities, and the 1198 decree prohibiting further female professions.6 In his influential Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, Herbert Grundmann spoke of the Order’s efforts to “free itself from the participation of women.”7 The historiographical terrain is similar for the Cistercians, particularly in the debate over the formal inclusion of women’s communities in the order.8 We are not suggesting that such questions and approaches are invalid or uninteresting, but rather that they have dominated the way that we think about what it meant to be a religious woman in the Western Middle Ages. The tendency to see women as marginal to—​or even problematic for—​the work of orders is popular in contemporary histories and encourages the continued relegation of religious women to their own, separate chapters in monastic surveys. In C. H. Lawrence’s standard English-​language survey, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, for example, the “Sisters or Handmaids” are still mainly confined to their own single chapter, whose first section carries the title, “Frauenfrage—​the question of sisters.”9 There is no denying that this historiographical trajectory has been sustained in large part with the backing of surviving written and iconographic sources from the Middle Ages. Like their early modern and modern counterparts, medieval monastic historians overwhelmingly speak from a male perspective as they imagine narratives that respond to particular institutional needs and interests. The Constance frescoes, for example, reflect the perspective of the Augustinian Hermits, an order with no contemporary female counterpart.

Joseph E. Jansen, La Belgique norbertine ou l’Ordre de Prémontré en Belgique à travers huit siècles d’existence, vol. 1 (Averbode, 1920), 72. 7 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Robert E. Lerner (Notre Dame, IN, 1995), 77–​8. 8 See Constance H. Berman, “Were There Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Nuns?” Church History 68 (1999):  824–​64; for a similar critique, see Alexis Grélois, “Clairvaux et le monachisme féminin des origines au milieu du XVe siècle,” in Le temps long de Clairvaux. Nouvelles recherches, nouvelles perspectives (XIIe-​XXIe siècle), ed. Arnaud Baudin and Alexis Grélois (Paris, 2016), 155–​60. 9 C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (London and New York, 2015), 199.

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Plans to include four female communities, reflected in the surviving written sketches for the frescoes, were apparently scuttled owing to a lack of space.10 In the end, theirs is a version of monastic history that excludes women, despite the fact that Augustine’s Letter 211 (423), one of the earliest textual sources for the RA, was addressed to a community of religious women. Here and elsewhere, the role of women in the development of various forms of religious life was simply not seen as integral to the development of the “family tree” of monasticism, but rather as a side-​growth. The problems with this selective reading of the sources are already evident in the Life of Antony (c. 360): when Antony decides to abandon all his wealth and to live a perfect life, the first thing he does is to place his younger sister in a female monastery. Decades before the male monasteries of Pachomius and Basil, then, at least one women’s community already existed, raising the possibility that female forms of monasticism were the real point of departure, and not the other way around. In these volumes, we have tried to write women back into the broader narratives of monastic history. To that end, whenever possible, women have been integrated rather than confined to separate chapters or sections. Further, many of our authors challenge the received tradition that interprets religious women as marginal, or as a “problem” for men that needed solving.

Rethinking the Boundaries of Monasticism Scholars of monastic history need to be aware of the ways in which both medieval and modern historiography have shaped our most basic understandings of what monasticism is, down to how we define seemingly self-​evident categories such as “monk,” “nun,” “order,” and even “monasticism” itself. These definitions depend on who is telling the story. For the purposes of the present volumes, we have defined as monastic those individuals who were devoted to contemplation and prayer, generally with an element of separation from society (e.g. living in extremely ascetic conditions, and/​or removed from centers of population, and/​or enclosed architecturally), whether or not they did so in community. Although cenobitic monasticism would become the predominant form of male monasticism in the West during the early Middle Ages, it was never the exclusive one. From the beginnings of monasticism in the East, and throughout our period and beyond in the West, there were Harald Derschka, “Die Ordensdarstellung in der Konstanzer Augustinerkirche:  eine Gesamtschau der Männerorden aus der Sicht der Augustinereremiten,” in Dreifaltigkeit­ skirche Konstanz, ed. Landesdenkmalamt für Denkmalpflege im Regierungspräsidium Stuttgart (Lindenberg, 2007), 31.

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“wandering monks,” hermits, recluses, house ascetics—​and the list could go on—​side by side with religious individuals living in more or less regulated communities. This continued diversity, and the permeability of the frontiers between these categories, were especially characteristic of female monasticism, as many of the articles that follow show. One of the main reasons why so little space has been dedicated to female religious in previous monastic histories is that they often had a fluid monastic identity, hard to place within a single order or to characterize with a single term. For example, Jutta of Sponheim (d. 1136)  probably began her dedicated religious life as a house ascetic before she and her protégée, Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), became recluses in the outer court of Disibodenberg, a male monastery. Hildegard would later found the female monastery of Rupertsberg, where she was the abbess.11 Catherine of Siena (d. 1380)  was not a Dominican tertiary; this stamp was only put on her a fortiori by the Dominican order.12 The female monastery of Blesle, in Auvergne, followed the RB in the central Middle Ages, but at some indeterminant point (and probably gradually) before 1751, the women started living in individual houses and calling themselves canonesses.13 These examples can be easily multiplied. Only detailed regional, ecclesiastical, and political studies, side by side with surveys like our book, can help open up and move the history of medieval religious women forward. The ubiquity and variety of forms of monastic life in the Middle Ages challenge simple formulations. Our approach to the fundamental problem of defining monasticism has thus remained open, sensitive to the fluctuating ways in which medieval religious defined themselves, and especially to how these responses might have varied by gender, and across time and space. For instance, although mendicants considered themselves to be quite different from cenobitic monks when their orders first appeared in the early thirteenth century, a history of Western monasticism cannot bypass them completely: their story is too entwined with that of monasticism in the later Middle Ages. It is especially difficult to pinpoint the border between the female mendicant orders, whose women were usually cloistered, and the traditional monastic orders. We have thus asked each of the contributors to keep the question of self-​definition in mind, and to be wary of relying on definitions

A. Silvas, ed. and trans., Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources (Turnhout, 1998). Alison More, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200–​1600 (Oxford, 2018), 75–​7. Martin de Framond, “Notes sur l’histoire des Bénédictines de Saint-​Pierre de Blesle (IXe-​XVIIIe siècles),” in La place et le rôle des femmes dans l’histoire de Cluny, ed. Jean-​Paul Renard et al. (Saint-​Just-​près-​Brioude, 2013), 79–​112.

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that medieval lay or ecclesiastical hierarchies might have attempted to impose on monastics. Even after the seven years that have gone into the preparation of these two volumes, including the vigorous and challenging debates that animated our contributors’ workshop at the former Cistercian monastery of Heiligkreuztal (Germany) in July of 2015 and the many fruitful conversations with our graduate students at the University of Toronto and The Ohio State University, we are left with more questions than answers about where to place the boundaries of monasticism. Is it valid, for example, to exclude, as we did, the military orders? Where is the boundary between “monastic” and “secular”? Should monasticism really be positioned in opposition to forms of religious life more oriented toward engagement in the secular world, such as communities that focused on pastoral care and public preaching, or communities created to manage hospitals, lodge pilgrims, and so on? In the end, we opted to raise questions and open debates rather than to resolve them, and to allow for rich variation across contexts. All of these decisions regarding inclusion and exclusion could be challenged with various arguments.

The Organization of the Volumes The two volumes are organized into four sections. Volume I  covers the origins to the eighth century (Part I) and the Carolingians through to the eleventh century (Part II). Volume II covers the long twelfth century (Part III) and the later Middle Ages (Part IV). The chronological break between Part I and Part II corresponds to the stabilization of Western monasticism under the Carolingians, with the (theoretically) general adoption of the RB within the empire. It was also marked by the attempt to establish a clear distinction between monks and canons, a fundamental distinction for some monastic authors that was nevertheless challenged again and again through the centuries by monks and regular canons. We refer to the period covered by Part II as the central Middle Ages in order to distinguish it from the late antique and early medieval periods that precede it, and from the high and late medieval periods that follow. The division between Part III and Part IV marks the emergence of the “new” monasticism that developed first in Italy in the eleventh century with key figures such as Romuald of Ravenna and Peter Damian, and then north of the Alps in the second half of the eleventh century and early twelfth century. Part IV starts with the beguines and the flowering of the mendicant orders. It offers a fresh look at the evolution of monasticism in the late Middle 9

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Ages, forcefully and convincingly challenging common characterization of the period as marked by decadence and decline. There are obvious limitations to this, and indeed any, chronological division. Continuities can and should be observed, and comparisons over time are essential. For example, how different were the house ascetics of Marcella and Jerome’s circle from the beguines and recluses of the late Middle Ages? How do the “wandering monks” of the first centuries compare to the early mendicants almost a thousand years later? Many of the articles here consciously cross these chronological divisions, as their titles reflect. With so many articles including material from across the four periods, we have provided ample cross-​ references, and the index to the volumes is a vital resource for readers seeking to make connections and identify additional related material. Each of the four parts that comprise these volumes begins with a historiographical essay pointing to both past and future research and an article that surveys the range of surviving primary sources for the period covered:  for Origins to the Eighth Century, Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp (historiography) and Anne-​Marie Helvétius, with the collaboration of Michel Kaplan, Anne Boud’hors, Muriel Debié, and Bénédicte Lesieur (sources); for the Central Middle Ages, Felice Lifshitz (historiography) and Scott Bruce (sources); for the Long Twelfth Century, John Van Engen (historiography) and Lauren Mancia (sources); and for the Later Middle Ages, Elisabeth Lusset and Bert Roest (historiography) and Cécile Caby (sources).

Other Central Geographic, Thematic, and Interpretive Questions The full list of authors reflects a rich diversity of approaches to the history of medieval Western monasticism. Contributors come from all over Europe, North America, and Australia, and many are presenting their work here in English for the first time. While the majority are historians, more than one third are specialists in disciplines such as archaeology, art, music, philology, religious studies, and theology. There is also a wide range of specializations reflected among the historians, including economic, political, social, and gender history. Although the geographical focus of the two volumes is continental western Europe and the British Isles, Part I, which covers the first centuries of the history of Christian monasticism, also includes the eastern part of the Mediterranean. There was no fixed border in the Roman Empire between the Greek East and the Latin West, and one cannot understand 10

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Western monasticism without appreciating and studying its Eastern origins. Individuals, texts, and ideals flowed between East and West, and primarily from East to West, during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, as the articles by Anne-​Marie Helvétius, David Brakke, and Roberto Alciati show. Moreover, it is useful to compare the shapes taken by Western monasticism with solutions adopted in the East, for instance regarding rules, as Albrecht Diem and Philip Rousseau have done in their contribution. Peter Jeffery’s article traces the development of monastic liturgies from the first centuries of Christianity down to the Carolingians—​a contribution that illustrates the advantages of breaking down the boundary between East and West for the first centuries of monasticism. As early as the sixth century, however, and certainly by the eighth century, the differences between Greek and Latin forms of monasticism had become sufficiently significant to justify confining the focus of the rest of the book to the Latin world. Nevertheless, this is another boundary that several of our authors have tested, questioned, and crossed. As the article by John Howe shows, there was continued contact between East and West from the late eleventh century onward, and Greek monks were present in southern Italy throughout the Middle Ages, as discussed by Valerie Ramseyer. The article by Michel Kaplan presents the evolution of the Byzantine monasteries throughout the Middle Ages (from the standpoint of economics), providing the basis for interesting comparisons with the West. Two articles offer a view of border areas in which Eastern and Western forms of monasticism interacted: Ramseyer for Italy up to the eleventh century, and Emilia Jamroziak for east-​central Europe in the later Middle Ages. In the West, internal linguistic and territorial frontiers are not essential to understanding medieval monasticism, even though surveys have too often been defined by modern political boundaries. While we have been keen to avoid such anachronism, we have not entirely ignored regional variations. We have tried especially to give a sense of the remarkable diversity that existed within Western monasticism outside the Frankish kingdoms and their heirs. To that end, a number of articles focus on regions beyond that area, including Pablo Díaz’s contribution on Hispania before the Umayyad conquest of the eighth century, Lisa Bitel’s overview of Irish monasticism in the early Middle Ages, Colmán Ó Clabaigh’s discussion of the impact of colonialism on Irish monasticism in the High Middle Ages, and Jamroziak’s discussion of monasticism in areas that were the precursors of modern Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Christopher Jones traces the original shape of Anglo-​Saxon monasticism in the time of Bede and Boniface, and Janneke 11

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Raaijmakers discusses the complex role played by nuns and monks in the colonization of the eastern and northern frontiers in the same period. Finally, the article by Sigrid Hirbodian highlights the fruitfulness of bringing together a variety of archival and literary sources to produce regional monastic history, and Steven Vanderputten likewise insists on the necessity of considering the reform of any monastery in its local political context. To encourage connection and dialogue among this diverse group of authors, we suggested an ambitious range of thematic and interpretive problems, beginning with the pressing need to reconsider received definitions and traditional boundaries. Kathryn Jasper and John Howe study the challenges that the eremitical movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries posed to contemporary forms of cenobitic monasticism. Gert Melville theorizes about the transformation of monasticism into an order-​based institution, while Ursula Vones-​Liebenstein explores the complex frontier between regular canons and monks. Elma Brenner describes the monastic ideal that guided the organization of life in hospitals and leprosaria. Cristina Andenna’s article studies the blurred boundary between mendicant women and nuns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Alison More and Anneke Mulder-​Bakker’s contribution investigates the commonalities and differences between cenobitic and pious lay women. The physical shape and location of monasteries evolved across time and space, but never as dramatically as in the first half of our period. Two teams of archaeologists—​Darlene Brooks Hedstrom and Hendrik Dey for East and West in late antiquity, and Sébastien Bully and Eleonora Destefanis for Italy and Gaul in the early Middle Ages—​take a close look at the first centuries of monastic architecture, before monasteries took on the shape we know so well. The contributions by Michel Lauwers, Adam Cohen, Isabelle Cochelin, and Hedwig Röckelein also showcase recent innovative research on spatial analysis, sacralization of space, and issues of accessibility, offering new possibilities for the study of the interaction between monasteries and the outside world. Liturgy was always fundamental to the life of medieval monastics, and six articles are specifically devoted to this topic. Jeffery discusses psalmody and prayer in early monasticism, and Jesse Billett traces further developments in the divine office down to the eleventh century. Susan Boynton gives us a sense of the rich panorama of liturgical activities in the high and late Middle Ages. Gordon Blennemann focuses on the emergence in late antiquity of the fundamental intercessory roles of monastics and the increasing importance of the celebration of the Eucharist in monasteries, especially since the Carolingian 12

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period. Fiona Griffiths places the celebration of the mass more specifically in the context of female monasteries of the later periods, and Gisela Muschiol provides an overview of gender studies in the framework of monastic liturgy throughout the Middle Ages. Recent research on medieval gender and sexuality also stands at the center of a number of articles discussing a wide range of topics:  Isabelle Réal describes the day-​to-​day activities of monastics in the early Middle Ages; Alison Beach and Andra Juganaru address the challenges of research on medieval double monasteries; Fiona Griffiths explores the relationship between nuns and the priests in charge of their cura animarum; and Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq discusses reclusion. Although most of the articles here integrate female and male monasticism, several look exclusively at forms of religious life for women. Eliana Magnani offers the first ever synthetic treatment of the phenomenon of house ascetics from late antiquity to the eleventh century. More and Mulder-​Bakker provide an overview of the lives of religious women outside the cloister up to the late Middle Ages. Maria Chiara Giorda explores the role of family in late antique Egyptian female monasticism. Andenna examines the dynamics between popes, bishops, male orders, and female religious from the long twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. The fundamental importance of monastic education and erudition throughout the Middle Ages has indeed long been recognized. While many articles touch on learning within both female and male monasteries, several focus more particularly on this theme. Alciati evokes the textual communities at the origin of different interpretations of monasticism in late antiquity, and John Contreni provides an overview of Carolingian learning. Constant Mews tackles the debates around theology in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, while James Clark discusses how monks shaped, and were shaped by, universities. Other authors approach the issue of learning from a variety of angles: Jones, for example, explores the particulars of Anglo-​Saxon monastic learning, including its bilingualism, while Christoph Rolker highlights the study of law up to Gratian, and Brenner the role played by medical knowledge in high and late medieval monasteries. Two articles investigate the writing, reading, and preaching of sermons in monastic contexts: Timothy Baker and Beverly Kienzle for the period up to the long twelfth century, and James Clark and Kate Bush for the later Middle Ages. The article by Eva Schlotheuber and John McQuillen traces the history of monastic libraries from the eighth century to the invention of the printing press.

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While discussions of monastic artistic production are integrated into many articles, the articles by Cohen (focusing on the period from c. 700 to 1100) and Alexandra Gajewski and Stefanie Seeberg (treating the twelfth century to the fourteenth) are dedicated to the topic. Gajewski and Seeberg include previously ignored forms of art (notably textiles) in their discussion, forms that are also touched upon by Muschiol and Griffiths, suggesting how much remains to be said about the role of religious women in artistic production and patronage. The economic aspects of Western monasticism have also too often been downplayed, even though monks and nuns were key players in the economy of medieval Europe. Three articles were specifically written by economic historians: Kaplan discusses the economy of Eastern monasteries up to the end of the Byzantine Empire, while Jean-​Paul Devroey focuses on monastic economy in the Carolingian period, and Constance Berman in the high and late Middle Ages. Other articles also deal with economy to a greater or lesser extent:  Isabelle Rosé for the central Middle Ages, to explain how abbeys transformed themselves into feudal lords; Jonathan Lyon for the long twelfth century, when monasteries were intricately linked with the local families; and both Röckelein and Hirbodian for the high and late Middle Ages. Monasteries were very much part of the politics of the non-​monastic world, both ecclesiastical and secular, contrary to the old claim that monks and nuns lived in desert-​like isolation. Billett, Jones, and especially Rutger Kramer and Vanderputten discuss monastic reforms in England and on the Continent in their political context. Tristan Sharp explores the interaction between monasteries and the secular Church, and particularly with bishops. Several of our authors highlight the political role that monastics played, or were made to play, throughout the Middle Ages, showing how their relations with the world beyond the monastery changed and evolved. Besides Kramer’s for the Carolingian Empire, the article by Rosé explores more particularly the rhetoric of power developed by some great abbots in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The contributions by Lyon and Hirbodian further reflect the continued engagement of monastics within family or kin groups in the high and later Middle Ages respectively. Two articles consider both the self-​perception of regulars and the ways in which lay people (and not only the lay and/​or ecclesiastical authorities) viewed medieval monks and nuns. Sita Steckel offers a nuanced discussion of anti-​monastic satire in secular literature from the twelfth century to the later Middle Ages, and Roest takes on the common perception of decline and decay within the monastic world of the late Middle Ages. Both of these 14

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articles contribute to our understanding of the social role that monasteries played within medieval society at large. Finally, the lives of “ordinary” monks and nuns, as well as the lives of non-​ professed or non-​choir religious men and women (lay brothers and sisters, and men and women living within or beside a monastic precinct) have attracted less scholarly attention than those of their more extraordinary counterparts, and there is still much to be learned about everyday life within monasteries. Réal discusses the daily activities of monks and nuns from late antiquity to the Carolingian period on the basis of rules and saints’ Lives, while Cochelin considers the interaction of the simple monks with lay servants and abbots, primarily using customaries. Christian Knudsen offers a broader depiction of the daily life of monks in the late Middle Ages, drawing on the wealth of sources for this later period, especially visitation records. Megan Cassidy-​ Welch has written a much needed synthesis on the lay brothers and lay sisters who lived in or around monasteries, seeing to the material needs of monks and nuns during the high and later Middle Ages. The History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West brings together into a single resource the work of a diverse and international team of scholars to offer the most comprehensive treatment of late antique and medieval monasticism in the Latin West published to date. The mise en parallèle of all these different voices and perspectives highlights new directions in research for coming generations of scholars. The polyphony of monasticisms presented here demands that future research not be constrained by definitions, categories, and narratives inherited from the rich and complex legacy of order-​ based histories of the monastic tradition. The articles that comprise these two volumes together constitute an inflection point in medieval monastic historiography. It is our hope that they will inspire research guided by a more flexible palette of terms and more permeable boundaries that allow religious women and other religious figures too long left in the shadows or considered marginal or second class—​the house ascetics, the lay brothers and lay sisters in monasteries, urban recluses, and a wide array of others who defy easy categorization—​to take their proper place in the story of medieval monasticism.

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PA RT   I *

THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY

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The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism A l bre cht Die m a n d Claudia   Rapp Someone in need of a first orientation about the origins and the early history of monasticism, whether in the West or in the East, might feel confused and lost.1 Only one generation ago, a volume like this would have started in the Greek East with chapters on Antony and the Desert Fathers, Pachomius and the origins of cenobitism, Basil and his Rule; then moved on to the Latin West with Martin, Lérins, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) and his Rule for nuns, Benedict and the Regula Benedicti (RB); continued further north with Columbanus (d. 615) and Irish monasticism; returned to the Continent with Anglo-​Saxon monks; and concluded with Benedict of Aniane and the triumph of the RB in Carolingian times. For the Greek-​speaking East, the storyline would have taken a different turn after Basil, continuing on to the laura-​ style monasticism propagated by Sabas in the Judean desert, the monastic reform by Theodore the Studite (d. 826) in the ninth century, and the foundation of the Great Lavra by Athanasius the Athonite in the tenth.2 And Albrecht Diem’s contribution to this chapter was made possible by the SFB F 4202 “Visions of Community,” funded by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF), the Faculty of History and Cultural Sciences of the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Science. Claudia Rapp’s contribution benefited from the financial support of the University of Vienna and the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) Wittgenstein-​Prize Project “Mobility, Migration and Personal Agency.” We would like to thank Pater Marcel Albert OSB, Matthieu van der Meer, and the students of Isabelle Cochelin’s graduate workshop “Out of the Hermitage” for their comments and suggestions. 1 For a comprehensive bibliography on late antique and early medieval monasticism, see www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org/​bibliographymonasticism.htm (date of last access: 27 August 2018). 2 General overviews:  C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism:  Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (London and New York, 2015); Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism:  From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2000); Gert Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism:  Its History and Forms of Life (Kalamazoo, MA, 2016); William Harmless, Desert Christians:  An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford and New York, 2004); Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, c. 350–​850 (Cambridge, 2009).

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there would have been the obligatory twenty-​f ive or fewer pages on female monasticism.3 Now, the situation has changed. In the old monastic drama, Antony, Athanasius, Martin, Macrina, Eustochium, Melania, Sabas, Patrick, Cassian, Caesarius, Benedict, Radegund, Columbanus, or Theodore the Studite stood center stage. But since their stories (as far as they are told in hagiographic works) have fallen prey to rigorous source criticism in recent years, they are beginning to lose contours or even recede into the background.4 Much of what has been taken for granted—​such as the importance of Lérins, the Irish impact, the idea of monasticism as a vita regularis, female monastic enclosure, the preeminent role of the RB (and Benedict’s authorship of the Rule), or the role of Benedict of Aniane as a praeceptor regulae—​has been subject to critical new assessment.5 The traditional narrative has gradually lost its persuasive force, and it is uncertain whether new comprehensive narratives can or even should be expected soon. The study of monasticism, especially since the 1990s, has diversified into a multitude of thematic approaches that postulate new turning points,

Surveys on female monasticism: Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994); Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Jane Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society c. 500–​1100 (Chicago, IL, 1998); Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 2008); Gert Melville and Anne Müller, eds., Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages. Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Münster and Berlin, 2011); Alice-​Mary Talbot, Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Burlington, VT, 2001); Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, Michael Grünbart, and Matthew Savage, eds., Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond (Vienna, 2014). 4 For example, Clare Stancliffe, St. Martin and His Hagiographer:  History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford, 1983); Richard J. Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-​Century Gaul (Oxford, 2007); William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge, 1994); Thomas M. Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), 344–​90 (on Columbanus); Anna Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout, 2008); Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven, CT, 1992); Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism (Washington, DC, 1995); Thomas Pratsch, Theodoros Studites (759–​826)—​zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Der Abt des Studiosklosters in Konstantinopel im Spannungsfeld von Patriarch, Kaiser und eigenem Anspruch (Frankfurt and New York, 1998). 5 For example, Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000); Ian N. Wood, “The Irish in England and on the Continent in the Seventh Century: Part I,” Peritia 26 (2015): 171–​98; Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram:  The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 53–​84; Rutger Kramer, Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire:  Ideals and Expectations during the Reign of Louis the Pious (813–​828) (Amsterdam, 2019). 3

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transcend traditional frameworks and ask new questions.6 Monastic studies now often focus on “the desert” in addition to the Desert Fathers; on “gender,” “the body,” or “masculinity” in addition to nuns, convents, chastity, and virginity; on “charisma” in addition to the Lives of saints; and on “normativity” in addition to monastic rules or regular observance. “Discipline” draws more attention than obedience and fasting; we explore “monastic landscapes” and “monasticisms” rather than just focusing on Lérins, Montecassino, Luxeuil, or other eminent monastic foundations. We now talk about “identity,” “networks,” and “communication” as a way of thinking about monastic orders; about “life cycles” when we want to discuss novices; and about “sacred space” when we explore the concept of enclosure. Most of the contributions in this volume follow these new paths and elaborate on their themes within a well-​defined regional or temporal framework, shying away from broad summaries and sweeping claims. They provide methodological suggestions, point to sources outside the canon, and lay down tracks for future research, rather than offering superficially convenient syntheses and deceptively definitive, but telescopically foreshortened answers. In this section, for example, the studies of female ascetics who lived in organized groups in Egypt (Maria Chiara Giorda), of domestic female asceticism in the Latin West and its increasing appropriation by the Church (Eliana Magnani), and of nuns and manual labor (Isabelle Réal) engage with female monasticism from entirely different perspectives, in different periods and contexts. They show two approaches that are equally legitimate and productive: studying female religious life as a phenomenon distinct from and largely independent of the male monastic traditions, and as a particular form of a monastic life that largely transcends gender differences. A number of contributions in this volume address different “monastic landscapes”: Visigothic Spain (Pablo Díaz), southern Italy (Valerie Ramseyer), Ireland (Lisa Bitel), Anglo-​ Saxon England (Christopher Jones), and the northern and eastern frontiers of the Frankish world ( Janneke Raaijmakers). Instead of drawing a detailed and comprehensive “map” of early medieval monasticism, these contributions create an itinerary of methodologies to study monastic life in particular regions on the basis of specific sets of sources: monastic rules, penitentials and instructional narratives, and hagiography, as well as charters and other forms of documentary evidence. They do

Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram; Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer, eds., Shaping Stability. The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2016); Maciej Bielawsi and Daniël Hombergen, eds., Il monachesimo tra eredità e aperture (Rome, 2004).

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so with an eye on conflict and competition, the impact of political structures, and the connections between monastic and familial identities. The impulse to seek firm ground in focused and detailed studies, along with the reluctance to produce syntheses, is a result of the emancipation from the monastic master narrative. Monastic studies are in flux. Liberated from old paradigms, and using sources that had been overlooked or ignored,7 they might well be one of the most dynamic fields of medieval studies today. New syntheses may come at some point—​and the articles in this volume are opening new perspectives for a future road map—​but we are not there yet.

The Traditional Narrative and its Shortcomings From early on, monastic communities created their identity on the basis of invented traditions that were later, simplified by time, synthesized into the grand monastic narrative we have been accustomed to hear and tell. The traditional narrative that carries us from Egypt to Mount Athos or Kornelienmünster is not just a modern construct that can be phased out and shelved like other inventions of modern historiography, such as “feudalism,” the medieval “state,” the “Carolingian Renaissance,” or Byzantine “caesaropapism.” Indeed, it is a storyline that has its own, medieval history, which took shape largely in the context of the Carolingian monastic reforms of the ninth century. Carolingian scriptoria and libraries created a canon of Latin sources and shaped the idea of monasticism as “regular” life (vita regularis)—​a development discussed in the contribution of Diem and Rousseau in this volume. The late antique and Byzantine East, where each monastery followed its own set of rules (typikon), offers an interesting counterpoint.8 The absence of monastic orders meant that the institutional development of monasticism was not foregrounded to the extent of becoming the protagonist in a master narrative. Instead, the medieval chain of tradition that linked the lived present with the foundational period in the late antique past was not so much focused

As exemplified by the contribution of Helvétius in this volume; see also the monumental Adalbert de Vogüé, Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique dans l’antiquité. Première partie: le monachisme latin, 12 vols. (Paris, 1991–​2008); and Adalbert de Vogüé, Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique dans l’antiquité. Deuxième partie: le monachisme grec, 3 vols. (Rome, 2015). 8 The English translation of more than sixty Greek monastic rules, beginning with late antiquity, has given new impetus to the study of Byzantine monasticism, and is available online at www.doaks.org/​research/​publications/​books/​byzantine-​monastic-​ foundation-​documents-​a-​complete (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 7

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on texts and rules, but mainly on individual saints (Antony first and foremost, but also other Desert Fathers9) who provided models for monastic conduct, or on spiritual guides who offered inspiration through their teaching, especially Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) and John Climacus (d. c. 650). With regard to the emergence of Western monasticism, Benedictine scholars of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries added their part to this linear view of the history of monasticism by producing widely available editions of texts considered to be canonical, and a methodological tool kit to analyze them. They created a narrative that provided their own monastic world with an empowering past and an origin myth that legitimated their own existence and mostly ignored female monastics. Monastic history largely became male ‘Benedictine’ history; its protagonists became, where possible, Benedictines or at least Proto-​Benedictines. This also resulted in a narrowing of the geographic focus, leaving us with the impression that everything relevant happened in the Frankish kingdoms, in a few monasteries in Italy (mainly Montecassino), and, maybe, in the Irish and Anglo-​Saxon world—​as far as it had an impact on the monastic heartlands.10 A  number of contributions to this volume focus therefore on monastic landscapes and traditions that have often been considered peripheral:  Visigothic Spain (Pablo Díaz), the northern and eastern frontiers ( Janneke Raaijmakers), and southern Italy (Valerie Ramseyer). Many of the elements that became a part of the monastic master narrative, such as the Egyptian origins, the myth of the desert,11 the dichotomy of cenobitism and eremitism, the role of some obvious monastic foundations (for example Lérins, Montecassino, and Luxeuil), or the notion of a distinctly Irish monastic ideal, are, as it were, based on “situational constructs” that served very specific agendas in the periods they were created.12 Moreover, the master narrative of monasticism is predominantly a Western phenomenon based on Latin sources. The neglect of the monastic worlds of the eastern Mediterranean, in Byzantium, and in the regions under Islamic rule



A good example is the accretion of stories about Abba Poimen. See William Harmless, “Remembering Poimen Remembering,” Church History:  Studies in Christianity and Culture 69 (2000): 483–​518. 10 On the history of early modern monastic historiography, see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963). 11 James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society and the Desert. Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999); Claudia Rapp, “Desert, City and Countryside in the Early Christian Imagination,” in The Encroaching Desert: Egyptian Hagiography and the Medieval West, ed. Jitse Dijkstra and Mathilde van Dijk (Leiden, 2006), 93–​112. 12 See, for example, the article by Bitel in this volume. 9

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(including Spain) may be one of the greatest omissions in traditional monastic historiography.13 Aside from creating a past that serves the present, many of the sources available to us express what are, in fact, diverse and often controversial theological viewpoints under the pretense of consent and common sense. Authors of rules, hagiographic texts, ascetic treatises, letters, and charters operate, for example, on the basis of distinct ideals of sanctity, eschatologies, notions of sin and salvation, conceptions of human nature, theories on the relationship between grace and human agency, viewpoints on the nature of the Eucharist, models of penance, or rationales of the effect of ascetic life and renunciation of the world. The debates on grace, predestination, and free will in the West or on the veneration of images in the East that are articulated openly by medieval authors are only the tip of an iceberg of countless discretely pursued theological debates that lurk below the apparent calm and immutable surface of our sources.14 One can smuggle a lot of—​potentially controversial—​theology into the story of an unquestionably saintly individual or into a seemingly inconspicuous sequence of miracula.15 The textual techniques and rhetorical strategies that monastic writers deployed in order to evoke a suitable past and argue about fundamental theological questions under the guise of harmony and consensus would repay further exploration in their own right, as has already been demonstrated with much success in other areas of study.16 The timeless monastic ideal with its origins in a remote past is linked to the present through the slow construction of a canon of texts of the sancti patres. Monastic bestsellers such as Cassian’s (d. 435)  work, the Regula Basilii, the Vitae Patrum (including the Life of Antony and Jerome’s (d. 420) hagiographical





Arthur Vööbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient: A Contribution to the History of Culture in the Near East, 3  vols. (Louvain, 1958–​68); Florence Jullien and Marie-​ Joseph Pierre, eds., Monachismes d’Orient (Turnhout, 2011); Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (Charlottesville, VA, 2016). 14 Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-​Pelagian Controversy (Macon, GA, 1996); Marie-​France Auzépy, L’hagiographie et l’iconoclasme byzantin. Le cas de la Vie d’Étienne le Jeune (Brookfield, VT, 1999). 15 For a case study, see Albrecht Diem, “‘Die ‘Regula Columbani’ und die ‘Regula Sancti Galli’: Überlegungen zu den Gallusviten in ihrem karolingischen Kontext,” in Gallus und seine Zeit. Leben, Wirken, Nachleben, ed. Franziska Schnoor, Karl Schmuki, Ernst Tremp Peter Erhart, and Jakob Kuratli Hüeblin (St. Gall, 2015), 65–​97. 16 Jamie Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom (Cambridge, 2014); Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas:  The West Frankish Kingdom (840–​987) (Turnhout, 2012); Monique Goullet, Écriture et réécriture hagigraphiques. Essai sur les réécritures de Vies de saints dans l’Occident latin médiéval (VIIIe–​XIIIe s.) (Turnhout, 2005). 13

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œuvre), the Apophthegmata Patrum, the monastic Historiae in Latin and Greek, and eventually the RB all play a complex double role as cornerstones for the creation of a monastic identity and consequently as preferred sources for modern explorations of monastic history.17 It is often difficult to keep these roles apart—​as Roberto Alciati shows in his contribution to this volume. Most narrative and normative texts, theological works, letters, and charters related to monastic life situate the present within a tradition reaching back to the supposed origins of monastic life and thus make distinct historical claims. Whatever past they constructed depended on the purposes and objectives of their authors and the expectations of their audience. Monks (but also nuns) could find their forefathers in the prophets of the Old Testament, in the asceticism of John the Baptist, in the apostolic community, in Antony’s hermitage, in Pachomius’ koinobion, or, closer to home, in the communities founded by Honoratus, Patrick, or Benedict. The authors of our sources proclaim, restore, or adapt a seemingly timeless monastic ideal, an ideal state that had been established in a distant past. No medieval text—​at least none written from an insider’s perspective—​would praise innovations and transformations, let alone openly admit that the ideal of the sancti patres had been abandoned. If we read these sources uncritically, we gain the impression that monasticism has indeed little history in itself aside from ‘spreading’ into different regions and establishing itself in newly Christianized parts of the post-​Roman world:  Lérins becomes a Western outpost of ‘Egyptian’ monasticism; the impenetrable forests of the Jura are transformed into a climate-​adjusted variant of the desert; and there is an Antony hidden in almost every good monastic founder. If we were to take these sources literally, not much would have happened, aside from slightly adjusting this timeless ideal to different regions (and weathers), except for returning to an imagined ideal state conveniently situated in a remote past and often in another country. Traditional monastic historiography, both medieval and more recent, used to synthesize this assemblage of constructed pasts (despite all contradictions) into one narrative revolving around two ideal types of monastic organization:  cenobitism and eremitism, both of them in complete harmony with the teaching and the hierarchy of the Church. If we follow our sources

On the impact of the Vitae Patrum in the Latin West, see Pascal Bertrand, “Die Evagriusübersetzung der Vita Antonii. Rezeption-​ Überlieferung-​ Edition. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Vitas patrum-​Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 2006). See also the new edition of the two Latin versions of the Vita Antonii in Vitae Antonii versiones latinae. Vita beati Antonii abbatis Evagrio interprete. Versio uetustissima, ed. Lois Gandt and Pascal Bertrand, CCSL 170.

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(as has been done in the past) and apply their categories (for example, the four types of monks proposed at the beginning of the RB) and distinctions (between orthodox and heterodox, true monks and dangerous frauds), we tell the story of monasticism the way they told it themselves. But if we read our sources against the grain and force them to disclose what they want to disguise, a story with many different facets emerges: processes of diversification, transformation, and experimentation that produced an almost unlimited diversity of forms of spiritual or ascetic communities that vastly differ in settings, practices, ideologies, economic bases, and theological frameworks. We find what we used to call “monks” or “nuns” in caves, tombs, and huts, on islands, in a real or symbolic desert, in lavish Roman villas, on the fringes of cities but also right at their centers.18 Monastic communities could consist of a charismatic leader surrounded by a handful of followers, of married couples or “non-​traditional” families bound in spiritual brotherhood,19 or domestic communities of praying virgins and widows,20 but also as streamlined organizations and veritable monastic cities.21 Some communities were culturally refined, theological think-​tanks, places of education and learning, and recruiting grounds for a future ecclesiastical elite, while others kept a deliberate distance from learning and scholarship. Some fostered collective poverty; others became large economic centers for the quasi-​industrial production of goods, or places living off the revenues of vast estates that had been owned by those who had entered the community or of donations pro remedio animae with the expectation of receiving intercessory prayer in return.22 And it is important to keep in mind that these responses inevitably change over time:  a hermitage might turn into a factory of intercessory prayer; a renowned center of learning might fall into obscurity within a generation. Collective poverty, in particular, is usually a rather short-​lived ideal.23





See also the article by Dey and Brooks Hedstrom in this volume. See the article by Díaz in this volume; Claudia Rapp, Brother-​Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual (New York, 2016). 20 See the article by Magnani in this volume; Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, DE, 1983); Kristina Sessa, The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge and New York, 2012). 21 Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-​Century Egypt, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, 1999). 22 See the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume; Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul:  Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA, 2015). On monastic intercessory prayer, see also the article by Blennemann in this volume; Renie S. Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford, 2017). 23 See the articles by Kaplan and Devroey in this volume. 18 19

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Each community developed different responses to the challenge of living a secluded and more rigorous life than ordinary Christians, often (though not always) determined by a quest for perfection and a pursuit of salvation, and with the goal of establishing stable structures that would outlast the lifespan of their individual members. Calling all of these communities and organizations “monasteries” and subsuming them under the umbrella term “monasticism” might be misleading and not do justice to their diversity.24 We should at least use the plural “monasticisms.” Yet almost all of these monasticisms had one thing in common: their claim to represent the “real thing” and the most perfect manifestation of the timeless ideal of the sancti patres. Our sources either ignore other monasticisms or dismiss them as reproachable products of deviation and decline. Monks and nuns often had few good things to say about each other, and monastic historiography tended to follow the verdicts of the ones who survived the longest. The four types of monks that we find in the Rule of the Master and in the RB (good monks and hermits, bad Sarabaites and gyrovagi) were not so much a classification but a polemic and enduringly effective tool for exclusion. If we were to take Benedict seriously, many protagonists of our saints’ Lives would perfectly deserve to be called gyrovagi (“wanderers”), in Benedict’s eyes the worst kind of monks. What is, after all, the difference between a gyrovagus and a peregrinus? The communities arising around many holy men (Martin, Romanus, and Lupicinus), or the monastic pioneers in Gregory of Tours’ (d. 594) Liber vitae Patrum could easily be categorized as Sarabaites—​those who live without a rule.25 Indeed, monastic communities properly living sub regula vel abate were still a minority in Benedict’s time. Any form of communal religious life that was not acknowledged as monastic by the canon of monastic sources had little chance of gaining a place in the history of monasticism. This applies especially to communities placed outside the boundaries of orthodoxy. Yet there is no reason to deny Nestorian, Monophysite, Arian, Donatist, or Melitian communities their rightful place in monastic history just because we know much of them through polemics and distorted descriptions. Whether one ended up on the wrong or right side of history is often enough based on historical coincidences and on the sources that happen to have been preserved. The self-​serving origin myths within the Christian tradition that our sources tend to offer should not prevent us from searching for the origins

See the article by Bitel in this volume. Rapp, Brother-​Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, 88–​157.

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of monastic life—​as a spiritual quest, as an ascetic effort, and as a form of social organization—​in philosophical schools,26 in gnostic communities,27 among Essenes, Manichaeans, and Encratites, or in the many other groups that posed a challenge or were in opposition to the emerging church structure that was in unison with Roman society after 313.28 It is therefore fruitful to step away from the notion that monasticism was built upon a unified body of doctrine and clear boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as David Brakke discusses in his contribution to this volume. The challenge to deal with the provocations of Augustine’s notion of original sin, lack of agency, and dependence on grace may have overshadowed monastic theology for centuries, but it was by no means the only focal point of theological strife and dissent. The decisions to define a monastic community as congregatio sancta and a monastery as locus sanctus, to proclaim the effectiveness of the medicamenta paenitentiae, or to postulate that impenetrable boundaries establish a higher degree of purity seem obvious claims from our post facto positions but they were in fact first and foremost fundamental innovative doctrinal matters. We should not underestimate the level of reflection and sophistication, and the willingness to address these problems in the texts produced by early medieval monks and nuns. Particularly in the late antique and early medieval period, the margins of orthodoxy were much wider than one might assume.29 This, however, requires putting the magnifying glass to every programmatic statement and seeing diversity and dissent under a thick layer of pretended harmony and unity.

The Darker Side of Monasticism(s) Scholars used to approach monasticism—​and certainly the achievement of creating powerful and permanent institutions—​with a high degree of reverence and respect. Among the few exceptions are historians such as Edward Gibbon (1737–​94), who claimed that monks contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, and those Protestant or Enlightenment scholars who located

Samuel Rubenson, ed., Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia (Leuven, 2013). David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 28 Peter Brown, The Body and Society:  Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York, 2008); Richard Valantasis, ed., Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice (Princeton, NJ, 2000). 29 Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia:  A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (New York, 2014); David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Baltimore, MD, 1998). 26 27

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the roots of Catholic superstition in the texts of the monastic fathers.30 The generally admiring and sympathetic views on monastic achievements, however, make us overlook the fact that, at least in the late ancient world, monks (and to a lesser extent nuns) did not enjoy unequivocal popularity. Libanius (d. c. 393), the pagan rhetor of Antioch, had harsh words of condemnation for the Christian ascetics who made a public display of their virtue while eating and drinking to their hearts’ content thanks to the charity of others.31 He was certainly not the only one. Most variants of monastic life were met with suspicion, resistance, or blunt aversion, from cultivated pagans, Christian bishops, and Roman bureaucrats alike. Far into the seventh century, secular laws and acts of councils approached monastic life with little sympathy and primarily with the purpose of crisis management.32 Ascetic communities were, from the viewpoint of powerful outsiders, an unavoidable nuisance—​often just too popular to be suppressed.33 The iconoclastic policy of Byzantine emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries specifically targeted monks and monasteries that had become too powerful in spiritual and economic terms.34 The Church as it was guided by local bishops could function perfectly well without monks, though veiled virgins and widows did have an established place in Church structures from an early date.35 It is very difficult to find contemporary voices of unequivocal praise of monastic life, let alone a general call for monastic conversion. This is understandable given that monastic groups claimed superiority by living according to higher standards—​in discipline, chastity, renunciation of wealth, liturgical practice—​which represented a provocation to those who did not meet these standards. In particular, they posed a challenge to the authority of the leaders of the emerging Church structures under episcopal control. This structural conflict phased out only



Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, vol. 2 (London, 1994), 411–​30, Book 3, chap.  37; Adolf von Harnack, Das Mönchtum, seine Ideale und seine Geschichte (Giessen, 1881). 31 Libanius, Oration 30.8–​13 (Pro Templis), in Libanius, Selected Works, with an English Translation, Introduction and Notes, ed. A. F. Norman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 107–​13. 32 Codex Iustiniani, Novella 123, c. 34–​44 (a d 546), in R. Schoell and W. Kroll, eds., Corpus 25. On Merovingian monastic legislation, see Iuris Civilis, III (Berlin, 1888), 618–​ Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005), 273–​89. 33 Albrecht Diem, “Gregory’s Chess Board: Monastic Conflict and Competition in Early Medieval Gaul,” in Compétition et sacré au haut Moyen Âge. Entre médiation et exclusion, ed. Philippe Depreux, François Bougard, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout, 2015), 165–​91. 34 John Haldon and Leslie Brubaker, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–​850: A History (Cambridge and New York, 2011). 35 See the article by Magnani in this volume; Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (New York, 2013).

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slowly, though there was, undoubtedly, a general trend toward integration of monastic communities into ecclesiastical structures, which had a deep impact on both sides.36 Bishops became founders and patrons of monasteries; the foundation of a monastery was a legal transaction; monasteries served as recruiting places of new elites.37 But this process (which might form another backbone of a new monastic narrative) never applied to all variants of monastic life and, even in the Carolingian period, was not yet fully implemented. Still, only death and a remote memory could turn annoying, potentially dangerous, subversive, unkempt, and smelly troublemakers and their followers into saints and holy communities. A  refreshing alternative perspective on monasteries can be gained if we look at them through the eyes of people like the angry priest Florentius, who tried to tempt Benedict’s community by having a group of naked women dance in front of the monastery’s window.38 Perhaps he had good reasons for disliking Benedict and his followers, even if his measures were somewhat drastic. Even monks with their insider’s perspective, full of praise for their own way of life and the tailor-​made past that legitimated its existence, could be critical and often even hostile toward the ants from a different hill.39 Palladius (d. before 431) wrote the Historia Lausiaca as a cautionary tale, exposing praiseworthy examples because there were so many bad ones around.40 Jerome’s letters contain more warnings against corrupt monks than praises of rightful ones.41 Augustine’s De opere monachorum, an angry outburst against monks who claimed that their status exempted them from work, wandering monks, and traders in fake relics, became a bestseller throughout the Middle Ages: [The most skillful enemy] has so many hypocrites under the disguise of monks spread around everywhere, who roam around in the province, not





Robert Austin Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990); Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, CA, 2005). 37 This was already the case in late antique Egypt. See Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009). 38 Gregory I, Dialogi II 8.1–​7, SC 260, 160–​4. 39 See, for example, Regula communis 1–​2, in Julio Campos Ruiz, ed., San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda (Madrid, 1971), 172–​7; see also the article by Díaz in this volume; and numerous studies by Paula Barata Dias, who is preparing a critical edition of the Visigothic monastic rules. 40 Palladius, Historia Lausiaca, prol. II.8–​15, in Adelheid Wellhausen, ed., Die Lateinische Übersetzung der Historia Lausiaca des Palladius (Berlin and New  York, 2003), 488–​91; Claudia Rapp, “Palladius, Lausus and the Historia Lausiaca,” in Novum Millennium: Essays in Honor of Paul Speck, ed. Sarolta Takács and Claudia Sode (Aldershot, 2001), 279–​89. 41 Jerome, Ep. 22.34, 50, 52.5–​6, 54.5, and 57.2, CSEL 54, 196–​7, 388–​95, 421–​6, 470, and 504–​5; Ep. 82.10 and 92, CSEL 55, 117 and 147–​55; Ep. 130.7 and 133.3, CSEL 56, 182–​6, and 244–​7. 36

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being sent anywhere, not belonging anywhere, not staying nor settling down anywhere. Some hawk the limbs of martyrs (if they were martyrs), others praise their rags and chains, others pretend to have heard that their parents or kin live in some region or another and that they are on the way to them. All of them are begging; all of them make demands, either of the expenses of a profitable poverty or of a reward for their pretended sanctity. Since in the meantime they are everywhere debunked for their evil deeds or in one way or another exposed, your intention is defiled along with the general reputation of monks—​an intention so good and holy that we wish it to flourish in Christ’s name both throughout other regions and throughout all of Africa.42

Even in the seventh century, when we would expect that monks had gained an established place within a Christian society, Isidore of Seville (d. 636) gives the impression that they are corrupt until the opposite is proven: Monks are chosen according to humility. To be sure, the disease of vainglory stains many of them, and abstinence puffs up many, and knowledge exalts. They do good things, but for fame and not for eternal life, in other words so that they may grasp the glory of praise or reach the height of the desired honor. Among them discord often arises, and the jealousy of envy concerning fraternal successes is produced, the love of temporal things walks about, pursuing earthly yearnings just as uselessly as frequently, doing so before human eyes without shame. Such as these, therefore, should never be called monks, because they are joined to God only by profession and not by action.43

Such comments make a sharp distinction between those who are monks only in name and those who truly deserve that appellation. They imply a call for internal renewal according to the “true” monastic spirit of yore, but they can also be read as harsh criticism of contemporary manifestations of monastic living, though we should avoid taking their side too easily.

The Monastic Experiment If we listen to the critics of monastic life and screen out the rhetoric that claims that such life fulfills a timeless ideal from which it evolved organically



Augustine, De opere monachorum XXVIII.36, CSEL 41, 585. On wandering monks, see Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300–​800 (University Park, PA, 2005); Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2002). 43 Isidore of Seville, De ecclesiasticis officiis XVI (XV) 18, CCSL 113, 79–​80; translated in Thomas L. Knoebel, ed., Isidore of Seville: De ecclesiasticis officiis (New York, 2008), 89.

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and in harmony with its surroundings (leaving aside those described as unquestionably evil or possessed by demons), late antique and early medieval monastic history starts to look like a long process of internal strife, competition, and experimentation. Founding, organizing, controlling, and reforming a religious community meant experimenting with ways to overcome the odds of internal conflicts and centrifugal powers. Monasteries had to deal with lack or decline of discipline and motivations, uprisings, the challenge of institutionalizing charisma, economic constraints, and the necessity of fending off external control and interference. They had to make efforts to defend their own theological and spiritual basis. Can monastic life surmount or circumvent human weakness and inherent sinfulness? Is it possible to “organize” and institutionalize sanctity and turn monasteries into places that are suitable for pursuing eternal salvation?44 Some of these experiments in the early Middle Ages were more audacious and revolutionary than anything we find in later centuries. Antony, Basil, Pachomius, Shenoute, Evagrius, Cassian, Theodoret, Caesarius, Benedict, Columbanus, Jonas of Bobbio, and Fructuosus deserve recognition as radical thinkers and geniuses of their own sort. Monasteries can be seen as laboratories for exploring techniques of perfection and attempting to realize utopias—​laboratories that operated with constantly changing experimental arrangements. They evolved in a late and post-​Roman world in flux, where political structures, moral codes, and religious practices were not yet consolidated. Hardly any monastic writer would admit that many of these experiments failed miserably, though it is easy to read crisis and struggle for survival between the lines. Often only miraculous intervention could save a community that was on the brink of starvation, under siege by hostile surroundings, or embroiled in a conflict that threatened to destroy it. The violent uprising of the nuns in Radegund’s foundation in Poitiers marks one of the most spectacular failures of a monastic experiment.45 Many communities did not survive the death of their founder. Only a minority of monastic enterprises succeeded in establishing the institutional continuity that we tend to praise and admire—​at least until there were recognized models, legal frameworks, and network structures



Albrecht Diem, “L’espace, la grâce et la discipline dans les règles monastiques du haut Moyen Âge,” in Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieu clos (VIe–​XIXe siècle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-​Donat, Julie Claustre, Élisabeth Lusset, and Falk Bretschneider (Paris, 2015), 215–​38. 45 Kathrin Götsch, “Der Nonnenaufstand von Poitiers:  Flächenbrand oder apokalyptisches Zeichen? Zu den merowingischen Klosterfrauen in Gregors Zehn Büchern Geschichte,” Concilium Medii Aevi 13 (2010): 1–​18.

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that could support and unify monastic foundations and move them more smoothly beyond the experimental stage. Within the Frankish world, such institutionalization may have arisen in the aftermath of Columbanus’ arrival on the Continent. Under his successors we find the first formulae for elaborately phrased privileges and grants of immunity, along with a firm belief in the necessity of a text-​based regular life.46 The rise of established models of monastic organization and the slow (though never complete) disappearance of pioneering experiments might at some point form yet another structuring element of a new monastic narrative.

New Opportunities for Scholarship: Crossover Methodologies New perspectives on the history monasticism can be gained by borrowing approaches and methodologies from adjacent scholarly disciplines. Talking about monasteries as “laboratories” might cause confusion and reluctance among traditional historians, church historians, and theologians (though probably not so much among some monks and nuns today), but it helps to convince scholars in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that the first centuries of monastic history offer a wealth of material for them that has still hardly been broached. Psychologists working on emotions, queer theorists breaking down gender binaries, architects theorizing about space, anthropologists interested in the mechanisms of collective memory, cognitive scientists interested in modes of perception and mental control, sociologists interested in charisma—​to mention but a few of the possibilities—​may discover that early medieval monasticism provides a wealth of opportunities for comparative approaches. It offers test cases to support, dismantle, or refine their theories. More importantly, these “monastic laboratories” produced models, practices, categories, and semantic repertoires with a long staying power that extends to the present day. The “discovery” of monasticism by disciplines outside history, theology, and philology would open a two-​way street that could unlock opportunities to explore new methodological repertoires and to ask questions we would never have thought to ask. Erwing Goffman’s “total institutions,” Michel Foucault’s “confessing animal” and his “battle for chastity,” or Max Weber’s “routinization of charisma” and Mary Douglas’s “ritual purity” have now become familiar within monastic studies, but there is much more potential, as Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional

Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999).

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communities, Felice Lifshitz’s Anglo-​Saxon feminism, Jo Ann McNamara’s third monastic gender, or Inbar Graiver’s work on demonology and cognitive science show.47

Archaeology of Concepts Many aspects of monastic life that we take for granted and that our sources depict as timeless and essential are, in fact, products of the long monastic experiment, often developed and implemented against fierce resistance. Intercessory prayer, regular observance, unconditional obedience and submission, support of the poor, manual labor, enclosure, the notion of the monastery as sacred space, the role of monasteries as places of education and preservation of knowledge, and formal procedures for monastic foundations as a legal transaction are all conceived as essential and uncontested features of monastic life. This was not the case, and—​as has been suggested above—​ we can trace their genesis by listening to the muffled voices of dissent. The emergence of these (and many other) aspects of medieval monastic life might at some point become another basis for a new monastic narrative, notwithstanding the reluctance of our sources to tell such a story. There are countless examples of adjustment, adaptation, and change, some of which have already been studied or at least broached, such as monastic recruitment patterns, the transformation of monasteries into prisons and places of forced retreat, the development of penitential practice, shifting notions of chastity and sexuality, the rise and transformation of normative observance, and the meaning of poverty in the monastic world.48 Descriptions of slow transformations that show awareness of Gleichzeitigkeiten des Ungleichzeitigen (“simultaneity of the non-​simultaneous”) will eventually replace a linear monastic Ereignisgeschichte (“history of events”). We can access these transformations by means of an archaeology



Lifshitz, Religious Women; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Jo Ann McNamara, “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden, 1999), 199–​209; Inbar Graiver, Asceticism of the Mind:  Forms of Attention and Self-​Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism (Toronto, 2018). 48 See, for example, Mayke De Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden, 1996); Mayke De Jong, Monastic Prisoners or Opting Out? Political Coercion and Honour in the Frankish Kingdoms,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Carine van Rhijn and Frans Theuws (Leiden, 2001), 291–​328; Rob Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2014); Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–​550 AD (Princeton, NJ, 2012); Diem, Das monastische Experiment. 47

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of concepts. Here are some examples, which stand, again, for countless other options. Monachi became at some point a category distinct from laici—​a transformative process crucial to monastic history, though not yet fully explored. For Caesarius of Arles monks were still lay people. Roughly a decade later, his successor Aurelianus (d. 551) wrote a new monastic rule that was largely based on Caesarius’ works. Diverting from Caesarius, however, he emphasized that his monks were a category apart: neither laici nor clerici. It would be wrong to assume that in 550 c e monks stopped being lay men, but Aurelianus’ revision of Caesarius’ rules nevertheless points toward a new monastic world.49 We see a similar shift taking place at roughly the same time if we compare the RB, which does not refer to laici at all, with the Regula magistri, which applies a clear distinction between monachi and laici even in places where both rules have the same wording otherwise. Benedict’s world seems to be that of the past, while the Master’s rule points into the future. This may be a good reason to reopen the debate on the relative sequence of the two rules.50 A second example asks what “asceticism” entails, keeping in mind that the Greek term askesis has no Latin equivalent.51 None of our sources would admit this, but there are clear indications that the repertoire and the function of ascetic practices profoundly changed and diversified between the fourth and the seventh (or ninth) centuries. In general—​and admittedly oversimplifying—​fasting turned into regulated eating, the battle against ever-​ present sexual desire into closely controlled sexual abstinence (with a deep impact on how monastic communities and spaces are organized); mortificatio of the body turned into a regime of disciplining and caring for the body; the demonic battleground of the desert got replaced by the safe and sacred monastic confines; radical poverty and austerity turned largely into the practice of sharing property; and the dramatic renunciation of the world was transformed into a regulated monastic conversion that went along with carefully calibrated legal transactions.





Albrecht Diem, “ ‘…ut si professus fuerit se omnia impleturum, tunc excipiatur’: Observations on the Rules for Monks and Nuns of Caesarius and Aurelianus of Arles,” in Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL. Festschrift für Kurt Smolak zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Victoria Zimmerl-​Panagl, Lukas J. Dorf bauer, and Clemens Weidmann (Berlin, 2014), 191–​224. 50 Still the most important contributions to this debate are the articles between Adalbert de Vogüé and Marilyn Dunn, the last of which was Marilyn Dunn, “The Master and St Benedict: A Rejoinder,” English Historical Review 107 (1992): 104–​11. 51 See the article by Alciati in this volume.

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Particularly important is the transformation of the practice and function of prayer. The ideal of ceaseless prayer, deliberate sleep deprivation, and constant weeping gave place to detailed ordines psallendi, to liturgical discipline, and to an almost industrial production of prayers and masses as a practice of collective intercession for the benefit of the founders and supporters of the monasteries.52 Intercessory prayer became for many (though not necessarily for all) monastic communities one of the main raisons d’être and a cornerstone for the integration of monasteries into wider political and ecclesiastical structures.53 In middle and late Byzantium, this was especially true for the monasteries that owed their existence to aristocratic family foundations, often founded by high-​born women.54

Texts and Stones The work of “real” archaeologists reminds us that there are physical remains of the monasteries we thought to know only from texts. The monastic worlds emerging from an increasing wealth of material evidence are often strikingly different from those worlds evoked by narratives and norms. They stubbornly resist simple syntheses. The different monasticisms—​those emerging out of texts and those emerging out of soils—​compel us to develop new ways of reading our textual and material evidence. Hendrik Dey and Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, and Sébastien Bully and Eleonora Destefanis show this in their two contributions, which provide an exhaustive overview of current excavations of monasteries that we have tended to approach largely on the basis of textual evidence.55 Who would have thought that the “wilderness” of Luxeuil had been densely populated and of crucial strategic importance—​as the contribution of Bully and Destefanis shows; and that the bones of the austere ascetics of Lérins or the pious monks at St. Stephen in Jerusalem bear the signs of diseases caused by overindulgence rather than excessive fasting?56



See the article by Jeffery in this volume. See the article by Blennemann in this volume; Arnold Angenendt, “Missa specialis:  zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entstehung der Privatmessen,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 17 (1983): 153–​221. 54 Catia Galatariotou, “Byzantine ktetorika typika:  A Comparative Study,” Revue des Études Byzantines 45 (1987): 77–​138. 55 Michel Lauwers, ed., Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval (Turnhout, 2014). For a general overview of the potential for the archaeological corrective of the written sources, see Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert, eds., La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe siècle), vol. 1. L’état des sources (Cairo and Athens, 2015). 56 Sheridan Gregoricka, “Ascetic or Affluent? Byzantine Diet at the Monastic Community of St. Stephen’s, Jerusalem from Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32.1 (2013): 63–​73; and the forthcoming work by Émilie Perez 52 53

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The excavations of Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune show us that the foundation of the monastery in 515 as it is praised in narrative sources was in fact not a foundation at all, but rather a forced and disruptive transition from one monastic model to another.57 The spatial setting of San Vincenzo al Volturno challenges everything we thought we knew about Carolingian monastic spaces based on the Plan of St. Gall, which had been guiding our imagination.58 Monastic archaeologists will continue to surprise by unearthing many more stumbling blocks for those who create worlds merely out of  words.

The Monastic Kaleidoscope Scholars studying the transformation of the Roman world, and the history of the post-​Roman barbarian kingdoms and the eastern Mediterranean, must inevitably deal with monks, nuns, and their institutions. Monasteries assumed a crucial role as repositories of knowledge and the places where key texts had been written,59 as political assets, as economic centers, as recruiting places for an ecclesiastical or even secular elite, or as focal points of collective identities. It was a long process by which these establishments—​at least some of them—​became anchors in political and cultural landscapes. A large part of the written sources that give us access to the late Roman and early medieval worlds, at least in the West, direct our gaze through a monastic filter. Reading our source material consistently against the grain and discerning the presence of this filter and its operating mechanisms is one of the greatest and most exciting challenges for future scholarship. A  particularly valuable contribution to this effort are projects reconstructing monastic libraries and making their manuscripts available digitally.60



(University of French Polynesia, Tahiti/​CNRS) based on bio-​archaeological research in Lérins and other Provençal monasteries. 57 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Francis Theuws, with Carine van Rhijn (Leiden, 2001), 271–​90. 58 In addition to the work of Federico Marazzi and Michel Lauwers, see Hendrik Dey, The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2015), 221–​43. 59 See the article by Contreni in this volume, and the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in volume II. 60 For a reconstruction of the libraries of St. Gall and Reichenau, see www.stgallplan. org/​ (date of last access:  18 August 2018); for the library of Lorsch, see www. bibliotheca-​laureshamensis-​digital.de (date of last access:  18 August 2018). The Monastic Manuscript Project is online at www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org (date of last access: 18 August 2018).

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Upon closer investigation, every specific “monasticism” is the product of a social context and a mirror of institutions, models, and structures that we find in its surrounding world. Every line of conflict and competition within monasteries, every debate over monastic ideals and practices, and every experiment in organizing and perpetuating a monastic institution is a reflection of what happens in the world outside. Quite often the monastic mirrors make things visible that would otherwise remain in the dark. Even those historians of the late antique and early medieval worlds who are not primarily interested in a history of monasticism as an isolated phenomenon will realize that the “monastic kaleidoscope” or the “monastic laboratory” opens up new perspectives on innumerable aspects of this period. There is no way of understanding the transformation and diversification of the Roman world without taking the transformations and diversities of late antique and early medieval “monasticisms” into account. Continuing to historicize all aspects of monastic life and challenging the notion of a stable and trans-​historical monastic ideal, recognizing the diversity of often competing “monasticisms,” and abandoning the notion of a structural harmony between the monastic world and its surroundings open up a wealth of new vistas on an ever-​ changing phenomenon—​as many of the contributions to this volume show.

Bibliography Brown, Peter. The Ransom of the Soul:  Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity. Cambridge, MA, 2015.   Treasure in Heaven. The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. Charlottesville, VA, 2016. Choy, Renie S. Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms. Oxford, 2017. De Jong, Mayke. “Monastic Prisoners or Opting Out? Political Coercion and Honour in the Frankish Kingdoms.” In Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Carine van Rhijn and Frans Theuws, 291–328. Leiden, 2001.   In Samuel’s Image. Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West. Leiden, 1996. Dey, Hendrik, and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Diem, Albrecht. Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens. Münster, 2005. Elm, Susanna. “Virgins of God.” The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 1994. Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society and the Desert:  Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg, PA, 1999. Goullet, Monique. Écriture et réécriture hagigraphiques. Essai sur les réécritures de Vies de saints dans l’Occident latin médiéval (VIIIe–XIIIe s.). Turnhout, 2005. Haldon, John, and Leslie Brubaker. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.  680–850:  A History. Cambridge and New York, 2011.

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Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford and New York, 2004. Hatlie, Peter. The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, c. 350–850. Cambridge, 2009. Kreiner, Jamie. The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom. Cambridge, 2014. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2014. Leyser, Conrad. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford, 2000. Lifshitz, Felice. Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia:  A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture. New York, 2014. Markus, Robert Austin. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge, 1990. Meens, Rob. Penance in Medieval Europe. Cambridge, 2014. Rapp, Claudia. Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual. New York, 2016. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY, 1999. Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA, 1999. Vogüé, Adalbert de. Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique dans l’antiquité. Première partie: le monachisme latin. 11 vols. Paris, 1991–2008.   Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique dans l’antiquité. Deuxième partie: le monachisme grec. 3 vols. Rome, 2015.

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Re-​Reading Monastic Traditions: Monks and Nuns, East and West, from the Origins to c. 750 An n e - M ​ a rie He lv étius, with the collabor ation o f M iche l Ka p la n, A n n e B oud’h ors, Muriel De b ié, a n d B é n é dicte Lesieur ( tr a n slate d b y Susa n Boynton)

Introduction To present the textual sources of Western monasticism up to c.  750, it is essential to involve specialists of Eastern Christianity in order to take into account the exchanges and reciprocal influences that have shaped the monks from different regions of the Christian world.1 In addition to my contribution on Latin sources, Michel Kaplan was responsible for the Greek sources, Anne Boud’hors for the Coptic ones, Muriel Debié for the Syriac sources (outside Palestine), and Bénédicte Lesieur for the Palestinian ones. Nevertheless, any attempt at synthesis would be premature; if many texts have been translated—​from Greek to Latin and vice versa, but also into Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Ethiopian—​ no existing repertory lists them. The current state of our knowledge is still lacunary, for it relies on an outmoded vision of history that separated and even opposed East and West. The conventional narrative that appears in all syntheses of the origins of monasticism is based on the painstaking work of modern and contemporary

For the main syntheses, see Samuel Rubenson, “Asceticism and Monasticism, I: Eastern,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 2: Constantine to c. 600, ed. Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (Cambridge, 2007), 637–​68; Marilyn Dunn, “Asceticism and Monasticism, II: Western,” in ibid., 669–​90; Anne-​Marie Helvétius and Michel Kaplan, “Asceticism and Its Institutions,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 3: Early Medieval Christianities (c. 600–​c. 1100), ed. Thomas Noble and Julia Smith (Cambridge, 2008), 275–​ 98 and 703–​12. See also, Bibliography on the History of Monasticism in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org/​bibliographymonasticism.htm (date of last access: 18 August 2018).

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philologists, one of the most famous of whom was Adalbert de Vogüé, who wrote a magisterial study of all the narrative texts in Latin and Greek that constitute the early monastic tradition that is commonly accepted by monks today.2 It presents the major works of the Latin world from the Life of Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria to Benedict of Aniane, including along the way Jerome, Rufinus, Ambrose, Augustine, Sulpicius Severus, John Cassian and the fathers of Lerins, Caesarius, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, Columbanus, Isidore, and Bede, as well as conciliar canons, the first written rules, and some saints’ Lives. The existence of this study by Vogüé makes it unnecessary to present these well-​known sources once again.3 It is nevertheless important to point out the limitations of his work. Vogüé set out to demonstrate the inevitability of the triumph of the Benedictine model in the West. According to this teleological approach, the entire history of early monasticism merely prepared the way for the imposition of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) in the West by Carolingian legislation. From this point of view, “true” monasticism could only be cenobitic and orthodox and postdate the Council of Nicaea (325); all forms of asceticism that preceded this date were judged “deviant” or were excluded from the definition of monasticism.4 Being a good philologist, Vogüé paid little attention to apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, or anonymous texts, which lacked authority in his eyes. Thus, he neglected the majority of extant hagiographical sources, namely the Lives of saints and the anonymous Passions of martyrs. He took into account neither liturgical sources, nor historical ones such as chronicles, diplomatic, and epigraphic sources, nor archaeological research. Finally, the separation he introduced between the Latin and Greek traditions falls within a historiographic tradition that seeks to identify the specific features of the Roman Catholic Church, which are obviously anachronistic for the early Middle Ages. This article will adopt a different perspective centered on the contacts between East and West, taking the most recent research into account and emphasizing the sources that were neglected by Vogüé.5 How did early medieval monks and nuns represent the origins of their way of life? What texts did

Adalbert de Vogüé, Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique de l’antiquité. Première 2008); Adalbert de Vogüé, Histoire partie:  le monachisme latin, 12  vols. (Paris, 1991–​ littéraire du mouvement monastique de l’antiquité. Deuxième partie: le monachisme grec, 3 vols. (Rome, 2015). 3 See the article by Alciati in this volume. 4 For a more flexible conception, but still a monastic one, see Vincent Desprez, Le monachisme primitif. Des origines jusqu’au concile d’Éphèse (Bégrolles-​en-​Mauges,  1998). 5 For recent bibliography, see the article by Diem and Rapp in this volume. For examples of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, see recent colloquia, including Jeffrey 2

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they read? What relations did they have with their eastern counterparts? To what extent can the historians of today understand the monastic traditions that circulated in the early Middle Ages? These questions will not be answered definitively here, but they deserve to be asked with an eye toward future research.

The First Latin Sources: Questions of Terminology Let us imagine how a Western monk of the seventh century would describe the first centuries of monasticism. According to Jerome (d. 420), he would first evoke “the monks of the Old Testament” (Eli, Elijah and the prophets, the sons of Rechab and some others),6 then would mention the adolescent Mary in the Temple,7 John the Baptist, Christ, and the Apostles. Having read the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) in the translation of Rufinus of Aquileia (d. c. 410),8 as well as Jerome and John Cassian (d. 435), he would be convinced that the first Egyptian monks (men and women called therapeuts), were the direct heirs of the Apostles and of Mark the Evangelist.9 To describe the Apostles’ way of life, he would base his account not only on the canonical book of the Acts of the Apostles (particularly Acts



Hamburger et  al., eds., Frauen—​Kloster—​Kunst. Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters (Turnhout, 2007); Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and Veil. Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 2008); Flavia De Rubeis and Federico Marazzi, eds., Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture (Rome, 2008); Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, eds., Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011); Gert Melville and Anne Müller, eds., Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages:  Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Berlin and Münster, 2011); Michel Lauwers, ed., Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval (Turnhout, 2014); Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert, eds., La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe siècle), I. L’état des sources (Cairo and Athens, 2015); Marialuisa Bottazzi et al., eds., La società monastica nei secoli VI–​XII. Sentieri di ricerca. Atelier jeunes chercheurs sur le monachisme médiéval (Rome and Trieste, 2016); and three colloquia organized in 2015 on Columbanus and his legacy, the first already published as Eleonora Destefanis, ed. L’eredità di san Colombano. Memoria e culto attraverso il Medioevo (Rennes, 2017); and especially Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–​April 6th 2016) (Spoleto, 2017). See also Federico Marazzi, Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio (Milan, 2015). 6 Jerome, Epistolae 58.5 and 125.7, in Jérôme Labourt, ed., Saint Jérôme. Lettres, 8 vols. (Paris, 1949–​63), 3:79 and 7:119. See also Desprez, Le monachisme primitif, 25, s.v. 7 Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Le monachisme féminin en Occident de l’antiquité tardive au haut Moyen Âge,” in Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente,  193–​4. 8 Eusebius of Caesarea, Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. and trans. Gustave Bardy, 4 vols., SC 31, 41, 55, and 73. Tyrannius Rufinus, Opera, ed. Manlio Simonetti, CCSL 20. 9 See, for instance, Cassian, Institutions, ed. Jean-​Claude Guy, SC 109, 64–​5, II.3.5.

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4:32–​35) but also on the apocryphal Acts, like those of Paul and Thecla, or of Peter or Thomas.10 Then he would cite the virgins of the Shepherd of Hermas,11 and also the early martyrs, both men and women, some of whom had lived in monasteries, while others had led an itinerant life. On Egypt, he would mention the “Lives of the Fathers,” meaning the collections of apophthegmata, the Historia monachorum or Historia Lausiaca of Palladius (d. before 431), then the Lives of Paul, of Antony, and of Pachomius. He would certainly know the collections of sententiae such as that of Sextus,12 the epistolary collections of exhortations to virgins, such as those attributed to Clement of Rome (d. 99),13 and other writings (letters, exegetical treatises, sermons, rules) transmitted rightly or wrongly under the name of the “fathers” of monasticism, such as Basil, Pachomius, Macarius, Jerome, and Cassian. A collection of sententiae written by a Gallic monk of the seventh century, the Liber scintillarum of Defensor of Ligugé, thus contains quotations from Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373), but also an exhortation to monks, misattributed to Ephrem.14 All these witnesses to the Eastern traditions would have reached him in Latin manuscripts containing texts of diverse genres, but he would not have had the modern critical tools to organize, assess, and date them, nor to distinguish between the authentic works and the pseudepigrapha. As for apocryphal or anonymous works, he would have understood them as authentic, as long as he found them spiritually beneficial. Therefore, he would have been exposed to Origenist, Gnostic, Enctratite, Priscillianist, and other heresies to a much greater extent than historians of today might imagine.15 In these works, he would have found an extremely diverse array of “monks” and “monasteries.” On the etymology and the meaning of the term “monk,” he would have read diverse interpretations—​the Greek term monachos, from monos, signifying one who lives in solitude, one who has removed himself





Els Rose, Ritual Memory: The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West (c. 500–​1215) (Leiden, 2009); for apocryphal texts, translated in English and accessible online, see www.earlychristianwritings.com (date of last access:  18 August 2018). 11 Hermas, Le Pasteur, ed. and trans. Robert Joly, SC 53bis, 63–​4, for the Latin versions. 12 Sextus, The Sentences of Sextus, ed. Walter T. Wilson (Atlanta, GA, 2012). On the collections of sentences, see Columba M. Battle, Die ‘Adhortationes sanctorum’ (‘Verba Seniorum’) im lateinischen Mittelalter. Überlieferung, Fortleben und Wirkung (Münster, 1972). 13 On this literature, see Avitus of Vienne, Éloge consolatoire de la chasteté (sur la virginité), ed. Nicole Hecquet-​Noti, SC 546, 10–​15 and 79–​84. 14 Defensor de Ligugé, Livre d’étincelles, ed. and trans. H.-​M. Rochais, 2 vols., SC 77 and 86. 15 On these heterodox movements, see the article by Brakke in this volume.

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from the world, one who has chosen continence, or one whose soul is unified and has joined God.16 In an exegetical tractate attributed to Jerome, he would have learned that the book of Psalms, in Hebrew, already referred to monks as “those in which sin does not dwell.”17 He would have found “monasteries” everywhere, from those of the Therapeutes to those in the Life of Antony or the Life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus (d. c. 425),18 and he would understand that this term designated nothing more than a place where monks lived, whether alone or in a group. Unlike modern translators (such as his French translator, Jacques Fontaine, for the term monasterium), he would not have distinguished between “hermitage” and “monastery,”19 but he would have known that monasticism encompassed multiple ways of life, female and male, including ascetics living at home, anchorites, preachers, and itinerant mendicants, and experiences of common life or active life in the world, serving the needy or places of worship. As Vincent Desprez writes, “since the monastic vocation is very personal, there are as many monasticisms as there are monks.”20 Our example of a monk reading a particular set of texts could be multiplied ad infinitum: each monk or group of monks had certain books at his disposal and formed his own opinion. Furthermore, the monks of the seventh century were unaware of the typology that structures our current understanding of the textual sources. To give just one example, the modern definition of the term “rule” (regula) does not reflect the reality of the early Middle Ages and has led to numerous misunderstandings.21 In his presentation of monastic rules, Vogüé excluded works that are actually entitled regula in the manuscripts, and he included texts that do not have this title.22 The category thus created corresponds to



See Françoise Morard, “Monachos, moine:  histoire du terme grec jusqu’au IVe siècle:  influences bibliques et gnostiques,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und 411; Françoise Morard, “Encore quelques réflexions sur Theologie 20 (1973):  332–​ monachos,” Vigiliae Christianae 34 (1980): 395–​401; Edwin A. Judge, “The Earliest Use of ‘Monachos’,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977):  72–​89. For the Coptic equivalent, see Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009), 271 and 292–​4; for the Syriac equivalent, Marie-​Joseph Pierre, “Les ‘membres de l’Ordre,’ d’Aphraate au Liber Graduum,” in Le monachisme syriaque, ed. Françoise Jullien (Paris, 2010), 20–​4. 17 Pseudo-​Hieronymus, Breviarium in psalmos, Ps. 67:7, in PL 26, 1013. 18 See the article by Alciati in this volume. 19 BHL 5610 (for the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina number, see below, note 119): Sulpicius Severus, Vie de saint Martin, ed. and trans Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols., SC 133–​5. 20 Desprez, Le monachisme primitif, 8. 21 See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 22 Adalbert de Vogüé, Les règles monastiques anciennes (400–​700) (Turnhout, 1985). 16

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our modern conception of a rule, but not to that of the monks who copied and read these manuscripts. At the time, the term could refer to passages from the Bible as well as to the sayings of the fathers, epistolary exhortations to virgins, sermons, or saints’ Lives. Directives for monastic life were at first transmitted orally from a master to his disciple(s), then demonstrated by the master’s own actions. Consequently, each leader could establish his “rule” without necessarily producing a written text; like every good shepherd, each one preached by word and example. Thus, the Life of the Jura Fathers, written in the sixth century in Gaul, is presented as vita vel regula (a phrase borrowed from the Rule of Four Fathers); for the author, no written rule could replace the exempla described in the Lives of the founding fathers.23 After the period under discussion here, the use of the term regula in the Latin West took on a specific meaning that was the direct result of the tendency toward the progressive “cenobitization” of monasticism, which was already apparent around 400 in the writings of Jerome and Cassian and would be reinforced in the subsequent centuries in the face of resistance from many quarters.24

The Circulation of People, Texts, and Ideas Around 400, the Western proponents of monasticism were great travelers, literate and multilingual. Jerome, who knew Greek and Hebrew, had lived in Antioch, in the Syrian desert, in Constantinople, and in Rome, before taking up residence in Palestine with Paula and Eustochium (d. 419/​20), his disciples from the Roman aristocracy. Ambrose of Milan, like Jerome, Rufinus, Melania the Elder, Pelagius, and Julian of Eclanum, knew Greek and read both Origen and the Cappadocian fathers in the original language. All of them were in contact with each other, associated with Greeks, and translated Greek texts into Latin (or had them translated). Melania sent her friend Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) to visit the monks of Egypt. John Cassian stayed in Palestine, then in Lower Egypt, Constantinople, and Rome, before settling in Provence. Melania the Younger (d. 439), moving from Italy to Africa, and then to Egypt and Palestine, knew Rufinus, Jerome, Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, and Bassula, the mother-​in-​law of Sulpicius Severus. Severus, the biographer

BHL 7309, 5073, and 2665: François Martine, ed. and trans., Vie des Pères du Jura, SC 142, 236. See the Rule of the Four Fathers 2.28, in Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., Les règles des saints Pères, SC 297, 1:190–​1. 24 See also Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Normes et pratiques de la vie monastique en Gaule avant 1050: présentation des sources écrites,” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines, 379–​86. 23

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of Martin of Tours, compiled the travel narrative of his friend Postumianus when he returned from Egypt.25 After Egeria,26 many Westerners went to the East to visit the Holy Land or the monks in Egypt. Some of them stayed; there were many monasteries of Latin monks in Palestine and Egypt. Throughout the early period, monks had a taste for travel.27 Even in the eighth century, the Anglo-​Saxon monk Willibald traveled to Jerusalem via Rome, Sicily, Greece, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Asia Minor, then Syria, before becoming the bishop of Eichstätt in Germany.28 Conversely, many Eastern monks in exile or fleeing the Persian or Arabian invasions found refuge in Africa or Italy before continuing to the north, like Theodore of Tarsus (d. 690), sent from Rome to Canterbury via Saint-​Denis in 668–​9.29 Even if they did not all leave behind written accounts of their travels, there is no doubt that they told western Europeans about their experiences, and brought manuscripts from the East in their bags, as Theodore of Tarsus did.30 Some of them were probably the anonymous translators of Greek texts into Latin, and vice versa. In Rome there were many Greek monks,31 as in southern Italy and Sicily;32 most of the bishops of Rome at the end of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth were of Greek or Syriac origin. One of them, Zachary (741–​ 52), translated the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (d. 604), including the Life of Benedict of Nursia.33 Thus, the Latins who went on pilgrimage to Rome could meet Greeks there, hear their accounts of their travels, and obtain translations





See the article by Alciati in this volume. Egeria, Itinerarium, in Pierre Maraval, ed. and trans., Égérie. Journal de voyage (Itinérarium), SC 296. For an English translation, see Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, trans. Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw (Collegeville, MN, 2018). 27 Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks:  Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims:  Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300–​800 (University Park, PA, 2005). See also Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–​900 (Cambridge, 2001). 28 Hugeburc, Vita Willibaldi, ed. O.  Holder-​Egger, MGH SS 15.1, 86–​106; translated as Charles H. Talbot, “The Hodoeporicon of Saint Willibald,” in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), 141–​64. 29 Michael Lapidge, ed., Archbishop Theodore:  Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence (Cambridge, 1995). See also the article by Howe in this volume. 30 See David N.  Dumville, “The Importation of Mediterranean Manuscripts into Theodore’s England,” in Lapidge, Archbishop Theodore, 96–​119. 31 Jean-​Marie Sansterre, Les moines grecs et orientaux à Rome aux époques byzantines et carolingiennes (milieu du VIe s.–​f in du IXe s.), 2 vols. (Brussels, 1983). 32 See the article by Ramseyer in this volume. 33 Louis Duchesne and Cyrille Vogel, eds., Liber Pontificalis. Texte, introduction et commentaire, 4 vols. (Paris, 1886–​1957), 1:435; Michel Aubrun, trans., Le livre des papes. Liber Pontificalis (492–​891) (Turnhout, 2007), 126. 25

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of Greek texts. They stopped at monasteries along the way and could therefore transmit information to other monks. The monasteries situated along the major travel routes, such as Lérins on the main sea route34 or Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune on the principal land route from north to south,35 were in a privileged position to contribute to the spread of texts and ideas; even if information gathered in this way was subject to scrutiny, it shaped the more or less idealized Western representations of the monks and nuns of the distant East.

The Sources for the History of Eastern and Western Monasticism In order to summarize the wealth of documentation available to those interested in the early history of monasticism, we present here a brief survey of some texts of particular interest. The Latin sources are obviously the most numerous but, since they are also the best known and some of them are explored in detail elsewhere in this book (particularly those of Ireland, Spain, and Italy36), we emphasize various regions of the East, and also the relationships that linked the Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Coptic cultural spheres. For the sake of clarity, we classify them by type, despite the reservations we have expressed about the relevance of these categories. The sources for the history of the first centuries of monasticism are of various kinds—​archaeological, epigraphical, diplomatic, legislative or normative, theological, liturgical, historiographical, and hagiographical. Written sources are in Latin, Greek, Coptic in Egypt, and Syriac in west Asia. Syriac—​ the dialect of Aramaic which originated in or around Edessa/​Urhoy (modern Urfa/​Şanlιurfa in southeast Turkey), the metropolis of the Roman province of Osrhoene—​has until now been both the literary and the ecclesiastical language of the Christian populations in Ancient Syria, Palestine, northern Mesopotamia, Iraq, and Iran. Syriac is the language of the third-​largest surviving corpus of late antiquity, and it remained in use alongside Greek in the Roman/​Byzantine Empire, Pahlavi in the Sasanian Empire, and Arabic from the seventh century on. The sources on monasticism west of the Euphrates were written in both Greek and Syriac, those east of the Euphrates and Tigris

Mireille Labrousse et al., eds., Histoire de l’abbaye de Lérins (Bellefontaine, 2005); Yann Codou and Michel Lauwers, eds., Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2009). 35 Bernard Andenmatten and Laurent Ripart, eds., L’abbaye de Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune, 515–​ 2015 (Saint-​Maurice, 2015). 36 See the articles by Bitel, Díaz, and Ramseyer in this volume. 34

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in Syriac alone. The spread of monasticism did not come to a halt with progressive Islamicization. Monastic authors like Evagrius influenced Syriac monasticism; conversely, Syriac monastic literature had a broad influence on Latin, Greek, and eastern European monasticism through monastic authors such as Isaac of Nineveh/​the Syrian (seventh century, Assyria), whose works were ultimately included in the Russian Philokalia.37

Archaeology and Epigraphy Since other contributions in this volume are dedicated to archaeology,38 we will mention just a few aspects of monastic archaeology in the East. The area occupied by Egypt, Palestine, and, to a lesser extent, Syria, presents a notable contrast with the rest of the empire. To the west, in the Balkans, there is little evidence for monasticism in our period, except for a limited number of ancient sites that were reoccupied by proto-​Byzantine monasteries. There are just a few comparable sites of this kind in Asia Minor. More sites are known in the areas bordering on Mesopotamia, which were marked by the Syriac tradition, such as the region of the Tur ‘Abdin, south of the Tigris.39 In the rocky areas of Cappadocia formed by volcanic tufa, there are certainly many monasteries, but they are mostly later than the period under consideration here.40 The archaeological record is much richer for Syria, Palestine, and especially Egypt.41 There have been recent overviews of the architecture of Egyptian monks42 and of daily life in the monasteries.43 Data from archaeology should be studied together with the information from written sources.



Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian), “The Second Part”, Chapters IV–​XLI, ed. Sebastian P. Brock (Leuven, 1995). On Isaac, see Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000); Sebastian P. Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: The Translation of Isaac the Syrian,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (Leuven, 2001), 201–​8. 38 See the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 39 Olivier Delouis, “Portée et limites de l’archéologie monastique dans les Balkans et en Asie Mineure jusqu’au Xe siècle,” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines,  256–​9. 40 Catherine Jolivet-​Lévy, “La vie des moines de Cappadoce (VIe–​Xe siècle): contribution à un inventaire des sources archéologiques,” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines, 215–​49. 41 Essential reference for Egypt: Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte. See also Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 42 Włodziers Goldweski, “Monastic Architecture and Its Adaptation to Local Features (Egypt),” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines,  1–​21. 43 Maria Mossakoska-​Gaubert, “Alimentation, hygiène, vêtements et sommeil chez les moines égyptiens (IVe–​VIIIe siècles),” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines,  23–​55. 37

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For Latin epigraphy, one can consult the database of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum,44 to be supplemented for the Middle Ages by a series of regional repertories.45 There is no overview specifically devoted to the epigraphy of the monastic world, but research on monasticism in the period under discussion here increasingly makes use of epigraphical sources.46 For Byzantium, one must consult the Chroniques of Denis Feissel under the terms “monks, monasteries, nuns” (with more than eighty references).47 A remarkable synthesis by Sylvain Destephen on monasticism in the diocese of Asia demonstrates the importance of various sources, especially epigraphical ones, in a vast region that had relatively few monasteries.48 The book includes a table of monasteries that are attested or thought to have existed, followed by a map.49 Another epigraphical source is provided by the monastery of Choziba in Palestine, between Jerusalem and Jericho; its cemetery contains 200 epitaphs of monks, of which 68 state their place of origin.50 Two came from Rome, which doubtless means the West; the seventeen Palestinians are in the minority compared to those from the dioceses of Asia and Pontus, especially Cilicia (eleven) and Cappadocia (seven). There are also numerous inscriptions in the monasteries of Egypt, where, surprisingly, Greek dominates even in the Coptic-​language monasteries, but Coptic takes over starting in the sixth century.51 However, the region does not have the kind of epigraphical corpora found in Syria.52 Funerary inscriptions mention the ecclesiastical rank for monks who had acceded to it, and sometimes their occupation, showing a significant degree of specialization. Two monastic necropolises stand out from the rest: those of Apa Jeremia in Saqqara53 and of Anba Hadra in Assouan.54



Online: http://​cil.bbaw.de/​cil_​en/​dateien/​datenbank_​eng.php (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 45 For Gaul, see repertories by Edmond Le Blant, then the volumes in Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale (VIIIe–​XIIIe siècle), www.persee.fr/​collection/​cifm (date of last access: 18 August 2018). For guidance, see also http://​handley-​inscriptions. webs.com/​(date of last access: 18 August 2018). 46 For instance Yvette Duval, Auprès des saints corps et âme. L’inhumation “ad sanctos” dans la chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident du IIIe au VIIe siècle (Paris, 1988). 47 Denis Feissel, Chroniques d’épigraphie byzantine, 1987–​2004 (Paris, 2006), 420. 48 Sylvain Destephen, “Quatre études sur le monachisme asianique (IVe–​VIIe siècle),” Journal des savants (2010): 193–​264. 49 Ibid.,  202–​7. 50 Alfons Maria Schneider, “Das Kloster der Theotokos zu Choziba im Wadi el Kelt,” Römische Quartalschrift 39 (1931): 297–​332. 51 See the bibliography in Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte,  663–​8. 52 Ibid., 99–​106. 53 Cäcilia Wietheger, Das Jeremias-​Kloster zu Saqqara unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Inschriften (Altenberge, 1992). 54 Henri Munier, “Les stèles coptes du monastère de Saint-​Siméon à Assouan,” Aegyptus 11 (1930–​1): 257–​300 and 433–​84. 44

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Engraved or painted inscriptions appear later on the walls of rooms in the monasteries, such as the monks’ cells, and principally those intended for prayer. These inscriptions often accompany paintings.55

Diplomatic and Documentary Sources In the West, the first diplomatic sources appear in the sixth century, first the testaments of founders and donations to monasteries, then acts of foundation (such as that of Eligius for Solignac in 632), royal and episcopal privileges granted to monasteries, formularies (such as that of Marculf ), and so on. Sometimes the originals are preserved but most of the extant documents are copies. There is no systematic repertory of this corpus but there are editions and recent studies of some of the documents.56 The quantity is certainly not as great as it would be from the Carolingian period onward,57 and many are forgeries. These documents, often difficult to interpret, elicit scholarly debate, but the study of false acts is just as interesting for the context of their redaction.58 Among the oldest collections, the most important is that of Saint-​Denis, which Olivier Guyotjeannin has begun publishing online.59 A  discovery in the twentieth century brought to light the seventh-​century accounts of Saint-​Martin in Tours, preserved in the form of parchment or papyrus fragments that had covered the binding of a manuscript.60 Among





Paul C. Dilley, “Dipinti in Late Antiquity and Shenoute’s Monastic Federation:  Text and Image Painting of the Red Monastery,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 165 (2008): 111–​27. 56 For the royal diplomas in the Frankish world, see Theo Kölzer, Die Urkunden der Merowinger, 2 vols., MGH DMer 1; for the diplomas of the mayors of royal palaces, see Ingrid Heidrich, Die Urkunden der Arnulfinger (Hanover, 2011). For England, see Peter Sawyer, Anglo-​Saxon Charters, now online at www.esawyer.org.uk/​about/​index. html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). Regarding testaments, see Sylvie Joye and Paul Bertrand, “Les ‘testaments de saints’ en chrétienté occidentale,” in Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin (VIe–​XVIe siècle), ed. Marie-​Céline Isaia and Thomas Granier (Turnhout, 2014), 293–​307. On royal and episcopal privileges, see Eugen Ewig, Spätantikes und fränkisches Gallien. Gesammelte Schriften (1952–​1973), ed. Hartmut Atsma, 2 vols. (Zurich and Munich, 1976–​9). On formularies, see Alice Rio, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2009). 57 See the article by Bruce in this volume. 58 Fälschungen im Mittelalter, 6 vols. (Hanover, 1988). 59 See École nationale des chartes, “Chartes médiévales de l’abbaye de Saint-​Denis (VIIᵉ–​ XIIIᵉ siècle),” www.chartes.psl.eu/​fr/​publication/​chartes-​medievales-​abbaye-​saint-​ denis-​viie-​xiiie-​siecle (date of last access: 18 August 2018). See also Daniel Sonzogni, “Le chartrier de l’abbaye de Saint-​Denis en France au haut Moyen Âge: essai de reconstitution,” Pecia. Ressources en médiévistique 3 (2003): 9–​210; Olivier Guyotjeannin and Anne-​ Marie Helvétius, eds., Écrire pour Saint Denis. Productions hagiographiques et documentaires médiévales (Paris, 2018), 5–​370. 60 Pierre Gasnault, ed., Documents comptables de Saint-​ Martin de Tours à l’époque mérovingienne (Paris, 1975). 55

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these documents written in Latin, some, written in Greek, preserve the text of a homily of Ephrem the Syrian.61 For our period, the Eastern sources are limited to Egypt and a few rare findings in Palestine.62 The sources for Egypt are extremely rich, not only those from monasteries,63 but also administrative ones, such as legal acts, economic texts, and letters, mostly written on papyrus scraps or pottery shards and small bits of limestone that are collectively known as ostraca. These objects are dated to the period between the end of the sixth century and the end of the eighth century. A series of discoveries has made possible the reconstruction of entire groups of documents.64 Many are letters that show the relations between monks or with outsiders. Some include documents that attest to the social and economic activity of a monastery, such as the center of Wadi Sorga, the monastery of Apa Thomas.65 The extant tax documents, some of them in relatively good condition, attest to the roles of monks and monasteries in local society, such as the fiscal register of Aphrodito,66 which complements the publication of the land register.67 According to the editors of the land register, approximately a third of the lands belonged to the village’s seven monasteries.68 Despite the difficulties of interpreting the papyrological data, they offer a mass of information that is unavailable for Byzantium before the tenth or eleventh century.

Normative Sources The situation is different for the normative sources, which are mostly legislative or canonical. The most important of these were the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, issued jointly by the bishops and the emperor; the monks created disorder, especially in Constantinople, and it was necessary to subject them to episcopal authority, which most of them did not recognize,

BnF, suppl. grec 1379. G. J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana, 3: Non-​Literary Papyri (Princeton, NJ, 2015). Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte,  69–​99. 64 See, for instance, Sarah J. Clackson, ed., Coptic and Greek Texts Relating to the Hermo­ polite Monastery of Apa Apollo (Oxford, 2002), with more than sixty-​six documents edited. 65 W. E. Crum and H. I. Bell, Wadi Sarga:  Coptic and Greek Texts from the Excavations Undertaken by the Byzantine Research Account (Copenhagen, 1922). 66 Constantin Zuckerman, Du village à l’empire. Autour du Registre fiscal d’Aphroditô (Paris, 2004). 67 Jean Gascou and Leslie MacCoull, “Le cadastre d’Aphroditô,” Travaux et mémoires 10 (1987): 103–​58. 68 Zuckermann, Du village à l’empire,  226–​9. 61

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as they were not ordained clerics.69 The council placed monks under the authority of the bishop, beginning with those monks who were priests; it forcefully asserted the perpetual authority of the bishop over the monasteries (whose foundation he had authorized), and over their possessions. Although several of his predecessors had issued legislation concerning the monks,70 Justinian (r. 527–​65) gave them particular emphasis in three laws, all restrictive,71 focused entirely (Novellae 5,72 535 and 133,73 from 539) or partly (novella 123,74 from 546) on monasteries. The first, which reserves the foundation of monasteries for bishops, prescribes a novitiate of three years and the dormitory. This law dwells at length on monastic property; the bishop chooses the hegumen (the head of the religious community). All these prescriptions were equally applicable to female monasteries. Novella 133 emphatically repeats these prescriptions by specifying them, because they are not always applied. Again prohibiting double monasteries as he had already done in the Code, Justinian decrees that the monks must leave, and he gives the nuns the choice of the priest serving them. This novella is the origin of our modern conception of monasteries, which became complexes including dormitories and refectories surrounded by enclosures. The novella again addressed monastic property, which seems to have been a subject of growing concern, but did not put an end to double monasteries, which are attested at this time in Gaul, Spain, England, and Ireland.75 In the East as in the West, monks and nuns were the focus of innumerable conciliar canons that have not yet been studied systematically.76 We will mention just a few cases of canons concerning the internal organization of





Gilbert Dagron, “Les moines et la ville:  le monachisme à Constantinople jusqu’au concile de Chalcédoine,” Travaux et mémoires 4 (1976):  229–​76, reprinted in Gilbert Dagron, La romanité chrétienne en Orient. Héritages et mutations (London, 1984), chapter VIII. 70 See for instance Valentinian I, Valens, and Gratian in 370: Code Théodosien XVI.2.20, in T. Mommsen and P. Meyer, eds., J. Rougé and R. Delmaire, trans., Les lois religieuses des empereurs romains de Constantin à Théodose II (312–​438), vol. 1: Code Théodosien XVI, SC 497, 160–​3; Theodosius II and Valentinian III in 434: Code Théodosien, V.3.1, in ibid., vol. 2: Code Théodosien I–​XV, Code Justinien, Constitutions sirmondiennes, SC 531, 80–​1. 71 For a useful summary, see Adalbert de Vogüé, “La législation de Justinien au sujet des moines,” Revue Mabillon 14 (2003): 139–​51. 72 Justinian, Corpus Iuris Civilis III, ed. R. Schoell and G. Kroll (Hildesheim, 1993), 29–​35. 73 Ibid., 666–​76. 74 Ibid., 620–​5, ­chapters 37–​42. 75 See the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 76 For the West, see Jean Gaudemet, Les sources du droit de l’Église en Occident du IIe au VIIe siècle (Paris, 1985); and Jean Gaudemet, Les sources du droit canonique, VIIIe–​XXe siècle (Paris, 1993). Terence P. McLaughlin, Le très ancien droit monastique de l’Occident (Ligugé and Paris, 1935) is still useful.

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monasteries.77 Pachomius (292–​346), founder of the monastery of Tabennesis, in the Thebaid on the east bank of the Nile, was a Coptic-​speaking soldier who converted to Christianity around 314, became an anchorite (initiated by Palamon), lived a few years with Antony, and in 324 founded his first, extremely successful community. His sister Mary founded a female community on the other bank of the river.78 In addition to his own community, which had several hundred monks, at his death Pachomius was the head of six to nine monasteries of men and two of women. With few exceptions, his works were written down in their entirety only after his death. His monasteries followed the model of Egyptian villages and were organized by occupation, so as to be self-​sufficient. His rules, which were first transmitted orally in Coptic, have come down to us only in the Latin translation made by Jerome in 404 from the Greek translation of the Coptic text (which survives only in fragments). The fragments of the original text exhibit some differences in comparison to Jerome’s translation, which supplements the Coptic text with explanations as well as adding his own commentary, but this was the version of the writings of Pachomius that was known to monks in the West.79 The works of Shenoute (d. 465), the superior of the White Monastery in the fourth and fifth centuries, constitute the most original corpus among the Coptic literary sources, for these texts are known only in Coptic, and their author was completely unknown to Western Christianity. His works comprise eight volumes of Discourses (not specifically monastic) and nine volumes of sermons on monastic discipline (Canons).80 An international team of scholars is preparing a critical edition of this corpus.81 After the Council of Chalcedon (451), which declared the church of Alexandria schismatic, Egyptian monks were mostly monophysites. The persecutions that followed in the sixth century generated a polemical and apologetic literature with a strong hagiographic tendency, for example around



See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. In a very extensive bibliography, besides Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte, 47–​60 and 419–​26, see Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 1985). 79 Amand Boon, ed., Pachomiana latina. Règle et épîtres de S. Pachôme, épître de S. Théodore et ‘Liber’ de S. Orsiesius. Texte latin de S. Jérôme (Louvain, 1932). 80 Stephen Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus (Leuven, 2004). 81 Anne Boud’hors, Le Canon 8 de Chénouté (d’après le manuscrit Ifao Copte 2 et les fragments complémentaires). Introduction, édition critique, traduction (Cairo, 2013). On the Discourses, see Ariel G. Lopez, Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2012). On the canons, see Bentley Layton, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (Oxford, 2014). 77

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the figure of Abraham of Pboou (or of Farshut).82 The corpus tends to associate Shenoute closely with Pachomius so as to present him as a unique figure in the literary tradition. Later Egyptian monastic movements were inspired by this two-​headed figure far more than by the works themselves. Turning to Asia Minor, the case of Basil of Caesarea is even more complex and his influence greater.83 Born around 329 at Neocaesarea, Basil studied at Caesarea, while his sister Macrina (d. 379) transformed the family villa of Annisa into a mixed ascetic community. Basil was baptized and joined this community, then circulated among various monastic groups. In 365, he returned to Caesarea and completed the first “edition” of his Small Asketikon, a work which he would continue to supplement. In 370, he became the metropolitan of Caesarea, the principal seat of the civil diocese of Pontus, until his death in 379. The monks of the region pressed him to supply a revised version of his Small Asketikon, which became the Great Asketikon; from that time, various versions circulated in Caesarea and in other regions of Pontus. In reality, the distinction between the two texts of the Asketikon is artificial, for the entire text was in continuous development. The Small Asketikon is known to us only through a Syriac version (which is presumably the oldest version), some Greek fragments, and the Latin translation of Rufinus,84 which was widely received in the West under the name of the Regula Basilii; in its emphasis on the life of the community and obedience to the abbot, it is one of the texts that inspired the Benedictine Rule. The later redaction, organized in the manuscripts into 55 long responses and 318 brief responses, is the only version preserved in Greek and would require a lengthy editorial process.85 The Asketikon as a whole consists of questions from monks with Basil’s response. This text does not itself constitute a rule in the modern sense of the term, but it is called a regula, as in RB 73. Paradoxically, the influence of Basil is easier to follow in the West than in the East. Eastern monasteries are ruled by their foundation charter, or typikon, which is both regulatory and liturgical, except when there are two different documents; no such case is known before the ninth century. The other sources from the seventh and

82



83



See James E. Goehring, Politics, Monasticism, and Miracles in Sixth Century Egypt (Tübingen, 2006). See most recently Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford, 2005); on the lasting influence of Basil, there is a volume in preparation by Olivier Delouis and Annick Peters-​Custot. 84 Basilius, Basilii Regula a Rufino Latine Versa, ed. Klaus Zelzer, CSEL 86; translated as Anna M. Silvas, ed. and trans. The Rule of St Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition (Collegeville, MI, 2013). 85 Paul J. Fedwick, Bibliotheca Basiliana Universalis, 3: The Ascetica (Turnhout, 1997).

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eighth centuries are too rare to yield any real conclusions. By contrast, in the decade around 800, Theodore the Studite (d. 826) clearly had access to the works of Basil, who inspired all subsequent Byzantine monasticism, directly or through Theodore. Evagrius Ponticus, as his name indicates, was born on the Hellespont around 346.86 The son of a country bishop, he was ordained lector by Basil, then deacon by Gregory of Nazianzus, whom he accompanied to Constantinople and then Jerusalem, where he became a monk. Well read in the works of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Evagrius left for Egypt in 383 on the advice of Melania the Elder (d. 410); he died there in 399, surrounded by disciples who were essentially Origenists. His considerable œuvre has reached us in Greek only in lacunary form, doubtless as a result of the condemnations of Origenists at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, but he had an important influence on the West through the translations of Rufinus and the Collationes of John Cassian.87 The Asketikon of Isaiah,88 a hermit resident in the south of Gaza, attests to the observance of an eremitic and itinerant way of life in this region in the years 460–​80. The anti-​Chalcedonian sources enable us to discern the same developments in Gaza as in the Judean desert. A  koinobion was founded in 492 near Maiuma by the disciples of Peter the Iberian.89 The Plerophories show that the monastery of Isaiah, a simple hermitage housing a small colony of disciples of the holy recluse until the 480s, could also have given way to a koinobion in the years 500–​10.90 The text that was surely the most widely read in Eastern monasticism, judging from the manuscript tradition, was written by a Syrian monk born in 579 who died in his monastery in the Sinai desert around 650. He is known as John Climacus based on his principal work, The Ladder of the Divine Ascent, which presents a path of sainthood for monks.91 On the model of Jacob’s

Antoine Guillaumont, Un philosophe au désert. Évagre le Pontique (Paris 2004). See especially Evagrius Ponticus, Traité pratique, ou Le moine, ed. and trans. Antoine and Claire Guillaumont, 2 vols., SC 170–​1. 88 Abba Isaiah, Τοῦ ὁσίου πατρὸς ἡμῶν ᾿Αββὰ ᾿Ησαΐου Λόγοι ΚΘ, ed. Augoustinos, new ed. ( Jerusalem, 1962); Abba Isaiah, Abba Isaiah of Scetis: Ascetic Discourses, trans. John Chryssavgis and Pachomios Penkett (Kalamazoo, MI, 2002). 89 BHO 955 (for the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis number, see below, note 119): John Rufus, The Lives of Peter the Iberian, Theodosius of Jerusalem, and the Monk Romanus, ed. and trans. Camelia B. Horn and Robert R. Phenix (Atlanta, GA, 2008), 2–​281. 90 John Rufus, Plérophories. Témoignages et révélations contre le concile de Chalcédoine par Jean Rufus évêque de Maïouma, ed. and trans. François Nau (Paris, 1911), 11–​161, additional texts, 162–​83. 91 PG 88, 631–​1209; or Walther Völker, ed., Scala Paradisi. Eine Studie zu Johannes Climacus und zugleich eine Vorstudie zu Symeon dem Neuen Theologen (Wiesbaden, 1968).

86 87

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ladder, each of the thirty chapters is a step toward Paradise, with the risk of falling from each rung. Seven chapters address the ascetic virtues; the following nineteen chapters instruct the reader how to overcome various vices by espousing the corresponding virtues; and the final four chapters present the highest virtues attainable through the ascetic life. The text does not seem to have been translated into Latin before the thirteenth century. As for Syriac sources, the canonico-​liturgical texts such as the Didascalia of the Apostles attest to the existence in the third century of organized groups (tagma or ordo) serving local communities. In the first half of the fourth century, the Demonstrations of Aphraates (Persian empire, c. 330–​340)92 and the Carmina Nisibena of Ephrem the Syrian (Nisiba, then Edessa) allude to the bnay and bnāt qyāmā, virgin or continent women and men who were established to serve Christian communities through prayer and aid to the sick. They are the counterparts of the kanonikoi and kanonikai mentioned by Basil of Caesarea;93 these ascetics who sang and prayed in the churches of the martyria were probably at the origin of canonical life. The great Syriac poet Ephrem reportedly wrote hymns for the female ascetics, the bnāt qyāmā, and led choirs of both men and women; his reputation quickly spread to the West. Aphraates’ sixth and seventh Demonstrations (written in 336/​7) are more specifically witnesses to the early history of the bnay qyāmā and iḥidāyē (solitaries).94 All sorts of canons also provide interesting information about them, especially those by Rabbula, bishop of Edessa (411–​32)95. More familiar forms of monasticism following the model of the laura and coenobium, where ascetics or hermits were more or less loosely connected to the monastery and under the guidance of the rēsh dayrā/​archimandrite/​abbot, gradually developed in the fourth and fifth centuries. We have

Aphraates, Aphraatis. Sapientis Persae Demonstrationes, ed. J. Parisot (Paris, 1894); Aphraates, Aphrahat. Demonstrations, trans. Kuriakose A. Valavanolickal (Kerala, 2005). 93 Basil of Caesarea, Letter 52, in Saint Basil: The Letters, ed. and trans. Roy J. Deferrari (London, 1926–​34); see infra. 94 For a thematic bibliography on Syriac monasticism, see Jullien, Le monachisme syriaque, 305–​32; see also the very useful Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity, http://​ csc.org.il/​db/​db.aspx?db=SB (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 95 François Nau, ed., Les canons et les résolutions canoniques de Rabboula, Jean de Tella, Cyriaque d’Amid, Jacques d’Edesse, Georges des Arabes, Cyriaque d’Antioche, Jean III, Théodose d’Antioche et des Perses (Paris, 1906); Arthur Vööbus, ed., Syriac and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian Monasticism (Stockholm, 1960), for Marūtā of Maipherqaṭ, Rabbūlā of Edessa, Abraham of Kaškar, Dadišo’ Qatraya, and Babai the Great. See also Robert Phenix and Cornelia Horn, eds., The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the “Life of Rabbula,” His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns (Atlanta, GA, 2017).

92

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extensive information about these more institutionalized monasteries thanks to the many canons that contain monastic rules written in Syriac by important bishops and abbots in the Roman and Persian empires.96

Epistolary, Narrative, and Liturgical Sources The surviving correspondence of Eastern monks furnishes dispersed but significant information; here we will discuss the most important of these corpora. From Egypt, besides the ostraca mentioned earlier, letters attributed to Pachomius are preserved in Coptic, some of which are still unpublished.97 The Letters of Antony present the same problems of attribution as those of Pachomius. If they are authentic, they could have been composed in Greek or Coptic.98 In any case, these letters seem to come from an Egyptian milieu of an Origenian bent. If the monks of Lower Egypt were Origenian from the outset, like the Pachomian monks, there are very early traces of the opposing position in the texts of Upper Egypt.99 The letters of Basil of Caesarea are fundamental for the Greek world,100 but we must also mention the interesting correspondence of Barsanuphius with John of Gaza,101 two recluses residing in a koinobion to the south of Gaza; this correspondence confirms the rise of the cenobitic way of life and the decrease in independent eremitic practices in the years 520–​60. John and Barsanuphius were, in fact, hermits who no longer lived in their own hermitage, but in a koinobion, where they were subjected to the authority of a hegumen. Another point of view is offered by the correspondence of a Christian Greek orator of Gaza, Procopius, who was a witness to the continuity of urban asceticism.102





François Nau, ed., “Littérature canonique syriaque inédite:  Concile d’Antioche; Lettre d’Italie; Canons des ‘saints Pères’, de Philoxène, de Théodose, d’Anthime, d’Athanase etc,” Revue de l’Orient Chrétien 14 (1909): 1–​49, 113–​30 [MS Paris, BnF, syr. 62]. For other canons, see Nau, Les canons et les résolutions canoniques, and A. Vööbus, ed., The Synodicon in the West Syrian Tradition (Leuven, 1975). See also Sabino Chialà, “Les règles monastiques syro-​orientales et leur caractère spécifique,” in Jullien, Le monachisme syriaque, 107–​22. 97 See Christoph Joest, Die Pachom-​Briefe. Übersetzung und Deutung (Leuven, 2014). 98 Samuel Rubenson, Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint, new ed. (Minneapolis, MN, 1995). 99 See Anne Boud’hors, “Coptic Literature,” in Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford, 2012), 224–​46. 100 Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil: The Letters. 101 François Neyt et al., ed. and trans., Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza. Correspondance, 3 vols., SC 427, 450, and 468. 102 Eugenio Amato, ed., Rose di Gaza. Gli scritti retorico-​sofistici e le Epistole di Procopio di Gaza (Alessandria, 2010). 96

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For the Latin world, the letters of Jerome are obviously fundamental and inspired subsequent authors.103 Among many others, those of Ambrose of Milan,104 Gregory the Great (d. 604),105 Columbanus (d. 615),106 Boniface (d. 754),107 and Alcuin of York (d. 804)108 offer valuable evidence for Western monasticism. In addition, a great many letters resemble carmina or sermons or homilies, and thus form part of the same broad corpus as the exhortationes addressed to monks or virgins, individually or collectively, and the various treatises on subjects such as asceticism, the desert, virginity, the vices and virtues, and so on.109 Rather than discussing the best-​known examples, such as those of Caesarius,110 we wish instead to point out the consolatory eulogy addressed by Avitus of Vienne (d. c. 519) to his sister Fuscine (beginning of the sixth century),111 the Ascetic and Moral Letters of Fulgentius Ruspensis (beginning of the sixth century)112 and the Sermones of Eusebius Gallicanus (seventh century).113 Even if the authors of ecclesiastical histories pay more attention to bishops than to monks, their writings are interesting from the point of view of the history of monasticism, beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Historia ecclesiastica was transmitted to the West by Rufinus.114 In the Latin world, chronicles such as the Ten Books of the Histories of Gregory of Tours (d. 594)115 or the Historia ecclesiastica populae anglicorum of Bede the Venerable (d. 735)116 are essential. Finally, regarding liturgical sources (which have not yet received sufficient

Jerome, Epistolae. Ambrose, Lettere, ed. Gabriele Banterle, 3 vols. (Milan and Rome, 1988). 105 Gregory the Great, Epistolae, MGH Epistolae 1 and 2; Registrum epistularum libri XIV, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140–​140A. 106 Colombanus, Epistolae, in Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M. Walker (Dublin, 1957), 2–​59, reprinted by B.  Färber in The Corpus of Electronic Texts, https://​celt.ucc.ie/​ publishd.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 107 Reinhold Rau, ed., Briefe des Bonifatius, Willibalds Leben des Bonifatius (Darmstadt, 1968); Ephraim Emerton, trans., The Letters of St. Boniface (New York, 2000). 108 Alcuin, Epistolae, MGH Epistolae 4. 109 Examples in Helvétius, “Normes et pratiques de la vie monastique,” 378–​9. 110 Caesarius of Arles, Œuvres monastiques, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and J. Courreau, SC 345 and 398. 111 Avitus of Vienne, Éloge consolatoire de la chasteté (sur la virginité), ed. and trans. Nicole Hecquet-​Noti, SC 546. 112 Fulgentius of Ruspa, Lettres ascétiques et morales, ed. and trans. Daniel Bachelet, SC 487. 113 Eusebius Gallicanus, Collectio homiliarum, ed. François Glorie, CCSL 101A. 114 Tyrannius Rufinus, Opera, ed. Manlio Simonetti, CCSL 20. 115 Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 1.1; English translation, Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, 1974). 116 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969). 103

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attention in East or West), the pioneering work of Gisela Muschiol117 and of Els Rose,118 as well as the contributions of Peter Jeffery and Gordon Blennemann in this volume, address aspects of this vast subject in the Latin West.

Hagiographical Sources Hagiography in all forms (Passions of martyrs, Lives of saints, translations of relics, miracle collections, martyrologies, and menologies) is a major source for the first centuries of monasticism, in the East as in the West. Not only does it comprise the largest number of extant texts, but it is also the body of literature that was most read by monks and nuns throughout the Middle Ages. It would be impossible to offer a complete exposition here; the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL), the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG), and the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (BHO) demonstrate the wealth of the extant texts.119 There is as yet no catalogue that would make it possible to search these collections for the texts relating to monks and nuns. In addition, the majority of historians of monasticism have privileged a few very well-​known texts that are frequently translated and commented on, to the detriment of hundreds, even thousands, of other texts that are still awaiting a good critical edition. Paradoxically, these texts are often preserved in several hundred manuscripts and in all the ancient languages but without having attracted the attention of specialists. This research area should develop in the coming years, especially since scholars have taken an interest not only in the texts but also in the manuscripts that contain them. For the Latin world, there are fortunately good references works, such as Hagiographies, initiated in 1992 by Guy Philippart and now directed by Monique Goullet. Still in progress, this series offers a critical presentation of all the Latin



Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994); Gisela Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World. East and West, 300–​900, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 198–​216. See also the article by Muschiol in volume II. 118 Rose, Ritual Memory. 119 Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL) (Brussels, 1898–​9), reprinted 1992 with Novum Supplementum, ed. H. Fros (Brussels, 1986), in the series Subsidia Hagiographica (SH), vols. 6 and 70, and together containing more than 9,000 entries. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG), ed. F. Halkin (Brussels, 1957) and Novum Auctarium (Brussels, 1984), respectively SH 8a and 65, with more than 2,500 entries. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (BHO) (Brussels, 1910; reprint 1970), SH 10, with more than 1,200 entries; Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, database on Syriac hagiography: http://​syriaca.org/​bhse/​index.html (date of last access: 5 May 2019). 117

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hagiographic sources, ordered by cultural area and period. As of the time of writing, all of antiquity has been covered.120 For the period 314–​750, however, only the texts produced in Italy121 and in England, Wales, and Ireland122 have been described. Spain and the Merovingian world, for which there are already useful catalogues, have not yet been included in Hagiographies.123 Other pertinent resources are the numerous publications (edited by François Dolbeau, Martin Heinzelmann, and Joseph-​Claude Poulin since 1987)  resulting from the research project of the German Historical Institute (Institut Historique Allemand) in Paris on hagiographic sources composed in Gaul before the year 1000. The Lives of monks became known in the West at first through the legends transmitted from the East by the Latin translations of the Life of Antony, the Historia monachorum, and the Historia lausiaca, to which we will return below, but also by the Lives written by Jerome, often cited as references.124 Later, a number of important monastic settlements in Gaul spread the great Lives of the monks who had become bishops, such as, for Tours, the Life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus, inspired by that of Antony,125 and, in the circle of Lérins, the Life of Honoratus by Hilary of Arles (d. 449),126 both of which exhibit a marked ascetic character; but at that time most hagiography was about bishops. Only around 500 did there emerge Lives of monks who were not bishops: for example, in Italy, the Life of Severinus of Norcia by Eugippus (d. c. 533),127 or, in Burgundy, the Life of the Jura Fathers128 and the Life of the







Victor Saxer, “Afrique latine,” Hagiographies 1 (1994): 25–​95; Antoon A. R. Bastiaensen, “Jérôme hagiographe,” Hagiographies 1 (1994), 97–​123; Francesco Scorza Barcellona, “Agli inizi dell’agiografia occidentale,” Hagiographies 3 (2001): 17–​97. 121 Cécile Lanéry, “Les Passions latines composées en Italie,” Hagiographies 5 (2010), 15–​369; Stéphane Gioanni, “Les Vies de saints latines composées en Italie de la Paix constantinienne au milieu du VIe siècle,” Hagiographies 5 (2010), 371–​445. 122 Michael Lapidge and Rosalind C. Love, “The Latin Hagiography of England and Wales (600–​1550),” Hagiographies 3 (2001), 203–​325; Maire Herbert, “Latin and Vernacular Hagiography of Ireland from the Origins to the Sixteenth Century,” Hagiographies 3 (2001), 327–​60. 123 José Carlos Martin, Sources latines de l’Espagne tardo-​antique et médiévale (Ve–​XIVe siècles). Répertoire bibliographique (Paris, 2010); Martin Heinzelmann, “L’hagiographie mérovingienne: panorama des documents potentiels,” in L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures, ed. Monique Goullet et al. (Ostfildern, 2010), 27–​82. 124 Jerome, Trois Vies de moines (Paul, Malchus, Hilarion), ed. and trans. Edgardo Morales and Pierre Leclerc, SC 508. 125 Sulpicius Severus, Vie de saint Martin. 126 BHL 3975: Hilary of Arles, Vie de saint Honorat, ed. and trans. Marie-​Denise Valentin, SC 71. 127 BHL 7655: Eugippius, Vie de saint Séverin, ed. and trans. Philippe Régerat, SC 374. 128 Martine, Vie des Pères du Jura. 120

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Abbots of Agaune.129 For female saints, also in the sixth century, there is the atypical Life of Genevieve of Paris, about an ascetic virgin who fulfilled important ecclesiastical responsibilities without entering a monastery,130 then the two Lives of Radegund, one written by Venantius Fortunatus (d. 600/​9) and the other by the nun Baudonivia (fl. c.  600)  in honor of this queen who became abbess at Poitiers.131 These sixth-​century Lives influenced, among others, Jonas of Bobbio (d. after 659), author of the Life of Columbanus and His Disciples,132 and all subsequent hagiography to such a degree that it would be impossible to describe in detail here. We will simply point out that, among these Lives, the most widely transmitted was that of Martin, which was also translated into Greek.133 The Latin world also produced large hagiographical collections, such as that of Gregory of Tours134 and especially the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, which were translated into Greek.135 The texts that were read the most by monks both in the East and in the West, however, were the Acts and Passions of the martyrs.136 More numerous in the East early on,137 they were of great concern to the bishops of the fourth century, such as Damasus of Rome,138 Basil of Caesarea,139 Gregory of







BHL 142: Éric Chevalley and Cédric Roduit, eds. and trans., La mémoire hagiographique de l’abbaye de Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune. “Passion anonyme de saint Maurice,” “Vie des abbés d’Agaune,” “Passion de saint Sigismond” (Lausanne, 2014), 117–​81. 130 BHL 3335: Vita Genovefae, M GH SS RM 3, 204–​38. See Martin Heinzelmann and Joseph-​ Claude Poulin, Les Vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris (Paris, 1986). Regarding the place of women in the clergy, see Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2007). 131 BHL 7048:  Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis auctore Fortunato, ed. Yves Chauvin and Georges Pon, in La vie de sainte Radegonde par Fortunat. Poitiers, Bibliothèque Municipale, manuscrit 250 (136), ed. Robert Favreau (Paris, 1995), 56–​113. BHL 7049: Baudonivia, Vita Radegundis auctore Baudonivia, MGH SS RM, 2, 377–​95. 132 BHL 1898: Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani et discipulorum eius, MGH SRG 37, 1–​294; English translation, Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood, trans., Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast (Liverpool, 2017). 133 BHG 1181–​1181b. 134 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, Liber vitae Patrum, Liber in gloria confessorum, MGH SS RM 1.2; English translations: Glory of the Martyrs, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool, 2004), Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James (Liverpool, 1991), and Glory of the Confessors, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool, 2004). 135 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and Paul Antin, 3 vols., SC 251, 260, and 265. 136 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels, 1921; 2nd ed. 1966); Hippolyte Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed. (Brussels, 1933). 137 Johan Leemans et al., eds., “Let Us Die That We May Live”: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine (c. AD 350–​AD 450) (London, 2003). 138 Marianne Sághy, “Renovatio memoriae: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome,” in Rom in der Spätantike. Historische Erinnerung im städtischen Raum, ed. Ralf Behrwald and Christian Witschel (Stuttgart, 2012), 251–​66. 139 Mario Girardi, Basilio di Cesarea et il culto dei martiri nel IV secolo. Scrittura e tradizione (Bari, 1990).

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Nyssa,140 and John Chrysostom, whose elegies to the martyrs date to his years in Antioch (387–​96) and his tenure as patriarch of Constantinople (398–​404). Since this city had no native martyrs, the imperial court and the patriarchate were constantly translating relics, providing material for John’s elegies.141 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to list all the martyrs whose Passions (real or legendary, but impressive to posterity) were written and rewritten. Some were written in epic style; others were developed into a “Life and Passion,” thus emphasizing what preceded the martyrdom.142 The Passions of Western martyrs also circulated in the East and were highly valued in monastic circles, as seen in the famous example of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.143 Denis of Paris was certainly not a monk, but his cult was promoted by the important Abbey of Saint-​Denis. We know of two Latin Passions of Denis that are transmitted by 100 manuscripts before the Carolingian period; one of them was translated into Greek by the eighth century. The story of Denis, who from that time onward was confused with Dionysius the Areopagite, was transmitted in the East in various forms in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic translations.144 Conversely, the Lives and Passions of Eastern saints were widely transmitted in the West in their Latin versions, most of which go back to the fifth and sixth centuries, as demonstrated by their presence in the earliest Latin legendaries, produced before 800.145 Thus, the Latin version of the Passion of Margaret/​Marina of Antioch is preserved in more than a hundred Western





Monique Alexandre, “Les nouveaux martyrs: motifs martyrologiques dans la vie des saints et thèmes hagiographiques dans l’éloge des martyrs chez Grégoire de Nysse,” in The Biographical Works of Gregory of Nyssa. Proceedings of the Fifth International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Mainz, 6–​ 10 September 1982), ed. Andreas Spira (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 33–​70. 141 John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints:  Select Homilies and Letters, trans. Wendy Mayer (Crestwood, NY, 2006). 142 Marina Détoraki, “Greek Passions of the Martyrs in Byzantium,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis, 2  vols. (Farnham, 2011–​14), 2:61–​101. 143 Jacqueline Amat, ed. and trans., Passion de Perpétue et Félicité, SC 417. 144 See Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Un sermon anonyme en l’honneur de saint Denis de Paris (BHL 2187),” Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (2013): 214–​ 25; and Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Saint Denis d’après les premiers textes,” in Saint-​ Denis dans l’éternité des rois et reines de France, ed. Pascal Delannoy (Strasbourg, 2015), 28–​33, before the publication of Guyotjeannin and Helvétius, Écrire pour Saint Denis. 145 Monique Goullet, ed., Le légendier de Turin. MS. D.V.3 de la Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire (Florence, 2014); Martin Heinzelmann, “Ein karolingisches Legendar vom Beginn des 9.  Jahrhunderts. Montpellier, Bibl. Interuniversitaire Faculté Médecine H.55,” in Zwischen Rom und Santiago. Festschrift für Klaus Herbers zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Claudia Alraum et al. (Bochum, 2016), 211–​25. 140

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manuscripts,146 as is that of Eugenia, which relates the story of a young virgin who, dressed as a man, ultimately becoming abbot of an Egyptian monastery.147 When the Anglo-​Saxon Aldhelm (d. 709), around 700, suggested male and female models of virginity to the abbess Hildelith of the double monastery of Barking, he referred to Agatha, Lucy, Eugenia, Thecla, and many others.148 Unfortunately, most of these narratives still await a good critical edition and we often do not know whether they have been translated from Greek into Latin or the reverse. More research is needed on their connections with the biblical apocrypha and their spread between East and West.149 The Lives of saints also represent a major source for early Eastern monasticism: Greek hagiography is an enormous corpus, of which a useful synthesis already exists.150 The archetype, or at least the earliest of these Lives, is that of Antony, by the patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373).151 Written for Western monks, this is certainly one of the first Lives translated into Latin, and it had considerable success in both East and West.152 The Life of Pachomius, which is the first example of the genre of Lives of a monastic founder and leader, is a complex case; the question is whether the original Life was Coptic or Greek (which both exist in multiple redactions), and how these versions relate to the Latin and Arabic translations as well as the other texts in the Pachomian tradition.153 The second Greek Life was translated by Dionysius









Maria Carmen Viggiani, Sandra Isetta, and Monique Goullet, “Passio Marinae, BHL 5303c,” in Goullet, Le légendier de Turin, 730–​49. 147 Gordon Whatley, “Passio Eugeniae, BHL 2666,” in Goullet, Le légendier de Turin, 671–​703. 148 Aldhelm, De virginitate I. Prosa, c. 44 and De virginitate II. Carmen, in Aldhelmi opera, MGH AA 15, 296–​8 and 431. See Sarah Foot, “Flores ecclesiae: Women in Early Anglo-​ Saxon Monasticism,” in Melville and Müller, Female vita religiosa,  173–​5. 149 For pioneering works, see Franca Ela Consolino, “Modelli di santità femminile nelle più antiche Passioni romane,” Augustinianum 24 (1984): 83–​113; Consolino, “La donna negli Acta martyrum,” in La donna nel pensiero cristiano antico, ed. Umberto Mattioli (Genova, 1992), 95–​117; Alberto D’Anna, ed., Tradizioni apocrife e tradizioni agiografiche. Fonti e ricerche a confronto, Sanctorum 4 (2007): 7–​149. 150 Stephanos Efthymiadis et al., “Greek Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Fourth-​Seventh Centuries),” in Efthymiadis, Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 1:35–​94. 151 BHG 140: Athanasius of Alexandria, Vie d’Antoine, ed. and trans. Gerard J. M. Bartelink, SC 400; and BHO 68:  Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony:  The Coptic Life and the Greek Life, trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Kalamazoo, MI, 2003). 152 For the first Latin translation (BHL 609e), see Athanasius of Alexandria, Vita di Antonio, ed. Gerard J. M. Bartelink (Milan, 1974); for the second Latin translation (BHL 609), see Evagrius, Vita Antonii auctore Evagrio, AASS, Jan. II (Antwerp, 1643), 120–​48 (3rd ed., 485–​506). 153 James E. Goehring, The Letter of Ammon and Pachomian Monasticism (Berlin, 1986), 3–​23. 146

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Exiguus (d. c. 540),154 but a different Latin Life was even more widely transmitted in the West.155 The most complex case is that of the Apophthegmata Patrum, a collection of sayings and deeds of the Desert Fathers which did not lead to the writing of Lives, but which spread their wisdom first by oral transmission from master to disciple, from one kellion (habitation of one or more ascetics) to another.156 These stories gave rise to true collections. The success of the History of the Monks of Egypt157 reached far beyond monastic circles; it was translated into Latin, probably by Rufinus.158 But the principal author who drew upon this literature was the monk Palladius around 420159 in his Historia Lausiaca,160 named after Lausiakos, the eunuch and chamberlain of Theodosius II who apparently commissioned the work. In its seventy-​one brief chapters, twenty of which are about women, the author combines the Apophthegmata with miracles and literary biography to recount his experiences in Egypt. Transmitted in Constantinople, but also very broadly in the West,161 the Historia Lausiaca constitutes an outstanding











BHG 1400: François Halkin, ed., Sancti Pachomii vitae graecae (Brussels, 1932), 166–​271. BHL 6410: Vita Pachomii interprete Dionysio Exiguo, in Henri van Cranenburgh, ed., La Vie latine de saint Pachôme. Édition critique (Brussels, 1969). 155 BHL 6411–​12:  Albrecht Diem and Hildegund Müller, eds., Vita Pachomii; “‘Vita, Regula, Sermo.’ Eine unbekannte lateinische ‘Vita Pacomii’ als Lehrtext für ungebildete Mönche und als Traktat über das Sprechen,” in Zwischen Niederschrift une Wiederschrift. Frühmittelalterliche Hagiographie und Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Kompendienüberlieferung und Editionstechnik, ed. Richard Corradini and Max Diesenberger (Vienna, 2010), 223–​72. 156 John Wortley, ed. and trans., The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers:  A Select Edition and Complete English Translation (in Greek and English) (Cambridge, 2013). For a more exhaustive edition, see Jean-​Claude Guy, ed. and trans., Les apophtegmes des Pères. Collection systématique, 3 vols., SC 387, 474, and 498. 157 BHG 1433–​4: André-​J. Festugière, ed., Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Édition critique et traduction annotée (Brussels, 1971); English translation:  Andrew Cain, trans., The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late Fourth Century (Oxford, 2016). 158 BHL 6524; see Eva Schulz-​Flügel, “Zur Entstehung der Corpora Vitae Patrum,” in Critica, Classica, Orientalia, Ascetica, Liturgica, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven, 1989), 289–​300; Tyrannius Rufinus, Historia monachorum sive de vita sanctorum patrum, ed. Eva Schulz-​Flügel (Berlin, 1990). 159 Bernard Flusin, “Pallade d’Hélénopolis,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 12.1 (Paris, 1984), 113–​26. 160 BHG 1435–​8:  Palladius, Historia Lausiaca. Geschichten aus dem frühen Mönchtum, ed. Adelheid Hübner (Freiburg, 2016); English translation, Robert T. Meyer, trans., Palladius: The Lausiac History (London, 1965). See Claudia Rapp, “Palladius, Lausus and the Historia Lausiaca,” in Novum Millennium:  Studies on Byzantine History and Culture Dedicated to Paul Speck, ed. Claudia Sode and Sarolta Takács (Aldershot, 1999),  63–​81. 161 BHL 6532–​ 4:  Adelheid Wellhausen, ed., Die lateinische Übersetzung der Historia Lausiaca des Palladius. Textausgabe mit Einleitung (Berlin, 2003). See also Heinzelmann, “L’hagiographie mérovingienne,” 34–5. 154

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work of monastic propaganda, owing in large part to its lively stories written in simple language. The works of the sixth-​century Palestinian monk John Moschos are in the same vein. A friend of Sophronius, who would become the patriarch of Jerusalem, Moschos traveled among the monasteries of Palestine and Syria, and also those of Egypt, gathering anecdotes and teachings. He then wrote the Spiritual Meadow,162 doubtless finished after his death in Cyprus in 619, during the Persian occupation of Palestine. This work is one of the most widespread in Eastern Christianity. The sanctity attributed to many bishops (some of them having been monks) was closely linked to the authority they acquired.163 Several patriarchs of Constantinople are considered saints, such as Gregory of Nazianzus (d. c. 390) and John Chrysostom (d. 407), mentioned above. The local population sometimes pushed a monk onto the bishop’s throne with more or less success: in Galatia, Theodore of Sycheon, elected bishop of Anastioupolis, had to resign for incompetence;164 in Lycia, Nicholas of Sion ended up as bishop of Pinara without known incident and had a cathedral built.165 In addition to their presence among the ranks of the martyrs, women occupied an important place in monasticism. Some of the holy women of the fourth century observed domestic asceticism without actually entering a monastery:166 Olympia, who was a deaconess;167 Melania the Younger (d. 439), well known in the West;168 Macrina, sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory



BHG 1441–​2:  John Moschos, Le pré spirituel, ed. and trans. Marie-​Joseph Rouët de Journel, SC 12; English translation, John Wortley, trans., The Spiritual Meadow by John Moschos (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992). 163 Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, CA, 2005). 164 BHG 1748:  André-​J. Festugière, ed. and trans., Vie de Théodore de Sykéôn, 2  vols. (Brussels, 1970); partial English translation in Elizabeth Dawes and Norman Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints:  Contemporary Biographies Translated from the Greek (Oxford, 1948), 88–​192. See Michel Kaplan, “Le saint, le village et la cité,” in Pouvoirs, église et sainteté. Essais sur la société byzantine (Paris, 2011), 273–​90. 165 BHG 1347: Ihor and Nancy Ševčenko, ed. and trans., The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion (Brookline, MA, 1984); see also Michel Kaplan, “L’espace et le sacré d’après les sources hagiographiques,” in Kaplan, Pouvoirs, église et sainteté, 367–​410. 166 See the article by Magnani in this volume. 167 BHG 1374–​5:  John Chrysostom, Lettres à Olympias 2, ed. and trans. Anne-​Marie Malingrey, SC 13bis, 407–​49; English translation, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends (New York, 1979), 127–​57. 168 BHG 1241: Denys Gorce, ed. and trans., Vie de Sainte Mélanie, SC 90; English translation, Elizabeth A. Clark, The Life of Melania the Younger (New York, 1984). For the Latin Life, see BHL 5885: Patrick Laurence, La vie latine de sainte Mélanie par Gérontius. Édition critique, traduction et commentaire ( Jerusalem, 2002). 162

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of Nyssa.169 To satisfy their monastic vocation, other women went so far as to disguise themselves as men, following the example of the martyr Eugenia.170 This was the case of a native of Perga in Pamphylia, Matrona, whose husband opposed her monastic vocation; she disguised herself as a eunuch named Babylos to enter the monastery founded by Bassianos. The deception was revealed to Bassianos (who was also a saint) and he sent her to a female monastery of Emesa in Syria, where she ended up becoming abbess. To avoid the arrival of her husband, she fled to Beirut, where she took up residence in an ancient pagan temple, joined by many women and girls who became nuns. When her husband died, she returned to Constantinople, where, with the help of Bassianos, she founded a new monastery, probably a double community.171 In the Syriac world, the main source for information on holy men, holy women, ascetics, and monks, is a hagiographical corpus that crosses linguistic boundaries.172 Several collections of monastic biographies and monastic histories provide information on monasticism in the West and East Syriac Churches in different periods and regions. The best-​known hagiographer from this region is Theodoret of Cyrus. Born in Antioch in 393, he spent seven years in a monastery near Apamea in Syria before being elected bishop of Cyrus (Ḳūrus, in the far north of modern Syria). At first a confirmed Nestorian, in 451 he joined the Council of Chalcedon. He died around 460, leaving a considerable body of theological, epistolary, and historical writings in Greek. In addition to a Historia ecclesiastica which continues that of Eusebius of Caesarea, he wrote a History of the Monks of Syria or Historia philothaea, comprising thirty Lives of monks, followed by a Treatise on Charity.173 Ten of the monks were still alive when he wrote his History; just three were women, two





BHG 1012:  Gregory of Nyssa, Vie de Sainte Macrine, ed. and trans. Pierre Maraval, SC 178; English translation, Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Toronto, 1989). 170 Évelyne Patlagean, “L’histoire de la femme déguisée en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté féminine à Byzance,” Studi Medievali 17 (1976): 597–​623. 171 BHG 1221: Hippolyte Delehaye, ed., Vie de Matrona de Perge, AASS, Nov. III, cols. 790–​ 813; English translation by Jeffrey M. Featherstone, in Holy Women of Byzantium, ed. Alice-​Mary Talbot (Washington, DC, 1996), 13–​64. See Nathalie Delierneux, “The Literary Portrait of Byzantine Female Saints,” in Efthymiadis, Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 2:363–​86. 172 See Jean Maurice Fiey, Saints syriaques (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Sebastian P. Brock, “Syriac Hagiography,” in Efthymiadis, Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 1:259–​83; André Binggeli, ed., L’hagiographie syriaque (Paris, 2012); André Binggeli, “La vie quotidienne des moines en Syrie-​Mésopotamie au miroir déformant des sources littéraires (IVe–​Xe siècle),” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines, 179–​91. 173 BHG 1678–​ 80:  Theodoret of Cyrus, Histoire des moines de Syrie, ed. and trans. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-​ Molinghen, 2  vols., SC 234 and 257; English

169

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of whose Lives are grouped in the same chapter. The History of the Monks of Syria was later translated in part into Syriac.174 Theodoret tells the story of Julian Saba (the Elder, d. 367), one of the first ascetics who gathered a small community around him in the desert of Osrhoene, and the life of the famous Simeon Stylites (the Elder, d. 459), among others. The two Simeons had many imitators. Simeon the Elder, the inventor of this type of asceticism, has a rich and very complex hagiographical tradition.175 Besides the chapter which Theodoret wrote about him while he was still alive, there is a Syriac Life, contained in a manuscript dated to 474,176 and a Greek Life written by Antony, presumably one of his disciples, which was the basis of an early Latin translation known to Gregory of Tours. These texts, which need new critical editions, are transmitted in numerous Greek and Latin manuscripts.177 When the sanctuary of Simeon became monophysite, a rival Chalcedonian site was proposed to him at the other end of Antioch, on Mount Admirable, that of Simeon Stylites the Younger (521–​96). In this case, hagiography is the key to understanding archaeological findings.178 Cyril of Scythopolis (Tel Beït-​Shéan, in Israel) is another author of multiple Lives in Greek. He was born around 525, and became a disciple of Sabas (439–​ 532), whom he met in adolescence. Tonsured in 543, he followed various spiritual masters, and lived for a while as a hermit near the Jordan, before entering the monastery of Euthimius. In 557, he moved finally to the Great Laura of Sabas, but died shortly afterwards. He left behind seven Lives of varying length, of the monks Euthimius, Sabas, John the Hesichiaste, Kyriakus, Theodosius, Theognius, and Abraamius.179 The two longest Lives are those of Euthimius





translation, Theodoret of Cyrus, A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1985). See Pierre Canivet, Le monachisme syrien selon Théodoret de Cyr (Paris, 1977). 174 Bernard Outtier, “Notule sur les versions orientales de l’Histoire Philothée (CPG 6221),” in Antidoron. Hulde aan Dr. Maurits Geerard, vol. 1 (Wetteren, 1984), 73–​80. 175 See Bernard Flusin, “Syméon et les philologues ou la mort du stylite,” in Les saints et leur sanctuaire à Byzance, Textes, images et monuments, ed. Catherine Jolivet-​Lévy, Michel Kaplan, and Jean-​Pierre Sodini (Paris, 1993), 1–​23. 176 BHO 1121 and 1124:  P. Bedjan, ed., Vie syriaque de Syméon Stylite, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 4 (Paris 1894), 507–​644; English translation: Robert Doran, trans., The Lives of Simeon Stylites (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), who has also translated the Greek Lives by Theodoret and Antonius. 177 BHG 1682–​1685k; BHL 7956–​61; see Flusin, “Syméon,” 7–​9. 178 BHG 1689: Paul Van den Ven, ed., La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le Jeune (Brussels, 1962), 255–​316. On archaeology, see the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 179 Eduard Schwartz, Kyrillos von Scythopolis (Leipzig, 1939); Cyril of Scythopolis, Lives of the Monks of Palestine by Cyril of Scythopolis, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991). See Bernard Flusin, Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis (Paris,

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and Sabas, but Cyril was strongly influenced by the vision of Euthimius, the teacher of Sabas, transmitted in the Laura of Sabas, which is presented as the archetype of monasticism and imposes its model on other monasteries. These Lives tell us a great deal about the creation of the patriarchate of Jerusalem, the involvement of monks, and the theological disputes of sixth-​century Palestine. The term laura, which originally designated a path leading from one hermitage to another, became synonymous in the Byzantine world with a form of monastic life that combined a cenobitic house with hermitages of two or three monks who were judged worthy of living in relative isolation. The prestige of the Laura of Sabas, which still exists today above the Kidron Valley, is thus as one of the principal centers of Byzantine monasticism, whose later directions would certainly have surprised its founder. The outstanding Lives of the Eastern Saints (c. 566−568), written in Syriac by the bishop John of Ephesus (d. 586), a confidant of the emperor Justinian and also the author of an ecclesiastical history, is another major source for the sixth century. This text recounts the stories of the anti-​Chalcedonian monks and is a counterpart to the Chalcedonian Lives written by Cyril of Scythopolis.180 It provides a unique insight into the monastic communities of northern Syria at a time of persecution by the imperial Chalcedonian orthodoxy, when monastic life was disrupted and scores of monks were expelled from their monasteries and sent into exile in Egypt, where John met some of them. The History of Pseudo-​Zachariah also has information about the monasteries in the vicinity of Amida (modern Diyarbakır in southeast Turkey) and Edessa in that period.181 These histories provide information about distinctive forms of asceticism developed in the context of periodic threats by the Huns and the Persians in the border regions of the empires, as well as of the sporadic persecutions to enforce the Chalcedonian faith and imperial orthodoxy. The Egyptian model of monasticism grew more and more prestigious in the Syriac tradition, and a well-​known compilation of texts on the Egyptian fathers, entitled The Paradise, was put together by the seventh-​century East Syriac monk “Enanisho” and circulated widely.182 The histories were taken



1983); Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC, 1995). See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, CA, 1990). 181 Geoffrey Greatrex, trans., The Chronicle of Pseudo-​Zachariah Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 2011). 182 “Enanisho,” The Book of Paradise, Being the Histories and Sayings of the Monks and Ascetics of the Egyptian Desert by Palladius, Hieronymus and Others: The Syriac Texts, According to the Recension of “Anân-​Îshô” of Bêth ‘Âbhê, ed. E. A. W. Budge (London, 1904).

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from sixth-​century Syriac versions of the Historia Lausiaca by Palladius, the Historia Monachorum, and the Apophthegmata Patrum. An important reform of East Syrian monasticism is attributed to Mar Abraham of Kaškar in southern Iraq (d. c. 586),183 who allegedly traveled to the desert of Scetis in Egypt, to the Sinai, and to Jerusalem, before founding “the Great Monastery” on Mount Izla. He issued a new rule for his foundation in 570, modeled on the Egyptian type of monasticism, which promoted a way of life associating solitary and cenobitic lifestyles. His disciples soon disseminated this model all over Mesopotamia and Persia. Later, the history of the origins of eastern monasticism was reinvented in a series of Lives that attributed the introduction of Egyptian monastic forms in Mesopotamia to Mar Awgen/​Eugenios and his alleged seventy-​two disciples.184 Awgen is not mentioned in any source before the late seventh century, which indicates that his history is a late re-​elaboration. Although fictitious, these Lives contain topographical details as well as realia on monastic life that can be of interest. Numerous Lives of monastic founders were produced in the Sassanid Empire, in verse and in prose, like the verse Life of the late sixth-​century monastic founder Rabban Bar ‘Idta (d. 612),185 written by a certain John (on which a certain Abraham states that he based his own verse version), or the prose Life of another founder, Rabban Hormizd, to cite just two examples.186 Monasteries were places where manuscripts were copied, and where knowledge was transmitted.187 The Book of the Founders of Schools and Monasteries, also known as the Book of Chastity, is an East Syrian collection of abbreviated Lives of monks who founded schools and monasteries in the decades after Mar Awgen and his disciples; it was composed in the 850s by Išo’denaḥ, bishop of Baṣra.188 It is a unique source of information on the scholastic networks in the Church of the East, on the importance attached to the training of monks for the missions to Central and East Asia, and on the disputations with Manicheans and Zoroastrians, as well as with the Syrian Orthodox, who challenged the East Syrians at the court of the shahs.

BHO 14. On Abraham and his achievements, see Chialà, “Les règles monastiques syro-​orientales,” 114–​18. 184 BHO 120–​2, in two recensions. Disciples: twelve Lives are known, not all edited so far. 185 BHO 137. 186 Jean Maurice Fiey, Assyrie chrétienne. Contribution à l’étude de l’histoire, de l’archéologie et de la géographie ecclésiastiques et monastiques du Nord de l’Iraq, 3 vols. (Beirut, 1965–​8), 1:270–​83 and 2:533–​48. 187 Muriel Debié, “Livres et monastères en Syrie-​ Mésopotamie d’après les sources syriaques,” in Jullien, Le monachisme syriaque, 123–​68. 188 Išo’denaḥ of Baṣra, Le livre de la chasteté composé par Jésusdenah, évêque de Baçrah, ed. and trans. Jean-​Baptiste Chabot, in Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 16 (1896): 225–​92. 183

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Monastic schools in the region known as Bet Qatraye (which comprised the peninsula of Qatar but also its hinterland and the coast of northeast Arabia as far as Oman and the islands) are known for having produced in the sixth and seventh centuries important monastic Syriac writers, including Isaac of Nineveh, Dadišo, Gabriel, Abraham bar Lipeh, Aḥob, all nicknamed Qatraya (from Qatar), who wrote ascetic, biblical liturgical, and mystical works.189 Their production of a few hagiographical works as well gives precious information about monastic spirituality and life on these shores until well into the Islamic period.

Conclusion We hope to have shown the wealth of extant sources for the history of monasticism in East and West in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, but also the problems of interpretation that they present and the extensive research that remains to be done. This period saw the development of extremely diverse ascetic and monastic ways of life, which authorities attempted to unify little by little, not without difficulty. The writings of the time attest to the numerous conflicts that could arise between monks and their hierarchy, and sometimes among the monks themselves, but also the forms of solidarity that developed among them. In fact, they shared many common traditions, reading and exchanging the same texts. According to the Life of Genevieve, written in 520, from atop his column Simeon Stylites the Elder had enjoined Syrian merchants on their way to distant Gaul to obtain news of the Parisian virgin and to send her his greetings!190 The history of these connections between the monastic trends in different regions of the world remains to be written, and requires an extensive linguistic background: not only is there a vast bibliography in a multitude of modern languages, but the extant sources, many of them still unpublished, are written in a great variety of ancient languages. No modern translation can transmit the experience of reading these texts in their original language, in their original form. The study of manuscripts benefits from ever more refined new technologies. The digitization of an increasing number of sources will facilitate



See Jean Maurice Fiey, “Ichô‘dnah, métropolite de Basra, et son œuvre,” L’Orient syrien 11 (1966): 431–​50. Sebastian P. Brock, “Syriac Writers from Beth Qatraye,” Aram periodical 11–​12 (1999–​2000): 85–​96. 190 Vita Genovefae 27, 226. 189

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their use more than ever before. Archaeological excavations are constantly in progress, resulting in discoveries of new remains or documents that continuously enrich our knowledge of the period. Without a doubt, future research will reveal an ancient monastic world that was much more open, multicultural, and connected than has been imagined until now.

Bibliography Battle, Columba M. Die ‘Adhortationes sanctorum’ (‘Verba Seniorum’) im lateinischen Mittelalter. Überlieferung, Fortleben und Wirkung. Münster, 1972. Bottazzi, Marialuisa et al., eds. La società monastica nei secoli VI–XII. Sentieri di ricerca. Atelier jeunes chercheurs sur le monachisme médiéval. Rome and Trieste, 2016. Boud’hors, Anne. “Coptic Literature.” In Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, 224–46. Oxford, 2012. De Rubeis, Flavia, and Federico Marazzi, eds. Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–XI). Topografia e strutture. Rome, 2008. Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires. Brussels, 1921; 2nd ed. 1966. Delouis, Olivier, and Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, eds. La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–Xe siècle), I. L’état des sources. Cairo and Athens, 2015. Desprez, Vincent. Le monachisme primitif. Des origines jusqu’au concile d’Éphèse. Bégrollesen-Mauges, 1998. Destefanis, Eleonora, ed. L’eredità di san Colombano. Memoria e culto attraverso il Medioevo. Rennes, 2017. Dey, Hendrik, and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Dunn, Marilyn. “Asceticism and Monasticism, II:  Western.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, 2:  Constantine to c.  600, edited by Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris, 669–90. Cambridge, 2007. Duval, Yvette. Auprès des saints corps et âme. L’inhumation “ad sanctos” dans la chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident du IIIe au VIIe siècle. Paris, 1988. Efthymiadis, Stephanos, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography. 2 vols. Farnham, 2011–14. Hagiographies. Histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire en Occident des origines à 1550. 7 vols. Turnhout, 1994–. Hamburger, Jeffrey, and Susan Marti, eds. Crown and Veil. Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries. New York, 2008. Hamburger, Jeffrey, et al., eds. Frauen—Kloster—Kunst. Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. Turnhout, 2007. Heinzelmann, Martin. “L’hagiographie mérovingienne:  panorama des documents potentiels.” In L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures, edited by Monique Goullet et al., 27–82. Ostfildern, 2010. Helvétius, Anne-Marie, and Michel Kaplan. “Asceticism and Its Institutions.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, 3: Early Medieval Christianities (c. 600–c. 1100), edited by Thomas Noble and Julia Smith, 275–98 and 703–12. Cambridge, 2008.

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Anne-Marie Helvétius   et al. Isaia, Marie-Céline, and Thomas Granier, eds. Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin (VIe–XVIe siècle). Turnhout, 2014. Jullien, Françoise, ed. Le monachisme syriaque. Paris, 2010. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2014. Marazzi, Federico. Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio. Milan, 2015. Martin, José Carlos. Sources latines de l’Espagne tardo-antique et médiévale (Ve–XIVe siècles). Répertoire bibliographique. Paris, 2010. McLaughlin, Terence P. Le très ancien droit monastique de l’Occident. Ligugé and Paris, 1935. Melville, Gert, and Anne Müller, eds. Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts. Berlin and Münster, 2011. Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–April 6th 2016). Spoleto, 2017. Muschiol, Gisela. “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West.” In Gender in the Early Medieval World. East and West, 300–900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith, 198–216. Cambridge, 2004. Rose, Els. Ritual Memory:  The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West (c. 500–1215). Leiden, 2009. Rubenson, Samuel. “Asceticism and Monasticism, I:  Eastern.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, 2: Constantine to c. 600, edited by Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris, 637–68. Cambridge, 2007. Vogüé, Adalbert de. Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique de l’antiquité. Première partie: le monachisme latin. 12 vols. Paris, 1991–2008.   Histoire littéraire du mouvement monastique de l’antiquité. Deuxième partie:  le monachisme grec. 3 vols. Rome, 2015.   Les règles monastiques anciennes (400–700). Turnhout, 1985. Wipszycka, Ewa. Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–VIIIe siècles). Warsaw, 2009.

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The Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries D ar l e n e L .   B ro oks He dstro m a n d H endrik   Dey

Intensive regional surveys and a growing interest in monastic archaeology are providing new evidence for the history of the earliest monastic settlement in both East and West, and demonstrating above all the enormous variety in the morphology of monastic structures and the contexts in which early monastics lived. Monks reoccupied and modified older, sometimes derelict structures such as villas, farms, temples and sanctuaries, and urban houses; they lived in caves and rock-​cut chambers; and they constructed new complexes of the most varied typologies, from small clusters of huts built in perishable materials to large, elaborate structures in stone and mortared masonry.1 The recent surge of attention to the architectural contexts and the material culture of early monasticism has also effectively highlighted the limits of current knowledge regarding the constructed environments inhabited by early monks, and begun to rectify past misconceptions, many of them resulting from past generations of scholars’ reliance on the textual corpus at a time when well-​documented, scientifically excavated monastic sites were few and far between.2 The extant hagiographical and prescriptive texts, while quite numerous for both East and West before 600 c e, are nearly always frustratingly vague on the physical contours of monastic settlement, and very often misleading. Texts produced by or for monks naturally stressed their otherness, their separation from the world, and the distinctiveness of their unique calling. Moreover, prescriptive or normative documents, monastic rules above all, tend to impart

Amr al-​Azm and Daniel J. Hull, “The Hauran Monastic Landscapes Project,” Newsletter of the Council for British Research in the Levant (2004): 31–​2; Béatrice Caseau, “The Fate of Rural Temples in Late Antiquity,” in Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, ed. William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado (Leiden, 2004), 105–​44; Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert, eds. La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe siècle) (Cairo, 2011); Federico Marazzi, Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio (Milan, 2015). 2 Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines. 1

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Figure 4.1  Map of selected monastic sites, East and West. Map by David Jaeger.

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a spurious air of regularity and homogeneity to the monastic experience, when they are in fact responses to a far more complex and heterogeneous reality. These factors, coupled with a tendency to project the origins of the (relatively) more standardized, quadrangular cloister with adjacent church characteristic of the high Middle Ages farther back in time than the evidence warrants, led earlier scholars to assume a much more pronounced distinction between vernacular and monastic architecture than often existed in reality, from one end of Christendom to the other.3 Thus, in East and West alike, probable monastic sites that diverged from presumed norms often failed to be recognized as such, while the identification of other sites once assumed to be monastic has now been called into question or refuted entirely. A number of additional common points emerge from the following survey of early monastic environments in both East and West, among the most important of which is the observation that, for the period before c. 600 ce, the spaces occupied by both male and female monastics are, more often than not, architecturally and archaeologically indistinguishable from the vernacular architecture of the regions in which they are located. In a great number of cases, in the East and perhaps even more so in the West, ascetics occupied existing structures, often with minimal alterations and only essential repairs; and even new constructions conformed with prevailing regional architectural typologies. Even with careful excavation and study, then, it is difficult to confirm monastic provenance on the basis of physical evidence alone.4 The problem is still more acute in cities, which the textual record implies were teeming with monasteries from the fourth century on—​there may indeed have been more ascetic communities in urban environments than in the countryside in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries,5 though their fame, then as now, was eclipsed by remote, forbidding bastions of isolation such as Lérins or Luxeuil in Gaul and the large monastic estates in Egypt.6 But since urban communities generally occupied houses indistinguishable from the rest, located moreover in places often continuously occupied up to the present, it has proven



Oliva Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003), 29–​37. 4 Kim Bowes, “Houses, Villas and the Archaeology of Asceticism in the Late Roman West,” in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 315–​51. 5 Isabella Baldini Lippolis, “Private Space in Late Antique Cities: Laws and Building Procedures,” in Housing in Late Antiquity, ed. Luke Lavan et  al. (Leiden, 2007), 197–​238. 6 See the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 3

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almost impossible to find them.7 Material traces of female monasticism are thus especially scarce, as nuns were almost always based within the protected confines of towns and cities in the period before 600 ce. One thing, however, is quite clear:  in terms of both their physical structure and the daily routines of their inhabitants, monasteries—​from Ireland to Syria—​very often had much closer links with lay society than the hagiographical and prescriptive sources indicate.

Eastern Monastic Settlements We begin with the eastern Mediterranean, the birthplace of Christian monasticism, where the rise of female and male monastic communities was presented in monastic literature as involving a widespread spate of monastic construction and new settlements. The physical evidence for these communities before 600 c e, however, is elusive. Many discussions of early monastic settlements and their foundation were drawn purely from the literary sources without any supporting archaeological evidence. When monastic settlements were identified, the chronology for construction and later phases was often difficult for earlier excavators to discern. The majority of the Egyptian settlements have been identified as male, monastic communities. Monastic correspondence between archimandrites and female leaders demonstrates that women’s communities did exist, but we do not have any archaeological evidence for these settlements.8 Since religious women predominantly lived in domestic quarters that were similar to non-​monastic dwellings, and as monastics may not have owned the gendered items that male excavators in the early twentieth century anticipated as artifacts of female occupation, the sites of female monastics are indistinguishable from other domestic habitation, and thus the line between vernacular and monastic architecture is almost entirely blurred.9



Catherine Saliou, Les lois des bâtiments. Voisinage et habitat urbain dans l’empire romain. Recherches sur les rapports entre le droit et la construction privée, du siècle d’Auguste au siècle de Justinien (Beirut, 1994). 8 Claudia Rapp, “Early Monasticism in Egypt,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Zurich, 2011), 21–​42. 9 Carolyn S. Sniveley, “Invisible in the Community? The Evidence for Early Women’s Monasticism in the southern Balkan Peninsula,” in Shaping Community:  The Art and Archaeology of Monasticism, ed. Shelia McNally (Oxford, 2001), 57–​66; James Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert:  Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999),  53–​72. 7

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Monastic literature points to the development of monastic settlements in the East as a somewhat linear process that began in the late third century. Greater scrutiny of late antique sources and documentary evidence, including papyri, ostraca (accounts and letters written on broken ceramic sherds), and inscriptions, reveals a far more complex and moderate process of settlement.10 Thus, the literary sources and the archaeological evidence need to be read in concert to ascertain when and where monasteries were built. Far too often, discussions of the archaeology of early monasticism in the East have been based on literary traditions alone, or on the physical presence of a church even where essential buildings for housing a monastic community are lacking. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria offer the greatest evidence for early forms of monastic settlement. While early monastic literature highlights the importance of physical isolation from non-​monastic communities in the desert, the archaeological evidence points to a diversity of locations for monasteries, which were often located in closer proximity to settlements than previously thought.11

Egypt Monastic communities elected to establish settlements in a variety of locations. Some were along the edges of the Nile or in nearby desert cliffs in naturally formed caves or preexisting tombs, which must have made the settlements quite visible and known to local communities traveling by foot or by boat.12 Other communities were large, purpose-​built settlements that looked like small villages; and still others were more modest settlements, emerging from the remodeling of abandoned quarries, tombs, or temples. The documentary evidence from ostraca and papyri clearly illustrates that the affinity for isolation espoused in the literary sources was not evident in daily living: monks were deeply engaged in the lives and experiences of lay communities.13



Maria Chiara Giorda, “Le désert devint une ville.” À la recherche d’une identité monastique en Égypte dans l’antiquité tardive (Saarbrücken, 2010). 11 Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, “Divine Architects:  Designing the Monastic Dwelling Place,” in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300–​700, ed. Roger Bagnall (Cambridge, 2007), 368–​89; Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009). 12 Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, The Egyptian Monastic Landscape in Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2017). 13 Malcolm Choat, “Property of Ownership and Tax Payment in Fourth-​ Century Monasticism,” in Monastic Estates in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt: Ostraca, Papyri, and Essays in Memory of Sarah Clackson, ed. Anne Boud’hors et  al. (Cincinnati, OH, 2009), 129–​40.

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The two most famous settlements known to the Mediterranean monastic world, thanks to the writings of travelers to Egypt such as John Cassian (d. 435), Jerome (d. 420), and others, are Kellia and Scetis. They are both located in the northwest Delta in Lower Egypt, and are examples of large monastic communities that were not cenobitic, but rather loose configurations of independent monastic residences that resembled small villages. Kellia (“the Cells”) consists of seventeen discrete areas or mounds with at least 1,500 buildings, including several churches, chapels, martyria, and oratories. As the entire community was not enclosed, the individual dwellings consist of a range of forms, from two-​roomed private residences for a solitary monk to fifty-​roomed buildings that could house more than a dozen monks. Although Kellia was eventually abandoned in the ninth century, Scetis (modern Wadi Natrun) has had a continuous monastic presence. Excavations at and near the four contemporary monasteries (Dayr Anba Maqar, Dayr Anba Bishoi, Dayr al-​Suryan, and Dayr al-​Baramous), as well as in between these sites, illustrate that these settlements originally began as unenclosed clusters of residences.14 The monastic communities dot a low-​lying valley marked by several large natron (salt) lakes. With similar residential designs to Kellia, Scetis had hundreds of multi-​roomed buildings scattered throughout the desert and clustered together to form small villages with churches, monastic houses, guest halls, and kitchen facilities.15 Only a few of these structures, however, may date to before 600, and the majority were built in the period after the Arab conquest. Numerous cliffs line the Nile Valley and are pierced by pharaonic tombs. Monks often used the long-​abandoned tombs, with their multi-​roomed floor plans, as a foundation for a new settlement and then built out from the opening onto the terraces with mud brick and timber additions. The occupants Christianized the residences with white plaster upon which they painted crosses, added multicolored Christian iconographic programs, and inscribed their Coptic prayers. The most well-​known concentration of monastic adaptive reuse of pharaonic tombs and mortuary complexes is found in the western hills of Thebes in Upper Egypt.16 Hundreds of monks lived in Thebes, at communities such



Hugh Evelyn White, The Monasteries of the Wadi Natrun, 3 vols. (New York, 1932). Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Stephen J. Davis, et al., “New Archaeology at Ancient Scetis:  Surveys and Initial Excavations at the Monastery of St. John the Little in Wadi al-​Natrun:  Yale Monastic Archaeology Project,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 217–​28; Karel Innemée, “Excavations at Deir al-​Baramus 2002–​2005,” Bulletin de la Société d’archéologie copte 44 (2005): 55–​68. 16 Guy Lecuyot, “The Valley of the Queens in the Coptic Period,” in Acts of the Fifth International Coptic Congress, Washington D.C., 11–​16 August 1992, vol. 2/​1, ed. David W. Johnson (Rome, 1993), 263–​76. 14 15

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as the Monastery of St. Phoibammon, Deir el-​Roumi, Deir el-​Medina, Deir el-​Bachit, and Deir el-​Bahri. The sites include invaluable ostraca documenting monastic life, leases of cells, and economic exchanges with local communities. The Monastery of Epiphanius, a small seventh-​century residence, was excavated in 1913–​14 and typifies the method of extension of an ancient tomb for late antique habitation.17 In the region of Fayyum, the monastic community at Naqlun is the best representative of a late antique settlement in a semi-​oasis area. It is a site with two distinct components, including more than ninety independent residences (Coptic ma nshōpe; Arabic manshubiya) built into the natural shale and limestone cliffs.18 Further south at the site of Esna, south of Thebes, a team discovered fifteen sixth-​century semi-​subterranean monastic dwellings.19 The buildings are cut into the geophysical strata, and are accessed only by a staircase that leads down from the desert valley into a sunken open-​ air courtyard with attached sleeping quarters, oratories, and kitchens. All of these sites were relatively unknown outside Egypt and therefore offer a completely different perspective on monasticism in Egypt from that found in the hagiographic literature associated with Antony (d. 356), the Desert Fathers, and Pachomius (d. 348). Although Pachomius and his cenobitic monasteries were a central feature of Egyptian monasticism, we do not have any archaeological remains for his multi-​site community, which had dissolved by the early sixth century. The best example of Upper Egyptian cenobitic monasticism is found near the cities of Sohag and Akhmim at the White Monastery associated with Shenoute of Atripe (d. 465). Shenoute’s surviving works—​including treatises, sermons, monastic rules, and homilies in the Canons and Discourses—​provide the largest literary corpus of the Sahidic dialect (the earliest Coptic dialect) from one author, with over 3,800 pages preserved.20 Fortunately the remains of Shenoute’s White Monastery Federation are still visible and include several components: a large men’s community with its imposing fifth-​century limestone church, one of the best preserved late antique Christian monuments still in use (now the White Monastery);21 a second men’s community at the

Herbert Winlock and Walter E. Crum, The Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes, 2 vols. (New York, 1926). 18 Wlodzimierz Godlewski, “The Hermitage of Apa Phoibamon,” in Les civilisations du bassin méditerranéen. Hommages à Joachim Sliwa, ed. Joachim Sliwa, Krzystztof Cialowicz, and Janusz Ostrowski (Cracow, 2000), 92–8. 19 Serge Sauneron and Jean Jacquet. Les ermitages du désert d’Esna, 4 vols. (Cairo, 1972). 20 Stephen Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus (Leuven, 2004). 21 Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom et al., “The White Monastery Federation Project: Survey and Mapping at the Monastery of Apa Shenoute (Dayr al-​Anba Shinūda), Sohag, 17

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nearby Red Monastery;22 a women’s community to the south in the village of Atripe;23 a collection of independent hermitages in the limestone cliffs to the west; and the tomb of its most revered leader, Shenoute.24 Another example of a large purpose-​built monastery founded in the late fifth and sixth century is the Monastery of Jeremias, built in the valley just south of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. The site provides a rich array of material evidence with three elaborate stone and mud brick churches, a refectory, residences, chapels, a hospital, and a series of rooms for monks and pilgrims in stone, wood, and mud brick.25 A further contemporary and extensively excavated site in Middle Egypt is at Bawit. It contains a complex settlement known as the Monastery of Apa Apollo, with an unprecedented number of monastic residences covering 40 hectares.26 Papyri and ostraca recovered from the Monastery of Apollo reveal a monastic community with wide economic ties to a variety of smaller monastic settlements and neighboring cities, illustrating the interconnectivity between lay and monastic communities.27







2005–​2007,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 65 (2013): 333–​64; Peter Grossmann et al., “Second Report on the Excavation of the Monastery of Apa Shenute (Dayr Anba Shinuda) at Suhag,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 63 (2009): 167–​220. 22 Elizabeth Bolman, ed. The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (New Haven, CT, 2016). 23 Excavation by Yale Monastic Archaeology Project South (Sohag), http://​egyptology​.​ yale.edu/​expeditions/​current-​expeditions/​yale-​monastic-​archaeology-​project-​south-​ sohag/​atripe (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 24 Elizabeth Bolman, Stephen Davis, and Gillian Pyke, with contributions by M. Abdel Rahim, et al. “Shenoute and a Newly Discovered Tomb Chapel at the White Monastery,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 453–​62; Stephen Davis et al., “Life and Death in Lower and Upper Egypt: A Report on Recent Monastic Archaeology at Yale,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies 3 (2012): 9–​26. 25 James E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1905–​1910) (Cairo, 1907–​13). 26 Tomasz Herbich and Dominique Bénazeth, “Le kôm de Baouît:  étapes d’une cartographie,” Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale 108 (2008):  165–​204; Emile Chassinat, Fouilles à Baouit, vol. 13 (Cairo, 1911); Jean Clédat, Le monastère et la nécropole de Baouit, vols. 12 and 39 (Cairo, 1904–​16); Jean Clédat, Le monastère et la nécropole de Baouit, ed. Dominique Bénazeth and Marie-​Hélène Ruschowscaya (Cairo, 1999); Dominique Bénazeth, “Histoire des fouilles de Baouit,” in Études Coptes IV (Louvain, 1995), 53–​62. 27 Anne Boud’hors, Ostraca grecs et coptes. Des fouilles de Jean Maspero à Baouit (Cairo, 2004); Sarah Clackson, Coptic and Greek Texts Relating to the Hermopolite Monastery of Apa Apollo (Oxford, 2000); Sarah Clackson, “Reconstructing the Archives of the Monastery of Apollo at Bawit,” in Atti del XXII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia, Firenze, 23–​29 agosto 1998, ed. Isabella Andorlini et  al. (Florence, 2001), 219–​36; Sarah Clackson, It Is Our Father Who Writes:  Orders from the Monastery of Apollo at Bawit (Cincinnati, OH, 2008).

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Palestine (Gaza and the Judean Desert) Monasticism in the Holy Land is often divided into two areas of activity—​ the land of the Judean desert and the land of Gaza.28 The two areas spawned regional variations in settlement and in literary production that reflect the same pattern of individuality observed in the early monastic settlements of Egypt.29 Perhaps the most famous of its monastic founders is a Cappadocian named Sabas (439–​532 ce), who relocated to the deserts of Judea and established the Great Laura, later known as Mar Saba—​still the most important of the early Palestinian monasteries.30 Over seventy monastic sites nestle around Mar Saba, including the Monastery of Choziba, Gerasimus, and Euthymius. Under Sabas, the Kidron Basin became a monastic center to rival the great reputations of Egyptian and Basilian monasticism.31 Most of the dwellings employ elements of the natural landscape and served as long-​term residences, not merely as temporary shelters. The builders remodeled natural caves with additional walls made of rocks, mud, and fieldstones, and then applied plaster to secure most surfaces. A few residences contained mosaic paving. Doors, windows, and roofing were frequently made from wooden beams, whose post slots and sills are still visible in the cliff faces. Surveys in the 1980s documented the remains of more than fifty-​f ive early settlements in the region of the Dead Sea, Judea, and Jerusalem alone that were not previously recognized as monastic settlements.32 The surveyed







Lorenzo Perrone, “Byzantine Monasticism in Gaza and in the Judean Desert:  A Comparison of Their Spiritual Traditions,” Proche-​Orient Chrétien 62 (2012):  6–​22; Lorenzo Perrone, “Monasticism in the Holy Land:  From the Beginnings to the Crusaders,” Proche-​Orient Chrétien 45 (1995):  31–​63; Vassilios Tzaferis, “Early Christian Monasticism in the Holy Land and Archaeology,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (Leuven, 2001), 317–​22. 29 Theodoret of Cyrus, Histoire des moines de Syrie, ed. and trans. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-​Molinghen, SC 234 and 257; English translation, Theodoret of Cyrus, A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1985). Cyril of Scythopolis, Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R. M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991). 30 John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ:  The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–​631 (Oxford, 1994). See also the article by Brakke in this volume. 31 Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC, 1995), 55; Joseph Patrich, “The Cells (Ta Kellia) of Choziba, Wadi el-​Qilt,” in Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land: New Discoveries, ed. Giovanni C. Bottini et al. ( Jerusalem, 1990), 205–​26; Joseph Patrich, “The Sabaite Monastery of the Cave (Spelaion) in the Judean Desert,” Liber Annuus 41 (1991): 429–​48; Joseph Patrich, Beni Arubas, and Beni Agur, “Monastic Cells in the Desert of Gerasimus near the Jordan,” in Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Documents, ed. Frédéric Manns and Enrico Alliata ( Jerusalem, 1993), 277–​96. 32 Yizhar Hirschfeld, “List of the Byzantine Monasteries in the Judean Desert,” in Bottini et al., Christian Archaeology in the Holy Land: New Discoveries, 1–​90; Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries (New Haven, CT, 1992); Yizhar Hirschfeld, “Monasteries and Churches in the Judean Desert in the Byzantine Period,” in Ancient Churches Revealed, 28

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sites include cells, dining halls, kitchens, storerooms, and a chapel.33 Many of the monastic sites line the major Roman roads leading between Jerusalem and Jericho and would thus have provided lodging and food for religious travelers. The travelogues of fourth-​century Egeria and later sixth-​century Antoninus of Placentia provide vivid descriptions of many encounters with monks, their experiences with hospitality, and their stays at monastic hostelries along routes within the Holy Land.34 Khirbet ed-​Deir, which has the best-​preserved cave church in the Judean desert and dates to the late fifth to mid-​seventh century, is an excellent example of the type of communities that Egeria might have visited.35 The site contains monastic residences, a chapel, stables, gardens, and facilities for a variety of agricultural activities. The site of Khirbet es-​Suyyagh in the Judean Shephelah offers an example of a rural cenobium, possibly the site of the Monastery of Samson mentioned in John Moschos’s (d. c.  619)  Spiritual Meadow.36 The settlement includes a gate, a tower, dining rooms, a kitchen, a bakery, a hospice for pilgrims, workshops for wine and oil production, a domestic area, and nearby agricultural lands. A unique feature at Khirbet es-​Suyyagh is the separation of the church from the monastery proper, which may stem from the fact that the site was originally a farmhouse. In contrast with the extensive archaeological evidence in the Judean deserts, little is visible of the monastic communities in Gaza, for they are located in areas continuously occupied and largely urban. Therefore, Gazan monasticism, founded in the fourth century by Hilarion, according to Jerome, is known to us almost exclusively from an impressive corpus of texts such as the Questions and Answers of Barsanuphius and John, the Instructions of Dorotheus, and the Asketikon of Isaiah of Gaza.37 Little archaeological evidence survives



ed. Yoram Tsafrir ( Jerusalem, 1993), 149–​54; Yizhar Hirschfeld, “Deir Qal’a and the Monasteries of Western Samaria,” in The Roman and Byzantine Near East, vol. 3, ed. John H. Humphrey (Portsmouth, RI, 2002), 155–​90. 33 Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism,  165–​6. 34 Maria Kazakou and Vasileios Skoulas, eds., Egeria:  Mediterranean Medieval Places of Pilgrimage (Athens, 2008). 35 Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Early Byzantine Monastery at Khirbet ed-​ Deir in the Judean Desert: The Excavations in 1981–​1987 ( Jerusalem, 1999). 36 Itamar Taxel, Khirbet es-​Suyyagh:  A Byzantine Monastery in the Judaean Shephelah (Tel Aviv, 2009). 37 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky, “Gaza Monasticism in the Fourth–​Sixth Centuries:  From Anchorite to Cenobitic,” Proche-​Orient Chrétien 50.1–​2 (2000):  14–​62; Yizhar Hirschfeld, “The Monasteries of Gaza: An Archaeological Review,” in Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity, ed. Brouria Bitton-​Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky (Leiden, 2004), 61–​81; Catherine Saliou, ed. Gaza dans l’antiquité tardive. Archéologie, rhétorique et histore. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers (6–​7 mai 2004) (Salerno, 2005).

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to substantiate a fourth-​century founding for the monastic communities in the area. The Monastery of Hilarion at Umm el-​’Amr has a Byzantine-​period church, a chapel, the tomb of Hilarion, a bathhouse, a hostel, and cells, and the whole community was dismantled during the Umayyad period.38 The monastic complex near Khirbet Jemameh may date to as early as the sixth century.39 Its central church, which the excavators think originally functioned as a farmhouse, includes a crypt and a vaulted burial chamber. Additional rooms radiate off from the courtyard and include a large hall, a kitchen, and a possible dormitory. Many of the features could have been part of the original agricultural estate, subsequently modified for monastic habitation.40 Thus, as in Egypt, Gazan monks modified existing structures for monastic use and adapted desert monasticism for more populous areas.

Cappadocia and Syria Few early monastic settlements have been as extensively excavated or surveyed as those found in Egypt and Palestine. Select monastic sites from late antique Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Syria, however, contain instructive evidence of how monastic settlements emerged alongside church complexes, pilgrim centers, and remodeled farmhouses.41 In eastern Anatolia, in the region of Cappadocia, Basil the Great (d. 379) wrote treatises on ascetic practice and rules for cenobitic communities. He was writing from a primarily urban settlement, and no trace of his monastic communities remains. Unlike the Syrian, Palestinian, and Egyptian monks who sought to reoccupy abandoned sites



René Elter and A. Abd el-​Rhadan, “Le monastère de saint Hilarion:  évolution et développement architectural d’un sanctuaire de pèlerinage dans le sud de Gaza (Palestine),” Cahiers de Saint-​Michel de Cuxa 38 (2007):  121–​36; René Elter and Ayman Hassoune, “Le complexe du bain du monastère de Saint Hilarion à Umm el-​’Amr: première synthèse architecturale,” Syria 85 (2008): 129–​44; René Elter, “Le monastère de saint Hilarion: les vestiges archéologiques du site de Umm el-​’Amr,” in Saliou, Gaza dans l’antiquité tardive, 13–​40; Jean-​Baptiste Humbert and Ayman Hassoune, “Brefs regards sur les fouilles byzantines à Gaza,” in ibid., 1–​11; Jean-​Baptiste Humbert, ed., Gaza méditerranéenne. Histoire et archéologie en Palestine (Paris, 2000). 39 Ram Gophna and Nurit Feig, “A Byzantine Monastery at Kh. Jemameh,” ‘Atigot 22 (1993): 97–​108. 40 Hirshfeld, “Gaza Monasticism,” 78–​9; Gophna and Feig, “A Byzantine Monastery at Kh. Jemameh,”  106–​7. 41 Jean-​Luc Biscop and Jean-​Pierre Sodini, “Travaux récents au sanctuaire syrien de Saint-​ Syméon le Stylite,” Comptes-​rendus des Séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-​lettres (1983):  335–​72; Jean-​Luc Biscop and Jean-​Pierre Sodini, “Qal’at sem’an et les chevets à colonnes de Syrie du Nord,” Syria 61 (1984):  267–​330; Jean-​Pierre Sodini, “Qal’at Sem’an:  centre de pèlerinage,” in Syrie:  mémoire et civilisation, ed. Sophie Cluzan, Eric Delpont, and Jeanne Mouliérac (Paris, 1993), 350–​7; Jean-​Luc Biscop, Dominique Orssaud, and Marlia M. Mango, Deir Déḥès. Monastère d’Antiochène. Étude architecturale (Beirut, 1997). 38

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or settle in uninhabited areas, Cappadocian monks, both male and female, elected to live in communities in close proximity to non-​monastics and to fellow monks.42 Early monasteries do exist, for example, in Cilicia. The twenty-​ year excavations at the mountain ledge site at Alahan in southern Anatolia present evidence for how a fifth-​century pilgrimage center eventually evolved into a monastic settlement with a cave church, two basilicas, and a baptistery. As with many other church complexes, it is often difficult to identify or locate other monastic buildings except for the monumental structures.43 In Syria, the most famous monastic center is Qal’at Sim’an, with a martyrium at its center for the first stylite, Simeon the Elder (390–​459), described by Theodoret of Cyrus (c. 393–​460).44 Simeon lived at a monastic community near Teleda in the early fifth century, but moved to new locations to find higher, more substantial pillars to occupy. His eventual location at Qal’at Sim’an would make the site one of the most famous Christian centers of the Mediterranean. Like other pilgrimage centers, it contains extensive architectural remains of both a monastic community and buildings reserved for pilgrims, and naturally it is often difficult to differentiate between the two areas. At times the difference lies in the eye of the excavator, especially when conclusive epigraphic or documentary evidence is not available. In a recent effort to reexamine the evidence, one study proposed a 50  percent reduction in the presence of monastic settlements in the northern Syrian limestone massif.45 Surveys west of Antioch, at St. Barlaam on Mount Kasios and St. Simeon the Younger Stylite on Wondrous Mountain, provide ample evidence of monastic communities built in the countryside in the sixth century, inspired by the other stylite martyria complexes.46 As at Qal’at Sim’an, the monastery for



Existing Cappadocian monastic structures date to the Middle Byzantine period (c. 800–​1204) or later. Robert Ousterhout, Visualizing Community: Art, Material Culture and Settlement in Byzantine Cappadocia (Washington, DC, 2017); J. E. Cooper and M. Decker, Life and Society in Byzantine Cappadocia (New  York, 2012), 108; Robert Ousterhout, “Questioning the Architectural Evidence for Cappadocian Monasticism,” in Work and Worship at the Theotkos Evergetis, ed. Margaret Mullett and A. Kirby (Belfast, 1997), 420–​31. 43 Michael Gough, ed., Alahan: An Early Christian Monastery in Southern Turkey (Toronto, 1985); Cyril Mango, “Germia, A Postscript,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 41 (1991): 297–​300. 44 Theodoret of Cyrus, Historia Religiosa, in Theodoret of Cyrus, L’histoire des moines de Syrie; English translation, A History of the Monks of  Syria. 45 Daniel Hull, “A Spatial and Morphological Analysis of Monastic Sites in the Northern Limestone Massif, Syria,” Levant 40 (2008): 89–​113. 46 Wachtang Djobaze et al., Archaeological Investigations in the Region West of Antioch-​on-​the-​ Orontes (Stuttgart, 1986). 42

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St. Simeon the Younger Stylite had a hostel for pilgrims, dining areas, a kitchen, a refectory, and a complex water supply system. In many cases in Syrian monasticism, the popularity of stylites led the way for the construction of both pilgrimage centers and monasteries.47

Western Monastic Settlements While instances of ascetic Christian lifestyles are attested in the West as early as the second century,48 the first flowering of both communal (cenobitic) and solitary (eremitic or anchoritic) monasticism occurred in the mid-​to late fourth century, when news of the desert monks of the East inspired a spate of ascetic conversions.49 In urban contexts, home to the majority of the first ascetic foundations—​among them the monasterium clericorum established by Eusebius of Vercelli (d. 371)  next to the cathedral in that city in the 360s, upon returning from exile in the East,50 and the cloistered communities in Rome and Milan observed by Augustine (d. 430) in the 380s51—​it has proven almost impossible to identify sites of monastic habitation in the archaeological record, in large part because monasteries so frequently occupied structures effectively indistinguishable from those inhabited by other city-​dwellers. Textual sources indeed suggest that urban ascetics tended to reuse existing buildings, particularly houses, that often presumably belonged to the Mediterranean tradition of the atrium-​house, with rooms arranged around one or more atria or courtyards. Notable examples include the aristocratic Roman women (e.g. Paula, Marcella, Melania, Eustochium), best attested in Jerome’s letters, who turned their households into ascetic retreats in the later fourth century,52 and, later, the several Roman popes who established monasteries in their family residences, beginning with the future Pope Gregory I’s



Lukas Amadeus Schachner, “The Archaeology of the Stylite,” in Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity, ed. David M. Gwynn and Susanne Bangert (Leiden, 2010), 329–​98. 48 Georg Jenal, Italia ascetica atque monastica. Das Asketen-​und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/​250–​604) (Stuttgart, 1995). 49 Andreas E. J. Grote, Anachorese und Zönobium. Der Rekurs des frühen westlichen Mönchtums auf monastische Konzepte des Ostens (Stuttgart, 2001). 50 Jenal, Italia ascetica atque monastica,  12–​15. 51 Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae 1.33.70, CSEL 90, 74–​5; Augustine, Confessiones 8.6.15, CSEL 33.1, 181–​2. 52 Jenal, Italia ascetica atque monastica, 33–​ 64; Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000), 46–​56. See also the article by Magnani in this volume. 47

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transformation of his ancestral home on the Caelian Hill into the monastery of Sant’Andrea in the 570s.53 Another increasingly prominent feature of the urban landscape in the West were the monasteries established in the immediate vicinity of cathedrals and other prestigious churches, among the earliest and most influential examples of which are the two ascetic communities founded by Augustine at Hippo Regius around 400, one for the cathedral clergy and one for non-​ordained monks, which like Eusebius’ clerical monastery at Vercelli lay adjacent to the city’s cathedral.54 Again, however, despite the growing archaeological interest in cathedral complexes in recent decades, it continues to be extremely difficult to identify spaces occupied by monks with much confidence. At Hippo, excavations revealed that several domus (houses) surrounding the basilica presumed to be the cathedral continued to be occupied and in some cases modified and repartitioned following the construction of the church, including one that communicated directly with the north aisle of the church.55 While this last house might well be the location of one of Augustine’s monasteries, the fact remains that nothing about the architecture or the associated finds attests unambiguously to the presence of monks; it remained effectively indistinguishable, in architectural terms, from the atrium-​houses occupied by the other late antique inhabitants of  Hippo. Similar uncertainties surround the identification of the clusters of rooms arranged around courtyards adjacent to the so-​called ‘Catholic’ and ‘Donatist’ cathedrals at Theveste,56 as well as the row of rectangular cells built along the north flank of the northern cathedral at Geneva around 400.57 The simple fact is that such “basilical monasteries,” so well attested in the textual record, are nearly impossible to distinguish in reality from the extensive clusters of residential and charitable facilities that proliferated around urban churches in the fifth and sixth centuries.



Guy Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries: Notes for the History of the Monasteries and Convents at Rome from the V through the X Century (Vatican City, 1957). 54 Grote, Anachorese und Zönobium, 33–​7; George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule (Oxford, 1987), 58–​60. 55 Bruno Bizot, “La basilique et ses abords,” in Hippone, ed. Xavier Delestre (Aix-​en-​ Provence, 2005), 193–​215. 56 Noël Duval, “Les témoignages archéologiques du monachisme nord-​africain,” in Le site monastique copte des Kellia. Sources historiques et explorations archéologiques, ed. Philippe Bridel (Geneva, 1986), 273–​87. 57 Charles Bonnet, “Habitat des premiers clercs dans le groupe épiscopal de Genève,” i n Wohn-​und Wirtschaftbauten frühmittelalterlicher Klöster, ed. Hans Rudolf Sennhauser (Zürich, 1996), 11–​23. 53

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The same might be said for the great suburban pilgrimage center at the grave of St. Felix at Nola/​Cimitile, extensively rebuilt by Paulinus (d. 431)  beginning around 395, where the “monastery proper” inhabited by Paulinus and his ascetic companions was subsumed within a contiguous ensemble of buildings that included two basilicas and two colonnaded atria.58 Unfortunately, while the basilicas (the basilica vetus, of c.  350–​375, and Paulinus’ basilica nova of c. 400) have been extensively studied, little is known archaeologically of the residential—​and in particular the monastic—​buildings.59 Paulinus’ testimony indicates the presence of spaces reserved for the poor and the sick, for distinguished guests, and for the members of the monastic community, all grouped in close mutual proximity; the smaller of the two atria perhaps featured a peristyle at ground level, topped by a second story comprising cells for Paulinus and his ascetic companions.60 In any case, it appears that the complex as a whole, including the spaces occupied by its monastic inhabitants, remained firmly rooted in the traditions of Mediterranean vernacular architecture. Even in the sixth century, the available information on the physical contours of urban monasteries still derives more from generally vague textual references than archaeological data. The problem is particularly acute in the case of female monasteries, which were overwhelmingly located within the protected confines of city walls,61 and thus in places often occupied continuously from antiquity to the present, where the venerable sites of early Christian cult have been subject to constant remodeling, covered over, or lost entirely. In Gaul, urban topography inherited from the late Roman period apparently did much to condition the architectural contours of two leading nunneries: Caesarius’ convent of St. John in Arles, founded in 512, and the convent of St. Croix at Poitiers, established by the Merovingian queen Radegund in the 560s. Both were situated just inside the late Roman city walls, which, in addition to offering protection, would have helped to ensure the strict claustration demanded by Caesarius’ rule (RCaeV 36–​43), in use at





Tomas Lehmann, Paulinus Nolanus und die Basilica Nova in Cimitile/​Nola (Wiesbaden, 2004); Maria M. Kiely, “The Interior Courtyard: The Heart of Cimitile/​Nola,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12.4 (2004):  443–​79; Hugo Brandenburg and Letizia Pani Ermini, eds., Cimitile e Paolino di Nola (Vatican City, 2003); Carlo Ebanista, Et manet in mediis quasi gemma intersita tectis. La basilica di S. Felice a Cimitile. Storia degli scavi, fasi edilizie, reperti (Naples, 2003). 59 Lehmann, Paulinus Nolanus, 121–​2 and 241–​46. 60 See Kiely, “The Interior Courtyard,” esp.  253–​54, a conjectural reading of Paulinus’ Carm. 27. 61 See, for example, Hartmut Atsma, “Les monastères urbains du nord de la Gaule,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 62 (1976): 163–​87, esp. 184. 58

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both places.62 Gregory of Tours’ (d. 594) description of Radegund’s funeral indicates that, at St. Croix, the nuns had access to the battlements and towers of the wall, which they may even have occupied.63 Excavations conducted at St. Croix at the beginning of the twentieth century revealed a small, single-​ aisled church, flanked by two small rooms optimistically identified by the excavators as the cell and oratory of Radegund herself, though the dating of these structures is insufficiently precise to permit a confident attribution to the sixth-​century phase.64 At St. John in Arles, new excavations have begun to uncover traces of the monastic church, a basilica with a semicircular apse,65 but at present neither the archaeology nor the writings of Caesarius suffice to reconstruct the remainder of the convent in any detail. While rural monasteries stand a better chance of surviving in recognizable form than those in cities, an observation that holds for the East as well as the West,66 it is proving nearly as difficult to identify monastic architecture in the countryside. It is clear that the fifth century and even more so the sixth witnessed substantial growth in rural populations of both hermits and cenobites across much of the West, and much attention has been devoted to finding traces of their presence, especially in the remains of villas. Although ascetics undoubtedly did often occupy the remains of older villas and other rural settlements, it is increasingly apparent that, in the large majority of cases where a monastic presence on an earlier site is plausible, there is a hiatus between the ‘primary’ occupation of villas by the landowning elites of the later Roman Empire and the period of their reuse, which generally occurred when the original structures were at least partly in ruins.67 Further, the identity of these later populations is notoriously difficult to establish. Most additional construction seems to have been in perishable materials

Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 9.39, 9.42; see also Jacques Biarne, “L’espace du monachisme gaulois au temps de Grégoire de Tours,” in Grégoire de Tours et l’espace gaulois, ed. Nancy Gauthier and Henri Galinié (Tours, 1997), 131–​6. 63 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria confessorum 104, MGH SS RM, 1.2, 365. 64 Yvonne Labande-​Mailfert, “Poitiers:  abbaye Sainte-​Croix,” in Les premiers monuments chrétiens de la France, vol. 2, ed. Guy Barruol (Paris, 1996), 284–​9. 65 Marc Heijmans, “L’enclos Saint-​Césaire à Arles, un chantier controversé,” BUCEMA (Hors série no 3, 2010), http://​cem.revues.org/​index11405.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 66 On the Levant, see Yizhar Hirschfeld, “The Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine Period,” in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land:  From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Turnhout, 2006), 401–​19. 67 John Percival, “Villas and Monasteries in Later Roman Gaul,” JEH 48 (1997):  1–​21; Francisco Moreno Martín, “La configuración arquitectonica del monasterio hispano entre la tardeantigüedad y el alto medioevo:  balance historiográfico y nuevas perspectivas,” Anales de Historia del Arte (número extraordinario 1, 2009):  199–​217; Bowes, “Houses, Villas,” 315–​51. 62

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largely invisible in the archaeological record, and the meager traces (post-​ holes, hearths, ceramics) that survive might equally well belong to secular communities or monks; the same applies a fortiori to the scattered caves and huts occupied by anchorites and rural populations alike.68 Even when there are surviving traces of churches, either installed in existing rooms or newly built in stone, neither typology nor construction techniques usually suffice to demonstrate a specifically monastic connection.69 In Italy, textual and archaeological data combine to permit three of the most important sixth-​century monasteries, all of which made extensive use of earlier structures, to be identified with reasonable certainty. The first is Subiaco, where a monastic community occupied the remains of the Neronian villa straddling the River Aniene during the period of Benedict’s residence in a nearby cave in the early sixth century, prior to his move to Montecassino. While recent archaeological investigations at the villa, particularly in “Nucleus A,” a rectangular block of rooms measuring some 70 by 20 m, have revealed substantial signs of sixth-​century habitation in the form of ceramics and hearths, which likely do relate to the phase of monastic occupation, the scarcity of substantial modifications to the existing fabric of the Neronian complex is striking. Apart from essential repairs made to shore up damaged masonry, the original plan of the site was hardly altered.70 The second site is Benedict’s later monastery on the acropolis at Montecassino, founded c.  529, which rose among the remains of an altar and a small temple dedicated to Apollo, both of which were transformed into modest, one-​room churches, measuring 7.6 by 15.25  m and 7 by 7  m respectively.71 The structures in which the monks slept, ate, and worked have disappeared completely enough to suggest that they were built of perishable materials. If the Rule of St. Benedict can be trusted as a guide to the initial configuration of the monastery, there was a communal eating space (RB 43.13, 63.18) and several communal dormitories intended for the use of





Francisco José. Moreno Martín, “Los escenarios arquitectónicos del eremitismo hispano. Límites para su studio,” in El monacato espontáneo. Eremitas y eremitorios en el mundo medieval, ed. José Ángel García de Cortázar and Ramón Teja (Aguilar de Campoo, 2011), 87–​119. 69 Francisco Moreno Martín, “Arquitectura y usos monásticos en el siglo VII:  de la recreación textual a la invisibilidad material,” Anejos de Archivo Español de Arqueologia 51 (2009): 281–​2. 70 Maria Grazia Fiore Cavaliere, Zaccaria Mari, and Angelo Luttazzi, “La villa di Nerone a Subiaco e la fondazione del monastero benedettino di S. Clemente,” in Il Lazio tra antichità e medioevo, ed. Jean Coste, Zaccaria Mari, Maria Teresa Petrara, and Maria Sperandio (Rome, 1999), 341–​67. 71 Angelo Pantoni, L’acropoli di Montecassino e il primitivo monastero di S.  Benedetto (Rome, 1980). 68

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groups of ten or twenty monks under the guidance of a superior (RB 22.3), all surrounded by a walled enclosure (RB 4.78, 67.7). Finally, there is Vivarium, the monastery founded by Cassiodorus (d. c. 583) in his Calabrian villa in or shortly after 555. Excavators working in the 1980s identified the remains of a small (15 by 5 m), single-​nave church built into the remains of a triconch in the late Roman villa, apparently at the time of its conversion into a monastery.72 Apart from what might be a section of an irregularly shaped enclosure wall uncovered near the apse of the church,73 further traces of construction belonging to the monastic phase of occupation are lacking; as in the case of Subiaco, we might assume that the remainder of the existing villa largely sufficed to meet the needs of the monks. All three foundations thus appear to share a number of common features: their churches are small, single-​nave structures, evidently intended for the use of a restricted number of monks (surely fewer than fifty); there is little trace of communal spaces for eating and sleeping, which may either have occupied existing buildings or have been built of perishable materials; and they make heavy use of older structures. It is noteworthy that these leading Italian monasteries all appear to have been far smaller and less populous than many of their sixth-​century contemporaries in Egypt and Syria discussed above. Much the same can be said for several of the most influential early foundations north of the Alps. The site of Martin of Tours’ (d. 397) first ascetic community at Ligugé, founded in the 360s, evidently took shape among the ruins of an extensive villa abandoned a generation or two earlier. An apsidal hall measuring roughly 14 by 5 m, presumably a church, was installed in the remains of a semi-​subterranean basin or cistern located beneath the remains of the later monastic church of St. Martin.74 This structure may date to as late as the sixth century, however, and there is no clear sign of further buildings attributable to the Martinian phase of the community, perhaps because they were built in wood, like the cells inhabited by the monks at Martin’s second foundation at Marmoutier.75 At the end of our period, Columbanus’ (d. 615)  Luxeuil, founded in the 590s, also rose among the remains of a substantial Roman-​period settlement,

François Bougard and Ghislaine Noyé, “Chronique:  Squillace,” MEFRM 98 (1986): 1195–​1212. 73 Ibid., 1202. 74 Paul-​Albert Février and Noël Duval, “Ligugé:  Église Saint-​Martin,” in Les premiers monuments chrétiens de la France, vol. 1, ed. N. Duval (Paris, 1996), 278–​83. 75 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 10.4–​5,  274–​5.

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described by his biographer Jonas as a defunct castrum surrounded by a strong wall.76 Recent excavations at the site have confirmed the presence of a nucleated settlement with abundant structural remains datable to between the first and fourth centuries, and suggest—​contra Jonas—​continuing occupation throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, when a large (c. 34 by 19.5 m) funerary basilica with a tripartite nave and square apse was built in petit-​appareil masonry (small blocks of mortared stone) amid a late antique necropolis, where the monks of the adjacent monastery were buried from the seventh century on.77 The original nucleus of the monastery itself, including its oratory dedicated to Mary, perhaps occupied the nearby remains of a monumental, apsidal building datable to the second century.78 In any case, the current state of the evidence suggests that the monastic community first settled among the Roman-​period structures, occupying their standing remains and/​or recycling their materials. In the case of monasteries founded on previously unoccupied sites, however, where there were no older structures to be inhabited or ransacked for building supplies, wood often remained the material of choice throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, even for churches, as in the fifth-​century Jura monasteries such as Condat.79 In Ireland, too, the first monastic architecture hardly differs from the secular. The monasteries founded in the fifth and sixth centuries (and indeed for another half-​millennium) tend to resemble closely the ubiquitous “ring-​forts,” some 60,000 of which still survive throughout the island, which may variously have functioned as settlements, pastures, and forts. These roughly circular or oval enclosures, surrounded by one or more concentric dry-​stone walls and/​ or ditches, are both extremely durable and very hard to date, a problem all the more vexing given that they continued to be built from the prehistoric period through the high Middle Ages.80 Some older, presumably abandoned structures were reoccupied by monastic communities, while newly built



Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani 1.10, MGH SRG 37, 169–​ 70. Columbanus’ first Continental foundation at nearby Annagray is also said to have occupied a “ruined castrum” (castrum dirutum): Vita Columbani 1.6 (ibid., 163). See also the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 77 Sébastien Bully et  al., “L’église Saint-​ Martin de Luxeuil-​ les-​ Bains (Haute-​ Saône), deuxième campagne,” BUCEMA 14 (2010): 39–​43. 78 Sébastien Bully and Christophe Gaston, “Luxeuil-​les-​Bains (Haute-​Saône), deuxième campagne de diagnostic archéologique des places du centre ancien,” BUCEMA 11 (2007): 50–​6. 79 Alain Dubreucq and Christian Lauranson-​Rosaz. “De l’ermitage au monastère:  aux origines de l’espace monastique en Gaule à partir de deux exemples:  Burgondie et l’Auvergne (fin Ve–​début VIIIe siècle),” HAM 9 (2003): 279–​94. 80 T. M. Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), 148–​51. See also the article by Bitel in this volume. 76

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monasteries tended to be similarly configured. Inside such enclosures, monks and seculars alike dwelt in round, dry-​stone “beehives” (clochans), but built (generally tiny) quadrangular churches as early as the fifth century, a typological innovation apparently introduced from mainland Europe along with Christianity. The monasteries, however, tended to feature a founder’s tomb, along with one or more inscribed crosses or grave-​markers; the presence of a nearby cemetery with a high proportion of male—​or in theory female—​ burials can also help to identify a site as a locus of monastic habitation.81

Conclusion In the period before 600 c e, nothing approaching a standardized paradigm for the configuration of monasteries existed anywhere in the West. The variety of architectural solutions chosen by early monks is simply too heterogeneous, though it is true that monastic texts of the sixth and especially the seventh century begin to display a more standardized architectural vocabulary in relation to the principal components of communal monastic space (oratories, refectories, dormitories), a trend that likely reflects similar developments in physical reality.82 By the sixth century, too, if not before, relatively impermeable perimeter walls were an increasingly ubiquitous part of the monastic landscape.83 Nonetheless, there was no standard configuration for these various components of monastic topography by the end of the sixth century, nor indeed for centuries thereafter, much less anything resembling the quadrangular cloisters flanking abbey churches that made their first appearance in the eighth century and became widespread during the high Middle Ages.84 So too in the East, where physical remains are only somewhat less sparse, especially prior to the fifth century, the monastic settlements surveyed above in Anatolia, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria illustrate the multifarious



Michael Herity, “Les premiers ermitages et monastères en Irlande, 400–​700,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 36 (1993):  219–​61; Michael Herity, “The Building and Layout of Early Irish Monasteries Before the Year 1000,” Monastic Studies 4 (1983):  247–​84. On female communities in Ireland, see Lisa Bitel, “Women’s Monastic Enclosures in Early Ireland: A Study of Female Spirituality and Male Monastic Mentalities,” JMH 12 (1986): 15–​36. 82 Pierre Bonnerue, “Éléments de topographie historique dans les règles monastiques occidentales,” Studia Monastica 37 (1995): 57–​77. See also the article by Lauwers in this volume. 83 Hendrik Dey, “Building Worlds Apart:  Walls and the Construction of Communal Monasticism from Augustine through Benedict,” Antiquité tardive 12 (2004): 357–​71. 84 Werner Jacobsen, “Die Anfänge des abenländischen Kreuzgangs,” in Der mittelalterliche Kreuzgang. Architektur, Funktion und Programm, ed. Peter K. Klein (Regensburg, 2004),  37–​56. 81

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development of newly built environments and the diverse modifications of existing landscapes, older structures, and the natural environment for Christian use.85 As in the West, a number of sites once thought to be monastic settlements, many in Cappadocia and Syria, are now no longer regarded as exclusively monastic.86 Also as in the West, Byzantine monastic foundations often shared the same architectural plans and materials as non-​monastic domestic spaces, a convergence of form that in the past led to the mistaken identification of rural agricultural settlements as monasteries simply on the basis of the more humble materials and methods employed in their construction.87 The pace and chronology of the spread of monastic settlement also varies considerably between regions. Communities of ascetics and the built spaces they inhabited emerged rapidly in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria in the fifth and sixth centuries, but more slowly in Anatolia and Greece until after 600. Regional variations such as stylite monasteries, double monasteries, and the combined pilgrimage-​monastic center further complicate the story of Eastern monasticism. There are additional, supra-​ regional differences between East and West, though the physical and textual data remain sparse enough to make generalizations and interregional comparisons difficult and inevitably provisional. It seems that, in the eastern Mediterranean, communal monasteries often far exceeded the size of Western foundations, in terms of both their physical extent and the number of monks they housed. Few Western sites can be imagined, on the basis of archaeological evidence, to have housed more than several dozen monks, a figure that was regularly exceeded in Egypt and the Levant, where communities often numbered in the hundreds. The extant remains also indicate that non-​communal living arrangements were extremely common in the East, where monasteries often consisted of more-​ or-​less diffuse clusters of individual cells. Textual evidence from the West, where the physical evidence is almost nonexistent, shows that similar groups of individual cells were present at early foundations such as Martin of Tours’ second monastery at Marmoutier; by the sixth century, however, texts such as



Saba Farès, “Christian Monasticism on the Eve of Islam: Kilwa (Saudi Arabia),” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 22 (2011): 243–​52; Nina Garsoïan, “Introduction to the Problem of Early Armenian Monasticism,” Revue des études arméniennes 20 (2005–​7):  177–​236; Fergus Millar, “Christian Monasticism in Roman Arabia at the Birth of Mahomet,” Semitica et Classica 2 (2009): 97–​115; G. R. D. King, “A Nestorian Monastic Settlement on the Island of Ṣīr Banī Yās, Abu Dhabi: A Preliminary Report,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60.2 (1997): 221–​35. 86 For numerous Western examples, see Bowes, “Houses, Villas.” 87 Doron Bar, “The Christianization of Rural Palestine during Late Antiquity,” JEH 54 (2003): 401–​21. 85

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the Rule of the Master and the RB (and later the Rule of Fructuosus and others) presume communal sleeping arrangements in dormitories.88 For Bonnerue, there was thus a profound shift in the direction of communal spaces in the West, for eating and working as well as sleeping, beginning in the sixth century,89 a development that perhaps came more slowly and less consistently to the East. Yet despite the vast range of political structures, ecclesiastical institutions, theological preferences, cultural norms, and environmental conditions that prevailed across the vast sweep of the Christian world in late antiquity, there are common threads in the development of monastic landscapes and topographies in the period before 600 c e. It was a time, above all, when diversity of forms and practice prevailed everywhere, despite all efforts by would-​be monastic legislators, none of whose “rules” were widely, much less exclusively, followed.90 As a result, there were nearly as many different spatial configurations as there were monasteries. Indeed, if there is a single conclusion to be drawn based on the current state of knowledge, it is that the early history of monastic architecture in East and West alike is inextricably linked with, and usually effectively indistinguishable from, the history of vernacular architecture in the various regions touched by the ascetic movement.

Bibliography Biarne, Jacques. “L’espace du monachisme gaulois au temps de Grégoire de Tours.” In Grégoire de Tours et l’espace gaulois, edited by Nancy Gauthier and Henri Galinié, 131–6. Tours, 1997. Biscop, Jean-Luc, Dominique Orssaud, and Marlia M. Mango, Deir Déḥès. Monastère d’Antiochène. Étude architecturale. Beirut, 1997. Bolman, Elizabeth, ed. The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt. New Haven, CT, 2016. Bolman, Elizabeth, Stephen Davis, and Gillian Pyke, with contributions by M.  Abdel Rahim, et  al. “Shenoute and a Newly Discovered Tomb Chapel at the White Monastery.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 453–62. Bonnerue, Pierre. “Éléments de topographie historique dans les règles monastiques occidentales.” Studia Monastica 37 (1995): 57–77.



See, for example, RB 22.3; on Marmoutier, see Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 10.4–​5,  274–​5. 89 Bonnerue, “Éléments de topographie historique,” esp. 72–​6. 90 Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule:  Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 53–​83. See also the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 88

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Egyptian Nuns in Late Antiquity as Exemplars M a ria Chia r a   G io rda (t r a n slate d b y A l e ssia B er ardi)

One day two elderly men from the region of Pelusio went to Mother Sarra. Along the way, they were saying to each other:  “Let’s humiliate this old woman!” They said to her, “Be careful that you do not exalt yourself in your mind and say:  ‘Behold, the anchorites come to me, who am a woman!’ ” Mother Sarra said to them, “In nature I am a woman, but not in thought.” (AP/​G Sarra 4)1 She said again to the brothers: “I am a man and you are women.” (AP/​G Sarra 9)

The role of the Christian woman in late antiquity has been widely studied, and many aspects of female asceticism have recently been brought to light.2 The result has been a denunciation of the sexism of the tradition and a rehabilitation of great exceptional figures, but with one serious consequence:  nuns are often made into folkloristic figures.3 Writing the history of the women who undertook the path of religious life, and particularly monastic women, both in their everyday life and through radical choices that often mirrored the masculine ones, is risky owing to the discontinuity of the sources, the complexity of their chain of transmission, and the gaps and grey areas that still remain.4

Apophthegmata Patrum. Collectio Graeca alphabetica (AP/​G); Greek text edited by J.-​B. Cotelier (PG 65.71–​440); English translation by Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Kalamazoo, MI, 1975). 2 Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford, 1993); Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride:  Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (London, 2013). See Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”:  The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford and New York, 1994), 6, n. 21, for further bibliographical references. 3 Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA, 1998). 4 On the difficulty of identifying late antique female monasteries, see the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 1

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This article aims to investigate the social and cultural implications of the choice for virginity or chastity (for widows) in late antiquity, in order to explore the possibility that the religious life allowed women to free themselves from submission to paternal figures and avoid relegation to the margins of society. I will highlight the contemporaneous emergence of the female and male ascetic choice, starting from the experiences of domestic ascetic life. I  will also address the continuous tension between a reality in which female monastic life had its own roots and traditions, and a rhetoric that makes it a mere variant of a male monastic model. Although this volume is dedicated to the West, much can be made by drawing attention to the situation in Egypt and reflecting on the tension between the centrality and marginality of the female monastic experience, a common thread in both Latin and Greek Christianity. I  will thus offer examples intended to emphasize similarities, dependencies, and fractures among diverse ascetic and monastic female experiences. In the second section, I will focus on the continuity between family life and monastic life. The preservation of biological ties even after the religious choice allowed some women to continue in their role as mothers, sisters, and even wives within their monasteries, thus reflecting the ambiguous positions open to women choosing the religious life. Finally, I  will offer some examples of women who played the role of spiritual mothers, daughters, and sisters within their monastic family. This complexity of roles prevents us from determining who had the greater or lesser freedom and emancipation: the women who decided (or were forced) to marry, or those who chose (or were forced into) the monastic life. The reality was ambiguous and complex, characterized by intersecting spiritual, cultural, social, and economic factors.

From Household to Monastery: First Steps of Women’s Asceticism Reconstructing the history of female asceticism is not an easy task. The sources from the first centuries are difficult to interpret, and the evidence for women choosing not to have a family, and of both spiritual and corporal practices analogous to those that were particular to female monasticism from the fourth century onward, are fragmented. It is true that, already at the end of the second century and at the beginning of the third, women no less than men were attracted by (perpetual) chastity, which purified them and made them more suitable for the reception of the Spirit. Thus, within

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all of the churches, groups of abstinent and virgin women arose, as well as real orders of widows. In the middle of the third century, there were around 1,500 poor and needy widows in Rome; at the end of the fourth century, the city of Antioch supported some 3,000 widows and virgins. Moreover, wealthy widows also supported Christian communities, as in the case of Olympia, the spiritual friend of Chrysostom (d. 407), or of the widows in Jerome’s (d. 420) circle.5 The invitation to chastity and virginity is, after all, a theme often present in New Testament apocryphal literature such as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of Paul and Thecla, in which the women are models of both physical and spiritual integrity and solidity. It is not enough, however, to trace the first forms of female asceticism through the choice for virginity or chastity. It is also necessary to trace the performance of bodily practices such as fasts, vigils, and the renunciation of food. The first forms of female ascetic practice were carried out at home in a domestic manner, albeit with a definitive physical detachment from the everyday life of the family. Entry into a formal female monastery was not expected of these ascetics. The first hints of these practices can be found in Acts 21:8–​9, where we encounter Philip’s daughters, virgins and prophetesses living at home. Female domestic asceticism was a longstanding phenomenon that did not disappear with the spread of a more structured monastic model.6 The diffusion of this way of life is confirmed by different types of sources, including canonical literature and papyri, in which female virgin ascetics are compared to widows because of their consecration to God. The conjugal bond is clearly overcome by a lifestyle considered to be both different and superior, freeing woman from worldly ties. It is no coincidence that these women were called the “brides of Christ.” Their matrimonial bond was consummated only on a religious-​spiritual level, creating both a new and an “other” marriage, which replaced marriage to a husband. Through greater physical detachment from daily dwelling places, and in particular through a more explicit adoption of life rules that formalized ascetic practices, monasticism called family ties further into question. Women who chose either an anchoritic or cenobitic monastic life by joining



Peter Brown, The Body and the Society:  Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York, 2008). 6 See the article by Magnani in this volume, and the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in volume II. 5

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one of the communities spreading throughout the area often set aside previously held family bonds. Such bonds, however, were sometimes preserved, and monastic choices within the same biological family could, in fact, reinforce them.7 The fourth-​century canons attributed to Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (Ath. Can.) report that some virgins left their homes and families to live in a monastery of virgins under the guidance of a mother.8 Women who lived apart from their families, homes, and villages could attend celebrations in the church as a group, but not during feasts or at night. They were to fast until sunset, as well as on Saturdays and Sundays; they were not allowed to talk with married women; and they could visit their families only if accompanied by other virgins.9 The contents and the terminology used in the text seem to attest to a formal monastic model. It is interesting to note that some of these regulations were transmitted through the centuries and accepted within the sixth-​century rule for nuns of Caesarius of Arles (RCaeV), the pivotal Western source for the female monastic experience. While several papyri provide information about forms of female monastic asceticism that seem no longer to have been domestic, the classification of these communities of women, their identification as monasteries, and the kind of asceticism practiced there remain unclear. Perhaps they reflected a transition from domestic asceticism to monastic asceticism, or were confraternities of some kind that continued to exist within the villages, possibly also within houses. In any case, what can be seen here is the communitarian development of asceticism, which clearly represents a further stage in the spread of female monasteries, now separated from the world, within Egyptian territory, a development also seen later elsewhere in both East and West. The first occurrences of the term monaché (nun) used in a technical way appear in the fourth-​century papyri that are one of the main documentary source bases for the history of Egyptian monasticism. Although papyri are closely tied to their local historical and geographical contexts, they remain excellent instruments for collecting accurate and concrete information about monastic life. The text

Philip Rousseau, “Blood-​ Relationship among Early Eastern Ascetics,” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1972):  135–​44; Andrew S. Jacobs and Rebecca Krawiec, “Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 257–​63; Rebecca Krawiec, “From the Womb of the Church: Monastic Families,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 283–​307. See also the article by Alciati in this volume. 8 Athanasius, The Canons of Athanasius of Alexandria: The Arabic and Coptic versions, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Riedel and Walter Ewig Crum (London, 1904), Ath. Can. 48, 92, 99. 9 Ibid., Ath. Can. 92. 7

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PSI VI 698,10 from Oxyrhynchus in 392, mentions the house of a nun. Was this a nun (monaché) who continued to own her house or, perhaps less likely, a woman who practiced domestic asceticism? The fifth-​century papyrus P.Princ. II, 84, which concerns the selling of a house that belongs to Euphemia monazousa, raises similar questions. Judging by the terminology and the content of these documents, I am inclined to see in them evidence of female monastic praxis in places detached from the house and the family of origin. Two texts from the beginning of the fourth century, P.Oxy XIV, 1774 and SB III 9746, mention a certain Didyma, who seems to be a mother superior of a group of spiritual sisters.11 It is important to remember that within the available Greek and Coptic sources, it is often very difficult to distinguish between references to biological relationships and references to spiritual bonds. Given the context and function of the correspondence, I  am convinced that this text refers to the latter. Alongside these documentary sources, there is abundant evidence in the most ancient literary sources for the existence of a female cenobitic way of life, for example in the Life of Antony, in the Lives of Pachomius, and in the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. The Latin translations of these texts also provide insight into their transmission and influence on occidental Christianity. Some of the Apophthegmata, the maxims of monks from Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in the fifth century, are attributed to women, namely to Sara, Theodora, and Syncletica. It is undeniable that the presence of only three women within the whole corpus of maxims is a sign of marginality, if not of the feminine experience itself, at least in terms of the way in which this same experience was welcomed, accepted, and transmitted. It is indeed telling that more space was not given to women. But, although the category of “Desert Mothers” has been heavily disputed in the past, the existence of women in this setting can no longer be questioned.12 It is striking that the content of the female maxims almost completely mirrors the male ones. I would like to focus here, in particular, on the conditions of community life within female monasteries, because this context offers a more productive space for complex reflection about family and the relationships between

All the abbreviations for papyri, ostraca, and tablets can be found at http://​papyri.info/​ docs/​checklist (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 11 Mario Naldini, Il Cristianesimo in Egitto. Lettere private nei papiri dei secoli II–​IV (Fiesole, 1998), letters 36 and 37, 173–​80. 12 Caroline Schroeder, “Women in Anchoritic and Semi-​ Anchoritic Monasticism in Egypt: Rethinking the Landscape,” Church History 83 (2014): 3; William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford and New York, 2004),  440–​2.

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nuns and family than ascetic life or semi-​anchoritic life. A text reported in the Historia Lausiaca (HL) from the fifth century explicitly speaks about a female community within the Pachomian complex.13 This included 400 women, and had the same constitution and largely the same manner of life as the male monastery. The women lived across the river from the men. When a virgin died, the other virgins prepared her body for burial and, acting as bearers, laid it on the riverbank. The brethren, crossing in a ferry with palm leaves and olive branches, retrieved the body, singing psalms as they went, and buried it in their own cemetery. Apart from the priest and the deacon, no man was to cross over to the women’s monastery, and then only on Sundays. There are cases recorded of women who ran away to become nuns, and accounts of others who were forced to become nuns. There are also nuns who escaped from monasteries, nuns who had a family and children, and nuns who never had a family. Because all of these are situations that were also reported for monks, I do not think that it is possible to discern a precise and detailed distinction between the female and male motivations for entering the monastic life from the available sources. Similarly, it is not entirely clear if and how male monastic rules were applied by the nuns, or at least proposed to them.14 As Schroeder noted, Shenoute (d. 465), archimandrite of the monastery of Atripe (afterwards called the White Monastery), alludes to male and female hermits connected to his monastery, but the degree to which the women within the boundaries of his community submitted to the rules is unclear.15 How much direct supervision and control these nuns received and whether they were full members of the monastic community remains unknown. One variant features a woman dressed as a man in order to be accepted into a monastery. One anonymous monk, for example, lived alone in a cave and grew famous for his discipline in plaiting rope and refusing to speak to visitors. This monk’s female sex was revealed only after death.16 These marginal cases are interesting, whether they reflect reality or were merely



Palladius, Historia Lausiaca, in Die Lateinische Übersetzung der Historia Lausiaca des Palladius, ed. Adelheid Wellhausen (Berlin and New York, 2003), 29. See also HL 29–​30, 33, 49, 56, 59, and 67. 14 See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume; on the RB and RCaeV, see Albrecht Diem, “The Gender of the Religious: Wo/​Men and the Invention of Monasticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 439–​44. 15 Schroeder, “Women in Anchoritic and Semi-​Anchoritic Monasticism,” 5–​6. 16 AP/​G Bessarione 4. 13

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rhetorical constructions. The reasons for the persistence of this topos, however, have not yet been explored.17 The female monastic phenomenon consolidated and spread from the first decades of the fourth century in parallel with the spread of male forms of monastic life. Women, however, were marginalized in the contemporary literature on the topic, which was written exclusively by male authors. But even while monastic women were pushed to the margins in ancient sources (and in modern scholarship), female virginitas was the subject of constant reflection, from Tertullian (d. after 220), to Athanasius (d. 373), to Aldhelm (d. 709).

Families in the Monastery: Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters Still In renouncing their sexuality by devoting themselves to virginity or to chastity and following the ascetic path, these women became spouses of Christ. They were also willing to give up their houses, husbands, and children to become members of a new monastic family as mothers, sisters, and daughters, either for a limited period of time or indefinitely. In some cases, however, it is possible to observe the preservation of familial bonds “in the flesh.” Biological sons and daughters might follow their mothers in the monastic choice, or women might follow their children, husbands, and, more easily, their brothers. This may have happened more frequently in the West as the result of its family typology and the structure of its first monasteries: there, whole families, many from noble or wealthy backgrounds, moved into or founded monasteries, taking with them all the members of their household, including the servants, as in the case of Melania and Pinianus or the community of St. Honoratus, on the island of Lérins. From its beginnings in the fifth century, many of Lérins’ aspiring ascetics came from the same family. Eucherius (d. 449) and Salvianus, for example, abandoned the world with their wives and children and joined the island monastery.18 The case of Jura offers the best comparison with Oriental monasticism. Romanus, a monk whose story is narrated in the biographies of the fathers of the Jura, was soon joined by his brother and sister.19 In this way, he anticipated by a century the famous story



John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism:  The Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974): 1–​32. Roberto Alciati and Maria Chiara Giorda. “Legami carnali e spirituali nel monachesimo cristiano antico (IV–​VII secolo),” in Famiglia monastica. Prassi aggregative di isolamento, ed. Maria Chiara Giorda and Francesca Sbardella (Bologna, 2012), 92–​5. On Lérins, see also the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, Alciati, Diem and Rousseau, and Lauwers in this volume. 19 On the monastery of Condat in the Jura, see the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 17

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of the monastic choice of Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) and his sister. The typological similarities (an ascetic monastic community in the process of organizing itself ) and the fact that the familial bonds were not only kept, but also were not hidden by the sources, allow us to compare the case of Lérins and that of Jura to the Egyptian circles. Along with a discourse of renunciation of the familial/​biological bonds—​ first and foremost in the written sources, and in monastic rhetoric, but also in the visual arts—​one can simultaneously observe the maintenance of bonds within what is called the monastic family.20 From the senatorial aristocracy of Rome to the farmers of Coptic Egypt, the organization of the family influenced the spread of different monastic forms throughout the Mediterranean basin, even as the biological family remained present within monasticism.21 The importance of the relationships between siblings, in particular, was expressed right from the origins of Egyptian monasticism. Palladius’ (d. before 431) Historia Lausiaca recounts the story of Ammonius (d. c. 242), one of the most famous monks of the Egyptian desert of Nitria. Ammonius undertook the hermitical life with three brothers and two sisters. The siblings lived in separate and distanced cells, which they occasionally left to visit one another.22 The most famous case, however, is that of Amun (d. c. 357). According to Palladius, Amun retired into the desert after years of unconsummated conjugal life.23 What is noteworthy here is that Amun’s wife chose to live under the same ascetic conditions, first in communion with him, and later separated from him, remaining in the family house. The choice of a husband and wife to live an ascetic life together epitomizes the tension and ambiguity that can be observed throughout monastic literature when family relationships are in view. That some couples cohabited for years is evidence that monastic life does not necessarily imply a total annihilation of pre-​existing bonds. Examples of this sort of cohabitation can also be found in the West, both between husband and wife and among the members of both sexes of the same family. Beyond the aforementioned Melania and Pinianus, there are the cases of Paulinus and Therasia (husband and wife) and of Sulpicius and Bassa (son-​in-​law and mother-​in-​law, the latter in fact substituting for Sulpicius’ dead wife), who declared that they were living

Maria Chiara Giorda and Francesca Sbardella, “Esperienze monastiche e logiche famigliari: un’ipotesi di ricerca,” in Famiglia monastica. Prassi aggregative di isolamento, ed. Maria Chiara Giorda and Francesca Sbardella (Bologna, 2012), 13–​24. 21 Schroeder, “Women in Anchoritic and Semi-​Anchoritis Monasticism,” 280–​1. 22 HL 11. 23 HL 8.2.

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together not only in chastity but also with total indifference toward gender.24 Their complete dedication to asceticism led to the emptying of gender and the overcoming of sexual differences. Their bond did not prevent them from progressing in asceticism, but instead helped them along their spiritual path. It is interesting that Paulinus and Therasia gave a precious gift to Sulpicius and Bassa, validating this sort of spiritual twinning. Precept 143 of the corpus of rules from the Pachomian circle gives some instructions for the monastery of virgins: Let us also speak about the monastery of the virgins. None shall go to visit them unless he has there his mother, a sister or a daughter, relatives or cousins, or the mother of his children. If there is the necessity to see them, either because, before they renounced the world and entered the monastery, they were entitled to an inheritance from their father, or for some other evident reason, an elderly man of proven conduct shall be sent with them: they will see the virgins and they will come back together. None shall go to them, except those we just mentioned. If these ones want to see them, they shall first of all inform the father of the monastery, and he will send them to the elderly men (ad seniores) who have been delegated for the spiritual service of the virgins (ministerium virginum).25

Since the addressees of the Pachomian rules are male, it is evident that this exhortation focused on the conduct of the monks, with particular attention to their relationship with the nuns. That only monks with relatives in the female monasteries were allowed to visit the latter shows that the monastic choice was shared, in some cases, by members of the same family, and suggests that this kind of relationship within the different communities was fairly frequent. A non-​cenobitic monastic context more akin to that described in the Apophthegmata is that of the monk Frange, who lived in a tomb in the western part of the Thebaid in the seventh century. The precious dossier of sources, comprising mainly letters written by and to this exemplary monk, documents the familial bonds among the men and women who shared his experience of retreat and isolation. It would thus seem that it was possible to live an ascetic life within the family in a domestic environment or, in any case, in ways less radical than those followed by Frange. Of particular interest is a group of five



R. Alciati M.  Giorda, Possessions and Asceticism:  Melania the Younger and Her Slow Way to Jerusalem. In:  “Zeitschrift für Antike und Christentums/​Journal of Ancient Christianity”, 14(2) (2010): 425–​444 p. 235. 25 Amand Boon, ed., Pachomiana latina. Règle et épîtres de St. Pachôme, épître de St. Théodore et “Liber” de St. Orsiesius. Texte latin de St. Jérôme (Louvain, 1932), 57.

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ostraca that refer to a quarrel that involved a woman from Pétémout.26 One of Frange’s sons played a role in the episode, although it is not clear whether he was a spiritual or a natural son.27 The appellation “father” has caused scholars to interpret this as a mixed monastic environment, within which biological family ties were maintained and nurtured.

The Monastery as Family: New (Spiritual) Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters If the monastery can be considered a family, it is necessary to ask what role the women played in it and how that role compares to the one that they had held in their worldly families, as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. The term “wife” or “spouse,” central to the experience of the virgin ascetics styled as spouses of Christ, was made less prominent through new functions that women performed within the monastic family. In the new setting, religious women were essentially either mothers or daughters, as well as sisters to each other. The epithet “mother” is used extensively in cenobitic contexts in reference to the mothers superior of the monasteries, as in the case of Maria, Pachomius’ sister, who was mother of the virgins for her whole life.28 The documentary texts from the fourth to the seventh century are filled with attestations of spiritual mothers, ama/​amma, also referred to by diminutives such as “godmother” and “nurse,” which is similar to the use of apa, originally a term of endearment for a father. Mothers unquestionably could hold roles of responsibility, even toward monks, as some letter exchanges attest.29 SPP X 35 (sixth century, Oxyrhynchus) names ama Herais as a spiritual mother of nuns within a list of monasteries. An inscription from the monastery of apa Geremia in Saqqara, mentions Susanna, mother (ama) of the great monastery.30 In most of the occurrences the term “mother” is found in the singular form; this is a female authority for a group of nuns. Mothers, however, were not the only authorities within monasteries. They were often accompanied and supported by, and sometimes subjected to, a male head of the family. This model is easy to observe in double monasteries,



Fragments 167–​71 of Frange’s archive in Anne Boud’hors and Chantal Heurtel, Les ostraca coptes de la TT 29. Autour du moine Frangé, vol. 1 (Brussels, 2010), 19. 27 Ibid., 17–​18, with regard to familial bonds, and 142 for the relationship between Frange and this son. 28 Louis Théophile Lefort, ed., S. Pachomii Vita, Bohairice Scripta (Louvain, 1925), 27. 29 Boud’hors and Heurtel, Les ostraca coptes, 19. 30 James Edward Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara 1906–​1907 (Cairo, 1909), 36–​7, no. 27. 26

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where the female precinct was adjacent to the male one.31 The case of Moses, who lived in the second half of the fifth century, is revealing because he wrote as father (and thus as the highest authority) to his spiritual daughters who lived in the monastery under the guidance of their mother.32 Finally, the role of mother within monasteries was also exercised by the women who contributed physically to the expansion of the monastic family by ceding their children to the monastery. In this case, they were not mothers of nuns or of monasteries, but mothers within the monasteries, and their main role was to contribute to the growth of the number of monks or residents (sometimes lay people). This is the case in several instances of the donation of children, entrusted to the care of a spiritual father or directly to the monastery, as attested by the literature and the papyri.33 The sources do not discuss the role of these mothers after the donation but, because of the way in which the monastic life was organized, it is likely that they were no longer involved in the rearing of their children. The high level of integration between genders in the Shenoutian family is particularly striking. Shenoute was the highest authority figure for the women, in an even more direct and decisive way than Pachomius (d. 348) for what can be called his female monasteries. The texts of Shenoutian monasticism contain a rhetoric of unity within the monasteries; the monastic experience was said to unite men and women and provide a model that could be followed by both. This aspect of Shenoutian monasticism reveals the fraternal bonds between monks and nuns, who were called and who referred to themselves as brothers and sisters. Shenoute, in fact, uses the Coptic term for brothers (sneu) to refer to both monks and nuns. While the women were integrated into the monastic family, there was no intention on the part of the father of the monastery to erase their female nature. Shenoute led his monks, the brothers both male and female, in two distinct communities: his, which was male, and another one, female. While there is no denying Shenoute’s rhetoric of unity, he repeatedly provided tools aimed at distinguishing gender roles, restraining women, subordinating them first to himself and second to the other authoritative monks, and separating the men and women. In the Shenoutian monasteries, power relationships between the two sexes remained asymmetrical, reproducing the family

On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. “Vie de Moïse,” in Émile Amélineau, Monuments pour servir à l’histoire de l’Égypte chrétienne aux IVe et Ve siècles (Paris, 1895), fasc. 2, 694. 33 See bibliography cited in Maria Chiara Giorda, Il regno di Dio in terra. I monasteri come fondazioni private (Egitto V–​VII secolo) (Rome, 2011), 156, n. 123. 31

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structure and the positions of power and authority that were to be found within natural families: Shenoute was thus the father of the monastic family, and the monks and nuns his children. The familial model that inspired his monasteries was a patriarchal one that expected the male head of the family to be a present and strong authority. He followed and created no fracture with the patriarchal model that was to be found in secular society. The nuns were sisters among themselves, and the daughters of a mother and a father.34 Finally, all of the nuns who were subject to the mothers and fathers in charge of monastic communities were included within the category of spiritual daughters. There were also several cases of women who approached the spiritual fathers who lived within the monasteries to ask for prayers and for spiritual support. In papyrus P.Lond.Copt. VI 1926 (c. 340), for example, a certain Valeria writes to an ascetic living in Heracleopolis, apa Paphnutius, her spiritual father. She asks for his help and entrusts her daughters Bassiane and Theoklia and her whole household to him. A similar father–​daughter relationship is reflected two centuries later in surviving documents from Wadi Sarga (where the monks call themselves brothers and a father of the monastery is mentioned). Here (P.Sarga 164), a woman addresses a holy father, as she already had in the past, recognizing his capacity for praying, as well as for granting forgiveness and offering intercession. Even more clearly than in the previous example, this daughter did not reside within the monastery, which was more certainly a strictly male environment. Nevertheless, I think that it is correct to speak again here of a monastic family. The Wadi Sarga text also highlights the growing separation between East and West from the sixth century onward. As the bonds loosened between the Greek and Latin parts of the Mediterranean, so does the possibility of a comparison between their various monastic environments. In the West, the Jeromian and then the Benedictine line progressively established themselves, creating an anti-​family monastic mainstream.35 In the East, however, and particularly in Egypt, the regional divisions and the later Islamization of the country, as well as a very different economic situation, led to a change in the balance of power and to both a different conservation of familial bonds and a different role for women. We can, therefore, observe in the East the creation of a new familia, not biological but spiritual, with some bonds tight and others loose. In this family,

Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery (New York, 2002), 136 and  144–​7. 35 Roberto Alciati, “Da Oriente a Occidente:  contatti fra le due parti dell’Impero,” in Monachesimo orientale, ed. Giovanni Filoramo (Brescia, 2010), 193–​229.

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some features were different from the existing non-​monastic familial model, apart from the concrete and essential physical separation between the two sexes.36 Within the monastic environment, and thanks to the combination of a rhetoric of unity and equality that tended simultaneously to distinguish and separate, women now became mothers, now sisters (though in some cases absorbed and intermixed among the brothers), now daughters, and their position was one of a greater symbolic equality with the monks. The deeply rooted sexist and patriarchal structures present in the biological families were not entirely eradicated and overcome, especially within double monasteries. The nuns did, however, gain greater responsibility and autonomy. It is interesting to reflect upon the fact that the women who lived in monasteries without men, or far from men, had such independence and autonomy that they were able to manage even the economy of their communities.37 The intersections between social, affective, and economic bonds that the experiences of female monastic life highlight are complex. Indeed, female asceticism could be an instrument of liberation, an attestation of greater independence, or a way to increase security and protection through affiliation with or proximity to a male monastery.38

Conclusions Complex and intertwining spiritual, social, cultural, and economic factors make any attempt to construct a rigid monastic taxonomy of practices, places of residence, and organization for monastic women (as indeed also for monastic men) fruitless and misleading. Some tentative conclusions, however, can be drawn. This article has attempted to cast some light on the roles of religious women by reflecting upon the ways in which they rethought and maintained their familial roles, and by examining the strategy for (re)generation that they carried out in the absence of the possibility of biological generation. This is an anthropological and historical trait present within every human society, whatever its specific expression in terms of family, domestic organization, and ways of parenting. It is not possible to determine whether the denial of the reproductive function weighed more heavily upon monks or nuns. Since one of the most common roles among the women of that era was that of biological mother, however, the choice of the monastic life

Roberto Alciati M. Giorda Famiglia cristiana e pratica monastica (IV-​VII secolo). In: “Annali di storia dell’esegesi”, 27(1) (2010): 265–​290. 37 Schroeder, “Women in Anchoritic and Semi-​Anchoritic Monasticism,” 14–​15. 38 Ibid.,  16–​17.

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must have represented a clear demarcation between the nuns and the women active in the lay world. But the testimonies given by the sources seem to support a reevaluation of the notion that entry into the monastic life in this era demanded the total fracturing of worldly biological and familial ties. There are numerous references within the sources to maintaining both horizontal and vertical familial bonds, regulated according to the different sensibilities of the heads of monasteries, who might be more or less strict in dealing with situations of cohabitation, with the proximity of members of the same family who had embraced the monastic life, and with the possibility of visiting relatives coming from the world outside the monastery. Such familial ties were maintained not only concretely but also narratively and metaphorically. These relationships can be ascribed to the survival strategies of monastic families, as a paradoxical reversal of the interruption of natural reproduction. As with biological families, there was a generative necessity within monasteries, not only spiritually and theologically, as monastic literature and art show, but also socially, economically, and legally, as demonstrated by the persistent presence of children, parents, brothers, and sisters, by the relationships with biological families and the external world, and by the use of an easily recognizable terminology of the family.

Bibliography Alciati, Roberto, and Maria Chiara Giorda. “Legami carnali e spirituali nel monachesimo cristiano antico (IV–VII secolo).” In Famiglia monastica. Prassi aggregative di isolamento, edited by Maria Chiara Giorda and Francesca Sbardella, 69–97. Bologna, 2012.   “Possessions and Asceticism: Melania the Younger and Her Slow Way to Jerusalem.” Zeitschrift für Antike und Christentums 14 (2010): 425–44. Brown, Peter. The Body and the Society:  Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. 2nd ed. New York, 2008. Clark, Gillian. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles. Oxford, 1993. Cooper, Kate. Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women. London, 2013.   The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA, 1996. Diem, Albrecht. “The Gender of the Religious:  Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, 432–46. Oxford, 2013. Elm, Susanna. “Virgins of God”:  The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford and New York, 1994. Giorda, Maria Chiara. Il regno di Dio in terra. I monasteri come fondazioni private (Egitto V–VII secolo). Rome, 2011. Harmless, William, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford and New York, 2004.

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Egyptian Nuns in Late Antiquity as Exemplars Jacobs, Andrew S., and Rebecca Krawiec. “Fathers Know Best? Christian Families in the Age of Asceticism.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 257–63. Krawiec, Rebecca. “From the Womb of the Church: Monastic Families.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 283–307. Martin, Dale B., and Patricia Cox Miller, eds. The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Durham, NC, 2005. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA, 1998. Rousseau, Philip. “Blood-Relationship among Early Eastern Ascetics.” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1972): 135–44. Schroeder, Caroline. “Women in Anchoritic and Semi-Anchoritic Monasticism in Egypt: Rethinking the Landscape.” Church History 83 (2014): 1–17. Talbot, Alice-Mary. “The Byzantine Family and the Monastery.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 119–29. Wilfong, Terry G. Women of Jeme: Lives in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt. Ann Arbor, MI, 2002. Wipszycka Ewa. “Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–VIIIe siècles).” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 11 (2009): 609–11.

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Psalmody and Prayer in Early Monasticism P ete r Je ffe ry,   OblSB Meanings of “Psalmody” Though the word “psalmody” literally refers to the singing of psalms, it has been used for every kind of psalm performance, including recitation in a speaking voice and silent mental repetition. Thus, when reading ancient and medieval texts, it may be hard to tell which kind of performance an ancient writer had primarily in mind. Latin and Greek words for say, sing, recite, and even meditate can all refer to either speaking, chanting monotonously, singing musically, or rehearsing silently in one’s mind.1 In early monasticism, though, psalmody was not the same thing as prayer. In some early sources, reciting a psalm is a lot like reading the Bible: the scriptural words moved the monk to respond by praying, often in his own words.2 In others, reciting large numbers of psalms resembles a penitential or ascetic practice, comparable to (and often combined with) fasting, deliberate poverty, uncomfortable body positions, or sleep deprivation. Once memorizing the Psalter became part of the process of becoming a monk, psalmody could also have an initiatory aspect. As monastic practices became more established, psalmody came to be regarded as an obligation that the monk owed to God. It is this sense of obligation that gave rise to the terms “divine office” (from Latin officium divinum), and opus Dei (“the work of God”) to express the monk’s duty to get through the required psalms.3

John Wortley, “How the Desert Fathers ‘Meditated’,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 46 (2006): 315–​28. 2 Adalbert de Vogüé, “Psalmodier n’est pas prier,” Ecclesia Orans 6 (1989): 7–​32; Andrew Nugent, “Benedict: A Sense of Prayer,” American Benedictine Review 50 (1999): 149–​60; Columba Stewart, “The Use of Biblical Texts in Prayer and the Formation of Early Monastic Culture,” American Benedictine Review 62 (2011): 188–​201. 3 Irénée Hausherr, “Opus Dei,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 13 (1947): 195–​218, trans. Bert Breiner in Monastic Studies 11: On Benedictine Monasticism (Pine City, NY, 1975), 181–​204. Ambrose Wathen, “Opus Dei,” in Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, vol. 6 (Rome, 1980), 753–​61. 1

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Since the word “psalmody” refers to a wide range of practices that were understood differently by different people, retracing the origins and early development of monastic psalmody requires a lot of untangling.4 Many issues remain in dispute. The task is complicated by several tensions that made themselves felt as the monastic movement emerged from within the wider Christian community. Particularly important was the distinction between clergy and laity. Male monks were originally laity, since (like nuns) they were not ordained. As a result, some apparently monastic practices may actually have been of lay origin: monks and nuns simply continued using them or even developed them further. Yet, as exemplary, committed Christians, monks and nuns could be held in greater honor, admired and emulated even by some of the clergy. Thus, even practices that were originally monastic were widely imitated by non-​monks, including the clergy. In any case, as late antiquity passed into the Middle Ages, male monks were increasingly clericalized through ordination to the priesthood, while the clergy was to some degree monasticized:  encouraged to adopt celibacy and obliged to recite a divine office. Thus some practices that should be seen as originally monastic came to be perceived incorrectly as clerical or priestly in nature. As far as psalmody and prayer were concerned, however, the tension was between clerical and lay, not between male and female. Psalmody was not a sacrament and so was never gendered: monastic rules that were written expressly for women or men quote each other, recommend similar psalmodic practices, and were read by celibate monastics of both genders. Other tensions that may confuse the researcher on early psalmody involve relationships between group worship and private practices, between the singing of biblical texts and newly composed hymnody, and between the life of prayer and the need for mundane work. Many of these tensions can be seen in the crucial distinction between the “monastic” and “cathedral” forms of the divine office.

Monastic vs. Cathedral Offices Liturgical historians can detect that the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century brought two distinct approaches to public worship. In the

Most of the early sources are learnedly unraveled in Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today, 2nd. ed. (Collegeville, MN, 1993), which also contains valuable information about the medieval and modern Eastern liturgies. The medieval and later traditions of the West are dealt with more cursorily.

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last hundred years, scholars have adopted the labels “cathedral office” and “monastic office” for them. The difference is something of an abstraction, since most liturgies for which we have historical evidence incorporated elements of both. Debate about the terminology continues.5 But understanding the difference is indispensable to making sense of the vast array of traditions and sources. In principle, the cathedral (I would prefer “urban”) office was led by the clergy, under the bishop, who was based in his cathedral—​the church building where his throne (cathedra) was located. However, this type of worship did not remain in the cathedral. It was stational: over the course of the year, the bishop and his entourage traveled to other church buildings around the city, celebrating mass and parts of the “cathedral” office with the local clergy and parishioners, who were joined by Christians from all over the city. Monastic communities that resided inside the city also joined in,6 so that in some sources we can still recognize discrete segments of monastic and cathedral psalmody.7 Monastic worship, in theory, claimed the legacy of the early monks who, according to the idealized model, had left civilized society to live in the desert. It therefore had reason to reject some features of urban/​cathedral worship. Since most early monks were lay people, for instance, clerical hierarchy had little relevance. Monastic hierarchy was based on seniority—​the length of time that an individual had been a monk. Thus it was the more experienced monks who would lead psalmody and prayer. Since monastic life had an austere, ascetic character, some early monks also claimed to reject the poetic and melodic hymnody that flourished in cathedral/​urban worship, preferring the unadorned texts of Scripture and the psalms.8 The Apophthegmata, the stories and sayings of the Desert Fathers of lower (northern) Egypt, have little to say about liturgical practices as such, but they describe feats of ascetical heroism

Paul Bradshaw, “Cathedral and Monastic: What’s in a Name?” Worship 77 (2003): 341–​ 53. Robert Taft, “Cathedral vs. Monastic Liturgy in the Christian East:  Vindicating a Distinction,” Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata 3rd ser. 2 (2005):  173–​219. Stig Ragnvald Frøyshov, “The Cathedral–​ Monastic Distinction Revisited. Part I:  Was Egyptian Desert Liturgy a Pure Monastic Office?” Studia Liturgica 37 (2007): 198–​216. 6 Jean-​Miguel Garrigues and Jean Legrez, Moines dans l’assemblée des fidèles à l’époque des pères, IVe–​VIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992). 7 For examples, see Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 31–​3, 48–​50,  230–​7. 8 Stig Simeon Frøyshov, “La réticence à l’hymnographie chez des anachorètes de l’Égypte et du Sinaï du 6e au 8e siècles,” in L’hymnographie. Conférences Saint-​Serge, XLVIe semaine d’études liturgiques, Paris, 29 juin–​2 juillet 1999, ed. Achille M. Triacca and Alessandro Pistoia (Rome, 2000), 229–​45; Georgi R. Parpulov, “Psalters and Personal Piety in Byzantium,” in The Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson (Washington, DC, 2010), 77–​105. 5

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that could include the recitation from memory of entire books of the Bible or all 150 psalms. There are frequent discussions of how to balance unceasing prayer with the need to work. Another common theme is the difficulty of keeping one’s attention focused on psalmody or prayer; in fact, elder monks sometimes recount visions in which they observed devils trying to distract monks with temptations and impure thoughts. For Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), one of the first monastic theologians, paying close attention to the texts of the psalms was a way to quiet the passions and keep distracting thoughts at bay, experience divine healing, and encounter Christ, the Word of God present in the psalms.9 In the prosopographical approach to exegesis, the Psalter was the book of the Bible in which the voice of Christ and of the Church could be heard most directly, and the monk could perceive his true sinful self most clearly, as if in a mirror, and so be brought to tears of compunction over his sins, which would motivate him to pray.10 Intense praying could lead to an ecstatic state that was likened to being on fire.11 But the most obvious distinction had to do with the construction of time. The cathedral office hinged on the daily transitions between light and darkness, or rather between natural and artificial light. Thus the blessing of lamps (lucernarium) at Vespers in the evening, and the return of daylight at the morning praises (Lauds), were both imbued with biblical and Christological symbolism. The annual cycles of fixed and movable feasts were also central. Monastic worship, on the other hand, aimed at the New Testament ideal to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), which made the passage of time relatively less important. Of course, it is literally impossible for a human being to pray with no interruption. Even monks had to do agricultural or handicraft work to support the monastery, as well as find time for spiritual reading, sleep, and other bodily needs. Accommodations had to be made, and this spawned a wide variety of local traditions, each with its own way of structuring the daily and weekly liturgical cycles. Most of the Latin traditions have identifiable antecedents in Eastern Christianity, particularly from Egypt or the Holy Land, which were



Luke Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford, 2005). Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York, 1998), 121–​2. Peter Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and the Emerging Roman Chant Repertory,” in Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies of the Medieval Liturgy and its Music in Memory of James W. McKinnon, ed. Sean Gallagher, James Haar, John Nádas, and Timothy Striplin (Aldershot, 2003), 55–​8. Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, ed. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah, NJ, 1980). 11 Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 117–​22; William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (New York, 2004), 243 and 397–​8. 9

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visited by numerous Western pilgrims who then recounted their experiences back home. Actual routes of transmission are therefore difficult to trace, since it was an oral transmission of experiences and memories more than a transmission of texts. In fact, many of the relevant Greek texts were never even translated into Latin, and some of those that were, like the Rule of St. Basil, offer relatively little liturgical information. Of early Latin sources that describe Eastern practices, the most important are (1) the incompletely preserved travelogue of Egeria, describing the liturgies she witnessed in Jerusalem in 383–​4;12 (2) Latin translations of the Apophthegmata of the Desert Fathers; and (3) the Institutes of John Cassian (d. 435), written about 420 to promote a reform in the monasteries of southern Gaul, and detailing the celebrations he remembered participating in in Egypt and Palestine some decades earlier.13 However, probably the most useful way to classify the early traditions is according to the ways they divided up the day and night.

Unceasing praise (laus perennis) The most obvious way to pray without ceasing was through a ritual that literally never ended. The monks were divided into groups that would take turns celebrating the office in shifts, so that part of the community was always at worship. Best known for this approach were the monasteries of akoimetoi (“sleepless”) monks in Constantinople.14 In the Latin West, however, the only well-​known example was the Abbey of Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune, at the eastern tip of Lake Geneva.15



John Wilkinson, ed. and transl., Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed., corrected (Oxford, 2006); on the date, see 169–​71. Egeria, Journal de voyage (Itinéraire), ed. Pierre Maraval, SC 296; for an English trans., see Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Egeria:  A New Translation, trans. Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw (Collegeville, MN, 2018). Jesús Alturo, “Deux nouveaux fragments de l’’Itinerarium Egeriae’ du IXe–​Xe siècle,” Revue bénédictine 115 (2005): 241–​50. 13 Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 29–​32. See also the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 14 Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–​850 (Cambridge, 2007), 69–​71, 74–​80, 85–​90, 102–​13, and elsewhere. 15 Homilia XXIV (515 Sept. 22), in Œuvres complètes de saint Avit, Évêque de Vienne, new ed. (Lyon, 1890), 337–​9. The same text is Homilia XXV in Rudolphus Peiper, ed., Alcimi Ecdicii Aviti Viennensis Episcopi Opera Quae Supersunt, MGH AA 6 pars posterior (Berlin, 1883), 145–​6, 180–​1. François Masai, “La ‘Vita patrum iurensium’ et les débuts du monachisme à Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune,” and Bonifatius Fischer, “Bedae de titulis psalmorum liber,” in Festschrift Bernhard Bischoff zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, ed. Johanne Autenrieth and Franz Brunhölzl (Stuttgart, 1971), 43–​69, 90–​110. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Perennial Prayer at Agaune,” in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society: Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 37–​56. Albrecht Diem, “Who Is Allowed to Pray for the King? Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune and the Creation of a Burgundian Identity,” in Post-​Roman

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Twenty-​Four  Hours Another approach was to organize the office in twenty-​four sections, one for each “hour” of the Greco-​Roman day. The period of daylight and the period of darkness were each divided into twelve equal sections (hōrai in Greek; compare John 11:9; Acts 23:23; Martial, Epigrams 4.8) which had no fixed duration, since the length of the daylight period varied by time of year and also by latitude: longest in the summer, but shorter as one got farther away from the equator. Recent research has found that an office of twenty-​four hours was used by the monastic community located in the basilica of the Anastasis (Resurrection) in Jerusalem (where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now stands) and, early on, in the Great Laura of Sabas in the Judean desert.16 It appears that the monks, or at least some of them, gathered for worship at every one of the twenty-​four hours, but had time for other matters in between. The most influential twenty-​four-​hour office was celebrated in Egypt. In its simplest form, as found in the Codex Sinaiticus of the Greek Bible, it consisted of twelve morning psalms and twelve evening psalms, apparently the same psalms every single day.17 The original idea may have been to recite one psalm per hour, but in the extant sources the psalms were recited one after another: twelve at an evening service and twelve more at a vigil before dawn. As a result, this type of monastic office was a largely nocturnal affair. Eventually formalized as “the Rule of the Angel,” it became widely known and influential in the West through the writings of Cassian, who tells us how it was performed: one monk stood up to recite a psalm while the others sat on the ground weaving baskets for the monastery to sell. When he finished, all stood up, extended their arms, and prayed silently. Then they knelt, prostrated, stood up again, stretched out their arms and continued praying silently. Finally, a priest would say a prayer out loud that “collected” the thoughts of all





Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, ed. Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout, 2013), 47–​88. 16 Stig Ragnvald Frøyshov, “L’horologe ‘géorgien’ du Sinaiticus ibericus 34” (PhD diss., Université de Paris IV Sorbonne, Institut Catholique de Paris, and Institut de théologie orthodoxe Saint-​Serge, 2003). See also Stig Ragnvald Frøyshov, “The Georgian Witness to the Jerusalem Liturgy: New Sources and Studies,” in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship, ed. Bert Groen, Steven Hawkes-​Teeples, and Stefanos Alexopoulos (Leuven, 2012), 227–​67, esp. 249–​57. 17 Frøyshov, “The Cathedral–​Monastic Distinction,” 205–​13; Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 58–​ 9, 62, 72, 202, and 252. The Byzantine Hexapsalmos appears to be a remnant of a similar grouping of twelve psalms: see Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 198–​200 and 279; Neil Moran, “Zwei Herrscherakklamationen in einer griechischen Handschrift aus Süditalien (Codex Messina gr. 161),” Die Musikforschung 30 (1977): 5–​6; Maxime (Leila) Ajjoub and Joseph Paramelle, Livres d’Heures du Sinaï, SC 486, 63–​9 and 73.

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the monks, and therefore became known in Latin as a collecta (English cóllect). Then all would sit, and another monk stood up to recite the next psalm.18

Three Times a Day Probably the earliest Christian practice was to pray three times a day. This is the only system with clear Jewish precedent (Ps. 55:18; Dan. 6:11). Private, individual Jewish prayer was not organized around cycles of psalmody, but was designed to coincide with the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem. Since the Temple’s destruction, the three prayer times survive in the Siddur or prayer book of the synagogue: Shaḥarit coincided with the morning sacrifice in the Temple, and also included the morning recitation of the Shema (Deut. 6:4–​9, etc.); Minḥah coincided with the afternoon sacrifice in the Temple; Ma’ariv was the time for the evening recitation of the Shema. By the time that the New Testament was written, these three prayer times had become identified with the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the Greco-​Roman twelve-​hour day (Matt. 20:1–​16; Luke 1:10; Acts 3:1, 10:3, 9, 30),19 roughly corresponding to 9 a.m., 12 noon, and 3 p.m. on the modern twelve-​hour clock. For Christians, these three times acquired further significance through the chronology of Jesus’ Passion:  at the third hour he was nailed to the cross (Mark 15:25); at the sixth hour he was condemned by Pilate ( John 19:14–16) and there was darkness at midday (Mark 15:33); at the ninth hour Jesus died (Mark 15:34–39). The third hour was also the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, who were gathered in prayer on the Jewish feast of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–​15). Such New Testament symbolism is therefore frequently found in both Eastern and Western prayer at these hours. Midnight “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”20 The emergence of the modern pattern of “monophasic sleep”21 that we now regard as normal seems to have resulted

Armand Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pachômien au quatrième siècle (Rome, 1968), 279–​87, 292–​323, and 324–​39. Taft, Liturgy of the Hours,  5–​11. 20 A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close:  Night in Times Past (New  York, 2005), 300; see also 300–​23, 335, 337; David Randall, Dreamland:  Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (New York, 2012), 17–​18. 21 Brigitte Steger and Lodewijk Brunt, “Introduction: Into the Night and the World of Sleep,” in Night-​Time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life, ed. B. Steger and L. Brunt (London, 2003), 1–​23, esp. 15–​20. 18 19

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from the invention of street lighting and other modern conveniences, which made it easier to stay up late instead of retiring soon after dark.22 Early Christians, of course, used the nightly interval to pray, and this was formalized in some monastic office traditions, producing the type of midnight office known in Greek as mesonyktikon. Early examples are attested in Cappadocia and in the rules of Columbanus and Fructuosus of Braga.23 Similarly, the Roman cursus of the 150 psalms (see below) began at the night office leading into Sunday morning, whereas Byzantine monks begin the Psalter at Vespers on Saturday.

Night Vigils Whatever the normal sleep pattern may have been, one could also deprive oneself of sleep as an ascetical practice. Deliberately giving up sleep in order to pray (Greek agrypnía) was already a custom in New Testament times (Matt. 25:1–​13; Mark 14:37; 2 Cor. 6:5, 11:27; Col. 4:2; 1 Pet. 4:7), which monasticism preserved and continued. In the urban/​cathedral liturgy this developed into several types of vigils or nocturnal services. The first was the Resurrection Vigil, celebrated every Sunday morning in Jerusalem before the Tomb of Jesus, but widely imitated elsewhere; it consisted of three psalms, after which the bishop of Jerusalem read a resurrection account from one of the four Gospels.24 The baptismal vigil, with twelve Old Testament readings followed by baptisms and then a mass, was celebrated on Easter and Pentecost in the Roman rite, on Epiphany and Easter in the East. Finally, there were vigils held at a saint’s tomb, either as a private devotion or as a public celebration the night before the saint’s feast; to fill the time it became common to recite all 150 psalms in order.25 Monastic vigils could take a variety of forms, but some





Petr Strobl, Die Macht des Schlafes in der griechisch-​römischen Welt. Eine Untersuchung der mythologischen und physiologischen Aspekte der antiken Standpunkte (Hamburg, 2002), 75–​81; Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011). 23 Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 86–​7, 114, and 119. On these rules, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 24 Stig R. Frøyshov, “The Resurrection Office of the First Millennium Jerusalem Liturgy and Its Adoption by Close Peripheries. Part I: The Pre-​Gospel Section,” in Studies on the Liturgies of the Christian East:  Selected Papers of the Third International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Volos, May 26–​30, 2010, ed. Steven Hawkes-​Teeples, Bert Groen, and Stefanos Alexopoulos (Leuven, 2013), 31–​57. 25 Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 165–​90. Peter Jeffery, “A Faithful Witness in Heaven: Keeping Vigil with St. Apollinaris,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 128–​47. In the Ethiopic rite, this type of vigil (known as Keštat za-​ ̔aryām) goes systematically through the fifteen Biblical canticles: see Bernard Velat, Études sur le Me ̔rāf. Commun de l’Office divin éthiopien (Paris, 1966), 133–​5 and 398–​431. 22

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Western rules would gradually increase the number of psalms as winter nights grew longer, then decrease them again as the short nights of summer approached.26

Divisions of the Night Another practice was to divide the period of darkness into either three or four segments. The Roman army held four watches during the night (Acts 12:4; see also Mark 6:48; Matt. 14:25). Jewish sources disagree as to whether the Levites, who guarded the doors of the Temple all night, worked in four shifts or three.27 There was also some ambiguity about when the night ended, since roosters begin crowing well before the sun actually comes up. Thus there were four nocturnal markers that could serve as times for prayer: dusk, midnight (when people woke up temporarily), cockcrow, dawn (see Mark 13:35).28 It is likely, then, that the ancient Hebrew psalmist who wrote “Seven times a day I  praise thee” (Ps. 119:164, Vulgate 118:164) was thinking of the three daily prayer times of the Jewish Temple plus four Levitical watches during the night. No Christian source, however, interprets it that way. “Seven Times a Day” Most of the prayer traditions that survived into the Middle Ages are based on a combination of the systems described above. What may have happened in some places was that the dawn and sunset hours of the cathedral office, laudes matutinae and vesperae, were combined with the three daily prayer times to form a core of five celebrations: Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers.29 To this would be added one of the arrangements for the night office. We have such a five-​hour daily cycle in one of our earliest Latin monastic texts, the North African Ordo Monasterii that was incorporated into the Rule of St. Augustine (RA).30 It is combined with a night office that grows longer and shorter with the seasons of the year. The Ordo adds to this “the usual psalms before sleep,”



Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 109, 114. Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth 3a–​3b. Compare Lam. 2:19; Judg. 7:19; Luke 12:36–​40; Exod. 14:24; 1 Sam. 11:11. 28 For classical Roman authors’ discussions of how to divide the day and night, see Michael P. J. van den Hout, A Commentary on the Letters of M. Cornelius Fronto (Leiden, 1999), 82–​4 and 31, 10–​16. 29 Stig Simeon Frøyshov, “The Formation of a Fivefold Cursus of Daily Prayer in Pre-​ Constantinian Christianity: Backward Inferences from Later Periods,” in Toxotēs: Studies for Stefano Parenti, ed. Daniel Galadza, Nina Glibetić, and Gabriel Radle (Grottaferrata, Rome, 2010), 121–​38. 30 Conrad Leyser, “Augustine in the Latin West, 430–​ca. 900,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey (Oxford, 2012), 460–​4. 26 27

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which would develop into Completorium or Compline, said at the time of retiring. It was short and often textually invariable, so that it could be recited in the dormitory with the lights out. Some traditions added an office at the first hour of daylight (roughly 6  a.m.), so that there were four of what came to be called “the Little Hours”:  Prime, Terce, Sext, and None. Research into this development is ineluctably entangled with Cassian’s description of the monastic office in Palestine, which (he says) originated by combining the two nocturnal services of the Egyptian monastic office with the three daily hours, then expanding further. Cassian’s complicated account has proved difficult to interpret. But it was Cassian (Institutes III, 4.197) who began the long tradition of appealing to Ps. 118:164 to justify the full cycle: “Seven times a day I praise thee”—​even though the total number of services in each twenty-​four-​hour period was usually more than seven, perhaps even in Cassian’s case.

The Main Latin Syntheses Irish syntheses As we move from late antiquity toward the Middle Ages, more complex Latin syntheses of these originally Eastern elements emerge. The simplest of these can be found in Irish monastic sources, which reached their most developed form in the traditions and texts of the Céli Dé or Culdees. While the Apophthegmata include stories of monks heroically reciting all 150 psalms, the Irish texts seem to make this the daily responsibility of every monk, to be completed in “three fifties” along with other texts, such as the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–​12). One finds Irish liturgical offices in which the three fifties form part of an even larger course of daily psalmody, but more often the recitation seems more like an expiatory exercise for the individual monk, to be combined with other ascetic practices such as holding up the hands for long periods, numerous genuflections or prostrations, repeated blows with a scourge, fasting, exposure to harsh weather conditions, and so on. Similar practices are prescribed in some of the Irish penitentials.31 In both Irish and Continental sources we find offices based on conflating Cassian’s descriptions of the Egyptian and Palestinian offices. Examples

Peter Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages:  Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (New York, 2000), 99–​143, esp. 102–​8. On early Irish monasticism, see the article by Bitel in this volume.

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include the fanciful celebrations in the Voyage of St. Brendan, and a pseudonymous “Rule of Cassian.” Combining the Egyptian and Palestinian traditions, however, results in a Vespers with fifteen psalms.32

Southern France More developed offices indebted to Cassian can be found in sixth-​century monastic rules from the southern French region where Cassian wrote. They are by two bishops of Arles: Caesarius (d. 542 or 543), who had been a monk at Lérins, and Aurelian (d. 552). The basic document is the Regula ad Virgines of Caesarius (RCaeV), who worked on it from about 512 to 534. Caesarius’ Regula ad Monachos is derived from the rule for virgins, as are Aurelian’s two rules for monks and virgins.33 The Cassianic grouping of psalms into threes and twelves has been expanded to six and eighteen. There is a greater use of non-​psalm elements such as readings and litanies, and increasing amounts of variability across the liturgical year. The monastic office in the rules of Arles retained the Egyptian practice in which one monk recited while others listened; at Arles each monk recited three psalms before the next one took over, rather than one as in Egypt. Silent prayer and prostration after these psalms are not clearly mentioned, however, nor is it entirely clear whether a collect was said. Similar ambiguity in other monastic rules of the sixth and seventh centuries suggest that prayer after each psalm was disappearing. One of Columbanus’ rules, which may represent the use of the monastery he founded at Luxeuil, mentions that monks knelt and prayed after each psalm, but does not mention the collect.34 In Isidore of Seville’s (d. 636) monastic rule the prostration is retained, but the collect is not mentioned.35 Nevertheless, several series of psalter collects do survive in early Latin manuscripts of the psalms.36 In the Arles rules one can see an expanding variety of other methods for performing the psalms. The sources use the Greek word antiphona, which

Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements,” 108–​10; Thomas O’Loughlin, “The Monastic Liturgy of the Hours in the Navigatio sancti Brendani: A Preliminary Investigation,” Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2006): 113–​26. 33 What follows is based on:  Caesarius of Arles, Œuvres monastiques, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, 2 vols., SC 345 and 398, 1:114–​28; Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 100–​10. 34 Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements,” 102–​12. 35 Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 102, 114, and 115–​16. 36 André. Wilmart, The Psalter Collects from V–​VIth Century Sources (Three Series), ed. Louis Brou (London, 1949; repr. Woodbridge, 2009); Henry Ashworth, The Psalter Collects of Pseudo-​Jerome and Cassiodorus (Manchester, 1963); Juan María Canals Casas, Colectas de salmos de la serie “Visita nos.” Introducción, edición crítica e índices (Salamanca, 1978). 32

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had appeared already in the Ordo Monasterii. In Latin, as still in Greek, this word referred to a unit of psalmody (i.e., a psalm, part of a psalm, or multiple psalms) in which two choirs alternate the verses, but a common refrain is appended to every verse, and the unit ends with the Gloria patri (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit …”). It was only about the ninth century that antiphona came to be applied to the refrain that we now call an “antiphon.” Responsorial psalmody, also mentioned in the Ordo Monasterii, was an older and simpler practice in which the verses were sung by a soloist, and the group responded by singing an invariable refrain. In addition to these two genres, the Arles sources also mention direct psalmody (directaneus, in directum) in which the entire psalm was sung straight through without refrains. The morning office at Arles included cantica or canticles, psalm-​like texts that are not from the book of Psalms.37 Finally, the Arles office was among the first to incorporate the Ambrosian hymns, strophic poems in iambic dimeter, written by Ambrose (d. 397) or in imitation of his style.

Northern Italy The earliest extant liturgical book for a Latin monastic office is the Antiphonary of Bangor—​so-​called because it contains hymns honoring the founder, monastic rule, and abbots of Bangor in Ireland. The hymn on the abbots was evidently composed during the reign of Abbot Cronan (680–​ 91); as a result the manuscript itself—​a monument of Irish paleography—​has been dated to the 680s. But there is no telling how long after Cronan’s reign the hymn might still have been copied. Since the manuscript shares a few texts with the liturgical chant repertory of Milan, it may actually represent the practice of Bobbio in northern Italy, where it was found.38 The antiphonary combines multiple small collections of hymns, canticles, collects, and antiphons (in the later sense; i.e. refrains) for an office that structurally resembles the resurrection vigil—​something we find also at Arles and Milan, as well as in Ireland.39 Central and Southern Italy When Pope Gregory sent Roman monks to England as missionaries, they brought with them their Roman liturgical practices, but we know little about them. By the eighth century, Anglo-​Saxon missionaries to the Continent were

Exod. 15, Dan. 3, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis, and the Te Deum are specifically mentioned. 38 On Bobbio, see the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 39 Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements,” 112–​27. 37

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encouraging the idea that everyone should follow the Roman liturgy, and so began a process of exporting manuscripts and unwritten liturgical expertise from Rome to the rest of Europe. The actual situation in Rome itself was fairly complicated, however, since there were many kinds of churches there, each with its own type of liturgy:  the great basilicas of the Constantinian era, the tituli built on the sites of early Christian house churches, monasteries both Greek and Latin, the stational liturgy used by the pope as bishop of Rome, and the less public worship of the pope’s court and household. What concern us are the traditions of the great basilicas, each of which had a handful of monasteries attached. Since it was these monasteries that supplied the clergy for daily worship in places like St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, and St. Mary Major, the divine office in the Roman basilicas was essentially of a monastic type, structured so that the entire book of psalms could be recited every week. As a result, very few traces of the non-​monastic cathedral office survive from Rome.40 The earliest source for the office of the Roman basilicas is the psalm commentary of Arnobius the Younger (mid-​f ifth century), whose monastery has not been identified, unfortunately. Arnobius mentions many random liturgical details that are consistent with other Roman evidence, and it often illustrates the kind of exegesis that underlay the selection of texts in medieval Roman and Gregorian chant. The latest sources we have for the office of the Roman basilicas are two twelfth-​century musical manuscripts of so-​ called Old Roman chant, both of which come from the orbit of St. Peter’s.41 In between is a complex of sixth-​century monastic rules, beginning with the Rule of the Master. This curious text, written in a question-​and-​answer format imitating the Rule of St. Basil, avoids assigning specific psalms to specific times, but repeatedly insists that the psalms be sung in numerical order. Every psalm, whether antiphonal or responsorial, is to be followed by prostration and prayer, so that there are twenty-​four prostrations every day and another twenty-​four every night—​with a few exceptions: only twenty were required on short summer nights, and prostrations were not made on Sundays or during the Easter and Christmas–​Epiphany seasons. Since the psalms are not



Peter Jeffery, “The Roman Liturgical Year and the Early Liturgy of St. Peter’s,” in Old Saint Peter’s, Rome, ed. Rosamond McKitterick, John Osborne, Carol M. Richardson, and Joanna Story (Cambridge, 2013), 157–​76. 41 London, British Library, Additional MS 29988; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, MS San Pietro B 79. A  facsimile edition of the latter manuscript is B.  G. Baroffio and S.  J. Kim, eds., Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio S.  Pietro B 79. Antifonario della Basilica di S. Pietro (sec. XII), 2 vols. (Rome, 1995).

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synchronized to the days of the week, it appears that the entire Psalter could be completed in about four days.42 The Rule of St. Benedict (RB), which owes much of its wording and arrangement to the Rule of the Master, offers a fixed weekly cursus, said to be derived from the usage of the “Roman Church” (RB 13.10). The weekly psalter begins on Monday, with Psalms 1–​19 assigned to the weekday offices of Prime. The psalter continues in the night office, with Psalms 20–​108 distributed from Sunday to Saturday, in the Egyptian number of twelve psalms per day. Psalms 118–​27 are distributed across the other Little Hours, and most of the remaining psalms (109–​16, 128–​47) are assigned to Vespers. Psalms 148–​50 are sung as one psalm at the end of Lauds, as in almost all Eastern and Western medieval traditions. This arrangement, known as the Monastic cursus, was used by all communities following the RB up to 1977, after which it still remains a legal option.43 The RB itself is lenient in this matter: “if anyone finds this distribution of psalms unsatisfactory, he should arrange whatever he judges better, provided that the full complement of one hundred and fifty psalms is by all means carefully maintained every week, and that the series begins anew each Sunday at Vigils.”44 But what was the usage of the Roman Church from which the Monastic cursus derived? It was probably closer to the so-​called Roman cursus, which was used by all medieval Roman-​rite clergy and non-​Benedictine religious orders. It is first attested by the Carolingian liturgist Amalarius of Metz (d. c.  850–​852),45 and in at least one way it seems more primitive than the Monastic cursus:  the Roman cursus begins with Psalm 1 at the night office between Saturday and Sunday, as if the day began at midnight. By triangulating among the Monastic and Roman cursus and the two Old Roman chant manuscripts, scholars have surmised that the original idea seems to have been to divide the psalter in half, with psalms 1–​108 assigned to Matins, psalms 109–​ 47 assigned to Vespers, the very long psalm 118 assigned to the little hours, and a few selected psalms assigned, outside numerical order, to Lauds and Compline. The Roman cursus was abolished by Pope Pius X (r. 1903–​14) in

Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 122–​30. Joseph Dyer, “Observations on the Divine Office in the Rule of the Master,” in Fassler and Baltzer, Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages,  74–​98. 43 Thesaurus Liturgiae Horarum Monasticae (Rome, 1977); Marcel Rooney, “Thesaurus Liturgiae Horarum Monasticae: A Treasure Still Hidden,” American Benedictine Review 44 (1993): 408–​11. 44 RB 18.22–​3; translation from Timothy Fry, et al., eds. and transl., RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes (Collegeville, MN, 1981). 45 Amalarius of Metz, Liber Officialis IV and Liber De Ordine Antiphonarii, in Amalarii Episcopi Opera Liturgica Omnia, ed. J. M. Hanssens, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1948–​50), 2:401–​ 543; 3:13–​109; and see also 3:139–​43. 42

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his apostolic constitution Divino Afflatu (1 November 1911), so that liturgical books published after that time are not useful for medieval historical research.

The Medieval Period The first community known to have lived by the RB was the group that restored Benedict’s abbey of Montecassino in 718. It was from there that the rule and the Monastic cursus (somewhat expanded) were imported into Carolingian Europe, and eventually adopted by all monasteries following the reform of Benedict of Aniane. However, the Monastic cursus may have been used earlier in the monasteries of “double rule” that followed the rules of both Benedict and Columbanus. The library at Bobbio once preserved some manuscripts illustrating this practice, but much was destroyed in the 1904 fire at the Turin National Library.46 For much of the medieval period, communities celebrating the office required a variety of books: a psalter; a hymnal; an antiphoner; a bible or lectionary of readings; books of sermons and hagiographical texts for reading during the nocturnal hours; a book of collects for the leader. By about the thirteenth century, however, it had become common to combine all the material (often with the readings shortened) into a single volume, or a set of two or four volumes. Such books are known as breviaries (since they abbreviate some material). They made it possible for a priest to carry the texts with him and read them privately when he was unable to attend the community celebration. The best way to understand the medieval Divine Office, therefore, is to obtain a breviary and learn to read it.47

Bibliography Ashworth, Henry. The Psalter Collects of Pseudo-​Jerome and Cassiodorus. Manchester, 1963. Bradshaw, Paul F. Reconstructing Early Christian Worship. Collegeville, MN, 2010. Egeria. The Pilgrimage of Egeria:  A New Translation, trans. Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw. Collegeville MN, 2018.

Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements,” 142, n. 89; 138–​9, n. 55. Most useful for the Roman cursus:  Knut Peters, ed., Breviarium Lincopense, 4  vols. in 7 (Lund, 1950–​8). For the Monastic cursus: J. B. L. Tolhurst, ed., The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, 6  vols. (London, 1932–​42; last volume reprinted Woodbridge, 1993). Other helps include Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982); and Margot Fassler, “Sermons, Sacramentaries, and Early Sources for the Office in the Latin West: The Example of Advent,” and László Dobszay, “Reading an Office Book,” in Fassler and Baltzer, Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, 15–​47,  48–​60.

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Psalmody and Prayer in Early Monasticism Fassler, Margot E., and Rebecca A. Baltzer, eds. The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography. New York, 2000. Fry, Timothy, et al., eds. and trans. RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes. Collegeville, MN, 1981. Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York, 2004. Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology. Toronto, 1982. Jeffery, Peter. “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours.” In Fassler and Baltzer, The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, 99–​143. Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York, 1998. Taft, Robert. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. 2nd. ed. Collegeville, MN, 1993. Veilleux, Armand. La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pachômien au quatrième siècle. Rome, 1968. Wilkinson, John, ed. and trans. Egeria’s Travels. 3rd ed., corrected. Oxford, 2006. Wilmart, André. The Psalter Collects from V–​VIth Century Sources (Three Series), ed. Louis Brou. London, 1949; repr. Woodbridge, 2009.

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Heterodoxy and Monasticism around the Mediterranean Sea Dav id  B r a kk e Sometime between 444 and 451, Dioscorus, the patriarch of Alexandria (d. 454), wrote to Shenoute (c.  348–​465), the leader of a large monastic community near Atripe, on the west side of the Nile, opposite Panopolis. Dioscorus asked Shenoute to help him enforce a memorandum that he had sent to three local bishops (appended to the letter) in which the patriarch banned a “heretic” named Elijah from the monasteries near Panopolis. Elijah, a priest and almost certainly a monk, promoted the teachings of the Alexandrian Origen (c. 185–​253/​4), the patriarch explained. He expressed satisfaction that a priest named Psenthaesios and “the monks with him” had rejected and expelled Elijah, but he lamented that a monastery called “The Encampment” was known to possess books by Origen and “other heretics.” Dioscorus urged Shenoute to investigate the situation in the region’s “cities and monasteries” and to unite them in opposition to Elijah and in support of Psenthaesios and his monks.1 We do not know what action, if any, Shenoute took in response to Dioscorus’ letter, but certainly he would have been receptive to the patriarch’s appeal: Shenoute wrote an extensive anti-​heretical treatise that targeted Origen and his teachings in particular.2 The Elijah affair illustrates the ambiguous relationship between heterodoxy and monasticism in late antiquity. On the one hand, Dioscorus knew that monks like Shenoute vigorously and consistently opposed heresy (as well as paganism), and he believed that Shenoute would be effective in the effort to silence Elijah. Although Dioscorus instructed the local bishops to confiscate

Herbert Thompson, “Dioscorus and Shenoute,” in Recueil d’études égyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Jean-​François Champollion à l’occasion du centenaire de la lettre à M. Dacier relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques lue à l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-​lettres le 27 septembre 1822 (Paris, 1922), 367–​76. 2 Shenoute, I Am Amazed, in David Brakke and Andrew Crislip, eds., Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great:  Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (Cambridge, 2015), 54–​82; Coptic text:  Hans-​Joachim Cristea, ed., Schenute von Atripe. Contra Origenistas (Tübingen, 2011). 1

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and send to him any heretical books they might find, it was Shenoute whom he told to investigate and unite the cities and monasteries in the area. The abbot Shenoute must have been the most significant leader of Christianity around Panopolis. On the other hand, Dioscorus knew also that a heretic like Elijah could find shelter in monastic communities and that monasteries could possess heretical books. Monks could be reliable defenders of orthodoxy, but in their communities heretical people, texts, and ideas could escape the reach of episcopal control. Christian monasticism of the fourth and fifth centuries encompassed a variety of experiments in abandoning traditional married family life in the household for new ascetic living arrangements.3 If scholars once understood early monasticism as easily defined and organized into standard types (eremitical, semi-​eremitical, cenobitic), they now emphasize the fluid and shifting nature of early monastic communities and the difficulty of distinguishing “monks” and “monasticism” from Christian ascetics and asceticism in general. As Christians settled into caves, transformed estates into ascetic communities, stood on pillars, and the like, they created new modes of living, some that persisted and others that disappeared or were condemned. Efforts to standardize monastic communities and connect them more closely to other church institutions conflicted with persistent ascetic impulses to improvise, to try new ways of seeking God and establishing fellowship with others, and to preserve independence from society and (in many cases) from the Church. As they have taken a more dynamic approach to monasticism, so too historians no longer treat “heterodoxy” or “heresy” as something that can be easily contrasted with a stable “orthodoxy” from which it deviated. Instead, the discourse of “orthodoxy,” “heresy,” and “schism” developed as a means of establishing and maintaining communal and ideological boundaries, of defending and challenging local traditions of thought and practice, and of configuring the relationship between particular beliefs and universal claims to truth.4 Charges of heresy in the early years of monasticism performed these same functions. They sometimes also reflected discomfort with new living arrangements or ascetic practices and preoccupations, even as monks themselves often prioritized shared ascetic values over doctrinal differences. As monasticism emerged, church officials labeled several innovative ascetic leaders as heretics. In the final decades of the fourth century and into the fifth,

3

See the article by Giorda in this volume. J. Rebecca Lyman, “Heresiology:  The Invention of ‘Heresy’ and ‘Schism’,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2: Constantine to c. 600, ed. Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris (Cambridge, 2007), 296–​313.

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however, major accusations of heresy divided monastic communities and created or exacerbated tensions between monastic groups and other forms of Christianity. Just as struggles over Trinitarian and Christological heresies took place primarily in the Greek-​speaking East, so too these monastic heresies were mostly Eastern affairs that involved Western monks only tangentially, with Pelagianism being the great exception. Likewise, male rather than (the numerous) female monastics tended to dominate and devote energy to these disputes, but gender was often a precipitating factor, and wealth and status sometimes made it impossible for men to ignore leading women. Charges of Origenism, anthropomorphism, Messalianism, Pelagianism, and the like focused not simply on doctrines (as did charges of Arianism or Nestorianism), but also on ascetic practices and spiritualities. It is difficult for the historian to know precisely how widespread these movements were, not only because reliable evidence from antiquity is always scarce, but also because authors tended to exaggerate or play down the strength of rival movements for rhetorical reasons and to construe as organized heresy people and texts that simply shared certain suspect ideas or practices. Instances of monastic heresy in the late antique Mediterranean world arose from conflicts that were both theological and social. Spiritualities of ontological fluidity, highly indebted to Origen, suggested the possibility of radical transformation of the self, even of the body; these views clashed with theologies that stressed ontological stability and the persistence of the flesh. So, too, monastic social improvisations challenged ecclesiastical and imperial interests in order and hierarchy. Such conflicts must not be understood, however, entirely in terms of an opposition between “monasticism” and other institutional forms of Christianity (“the Church”), but also as symptomatic of tensions within and among communities that we call “monastic.”

“Heresy” among Monastic Pioneers Some of the earliest known monks were also “heretics”—​or charged with being so. For example, both Athanasius of Alexandria and Epiphanius of Salamis (c.  315–​403) condemned as heretical the teachings and practices of the ascetic pioneer Hieracas of Leontopolis in Egypt, who was active in the middle of the fourth century.5 They complained that Hieracas’ doctrines

David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford, 1995), 44–​57; James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert:  Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999), 110–​33.

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of the resurrection and of Christ were unorthodox, but even more that he condemned marriage and had formed an ascetic community of celibate men and women that scandalously mixed the sexes and arrogantly separated itself from the wider Church. These bishops, both highly sympathetic to monasticism, feared an ascetic movement that would deprecate married Christians and the parish churches to which they belonged. In a similar vein, Athanasius (d. 373) criticized as heretics monks who advocated sleep deprivation or who absented themselves from the Eucharist when they experienced nocturnal emissions.6 At what point did some Church leaders perceive that monastic attention to the body and commitment to a more rigorous lifestyle had gone too far? Charging ascetics with heresy pushed back against what bishops saw as extreme or separatist tendencies in the new movement. The monastic experiments that Eustathius of Sebaste (d. c. 377), a contemporary of Hieracas, initiated or inspired in Asia Minor likewise elicited charges of heresy.7 Here, too, gender and the deprecation of marriage weighed on the minds of bishops, this time gathered at a synod in Gangra in 340 or 341. Celibate women and men were living together; the women dressed like men; these ascetics avoided worship led by married priests. Eustathius seems also to have inspired other monastic communities later revered as orthodox, such as that of Macrina (d. 379; the sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa) and her family at Annesi,8 but, thanks to his position in the trinitarian controversy, he proved a convenient target for opponents of the more troubling ascetic practices. Indeed, Eustathius and his allies supported the homoiousian (“of similar essence”) position on the Son’s divinity, which lost out to competing formulations (above all, homoousios, “of the same essence”). “Eustathians,” if they even formed such a group, ended up as heretics both doctrinally and monastically:  like that of Hieracas, their experiments in monastic living ran afoul of episcopal interests in gender distinction and communal solidarity. “Manichaeism” emerged as a useful charge with which to label ascetics or monastics whose teachings or practices struck bishops and other leaders as too extreme. Condemned under the emperor Diocletian in 295, the Manichaeans often presented their dualistic teaching as the true meaning of Christianity, and they arranged themselves in communities that had at their core a group

Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism,  84–​99. Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994), 106–​36. 8 On Macrina’s monastic community, see ibid., 78–​105; and the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 6 7

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called the Elect, whose ascetic lifestyle of celibacy, financial dependence on others, restricted diet, and communal living resembled that of other Christian monks. Labeling a Christian ascetic Manichaean suggested that this person had a heterodox commitment to dualism and a penchant toward mythological speculation and denigration of the body. In Spain, for example, the asceticism and learned exegesis of the teacher Priscillian (d. c. 386) brought him into conflict with his bishop, Hydatius of Merida. Once again, anxiety about gender added fuel to concerns about asceticism and orthodox doctrine, for Priscillian was accused of seducing women with his “Manichaean” teachings. Like the Egyptian monks who concerned Dioscorus, Priscillian read Christian works of dubious orthodoxy: he wrote a treatise in defense of reading non-​ canonical texts entitled On Faith and Apocrypha. He was executed in Trier around 386.9 Priscillian pioneered a form of monastic life—​the independent ascetic scholar who teaches interested and possibly ascetically inclined lay people—​ that men like Jerome (d. 420)  and Pelagius (d. after 418)  practiced and perfected. That historians tend to call Jerome a “monk” and Pelagius and Priscillian “ascetics” (as well as “heretics”) demonstrates the success of campaigns to restrict the category of “monk” to ascetics with the correct doctrines. “Monks” are also those who, like Jerome, settled at a greater physical remove from urban circles of learned Christians and their bishops—​even if, like Jerome, they remained deeply engaged with Mediterranean-​wide networks of lay wealth and episcopal power. If branding ascetic innovators as heretics started quite early in the history of monasticism, so too did efforts like that of Dioscorus to recruit monks for episcopal campaigns against doctrinal heresies. In the 350s Athanasius wrote letters to monks urging them not to share fellowship with “Arian” colleagues, and in his Life of Antony he depicted the monastic hero as refusing to have anything to do with Arians, Melitians, Manichaeans, or other heretics.10 It was probably an uphill struggle for these bishops. As Dioscorus noted, some monasteries included “heretical” books in their libraries. Although the monastic provenance of the notorious Nag Hammadi codices cannot be proven, it is certainly possible or even probable.11 And historians can document that Egyptian monks worked and lived together across sectarian or doctrinal

Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic:  Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley, CA, 1995). Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, 129–​40 and 247. 11 Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices (Tübingen, 2015). 9

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lines:  shared commitment to ascetic practice took precedence over church politics and doctrine.12 As scholars have told this perhaps not so surprising story of episcopal power and interference, they have been careful to point out that monastic leaders were often equally ready to label certain ascetic lifestyles as heretical. Among the earliest Christian men called “monks” were “renouncers” (apotaktikoi) who alone or in informal communities practiced asceticism in cities and villages.13 Such men were imitating female virgins who had been doing the same thing since at least the early third century and possibly from the days of Paul (1 Cor. 7:25–​38). Documented in the sources as early as the late third century, the male renouncers were a respected and even unremarkable presence in urban Christianity—​until new models for male monastic life emerged that appealed to leading figures as more orderly and disciplined and less entangled with ecclesiastical affairs. Some authors’ preference for the solitary life of the desert hermit or, even more, the formal cenobitic monastery organized under a rule led them to brand the venerable tradition of the renouncers as, if not explicitly heretical, at least a threat to proper ascetic devotion to God. Thus, in his famous Letter to Eustochium, Jerome condemned the renouncers, calling them “inferior” and “pests” and labeling them “Remnuoth,” a term of mysterious, allegedly Egyptian, origin.14 Probably drawing on Jerome, John Cassian (d. 435), himself a monk, divided monks into two “very good” kinds, cenobites and anchorites, and one “blameworthy” kind, “Sarabaites.”15 Sarabaites, in contrast to other monks, followed their own will, lived wherever and however they liked, and acquired money. Although Cassian did not call them heretics explicitly, his depiction of the Sarabaites drew on the rhetorical tropes of heresiology:  like other heresies, the Sarabaites developed later than legitimate forms of Christian monasticism as an aberration from them; they had an exotic name and sought their own selfish interests. Cassian insinuated some connection between the Sarabaites and Arianism, and he lamented that they made up about half of the



Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 196–​218. Edwin A. Judge, “The Earliest Use of Monachos for ‘Monk’ (P. Coll. Youtie 77) and the Origins of Monasticism,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977): 72–​89; Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert,  53–​72. 14 Jerome, Epistolae 22.34–​5. On Jerome’s Remnuoth and Cassian’s Sarabaites, see Malcolm Choat, “Philological and Historical Approaches to the Search for the ‘Third Type’ of Egyptian Monk,” in Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies, ed. Mat Immerzeel and Jacques Van der Vliet (Leuven, 2004), 857–​65. 15 John Cassian, Conferences 18.4; trans. in Boniface Ramsey, ed., John Cassian:  The Conferences (New York, 1997), 637.

12 13

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monks of Egypt and a majority in other regions.16 The men who pioneered the monastic life in third-​century Egyptian cities and villages became associated with Egypt’s arch-​heretic, Arius.

The Monastic Heresies of Late Antiquity Messalianism Cassian’s alarm at the ubiquity of lawless Sarabaitic monks resembles the concerns that other authors expressed about the prevalence of other forms of heretical monasticism, such as Origenism and Messalianism. Like Cassian’s Sarabaites, the term “Messalians” (“people who pray”) marked as heretically innovative a traditional pattern of ascetic living that predated many of the forms of monastic living that their opponents preferred.17 Unlike the Sarabaites, however, Messalians faced explicit and formal condemnations as heretics, on account both of their ascetic practices and of doctrines that they were alleged to profess. Epiphanius appears to have first identified a movement of Messalians and to have established a profile of their aberrant behaviors, which included wandering, lack of any personal property, indiscriminate mingling of men and women, and especially the refusal to perform labor and thus the reliance on others for material support.18 He provided a behavioral template that others could use to label suspiciously disorganized or disruptive ascetic groups. Some monks thereby identified as Messalians provided theological rationales for their lifestyle, most significantly the beliefs that a demon adheres to the human soul and can be expelled only by constant prayer (not by baptism alone) and that a liberated soul could achieve freedom from the passions. The resulting package of practices and doctrines provided the basis for the formal condemnations of Messalians at the Council of Ephesus (431) and in other settings. Daniel Caner has demonstrated that no coherent Messalian movement, heretical or otherwise, existed in late antiquity.19 Rather, from at least the second century, a variety of ascetic Christians across the Mediterranean had followed the Apostles’ example by wandering to preach and teach, and by depending on the support of more settled Christians for their livelihood. Evidence suggests that such practices were especially prevalent in Syria. As more organized

Cassian, Conferences 18.7.8; trans. in Ramsey, John Cassian: The Conferences, 642. Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks:  Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2002). 18 Epiphanius, Panarion 80. 19 Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks. 16 17

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forms of monasticism developed in the fourth century, the persistence of this apostolic model of ascetic life troubled ecclesiastical leaders: apostolic monks were filtering into urban areas and disrupting emerging models of episcopal patronage and ideals of monastic self-​sufficiency. In the East, the vivid, biblical imagery of Syrian asceticism—​for example, claims that evil “dwelled” within a person and required “uprooting”—​disturbed philosophically inclined Greek readers as it was translated into Greek texts.20 Theologians expressed alarm at Messalianism’s deprecation of baptism and claims to spiritual purification, while Church authorities sought to create and privilege stable monastic communities that did not draw lay support away from the episcopal network. In the West, Augustine (d. 430)  likewise in his On the Work of Monks (401) condemned monks who eschewed labor for the sake of prayer, depended on others for their material support, and grew their hair long; these monks, too, followed the “apostolic” tradition, but otherwise show no connection to Messalianism (nor did Augustine mention any).21

Origenism and Anthropomorphism Epiphanius was not only the first to identify Messalianism as a monastic heresy, but also ignited the first Origenist controversy, which involved monks and ascetics in Egypt and Palestine and extended its reach to Constantinople, where it claimed the formidable John Chrysostom (d. 407)  as a victim.22 Origen’s theology combined a deep biblicism with an open-​minded spirit of speculation and an ascetic emphasis on personal transformation. In the second and third centuries, Gnostic and Valentinian Christians had highlighted the role of cosmic elemental substances—​pneuma, psychē, and hylē—​in their mythologies in a way that suggested to their critics soteriological determinism and extreme deprecation of the body. In response, Origen emphasized the freedom of every human being to choose the good and to cooperate with God’s grace; he considered the body’s state an index of the soul’s return to God, which would climax in the possession of a spiritual body, certainly not the present body of flesh. His theology provided a meaningful framework for ascetic practices of bodily discipline and self-​transformation. On the other hand, it provoked controversy even in his lifetime:  Origen’s emphasis on the continued freedom of rational creatures to choose the good

20



21

Columba Stewart, “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431 (Oxford and New York, 1991). Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks, 117–​22. 22 Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy:  The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ, 1992).

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suggested the possibility of salvation even for demons, and a body open to profound change seemed to conflict with belief in a resurrected fleshly body continuous with the present body. In general, although Origen was a dedicated adherent of the “orthodox” Church, his spirituality of transformation and openness to intellectual inquiry strained against emerging structures of orthodoxy. Christian authors had been criticizing and defending Origen almost continuously before Epiphanius catalogued the alleged deficiencies in his thought in works of the 370s. Epiphanius set off the Palestinian dimension of the controversy in 394 by attacking Bishop John of Jerusalem (r. 387–​417) and warning against such teachings as the fall of pre-​existent souls into bodies, the subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father, the salvation of the devil, and allegorical interpretation of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis. Eventually the debate brought the rival scholars (and translators of Origen) Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 340–​410) into a sustained and bitter conflict, which divided ascetic and monastic Christians and their wealthy lay supporters not only theologically but also along lines of patronage, friendship, and other personal ties. A key ally of Rufinus was Melania the Elder (342–​410), whose great wealth enabled her to found and direct monasteries in Jerusalem and to support men like Rufinus. For these ascetic intellectuals, questions about the body that Origen’s theology raised—​its origin, its relationship to the soul, and its nature in the resurrection—​were entangled with charges of ascetic extremism and poor translation skills. Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria (d. 412) emerged as the leading player in the Egyptian branch of the controversy, which divided monks in the northern Egypt desert of Nitria. When in 399 Theophilus used his annual Festal Letter to criticize an anthropomorphic conception of God, who he argued is incorporeal, some monks traveled to Alexandria to protest. Denial of divine anthropomorphism undermined prayer focused on some image of God and called into question the goodness of the physical body and its eventual resurrection in the flesh. Theophilus then reversed himself: allegedly declaring to see “the face of God” in those of his monastic critics, he anathematized the books of Origen, whose allegorical interpretation undermined a “literal” understanding of humanity’s creation “in the image of God.” He violently expelled leading “Origenist” intellectuals from the monastic communities; when these refugee monks sought shelter with John Chrysostom in Constantinople, they initiated events that enabled Theophilus to get his ecclesiastical rival condemned and exiled. A similar fate befell John’s confidante Olympias, who had used her wealth to found and lead a monastery of some 250 women in 136

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the city. John’s attempts to exert more control over monks in Constantinople had already earned him the enmity of monastic leaders and their lay patrons, which Theophilus used to his advantage. Similar tensions in the capital city underlay the theological conflicts and charges of heresy that surrounded the later bishops Nestorius and Flavian.23 John Cassian was in Egypt when Theophilus issued his anti-​ anthropomorphite Festal Letter; he later presented as the paradigmatic anthropomorphite an elderly monk named Serapion whose “ignorance and rustic naïveté” led to the error of imagining that God has a human body.24 Following Cassian’s lead, modern scholars have tended to attribute anthropomorphism to the origin of Egyptian monasticism among illiterate “Coptic” monks (Serapion is an Egyptian name), whose conception of an embodied God reflected their background in Egyptian paganism. Origenism, then, entered the Egyptian desert with the arrival of learned Greek speakers like Evagrius Ponticus, who died shortly before the dramatic events of 399. Theophilus’ expulsion of the Origenist intellectuals represented the removal of a later and foreign element from the simple faith of Egyptian monks. Cassian, a disciple of Evagrius, looked back on this episode with regret. Recent scholarship has called this traditional interpretation into question. On the one hand, the earliest Egyptian monks were more literate and philosophically inclined than previously thought: the letters of Antony the Great (d. 356)  indicate that, although Athanasius’ Life presented the legendary hermit as illiterate and uneducated, he in fact wrote sophisticated monastic epistles and pursued ascetic self-​transformation within a cosmological theology indebted to Origen.25 Evagrius’ spirituality, which sought a knowledge (gnōsis) of God beyond all images, may have been distinctive, but it was by no means foreign to previous Egyptian monastic tradition.26 On the other hand, visionary experiences of God in human form appear not to have been remnants of paganism, but rooted in a long tradition of learned Jewish and Christian prayer and speculation based on biblical passages that suggested divine anthropomorphism. Evidence for such exegetically based mysticism and for Christologies that emphasized the glory of God in human form

Samuel Rubenson, “Asceticism and Monasticism, I: Eastern,” in Casiday and Norris, Cambridge History of Christianity, 2, 661–​3. 24 Cassian, Conferences 10.1–​4; trans. in Ramsey, John Cassian: The Conferences,  371–​3. 25 Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony:  Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis, MN, 1990). 26 David Brakke, “Research and Publications in Egyptian Monasticism, 2000–​2004,” in Huitième congrès international d’études coptes (Paris 2004): I. Bilans et perspectives 2000–​2004, ed. Anne Boud’hors and Denyse Vaillancourt (Paris, 2006), 111–​26. 23

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appears in a range of monastic literary sources, and thus the attribution of anthropomorphism primarily to uneducated monks is no longer persuasive.27 The anthropomorphite episode of the first Origenist controversy, then, arose from the diversity of the monastic movement in Egypt (which was not unique to that region); varied traditions of prayer and Christology that had awkwardly coexisted for decades came into open conflict and generated charges of heresy, thanks to the heavy-​handed and clumsy intervention of Theophilus, who appears as an ambiguous and little loved figure in later monastic literature. Evagrius’ name is not mentioned in the sources for the first Origenist controversy, but Clark argues persuasively that his teachings about the fall of souls, the necessity to pray without any images (of God or anything else) in one’s mind, the eventual transformation of the body, and the final restoration of all rational beings to communion with God (the apokatastasis) lay behind the “Origenism” that Theophilus and others condemned. ( Jerome, indeed, seems to have realized Evagrius’ importance some years later.28) There is no doubt that Evagrius’ teachings motivated the second Origenist controversy, which roiled monastic communities in Palestine in the first half of the sixth century.29 He compellingly combined Origen’s cosmological vision of fall from and return to God with a carefully constructed and psychologically astute plan for the monastic life. The monk, he argued, advances from ascetic practice to knowledge (gnōsis) of nature and of God primarily by doing battle with demonically inspired “thoughts” (logismoi), which he systematized under eight demons (gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride). Many monastic teachers in the East tried to reap the benefits of Evagrius’ ascetic wisdom without appropriating his teachings on the fall of rational beings, the resurrected body, and the apokatastasis, which they considered of dubious orthodoxy. Others found it safer simply



Alexander Golitzin, “The Vision of God and the Form of Glory: More Reflections on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of a d 399,” in Abba:  The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West:  Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, ed. John Behr, Andrew Louth, and Conomos Dimitri (Crestwood, NY, 2003), 273–​ 97; Paul A. Patterson, Visions of Christ:  The Anthropomorphite Controversy of 399 CE (Tübingen, 2012). 28 Clark, Origenist Controversy. 29 Franz Diekamp, Die origenistischen Streitigkeiten im sechsten Jahrhundert und das fünfte allgemeine Konzil (Münster, 1899); Antoine Guillaumont, Les “Kephalaia Gnostica” d’Évagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origénisme chez les Grecs et chez les Syriens (Paris, 1962); Daniël Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy: A New Perspective on Cyril of Scythopolis’ Monastic Biographies as Historical Sources for Sixth-​Century Origenism (Rome, 2001). 27

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to avoid completely Origen, Evagrius, and the elevated intellectual problems that their works raised. In Palestine, open conflict between proponents and critics of Evagrian Origenism divided the Great Laura, the monastic community that John Sabas had founded in 483 in the desert near Jerusalem.30 Precisely why the conflict arose and became as virulent as it did may never be fully known, but it seems that a leadership failure in the Great Laura resulted in the formation of a group of intellectually inclined monks at the New Laura. Attracted to the theologies of Origen and Evagrius but, even more, simply to theological work as such, these monks coalesced into a genuine faction under the intellectual leadership of Nonnus and Leontius of Byzantium (d. 543). A power struggle ensued and was resolved by the Council of Constantinople in 553, which condemned Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus the Blind, another ascetic teacher of the fourth century whose theology drew on Origen. Part of the motivation for the condemnation was to lure back to the imperial Church miaphysite (“one-​nature”) Christians, who rejected the dyophysite (“two-​natures”) Christology of the Council of Chalcedon (451). The division between Chalcedonian and anti-​Chalcedonian Christians undermined the unity of the Byzantine Empire and vexed its emperors, who repeatedly tried in vain to end it. The condemnation of Origen and Origenists in 553 was one more such attempt: presumably the miaphysites would share disgust at such obvious heretics and their doctrines. It is unlikely that all the monks charged with Origenism shared the same beliefs or even espoused all of the condemned doctrines. Even hostile sources divide the Origenists into parties; one group, for example, was called Isochristoi because they allegedly taught that the fully redeemed human soul would enjoy equality with the soul of Christ in the apokatastasis. Leontius of Byzantium may have earned the label “Origenist” because his Christology’s stress on the two natures of Christ resisted a trend toward greater accommodation of miaphysite sensibilities and because he embraced theological speculation and tolerance for a variety of viewpoints.31 Charges of heretical Origenism, then, served a variety of purposes: rapprochement between dyophysites and miaphysites, securing of one set of leaders over against another, contesting the place of intellectual study and speculation in the monastic life, and

John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ:  The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–​631 (Oxford and New York, 1994), 201–​17. On the Great Laura, see the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 31 Brian Daley, “The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 27 (1976): 333–​69.

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determining the limits of acceptable theological diversity within monastic communities. Evagrian Origenism’s emphasis on transformation of the self (intellect, soul, and body) suggested a fluidity of boundaries that troubled some monastic and ecclesiastical leaders.

(Semi-​)Pelagianism If Origen’s cosmic vision of fall and return attracted charges of heresy among monastic communities in the eastern Mediterranean, it was his emphasis on human freedom and optimism about the possibility of human perfection that became problematic in the Latin-​speaking West—​at least for Augustine. Although Augustine converted to an ascetic Christian lifestyle that sought not only to know the good but also to do it, by the turn of the fifth century he was developing a theology of grace that undercut any pretension to achieving spiritual and moral perfection in this life, at the level both of the individual and of the Church. His version of monasticism emphasized pursuit of a perfect community of love, exemplified by the sharing of possessions, rather than pursuit of individual perfection.32 In contrast, the British monk Pelagius stressed traditional themes of human freedom and cooperation with God’s grace in response to the Bible’s call to a life of righteousness, a message that understandably resonated with the monastic life of disciplined self-​improvement.33 As Origen had developed his theology in part to defend the justice of God, who could not be arbitrary in his dealings with human beings, so too Pelagius argued that God would judge human beings fairly. And should not monks and virgins receive a greater reward for their greater virtue? John Cassian attacked Pelagian views from a monastic perspective in his Conferences: like Augustine, he emphasized absolute reliance on God’s grace, but, unlike Augustine, he attempted to preserve and even to measure more precisely the monastic project of advance in virtue.34 The condemnation of Pelagius and his supporters as heretics in 418 hardly put to rest the questions raised by these competing and overlapping views. Scholars once constructed a single “Semi-​Pelagian Controversy” from conflicts over divine grace and human free will that engaged bishops and monks in the West from the 420s to the Council of Orange in 529. The

Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), 45–​83 and 157–​79. Rudolf Lorenz, “Die Anfänge des abendländischen Mönchtums im 4.  Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengechichte 77 (1966): 36–​8. 34 Conrad Leyser, “Lectio Divina, Oratio Pura: Rhetoric and the Techniques of Asceticism in the Conferences of John Cassian,” in Modelli di santità e modelli di compartamento, ed. Giulia Barone et al. (Turin, 1994), 79–​105. 32 33

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term “semi-​Pelagian,” however, was invented in the early modern era, and scholars now understand these conflicts as attempts to appropriate the teachings of both Augustine and Cassian in response to competing views that stressed either predestination or human freedom too strongly.35 It is worth remembering that it was Augustine’s teachings that initially elicited concerns about extremism among monks at Hadrumetum in North Africa in 427 and that Vincent of Lérins (d. c. 450) shortly thereafter complained of “predestinarians” who he alleged took divine election as permission for moral laxity. Discussion of Augustine’s teachings continued through the remainder of the fifth century, but conflict flared anew around 520, when monks from the Dobrudja (on the western shore of the Black Sea) arrived in the West and tried to stir up opposition to Faustus of Riez (d. c. 490) as insufficiently orthodox on the necessity of divine grace. In his work On Grace, Faustus had condemned Pelagius, but he also opposed any “predestinarianism” that left humanity completely helpless after the fall. In a manner similar to the charges of Origenism in the East during this period, accusations of Pelagianism were linked to Christology, especially to an alleged “Nestorian” emphasis on the two natures. The Council of Orange restated the Augustinian position on grace in a way that cohered with the monastic discipline that had become dominant in Gaul: the required grace given at baptism, it argued, empowers the human will to persevere in pursuit of the moral life.

Conclusion According to Jerome, as diverse as they were, the heretics Origen, Priscillian, Evagrius, Pelagius, the Manichaeans, and the Messalians shared one opinion: “that it is possible for human virtue and knowledge to attain perfection, by which I mean not merely likeness, but equality with God.”36 This statement exemplifies in a monastic context two heresiological strategies: the exaggeration of the opponent’s position to an unacceptable extreme (equality with God!) and the linking of disparate groups into a diabolical genealogy (all go back to Origen).37 But perhaps Jerome was onto something about heterodoxy and monasticism in late antiquity. Early monasticism was about experimentation: monks transgressed the expected and the established to seek new

Conrad Leyser, “Semi-​Pelagianism,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Fitzgerald et al. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), 761–​6. Jerome, Dialogue with the Pelagians, prol.1, trans. in Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks, 92. 37 Susanna Elm, “The Polemical Use of Genealogies: Jerome’s Classification of Pelagius and Evagrius Ponticus,” Studia Patristica 33 (1997): 311–​18. 35

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forms of community and greater experiences of prayer and contemplation; many of them drew inspiration for their projects of self-​transformation and pursuit of perfection from theologies that can be traced to Origen. And yet community and moral progress also seemed to require both stable social structures (at least for the transmission of wisdom) and personal humility, that is, recognition of what one could not do, at least not on one’s own. Even among and between monks, central values of continuity, humility, and stability could come into conflict with equally compelling values of innovation, perfection, and transformation—​and generate charges of heresy.

Bibliography Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–​631. Oxford and New York, 1994. Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford, 1995.   “Research and Publications in Egyptian Monasticism, 2000–2004.” In Huitième congrès international d’études coptes (Paris 2004):  I.  Bilans et perspectives 2000–2004, edited by Anne Boud’hors and Denyse Vaillancourt, 111–26. Paris, 2006. Burrus, Virginia. The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy. Berkeley, CA, 1995. Caner, Daniel. Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Berkeley, CA, 2002. Choat, Malcolm. “Philological and Historical Approaches to the Search for the ‘Third Type’ of Egyptian Monk.” In Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies, edited by Mat Immerzeel and Jacques Van der Vliet, 857–​65. Leuven, 2004. Clark, Elizabeth A. The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate. Princeton, NJ, 1992. Daley, Brian. “The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium.” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 27 (1976): 333–​69. Diekamp, Franz. Die origenistischen Streitigkeiten im sechsten Jahrhundert und das fünfte allgemeine Konzil. Münster, 1899. Elm, Susanna. “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 1994. Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg, PA, 1999. Hombergen, Daniël. The Second Origenist Controversy: A New Perspective on Cyril of Scythopolis’ Monastic Biographies as Historical Sources for Sixth-​Century Origenism. Rome, 2001. Judge, Edwin A. “The Earliest Use of Monachos for ‘Monk’ (P. Coll. Youtie 77) and the Origins of Monasticism.” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977): 72–​89. Leyser, Conrad. “Semi-​Pelagianism.” In Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan Fitzgerald et al., 761–​6. Grand Rapids, MI, 1999. Lundhaug, Hugo, and Lance Jenott. The Monastic Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Tübingen, 2015.

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The Invention of Western Monastic Literature: Texts and Communities Rob e rto A lciati Monks, Ascetics, and Textual Communities The words “monk,” “monastery,” “monasticism,” and their derivations, which are still found in contemporary religious discourses and institutions, bear only a slight relationship to the forms of Christian ascetic life that flourished in the second half of the fourth century. At that stage in the movement, these forms were very diverse and closely interwoven with the local environment. The clearest example is the use of the Greek word monachos: not in evidence in non-​Christian literature, its first appearance dates to 180, and it was first used as a technical term defining a separated group of persons in an Egyptian papyrus from 324.1 Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339)  and Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373)  were probably the writers who first introduced this set of words into literary texts, and, consequently, the earliest known use of the word monachus in Latin is found in the anonymous translation of Athanasius’ Life of Antony (originally written in Greek around 357; available in Latin by 373)2. The same observation could be made for the word monasterium: this new Latin word appeared for the first time in the translation of this same text made by Evagrius of Antioch



Edwin A. Judge, “The Earliest Use of Monachos for ‘Monk’ (P. Coll. Youtie 77)  and the Origins of Monasticism,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977):  72–​89; Samuel Rubenson, “Mönchtum I:  Idee und Geschichte.” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 24 (2012):  1011. On the relationship between asceticism and monasticism, see now Roberto Alciati, “Norm and Exercise: A Useful Pair of Lenses,” in Norm and Exercise: Christian Asceticism between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, ed. R. Alciati (Stuttgart, 2018), 13–​23. 2 L.  W. Barnard, “The Date of S.  Athanasius’ Vita Antonii,” Vigiliae Christianae 28 (1974): 169–​75; Ludovicus T. A. Lorié, Spiritual Terminology in the Latin Translations of the Vita Antonii (Nijmegen, 1955), 2. See also now the two introductory texts in Vitae Antonii versiones latinae. Vita beati Antonii abbatis Evagrio interprete. Versio uetustissima, ed. Lois Gandt and Pascal Bertrand, CCSL 170. 1

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(d. after 392), in which the term is always used (except once) to translate the Greek equivalent.3 Because of this, we commonly consider the biography of Antony and its Latin translations to be the first texts comprising the dossier known as “monastic literature.” Even if the old theory, which traced the monastic impulse in all corners of the empire back to an original Egyptian inspiration with a supposed persistent dispute between the eremitic and the cenobitic forms of life, has proven to be a literary fiction, Antony (d. 356) is still placed at the very beginning of any literary history of the monastic movement. But the image of Antony as the father of Christian monasticism is more correctly a product of its subsequent success, multiplied in turn by the success of the vita.4 Even if the Life of Antony offers little evidence for the historical origins of monasticism, an interpretative dispute grew up around the authenticity of its model, especially in the West. This literary fortune may be represented with the scheme of a family tree in which biological and social bonds are schematically drawn. Such a tree is better known as a stemma, and for the student of ancient literatures and philology, the process of building a stemma to schematize the relationships between manuscripts has always been the basis of textual analysis, because this is the starting point for any critical edition. If we look at monastic literature with this stemmatic method, at the bottom of our ideal diagram the extant textual evidence has been classified according to the language in which each text was written. The middle level is the most significant; here we see the main division of the texts between Eastern and Western recensions. Finally, at the top of the stemma we have the archetype from which all copies are supposed to derive. In our case, the archetype is the Life of Antony, whose value has been deeply analyzed and judged—​explicitly or otherwise. Nevertheless, as with any “origins,” monastic origins and their literature are a discontinuous, complex, and contradictory process. To write the history of monastic literature, therefore, means to reconstruct declaratory processes that led to the invention of a past monastic unity or canon. This canon was defined by a few Church fathers: Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339), who was probably the first for the Greek-​speaking world; and Rufinus (d. c. 410), Jerome (d. 420), and the Gallic ascetic circles, who were the mediators to the Latin part of the empire.

Lorié, Spiritual Terminology. An overview is now provided in Roberto Alciati, Monaci d’Occidente. Secoli IV–​IX (Rome, 2018), 72–​7. 4 James E. Goehring, “The Origins of Monasticism,” in Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata (Leiden, 1992), 235–​55. 3

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Mediation means to make texts available, often in different languages. When this process starts, the power of authors and exegetes to impose an “authorized” reading is ranged against the power of the reader to generate new interpretations.5 One manifestation of this power exercised over and through texts was the development of communities whose life and identity revolved around reading, writing, and living in accordance with particular texts. Latin monastic literature was born with these “textual communities”: that is, social groups organized around the common understanding of a text. Such a textual community need not be entirely composed of literates, because the minimal requirement is just one literate, the interpres, who understands a set of texts and is able to pass its message on verbally to others.6 Within each textual community, literates, unlettered, and semi-​lettered members are linked together and the main consequence of this interpretive action is a mixture of oral and written communication, which has the powerful aim to create an other-​world. For these religious virtuosi, texts are steps by which members climb toward perfection.7 This approach allows the history of monasticism to fragment into a series of (more or less) rival textual communities in which the relationships that comprise the ideal triangle of reader–​interpreter–​texts make the difference; the effects of shared readings or recitations8 are central to the formation of a group’s hermeneutic practices.9 This interpretative model has a twofold advantage. First, it offers scholars a greater awareness of (and with it, the possibility of emancipation from) the conditioning caused by the set of sources, here by the stemma that the “fathers” created for their own purposes. Second, it reveals the network of relationships established reciprocally among the “actors” in the community. It was both latent and blatant disputes about the texts that produced the canon of monastic literature.



Alan K. Bowman and Greg Wolf, “Literacy and Power in the Ancient World,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Wolf (Cambridge, 1994),  1–​16. 6 On the concept of the textual community, see Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1990). 7 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 90. 8 On recitation in monasticism, see Lillian I. Larsen, “The Aphophtegmata Patrum: Rustic Rumination or Rhetorical Recitation,” Meddelanden från Collegium Patristicum Lundense 23 (2008): 21–​30. 9 David Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity:  Towards a New History of the New Testament Canon,” in Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation:  Discursive Fights over Religious Traditions in Antiquity, ed. Anders-​Christian Jacobsen, D. Brakke, and Jörg Ulrich (Frankfurt am Main, 2012), 263–​80. 5

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EX ORIENTE LUX

Western Interpretations of the Eastern Christian Way of  Life The fortune of the Life of Antony offers a good example of these competing interpretations, especially if we look at the moment when the text reached the Latin West. Here, a comparison among the surviving witnesses shows, for example, how much the language used in the two Latin translations of Athanasius’ Greek biography changes. The description of Antony at the beginning of his monastic life is an interesting case in point:  according to Athanasius, Antony “devoted himself from then on to the exercise (askesis) rather than the household, giving heed to himself (prosechon eauto)” (Life of Antony 3). Here Athanasius uses two ancient philosophical concepts: prosoche (attention) and askesis (exercise). The earliest anonymous Latin translation rendered these two terms with the words attendere and studium deificans. Evagrius of Antioch simply omitted them. His decision may be interpreted as a negative evaluation of the philosophical tradition, which he considered to be a source of error or heresy.10 But it also reveals a trace of a selective process that should be read as a deliberate attempt to define—​or invent—​ the “authentic” or orthodox monastic way of life for a Latin (i.e. Western) audience. Evagrius’ translation seems undoubtedly to have played a crucial role in the spreading of the Eastern ascetic ideal, if we are to believe Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). In Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine and his friend Alypius were visited in Milan in the summer of 386 by Ponticianus, a high court official. During their conversation, this visitor discovered a copy of Paul’s epistles lying open on Augustine’s gaming table and, believing his hosts to be Christians like himself, told them about the story of Antony. Augustine became familiar with two other related issues at the same time: the organization of a group of monastic communities by Ambrose (d. 397) in the suburbs of Milan and the story of the conversion of two members of the emperor’s court at Trier by their reading of the Vita Antonii (Confessions 8.6.15). Augustine was deeply shaken and cried out:  “What is wrong with us? What does it mean what you heard? Uneducated people (indocti) are rising up and capturing heaven



10

Mark Sheridan, “Mapping the Intellectual Genome of Early Christian Monasticism,” in Church, Society and Monasticism: Acts of the International Symposium, Rome, May 31–​ June 3, 2006, ed. Eduardo López-​Tello García and Benedetta S. Zorzi (Rome, 2006), 323–​40.

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[Matt. 11:12], and we with our high culture without any heart (cum doctrinis nostris sine corde), we roll in the mud of flesh and blood” (8.8.19).11 This simple mention of Antony made everything clearer in Augustine’s mind and immediately provoked a reaction: “there was a small garden attached to the house we lodged: now the landlord, our patron did not use this space. I now found myself driven by the torment in my heart … and so I retreated to this garden (abscessi ergo in hortum), suddenly followed by Alypius” (8.8.19). We do not know if Augustine was also shocked by the reading of the Life of Antony, but in c­ hapter 72 (of the Evagrius translation) there is a dramatic scene that seems quite similar to Augustine’s conversion. When Antony saw a group of philosophers approaching him, he said: If you come to me, a foolish man (stultum), your labor is superfluous; but if you consider me wise (sapientem) also, the wisdom is a good thing that you consider to be imitated, because it is right to imitate good things. If I had come to you, I would have imitated you, but because you have come to me as to a wise man, you will be Christian as I am. They departed (abscesserunt) feeling admiration for his high intelligence (acumen ingenii) and seeing how he put all demons to flight.12

The wise philosophers discovered another wisdom, the foolish wisdom of the ascetic way of life, and came back transformed. Similarly, the highly educated Augustine moved to the backyard, the hortus of the villa, firmly intending to begin a new way of life. This is the foundation of the community of Cassiciacum, at the end of 386. Augustine’s interpretation of the ascetic life is the Christian version of the otium liberale: no desert or withdrawal from the world, but a restful life animated by conversations in a bookish atmosphere. Jerome’s approach was radically different. In 382, after visiting the eastern Mediterranean, he went back to Rome and was warmly welcomed by Pope Damasus (366–​84) and the heterogeneous world of the Roman aristocracy. Here he met Paula (d. c. 404), a wealthy Christian widow, Marcella (d. 410), the founder of an emerging ascetic circle, and many others. These women were especially attracted to and fascinated by his depiction of the ascetic life in the East.13 Three years before, he had finished his first biography of an Eastern ascetic, Paul of Thebes (d. c.  342), whom he presented as the real founder of the Egyptian ascetic way of life. The success of the Life of Antony

Translation adapted from Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991). Athanasius, The Life of Saint Antony, trans. Robert T. Meyer (Westminster, MD, 1950). Franca E. Consolino, “Tradizionalismo e trasgressione nell’élite senatoria romana: ritratti di signore fra la fine del IV e l’inizio del V secolo,” in Le trasformazioni delle élites in età tardoantica, ed. Rita Lizzi (Rome, 2006), 65–​139.

11 12

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convinced many that he was the first monk, but Jerome asserted that he had learned from two of Antony’s disciples, Amathas and Macarius, that Paul had moved to the desert many years earlier and was there discovered by Antony. In the prologue, Jerome writes that “seeing, then, that an account of Antony has been recorded in both Greek and Latin, I  have decided to write a few things about the beginning and end of Paul’s life, more because these things have been neglected than because of any talent on my part” (Life of Paul 1.3).14 The prologue to the Life of Paul and Jerome’s Letter 10 leave little doubt that Jerome’s intention was to write a sort of reply to Athanasius’ bestseller. Other items by Jerome to be listed among the key texts of early Latin monastic literature are surely the Life of Malchus—​or, to use Jerome’s title, On the Captive Monk (388–​91)—​and the Life of Hilarion (389–​91).15 At the beginning of the first biography, Jerome claims that he heard Malchus’ life story viva voce from Malchus (d. c. 390) himself, whom he met in a small village south of Antioch around 375 (Life of Malchus 2.3). Because of his strong intention to become a monk, Malchus faced the opposition of his father and suddenly decided to leave the family house. His new home was the desert of Chalcis. After the death of his father, he desired to return to his town and see his mother, but he was kidnapped on the way. Having spent some time in captivity with a married woman who was captured during the same raid (and who committed herself to the same ideal of chastity during her captivity), both decided to escape. Thus begins a series of adventures during which all of their persecutors died. In the end, they settled down in a remote place and lived in complete chastity until death.16 The literary structure clearly follows that of Hellenistic romance, but with this new ascetic flavor and particular attention to its readers’ community: for instance, once settled, Malchus lived in chastity with a female slave who had decided to embrace the ascetic life after having met him. When Jerome wrote his third and last hagiography, he returned once more to Paul: “We despise voices of abuse of some who, as they once disparaged my Paul, will now perhaps disparage Hilarion” (Life of Hilarion 1). In other words, from the very start, the author wanted to report on the reception of the first text of the series, disparaged by some skeptical readers. This is an

Jerome, “The Life of St. Paul, the First Hermit,” trans. M. L. Ewald, in Early Christian Biographies: A New Translation, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC, 1952), 219–​38. 15 The chronology of this ascetic trilogy is still disputed. My dates are established in Pierre Leclerc, “Introduction,” in Jerome, Trois vies de moines (Paul, Malchus, Hilarion), ed. Edgardo M. Morales, trans. Pierre Leclerc, SC 508, 11–​72. 16 Jerome, Vita Malchi: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. Christa Gray (Oxford, 2015). 14

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important sign of an ongoing discussion and tensions between Athanasius’ Antony and Jerome’s Paul or, to be more precise, between the hagiographers Athanasius and Jerome. In fact, Antony’s presence in the Life of Hilarion is again very important: Hilarion, a very well-​educated man, went to the desert to become a disciple of Antony. Because too many followers flocked to him, he chose to leave Egypt and find another desert place. After traveling through  different parts of the Mediterranean, he decided to come back to his original land: Gaza in Palestine. From this moment, in Jerome’s eyes, the Palestinian desert could count its own hero, stemming from the tree rooted in Antony’s tradition, but proudly independent. It is important to stress just one element: Hilarion seems to be very similar to Antony. Even the literary structure of his vita echoes the biography written by Athanasius. But there is a crucial difference: Hilarion is a literate and cultured man. Here, clearly, “classical education and social respectability are harmonized with the ideal of Christian asceticism.”17 The last important interpretation of the Eastern ascetic way of life was made by Rufinus of Aquileia, the Latin translator of Basil of Caesarea. Rufinus, Jerome’s fierce opponent during the Origenistic controversy, had another reason to strike at his counterpart: divergence regarding the translation of the Greek ascetic corpus. The first round of the dispute took place in the mid-​390s in Palestine, when Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403) charged John of Jerusalem with Origenism and Rufinus aligned himself with John. Under attack, Rufinus defended his theological orthodoxy in a statement to Pope Anastasius and in his Apology against Jerome. Nevertheless, he continued to translate Origen’s writings until the time of his death in about 410. As Elizabeth Clark masterfully demonstrated, “students of early Christianity can readily guess that other, nontheological issues lay only slightly beneath the surface of the controversy.”18 Only portions of the discussions actually concerned Origen, while much dealt with ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the definition of the authentic monastic way of life.19 Jerome preferred biographies; Rufinus opted for rules and “handbooks.” And, as noted above, Rufinus was the great mediator to the West of Basil’s ascetic treatises, especially when, after he disembarked in Italy, he was very pleased to accept hospitality

Samuel Rubenson, “Philosophy and Simplicity: The Problem of Classical Education in Early Christian Biography,” in Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau (Los Angeles, 2000), 123. 18 Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy:  The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 14. 19 See the article by Brakke in this volume. 17

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in a monastery at “Pinetum” (somewhere near Terracina on the Tyrrhenian coast). As Rufinus related in his own prefatory letter, Ursacius, the abbot of the community, begged him to translate for his monks the Asketikon of so renowned an author. This text soon became known as the Rule of St. Basil (c. 397). Some years later, Rufinus translated Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from Greek into Latin (c. 403), compressing the original ten books into nine, and adding a further two of his own. These two sections contain the first mention of monasticism within a general history of the Church. The first insertion of monasticism in the ecclesiastical history thus dates back to the very beginning of the fifth century, and is in Latin. Another important translation related to asceticism is still known today under the title of the Sentences of Sextus. According to Rufinus, Sextus (or Xystus) was a man honored in Rome with the glory of being both a bishop and a martyr. His Latin translation of Sextus’ Sentences was meant to answer the request of the Roman aristocratic Avita, the wife of his friend Apronianus, for a manual of asceticism: as Rufinus wrote, the aspiration of the work is moral perfection (ad totius posit perfectionem vitae sufficere); it is not a pious entertainment, but an instrument to initiate people “into the studious practice of self-​discipline.”20 Jerome, however, condemned both the text and its translation because self-​discipline sounded to him like a return to non-​Christian philosophy—​a new otium with a false Christian attitude, totally unrelated to the “real” Eastern model.

(The Proper) Western Monasticism: Country Leisure and Familial Relationships If we move further to the west and north in these same years, this mix of a new Christian otium, engagement with biography (hagiography), and the coming together of well-​educated people still predominates. A singular example of original Latin monastic writing is the well-​known Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus (d. c. 425), completed around 397. At the beginning of the following century (c. 404), Sulpicius published his second work on Martin, the Dialogues. In this work, the genre has shifted from biography to something similar to a philosophical dialogue. Three main characters play a role in this work: Postumianus, a man who had just returned to Gaul after



Valerio Pevarello, The Sentences of Sextus and the Origins of Christian Asceticism (Tübingen, 2013), 18.

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visiting Jerome and making a journey in Egypt; Gallus, an ascetic who was said to have been a disciple of Martin; and, finally, Sulpicius himself.21 This group is a perfect example of Martin’s upper-​class sympathizers, members of the imperial governing staff, but at the same time people who maintained solid relationships and interests in their native region. After serving with distinction in the imperial administration, they often chose to return to their estates, devoting themselves to estate management and the upkeep of fields and vineyards. In writing Martin’s biography, Sulpicius was keen to stress how familiar Martin was with important landowners. As he passed by the estate of a certain Lupicinus, he restored to life a young slave who had hanged himself (Life of Martin 8.1); on another occasion, he rescued the estates of the ex-​prefect Auspicius in southern Gaul from devastation (Dialogues 3.7); at yet another time, he exorcized the slave of the former proconsul Tetradius, who then renounced his paganism to become a catechumen (Life of Martin 17). Sulpicius also lived in a villa, and he remained the dominus there even after his conversion to ascetic life. Although he described himself as an ascetic following the model of Martin, the passage from otium ruris (country leisure) to a real withdrawal from the world had yet to be fully achieved. Sulpicius’ Dialogues are noteworthy for their explicit mention of some young slaves (pueri) living in his estate at Primuliacum, where the Dialogues take place. They seem to be the members of a community who share a new way of life with the dominus.22 At the same time, this community is clearly organized around the reading and discussion of texts. On the second day of Postumianus’ conference (Dialogues 3.1.4), neighboring crowds of monks, clerics, and lay men appeared, who, as Clare Stancliffe notes, seemed “to live close enough to have got wind of the story-​telling session, and had come to join in.”23 These people were not members of this community per se, but may easily have embraced the same way of life and seem to have enjoyed the learned debates hosted at Sulpicius’ house, which is commonly defined by modern scholars as a monastery. The ascetic community based on the Lérinian islands, offshore from modern-​day Cannes, was also a monastery (or a series of monasteries). Lérins

Sulpicius Severus, Gallus. Dialogues sur les vertus de saint Martin, ed. Jacques Fontaine, SC 510. 22 On the uncertain and fluctuating boundaries of the monastic community, see also the article by Díaz in this volume. 23 Clare Stancliffe, St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford, 1983), 32. 21

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was founded in the early fifth century and many of its inhabitants are known to us. They appear to have been related to each other but their solidarity was also reinforced by their joint pursuit of literary interests.24 This was not simply the manifestation of their love of literature, but also a precise strategy intended to consolidate a textual community in a process not dissimilar to the examples offered above. Honoratus (d. 429), who was a member of a consular family, settled on the island c. 400–​410, and about ten years later, Eucherius (d. 449), another eminent Gallic aristocratic, arrived. Honoratus had come with a certain Caprasius, and later persuaded his young relative Hilary, the son of a prefect of Gaul, to join them there. Around 430, Eucherius composed a text entitled On the Renunciation of the World, in which he urges a young man (perhaps his relative Valeranius) to leave the secular world and embrace the ascetic life. Shortly before, in 425 or 426, the brothers Vincent and Lupus of Toul had also joined the community. Vincent had formerly been a secular official, and Lupus was the husband of Hilary’s sister, Pimeniola.25 Further, Sidonius Apollinaris (d. c.  489), a representative of the inner “governing circle” of the Rhone valley,26 describes a certain Antiolus, another member of the community, as “a cellmate of the Lupuses” (Luporum concellita; Letters 8.14.2). Finally, Salvian, who was possibly a native of Trier or Cologne, and who later became a priest at Marseille, arrived. All of these men wrote texts that are rightly considered the original nucleus of Latin monastic literature. They wrote letters (and collections of letters), encomia, poetry, exhortations to virginity, and sermons. As Conrad Leyser has said, at Lérins “monastic renunciation was no more or less than a more stringent and exacting rendition of the otium in which the governing elite expected to indulge between their exertions—​negotium—​on behalf of the state.”27 We can think of this series of texts as books on the shelf of the ancient Christian library. They (and their authors) may also, however, be thought of as products of the intersection between monasticism and social relationships. Such an approach provides us with a way to reflect on how textual



Ralph W. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-​Century Gaul (Washington, DC, 1989), 83. 25 Salvatore Pricoco, L’isola dei santi. Il cenobio di Lerino e le origini del monachesimo gallico (Rome, 1978) remains the best guide to Lérins. A useful update is available, however, in Yann Codou and Michel Lauwers, eds., Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2009). See also the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Lauwers in this volume. 26 Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2010), 404. 27 Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000), 34. 24

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communities took shape in late ancient Christianity.28 As noted above, a textual community was shaped not only by specific texts but also by familial bonds and relationships. Discussion about texts and conversation (and dispute) among authors implies the establishment of multiple kinds of relationships. The above-​ mentioned texts might bind together persons of highly asymmetrical social standing, such as patrons and clients. The relationship between teachers and pupils, for example, seems to have been very successful, not only in the realm of “pagan” philosophical schools but also in the ascetic realm.29 Textual production within such relationships normally took the form of exhortations (from the master monk to the would-​be monk), sets of stories and biographies of the ideal fathers of the ascetic life, or letters often written as short tractates about some different aspects of this new way of  life. At the time when the men discussed in the previous pages were writing, their valiant efforts were directed toward projecting an image of unity. In the real world, however, beyond writings on the ideal nature of the monastic community, “blood was always thicker than ink. For in late Roman Africa, as elsewhere, blood got things done.”30 By the early fifth century, monasticism was promoted as a source of prestige for family nobility: it was not only the monks themselves, but their whole family, who gained from their glory.31 In his treatise Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life, John Chrysostom (d. 407) pointed out that ascetics found approval everywhere and that their parents would be famous and honored alongside them (3.20–​1). He thus composed his treatise about monasticism, addressed precisely to fathers opposing their sons who wanted to be monks. He admonished them that they were wrong to be angry, and that monks were, in fact, conferring a great benefit on their sons, because ascetic communities offered a sort of boarding-​ school education. These monasteries were not schools proper—​monastic schools only came into being centuries later—​but they did provide training for the monastic life, an education, or more precisely “an apprenticeship, designed to discipline the body to enable the soul to live a life of prayer and

Kim Haines-​ Eitzen, “Textual Communities in Late Antique Christianity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Chichester and Malden, MA, 2009), 246–​57. 29 This is evident in late antique Gaul. See Roberto Alciati, Monaci, vescovi e scuola nella Gallia tardoantica (Rome, 2009). 30 Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–​550 AD (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 174. 31 Ville Vuolanto, “Children and the Memory of Parents in the Late Roman World,” in Childhood, Memory and Family Identity in Roman Culture, ed. Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth (Oxford, 2010), 178. See the article by Giorda in this volume. 28

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contemplation.”32 Unfortunately, Chrysostom did not describe in detail the kind of education the monks could offer, but would-​be monks were surely taught about monastic routine and various spiritual exercises for bodily and mental discipline.33 The clearest proof of the persistence of family solidarity in this context is the above-​mentioned community of Lérins, whose members were deeply interested in providing education to the boys living alongside them. Here, textual community is profoundly entangled with bonds of blood. Eucherius urged relatives to join him and he had himself resolutely taken his whole family—​his wife, Galla, and their two sons, Veranus and Salonius—​to the island. The two boys surely enjoyed the upper-​class culture of the environment, but did not become ascetics themselves. After being taught and trained by their father and other learned ascetics, they both became bishops in the surrounding area. Among their masters there was also Salvian, who had married a certain Palladia before his arrival and had a daughter, Auspiciola. All three appear to have entered into some kind of monastic seclusion at the same time.

Friendship and Litteratura All of the ascetic and monastic circles mentioned above were entirely constructed around these three pillars:  family, as we have seen, friendship, and litteratura (the last understood here as literacy and textuality). Regarding the pairing of friendship and litteratura, the dialogues written by Augustine in this period, which reflect communal discussion, may also be considered among the first texts belonging to Western monastic literature; in fact, even if framed in a classical philosophical environment, one finds in them a vivid description of the ascetic ideal. In one of the dialogues that took place at Cassiciacum (On Order), the topic was progress. It is discussed from a scientific and moral point of view in Book 1 and examined as a component of two schemas for self-​progress in Book 2, namely the practice of the ascetic life and the study of liberal arts. In the preface, Augustine tells us something about the setting in which the conversations took place as a sort of externalizing of inner dialogues. Here we discover that the location was a borrowed villa some distance from Milan, where, in the company of pupils, friends,

John H.  W.  G. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose and John Chrysostom:  Clerics between Desert and Empire (Oxford, 2011), 111. 33 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life:  Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA, 1995).

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and relatives, he was free to pursue a number of ethical questions. These discussions were taken down by secretaries, and the record, after correction and revision, became the “dialogues” as we know them (On Order 1.2.5). These erudite persons had both ascetic and philosophical motives. They resisted “transitory things, and the passions, and by fleeing these, live a life of moral purity” in order to reach the knowledge of God.34 In this environment, those who were able to reach divine contemplation were also eruditi; in other words, they were able to bring together in unity what was spread about in various branches of learning. This complex process was possible because, in addition to biological ties and philosophical conversations, textual communities were animated by familiaritas, a sense of intimate friendship between individuals. A  familiaris could be a companion or a relative involved, with a counterpart, in a relationship, for example, of patron and client, which over the years took on the more intimate form of a relationship between two like-​minded friends. Moreover, familiaritas seems to describe life in community better than individual friendship.35 Asceticism, implying chastity, is normally intended as a way to end biological succession. But this does not mean, even if some ascetic texts seem to advocate for it, that the relationship with one’s offspring and other family members had to disappear or be neglected, especially when the members of a textual community belonged to well-​established Roman senatorial families. This was the case for Paulinus of Nola (d. 431), another illustrious man who turned to the ascetic life in Campania. Unlike Augustine, Paulinus established an ascetic community from his own personal wealth with a clear purpose: not to promote obedience to a monastic rule, but rather to reconfigure the tradition of Roman patronage in a very traditional place, the Roman villa. The project started with a progressive differentiation from his master, the grammarian, rhetor, and poet Ausonius of Bordeaux (d. c. 395). Careful readings of Ausonius’ writings enable us to feel the texture of “a confidential ‘worldly’ Christianity” very different from the Christianity of the younger generation of his pupil Paulinus. Ausonius was a Christian; Paulinus was a Christian too, but, as Peter Brown has argued, “by the 390s, the old man’s Christianity was out-​of-​date (or, rather, it had been declared to be out-​of-​date by a small but vocal minority in the churches of the Latin West).”36

Brian Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue:  The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2010), 147. Brian P. McGuire, Friendship and Community:  The Monastic Experience, 350–​ 1250 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1988), 152–​3. 36 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 202. 34 35

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Ausonius was a representative of the Christianity of the earlier generation, “still … at ease in the world” and unable to understand the renunciation of “treasure on earth … so that it could become treasure in heaven.”37 This renunciation was, however, either actually or rhetorically, central to the conversion of Paulinus and of several other Western ascetics who considered the East (and Egypt in particular) their ideal homeland. What Brown once wrote about ancient Christianity could now be applied to the rise of Christian monasticism in the West: “the question which faced [monks] in the world of late antiquity was how much of the past could be put in the past, and how much could be allowed to linger in the present.”38 Paulinus’ new life conditions led him to reject the literary otium learned by his master. If late antique hagiography leaves “the impression of an ongoing, even restless experimentation at work,”39 this experimentation, surely related to the process of defining male sanctity, is quite clear in the case of Paulinus. He completely reshaped his poetic writings within a hagiographic and ascetic framework and found new colleagues in the province of the empire in which asceticism and litteratura had celebrated their marriage—​southern Gaul, where Lérinian monasticism and Martin’s companions had established the criteria for Latin monastic literature. And, just as in Italy with Jerome and Rufinus, the dispute was once more about the definition of a real and authentic genealogical tree of ancient monasticism. The unceasing weaving of texts was the result of competition, and its goal was paideia. What mattered was not simply an education, but a comprehensive intellectual, moral, cultural, and social formation of young men (and young women). Exactly as in non-​Christian society, this new paideia produced men of knowledge, prestige, and power, the accumulation of which produced symbolic power, because paideia served as both a point of reference and a place of competition in this confrontation between rival textual communities with their rival approaches to monastic life.40 This was a competition—​overt or not—​among different micro-​societies organized around the common understanding of a script or a series of scripts.41



Ibid., 207. Peter Brown, “Conversion and Christianization in Late Antiquity:  The Case of Augustine,” in The Past Before Us:  The Challenge of Historiographies of Late Antiquity, ed. Carole Straw and Richard Lim (Turnhout, 2004), 116. In the original we read “Christians” instead of “monks.” 39 Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of the Saints:  An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 24; see also the article by Diem and Rapp in this volume. 40 See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-​Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (Beverly Hills, CA, 1970). 41 Stock, Listening for the Text, 23. 37

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The rhetorical quest for unity and harmony tended to hide the extent to which the community of authors was itself a “field of struggle between agents endowed with an objectively orchestrated habitus.”42 All of these writers were interested in promoting their own definitions of proper monasticism over alternative typologies. Their supposed theology as a unified whole is a later category, and one not undisputed in late antiquity.43 What we can define as an accumulation of cultural goods seems to have been particularly successful within the monastic groups that spread rapidly in Gaul and Italy from the second half of the fourth century. Within this particular area, textual communities appeared with their own faces; there was no clear distinction between monks and lay men, no reluctance toward ascetic family, and no seclusion in a desert. Consequently, the definition of “true monasticism” became an important element of ecclesiastical and, more generally, religious factionalism. The continuous dialogue with experienced masters and their written texts was the way to frame the orthodox monastic way of life within the mainly aristocratic Christiana societas.

Conclusion The final outcome of this process is a collection of texts that we now may rightly consider to be the first body of Western monastic literature. There is, however, at least one other phase that needs to be mentioned. All of these authors described and promoted their own ascetic ideals, but a second important selection occurred. Several centuries later, Carolingian scribes organized Christian literature as we know it: that is, they defined the canon and what today constitutes the Latin patristic tradition. This literary corpus was irreversibly shaped by decisions taken in the eighth and ninth centuries.44 The term “canon” to mean the Church fathers, taken for granted from the central Middle Ages until now and used as the rough equivalent of “early Christian writers,” still awaits the scrutiny of a historicizing approach.45

Pierre Bourdieu and Monique de Saint Martin, “La sainte famille: l’épiscopat français dans le champ du pouvoir,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 44–​5 (1982): 21. 43 Philip Rousseau, “The Historiography of Asceticism:  Current Achievements and Future Opportunities,” in The Past Before Us:  The Challenge of Historiography of Late Antiquity, ed. Carole Straw and Richard Lim (Turnhout, 2004), 89–​101. 44 On these fundamental but neglected issues, see Conrad Leyser, “Late Antiquity in the Medieval West,” in Rousseau, Companion to Late Antiquity, 29–​42 and 539–​55; and the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 45 A remarkable analysis of the literary history of ancient Christianity is Mark Vessey, “Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (New York, 2008), 42–​65. For a good example of this relentlessness, in the case of the “new” patristic 42

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Looking at the long history of the Life of Antony, we mentioned the original Greek and the two extant Latin translations; this biography has been transmitted, however, in many other languages and, as in the case of the Syriac version, with substantial differences from the Athanasius’ text.46 A similar and comparable situation can be observed with the Saying of the Desert Fathers. While this collection has long been regarded as the most faithful representation of the attitudes of the earliest Egyptian Desert Fathers, it passed through several stages of oral and written transmission. The Sayings are preserved in various collections in all the languages of the Christian tradition. As Samuel Rubenson has clearly pointed out, “these collections are eventually the result of a long development during which single sayings and minor collections were incorporated into what became, in each language, one or sometimes two comprehensive standard types of collections.”47 Consequently, historians started to doubt the usefulness and reliability of both the Life of Antony and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers for reconstructing the history of early monasticism.48 Although the Sayings is a text that seems to compile many classic, timeless teachings that have stood the test of time, we must be aware that the intention of the editors was to bring order to a complex, and perhaps even contradictory, history, and to project an image of unity. This same caveat applies when we read the biographies written by Jerome or the comparisons with the Egyptian way of life made in the texts of Sulpicius and the men of Lérins. With this awareness, however, our stock of sources can be seen in a new light. At the end of the fourth century, old questions seem to have returned to the stage. Like Clement of Alexandria wondering two centuries earlier whether the rich man would be saved (quis diues saluetur), monastic settlers and authors were defining the ascetic way of life, keeping in mind who the “real” monk was and, consequently, which monk would be saved by his own way of life. Just as evil existed in the world and Christians needed



library established at the imperial abbey of Lorsch in the middle of the eight century, see Julia Becker, “Präsenz, Normierung und Transfer von Wissen:  Lorsch als ‘patristische Zentralbibliothek’,” in Karolingische Klöster. Wissenstransfer und kulturelle Innovation, ed. Julia Becker, Tino Licht, and Stefan Weinfurter (Berlin, 2015), 71–​87. 46 For the status quaestionis, see Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis, MN, 1990), 126–​32. 47 Ibid., 145. See also on this Zachary B. Smith, Philosopher-​Monks, Episcopal Authority, and the Care of the Self: The Apophthegmata Patrum in Fifth-​Century Palestine (Turnhout, 2017),  25–​64. 48 The most recent assessment of this issue is available in Samuel Rubenson, “The Formation and Re-​Formation of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers,” in Studia Patristica 55, Vol. 3: Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia, ed. Samuel Rubenson (Leuven, 2013), 5–​21.

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to know where it came from, so too did bad ascetic ways of life exist in the monastic world. Correct forms of life had to be preserved and, it was hoped, spread. But, in doing this, ascetics were asked to turn to order, to norm; thus, what we now call monastic Christianity emerged. It was not the whole of Christianity but a portion of Christian society, now shaped by norm and order. As such, it did not constitute a universal law applicable to the entire society but “the framework and prototype of ‘righteousness’ and order per se.”49

Bibliography Alciati, Roberto. “And the Villa Became a Monastery: Sulpicius Severus’ Community of Primuliacum.” In Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, 85–​98. Turnhout, 2011.   Monaci, vescovi e scuola nella Gallia tardoantica. Rome, 2009. Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle:  Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–​550 AD. Princeton, NJ, 2012. Burrus, Virginia. The Sex Lives of the Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia, PA, 2004. Codou, Yann, and Michel Lauwers, eds. Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge. Turnhout, 2009. Consolino, Franca E. “Tradizionalismo e trasgressione nell’élite senatoria romana: ritratti di signore fra la fine del IV e l’inizio del V secolo.” In Le trasformazioni delle élites in età tardoantica, edited by Rita Lizzi, 65–​139. Rome, 2006. Graumann, Thomas. “The Conduct of Theology and the ‘Fathers’ of the Church.” In A Companion to Late Antiquity, edited by Philip Rousseau, 539–​55. Chichester and Malden, MA, 2009. Kloppenborg, John S. “Literate Media in Early Christian Groups:  The Creation of a Christian Book Culture.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22 (2014): 21–​59. Leyser, Conrad. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford, 2000.   “Late Antiquity in the Medieval West.” In A Companion to Late Antiquity, edited by Philip Rousseau, 29–42. Chichester and Malden, MA, 2009. Mathisen, Ralph W. Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-​Century Gaul. Washington, DC, 1989. McGuire, Brian P. Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–​1250. Kalamazoo, MI, 1988. Pevarello, Valerio. The Sentences of Sextus and the Origins of Christian Asceticism. Tübingen, 2013. Pricoco, Salvatore. L’isola dei santi. Il cenobio di Lerino e le origini del monachesimo gallico. Rome, 1978.

Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding (Albany, NY, 1988), 320.

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Invention of Western Monastic Literature Rousseau, Philip. “The Historiography of Asceticism: Current Achievements and Future Opportunities.” In The Past Before Us: The Challenge of Historiography of Late Antiquity, edited by Carole Straw and Richard Lim, 89–​101. Turnhout, 2004. Rubenson, Samuel. “Mönchtum I:  Idee und Geschichte.” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 24 (2012): 1009–​54. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ, 1983.   Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore, MD, and London, 1990. Vessey, Mark. “Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, 42–​65. New York, 2008.

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Monastic Rules (Fourth to Ninth Century) A l b re cht Die m a n d P hilip Rousseau

Introduction: A History Created Backwards In a study of late antique and early medieval monastic rules in the West, one logical starting point is Benedict of Aniane’s early ninth-​ century Codex regularum. We depend to an enormous degree on the sources that he has provided for us. The Codex (in the Munich manuscript, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28118)  is by far the most extensive early medieval collection of monastic rules: twenty-​four rules for monks and six rules for nuns.1 Many of them would probably have been lost if Benedict of Aniane had not collected and preserved them. He also produced a second work, the Concordia regularum, in which he arranged most of the material of his collection so that it corresponded thematically, chapter by chapter, with what we now think of as the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), and what he thought of as the work of the sixth-​century Benedict of Nursia. Both works, the Codex and the Concordia, formed part of his endeavor to promote the RB as a rule for all Frankish monasteries. He wanted to show that the RB formed the culmination of a rich tradition of monastic norms (not excluding exemplars from the East). Benedict of Aniane’s work has had a deep impact on virtually all subsequent understanding of the origins of Western monastic life. In 1661 and 1663, the German humanist Lucas Holstenius published his own Codex regularum, which included most of Benedict’s collection, along with a few rules from other manuscripts and a number of late antique and early medieval ascetic treatises. A  later edition and expansion of this work by Marianus Brockie Albrecht Diem’s contribution to this chapter was made possible by the SFB F 4202 “Visions of Community,” funded by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF), the Faculty of History and Cultural Sciences of the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Science. 1 On the manuscript dissemination of early medieval monastic rules, see www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org (date of last access: 18 August 2018).

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formed the basis of J. P. Migne’s reprint in the Patrologia Latina (most of it in PL 103), which is still not entirely replaced by modern critical editions.2 We shall argue here, however, that we should not necessarily read Benedict of Aniane’s work as he intended it to be read. It represents a misleadingly tidy picture of what was much less ordered in its development, and imposes on early sources a meaning and purpose that they did not always possess at the time of their original composition. Moreover, Benedict has also implanted in the mind of modern historians an image of monastic life as essentially governed by a written rule. The Codex regularum, which is vaguely organized chronologically, regionally, and by gender, could be and was read as a history book depicting the emergence of Latin monasticism as a chain of changing normative observances. While the texts may have been slightly different from each other, the Codex wants its reader to believe in a basic and stable principle:  that monasteries followed rules, according to the precept of the RB itself that the cenobitic life can only exist sub regula vel abbate (RB 1.2; RM 1.2). In this chapter, therefore, we want to mount an experiment: to see what happens if we step away from this early ninth-​century paradigm of a “life following a written rule” and give what we shall call more loosely “normative observance” a genesis and a history of its own, concluding that Benedict of Aniane’s notion of a regularized monastic life was a skillfully crafted construct that served the purpose of promoting his own understanding of what it meant to “follow” the RB.

The World of the Pioneers It has to be said at the outset that this approach presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, ascetic literature (from at least the fourth century onwards) includes texts habitually thought of as “rules”: today we may speak, even write, of the “Rules of Pachomius,” the “Rules of Basil,” the “Rule of Augustine,” even though the pioneers themselves rarely used the term regula when referring to those texts. On the other hand, before the end of the sixth century it is difficult to identify ordered communities of ascetics (such as we customarily think of as “monasteries”) living according to a single set of written prescriptions. Are we suggesting, therefore, that Benedict of Aniane “invented” a Vorgeschichte (pre-​history) of the RB, concocting an illusory sequence of pioneer rule-​writers? Obviously not. It needs to be stressed

Lucas Holstenius and Marianus Brockie, Codex regularum monasticarum et canonicarum, 2 vols. (Augsburg, 1759). A complete list of the abbreviations used for rules is to be found at the end of this chapter.

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rather that his “history book” tells only a fraction of the story of the rise of Western monasticism. Pachomius (d. 348), Basil (d. 379), and Augustine (d. 430), together with others of significance, really did exist and were eager to give some order to the ascetic life. What characterizes this early period is not so much the absence of that order as a confusion of terminology, an untidiness of development, and an obscurity of dependence.3 Let us begin with terminology. Scholars use the words “monks” and “monasteries” to translate many different terms referring to a great variety of fourth-​century situations, from a single individual living a life of focused devotion to groups of such enthusiasts numbering from two or three to tens or even hundreds; and both their persons and their dwellings could bear quite different names: apotaktikoi, spoudaioi, anachoretae; coenobia, cellae, laura.4 Even more to the point, these assemblies and establishments were rarely brought together or purpose-​built from scratch. In the earliest stages of ordered asceticism, existing urban or suburban families and households or rural small-​holdings, villages, or estates were co-​opted and expanded to new moral purposes.5 As Christianity experienced more public confidence after Constantine, such centers of ascetic devotion were extended to include pilgrims’ hostels and shelters for the destitute and sick, as well as new chapels, memorial shrines, and churches. So, we should not assume that the sancti patres whom Benedict of Aniane looked back to shaped a stable and forever repeated monastic model. We should think rather of “monasticisms” in the plural (although even that may make too formal a mark). An almost infinite variety of forms—​more or less communal, more or less ascetic—​played very different roles in a rapidly changing and geographically diverse society. A  monasterium in post-​Roman Gaul, for example, could be anything from the cell of a hermit or a community gathered around a charismatic individual (in a cave, on an island, in a city dwelling, or set in remote country—​as it were, “the desert”); to a monastically redefined aristocratic villa rustica, or a saint’s or martyr’s shrine with a monastic community adjoining; to an episcopal household, a community of clerics, or a monastery connected to an episcopal see; or, finally, to

See also the article by Helvétius in this volume. Claudia Rapp, Brother-​Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium:  Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual (Oxford, 2016). 5 Kimberly D. Bowes, “Inventing Ascetic Space: Houses, Monasteries and the ‘Archaeology of Asceticism’,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 315–​51. See also the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, Giorda, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 3

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an urban community of praying virgins and widows. Some “monasteries” could serve as hideouts for fugitive slaves or young aristocrats escaping from their family or state responsibilities; as re-​appropriations of pagan cult sites; as training camps for a future ecclesiastical elite; as places of forced retreat for clerics who committed a major transgression; as outposts of episcopal power; as missionary bases; as places of teaching, learning, and the preservation of knowledge; or as powerful factories of intercessory prayer for the surrounding world, for kings, bishops, and aristocrats.6 Even this list is not exhaustive and there are many examples of monasteries fulfilling more than one of these roles or changing their shape and function in the course of history. Each of these manifestations of monastic life reflects the society around it, and we can see in these mirrors much that might otherwise remain invisible. Indeed, in the changing face of monastic life, we observe transformations of the Roman world itself, which make the study of late antique and early medieval monasticism relevant within a much broader framework than just monastic or religious studies.7 An analogous amalgam characterizes the texts produced within and for all those different monastic communities. Material which it appears entirely appropriate to label prescriptive is constantly enfolded within corpora of writings different (or, perhaps better, complementary) in genre. An awareness of classical culture makes this entirely unsurprising. The pursuit of virtue had been governed for centuries by tested strategies recommended and demonstrated by acknowledged experts already distinguished by the authority of their moral success. This very fact implied in turn that, within certain “schools,” devotees felt or were made to feel a need to be “governed” in this sense; to cultivate trust, seek out talented and experienced instructors (or read their posthumous recommendations), and practice regular discipline and obedience. Such was the thrust of Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (contemporary with Jerome), imitating Philostratus who wrote nearly two centuries before him, and reaching back to the moralizing portraits of Plutarch. This may not have reflected a regulated way of life as Benedict of Aniane envisioned it; but the notion had long been in moralists’ minds nevertheless. So, even as we move into the more publicly Christian world, we discover a vast diversity of other texts that expressed “monastic” ideals, “monastic”

Renie S. Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford, 2017). 7 On the continuing monastic diversity in southern Italy and in Spain, see the articles by Ramseyer and Díaz in this volume. 6

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theology, and “monastic” discipline: ascetic treatises (like those of Evagrius and Cassian—​on whom more shortly), narrative texts (for example, the Historia monachorum, the Historia Lausiaca, the Verba seniorum, the Vitae Pachomii, or the Lives of the Fathers of the Jura), letters (like Caesarius’ Vereor), and sermons (like those of Faustus, Caesarius, and Ps.-​Ephrem the Syrian). In other words, there were regulae in the narrow sense but also regulae in a much broader sense. We shall return to this point; but it is worth saying at once that moral pedagogy, as it was subsequently inherited and developed within the Christian ascetic sphere, imposed narrower definitions on “regularity,” even as it allowed ordered devotion outside “monastic” institutions to escape, in a sense, the growing taste for the creation of “rules” as Benedict of Aniane might have later understood them. This ancient discourse of moral regulation was a necessary precondition—​ indeed, a concomitant—​of the process we are observing. In Latin, regula had a clear pedigree:  it retained, even in figurative usage, an association with “measure” and therefore with a pattern in relation to which one could assess the value or acceptability of a course of action. The Greek word hóros (Basil’s term for “rule”) functioned in a comparable way, setting up a framework of “markers” or “guidelines” within which an action became potentially fruitful or readily sanctioned, thus placing useful “bounds” to behavior in specified circumstances.8 And we are forced to broaden our field of reference still more. Given the fact that Augustine of Hippo and his master, Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), played a prominent part in the early development of Western ascetic practice, we have to take note of the way in which they made use of other terms—​officia (in Ambrose’s De officiis) and mores (in Augustine’s De moribus ecclesiae catholicae): these were words equally applicable to the description of desirable, indeed obligatory behavior; words equally old and Roman, underpinning what was considered appropriate in the public or civic sphere. There were many such terms that held sway, before regula achieved its dominance. Pursuing, therefore, our analogy with the scale and setting of ascetic practice, we note how the texts that carried a specific note of regulation were, like the ascetics themselves, part of a larger whole—​in their case, a literary whole. If we take as our initial examples the “rules” of Pachomius, Basil, and Augustine, we find two features:  first, the “rules” themselves are not homogeneous in form; and second, they are written by men who associated them integrally with other sorts of texts—​biographical, epistolary, homiletic,

Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, CA, 1994); and Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford, 2005).

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exegetical, theological, even liturgical, and in a few instances mundane—​all of which, taken as a larger whole, are appropriately considered exhortatory and formative: a total “rule of life,” an ascetic politeia. Here we have a double-​barreled conundrum: a rich but diffuse body of textual reflection and advice seemingly in search of an organization to impose it on. The apparent search is the illusion, not the body of texts themselves; and the illusion springs from two sets of ambitions, one our own and one more ancient. Our own is the historian’s natural urge to expose and explain development. We know that monasteries and rules existed in the Western Middle Ages: we can find the sites (eventually) on our maps, and we can find the texts (some of them, anyway) in our medieval archives. What we need (or think we need) is a narrative of discernible and explicable growth. The ancient illusion is more insidious. It resides in a later and in the end predominantly Carolingian wish to create a monastic tradition that culminates in its own program of definition and reform—​one architect of this history being, as we said at the outset, Benedict of Aniane, the compiler of the Codex regularum, ordering the centuries before him to lead where he wished.

Entering a New World: The Fifth Century Much that we have described so far in the earliest phases of ascetic development was Greek or Syriac in its inspiration. Eastern tradition began to follow a pattern not entirely dissimilar to the one we are tracing here for the West. We observe the creation of an early ninth-​century image of ancient monasticism, based on a similarly backward-​looking narrative, reflected in the work and career of Theodore of Stoudios.9 It was played out at exactly the same time as the “Carolingian moment” (Theodore lived 759–​826, Benedict of Aniane 747–​821). Both men essayed their reform or recapitulation after some two hundred years of post-​imperial identity confusion, made worse for the Byzantines by the rise of Islam and the shaming interlude (shaming for some) of Iconoclasm. But that is a different and (in several ways) contested story, and it was the century very roughly 400–​500 that saw Western, Latin monasticism starting out on its own path. This was a century of some “monastic” obscurity. Although it witnessed the emergence of Augustine’s “rule,” the work of Cassian (d. 435), the foundation of Lérins by Honoratus of Arles (d. 429), the De laude heremi of Eucherius of Lyon (d. 449), the De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius (written in Gaul toward the end of the century), and

Roman Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness (Oxford, 2002).

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(a little later, but referring back several decades) the Lives of the Fathers of the Jura, there is in fact a strange silence around the middle of the century, a “gap” that is difficult to fill convincingly with a smooth-​running development of regulae and monasteria. Let us look in a little more detail at this (roughly) fifth-​century story. It begins with translation work:  Rufinus of Aquileia’s (d. c.  410)  Latin translation of the “rules” of Basil (quite possibly undertaken for Latin-​speaking companions in Palestine, before his return to the West in 397) and Jerome’s (d. 420) Latin translation of the “rules” of Pachomius (made probably in 404).10 It is difficult to know exactly what sources the two men had at their disposal or where they obtained them; but a comparison between their productions and the Coptic or Greek material at our disposal (often later copies and sometimes variant or fragmentary) leads to two relatively secure conclusions: we have no reason to suppose that either man actually falsified his originals; and so their versions probably give us at least a useful guide to the stage of development that the Eastern texts had reached by their day. We have to adopt a slightly hesitant tone here, because the very act of translating such “rules” removed them from their original context and thus perhaps modified their effect, intentionally or otherwise. But, taken together with the early sixth-​century Latin Life of Pachomius, they certainly made available to the West full-​scale attempts to “regulate” the communal ascetic life; and they were attempts that Benedict of Aniane knew about. We should also take into account the Latin translation of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (known in the original Greek as the Apophthegmata Patrum—​henceforth AP) in their so-​called “systematic” form in the middle of the sixth century (what came to be known in the West as the Verba seniorum or Vitae Patrum), since many of these “sayings” were in fact fragments of “rules” in the sense of prescriptive legacies of named ascetic heroes first collected (in Greek) at the end of the fifth century.11 There are several things to note about the Latin legacy, so to speak, of Pachomius and Basil. First, we have no evidence that their “rules” functioned in their own time as Benedict of Aniane would have understood the word. Neither man was catering for a single system of ascetic living—​not even Pachomius, whose communities varied considerably in size, character, order



Catherine M. Chin, “Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives:  Translation as Origenism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 617–​47; Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago, IL, 2006); but see especially Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis. Prosopographische und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Stuttgart, 1992). 11 Jean-​Claude Guy, ed. and trans., Les apophtegmes des Pères. Collection systématique, 3 vols., SC 387, 474, and 498.

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of foundation, and overriding ethos.12 Nor can we be completely confident about the correspondence between Jerome’s translations of the specifically regulatory material and the way it was assembled in Benedict’s Codex. This applies in particular to the adduced divisions that Jerome appears to have made between iudicia, praecepta, and instituta. Basil’s rules as later appealed to in the East (after Rufinus’ time) emerged in different sets (some prolix, many more pithy), and were generated in different districts of Asia Minor and over a long period of  time. There is a particular and in some ways awkward feature of our uncertainty here. Not all serious ascetics in the fourth century thought it their primary duty to “lay down the law.” Yes, this was an age when Christian men and women were ready to lead in matters religious, and to be led by others; and they did so fully aware of the pedagogic traditions they had inherited from a classical past (as we pointed out above), with its traditions of schools, defined by their successions of masters and disciples.13 But the Christian paideia was marked in a special way by two cautious responses to the competitive self-​ assurance that had long characterized cultural formation in the ancient world:  first, something approaching “humility,” modifying one’s understanding of one’s insight and authority; and second, a conviction that one should not recommend verbally what one had not experienced in practice. These cautions are expressed within the very regulatory material itself, creating a tension precisely among those who produced or were portrayed in material collected in the Codex. In the Apophthegmata, an inquirer faced by persistent requests to act as a spiritual guide, who scrupled to acquiesce in the trust of such admirers, was confirmed in his hesitation by Abba Poemen’s counsel that he should be to them an “example,” not a “lawgiver” (AP, Poemen 174). Poemen assured another young visitor that, “just by remaining near” a potential mentor, “you will gain instruction” (AP, Poemen 65). Such anecdotes (the bulk of them surviving also in the “systematic” collection of sayings that influenced the West in its sixth-​century Latin translation) provide vivid evidence of the distance between those eager to launch into words and those who felt that well-​intentioned instruction was too easily confused with facile if not arrogant or misleading prescription. This general air of doubt and hesitation must color our assessment of the surprisingly little we do have

Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-​Century Egypt, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, 1999) and crucially James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999). 13 See, among many works, Fairy von Lilienfeld, Spiritualität des frühen Wüstenmönchtums, ed. Ruth Albrecht and Franziska Müller (Erlangen, 1983).

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from the later fourth century that can even remotely be thought of as “rules.” It explains convincingly why it has always been hard to find early signs of formal monasticism. Once Jerome and Rufinus had launched upon the Latin world their limited representations of Pachomius and Basil, we might think we face some plainer sailing—​the development of a more obviously regulated culture of asceticism, in defense of which we place our bets on Augustine and Cassian. But that does not quite work either. To begin with, Augustine’s “rules” were no more stable than the early traces of Pachomius and Basil. Whatever coherence they were allowed to acquire in later hands (much later, in the late eleventh century at the soonest), they were constituted in Augustine’s own time out of a range of different texts, undoubtedly influenced by early principles reflected in his dialogues from Cassiciacum in the later 380s, and then serving the changing needs of communities established first in Thagaste (after his return to Africa in 388) and then during a long episcopate in Hippo (from 395 to his death in 430). The core document concerned, the Ordo Monasterii (OM), is built around a set of principles rather than a daily routine (in that respect not unlike Basil’s “Longer Rules”); and the whole corpus is visibly the product of a man busy writing other things at the same time and in cognate styles.14 As for Cassian, he belonged to a class and generation of ascetics (like Jerome, or Evagrius and Palladius in the East) who were neither entirely settled in a clearly defined style of life nor associated with any one region of the empire.15 (Sulpicius, by the way, must be allowed a life of his own: he was more than the biographer of Martin of Tours (d. 397), way to the north—​his Dialogues are gravely underestimated as a key to his own personality and to the ascetic culture he represented—​and his episcopal hero gained his full and markedly unmonastic stature only two centuries later, at the hands of his successor Gregory, who died in 594.) Cassian’s surviving œuvre is remarkably confused in drift and implication.16 In spite of the much later (and perhaps not entirely reliable) testimony of Gennadius (De viris illustribus 62), he shows



Luc Verheijen, La Règle de saint Augustin (Paris, 1967); George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule (Oxford, 1987; reprinted 1990)  and Raymond Canning, trans., The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions, with introduction and commentary by T. J. van Bavel (London, 1984). 15 See the articles by Brakke and Alciati in this volume; Richard J. Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-​Century Gaul (Oxford, 2007). 16 Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN, 2010); Augustine Casiday, Tradition and Theology in St John Cassian (Oxford and New York, 2007); Steven D. Driver, John Cassian and the Reading of Egyptian Monastic Culture (London and New York, 2002); and Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (Oxford, 1998). 14

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little sign of being a monastic “founder.” Like Honoratus, Cassian (deeply influenced during his years in the East by the teaching of Evagrius) was very much the protégé of bishops, and whatever institutions he hoped to inspire or affect were the projects of churchmen such as Leontius of Fréjus (d. 488; Honoratus’ patron) and Castor of Apt (d. before 436). The only section of Cassian’s work that comes anywhere near being a “rule” in character is Books 1–​4 of his Institutes, and even they are to do mostly with dress and ceremony. His study of the vices in the remaining books and his three sets of Conferences—​intimate “chats” with famous ascetics of Egypt—​constitute much more a theology of the ascetic life, and show a remarkably ambiguous attitude to various styles of ascetic regime. Cassian, after all, spent a good fifteen years wandering here and there between his years in Palestine and Egypt (ending with the death of Evagrius in 399) and his eventual settlement in Marseille (under the patronage of Bishop Proculus around 415). Little effort is made to disguise the tension between a regulated monastic life and the almost competitive charisma of those ascetic sages who feature in the Conferences. Even more striking, Cassian then seems to have been scarcely at the forefront of people’s minds in the century after his death, meriting only a vague allusion (to the collationes patrum) in RB 73, where Basil by contrast is mentioned by name. (The spirit of his ascetic theology nevertheless permeates RB as a whole.) Lérins, finally, presents problems of its own.17 Its founder, Honoratus, in his eastern travels in the 370s, never reached the Holy Land as he had intended, but the regime he established on the famous island, when he returned, owed much to the earliest reputation of Pachomius, giving him a cast of mind identifiably different from Cassian. Much effort has been expended, especially by Adalbert de Vogüé, on identifying a “rule” of Lérins that developed through the fifth century in various recensions.18 The funeral oration preached by Hilary of Arles (d. 449) in 429 is as reliable as such speeches can be but essentially impressionistic. Lérins became famous mostly for the men, like its founder and Hilary, who left it to become bishops, and to that extent its spirit



See the articles by Alciati, Lauwers, and Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. See also Salvatore Pricoco, L’Isola dei santi. Il cenobio di Lerino e le origini del monachesimo gallico (Rome, 1978); Salvatore Pricoco, Monaci filosofi e santi. Saggi di storia della cultura tardoantica (Soveria Mannelli and Messina, 1992); Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000); Roberto Alciati, Monaci, vescovi et scuola nella Gallia tardoantica (Rome, 2009); and Roberto Alciati, “Il vescovo e il monaco nel De vita contemplativa di Pomerio,” in Church, Society, and Monasticism, ed. E. López-​Tello García and B. S. Zorzi (Rome, 2009), 25–​38. 18 Adalbert de Vogüé, ed. and trans., Les Règles des saints Pères, SC 297–​298. 17

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came to permeate the church of southern Gaul in later decades. The most famous of these alumni was undoubtedly Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 until his death forty years later.19 By Caesarius’ time the character of church life in the lower Rhône valley had become at least temporarily transformed by the settlement of the Ostrogoths in Italy, affecting the politics of both Franks and Burgundians to the north and reopening the area to the influence of the Greek East. (The “Fathers of the Jura,” further north, may have represented a more independent stance.) To that extent, Caesarius and his episcopal colleagues were able to reinterpret the meaning and tendency of ascetic culture at least in their own region: they were the first to present the “view from the future,” as Benedict of Aniane would do on a much greater scale more than two centuries later. This réécriture would continue to have an impact on the Western Church even after the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom to the armies of Justinian (r. 527–​65) in 554. Such was the world, barely ten years after Caesarius’ death and the death of Benedict of Nursia, which ushered in a clearly new phase in the history of Latin monastic culture.

The World after Chalcedon But there was one other event in the fifth century of crucial importance for our understanding of this chapter’s theme: the Council of Chalcedon, held in the East in 451, albeit with Western representatives of standing present. Its stipulations had a profound effect in the sphere of “normative observance,” and no less in the West (although perhaps more slowly) than in the East. Canon 4 (which is of most significance in our context) makes only a few demands (and note that this is a disciplinary canon, not immediately connected with the council’s doctrinal decrees), and none that are totally clear or detailed. The most anxious is probably the declaration that monks should live in monasteries and not wander around in cities, causing “political” as well as religious upheaval—​a clear feature of the late 430s and 440s.20 (This was a point that had been made by secular decree as far back as the reign of Theodosius I.) Moreover, monasteries are not to be established at the

William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge, 1994); Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990). 20 Daniel F. Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks:  Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims:  Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, AD 300–​800 (University Park, PA, 2005). 19

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whim of monks themselves but only with the approval of the local bishop; and, once established, no one can override the bishop’s authority over them (by the exercise of lay patronage, for example; see also canon 24). The exact nature of that authority, however, is very loosely expressed. Monks are not allowed to leave their monastery (unless the bishop has a special job for them to do—​of which canon 3 gives some examples). Within the monastery, they are expected to lead a “quiet life” (hēsuchía or quies), dedicated “only” to fasting and prayer. Throughout these canons, a constant distinction is made between ordained priests and monks. Priests should confine themselves to the place assigned to them (which, according to canon 6, can include a monastery), the implication being that, when monks are exhorted (in canon 4) to be “subject” to their bishop (hupotetáchthai and subiectos esse are the verbs used), this submission will be mediated through that priest (and will be of a type susceptible to that species of mediation). It does not seem to be expected that any monk will himself be ordained. Bishops do, nevertheless, have responsibilities of their own to provide for a monastery’s needs—​to exercise the “appropriate” prónoia or cura on their behalf. A remarkable paradox attaches to these prescriptions, which appear to impose a very thorough episcopal control over the monastic life. The paradox has two components. First, there is little attempt to provide a definition of the “quiet life” or to identify the formulae that should govern fasting and prayer (leaving, indeed, everything else a monk might do in his monastery completely unspecified). This point will reward attention. It lies at the root of important modern scholarship and anticipates later prescriptive details.21 Second, the council says nothing about the ascetic devotees (especially the female ones) who might not pursue their vocation under the label of “monk.” This cohort of enthusiasts, we shall find, had been and continued to be very large. They escaped the restrictions that Chalcedon appeared to impose, even while embracing (either alone or in small groups) the self-​discipline espoused by monks in a more formal sense. These “irregular” ascetics—​the vagantes or “wanderers”; the non-​cenobitic types of monk—​will now run in constant contrast to the “regular” life, and may indeed represent a criticism of what monasteries were attempting to achieve. This counter-​culture, within ascetic society itself, may have had a profound influence on the development of regulae, making the latter in their turn instruments of a distinctive

Both Owen Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1968), and Amand Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pachômien au quatrième siècle (Rome, 1968), opened their scholarly investigations with the importance of a liturgical ordo.

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safeguard or badge of authenticity. But an even greater complexity attaches to this relatively new development. To adhere to a “rule” was not simply a critical assertion that one was “doing things the right way.” It served to reinforce other useful boundaries between monk and world; in particular, it limited the degree to which bishops could enforce their own agenda within a community—​subverting with a certain irony the anxious stipulations of the Council of Chalcedon. We are beginning to observe, therefore, at least two features of a new phase: the next stage in the invention of the post-​Roman bishop (compare Caesarius with a more traditional figure such as Avitus of Vienne (d. c. 519)) and a new way of ordering the relations between bishops and virgins in particular. This took time, certainly in the West. Only when imperial practice had been stabilized anew with the establishment of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy in the 490s (reverberating up the Rhône valley into Gaul) could bishops in those regions discern what a post-​imperial Church was going to look like; and a man like Caesarius could only emerge in such a context. (We only have to think of the way bishops behave in the Histories of Gregory of Tours (d. 594)  or the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (d. 604)  to be struck by the difference.) So, while we might like to think that the work of the pioneers has prepared us for what comes next, the components of the ascetic legacy that do eventually “crop up” in the sixth century and thereafter do not do so in the form in which they left the 420s. At least some ascetics (and they will become a majority) have started to change from being competitive, individualistic, charismatic figures to members of organized and disciplined communities. This, in miniature, was the way in which Caesarius transformed Augustine (although the latter ironically was the least individualistic ascetic thinker). The Desert Fathers had also been moved into a past now represented only in texts, open to fresh interpretation in very different circumstances.

Toward a Chronology of Monastic Observance in the West The route from a world of ascetic diversity, the diffuse use of regulae, and a multiplicity of genres in which monastic norms could be expressed to the world of Benedict of Aniane can be best described by identifying different stages: an “experimental” phase lasting roughly until the end of the sixth century; a phase of consolidation of normative observance during the seventh century; and the slow and shaky “victory” of the RB from the eighth century onwards. As far as we can judge from the texts that are preserved (we will never know how “complete” the Codex regularum is, how much is lost 174

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and to what extent the preserved texts were filtered and maybe even modified to fit into Benedict of Aniane’s scheme), we can then see an increase in the number of Latin regulae, along with charismata, decreta, praecepta, leges, normae, institutiones, instituta, ordines, and other such terms from the fifth century onwards. Benedict of Aniane starts his compilation with four short regulae patrum: the Regula quattuor patrum (RIVP), the Regula patrum secunda (2RP), the Regula Macharii (RMac), and the Regula patrum tertia (3RP), a group of rules produced in the course of the fifth century and today tentatively ascribed to the monastery of Lérins, the first outpost of eastern Mediterranean monasticism in Gaul. The first of these regulae patrum is presented as speeches of Egyptian Desert Fathers: Macharius, Paphnutius, Serapion, and another Macharius. If we look at the last three, we can observe a remarkable shift in literary form. The RVIP and the 2RP present themselves as short speeches given at a gathering of monks; the RMac is mostly phrased as an admonition addressing the individual monk; and the 3RP is a collection of short, straightforward regulations. The diversity of formats, however, does not end with the 3RP: on the contrary, Benedict of Aniane’s collection gives the impression of a long-​ lasting experiment of finding the right words and the right tone. In other words, authors of monastic rules tried out a great number of different ways of conveying the content of a rule:  questions and answers (RBas, RM); words of wisdom spoken by venerable fathers at monastic gatherings (RIVP, 2RP); vociferous admonitions (RMac, RCaeV); straightforward paragraphs, with (RAM, RAV, RFer, RcuiV) or without (3RP, RCaeM, RTar) biblical grounding or theological rationales; florilegia of older monastic rules (ROr; RDon); or rephrased versions of older texts (RAV, RB, RM, RcuiM, RcuiV). Rules address the singular and plural you, the us, him, her, and them, and some of them shift from one tone and addressee to another in the middle of the text: a true playground of “regulating.” Nevertheless, despite their diversity in form, most rules are tied together by a closely knit intertextual net.22 Almost every author of monastic rules used, excerpted, or rephrased already existing ones. This sends two seemingly contradicting messages. On the one hand, using previous rules shows respect for a textual tradition, giving the authors of rules the status of those sancti patres who represent the venerable monastic past. On the other hand, new rules expressed the necessity to produce new norms by rewriting, rearranging,

Adalbert de Vogüé, Les règles monastiques anciennes (400–​700) (Turnhout, 1985), 14, draws a family tree of all monastic rules.

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and amending the old ones and in that way created a distance from this venerable past. In order to retain the vigor, the spirit, and the standards of the venerable predecessors, one has to rewrite and adapt their rules and do things slightly differently from how they did them. The largest group of monastic rules preserved by Benedict of Aniane was written in the sixth century—​and here things start to shift toward a clearer notion of what regulariter vivere might mean. In Gaul, the rules of Caesarius of Arles (RCaeM and RCaeV) were followed by three rules also written by bishops, Aurelianus and Ferreolus (RAM, RAV, RFer), and one rule of unknown origin, the Regula Tarnatensis (RTar). The Regula Pauli et Stephani (RPS), the Regula Magistri (RM) and the Regula Benedicti (RB) were probably written in Italy, roughly in the same period as Caesarius’ rules. Those new rules were to be read out aloud (RAM/​RAV 1; RTar 1.5; RFer 5; RB 58, 66; RPS 41); monastic entry equaled a submission to the regula; rules started to claim to be unchangeable; and, maybe most importantly, some of them began to describe themselves as a sancta regula (RCaeV 43, 47, 62; RB 23.1, 65.18; later RDon 5, 60; RcuiV 18): an instrument to create a holy community, not just as a tool to shape order and foster discipline or establish structures. This new phase represents another large step away from a practice of individual instruction. The move toward a normative understanding of regulae went along with a shift of emphasis in the rules’ content: on the one hand, toward a regulation and de-​individualization of asceticism that imposes a moderate but sophisticated regime of fasting, manual labor, organization of the day, and a mortificatio that was rather meant to kill one’s own will than the flesh and bodily desires; on the other hand, toward an increasingly rigorous system of liturgical discipline that was meant to ensure that monasteries continuously produced payer of the highest possible quality. In some rules (e.g. RPS and RTar) liturgical discipline overshadowed every other aspect of monastic discipline; yet it is prominently present in all sixth-​century rules.23 The genesis of the rules written by Caesarius of Arles (d. 542)  and only a few decades later by his successor Aurelianus (d. 551)  can be taken as an example of this process. RCaeV, written for a female community Caesarius had founded in the city of Arles, was continuously revised over a period from roughly 512 to 534. Through its amendments, the text itself tells a history of Caesarius’ monastic project: a story of crisis management, anorexic nuns, dirty laundry, and looks from unwished visitors, but also of a profound shift of monastic ideals. At the beginning the author describes the text as merely

On the divine office, see the articles by Jeffery, Billett, and Blennemann in this volume.

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an anthology of regulations collected from other texts and adjusted to the specific situation of virgins dedicated to God: “And, because many things in monasteries of women seem to differ from the customs of monks, we have chosen a few things from among many, according to which the older religious can live under a rule with the younger, and strive to carry out spiritually what they see to be especially adapted for their sex” (RCaeV 2).24 In the course of revising his Rule, Caesarius’ notion of the function of the text changed profoundly. In c­ hapter 47 he calls his text a sancta regula: “I admonish and I charge you before God and the angels, holy and highly venerated mother of the monastery, and you, the prioress of the holy congregation, let no one’s threats or persuasions or flattery ever relax your spirit, and do not yourselves take away anything from the established form of the holy and spiritual rule” (RCaeV 47, see also 43 and 62). In the last section of the text, the Recapitulatio added to finalize the work (RCaeV 48–​73), Caesarius repeats time and again that nothing of the Regula may be changed by anyone involved with the monastery, and emphasizes that the rule as holy text plays a crucial role in attaining salvation. The rule ends by emphasizing its legal character through the subscription and confirmation of its content by six bishops (RCaeV 73). In the course of its genesis, Caesarius’ Rule became a double tool. On the one hand, it provided a disciplinary basis for defining and collectively achieving perfection:  a regula sancta to create a congregatio sancta. On the other hand, Caesarius produced an instrument for his community to gain and maintain independence from external interference and control: a rule to protect the nuns from being ruled by others and not least by those bishops who, according to the Council of Chalcedon, were in charge. All the texts that Caesarius wrote for his monastery and the vita that the nuns commissioned after his death were driven by the fear that his successors might interfere in his project and eventually destroy it.25 The ambivalence of being a disciplinary program and a basis for claims of independence will remain an important aspect of the rise of normative observance. Caesarius’ much shorter Regula ad monachos (RCaeM), one of the few monastic rules that survive from the time of their writing but do not appear in Benedict of Aniane’s collection, adds yet another important aspect of the rise of normative observance. Its prologue reports that Caesarius wrote this rule

Slightly revised translation. William E. Klingshirn, “Caesarius’s Monastery for Women in Arles and the Composition of the ‘Vita Caesarii’,” Revue bénédictine 100 (1990): 441–​81.

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as a directive for all monasteries under his supervision. As such, his rule is one of the first to be phrased as a general directive, as an instrument for external supervision, and as a potential tool for monastic reform and unification. Aurelianus, who became bishop of Arles only a few years after Caesarius’ death, decided to write a new monastic rule (RAM), though largely phrased in the words of his predecessor. Why did he do this, instead of just using what was already there and held in high regard? Despite its close proximity to Caesarius’ rules, Aurelianus’ new work marks another watershed in the development of normative observance. First of all, it is probably the first monastic rule that was written by a complete outsider, a bishop who acted as founder of monastic communities while having neither a monastic past (as Caesarius certainly did) nor the inclination to enter a monastery himself. It was written for one of the first monasteries founded in collaboration with a secular ruler, the Frankish king Childebert I (d. 558). Second, Aurelianus’ rule was composed as one piece as a blueprint for a new type of monastery. Shortly afterwards he used the same rule for another foundation, a monastery for nuns. His RAV is somewhat shorter, but both versions are in essence the same. Using both male and female monastic traditions, Aurelianus developed with his regula a monastic program that was in principle not gender-​specific.26 The “female” impact on monastic rules (for men and for women), as seen for instance in the significant influence of RCaeV on RAM, can be observed in many subsequent stages of the monastic experiment. When Benedict of Aniane composed his Concordia regularum, he had no problem in changing all segments he inserted from female rules into the male grammatical form.27 The last, and maybe most fundamental innovation in Aurelianus’ monastic rule was placing the willingness to submit oneself to the norms of the rule at the center of monastic conversion. Beautifully consistent, Caesarius and Aurelianus framed their rules by placing their central concern in the first and last chapters. RCaeV begins and ends with enforcing enclosure, and the Rule becomes a major instrument in establishing a community thriving on an irrevocable spatial separation from the surrounding world (RCaeV 2.2–​3, 73.1–​2). Caesarius’ Regula ad monachos puts perseverantia at the beginning and



Albrecht Diem, “…ut si professus fuerit se omnia impleturum, tunc excipiatur: Observations on the Rules for Monks and Nuns of Caesarius and Aurelianus of Arles,” in Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL. Festschrift für Kurt Smolak zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Victoria Zimmerl-​Panagl, Lukas J. Dorf bauer, and Clemens Weidmann (Berlin, 2014), 191–​224. 27 Albrecht Diem, “The Gender of the Religious:  Wo/​ Men and the Invention of Monasticism,” in The Oxford Companion on Women and Gender in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 432–​46.

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at the end, emphasizing the irreversibility of monastic conversion (RCaeM 1, 26). Aurelianus addresses both enclosure and perseverantia, but his Rule is framed by the imperative to follow the Rule. Its first chapter begins with the words: “If someone converts to monastic life, the Rule is read to him and if he/​she professes to fulfill everything, he/​she may be admitted” (RAM/​RAV 1). RM and RB were written in Italy roughly at the same time as Caesarius’ and Aurelianus’ rules and we encounter in them a similar shift toward normative observance: rules were to be read aloud and formed the basis of monastic profession.28 The long-​discussed question of whether Benedict used RM or whether the “Master” used RB has not been resolved convincingly, and the possibility that both texts independently revised a rule now lost remains an option. RM, phrased as a master’s long-​winded response to a pupil’s questions, may be more “old-​fashioned” in form and language but it is clearly more advanced particularly in one respect, which also distinguishes the rules of Caesarius and Aurelianus from one another. Neither Caesarius nor Benedict use the term laicus in opposition to monachus, while both Aurelianus and the “Master” draw a clear distinction between regulated monastic professionals and laici even in those chapters that are otherwise phrased very similarly in both previously written rules.29 It is rather unlikely that Benedict as reviser of RM carefully weeded out all seventeen references to laici and, in doing so, eliminated the distinction between monastic professionals (in a literal sense of the word) and lay people.30 Benedict of Aniane preserved for us two other rules from the second half of the sixth century, the Regula Ferrioli (RFer), a bishop’s interference within his own monastic foundation, and the Regula Tarnatensis (RTar), of unknown authorship and provenance. Both texts place themselves in the existing normative tradition, using and rephrasing among others RCaeV, Pachomius’ Rules, and (only in RTar) Augustine’s Praeceptum. As such they show again the tension between claiming to continue and fulfill the tradition of the sancti patres and adjusting to fundamentally new frameworks. The same can be said about the four preserved Visigothic rules: a rule for nuns by Leander of Seville (d. 600), one for monks by his brother Isidore (d. 636), and two sets of norms ascribed to Fructuosus of Braga (d. 656). All these authors were bishops who regulated their own monastic foundations.31

RB 53.9, 58.9–​12, 66.8; RM 24.15–​27, 79.24, 87.3, 89.1, 89.8, 90.64. RAM 4.1, 14.1, 16, 19.1, 48.1; RM 1.6, 7.31, 24.20/​23, 56.1–​15, 58.8, 61.12–​15, 78.t, 87.t, 90.t, 90.83. 30 Compare especially RM 1.6 to RB 1.6; RM 56.1–​15 to RB 50; RM 61.12–​15 to RB 51; RM 87.t/​ 90.t to RB 58.t/​61.t; RM 90.83 to RB 58.27. 31 On the Visigothic rules, see the article by Díaz in this volume.

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Such so far is the story that Benedict of Aniane wants to tell us in his Codex regularum. Some rules justify it by emphasizing that there is no alternative to living under a written rule. The RB and RM start by vilifying those monks who are ‘unregulated’ (calling them sarabaitae and monachi gyrovagi).32 Yet if we look at other textual evidence from the sixth century, this story does not pass its “reality check.” There is still that other “unregulated” monastic world in existence, which we mentioned above. In fact, we have at this point still very little evidence for the actual use of regulae outside the texts themselves. Life according to written norms may still have been simply one variant within the vast multiplicity of monasticisms, though a variant favored by bishops who founded monasteries and by other external founders with a natural interest in institutional stability and permanence in ascetic standards—​and maybe by those monks or nuns who wanted to protect themselves from interference by outsiders and other monastics alike. The work of Gregory of Tours provides a case in point for the ongoing presence of a non-​regulated monastic diversity. Of all the monasteries he mentions in his Historiae, only one, Radegund’s monastery of the Holy Cross, is associated with a rule (that of Caesarius), which serves as Gregory’s own tool to crush an uprising that took place soon after its founder had died (Histories IX.39–​40).The monastic and ascetic panoptic of his Liber vitae Patrum is described without mentioning any written rule, even though there would have been more than enough occasions (stories of foundation processes and of internal and external conflicts) to use them as a source for authority and a tool to establish discipline. In sum, certainly until the end of the sixth century we have to approach the development of monasticism under three premises. First, there was no one monasticism but rather an infinite variety of more or less “regulated” monasticisms. Second, the textual basis of monastic life—​its regula, if we want to call it that—​could manifest itself in yet another confusing variety of different texts and genres. A regula can hide in a story, in an ascetic admonition, in a theological treatise, in a letter, in a charter, in a law, or in the acta of councils of concerned bishops. Third, there was, however, a slow development toward a “regulated” way of life that did use regulae as we know them, in the way that we expect them to be used. Benedict, the Master, and, to a certain extent, Caesarius could already make the claim that there is no

See the article by Brakke in this volume, and Monica Blanchard, “Sarabaitae and Remnuoth: Coptic Considerations,” in The World of Early Egyptian Christianity: Language, Literature, and Social Context, ed. James E. Goehring and Janet A. Timbie (Washington, DC, 2007), 49–​60.

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alternative to a regulated communal life: you either live sub regula vel abbate or you are a monachus gyrovagus or sarabaita. However, not all monks and feminae religiosae—​and not even all bishops involved in monastic matters—​may have agreed with them.

The Seventh Century: Nothing (or Everything?) New Gregory of Tours may still have been alive when, sometime in the 580s, the Irish monk Columbanus (d. 615) arrived on the Continent and founded his first monasteries, Annegray and Luxeuil. If we believe Columbanus’ hagiographer Jonas of Bobbio (d. after 659)—​which we should do with great caution—​his arrival formed a true turning point. It allowed the restoration of a Christian wasteland in which, mostly thanks to the negligence of the bishops, the medicamenta paenitentiae had been almost disbanded (Vita Columbani 1.5). Gregory of Tours would not have been amused by this verdict. Jonas supports this notion of renewal by suppressing all evidence that Columbanus’ monasteries and monastic practice had any roots in existing Frankish monasticism. He does not tell us that Columbanian foundations recruited from Frankish monasteries, prayed the ceaseless prayer of Saint-​ Maurice d’Agaune, and shaped their legal situation after existing models. Two of the monastic rules written for “Columbanian” monasteries, the Regula Donati (RDon) and the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (RcuiV), incorporated older Continental rules, most notably the RB and RCaeV. There may have been only a few royal monastic foundations before Columbanus’ arrival, but they certainly existed. Childebert I and Aurelianus founded one in Arles; Sigibert (d. 524) established Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune; Brunhild founded a monastery in Autun and Radegund one in Poitiers. In many regards, however, the monastic movement inspired by Columbanus was a watershed. It led to a great number of monastic foundations, especially in northern Francia, usually collaborative projects that involved already existing monasteries (particularly Luxeuil), bishops, aristocrats, and kings. In a different manner from older foundations, these new ones developed a remarkable institutional continuity—​thanks to their internal structure and legal status, external support, and the widely shared consensus to respect monastic boundaries. Many of them existed until the French Revolution. The monastery under a rule, which was founded by rulers and aristocrats as a place for intercessory prayer on their behalf, may have existed before Columbanus’ arrival as one variant among many; now it became a vastly successful standard model. 181

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The Regula, first labeled as Regula Columbani, then as Regula Benedicti et Columbani (which may never have existed as a specific text), and eventually as Regula Benedicti, played a central role in this process: a tool to legitimate the existence of the monasteries, to maintain standards of communal ascetic life, to shape internal structures, and to form the basis for a collective identity. Thanks to Benedict of Aniane, we have a number of written manifestations of these rules; we also have references to regulae in hagiographic texts and, most notably, in an increasing number of episcopal and royal charters that define the monastery’s rights and privileges but also their responsibilities toward their founders and the Christian world in general. The regula became a legal category, also (or maybe even primarily) for the interaction between monastery and outside world. Outsiders took an interest in regular discipline but they needed to “play by the regula,” as Jonas of Bobbio explains dramatically when he reports that the intrusion of King Theuderic II (d. 613)  and Queen Brunhild (d. 614) into Columbanus’ foundation of Luxeuil eventually caused their downfall and violent end: “If you try to destroy what has until now been strictly forbidden under the discipline of our Rule,” Columbanus replied, “I no longer want any of your gifts or support. And if you have come here for this reason, so that you might destroy the communities of God’s servants and dishonor the discipline of the Rule, I want you to know that your kingdom will quickly be destroyed entirely and all your family will be annihilated.” (Vita Columbani 1.19)

Here we have the same ambivalence that we already observed in regard to Caesarius’ and Aurelianus’ Rules:  the regula serves as a statement of independence and as a legal framework that protects communities from external interference but it also expresses an external interest in internal discipline, hierarchy, and maintaining standards. The Privilege of Rebais (632), the first preserved episcopal privilege issued for a Columbanian monastery, warned bishops (as had been done before) to be unobtrusive in their limited visits to monasteries (to be done mainly for liturgical purposes) and explains why: because monks, who are [after all] known as solitarii [“solitaries”], depend for their well-​being on an atmosphere of complete peace: led by the Lord, they then find unceasing joy; living under the Holy Rule [of Benedict and Columbanus] and following the lifestyle of the blessed fathers, they are able to pray more intensely to the Lord for the stability of the Church and the safety of the king and indeed of the fatherland. (PL 87, 1136)

Yet at the beginning of this new notion of regula stands a phantom, which shows us that Benedict of Aniane’s notion of normative observance is still 182

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far away. His Codex regularum contains a Regula Sancti Columbani (RColM combined with RColC) which looks rather different from most other rules in the collection. It consists of a general ascetic treatise (which was vaguely inspired by John Cassian) with two lengthy insertions: a liturgical ordo, and a rather chaotic monastic penitential which imposes corporal punishment, fasting, and prayers for a great number of often minor transgressions (the second insertion appears as Regula coenobialis, RColC, in modern editions). This Regula Sancti Columbani expresses several important new ideas, particularly the notion that monks have to pray for the outside world (RColM 7) and the rather revolutionary idea that confession and penance save from eternal damnation (RColC 1). Nevertheless, it is neither a program nor a legal basis for a new monastic movement.33 It is likely that the Regula Columbani that Jonas of Bobbio mentions several times in his Vita Columbani was different from the text preserved in the Codex regularum. Jonas’s work describes in great detail Columbanus’ monastic ideals, gives hints about internal structures of his monasteries and their notions of space and boundaries, but does so without quoting RColM and RColC (with the exception of one vaguely similar snippet of text). He refers to the Regula Columbani almost exclusively in the context of founding a monastery, an aspect not discussed at all in RColM and RColC. The text preserved by Benedict of Aniane may thus have been just one written manifestation of a much broader and more abstract Regula Columbani, which is just as much expressed in Jonas’s own work or in the monastic privileges issued for Columbanian foundations. There is still more in the term regula than just a written rule.34 The Regula Sancti Benedicti et (vel, seu) Columbani was a title that appeared for about half a century in some episcopal privileges. But it was probably not so much a text that combined different written rules (renamed by modern scholarship as regula mixta, a misleading neologism) but rather the RB combined with descriptions of the monastic ideal added to different texts produced by and for Columbanian monasteries. As a regula, therefore, it was indeed the “Benedictine” text that would later become the basis of Western monastic life. And yet, curiously, the first reliable traces of this future sancta

Albrecht Diem, “Columbanian Monastic Rules: Dissent and Experiment,” in The Irish in Europe in the Middle Ages: Identity, Culture, and Religion, ed. Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder (London and New York, 2016), 68–​85 and 248–​9. 34 Albrecht Diem, “Was bedeutet Regula Columbani?” in Integration und Herrschaft. Ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, ed. Max Diesenberger and Walter Pohl (Vienna, 2002), 63–​89; and Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram,  53–​84. 33

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regula can be found in the two already mentioned Columbanian Rules for nuns (RDon and RcuiV), which both vigorously rewrite Benedict’s text and express monastic ideals that are quite distinct from those of their model.35 This confusing interchange between “Benedictine” and “Columbanian” elements probably helps to explain why the second half of the seventh century opens another gap in the evidence. References to the Regula Columbani fade away but those to the RB also become scarce and unreliable. We have to wait for almost another century before the real takeover of the RB starts.

The Bumpy Road toward una regula Even that outcome is not straightforward. The short version of the Carolingian “Benedictine” takeover sounds simple and convenient: Carolingian rulers and reform-​minded monks, inspired initially by Anglo-​Saxon monks, realized that the RB was indeed “excellent in its discretion and splendid in its language,” as Gregory the Great expressed it in his Dialogues (2.36). They imposed the text as the single legal norm on all monasteries: monks are monks and monasteries are monasteries because they follow the RB. The “regular life” is now definitively monastic and definitively based on a written rule. This process found its culmination in the reform councils of 813 under Charlemagne and of 816/​ 817 under Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40). Benedict of Aniane played a key role in this process and expanded the una regula with a catalogue of explanations, slight alterations, and additions to the Rule.36 The attempt to submit all monasteries under Carolingian rule to one shared understanding of the RB, however, met resistance from some monasteries that wanted to cling to their own traditions, and consequently had rather limited success.37 The true catalogue of events is more complex. When the first Carolingian councils (from 742 onwards) started to promote the RB, the use of regulae seems already to have been a matter of past practice (if it had happened at all). Indeed, resistance against applying the RB did not come from monasteries that followed other regulae but from those that feared submitting to a regula



Albrecht Diem, “New Ideas Expressed in Old Words:  The Regula Donati on Female Monastic Life and Monastic Spirituality,” Viator 43 (2012): 1–​38. See the article by Kramer in this volume. Benedict of Aniane, Regula sive Collectio 35. See also Albrecht Diem, “The Capitularis, ed. Josef Semmler, CCM 1, 503–​ Carolingians and the Regula Benedicti,” in Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong, ed. Rob Meens et al. (Manchester, 2016), 243–​61. 37 Josef Semmler, “Benedictus II: una regula—​una consuetudo,” in Benedictine Culture 750–​ 1050, ed. Willem Lourdaux and Daniël Verhelst (Leuven, 1983), 1–​49. 35

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would force them to give up their consuetudines, which defined the internal structure and the schedule of daily life, especially of liturgical practices. So, giving the RB the status of una regula meant introducing (or maybe reintroducing) the notion of following a written rule (not, in other words, a plethora of consuetudines) more than replacing one written norm by another. The RB itself, however, was in a sense unsuitable for this effort. Even Benedict of Aniane admitted that no monastery of his time did—​or could—​follow the RB to the letter. This is not surprising, since we are dealing with a set of norms and monastic ideals that was produced roughly 250 years before for a community that was deeply rooted in the world of fading Romanitas. Such a world could hardly be more different from that of the self-​confidently rising Carolingian Empire. Moreover, the text of the RB needed to be discussed, interpreted, submitted to an exegetical reading, taught, and memorized, so that its spirit could be captured—​or at least what the Carolingian rulers and reformers considered that spirit to be, in line with what they saw as useful for their purposes. Such a process inevitably took time and invited variation. The communities that the author of the RB had in mind probably had little to do with the Carolingian “powerhouses of prayer.”38 The RB says nothing about intercessory prayer, which was to become the main raison d’être of Carolingian monastic life; nor had Benedict of Nursia imagined that monasteries would become centers for the preservation of knowledge, of education, and of training for a new reform-​minded elite. Most likely he never envisioned that monasteries would turn into major economic and political hubs with possessions scattered over hundreds of square kilometers. Nor could he have guessed that they would become places of forced retreat for the powerful who had fallen from grace, and outposts for missions and political expansion, founded by bishops and aristocrats and ruled by (often lay) people holding key positions in the Carolingian political apparatus.39 In many regards, the earlier Carolingian monasteries were about as “un-​Benedictine” as it was possible to be. They are certainly more appropriately placed in the tradition of the Regula Columbani as described by Jonas; in Columbanian privileges and (to some extent) in those rules ascribed more directly to Columbanus. It is here that we find the political entanglement, the intercessory prayer, the economic strength, the education and book

See the article by Blennemann in this volume and Choy, Intercessory Prayer. Mayke B. De Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2: c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 622–​53. See also the article by Rosé in this volume.

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production, the involved kings, aristocrats, and bishops, the assertiveness of being a congregatio sancta in a locus sanctus with carefully guarded boundaries, and the deep interest in maintaining monastic purity. In sum, it is far from surprising that we still find in Carolingian monastic charters of immunity words and sentences that first appeared in the Privilege of Rebais. During much of the eighth century, therefore, the RB as it had now survived had yet to embody categorically what might later be thought of as central and universal characteristics of Carolingian monastic existence. Its convenience consisted in meaning almost anything to anyone, and it served as a source of arguments for very different reform agendas. For the Anglo-​ Saxon church reformer Boniface (d. 754) and his contemporaries, for example, the RB was a tool to redefine the blurring boundaries between monachi and clerici canonici: monks lived under the regula; canons under (equally vague) canon law.40 Introducing this distinction had three implications. It helped to establish a clear ecclesiastic structure in the Frankish kingdoms and those regions that newly came under Carolingian power; it defined to what extent religious communities and institutions were submitted to episcopal power; and—​as a comparison between the RB and its counterparts (Chrodegang’s (d. 766) Regula canonicorum and the Institutio canonicorum) shows—​it forced communities to take a position on whether their members were allowed to own private property.41 To take another example, if we look at references to the RB in most of the charters of immunity issued by Charlemagne and his predecessors and successors, we find another context that made it especially attractive for monastic communities to place themselves sub regula sancti Benedicti. Most of these charters mention the RB in conjunction with granting a community the right to choose by itself the most suitable abbot from its own members, as the Rule prescribes. Indeed, choosing one’s abbot according to c­ hapter 64 of the Rule may have been the essence of living according to the Rule.42 It is remarkable that the documents marking what are often thought of as the heyday of monastic reform—​those related to the councils of 813 and 816/​ 817—​did not refer at all to this particular aspect of the Rule. Already the Council of Frankfurt in 794 had used select chapters of the RB as tools for

For example Concilium Germanicum (742), c. 7; Concilium Liftinense (743), c. 1; Concilium Aquisgranense (802); Concilium Cabillonense (813), c. 22, in MGH Concilia 2.1, 4, 7, 278. 41 See, for example, Chrodegang’s Privilege for Gorze, MGH Concilia 2.1, 60. Martin A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church:  Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2004). 42 MGH DKarl 1, nos. 52, 72, 89, 152, 157, 158, 164, 173.

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reform while at the same time explicitly rejecting a monastery’s right to choose its own abbot.43 Another, heavily contested, reform matter in which the RB could serve both ways was the question of creating liturgical unity. Should monasteries follow the Ordo Romanus or keep their own liturgical traditions—​perfectly legitimated through RB 18.22–​3? Or should they all uniformly pray for the king, the kingdom, and stability according to the liturgical ordo laid out in RB  8–​18? The conclusion to be drawn from this sluggish and contested process is not quite what we might have expected. It remains true that Benedict of Aniane presided in some sense over a (distinctly late) attempt at uniformity, which involved giving prominence to a particular “history” of monastic precedents; but his disposition to uniformity (whether it was his own or that of his masters) was not the only reason why the RB won the day as the most useful model for all monasteries. If we look at all the other contemporary arguments surrounding the implementation of the Sancta Regula, ranging from the question whether birds are meat to the question whether abbots should eat with guests or the community, we could subsume the contentious favoring of the RB under three main questions. First, which of its many regulations needed to be enforced to increase the monastic purity that enabled them to perform prayer of the highest quality? Second, which regulations might be used (rather unsuccessfully) to create uniformity among Carolingian monasteries? And third, what power and status was attached to those who ruled these Carolingian “powerhouses”? When one puts it that way, not much seems to have changed: the Rule—​and all the attempts to enforce different aspects of it—​could serve both to claim independence and to claim control. The two most important commentaries on the RB, written by Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel (d. c. 840) around the time of the 816 reforms and by Hildemar of Corbie (fl. c. 845) roughly a generation later, add yet another dimension to the Carolingian monastic enterprise. Two-​thirds of Smaragdus’ Expositio comment on the first seven chapters of the RB and show that Smaragdus was first and foremost interested in the theological grounding of monastic life and the role of the Sancti patres, rather than the technicalities of monastic structure and practice. Hildemar, who explained the Sancta Regula sentence by sentence to the oblates of Civate (in Lombardy), still devotes more than two-​thirds of his loquacious commentary (635 pages in modern print) to theological questions.44 If we look at the rest of his text, Hildemar’s countless

MGH Concilia 2.1, 168. Hildemar, Expositio regulae. See www.hildemar.org (date of last access: 18 August 2018).

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digressions focus on the difference between Benedict’s sixth-​century vision and the monastic practice of his own day (in this case at Civate), his deep interest in monastic purity, and his concern with uncontrolled abbatial power and the problem of how to deal with its abuse.45

Epilogue: Monastic Rules as Historical Sources Our investigation has followed a chronological order to demonstrate the benefits of not abiding by Benedict of Aniane’s view of pre-​Carolingian monastic history as a simple chain of rules to be followed. We arrive at an entirely different history of early medieval monasticism if we investigate the genesis of normative observance instead of assuming its presence, and if we accept that there was an initial—​perhaps unexpectedly long-​lasting—​diversity of monasticisms and a confusing variety of textual options to express and enforce ascetic values, monastic practices, and concepts of community. In this new narrative, the eventual triumph of the RB is neither the fruit of an organic process nor a historical necessity and, as we hope to have shown, even the Carolingian Benedictine norm needs to be reassessed. The fact that the thirty regulae collected by Benedict of Aniane (along with two or three others that were preserved elsewhere) played a less significant role than generally assumed does not diminish their eminent value as historical sources, and we have not yet sufficiently addressed their content. Aside from a long tradition of investigating the RB as a theological text and a source of spiritual wisdom, monastic scholarship has shown a striking lack of interest in what these regulae have to say and a hesitancy to approach each of them as an individual text representing its own little monastic universe. This lack of interest may have been caused by the assumption that most rules roughly say the same in different words—​as was implied in Benedict of Aniane’s Praefatio to the Concordia regularum. At first glance, the repertoire of topics addressed in rules is indeed rather limited. It includes tasks and responsibilities of monastic office holders (especially the abbot/​ abbess), liturgy and liturgical discipline, interactions among the members of the monastic community, transgressions, punishment, excommunication and exclusion, monastic entry, separation from (and interaction with) the surrounding world, manual labor, individual poverty, motivation, and negligence. To see the often fundamental differences requires a very close reading of the texts.

Diem, “The Carolingians and the Regula Benedicti,” 243–​61.

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What is most common in modern scholarship on monasticism—​and to a certain extent legitimate—​is the use of the corpus of monastic norms as a convenient and prolific quarry for details of monastic life or even early medieval daily life. Here we find mentions of shoes, kitchen tools, vegetable gardens, men holding hands, weaving women, writing utensils, and many other mundane things that are otherwise invisible in the scattered and fragmentary early medieval sources.46 Lateral cuts through the corpus of monastic norms provide a wealth of material on topics such as childhood, literacy, labor practices, liturgy, gender roles, sexualities, space and architecture, emotions, and ascetic practices, to mention only a few subjects—​and many still wait to be explored.47 Another traditional approach to rules has been the—​often unsuccessful—​attempt to assign rules to monasteries and monasteries to rules, based on the assumption that every monastery needed its regula.48 Yet a “synthetic” reading of rules that tends to use one rule to fill in the gaps of another and in which congruity is read as the indication of a pattern is problematic in many regards. The fact that many monastic rules are similar at first sight and are intertextually connected should incite us to do the opposite of combining evidence. Rules respond to other rules: the Regula patrum secunda to the Regula quattuor patrum, the Regula orientalis to the Regula Pachomii, Aurelianus’ rules to Caesarius’ rules, the Regula Tarnatensis to Caesarius’ and Augustine’s rules, the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines and the Regula Donati to the RB. They express discrete disagreement, maybe even discontent, or at least the notion that the work of previous regulators of monastic life, venerable as it may be, does not suit the new circumstances, so that the production of a new monastic rule is needed. Every regula forms a distinct contribution to the experiment to create ideal, theologically sound, practical, and perpetual





See the articles by Díaz and by Réal in this volume. See, for example, Mayke B. De Jong, In Samuel’s Image:  Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden, 1996); Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994); Pierre Bonnerue, “Concordance sur les activités manuelles dans les règles monastiques anciennes,” Studia Monastica 35 (1993):  69–​96; Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005); Sofia Uggé, “Lieux, espaces et topographie des monastères de l’antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge: réflexions à propos des règles monastiques,” in Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2014), 15–​42; and the articles by Réal and Cochelin in this volume. 48 Friedrich Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich. Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung (4. bis 8. Jhd.), 2nd ed. (Munich and Vienna, 1988). 46 47

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monastic institutions. This should incite us to read them against each other rather than along with each other. Possible battlefields illustrated through the writing and rewriting of rules are the tension between charismatic authority and strict hierarchy versus a notion of equality; collaboration and individual responsibility; different ways of interacting with the outside world; the balance of fostering ascetic achievements versus collective moderation; the pool and techniques of recruitment; the balance of opus Dei, manual labor, and intellectual activity; or the question of individual and collective poverty—​to mention only a few. One particularly interesting aspect of dissent, or at least of plurality of viewpoints, addresses the theological foundation of monastic life and the problem of how monastic communities can, despite the inevitable sinfulness and destructive tendency of each individual, become holy communities, establish holy spaces, foster the expectation of eternal salvation, and even, from a certain point onwards, start to produce a “surplus” in the form of powerful intercessory prayer for the Christian community in general and monastic founders and sponsors in particular. Some monastic rules come up with vastly different ideas of how monastic discipline could be used to circumvent the challenges of Augustine’s doctrine of full dependence on divine grace and his dismissal of any justification through work—​and, more generally, they might be read as evidence for a striking plurality of theological viewpoints stretching the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.49 Things get even more complicated if we take into account—​as we do for almost all medieval sources—​that rules may have been read and used differently at different moments in their history, initially maybe as a document of reform and crisis management, later as an identity-​forming text, as a word of wisdom of a venerable past, as a collectible to be combined with other rules (Benedict of Aniane’s Codex regularum was not the first collection), as a holy text to be submitted to careful exegesis, or even, as we know from the RB, as a text to improve one’s Latin skills.50 If we focus on the moment of genesis of a monastic rule we find yet another potentially fruitful way of approaching our texts as Gesamtkunstwerke. Norms never depict life; and any attempt to reconstruct monastic practice on the basis



Albrecht Diem, “L’espace, la grâce et la discipline dans les règles monastiques du haut Moyen Âge,” in Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieux clos (IVe–​XIXe siècle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-​Donat, Julie Claustre, Élisabeth Lusset, and Falk Bretschneider (Paris, 2015), 215–​38. 50 Matthieu van der Meer, Glosae in regula Sancti Benedicti abbatis ad usum Smaragdi Sancti Michaelis abbatis, CCCM 282.

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of rules fails for two obvious reasons: we do not know to what extent a regulation, particularly a disciplinary measure, indicates a problem or points to its solution. Moreover, aside from incidentally providing elements of stage decor, monastic rules (and narratives similarly) leave out the consensual, everything that does not need to be regulated, thus most likely the core of monastic life. Nevertheless, they inevitably reflect on a monastic reality and they are sometimes astonishingly close to “real life.” We can see the aristocratic lady who had starved herself to death and incited Caesarius of Arles’ overly anxious amendment on assessing the practice of individual fasting with great scrutiny (RCaeV 42). We can reflect on the incident of washing someone’s dirty linen that gave Caesarius a reason to prohibit his nuns from providing laundry service to priests. We can imagine how the monk who flirted with the parvuli (child monks also called oblati) urged monastic legislators to establish clear boundaries between monastic generations (RAM 35; see also RTar 13.4). And we see the monks attempting to sneak out of the monastery by crossing the river, which encouraged the author of the Regula Tarnatensis to prohibit the use of boats and punish every confidant of a monastic escape (RTar 4.5; 13.7–​ 8). Maybe we can even smell the monk who incited Ferreolus (d. 581) to prohibit the use of perfumes in his monastery (RFer 32). Every rule both conceals and reveals a number of dramas large and small, and the moment or process of composing each monastic rule has itself the potential for drama, which sometimes leaves traces in its prologue or dedicatory letter. Rules may express discontent with the existing normative tradition (or ‘unregulated’ monastic practice), but they can also indicate a very specific crisis that was the reason for abandoning a non-​regulated state, or perhaps for tossing out an existing normative basis for one’s ascetic life. It might be the nervous attempt of monastic founders or their successors to ‘routinize’ their charisma: the dying Benedict who writes down his Rule or Jonas of Bobbio who replaces Columbanus by the Regula Columbani;51 the gathering of monks whose most outspoken leaders put their ideas in writing (if we believe the setup of the Regula quattuor patrum); or the awareness that none of the old texts can form the basis of a continued existence, which motivated Caesarius and Donatus (d. after 658) to compose their rules for nuns. There is most certainly an interesting story behind the genesis of every single monastic rule. Finally, there is an irresolvable tension in monastic rules. Carolingian reformers (and Caesarius of Arles three centuries earlier) proclaimed their

Albrecht Diem, “Monks, Kings and the Transformation of Sanctity: Jonas of Bobbio and the End of the Holy Man,” Speculum 82 (2007): 521–​59.

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rule as regula sancta, as a disciplinary tool to bring their communities close to a state of collective sanctity. But rules can also be read as an expression of defeat. They show that a congregatio sancta (to use Caesarius’ term) needs to be regulated and can only exist in a hierarchical framework and a closely confined space. Rules admit that the apostolic sint vobis omnia communia (Acts 4:32) can only work if it is enforced upon the monks or nuns. They reveal, sometimes in great detail, a world of weaknesses, transgressions, and the fact that discipline and motivation is permanently in danger of being undermined by human deficiency. The remarkably scarce manuscript transmission of most monastic rules and the fact that regulae are rarely combined with other texts and are rarely excerpted or processed in florilegia or pastoral works, indicates that most rules were “for internal use only.” The RM, the (older or younger) brother or cousin of the RB, expresses unease about its own existence most pointedly in the chapter on the readings at table. If the monks are eating as a community, then let them hear the Rule. But if by chance lay people come to the table of the monastery, because of potential evil gossip in the world if a lay person gains knowledge of the secrets of God, if it pleases the abbot, [the weekly reader] should read from some other book, so that the secret of the monastery and the norms of a holy life determined by discipline will not be known to those who might make fun of them. (RM 24.20–​1)

Monastic rules can also be quite embarrassing texts.

Monastic Rules LOr: Liber Orsiesii, in Pachomiana Latina. Règle et épitres de S. Pachome, épitre de S. Théodore et “liber” de S. Orsiesius, ed. Amand Boon (Louvain, 1932), 109–47. RAM: Aurelianus of Arles, Regula ad monachos, in Albert Schmidt, “Zur Komposition der Mönchsregel des Heiligen Aurelian von Arles I,” Studia Monastica 17 (1975): 237–56; more complete in PL 68, 385–96. RAV: Aurelianus of Arles, Regula ad virgines, PL 68, 399–408. RB: Regula Benedicti, ed. and trans. Jean Neufville and Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 181–2; ed. Rudolf Hanslik, CSEL 75, 2nd ed. RBas: Basilius, Regula a Rufino latine versa, ed. Klaus Zelzer, CSEL 86; ed. and trans. Anna M. Silvas, The Rule of St Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition (Collegeville, MI, 2013). RCaeM: Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad monachos, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, SC 398, 165–226. RCaeV: Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad virgines, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, SC 354, 35–272; trans. Maria Caritas McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction (Washington, DC, 1960).

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Monastic Rules RCas:  Regula Cassiani, in Henry Ledoyen, “La ‘Regula Cassiani’ du Clm 28118 et la règle anonyme de l’Escorial A.I.13: présentation et édition,” Revue bénédictine 94 (1984): 154–94. RColC: Columbanus, Regula coenobialis, in Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker (Dublin, 1970), 142–69. RColM: Columbanus, Regula monachorum, in Columbani Opera, 122–43. RCom: Regula communis, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda, ed. and trans. Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Rocca Melia (Madrid, 1971), 172–211. RcuiM: Regula cuiusdam patris ad monachos, in Fernando Villegas, “La ‘Regula cuiusdam Patris ad monachos’: ses sources littéraires et ses rapports avec la ‘Regula monachorum’ de Colomban,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 49 (1973): 3–36. RcuiV:  Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, PL 88, 1051–70 (new edition by Albrecht Diem in preparation). RDon: Regula Donati, in Monastica: Donati Regula, Pseudo-Columbani Regula monialium (frg.), ed. Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl on the basis of the preparatory work of Michaela Zelzer, CSEL 98, 1:3–188. RFer: Regula Ferreoli, in Vincent Desprez, “La Regula Ferrioli: texte critique,” Revue Mabillon 60 (1982): 117–48. RFruc: Fructuosus of Braga, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 129–62. RI: Isidore of Seville, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 79–125. RLea: Leander of Seville, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 21–76. RMac: Regula Macharii, in Les règles des saints Pères, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé, vol. 1, SC 297, 287–389. RM: Regula magistri, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 105–7. RO: Regula orientalis, in Les règles des saints Pères, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé, vol. 2, SC 298, 409–95. RPac: Amand Boon, ed., Pachomiana Latina. Règle et épitres de S. Pachome, épitre de S. Théodore et “liber” de S. Orsiesius (Louvain, 1932), 1–74. 2RP: Regula patrum secunda, in de Vogüé, Les règles des saints Pères, 1:209–83. 3RP: Regula patrum tertia, in de Vogüé, Les règles des saints Pères, 2:499–543. RIVP: Regula quattuor patrum, in de Vogüé, Les règles des saints Pères, 1:57–205. RPS: Regula Pauli et Stephani, ed. Johannes Evangelista M. Vilanova (Montserrat, 1959). RTar: Regula Tarnatensis, in Fernando Villegas, “La ‘regula monasterii Tarnatensis’: texte, sources et datation,” Revue bénédictine 84 (1974): 7–65.

Bibliography Bowes, Kimberly D. “Inventing Ascetic Space: Houses, Monasteries and the ‘Archaeology of Asceticism’.” In Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 315–51. Casiday, Augustine. Tradition and Theology in St John Cassian. Oxford and New York, 2007. Claussen, Martin A. The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century. Cambridge, 2004. De Jong, Mayke B. “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2: c. 700–c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 622– 53. Cambridge, 1995.

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Albrecht Diem and Philip Rouss eau Dey, Hendrik, and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Diem, Albrecht. “The Carolingians and the Regula Benedicti.” In Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong, edited by Rob Meens et al., 243–61. Manchester, 2016. [2016b]   “Columbanian Monastic Rules: Dissent and Experiment.” In The Irish in Europe in the Middle Ages: Identity, Culture, and Religion, edited by Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder, 68–85 and 248–9. London and New York, 2016. [2016a]   “L’espace, la grâce et la discipline dans les règles monastiques du haut Moyen Âge.” In Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieux clos (IVe–XIXe siècle), edited by Isabelle Heullant-Donat, Julie Claustre, Élisabeth Lusset, and Falk Bretschneider, 215–38. Paris, 2015.   “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West.” In Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 53–84.   “Was bedeutet Regula Columbani?” In Integration und Herrschaft. Ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, edited by Max Diesenberger and Walter Pohl, 63–89. Vienna, 2002. Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg, PA, 1999. Goodrich, Richard J. Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in FifthCentury Gaul. Oxford, 2007. Guy, Jean-Claude. “Introduction.” In Les Apophtegmes des Pères. Collection systématique, edited by Jean-Claude Guy, vol. 1, 13–87. SC 387. Leyser, Conrad. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford, 2000. Markus, Robert A. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge, 1990. Muschiol, Gisela. Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern. Münster, 1994. Rebenich, Stefan. Hieronymus und sein Kreis. Prosopographische und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen. Stuttgart, 1992. Rousseau, Philip. Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN, 2010.   Basil of Caesarea. Berkeley, CA, 1994.   Pachomius:  The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA, 1999. Semmler, Josef. “Benedictus II: una regula—una consuetudo.” In Benedictine Culture 750– 1050, edited by Willem Lourdaux and Daniël Verhelst, 1–49. Leuven, 1983. Silvas, Anna M. The Asketikon of St Basil the Great. Oxford, 2005.   The Rule of St Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition. Collegeville, MN, 2013. Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford, 1998. Uggé, Sofia. “Lieux, espaces et topographie des monastères de l’antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge: réflexions à propos des règles monastiques.” In Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval, edited by Michel Lauwers, 15–42. Turnhout, 2014. Verheijen, Luc. La règle de saint Augustin. Paris, 1967. Vogüé, Adalbert de. Les règles monastiques anciennes (400–700). Turnhout, 1985.

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Social Plurality and Monastic Diversity in Late Antique Hispania (Sixth to Eighth Century) P a b lo C.   Día z (t r an s late d b y Susa na G on zá l ez K now les)

Now that the world’s time has begun to wane and is almost up, charity becomes cold, the most brutal forms of iniquity gain force, and the flame of ever unappeasable and voracious human ambition rekindles, and the devil’s most maddening and covetous atrocity grows bolder. In these sacred places there are ever fewer chosen individuals who willingly embrace the Lord. And, so that these monasteries do not become abandoned ruins, they take pig-​keepers from their own slaves and humpbacks from their own herds and youth from their properties, whom they tonsure against their will so that they may attend them in their religious services, and who are given a certain education at monasteries and are falsely called monks.1

This is how Valerio, an ascetic who had spent most of his life trying to avoid ecclesiastical authorities and monastic discipline, living as a hermit in the secluded valleys of El Bierzo, in inland Gallaecia (northwest Spain), complained about the situation of monasticism at the close of the seventh century.2 While the text presents a somewhat apocalyptic scenario—​almost anticipating the end of times—​his concerns about the dissolute life led at monasteries, forced work, and the loss of the original ideal of monastic life probably stem from the immediate reality around him. Bede’s (d. 735) similar report of a continuous state of indiscipline at about the same time was one

Valerio of Bierzo, De genere monachorum 3, ed. and trans. Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, Valerio del Bierzo. Su persona. Su obra (León, 2006), 324–​37. 2 Consuelo Maria Aherne, Valerio of Bierzo:  An Ascetic of the Late Visigothic Period (Washington, DC, 1949); Pablo C. Díaz, “Regula communis: Monastic Space and Social Context,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 117–​35. 1

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of the catalysts for the reform of the Frankish Church promoted by Pepin the Short after 742. The picture provided by Valerio, however, is mainly a result of the contrast between his own ascetic ideals—​the image of the flawless monk as the perfect athlete of Christ, a man living in concealed martyrdom—​and monastic reality. In the late seventh century, monastic life was essentially an institutional response that was perfectly integrated into its social context, far from its original conception as a set of idealized expressions of self-​sacrifice and personal conversion as a path to perfection and salvation. In fact, apart from Valerio’s own texts, the existing documentation for the development of the monastic phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula mostly portrays a practical institution whose purpose was to adapt to the diocesan Church on the one hand, and to the multifaceted and complex social reality of late antique and early medieval Hispania on the other.

Spiritual Uniformity Valerio’s De genere monachorum is valuable because of its exceptional character. It provides information about some of the monasteries that he frequented in the area of Asturica Augusta in modern Astorga (León). These anecdotal episodes are notable because Spanish hagiography rarely concerned itself with monastic life, with the exception of this text, an anonymous Vita Fructuosi, and the De viris illustribus by Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and Ildefonso of Toledo (d. 667). Also notable is a collection of advice that Bishop Leander of Seville (d. 600)  gave to a sister who had entered a female monastery in southern Hispania, although that text says little about the functioning of the monastery. No significant archaeological documentation exists. Apart from the canons and some sentences of the Spanish councils of the sixth and seventh centuries, therefore, the Spanish monastic reality of the Visigothic period must be reconstructed mainly through the surviving rules. While Visigothic rules are not numerous, they demonstrate strongly contrasting organizational realities and social contexts.3 There are three rules, strictly speaking, and two contractual documents in which the monks included the text of their profession, the conditions of coexistence they had to accept as well as the laws that protected them. The two most widely disseminated rules originate from two well-​known bishops, Isidore of Seville

On late antique and early medieval Western monastic rules in general, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume.

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(Regula Isidori, RI) and Fructuosus of Braga (Regula Fructuosi, RFruc).4 These represent two opposing views regarding the rigor of discipline and reflect two clearly different socioeconomic contexts. Isidore assumes a traditional Roman agrarian environment, in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, near a city, where great agricultural properties appear to be the dominant reality. With Fructuosus (d. 656) however, we are in northeast Hispania, in an environment of more compartmentalized and less productive agrarian spaces, where cities appear to be unknown. The Regula communis (RCom) is a document that was apparently produced by a group of abbots in agreement with the bishop of Dumio.5 While its geographical environment is the same as that of the RFruc, the social reality it evokes is highly complex: an environment in which families entered monasteries together, eventually transforming complete peasant communities into monasteries. It is in this context that the two aforementioned contractual texts are to be understood. One carries the significant name of Pactum and appears to be the agreement of stability that the professed monks of the RCom had to sign.6 The other emerges from the same context, probably in an earlier period. Although it has been transmitted as the Regula Consensoria Monachorum (RConM), it does not have the structure of a rule.7 It is, rather, a pact of profession between equals. This text is interesting for its reflection of a violent society in which monasteries appear to play the role of peacemakers within a context of enormous tension. Much like the three rules mentioned above, the two contractual texts were known by Benedict of Aniane, although he used only the rules, and most extensively that of Isidore of Seville, in his Concordia regularum.8 The origins of Hispanic monasticism are unclear. With the exception of sporadic references to ascetic behaviors whose impact and presence are difficult to assess, the first allusions to the monastic institution are recorded in sixth-​century documents. It is pictured as an accepted, though relatively



Isidore of Seville, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda, ed. and trans. Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Roca Meliá (Madrid, 1971), 79–​125. Fructuosus of Braga, Regula, in ibid., 129–​62; English translation: Claude W. Barlow, trans., Iberian Fathers. II: Braulio of Saragossa. Fructuosus of Braga (Washington, DC, 1969), 155–​75. 5 Regula communis, in Ruiz and Roca Meliá, San Leandro, 165–​ 208; English translation: Barlow, Iberian Fathers, 176–​206. 6 Pactum, in Ruiz and Roca Meliá, San Leandro, 208–​11; English translation: Barlow, Iberian Fathers,  207–​9. 7 Regula Consensoria Monachorum, PL 66, 993–​6; English translation: Barlow, Iberian Fathers, 213–​20. 8 Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum I: praefatio. Concordantiae. Indices. II: textus, ed. Pierre Bonnerue, CCCM 168–​168A, 143–​4. 4

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new, phenomenon that thus required the establishment of guidelines to solve simple cases, instructions that were based on experiences from Gaul or the eastern Mediterranean. Canon 11 of the council held in Tarragona (516) and canon 3 of the Council of Lérida (546) both refer to earlier councils in Agde and Orleans in Gaul.9 Likewise, canon 10 of a council held in Barcelona (540) refers to the decisions taken earlier in Chalcedon. This was the context for the establishment of certain ground norms such as the place of monasteries within the institutional ecclesiastical framework, especially in relation to episcopal authority: With the permission of the abbot, those who were approved by the bishop for the office of priest must be ordained for the use of the Church. The goods that are offered to the monastery are not subject in any way to the diocesan administration of the bishop. And should any layman wish to consecrate a basilica built by himself, he dare not withdraw it from the general regime of the diocese under the pretext of being a monastery if there is no religious community living there under a rule approved by the bishop.10

This canon establishes principles that can be considered essential and universal. On the one hand, it expresses the idea of a doctrinal unity within the diocesan territory, including the bishop’s approval of the regulae or rules to be followed at monasteries. This doctrinal unity was probably, in most cases, utopian and limited to the approval by the bishops of the priests in these monasteries. On the other hand, the canon demands monasteries’ absolute financial autonomy, turning them into property and power units, a crucial fact for their further evolution. These regulations were set at the great dawn of foundations, with widely differing sources of influence. In the Pyrenees, a series of monasteries initiated by Victorianus of Asán (d. c.  558)  around 550 seem to have been influenced by traditions from Gaul. Martin (d. 579; later known as Martin of Braga), a missionary from Panonia, arrived in Gallaecia at around the same time, probably heading a Byzantine mission. In addition to converting the Suebi to Catholicism, he founded a series of monasteries, among them that of Dumio, which was also a diocesan seat clearly marked by Eastern influences.11 There is evidence a few decades later of the arrival of North

For the texts of all of the Spanish councils mentioned here, see Gonzalo Martínez Díez and Felix Rodriguez, eds., La colección canónica hispana. IV. Concilios galos. Concilios hispanos: primera parte (Madrid, 1984). 10 Council of Lérida, canon 3. 11 Alberto Ferreiro, “The Missionary Labors of St. Martin of Braga in 6th century Galicia,” Studia Monastica 23 (1981): 11–​26. 9

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African monks who settled at least in Lusitania and in the east of the peninsula. The settling of a Celtic or Briton community along the western Cantabrian coast further contributes to this assortment of traditions. This sudden increase in the number of monasteries was even more dramatic after 589, when the Visigoths, after the conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula, finally converted to Catholicism. Around the year 590 the chronicler John of Biclaro (d. 621) writes that King Reccared (r. 586–​601) supported the founding of monasteries,12 and in the Second Council of Seville, held in 619, there is mention of newly created monasteries alongside older ones.13 Among these foundations are new women’s monasteries, whose management also required rules.14 Once monastic communities became part of society, they were integrated into the production–​consumption patterns and into the networks of local and regional power, but they were also included in the political sphere and in the complex web of relations among the kingdom’s elite. This was not only because monasteries had developed into large property structures;15 the foundations themselves were to become instruments for the control of land for their founders. While this phenomenon is already clear in sixth-​century institutions, as can be observed in the properties and social relationships of the monasteries of Asán or Dumio,16 it became more widespread in the early seventh century. The councils held in this period show the bishops’ fear of losing properties to monasteries,17 and some bishops even went so far as to dispossess or even dissolve and  destroy  them.18 These quarrels, conflicts of diverse nature, led to different types of commitment and significantly innovative monastic alternatives. It is doubtful that each monastery followed one specific rule. The rule to be approved by the bishop as mentioned by the Council of Lérida, the rule



John of Biclaro, Chronicle 86 (a. 586). Council of Seville II, canon 10. 14 Ibid., canon 11. 15 Beat Brenk, “Monasteries as Rural Settlements:  Patron-​ Dependence or Self-​ Sufficiency?” in Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, ed. William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2004), 447–​76. For the economic integration of early medieval monasteries, see the articles by Devroey and Kaplan in this volume. 16 Enrique Ariño and Pablo C. Díaz. “Poblamiento y organización del espacio:  la Tarraconense pirenaica en el siglo VI,” Antiquité tardive 11 (2003): 223–​37. 17 Council of Toledo III, canons 3 and 4; Council of Toledo IX, canon 5. 18 Council of Seville II, canon 10; Council of Toledo IV, canon 51; Council of Toledo IX, canon 2. 12

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alluded to by Eutropio (regulam hanc secundum antiquorum normam),19 and John of Biclaro’s alleged rule20 were probably merely references to a book of rules (quaternionem regularum)21 to be consulted in case of doubt. The increase in the number of foundations and the proliferation of the forms of monastic experience, however, made it necessary to provide ever more accurate and specific answers. Isidore of Seville stated this clearly in the introduction to his rule: Many are the rules and norms of the ancestors found here and there written by the Holy Fathers, and which some writers transmitted to posterity in too diffuse and obscure a way. As for us, following their example, we have embarked upon choosing some norms in a colloquial and rustic style so that you may easily understand how can you preserve the consecration of your state. (RI Praefatium)

Isidore drafted this rule around 620, concomitant with the deliberations of the Council of Seville of 619. In a completely different geographical and social context, around 646, Fructuosus of Braga similarly implied in his rule that all he was doing was extracting the parts that could be relevant for monastic life from the traditional rules (RFruc “In nomine Domini”). Likewise, one decade later, the first two chapters of the RCom clearly state what it rejects. The rule, probably written in the diocese of Dumio, seems to have been drafted to solve problems of arbitrariness and abuse that had changed the very concept of monastic life. In the first place, it was necessary to deal with foundations that had been arbitrarily established, without consulting the “General Conference” (communis conlatio) of abbots under the rule and without the bishop’s approval in accordance with the canons and rule: Some are accustomed for fear of Gehenna to found monasteries within their own homes, and to join in common under the terms of an oath with their wives and children and slaves and neighbours, and, as we have said, to consecrate for themselves churches on their own estates, name these after the martyrs, and falsely to call such establishments monasteries. We consider these not monasteries, but the perdition of souls and the subversion of the Church. From such have arisen heresy and schism and great controversy throughout the monasteries. (RCom 1)



Eutropio of Valencia, Epistola de districtione monachorum. Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus 31. 21 Braulio of Saragossa, Epistola 2.

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Secondly, in order to stress the differences with other types of monasteries established in cities by secular priests the author writes the following: Some priests are accustomed to simulate sanctity and they do so, not for eternal life but to serve the Church like mercenaries, and under the pretext of holiness, to pursue the emoluments of riches …. They have not distributed their goods to the poor. They have not lived a laborious life in monasteries to train [themselves]; … and they preach what they do not themselves practice; and they keep a common rule with secular bishops, princes of the earth and people.22

Such monasteries are further described as standing outside the boundaries of the confederation of abbots (probably in reference to the General Conference mentioned above) and the discipline set by the bishop living according to the rule (qui per regulam uiuit), around which an extraordinarily innovative sort of monastic confederation had been established. The bishop in charge at the time was probably the bishop of Dumio, although there may occasionally have been others.23 The three aforementioned Rules involve details regarding daily life. It is unclear whether or not the RI was originally intended for the specific monastery evoked in the manuscripts that contain it.24 Nevertheless, its influence seems to have been far-​reaching, and it became famous enough to be copied outside its original environment. RI seems to be based on moderation, austerity, and renunciation. Likewise, it establishes certain work requirements, a punishment system, and a hierarchy that Isidore considered accessible to most converts (RI Praef.). Visigothic monasticism should not be studied only in terms of its spiritual dimensions. Its social and material aspects must also be considered. Late antique monasteries had not yet established their own physical plan, but had rather adapted to the already existing morphology.25 Indeed, most monastic foundations took advantage of already structured farmlands. For instance, Fructuosus not only contributed family properties to his first foundations, but also introduced some of their laborers as part of the first group of monks. RI, by contrast, is a valuable guide, conceived both to regulate spiritual life and to rationalize the operation of an economic area—​an idealized space that could perfectly represent a large estate of late imperial tradition. Space layout follows the structure of late Roman villas, thus continuing in practice

RCom 2. Slightly revised translation. Charles Julian Bishko, “The Pactual Tradition in Hispanic Monasticism,” in Spanish and Portuguese Monastic History 600–​1300 (London, 1984), 19–​20. 24 Anscari M. Mundó, “Il monachesimo nella Penisola Iberica fino al sec. VII: questione ideologiche e letterarie,” in Il monachesimo nell’alto Medioevo e la formazione della civiltà occidentale, ed. Giuseppe Ermini (Spoleto, 1957), 106, n. 108. 25 See the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 22 23

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an already existing spatial and socioeconomic arrangement. Careful reading shows that Isidore not only arranges a physical space where the cloister and orchard, the central structure, correspond to the owner’s dwelling and attached premises, but also reproduces the same structures in regard to social relations and the distribution of productive tasks, thus adding an artificial element: an imaginary space.26 The type of monastery that is behind RI still involves the presence of a nearby urban unit. It assumes a certain level of monetary wealth, with investments and purchases in coin, associated with the economic pattern of an urban market rather than the self-​sufficiency characteristic of rural areas (RI 20). The women’s monasteries founded in Bética (at the southern tip of Spain) and referred to in the Council of Seville held in 619 owned properties in both town and countryside (rustica uel urbana). The setting is therefore one into which classical social and economic traditions had penetrated so deeply that, in spite of inevitable changes, they still remained in force. The presence of this type of monastery is reflected in The Lives of the Meridan Fathers (Vitas sanctorum patrum emeretensium), in reference to Lusitania, and in Eutropius’ (d. c.  610)  The Monks’ Severity (De districtione monachorum), in reference to Carthaginensis. The monasteries of the Tarraconensis province also seem to have followed this model, especially those located in the Ebro Valley, which were under the influence of the RI. Canon 3 of the Third Council of Saragossa (691), in requesting that monasteries not be turned into lay guesthouses, in fact, depicts a monastic structure that perfectly fits the provisions of the RI.27

Social Diversity and Monastic Syncretism In addition to the apparently homogeneous monasticism based on the paradigmatic model established by the RI, other, dissimilar, models could be found in late antique Hispania, all of which developed around the province of Gallaecia. Apart from Valerio’s testimony and the hagiographic text known as Vita Fructuosi, which describes the founding activities of its protagonist, the three rules RFruc, RCom, and RConM can help to reconstruct the complex



Pablo C. Díaz, “Espacio real/​espacio imaginado en los monasterios isidorianos,” in Monasteria et Territoria. Elites, edilicia y territorio en el Mediterráneo medieval (siglos V–​XI), ed. Jorge López Quiroga, A. M. Martínez Tejera, and Jorge Morín de Pablos (Oxford, 2007), 77–​90; Jacques Biarne, “Le monastère: un modèle de societé organisée et structurée d’après les règles des IVe–​VIe siècles,” in Images et représentations du pouvoir et de l’ordre social dans l’antiquité. Actes du colloque, Angers 28–​29 mai 1999), ed. Michel Molin (Paris, 2001), 111–​19. 27 Pablo C. Díaz, Formas económicas y sociales en el monacato visigodo (Salamanca, 1987).

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monastic reality. This selection of testimonies provides evidence of the complexity of the social substratum to which this type of monasticism belonged.28 The Vita Fructuosi is an anonymous text written somewhere around Braga with the purpose of supporting the see, while also clearly backing up Fructuosus’ monastic initiatives. The hagiographer writes about the conversion to monastic life of this Gothic aristocrat and of his engagement in the founding of monasteries, not only in the area of Gallaecia but also as far as Cádiz, at the southern tip of the peninsula, where he established a pattern of double monasteries whose later development is completely unknown. Fructuosus was well known at the time as the author of a rule that reveals his monastic ideals:  extreme austerity, absolute submission to the abbot’s authority, and a harsh punishment system with no leniency toward those who did not keep the monastery’s discipline. In fact, to become part of the monastic community it was necessary to pass a one-​year trial period living in a cell outside the monastery, subjected to the most abject poverty and to all manner of duties (RFruc 20). During this period, candidates were required to perform the lowliest and most difficult tasks. The severity of these tests was aimed at finding out whether the candidate had come to the monastery willingly or out of economic need. Only after the trial period, when the candidate’s intention to convert had been ascertained and it had been proved that he was not bound by personal submission, was it the case that: the abbot shall receive his oath (pactum), which contains the complete foundation of his religious profession, and by which the candidate shall bind himself to fulfill faithfully all the laws and customs of the monastery and never to act against them, and shall promise never to depart from the strict observance of the rule of the monastery which he is seeking to follow.29

The text seems to avoid any hint of wickedness on the part of the newly professed; it might even be an attempt to correct a former problem, since it is known that Fructuosus’ first foundation had included part of the property’s subordinates (ex familia sua) as monks.30 The text also includes an oath, a sort of contractual formula (pactum), by which monks sign their agreement to the conditions for becoming part of the community. This acceptance of discipline, prayer, fasting, and the hardships of everyday life defines Fructuosian

Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, “Popular Religion in Visigothic Spain,” in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. Edward James (Oxford, 1980), 5–​6 and 37. 29 RFruc 21; 22 in Barlow’s translation, here slightly revised. 30 Vita Fructuosi 3. 28

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monasticism better than any spiritual reference.31 It includes acceptance of the severity of the punishments for transgressors: five of the twenty-​four chapters of the RFruc are specifically devoted to the regulation of misdemeanors; in addition, the chapters discussing everyday activities and behaviors at the monastery usually include the punishments established for transgressors. RFruc is far less systematic than RI in terms of the monastery’s administrative and economic structure. This does not prevent us, however, from perceiving that we are within a poorer geographical area with smaller and more scattered farmlands,32 with less compact common spaces and no orchard. Fructuosus’ monastic communities are surrounded by villages (uici), villas (uillae), and secular properties (saeculares possessiones) in general (RFruc 22). This environment seems far from the reality of cities and a monetary economy. Nevertheless, the regulations evince a similar idea about what a monastery should be, and even share a common basic structure: the duality between cloistered and external spaces. Isidore and Fructuosus share another aspect that sets them apart from the RCom. Both seek a rational spatial arrangement and the establishment of regulations for governance, as well as for both communal and spiritual life, whereas the RCom attempts to arrange family groups following sanctioned norms, and probably whole peasant communities that were established as monasteries without any religious authority.33 RCom is structured to respect certain perfectly recognizable formal monastic elements, but at the same time presents a wealth of completely new ideas. A key can be found in the figure of the abbot himself and the insistence that he should not have an inheritance in the world, his first virtue being his ability to defend the monastery’s possessions (RCom 3). This is the first example of an assumption that is present throughout the whole text: communities governed by the RCom are under constant threat, both from the outside and from a latent internal risk of dissolution. The rule’s last chapter is devoted to how those who leave the monastery should be treated. They are clearly classified into two groups:  those who simply flee—​who are considered fugitives and therefore cannot be admitted to any

Réginald Gregoire, “Valeurs ascétiques et spirituelles de la ‘Regula Monachorum’ et de la ‘Regula communis’ de S. Fructueux de Braga,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 43 (1967): 159–​76. 32 Renan Frighetto, “Aspectos da vida económica no NW de Península Ibérica em finais do século VII:  a pequeña propriedade rural no obra de Valerio do Berzo,” Hispania antiqua 21 (1997): 515–​24. 33 Ildefons Herwegen, Das Pactum des hl. Fruktuosus von Braga (Stuttgart, 1907), 55–​60; Bishko, “The Pactual Tradition,” 20. 31

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other monastery and who, once found, must be bound by ropes and returned to their corresponding monasteries34—​and monks who decide to return to the secular world and who, supported by their relatives, rebel against and threaten the monastery (RCom 20). The text is ambiguous as to whether those who support such men are also members of the community. The explanation could be in an earlier chapter that requires converts to renounce all their possessions; the reason is to prevent something that seems to be happening at other monasteries: men have entered and brought their capital with them and later, losing their religious fervour, have made great trouble in demanding their property; and returning to the world which they had left …, with the aid of their relatives have extorted what they had brought with them to the monastery, and have sought the support of secular judges and with the help of magistrates (saionibus) have destroyed the monasteries. (RCom 18)

Notwithstanding the ambiguity of the text, it seems clear that the RCom is an attempt to prevent violence triggered by conflicting economic interests where property, or the way it is conceived, is at the core of the conflict. This is not an isolated event. The geographic and economic environments concerned have little to do with the ones evoked in RI or RFruc. They are based on a subsistence economy in which agricultural work is subordinated to livestock farming, and the text acknowledges that, if they ever had to depend on the bread produced in the area, it would barely last three months (RCom 9).35 The rule does not mention vegetables or oil, and cider appears to have relegated wine to a second place. There is a whole chapter devoted to shepherding, but nothing about traditional Mediterranean agriculture. There is mention of the church (RCom 7) and the domus or enclosure for the sick (RCom 7), although there seems to be no refectory or dormitory for the monks. No specific place for the Sunday assembly is mentioned; the superior communicates where the deans are to meet (RCom 13). The strict division into ecclesiastical areas seems to indicate that life was organized into small groups that shared undiscriminated workspaces. What type of communities followed the RCom? It is clear from the text that the rule encompassed a wide geographical area, and that it governed the actions of an association of monasteries: the abbots within a particular area are to hold monthly meetings to discuss the unity and consistency of their

Council of Toledo IV, canon 52; Council of Toledo XIII, canon 11; Leges Visigothorum 3.5.3. Chris Wickham, “Pastoralism and Underdevelopment in the Early Middle Ages,” in L’uomo di fronte al mondo animale nel’alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1985), 401–​51.

34 35

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practices (RCom 10).36 Several chapters provide an in-​depth description of how family groups (uiri cum uxoribus ac filiis) could live in the community (RCom 6 and 15–​17). All of this leads to the conclusion that peasant communities were being established as monastic structures, which morphologically paved the way to the creation of double monasteries.37 These communities pooled their properties and submitted them to the productive criteria dictated by the monastery and its head, the abbot. This is at the root of the preoccupation with the proper transfer of properties. It was important to ensure that those who decided to give up the religious life could never recover their contributions, which in certain cases could trigger violence. The reason for this peculiar process of institutionalizing monastic communities remains unknown. Based on the fact that this process predated attempts to regulate it through the rule, as reflected in its first chapter, it is possible that peasant communities were looking for a mechanism of defense against external attacks; the rule granted unity and patrimonial independence to the monasteries. These attacks mainly came from lords whose intention was either to subjugate these communities or to split them up by the individual subjection of their members. Either version was an attack on traditional proprietorial conceptions and therefore on their ancestral hereditary systems.38 To address this threat, monasteries could preserve the collective nature that the property and exploitation system still seemed to hold, as seen in references from the text itself.39 In this respect, the spreading of the monastic confederation implied by the rule and approved by a bishop, as required by canonical legislation, must have been a reaction to a violent social context that is barely mentioned in the sources. In fact, the presence of this bishop living under the rule (RCom 2), whose role was to protect the confederation, should be understood as a means of containing pressure from the aristocracy and secular bishops.40 This context of need explains why, as mentioned above, the main requirement for abbots was a commitment to the monastery’s defense. It also

José Orlandis, Estudios sobre instituciones monásticas medievales (Pamplona, 1971), 69–​82; Bishko “The Pactual Tradition,” 20. 37 Díaz, “Regula communis”; Orlandis, Estudios sobre instituciones monásticas medievales, 34; Alonso Fernández, La cura pastoral en la España romanovisigoda (Roma, 1955), 492. 38 Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages:  Europe and the Mediterranean 400–​800 (Oxford and New York, 2005), 552–​3. 39 Pablo C. Díaz, “Monasteries in a Peripheral Area:  Seventh-​Century Gallaecia,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Francis Theuws, with Carine van Rhijn (Leiden, 2001), 329–​59. 40 Alain Dierkens, Abbayes et chapitres entre Sambre et Meuse (VIIe–​XIe siècles). Contribution à l’histoire religieuse des campagnes du haut Moyen Âge (Sigmaringen, 1985). 36

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explains the implementation of a pact, alongside the rule, to govern the community. Unlike the RFruc, the RCom was transmitted with the pact that was to be signed by those who wished to join the community (RCom 18). By signing it, monks and nuns agreed to comply with the abbot’s authority, although they were entitled to question it if he exerted it arbitrarily. If the abbot were to treat any of the monks or nuns unjustly (“if you should treat any of us with pride or anger, or should love one and show hatred and rancor for another or should dominate one but revere another”), they had the right to complain to their immediate superior (the dean of their group of ten), who seemed to play the role of mediator in these cases. If the abbot refused to acknowledge and correct his mistakes, members of the community could also arrange to meet with and consult “other monasteries, or else a bishop who lives under the Rule, or a Catholic count who is a defender of the Church,” to secure correction and compliance with the rule (Pactum). The sense of democratic community becomes clearer further on, when the Pactum states that an assembly of the whole community is to be held for the trial of offenders so that, after reading the rules, they might agree on an appropriate punishment. The Pactum repeats the offense that seems to concern the community most: that any of its members, supported by his parents, brothers, sons, relatives, or neighbors, or by another monk, might plot against the rule. The terminology used seems to refer to both the kin group and more distant relatives.41 At this point, the text includes the punishment to be imposed by the abbot, which, in cases of contumacy, could even lead to banishment from the monastery. This means that those affected would “wander here and there unsettled and constantly on the move” (RCom 20):  that is, excluded from the community and deprived of its protection. Although the text is sometimes ambiguous, mostly using the masculine gender, when referring to punishment imposed on members of the community by the abbot, it is made clear that “this we declare both for men and for women” (Pactum). In fact, it seems that monks resorted to their relatives in order to avoid expulsion (RCom 14).

Contractual Professions: The Pactum The contents of the pactum mentioned in Fructuosus’ rule are unknown. That this term is also used by Isidore has led to the idea that there was a pact

Donald A. Bullough, “Early Medieval Social Groupings: The Terminology of Kinship,” Past & Present 45 (1969): 11–​12.

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involving Hispanic monasticism in all its forms,42 even though the contractual model is compatible neither with the principle of authority established by both Fructuosus and Isidore, nor with the lifelong character of the profession, which is stated in ecclesiastical and civil laws.43 The origin of the pactum of the RCom probably lies in the neighborhood monasteries mentioned in the first chapter of the rule, in which the abbot is described as a weak character, a mere figurehead manipulated by the pseudo-​monks (RCom 1). The submission of these monasteries to a rule was accomplished by accepting certain of their organizational features, among them their system of hierarchies supervised by the assembly and their own contractual commitment, which was guaranteed by the pactum. Political solidarity—​which had so far dominated the relations of the peasant community where the ultimate depository of authority was the conuentus publico uicinorum44—​was also expressed in the form of the religious commitment. It is even likely that this binding contract was taken from this local tradition and adapted to the requirements of RFruc for implementation in Fructuosus’ monasteries. The text known as RConsM, however, which is probably contemporary with the pactum of the RCom, might be another of the original pacts from which northwestern Hispanic monasteries drew most of their unique character.45 Indeed, the word pactum is used in the text to define its own nature (RConsM 8). It says that the document was drawn up by the interested parties themselves with the aim of adopting a consistent cohabitation criterion and of pooling their possessions (RConsM 1, also 8). The origin of the community is clearly based on a freely accepted permanent agreement of its members, in compliance with the legislation and with monastic commitment itself (RConsM 1). It even seems to comply with a hypothetical rule mentioned in the text under the expression “this book” (RConsM 8). The superior was in charge of ensuring the implementation of common decisions (RConsM 4), and the admission of new members had to have his approval and that of all the members of the community (RConsM 3). In addition, the document refers to leaving the monastery as a destructive action and, like the RCom, introduces the possibility of banishment from the community should the

Johannes Bernaldo, “Pactual Monasticism? About a Much Discussed Feature of Early Spanish Monasticism,” in In Quest of the Kingdom:  Ten Papers on Medieval Monastic Spirituality, ed. Alf Härdelin (Stockholm, 1991), 27–​63. 43 Justo Pérez de Urbel, “El compromiso monástico en la España de la Reconquista,” Studia Silensia 1 (1975): 57–​73. 44 Leges Visigothorum 8.5.6. 45 Charles J. Bishko, “The Date and Nature of the Spanish Consensoria Monachorum,” American Journal of Philology 69 (1948): 382–​3. 42

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circumstances so require (RConsM 4). The text fails to mention the nature of the new professions it discusses and whether they were collective (involving whole family groups). The community that established the RConsM does not seem to have had the support of any monastic confederation in case of need, nor the supervision of any figure of authority (beyond the community) to decide upon the appropriateness of its practices. It seems that those practices were not validated by any bishop; indeed, it advises that, should anyone learn of any different ascetic practice, they are to reject it, since it will fall to the abbot to decide whether it is acceptable or not (RConsM 5). Thus, the RConM is possibly an early step toward establishing the RCom, perhaps the iuramentum or sacramenti conditio referred to in the latter’s first chapter,46 although it might also refer to a community that was part of the confederation it represented.47 In fact, the RConsM evokes a confrontational and violent environment, which could set monasteries or communities with different ascetic modalities against each other, and which could stem from the attempts at recovering what had previously been contributed to the monastery, as described in the RCom (3 and 18).48 This violence would justify the focus of one chapter on how monks should react in case of a sudden attack that forced them to scatter: they should all meet wherever the abbot had taken refuge (RConsM 7). The RCom provided for the use of part of the monastery’s earnings to rescue prisoners, which can no doubt also be related to these episodes of violence.49 The variety of monastic forms that surrounded Valerio could have been what led him to write De genere monachorum, a text that, though unfortunately incomplete, reflects the plurality of Hispanic monasticism in the seventh century. While these forms did not introduce any particularly new features in terms of spirituality,50 they did manage to adapt to the social and economic reality of their time. Monasticism provided an answer to several organizational challenges and probably served as a means of spreading Christianity to areas where its presence was still weak. What became of this rich and varied monastic tradition when the Muslim invasion took place? There is no easy answer. The downfall of the political

Herwegen, Das Pactum,  76–​8. Bishko, “The Pactual Tradition,” 23–​4. 48 Bishko, “Date and Nature,” 382–​3. 49 Pablo C. Díaz, “Redimuntur captiui:  a propósito de Regula communis IX,” Gerion 10 (1992): 287–​93. 50 Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz, “La vie monastique d’après les écrivains wisigothiques (VIIe siècle),” in Théologie de la vie monastique. Études sur la tradition patristique (Paris, 1961), 371–​83. 46

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system should not necessarily have affected all of the particular institutions in the Iberian Peninsula. Owing to lack of information concerning the geographical and material location of Visigothic monasteries, it is not possible to trace archaeologically the length of their existence or the time of their collapse. While Mozarabic, Muslim, and Christian sources from the Reconquista provide barely a hint of the continuation of southern monasticism, and even less in marginal areas such as the mountains of Córdoba, references to pactual and familial monasticism in Galicia and along the Cantabrian coast before the arrival of the Cluny model show that this tradition, especially as expressed in the RCom, did not completely disappear.51 It was, in fact, a lingering phenomenon. Family-​based or even hereditary monastic communities were gradually integrated into monasteries with a more orthodox canonical foundation, and eventually all were subjected to the discipline of the major monastic orders that arrived from elsewhere in Europe. As the information that can be gathered from the sources available indicates, however, the scope of the phenomenon was very localized and linked to a context of specific social problems, making it difficult to draw parallels with other areas of western Europe.

Abbreviations for Primary Sources Pactum: Pactum, edited and translated in Spanish by Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Roca Meliá, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda (Madrid, 1971), 208–11. English translation: Claude W. Barlow, trans., Iberian Fathers. II: Braulio of Saragossa. Fructuosus of Braga (Washington, DC, 1969), 207–9. RCom:  Regula communis, edited and translated in Spanish by Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Roca Meliá, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda (Madrid, 1971), 165–208. English translation:  Claude W.  Barlow, trans., Iberian Fathers. II: Braulio of Saragossa. Fructuosus of Braga (Washington, DC, 1969), 176–206. RconM: Regula Consensoria Monachorum, PL 66, 993–6. English translation: Claude W. Barlow, trans., Iberian Fathers. II: Braulio of Saragossa. Fructuosus of Braga (Washington, DC, 1969), 213–20. RFruc: Fructuosus of Braga, Regula, edited and translated in Spanish by Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Roca Meliá, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas

Charles Julian Bishko, “Gallegan Pactual Monasticism in the Repopulation of Castille,” in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1951), 513–​31, reprinted with an “Additional Note” in Charles Julian Bishko, Spanish and Portuguese Monastic History 600–​ 1300 (London, 1984), 513–​31 and 532A–​536A; Orlandis, Estudios sobre instituciones monásticas medievales, 125–​64; José M. Mínguez Fernández, “Ruptura social e implantación del feudalismo en el Noroeste peninsular (siglos VIII–​X),” Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 3 (1985): 7–​32.

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Social Plurality and Monastic Diversity in Late Antique Hispania de la España visigoda (Madrid, 1971), 129–62. English translation:  Claude W.  Barlow, trans., Iberian Fathers. II: Braulio of Saragossa. Fructuosus of Braga (Washington, DC, 1969), 155–75. RI: Isidore of Seville, Regula, edited and translated in Spanish by Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Roca Meliá, San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la España visigoda (Madrid, 1971), 79–125.

Bibliography Aherne, Consuelo Maria. Valerio of Bierzo:  An Ascetic of the Late Visigothic Period. Washington, DC, 1949. Ariño, Enrique, and Pablo C. Díaz. “Poblamiento y organización del espacio:  la Tarraconense pirenaica en el siglo VI.” Antiquité tardive 11 (2003): 223–​37. Bernaldo, Johannes. “Pactual Monasticism? About a Much Discussed Feature of Early Spanish Monasticism.” In In Quest of the Kingdom:  Ten Papers on Medieval Monastic Spirituality, edited by Alf Härdelin, 27–​63. Stockholm, 1991. Bishko, Charles Julian. “Gallegan Pactual Monasticism in the Repopulation of Castille.” In Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal, vol. 2, 513–​31. Madrid, 1951. Reprinted with an “Additional Note” in Charles Julian Bishko, Spanish and Portuguese Monastic History 600–​1300, 513–​31 and 532A–​536A. London, 1984. [1984b] Bishko, Charles Julian. “The Pactual Tradition in Hispanic Monasticism.” In Spanish and Portuguese Monastic History 600–​1300, 1–​43. London, 1984. [1984a] Brenk, Beat. “Monasteries as Rural Settlements: Patron-​Dependence or Self-​Sufficiency?” In Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, edited by William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado, 447–​76. Leiden and Boston, MA, 2004. Castellanos, Santiago. “El testamento de Ricimiro de Dumio en el contexto de la consoli­ dación episcopal en la Hispania tardoantigua.” Hispania Antiqua 22 (1998): 427–​37. Dias, Paula B. “O lugar da ‘Regula monastica communis’ no monaquismo hispanico.” Humanitas 52 (2000): 213–​39. Díaz, Pablo C. Formas económicas y sociales en el monacato visigodo. Salamanca, 1987. Díaz, Pablo C. “Monasteries in a Peripheral Area:  Seventh-​ Century Gallaecia.” In Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Mayke de Jong and Francis Theuws, with Carine van Rhijn, 329–​59. Leiden, 2001. Díaz, Pablo C. “Espacio real/​espacio imaginado en los monasterios isidorianos.” In Monasteria et Territoria. Elites, edilicia y territorio en el Mediterráneo medieval (siglos V–​XI), edited by Jorge López Quiroga, A. M. Martínez Tejera, and Jorge Morín de Pablos, 77–​90. Oxford, 2007. Díaz, Pablo C. “Regula communis:  Monastic Space and Social Context.” In Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, 117–​35. Turnhout, 2011. Díaz y Díaz, Manuel C. “La vie monastique d’après les écrivains wisigothiques (VIIe siècle).” In Théologie de la vie monastique. Études sur la tradition patristique, 371–​83. Paris, 1961. Gregoire, Réginald. “Valeurs ascétiques et spirituelles de la ‘Regula Monachorum’ et de la ‘Regula communis’ de S. Fructueux de Braga.” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 43 (1967): 159–​76.

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Female House Ascetics from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century E l ia na M ag na n i ( t r an slate d b y L o chin B rouillard) The ascetic vocation of the women who remained in the world and did not join a monastic community never bore one single name. The categorization of a woman as devota, dicata, sacra, professa, sanctimonialis, puella, virgo, vidua, famula, or ancilla could equally refer to a woman enclosed in a monastery and to a woman devoted to God who continued to live in her home. Indeed, these terms in no way reflect the form and the degree of ascetic life which these women adopted, and which can be reconstructed only through a handful of contextual and prosopographical elements. The absence of precise terminology, in combination with the multiplicity of the terms used, is no doubt linked to the diversity of possible situations and the difficulty of clearly sanctioning—​or even the reluctance to sanction—​the place and function of these women within the Church.1 This difficulty is also echoed in the historiography, which has focused on the study of cenobitic religious life and has thus not yet developed concepts appropriate for such a complex phenomenon. The expression “house ascetics,” coined by Anglo-​American scholars, although imperfect, has the advantage of locating from the start the dwelling place of some of these consecrated women in their home as opposed to a monastery.2 Used as a heuristic device, this notion of house ascetic should also become a starting point for future research, which must seek to transcend

On the much debated question of the ordination and practice of sacerdotal function by women, see Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford and New York, 2008), 3–​22. 2 See for instance Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT, 2010), 131–​51; and Ewa Wipszycka, “L’ascétisme féminin dans l’Égypte de l’antiquité tardive: topoi littéraires et formes d’ascèse,” in Le rôle et le statut de la femme en Égypte hellénistique, romaine et byzantine, ed. Henri Melaerts and Leon Mooren (Paris, 2002), 355–​96 (for the expression “ascèse domestique” in French). 1

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it and do away with the dichotomy it establishes. Indeed, Latin syntagma like Deo devota (coined by Henri Leclercq in his entry for the Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie), Deo sacrata, or ancilla Dei, recurring in late antique and early medieval sources, all emphasize the relationship binding these women to God3 and conceive of asceticism as the means to achieve this relationship, no matter where the asceticism is being practiced. Further, while house asceticism has generally been considered a primarily female practice, future research must also consider the house ascetic practices of male individuals and groups, or even of mixed-​sex gatherings, and re-​examine the protohistory of a number of monasteries, priories, and chapters in the light of this fresh perspective.4

Roman Ascetic Women of Late Antiquity Toward the end of the fourth century, consecrated life for both women and men was redefined according to the diffusion of “oriental” asceticism. From an ecclesiological point of view, this ascetic ideal introduced distinctions as well as a hierarchy among Christians based on their way of life. We therefore move from a church conceived in collective terms, as it was by Tertullian (d. after 220) and Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), which only distinguished the righteous from the sinners and Christians from their persecutors, to a hierarchical church organized according to the moral criteria of asceticism, as we can see in the writings of Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), Jerome (d. 420), and Augustine (d. 430).5 It is in this polemical context, which opposed the tenets of the old tradition to the hierarchization of salvation, that Jerome reclaimed the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:8; Mark 4:8; Luke 8:8) in order to distinguish the degree of eternal reward (praemium) now associated with different types of Christians. In Jerome’s interpretation, the rewards of the married, of widows, and of virgins correspond to the seeds that grow in the good soil and produce a crop of thirty, sixty or a hundred times.6 A typology elaborated by Augustine and systematized by Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), based on female

Henri Leclercq, “Deo devota,” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, vol. 4, pt. 1 (Paris, 1920), 648; and “Ancilla Dei,” in ibid., vol. 1, pt. 2 (Paris, 1907), 1973–​93. 4 On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 5 Peter Brown, The Body and Society:  Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988). 6 Jerome, Aduersus Iouinianum 1:3, PL 23, 223. Regarding this development, see Bernhard Jussen, Der Name der Witwe. Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur (Göttingen, 2000); and Bernhard Jussen, “Virgins–​Widows–​Spouses: On the Language of Moral Distinction as Applied to Women and Men in the Middle Ages,” History of the Family 7 (2002): 13–​32. 3

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(though not exclusively) biblical figures including Mary for virgins, Anna for widows (Luke 2:36–​38), and Susanna (Dan. 13) for married women, was then added to the three moralized and hierarchized life statuses and upheld as a global social model, particularly for women.7 In practice, the ethical treatises and the epistolary exchanges of the advocates of asceticism between the fourth century and the beginning of the sixth century, as well as funeral inscriptions,8 demonstrate that the adoption of an ascetic lifestyle (propositum) was open to women (and to men) of all stations (professiones). Moreover, these ascetics continued to live within the familial household or a community (female or mixed), since the boundary between these forms of religious life was very blurred, and crossing from one form to the next was common. In fact, a household could easily be turned into a religious community. This is best attested and most studied in Italy, particularly in Rome and the surrounding area. The Italian evidence suggests a great diversity in the actions and organization of the ascetics, but also makes clear the influence of Christian women who were won over by asceticism in the course of the Christianization of senatorial families.9 The women considered as figureheads of this movement all came from the aristocracy;10 they were matrons (dominae, matronae) who surrounded themselves with servants and handmaidens (ancillae, puellae, sociae) who followed them in the religious life.11 Their commitment was not solitary but involved other members of their family and household, men as well as women.12



Augustine, Retractationum libri II 2:22, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57. Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 6, 7, in Sermons au peuple (1–​20), ed. Germain Morin, trans. Marie-​José Delage, SC 175, 332–​5. 8 For epigraphical inscriptions, see the database “EDCS:  Epigraphik-​ Datenbank Clauss/​Slaby,” http://​db.edcs.eu/​epigr/​epi.php?s_​sprache=en (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 9 Peter Brown, “Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy,” in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London, 1972), 161–​82. 10 For the historical developments which followed, see René Metz, La consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine. Étude d’histoire de la liturgie (Paris, 1954), 77–​93; Georg Jenal, Italia ascetica atque monastica. Das Asketen-​und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/​250–​604), 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1995), 33–​64, 328–​40, 681–​91, and 939–​58; and particularly Georg Jenal, “Frühe Formen der weiblichen vita religiosa im lateinischen Westen (4. und Anfang 5. Jahrhundert),” in Female “vita religiosa” between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Zürich and Berlin, 2011), 43–​77; Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (New York, 2013), 191–​212 and 247–​53. 11 Jerome, Epistulae 22.29.3; 39.1.3; 108.11.5, 14.3, 15.4, and 27.2; 127.5.1 and 3.4, ed. Isidor Hilberg, 3 vols., CSEL 54–​6. 12 See the articles by Giorda (for Egypt), Ramseyer (for southern Italy and Sicily), Díaz (for Spain), Bitel (for Ireland), Brooks-​Hedstrom and Dey (for archaeological findings), and Diem and Rousseau (for a reexamination of monastic “rules”). 7

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Marcella (d. 410), a women from the gens Caieonia, was among the important group of women connected to Jerome. After seven months of marriage, she was widowed and refused a second union with a member of the imperial family in order to live the rest of her life in abstinence as a Christian widow and to dedicate herself to charitable work and the study of Scripture (c. 355). She wore a simple tunic, refrained from eating meat, and only drank wine for therapeutic purposes. She remained by the side of her mother, Albina, in her parental house on the Aventine, avoided public appearances, and only went out in the quietest moments of the day to pray at the tombs of martyrs or in basilicas, always chaperoned by her mother or a retinue of pious women. She no longer conversed with men, and her meetings with monks or religious men, including Jerome, were conducted in the presence of witnesses. Marcella was at the center of an aristocratic circle of virgins and widows which Jerome directed during his stay in Rome, between 383 and 385, a role that he continued during his retreat in Bethlehem. The women of this network would meet to pray, sing the psalms, and study Scripture, but some also stayed in Marcella’s home. This was the case for the virgin Eustochium (d. 419/​20), who was raised (nutrita) there before she settled in Bethlehem with her mother, Paula, after which they wrote to Marcella as disciples (discipulae) to their mistress (magistra).13 Like Marcella, Paula the Elder (d. c. 404) was a Roman matron (matrona), a widow converted to asceticism. In Bethlehem, she founded a male monastery and three monasteries for virgins. The latter came from various provinces, with some from noble families and others from more ordinary or quite humble origins.14 As opposed to Paula and Eustochium, who embraced the cenobitic life, the virgin Asella remained in Rome and led a life of solitude within the confines of the familial household. She was enclosed in her bedroom (cubiculum, cellula) most of the time, and only left it in order to visit the tombs of the martyrs. She fasted, prayed, and sang the psalms, worked with her bare hands, never appeared in public, never spoke with men, and finally did not even maintain contact with her own sister, who was also an ascetic virgin.15 In Marcella’s last years, probably after the death of her mother, she made her ascetic practices even harsher, leaving her parental household to settle with Principia outside the city, in the solitude of the countryside, but returning upon Alaric’s conquest of Rome (410–​11). Injured by Goth soldiers,

Jerome, Epistolae 46.1.1; 127.5.2. Jerome, Epistolae 108.20.1; 108.20.3. 15 Jerome, Epistolae 24.3–​4. 13

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she sought shelter along with Principia at the basilica of St. Paul-​Outside-​the-​ Walls, where she died a few months later.16 Marcellina, Ambrose of Milan’s sister, made a vow of virginity in 352/​3 in the church of St. Peter of Rome in the presence of Pope Liberius (353–​66). She continued to live with her family, including her widowed mother, in their house in Rome, and to meet with her friends from the city. Ambrose exhorted his sister to live an exemplary ascetic life marked by sexual continence, fasting, decreasing visits from her social acquaintances, search for solitude, silence, prayer, and the continual recitation of the psalms.17 Married couples might also decide to pursue a common ascetic life. At the beginning of the fifth century, after seven years of childless marriage, Melania the Younger (d. 439) and her husband, Pinianus, withdrew to their lands outside Rome and embraced a rigorous ascetic lifestyle. They dedicated their wealth to charity for the poor and for prisoners, and to hospitality for foreign visitors.18 For this period in monastic history, it makes no sense to divide these women into strict categories, differentiating among nuns, hermits, and purely pious women living at home. Surviving sources do not distinguish between these categories.

Council Norms and Hagiographic Discourses A situation analogous to the one prevalent in Marcella’s Roman circle was taking shape on the Iberian peninsula during this period. The canons of the First Council of Toledo (c. 400) reveal the presence of young women devoted to God (puella Dei, religiosa puella) living with family. The canons forbade such women contact with men, ascetic or lay (confessor, laicus), unless they were close kin. We also observe the existence of families of religious individuals—​ bishops, priests, or deacons, and their spouses—​ whose daughters were consecrated (filia religiosa, filia devota), and who were condemned if they broke this commitment in order to marry. Alongside these virgins, we find professed women and widows (professa vel vidua), surrounded by fellow ascetics and servants (confessor vel servus suus), who had withdrawn to their household or their lands (in domo sua, in villa), and who were condemned



Jerome, Epistolae 127.8.1; 127.8.13. Ambrose of Milan, De uirginibus 3.1.1, 3.2.5, 3.2.8, 3.3.9–​11, 3.7.37, in Tutte le opera di sant’Ambrogio, ed. Franco Gori, vol. 1 (Milan and Rome, 1989), 100–​240; Paul the Deacon, Vita sancti Ambrosii 1.3, 4.1, and 38.5, in Vita di Cipriani. Vita di Ambrogio. Vita di Agostino, ed. Antoon Bastiaensen (Milan, 1975), 51–​124. 18 Denys Gorce, ed. and trans., Vie de sainte Mélanie, SC 90, 130–​42; English translation, Elizabeth A. Clark, The Life of Melania the Younger (New York, 1984). 16 17

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for celebrating vespers (lucernarium): in other words, for reading the psalms and singing antiphons outside a church or in the absence of a bishop, priest, or deacon.19 These canons thus allow us to discern households in which the religious life of consecrated women was part of the broader ascetic venture of a group of more or less close relatives and servants, both male and female. The late antique phenomenon of ascetic life led in one’s own home with one’s family or a few companions, was an accepted practice which persisted in the longue durée in Latin Christendom. The Fifth Council of Orleans (549) mentions, alongside women who have joined a monastery, young women and widows who, having turned to God and changed their clothing (commutates vestibus convertuntur), remain in their own houses.20 The Council of Paris of 614 refers to the “widows and young women who, in their own houses, have changed their clothing in order to take the religious habit, either on account of their parents’ will, or of their own volition.”21 Clothar II’s capitulary, issued a few days later, uses a similar formula.22 In general, at that time, bishops did not appear to have conceptualized a hierarchy between nuns living in a monastery and the consecrated women remaining in the world. In his Regula ad virgines (534), Caesarius alludes to “religious women” in the city of Arles whose consecrated life was so exemplary that it would honor the monastery if they were to visit and share a meal with the nuns, although these contacts should remain rare (RCaesV 39). Gregory the Great (d. 604)  mentions several consecrated women living in the world in Rome. His three aunts, for example, continued to live in their home. Among them, Tarsilla “elevated herself to the highest holiness by her unceasing prayer, the dignity of her life, and the singularity of her abstinence.” He also cites as an example the women who withdrew to private households close to the church of St. Mary Major: Redempta, who wore the religious habit (sanctimoniali habitu), and her two disciples, also wearing the same habit (in eodem habitu), who lived together in the same dwelling, and Gregoria, “a most holy virgin” (maxime sacra uirgo),





First Council of Toledo, canons 6, 9, 16, and 19, in La colección canónica hispana. IV. Concilios galos. Concilios hispanos, primera parte, ed. Gonzalo Martínez Díez and Félix Rodríguez (Madrid, 1984), 330–​1, 332, 335, 336–​7. See also the article by Díaz in this volume. 20 Concilium Aurelianense a. 549, 19, in Concilia Galliae A. 511–​A. 695, ed. Charles de Clercq, CCSL 148A, 155. See also Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994), 43–​63. 21 Concilium Parisiense a. 614 (10 October), 15, in Concilia Galliae A. 511–​A. 695; French translation in Jean Gaudemet and Brigitte Basdevant, trans., Les canons des conciles mérovingiens (VIe–​VIIe siècles), vol. 2, SC 354, 519. 22 Chlotharii II. Edictum (18 October 614), 18, MGH Capit. 1, 23. 19

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who turned to the church and converted to religious life (sanctimonialis uitae conuersationem quaereret) in order to shun marriage.23 These ascetic lifestyles have also been recorded in a number of hagiographical narratives. The Life of St. Consortia, written between the seventh century and the beginning of the ninth, depicts the religious conversion of an entire sixth-​century Gallo-​Roman family from the Provençal aristocracy. The text reflects the different possibilities for conversion which were considered socially and morally acceptable: intense isolation (adopted by the parents Eucherius and Galla), female virginity (as with Consortia and her young sister Tulle), establishment of a group around a house or a church, or even taking responsibility for a bishopric (as Eucherius did).24 The narrative thread of the vita, however, lies in the miraculous outcome of the struggle of Consortia, bride of Christ (nam sponsus Christus est) and handmaiden of God (famula Dei), to preserve her virginity from those who wished to marry her and claim her property. She built a church and a hospice (xenodochium) on her lands, distributed her surplus wealth to the poor, and acquired the royal authorization she needed to live her calling to virginity in her private domain (in loca Deo sacrata; ad propriam). Consortia is described as surrounded by a group of religious men and women, of dependents, of paupers and servants, of neighbors. Her consecrated life was spent in prayer, fasting, vigils and psalmody, shedding tears, attending mass, being guided by the Gospels, reading pious works, and yet living in the world. In Gregory of Tours’ (d. 594) account of the life of St. Yrieix (Aredius), his widowed mother, Pelagia, managed the household, supervised the servants, and oversaw the cultivation of the land and the care of the vineyards. Thus Yrieix, who was already tonsured, could dedicate himself to prayer, fasting, and building churches (ad ecclesias aedificandas). After he founded a monastery by turning his tonsured companions and servants into monks, the holy woman (beata mulier) Pelagia took up the charge of feeding and clothing each of them, never ceasing to praise and offer her prayers to God. In the expanded version of Yrieix’s Life written in the eighth century, Pelagia’s conversion is characterized by the abandonment of the secular habit in favor of



Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Book 4, 3.14, 16, and 17, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 260 and 265. 24 Vita Sanctae Consortiae, AASS, Junii IV, 250–​4. See Rémi Fixot and Caroline Michel d’Annoville, “Étude de la crypte de l’église Sainte-​Tulle (Sainte-​Tulle, Alpes-​de-​Haute-​ Provence):  histoire du culte et de l’édifice,” in Archéologies de Provence et d’ailleurs. Mélanges offerts à Gaëtan Congès et Gérard Sauzade, Bulletin archéologique de Provence Supplément 5 (2008): 735–​50. 23

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the religious one (sanctimoniali vestimento), and her role in the purveyance of the male monastery is emphasized by showing her laboring the fields.25

Public Profession and Liturgical Consecration In all of these examples, which showcase the practice as well as the establishment of a canonical framework for the life of women devoted to God, little attention is paid to whether they integrated themselves into a monastic community or remained at home. Two other types of distinction, however, do emerge clearly: the social status of the virgin or widow, and the type of commitment made to ascetic life. A clear distinction is made between women who simply stated an intention to remain chaste and those for whom this same intention was sanctioned by a liturgical ceremony centered around the taking of the veil (velamen, flammeum, maforte, mitra, mitella, pallium …), the wearing of a religious habit (vestis, vestimentum, habitus; mutare, induere), or even, in the tenth century, the transmission of a ring and a crown to the virgins. A bishop was required to perform this ceremony for virgins, but a priest was allowed to receive the profession of a widow. Women devoted to God were not necessarily formally consecrated in an ecclesiastical liturgical rite. The distinction between virgins who had received the veil and those who had not was made in the earliest decretals, which prescribed the penances imposed upon virgins who had broken their vow by contracting a union, whether it was consensual or not. The letter Ad Gallos Episcopos (dated to 383/​4 and attributed to Pope Damasus, with the help of Jerome), along with the letter of Pope Innocent I  to Bishop Victricius of Rouen in February 404, distinguishes the “virgin who has already received the veil in Christ (uirgo uelata iam [in] Christo), who publicly swore to preserve her virginity while the bishop was spreading over her the prayer of blessing,” from the “young woman who has not yet received the veil but who has made a commitment to remain thus [in her virginity].” The former have “married Christ spiritually” while the latter are equated with the widows who abandon their calling of widowhood, and are rebuked as such by Paul (1 Tim. 5:12).26



Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum X:29, MGH SS RM 1.1, 523; Vita Aridii abbatis Lemovicini 8 and 9, MGH SS RM 3, 576–​612, esp. 585. See Emmanuelle Santinelli, Des femmes éplorées? Les veuves dans la société aristocratique du haut Moyen Âge (Villeneuved’Ascq, 2003), 160, 165, 191, and 245. 26 Yves-​Marie Duval, La décrétale Ad Gallos Episcopos. Son texte et son auteur (Leiden, 2005), 28–​31, 61–​69, and 140–​1; Innocentius I, Epistolae 2, 13.15, and 14.16, PL 20, 478–​80. On marriage by abduction, see Sylvie Joye, La femme ravie. Le mariage par rapt au haut Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2012). 25

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Various conciliar meetings set the age from which women might take the veil.27 Although Paul had prescribed the age of sixty for widows dedicated to the service of the Church (1 Tim. 5:9), forty became the norm, as illustrated by canon 15 of the Council of Chalcedon (451) regarding deaconesses.28 The councils and imperial constitutions variously prescribed the age of forty and twenty-​f ive for virgins,29 but allowed the bishop to bestow the veil upon young girls in case of imminent death or of the threat of virginity lost thorough marriage or rape. The standard of twenty-​f ive years of age recommended by the African Church and taken up in canon 18 of the Council of Carthage (418) was eventually adopted by Rome and the Frankish churches.30 In practice, however, young women could be devoted to God without liturgical consecration between the ages of ten and twelve years. This was at least common toward the end of the fourth century in the Roman circle led by Marcella. Asella’s parents dedicated her to God just after her tenth birthday, and she enclosed herself in a cell when she was twelve. Eustochium was oriented toward ascetic life by her mother from her earliest days.31 In the case of widows, canon 21 of the Second Council of Tours (567), while condemning women who broke or otherwise failed to respect their vows, presented a kind of synthesis of the previous prescriptions. In particular, the canon echoed the challenges raised by the status of widows, as the Council of Epaone of 517 had earlier shown when it prohibited the liturgical consecration of widows “called deaconesses.” The bishops gathered in Tours also determined that the intention of chastity alone formulated by a widow (viduitatis propositum) had to be considered as sufficient, because of the lack of blessing for widows in “canonical books.”32 The Fourth Council of Toledo (633), while distinguishing “two kinds of widows, the lay and the religious” (saeculares et sanctimoniales), describes the framework in which consecrated widowhood was sanctioned. Though remarriage was permitted for widows who had not abandoned their lay habit, it was forbidden to widows who had appeared in front of a priest or at church wearing the religious habit.33 In 656,

Metz, La consécration des vierges, 104–​16. Eduard Schwartz, ed., Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, vol. 2:  Concilium universale Chalcedonense 1/​1 (Berlin, 1939), 161 (357). 29 For instance, canon 8 of the First Council of Saragossa of 380, in Díez and Rodriguez, La colección canónica hispana IV, 296. 30 Charles Munier, ed., Concilia Africana secundum traditionem collectionis Hispanae, CCSL 149, 329 and 369. 31 Jerome, Epistolae 24.2 and 39.6.1. 32 Concilia Galliae A. 511–​A. 695, 29, 163, 187, 346. 33 Gonzalo Martínez Díez and Felix Rodriguez, eds., La colección canónica hispana. V. Concilios hispanos: segunda parte (Madrid, 1992), 234–​5, c. LVI. 27

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the Tenth Council of Toledo went as far as defining the appropriate colors for the veil (purple or black), and decreed that any public appearance in religious habit or in front of witnesses constituted a permanent commitment by a widow to remain in her consecrated state. Nothing is said about where these widows dedicated to God were to live, but the canons hint at the idea that they were permitted some freedom of movement, and that enclosure in a monastery was conceived as a form of penance for those gone astray.34 While acknowledging the intrinsic significance of the resolve of women (both virgins and widows) who had decided to devote themselves to God, the councils also stressed the public character of this commitment and the external signs which made it manifest. Above all, they insisted on proper dress, and particularly on the wearing of the characteristic veil. Two centuries later, in the context of the ongoing reforms of the Carolingian Church,35 the canons of the Council of Paris of 829 concerning consecrated women reveal much about the reservations which the ecclesiastical hierarchy had regarding the bestowing and the taking of the veil. Indeed, the legislation they passed aimed at placing the bishop as the mandatory figure of the velatio, while, in practice, this prerogative does not seem to have been exclusive to him. The prohibitions laid down in the canons reflect the variety of possibilities: we find women of the lower class who, without turning to a priest, veiled themselves in the hope of entering the service of the local church; women who helped priests in the service of the altar; virgins and widows who were consecrated by abbesses or other nuns; priests who consecrated widows without referring to the bishop or who even dared to usurp the bishop’s role by consecrating virgins; noble women (nobiles feminae), especially young ones (adulescentulas), to whom the canons prescribe admission to a cloister, because they took the veil upon their husband’s death, but kept on living in their house since they needed to care for their children and their estate, and hence still enjoyed the benefits of secular life.36 Here, again, entering a monastery was a form of



Ibid., 525–​30, cc. IV and V. See also other councils and royal capitularies: for instance, the Council of Losnes (673–​5) (Concilium Latunense a. 673, 12 and 13, in Concilia Galliae A. 511–​A. 695, 316); the edicts of the Lombard king Luitprand (723) and of the Beneventan prince Arigis II (between 774 and 787)  (Liutprandi leges de anno XI 30, MGH LL 4, 122; Aregis principis capitula, 12, MGH Fontes 2, 174), commentary in Julie M. Anderson, “Historical Memory, Authority, and the Written Word: A study of the documentary and literary culture at the early medieval court of Benevento, 700–​900 c e” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2017), 129–​33; or again, the Council of Mainz of 888 (Mansi 18, 71–​2, c. 26). 35 See the article by Kramer in this volume. 36 Concilium Parisiense A. 829, 39–​46, MGH Concilia 2/​2, 637–​9. 34

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punishment for women transgressing moral codes, rather than an injunction in favor of cenobitic life or a proscription against consecrated life led in the world. Set against traditional interpretations of the reform movement of the Carolingian Church, the councils did not seek to prevent women from living their ascetic vocation in the world rather than in a monastery, but tried to ensure that the women who had professed vows were subject to and remained under episcopal authority. The ceremony of consecration in liturgical books like sacramentaries and pontificals generally preserves the distinction between virgins and widows, but prescribes certain prayers for both. Terms used in the rubrics and the orations, such as ancilla, famula, or sanctimonialis, may indeed refer to both statuses.37 Only a large-​scale study of the terminology related to women devoted to God, which has yet to be conducted, will be able to reflect the nuances and the semantic networks in which these terms are embedded. The same observation can be made with regard to the terms used to designate the ceremonies and the actions performed—​velatio/​velare (taking of the veil, to veil), benedictio/​benedicere (blessing/​to bless), and consecratio/​consecrare (consecration/​to consecrate), in particular. The historiography on the subject tends to consider them, at least until the twelfth century, as equivalent to one another but further research is required.38 Significantly, moreover, liturgical books do not mention whether the woman receiving consecration lives in the world or whether she is part of a monastic community. The only known exception is found in the Romano-​Germanic pontifical produced between 950 and 961/​3 at St. Alban’s Abbey in Mainz.39 This manuscript distinguishes in certain ways between the consecration of virgins living in monasteries and those who remain at home.40





On the different terms for cloistered or non-​cloistered religious women in Old English, however, see Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2000), 1:26–​30, 96–​104. 38 René Metz, “Benedictio sive consecratio virginum,” Ephemerides liturgicae 80 (1966):  263–​93, esp. 284–​5; Pierre-​Marie Gy, “Les anciennes prières d’ordination,” La Maison Dieu 138 (1979):  93–​122, esp. 108–​10; Yves Congar, “Note sur une valeur des termes ‘ordinare’, ‘ordinatio’,” Revue des sciences religieuses 58.1–​3 (1984):  7–​14; Gary Macy, “The Ordination of Women in the Early Middle Ages,” in A History of Women and Ordination, 1: The Ordination of Women in Medieval Context, ed. Bernard Cooke and Gary Macy, 1–​30 (Lanham, MD, and London, 2002); Macy, Hidden History of Women’s Ordination,  3–​22. 39 Cyrille Vogel, “Le pontifical romano-​germanique du Xe siècle: nature, date et importance du document,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 6–​21 (1963): 27–​48; Reinhard Elze and Cyrille Vogel, eds., Le Pontifical romano-​germanique du Xe siècle, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1963–​72). 40 Elze and Vogel, Le Pontifical romano-​germanique, 1:51–​4. 37

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The Velatio Ritual How did the liturgical ceremony of the taking of the veil unfold? According to the early Roman and Romano-​Frankish sacramentaries, and then the pontificals, the ceremony of consecration-​blessing of the virgins, the “brides of Christ,” was inspired through analogy with that of marriage, the velatio nuptialis.41 The euchological material transmitted to the Middle Ages was elaborated from the fifth century with a long Eucharistic prayer (Deus castorum corporum benignus habitator—​“God the generous inhabitant of chaste bodies”), perhaps composed by Pope Leo I  (440–​61). This prayer is found under the rubric Ad virgines sacras (“For consecrated virgins”) in the so-​called Leonine sacramentary (or Verona sacramentary), whose components have been dated to the end of the fourth century to the mid-​sixth century.42 This same prayer was reiterated in later sacramentaries and pontificals. In the old Gelasian sacramentary (end of the sixth century), it appears under a rubric which surveys the days during which the consecration of virgins can be celebrated—​on the day of the Epiphany, on Easter Monday, and on the feasts of the Apostles—​according to the dispositions laid down at the end of the fifth century by Pope Gelasius (492–​96) in his letter to the bishops of southern Italy.43 The old Gelasian sacramentary indicates that, at least from the end of the sixth century, the consecration of virgins required a specific mass, which included the granting of offerings by the newly consecrated virgins during the offertory. The second of the three formularies which the sacramentary contains probably relates to a particular mass for the blessing of widows, since the collect (Deus castitatis amator, “God who loves chastity”) refers to the sixtyfold rewards of the Parable of the Sower. In the eighth century, this formulary was explicitly connected to the mass for the blessing of widows, as the rubric of the “Philips” sacramentary of Autun (c. 800) demonstrates: “Item, prayers for the masses for this same widow.”44 The old Gelasian sacramentary of the end of the sixth century also includes a prayer for the blessing of widows professing their chastity, and two prayers under the rubrics “Blessing for the vestments of the virgins” and



Metz, “Benedictio sive consecratio virginum,” 263–​93. Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, with Leo Eizenhöfer and Petrus Siffrin, eds., Sacramentarium Veronense (Cod. Bibl. Capit. Veron. LXXXV [80]) (Rome, 1956), 138–​9, no. 1104. 43 Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, ed., Liber sacramentorum Romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli (cod. Vat. Reg. lat.) 316/​Paris Bibl. nat. 7193, 41 (56) (Sacramentarium Gelasianum) (Rome, 1960), 124–​8 and 213; Gelasius, Epistola 14, ad universos episcopos per Lucaniam, Brutius et Siciliam constitutos, c. 12, in Epistolae Romanorum pontificum genuinae…, ed. Andreas Thiel, vol. 1 (Braunsberg, 1868, reprint. 1974), 369. 44 Odilo Heiming, ed., Liber sacramentorum Augustodunensis, CCSL 159B, no. 1630. 41

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“Item, prayer for the handmaidens of God who, having converted, change their clothing,” which indicate that the ceremonies comprised the blessing of the habits which the women donned in order to affirm their profession. In the Gregorian sacramentary of the end of the seventh century, as well in the Gelasian sacramentaries of the eighth century, the blessing of the clothing of the widows and the virgins appears under a common rubric (Benedictio vestimentorum virginum vel viduarum).45 The bestowing of the veil, however, does not appear to have warranted a separate treatment, except in the Anglo-​ Saxon pontificals from the middle of the tenth century.46 In these ceremonies, the themes of the orations always revolve around the same motifs:  the submission to God (famula tua) and the commitment to the heavenly bridegroom, the virginal and chaste body offered as an oblation during the offertory, and the purification achieved through communion. All of these elements were transmitted through the ninth century in sacramentaries and in the first attempts at compiling pontificals. They were further developed in the mid-​tenth century in the shape of well-​defined ceremonies in the Romano-​Germanic pontifical, and, finally, in the Roman pontificals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as the pontifical of Guillaume Durand (1293–​6).47 The ordo of the consecration of widows in the Romano-​Germanic pontifical (Consecratio viduae que fuerit castitatem professa) begins by specifying the differences between this ceremony and the one for the consecration of virgins: the ceremony for widows takes place after the reading of the Gospel and can be celebrated by a priest, while the rite for virgins must be performed by a bishop and before the Gospel reading. First, the priest celebrating the rite should proceed to the blessing of the clothing of the widow about to make her vow. The widow will then don these new vestments and remain prostrate before the altar during the singing of the litanies. After the litanies, she will rise, and the celebrant will recite the preface Incorruptum aeternitatis



Jean Deshusses, Le sacramentaire grégorien. Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, vol. 2: Textes complémentaires pour la messe, and vol. 3: Textes complémentaires divers (Saint-​Paul, 1979 and 1982), 2:118–​19 and 3:222–​8; Eric Palazzo, “Les formules de bénédiction et de consécration des veuves au cours du haut Moyen Âge,” in Veuves et veuvage dans le haut Moyen Âge, ed. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1993), 31–​5; and Foot, Veiled Women, 1:127–​34. 46 H. M. J. Banting, ed., Two Anglo-​Saxon Pontificals: The Egbert and Sidney Sussex Pontificals (London, 1989), 122; Niels K. Rasmussen, Les pontificaux du haut Moyen Âge. Genèse du livre de l’évêque (Leuven, 1998), 207–​8, 277–​9. 47 Michel Andrieu, Le Pontifical romain au Moyen Âge, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1938–​40), vol. 1: Le pontifical romain du XIIe siècle, 154–​9 and 165–​7; vol. 2: Le pontifical de la curie romaine au XIIIe siècle, 414–​18; vol. 3: Le pontifical de Guillaume Durand, 411–​27. 45

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Deum (“God incorruptible for eternity”), continue with the blessing, and then place the veil on the widow’s head. In the prayers which follow, the virtues expected from the consecrated widow are enumerated:  humility, chastity, obedience, charity, and the practice of good works. The prayers also praise the model of “Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-​four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying” (Luke 2:36–​38).48 As noted above, the distinction between consecrated virgins living in a monastic community and those living at home is a significant characteristic of the Romano-​Germanic pontifical, which sets it apart from earlier, similar sources. The two ceremonies of the taking of the veil for these two groups of virgins are elaborated at length in the pontifical and do not differ much. The ordo of the cenobitic virgins is made up of two prayers, as well as the transmission of the veil, as we find in the ancient Roman liturgy, then four orations for the blessing of the vestments and the veil, the singing of the litanies, a formulary for the bestowing of the veil, a series of antiphons and prayers after the taking of the veil, special formularies and antiphons for the blessing of the ring and the crown (a novelty which further reinforced the analogy between the consecration of virgins and the wedding ceremony), the final blessing, and the proclamation of anathemas against those who might not respect the commitment of the virgin. After the mass, the bishop was to entrust the virgin to the person who had authority over her: “And if the one who stood witness for her [the virgin] is there, the bishop delivers her into his hands, saying: ‘See that this young woman consecrated to God present herself immaculate before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ” In the ordo for virgins who remain in their household, in addition to the differences in prayers and the time of the mass during which certain rites were performed, there is no granting of the ring and the crown. At the end of the mass, the virgin goes back home.49

Close to Male Communities The very explicit fashion in which the Romano-​Germanic pontifical considers consecrated virgins living in their home supports the idea that the women

Elze and Vogel, Le Pontifical romano-​germanique, 1:59–​62; Palazzo, “Les formules de bénédiction et de consécration”; and Foot, Veiled Women, 1:131–​4. 49 Metz, La consécration des vierges, 182–​222; Elze and Vogel, Le Pontifical romano-​germanique, 1:38–​46 and 1:51–​4. 48

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devoted to God mentioned in diplomatic sources were not all widows or nuns, but could also have been women committed to ascetic life in their youth who had remained since then in their household. The use of terms like Deo devota, Deo sacrata, Deo dicata, and sanctimonalia, among others, to refer to women dedicated to God is seen in charters between the seventh and tenth centuries. Unfortunately, it is only possible to determine in a few cases whether these women had entered a monastic community. Importantly, the proportion of those who stayed in the world could indeed be higher than scholars have assumed. Such women might have remained in their kin circle, but were especially found around churches, cathedral chapters, or male or female monasteries to which other members of their family were attached.50 Diplomatic evidence captures the moment at which these women received properties or distributed their goods to a church or a monastery, sometimes specifying the relatives affected by these transactions.51 If widows are more easily identifiable on account of the presence of their children, and often through the reference to a dead husband,52 the presence of brothers and nephews can suggest, among other things, a woman who dedicated herself to God in her youth. The case of Teucinde, Deo devota, who lived in Arles in the second half of the tenth century, reflects this kind of arrangement. Teucinde was part of a group of religious men and women of the church of Arles who all contributed to the foundation of the male monastery of Montmajour, in the suburban area of the town. Thanks to her donations and to the exchange of lands she arranged with the bishop, the provost, and the canons of Arles, Teucinde ensured that the monks of Montmajour owned the location upon which they had settled their community. She was the sister of Gontard, provost of the cathedral of Arles, then bishop of Fréjus, and perhaps also abbot of Montmajour. Her nephew, Riculf, an oblate at Montmajour, went on to



Elisabeth Magnou-​Nortier, “Formes féminines de vie consacrée dans les pays du Midi jusqu’au début du XIIe siècle,” La femme dans la vie religieuse du Languedoc, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 23 (1988): 192–​216; Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, “ ‘Deodicatae’ et ‘Deodevotae’: la regulación de la religiosidad femenina en los condados catalanes, siglos IX–​XI,” in Las Mujeres en el cristianismo medieval, ed. Ángela Muñoz Fernández (Madrid, 1989), 169–​82; Foot, Veiled Women, 1:112–​26, 1:134–​41, and 1:172–​88; Santinelli, Des femmes éplorées?, 147–​ 89; Eliana Magnani, “La vie consacrée en Provence autour de l’an mil: moniales, Deo devotae, moines et clercs,” in Le Royaume de Bourgogne autour de l’an mil, ed. Christian Guilleré, Jean-​Michel Poisson, Laurent Ripart, and Cyrille Ducourthial (Chambéry, 2008), 93–​110. 51 On monastic patronage, see the article by Rosé in this volume and the article by Lyon in volume II. 52 See, inter alia, the example of Rottrude, Deo sacrata, femina Deo devota, in 860 in Maximin Deloche, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Beaulieu (en Limousin) (Paris, 1859), nos. 19 and 180, referred to in Magnou-​Nortier, “Formes féminines de vie consacrée,” 208.

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claim the episcopal seat of Fréjus after his uncle, and was later chosen by some of the monks as abbot of Montmajour. As Teucinde’s heir, he is named in all her acts, and his inheritance was to be bequeathed to the abbey upon his death.53 Two other Deo devotae mentioned in the tenth-​century sources from Arles show that Teucinde’s was not an isolated case. Like Teucinde, these women came into contact with bishops, canons, and local monks in the course of events such as donations or the settlement of patrimonial conflicts. Eldegarda (aliqua femina, Deo devota) reclaimed as usufruct disputed goods left to the Church of Arles, while Domedia, humillima Deo devota (likely a kinswoman of Garnier, “abbot of Arles”) bequeathed her property to Montmajour.54 Alongside these women who acted as benefactors for monasteries, but whose ascetic lifestyle remains hard to define, there were also professed women who appear to have lived within or very close to male monasteries; Sarah Foot categorized these women as “vowesses living beside male communities” in Anglo-​Saxon England.55 Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, we find traces of these women in charters mentioning their oblation or conversion, or in necrologies in expressions such as “our nun” (monacha nostra), “our sister” (soror nostra), “our oblate” (donata nostra), or “converse” (conversa).56 The creation in the eleventh century of female priories, affiliated to great male abbeys, may have been a response to the pressure exerted by these women. This phenomenon can be illustrated by the foundation in 1055 by Abbot Hugh of Semur (1024–​1109) and his brother Geoffroy, for the women of their family, of the priory of Marcigny-​sur-​Loire in Burgundy, as a





Joseph H. Albanès and Ulysse Chevalier, eds., Gallia Christiana Novissima. Histoire des archevêchés, évêchés, et abbayes de France, vol. 3: Arles (Montbéliard and Valence, 1901), nos. 255, 277, and 278 (954, 975); Marseille, Archives Départementales des Bouches-​du-​Rhône [ADBR], B 276 RR1 (17 August 977) (“Charte Artem/​CMJS n° 4085,” www.cn-​telma. fr/​originaux/​charte4085/​ (date of last access:  18 August 2018)); Arles, BM, ms. 881 n° 2 (977) (“Charte Artem/​CMJS n° 4086,” www.cn-​telma.fr/​originaux/​charte4086/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018)). On these events and figures, see Eliana Magnani, Monastères et aristocratie en Provence (milieu Xe–​début XIIe siècle) (Münster, 1999, reprinted 2009), 101–​6 and 119–​21. 54 Albanès and Chevalier, Gallia Christiana Novissima, vol. 3: Arles, no. 241 ( January 920?); Georges de Manteyer, ed., Les chartes du pays d’Avignon, 439–​1040 (Mâcon, 1914), 73–​4, no. 68 (orig. ADBR 2H15, n° 43) (6 April 979) (“Charte Artem/​CMJS n° 4087,” www. cn-​telma.fr/​originaux/​charte4087/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018)). See Magnani, Monastères et aristocratie en Provence, 103–​6, 405. 55 Foot, Veiled Women, 1:172–​9. See also Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform Community and Conflict in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Cambridge, 2017), 73–​5. 56 See for example Magnou-​Nortier, “Formes féminines de vie consacrée,” 209–​10; and Magnani, “La vie consacrée en Provence,” 97–​8. See also the articles by Cochelin, and Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 53

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dependence of the abbey of Cluny. The acts of Cluny from the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh century indeed reveal the presence of many Deo devotae in the vicinity of the abbey.57 We have little evidence about how exactly this interaction between ascetic women and male monasteries unfolded. At the abbey of Bec, in Normandy, several accounts attest to the presence of a group of religious women living and serving God at the monks’ side, in the last third of the eleventh century:  Heloise, who was the mother of Herluin (the monastery’s founder); Eva, the mother of Gilbert Crispin (monk at Bec, then abbot of Westminster); Basilia, the widow of Hugh of Gournay; and her niece, the virgin Amfrida (deo sacrata). The last three joined the community at Bec under Anselm’s abbacy (between 1078 and 1093, before he became archbishop of Canterbury).58 In some of his letters to the monks of Bec, Anselm asks that his greetings be addressed to “our dearest ladies and mothers (dominas et matres),” Eva and Basilia.59 Eva’s devotion is stressed in the miracle story about her husband, written toward the end of the eleventh century or beginning of the twelfth. From the start of her marriage, she began to love the church of Bec as well as its abbot and its monks as her own sons, bestowing upon them precious ornaments and dyes. After her husband’s death, she spent her time fasting, holding vigils, and praying, stopped eating meat, and distributed alms to the poor. After a number of years, she received the veil from the archbishop of Rouen, William (1079–​1110), and remained subject to the monastery of Bec (in subiectione Beccensis coenobii) until her death.60 Here, as with other well-​known cases, attested by donation charters as much as chronicles, the occasional presence of women in male monasteries is often explained by the initiative of a kin group, by the oblation or the admission of a son in the monastery, or even by the conversion of a married couple.61



Eliana Magnani, “Cluny and Religious Women,” in A Companion to the Abbey of Cluny in the Middle Ages, ed. Scott G. Bruce and Steven Vanderputten (Leiden and Boston, MA, forthcoming). 58 Chronicon Beccense, PL 150, 648AB; and Sally N. Vaughn, St Anselm and the Handmaidens of God: A Study of Anselm’s Correspondence with Women (Turnhout, 2002), 68–​70, 97–​9. 59 Anselm of Canterbury, Epistulae 98, 118, and 147, in Opera Omnia, ed. Franz von Sales Schmitt, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1946), 228, 255, and 293. 60 Miraculum quo B. Maria subvenit Guillelmo Crispino, PL 150, 741D–​742A. 61 For instance, at Saint-​Martin of Tournai (Vaughn, St Anselm and the Handmaidens of God, 99) or at la Chaise-​Dieu (Pierre Roger Gaussin, “Les religieuses de la Congrégation de la Chaise-​Dieu,” in Les religieuses en France au XIIIe siècle, ed. Michel Parisse (Nancy, 1985), 107–​19, esp. 107–​8); see also Joachim Wollasch, “Parenté noble et monachisme réformateur:  observations sur les ‘conversions’ à la vie monastique aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Revue historique 264 (1980): 3–​24. 57

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Epilogue These accounts highlight the difficulty one encounters when trying to characterize too rigidly the kind of ascetic life led by these women, whose stories make clear the plurality of possibilities and the permeability of the boundaries between each of them. Even if the life of women devoted to God seems to have become more and more oriented toward male and female monasteries in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this does not imply the end of domestic asceticism, either for men or for women. Studies that have argued for a correlation between the decline of the term Deo devotae in diplomatic documents and the sharp increase of female monasteries from 1080 need to be reassessed on the basis of a systematic treatment of all the occurrences available, which must take into account the links between terminological changes and social practices.62 When we survey the evidence, the broader picture which can be drawn shows that ascetic life for women living in the world was a common practice, which was widely accepted and which stretched over centuries, adapting to social structures and ecclesiastical developments in every period, never ceasing to reinvent itself. This is what we see with the women condemned by the Second Lateran Council (1139) for failing to follow any rule and gathering together in private households (private domicilia), in which they welcomed whomever they wished for the purpose of taking the veil.63 These women provided a model for the practices which would be adopted by lay religious women in the centuries to come.64

Bibliography Brown, Peter. “Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy.” In Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, 161–82. London, 1972.   The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York, 1988. Cabré i Pairet, Montserrat. “ ‘Deodicatae’ et ‘Deodevotae’: la regulación de la religiosidad femenina en los condados catalanes, siglos IX–XI.” In Las Mujeres en el cristianismo medieval, edited by Ángela Muñoz Fernández, 169–82. Madrid, 1989. Cooper, Kate. Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women. New York, 2013.

Magnou-​Nortier, “Formes féminines de vie consacrée”; Magnani, “La vie consacrée en Provence”; Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 63 Concilium Lateranense II a.  1139, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. Josepho Alberigo et al. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1962), 202. 64 See the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in volume II.

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Female House Ascetics Foot, Sarah. Veiled Women. 2 vols. Aldershot, 2000. Jenal, Georg. Italia ascetica atque monastica. Das Asketen- und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/250–604). 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1995. Jussen, Bernhard. Der Name der Witwe. Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur. Göttingen, 2000.   “Virgins–Widows–Spouses:  On the Language of Moral Distinction as Applied to Women and Men in the Middle Ages.” History of the Family 7 (2002): 13–32. Macy, Gary. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Oxford and New York, 2008. Magnani, Eliana. “Cluny and Religious Women.” In A Companion to the Abbey of Cluny in the Middle Ages, edited by Scott G. Bruce and Steven Vanderputten. Leiden and Boston, MA, forthcoming.   “La vie consacrée en Provence autour de l’an mil:  moniales, Deo devotae, moines et clercs.” In Le Royaume de Bourgogne autour de l’an mil, edited by Christian Guilleré, Jean-Michel Poisson, Laurent Ripart, and Cyrille Ducourthial, 93–110. Chambéry, 2008. Magnou-Nortier, Elisabeth. “Formes féminines de vie consacrée dans les pays du Midi jusqu’au début du XIIe siècle.” La femme dans la vie religieuse du Languedoc. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 23 (1988): 192–216. Melville, Gert, and Anne Müller, eds. Female “vita religiosa” between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts. Zürich and Berlin, 2011. Metz, René. “Benedictio sive consecratio virginum.” Ephemerides liturgicae 80 (1966): 263–93.   La consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine. Étude d’histoire de la liturgie. Paris, 1954. Palazzo, Eric. “Les formules de bénédiction et de consécration des veuves au cours du haut Moyen Âge.” In Veuves et veuvage dans le haut Moyen Âge, edited by Michel Parisse, 31–5. Paris, 1993. Parisse, Michel, ed. Les religieuses en France au XIIIe siècle. Table ronde organisée par l’Institut d’études médiévales de l’Université de Nancy II et le CERCOM (25–26 juin 1983). Nancy, 1985. Santinelli, Emmanuelle. Des femmes éplorées? Les veuves dans la société aristocratique du haut Moyen Âge. Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 2003. Vaughn, Sally N. St Anselm and the Handmaidens of God: A Study of Anselm’s Correspondence with Women. Turnhout, 2002. Venarde, Bruce L. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997. Wollasch, Joachim. “Parenté noble et monachisme réformateur:  observations sur les ‘conversions’ à la vie monastique aux XIe et XIIe siècles.” Revue historique 264 (1980): 3–24.

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The Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries in Italy and France (Second Half of the Fourth Century to the Eighth Century) S é bastie n B ul ly a n d E l e onor a Destefanis ( tr a n slate d b y E m m et Marron) Late antique and early medieval monasticism emerged in many different forms, both in institutional terms and in terms of the organization of the communities. This plurality had a significant influence on the physical structures of the monasteries, although our knowledge is somewhat limited by the scarcity of archaeological remains.1 In both Italy and France, archaeological research has traditionally focused on the sacred buildings of these sites at the expense of the quotidian structures. Furthermore, aside from a few rare examples, the panorama of sites for which we have evidence for the earliest monasteries remains incomplete. A number of recent overviews, however, have highlighted the important advances made in Italy over the last few decades, with a notable increase in the number of sites excavated.2 The same can be said for France, where the



See the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. Besides the large body of recent research cited in the following pages, see also Georg Jenal, Italia ascetica atque monastica. Das Asketen-​und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/​250–​604), 2  vols. (Stuttgart, 1995); Letizia Ermini Pani, ed., Committenza, scelte insediative e organizzazione patrimoniale nel medioevo. Proceedings of the International Conference (Tergu, September 15th–​17th 2006) (Spoleto, 2007); Maria Carla Somma, ed., Cantieri e maestranze nell’Italia medievale. Proceedings of the International Conference (Chieti-​San Salvo, May 16th–​18th 2008) (Spoleto, 2010); Letizia Ermini Pani, ed., Teoria e practica del lavoro nel monachesimo altomedievale. Proceedings of the International Conference (Roma-​Subiaco, June 7–​9 2013) (Spoleto, 2015); Letizia Ermini Pani, ed., Gli spazi della vita comunitaria. Proceedings of the International Conference (Roma-​Subiaco, June, 8th–​10th 2015) (Spoleto, 2016); and Francesca Romana Stasolla, “Il monachesimo in Italia dalle origini a Gregorio Magno:  modalità insediative, architetture, organizzazione topografica e spaziale,” in Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–​ April 6th 2016) (Spoleto, 2017), 321–​54.

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past twenty years have seen an increase in archaeological research on the earliest and best-​known sites through deeper excavation and a reappraisal of older interventions.3 Drawing on this recent work, this article will argue that, despite the common motif that appears in the majority of hagiographical treatments of a retreat into the “desert,” it is becoming increasingly clear that the choice of location for the earliest monasteries was much more tied into contemporary political and economic machinations. Thus we find the reuse of earlier buildings (villae) and pre-​existing religious sites (sanctuaries, mausoleums, martyria), or sites that are strategic in terms of communication or the exploitation of natural resources (castra, route-​way stations, maritime stop-​off points), not to mention those established in urban settings (episcopal and aristocratic foundations). While the advance in research has allowed for a greater understanding of the contexts in which the earliest foundations were established, we still know very little about the spatial organization of these sites for the period between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This is, in part, due to the great variety in form. The written sources and the limited archaeological record reveal the lack of a standardized organization; a monastery can be anything from a group of cells—​wooden cabins or caves—​to a variety of elaborate buildings. We see both ex nihilo constructions and the reuse of previous buildings. One common characteristic in Gaul is the frequent presence of more than one oratoria/​ecclesia.4 The various monastic rules and hagiographical treatments, however, make sporadic reference to other buildings linked to monastic life: enclosures, gates/​gatehouses, guesthouses, refectories, kitchens, cellars, dormitories (from the sixth century onwards), workshops, infirmaries, baths, stores, ovens, mills, etc. The enclosure, despite its importance in defining monastic space, is only mentioned in a few texts. (S.B., E.D.)



Christian Sapin, “L’archéologie des premiers monastères en France (Ve–​déb. XIe s.): un état des recherches,” in Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture. Proceedings of the International Conference (Castel San Vincenzo, September 23rd–​ 26th 2004), ed. Flavia De Rubeis and Federico Marazzi (Rome, 2008), 83–​102; Cécile Treffort, “Des mots aux choses: traces de la vie quotidienne des moines en Gaule avant l’an mil,” in La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​VIe siècle), ed. Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert (Cairo, 2015), 359–​70. 4 Sofia Uggé, “Lieux, espaces et topographie des monastères de l’antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge:  réflexions à propos des règles monastiques,” in Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformations d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2015), 15–​42. 3

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Figure 12.1  Map of selected monastic sites in Italy and France, fifth to eighth century. Map by Eleanora Destefanis and Sébastien Bully; infographics by David Vuillermoz.

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Italy Late Antiquity It was in episcopal contexts and closely linked to charismatic bishops (such as Eusebius of Vercelli (d. 371) and Ambrose of Milan (d. 397)) that, as early as the middle of the fourth century, the first forms of community organization began to take shape, marked by the pursuit of communal prayer and life.5 Although they are often referenced as some of the earliest expressions of Western cenobitic monasticism, the participants who gathered around the bishop were clerics. While living a common life of prayer in chastity and concordia (a keystone of their existence), these men were also occupied with carrying out their liturgical and priestly duties, as documented in the case of Vercelli. Late antique ascetic practice developed along two other lines. On the one hand, eremitism spread in its various forms throughout central Italy and the islands (from the Tuscan archipelago to the islands of Liguria),6 as well as in northern Italy. Jerome (d. 420) also mentioned the Dalmatian islands in the Adriatic Sea as sites of ascetic life.7 On the other hand, some ascetic practices evolved in an essentially domestic environment, well illustrated in the Roman context by the letters of Jerome, which document the transformation of sumptuous dwellings into places of ascetic life by members of the aristocracy, particularly women.8 No material remains of this phenomenon have been uncovered to date, since it took very little to transform the former dwellings into places of solitary life. In the wake of these experiments, but in a manner more clearly oriented toward organized community life, we find monasteries documented in the city of Rome during the course of the sixth century.9 One of the most interesting aspects is the widespread female presence:  women belonging to the highest social classes frequently appear as members of these religious communities and as foundresses.





Lorenzo Dattrino, “Il cenobio clericale di Eusebio,” in Eusebio di Vercelli e il suo tempo, ed. Enrico dal Covolo, Renato Uglione, and Giovanni Maria Vian (Rome, 1997), 341. 6 Riccardo Belcari, “Monachesimo insulare tirrenico:  fonti documentarie e attestazioni materiali a Montecristo e nelle altre isole dell’arcipelago toscano,” HAM 19 (2013): 79–​97; Daniel Istria and Philippe Pergola, “Moines et monastères dans les îles des mers Ligure et Thyrrénienne (Corse, Sardaigne, archipel toscan et archipel ligure),” HAM 19 (2013): 73–​8. 7 Rossana Martorelli, Antonio Piras, and Pier Giorgio Spanu, eds., Isole e terraferma nel primo cristianesimo. Identità locale ed interscambi culturali, religiosi e produttivi (Cagliari, 2015). 8 See the article by Magnani in this volume. 9 See the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 5

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Early medieval structures that have recently been brought to light in the area of Largo Argentina (within the Campus Martius) have been identified as the monasterium Boethianum, belonging to the family of Boethius. According to the interpretation of the scientific director of the excavation, a complex was built in the abandoned temple area during the first half of the sixth century. Temple A was converted into a consecrated building to serve the religious community, whose members were most likely lodged in cells arranged along its rear, while the area in front was used as a vegetable garden. On the opposite side of the complex, a rectangular building that opened on to the adjacent street served as a refectory or reception room. A smaller building not far from this has been identified as the cellarium (storage area) of the monastery. All of these structures lie within the enclosure that had previously defined the temple area, the entrances to which were now closed off in order to create a clear separation between the internal and external space, reflecting the need for a distinction from the surrounding world.10 One must also include Rome’s so-​called “basilican monasteries,” which sprung up to serve the basilicas of the martyrs in the suburban areas from the fifth century on, with the aim of providing space for the performance of official duties and of offering both material and spiritual assistance to pilgrims. The Roman panorama thus represents quite a mixed context, with complexes made up of buildings that served complementary functions. This impression is further strengthened and confirmed by the monastic rules of sixth-​century central Italy (RM and RB), which make numerous mentions of structural components. Some of these elements have been associated, for instance, with archaeological material found in the complex uncovered near Alatri:  a surrounding wall with a single entrance encloses distinctive areas, including a vegetable garden, a cemetery, and a two-​storied rectangular building which has been identified as the dormitory and refectory, as well as religious structure and service buildings.11 The identification of this complex with a monastery, as well as its chronology, is very problematic, however, particularly considering that written sources about the site are very late.12



Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, “Tra la Porticus Minucia e il Calcarario: l’area sacra di Largo Argentina nell’altomedioevo,” Archeologia Medievale 21 (1994): 57–​98. 11 Elisabeth Fentress, “The Sixth-​Century Abbey,” in Walls and Memory: The Abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri (Lazio) from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond, ed. Elisabeth Fentress et al. (Turnhout, 2005), 33–​70. 12 Gisella Cantino Wataghin, “Moines et monastères en Italie à l’arrivée de Colomban:  quelques données entre archéologie et histoire,” BUCEMA 20.2 (2016), http://​cem.revues.org/​14521 (date of last access: 9 April 2019).

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A clearer image of monastic organization comes from Vivarium, the monastery founded by Cassiodorus (d. c. 583), close to Squillace, on the Ionian coast of Calabria. Beyond the literary focus and the clearly symbolic register of the well-​known description of the monastery written by Cassiodorus himself—​in which the coenobium is presented as a form of Eden, a paradisiacal prefiguration also reflected in the landscape, full of water and rich gardens13—​a certain amount of detail is paid in the text to the physical surroundings, most notably in relation to the hydraulic infrastructure and to the flow of visitors and the services that they necessitated in the monastery. These references are, moreover, completely compatible with the excellent roadside position of the site, which was easily reached and well incorporated into the main road system of the region. The site of Vivarium is now generally identified with a sixth-​century (and beyond) ecclesiastical site excavated on the ridge near Stalettì (on the eastern coast of Calabria), although some scholars continue to doubt this hypothesis. The most notable feature of this site is the cult building, a single-​nave church, probably built when the coenobium was founded. The church reuses a triconch structure (with a plan in the form of a trefoil) as its choir. According to the most recent interpretations, this structure may have originally been a mausoleum that belonged to the pre-​existing villa before it was repurposed to serve the monastic community. There was a small room adjacent to the southern side of the triconch, which housed a sarcophagus datable to the second half of the sixth century. This space became the focus of religious devotion in the course of the early medieval period, as documented in the inscriptions carved on the cover slab.14

The Lombard Period Into this heterogeneous context came the Lombards in the final decades of the sixth century, a time when some characteristics were becoming more well defined. The negative impact of these invaders has been significantly revised by recent studies.15 Indeed, at the start of the seventh century, just



Cassiodorus, Institutiones, I, c. 29 (de positione monasterii Vivariensis sive Castellensis), ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937), 73. See also the article by Lauwers in this volume. François Bougard and Ghislaine Noyé, “Chronique: Squillace,” MEFRM 98 (1986): 1195–​ 1212; Adele Coscarella, “Il monastero ‘vivariense sive castellense’ e l’edificio triconco di Stalettì (CZ): da Pierre Courcelle a oggi,” in Martiri, santi, patroni. Per una archeologia della devozione, ed. Adele Coscarella and Paola De Santis (Arcavacata di Rende, 2012), 299–​315, with previous bibliography. 15 Federico Marazzi, Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio (Milan, 2015),  151–​2. 13

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a few short decades after their migration into the Italian peninsula, the Lombard monarch was to become the lay protagonist of one of the most notable events in the history of Italian monasticism: the foundation of the monastery of Bobbio, which was a joint initiative of King Agilulf (d. 615/​ 16) and St. Columbanus (d. 615), who at that point had reached the end of the long peregrinatio that had taken him all the way across Europe from his native Ireland.16 In the vita of the saint and his disciples, written around 640, Columbanus’ biographer, Jonas of Susa, himself a monk at Bobbio, describes the place chosen upon the community’s arrival as wild and dominated by dense forest, thus conforming to the well-​known hagiographic topos in which the idea of the desert is recreated.17 In reality, however, a number of allusions in the written sources, together with material evidence, would seem to point toward the presence of a well-​ developed settlement that preceded the advent of the monks. Indeed, upon their arrival, they found a pre-​existing church in which miracles took place,18 a sign of the prior Christian character of the valley. The location was made still more attractive not only by the fertility of the soil and the presence of mineral springs, but also by its advantageous positioning on a number of important routes. It was situated at the intersection of the road between Piacenza (and the Po plain) and Genoa (and, by extension, the Mediterranean) and the roads that passed through the Apennine valleys, connecting Pavia and Milan with central Italy.19 This favorable position, moreover, was even more important during the early Lombard period, owing to its proximity to the frontiers with the Byzantine world. While this border should not be seen as a defined line, it represented a significant presence in the geopolitics of the Apennine region, as it extended across the other side of the mountain ridge into Ligurian territory not yet occupied by the Lombards.20 Beyond a number of reliquaries (including one Irish example dating to the seventh century) and various terracotta eulogiae originating from the eastern Mediterranean—​not to mention the notable collection of ampulae from the



Alessandro Zironi, Il monastero longobardo di Bobbio. Crocevia di uomini, manoscritti e culture (Spoleto, 2004), 1–​21. 17 Jonas of Susa, Vitae Columbani discipulorumque eius 1.30, MGH SS RM 4, 107. 18 Ibid. 19 Flavio G. Nuvolone, ed., La fondazione di Bobbio nello sviluppo delle comunicazioni tra Langobardia e Toscana nel Medioevo (Bobbio, 2000); Eleonora Destefanis, Il monastero di Bobbio in età altomedievale (Florence, 2002). See also the article by Devroey in this volume. 20 Roberta Conversi and Eleonora Destefanis, “Bobbio e il territorio piacentino tra VI e VII secolo:  questioni aperte e nuove riflessioni alla luce dei dati archeologici,” Archeologia Medievale 41 (2014): 289–​94. 16

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Holy Land, which demonstrate the key role played by the monastery as a center on the paths of international pilgrimage21—​very little material evidence for the earliest phase of the monastery’s existence has been found to date. We are left mainly with the small pieces of information contained in the Vita Columbani. This refers to an enclosing wall (septa), the stables for the pack animals, and, perhaps, rooms where activities such as book binding and shoe repairing were carried out.22 The Columbanian experience at Bobbio was destined to remain a somewhat isolated case, at least until the late seventh century when, under the leadership of King Perctarit (671–​88) and his successor, Cunipert (688–​700), the Lombard monarchy embraced the Catholic faith. A  process of consolidation of the Church was then initiated throughout the Italian peninsula, including the restoration of the diocesan seats and the foundation of monasteries.23 The sovereigns themselves were the main agents of this restoration. From the late seventh century and into the eighth, along with local dukes and members of the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy, they actively founded new monasteries, not only in the capital, Pavia, but throughout Italian territory. From a structural point of view, material remains are quite scarce for the period encompassing the end of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth. In general terms, even in the Lombard period, the reuse of pre-​existing structures seems to have been a very common phenomenon, as can be seen, for example, at sites like Brescia (San Salvatore), Farfa, and San Vincenzo al Volturno. The mechanisms of this reuse, however, demonstrate a noticeable diversification. Some sites were in continuous use (albeit in a different form) until the establishment of monasteries, while others had been abandoned.24 Another factor is the nature of the buildings that were reused, with greater or lesser transformation. In Brescia, for example, the monastery founded by Desiderius (first duke and later king of the Lombards) in the 750s sits on a pre-​ existing settlement that dates to the seventh century. It possessed a church as well as production buildings arranged around quadrangular open areas. This configuration (later adopted by Desiderius’ foundation) could be interpreted as either the center of a royal palace or even the early nucleus of an already



Eleonora Destefanis, “Il monastero di Bobbio sulle vie del pellegrinaggio altomedievale:  fonti scritte e dati materiali,” in Pellegrinaggi e monachesimo celtico. Dall’Irlanda alle sponde del Mediterraneo, ed. Francesco Benozzo and Marina Montesano (Alessandria, 2010 [2011]), 59–​108. 22 Jonas, Vitae Columbani 2.5, 117. 23 Claudio Azzara, L’ideologia del potere regio nel Papato altomedievale (Spoleto, 1997), 168–​9. 24 Eleonora Destefanis, “Archeologia dei monasteri altomedievali tra acquisizioni raggiunte e nuove prospettive di ricerca,” Post-​Classical Archaeologies 1 (2011): 351–​9. 21

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extant monastery.25 It is possible that much better information will soon be available from the recent findings on the female monastery of Cairate, once they have undergone an in-​depth review.26 In general, down to the Lombard period, the religious buildings themselves do not present any typology that could be specifically identified as “monastic,” either in terms of the dimensions—​which vary according to the make-​up of the community or, more importantly, in relation to the needs of the individual monastery—​or in terms of their layout. In many cases, particularly in northern Italy, the model of the aisleless church ending with three apses (documented for instance in San Felice and Santa Maria Teodote in Pavia, Santa Maria d’Aurona in Milano, and San Salvatore in Sirmione) should not be considered as particular to monasteries, as they often represent a choice linked to a high ranking official, the expression of a royal or aristocratic foundation.27 In most cases, moreover, local building traditions played a determining role in the architectonic choices, as can be seen, for example, in the case of Novalesa,28 which sits along the route which leads to the pass of Moncenisio in the western Alps. The quadrangular apse of Novalesa’s abbatial church and chapels display a style quite common throughout the whole alpine region. Novalesa represents one of the most significant examples of an early medieval monastic complex in the Italian context. It is especially notable for the presence of a number of religious buildings that are also attested elsewhere, having roles complementary to the abbatial church, from funerary functions—​intended not only for the community but also for lay people who had the privilege of being buried on monastic ground29—​to spiritual assistance to pilgrims and worshipers (also at Brescia and other sites).30 In



Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Francesca Morandini, eds., Dalla corte regia al monastero di San Salvatore-​Santa Giulia di Brescia (Mantua, 2014). 26 Valeria Mariotti, ed., Un monastero nei secoli. Santa Maria Assunta di Cairate. Scavi e ricerche (Mantua, 2014). 27 Saverio Lomartire, “Riflessioni sulla diffusione del tipo ‘Dreiapsidensaalkirche’ nell’architettura lombarda dell’altomedioevo,” HAM 9 (2003): 417–​32. 28 Gisella Cantino Wataghin, “L’établissement et l’histoire de l’abbaye de Novalaise,” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 255–​88. 29 Most recently, Marazzi, Le città dei monaci, 173–​5. On funerary spaces in monasteries, see also Gisella Cantino Wataghin and Eleonora Destefanis, “Les espaces funéraires dans les ensembles monastiques du haut Moyen Âge,” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 503–​54. 30 Eleonora Destefanis, “Le monastère face aux laïques au haut Moyen Âge: lieux de culte secondaires et accueil aux limites de l’espace monastique dans le contexte italien,” in Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtellerie, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisanales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe s. Actes des 3èmes journées d’études monastiques, Vézelay, 27–​28 juin 2013, ed. Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, BUCEMA, Hors série 8 (2015), https://​ journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13599 (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 25

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other cases the monasteries organized space for pastoral care outside the area strictly defined by the enclosing wall, for the community which built up around the monastery, forming what was to become a genuine monastic burgh. A number of these settlements are documented as early as the early medieval period (such as Bobbio and Borgo San Dalmazzo),31 where a plebs (a baptismal church) developed, ensuring that the necessary pastoral care was delivered. This can also be seen at Nonantola, where the excavation of the Church of San Michele has brought to light the medieval footprint of the settlement.32 The situation documented above, particularly in relation to the Lombard period, precedes the changes that came about during the Carolingian period, which saw a continuity without any hiatus. It must be said, however, that, in a number of cases, such as at Bobbio, Farfa, and San Vincenzo al Volturno, thanks to imperial support and the development of a European-​wide network of connections, these sites became exceptionally large and powerful in the Italian world. The most precise archaeological data that we have now for the Italian context undoubtedly come from San Vincenzo al Volturno, where construction between the end of the eighth century and start of the ninth of a monumental abbatial church,33 situated at the heart of the monastery, along with the spaces devoted to living, production, hospitality, and funerary memory,34 represents without a doubt the most tangible evidence of the grandeur reached—​equal to that of the great abbeys on the other side of the Alps. (E.D.)

France Late Antiquity The earliest monasteries begin to appear in Gaul slightly later than in Italy, during the second half of the fourth century and first half of the fifth, in





Eleonora Destefanis, “Monasteri, poli devozionali e abitato:  riflessioni sui borghi monastici di età medievale dell’Italia settentrionale, tra fonti scritte e strutture materiali,” in Le archeologie di Marilli. Miscellanea di studi in ricordo di Maria Maddalena Negro Ponzi, ed. Paolo De Vingo (Alessandria, 2018), 189–​207. 32 Sauro Gelichi, “La pieve di San Michele: storia di una chiesa e storia degli scavi,” in Nonantola 4. L’abbazia e le sue chiese, ed. S. Gelichi and M. Librenti (Florence, 2013), 93–​ 116. For Nonantola, see now Sauro Gelichi, Mauro Librenti, and Alessandra Cianciosi, eds., Nonantola 6.  Monaci e contadini. Abati e re. Il monastero di Nonantola attraverso l’archeologia (2002–​2009) (Florence, 2018). 33 Federico Marazzi, La “basilica maior” di San Vincenzo al Volturno (scavi 2000–​2007) (Cerro al Volturno, 2014). 34 Marazzi, Le città dei monaci, 248–​53. 31

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the regions of the west, Provence, the Rhone valley, and the Jura Mountains. Numbering no more than a dozen in the earliest phase, they grew from 22 at the start of the sixth century to 115 at the start of the eighth century, dispersed across the whole country.35 Founded around 361 by St. Martin, Ligugé is traditionally considered to be the first monastery in France.36 Archaeological investigation has shown that the monastery was founded in the ruins of an antique villa, characteristic of the Late Empire ones found throughout southwest Gaul. The earliest building on the site (possibly a cellar) was constructed in an antique pool, perhaps during the lifetime of St. Martin, and this was followed by the earliest church, which continued in use up to its extension in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This reading of the archaeology, which we also find on other sites, brings us to the thorny subject of the transition from villa to monastery in late antique Gaul, a process that is still not fully understood.37 The foundation in Ligugé was followed in 371 by the establishment of Marmoutier, once again linked to St. Martin and located on the right bank of the River Loire, just two kilometers above the castrum of Tours. Archaeological research has shown that the site on which the gothic abbatial church now stands was continually occupied from the first or second century on, with a network of terraces and the construction of well-​built, ornately decorated structures.38 As has already been noted for a number of Italian sites, particularly Brescia, the nature of this earliest occupation is difficult to define; it may have been linked to a staging post, a suburban villa, or a small settlement. While the structures would be remodeled numerous times down to the eleventh century, archaeological evidence suggests that the antique structures were originally transformed into a place of worship from







Sapin, “L’archéologie des premiers monastères en France,” 84; Michèle Gaillard and Christian Sapin, “Le paysage monastique de la Gaule à l'arrivée de Colomban,” in Colomban et son influence. Moines et monastères en Europe du haut Moyen Âge, ed. Sébastien Bully, Alain Dubreucq, and Aurélia Bully (Rennes, 2018), 51–​65. 36 Brigitte Boissavit-​Camus, “Les édifices cultuels de l’abbaye de Saint-​Martin de Ligugé (Vienne),” in Wisigoths et Francs autour de la bataille de Vouillé (507). Recherches récentes sur le haut Moyen Âge dans le Centre-​Ouest de la France, ed. Luc Bourgeois (Saint-​Germain-​en-​ Laye, 2010), 215–​35. 37 See Roberto Alciati, “And the Villa Became a Monastery: Sulpicius Severus’ Community of Primuliacum,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrick Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 85–​98; Nicolas Reveyron, “Forma monasterii: essai sur l’organisation de l’espace monastique comme mise en forme de l’identité ecclésiologique,” HAM 20.2 (2014): 439–​47. 38 Élisabeth Lorans and Gaël Simon, “Autour de Marmoutier:  les premiers siècles du monachisme en Touraine,” in Bully et al., Colomban et son influence, 87–​106. 35

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the fifth century onwards. Sulpicius Severus claims that St. Martin lived in a wooden cell, even though the monks had carved their grottos into the cliff side in the manner of Egyptian monasteries. The latter are difficult to date owing to their regular refurbishments. The wide range of religious buildings and funerary areas attested in the eleventh century may date as far back as the first centuries of the monastery, but this remains to be proven by archaeological research. In the first quarter of the fifth century, a second sphere of monasticism sprang up, this time in Provence, as exemplified by the foundations of Lérins between 400 and 410, under the direction of Honoratus (d. 429), followed by John Cassian’s (d. 435) foundation at Marseille around 415. Little is known with certainty about the layout of the monastery of Lérins on Île Saint-​Honorat prior to the Romanesque period, including the origin and chronology of the network of its seven places of worship, which not only delimited the space on the island but also contributed to its sacralization.39 The most recent excavations, however, have provided insight into the organization of the monastery in late antiquity.40 In the first phase, dated to the fifth century, the church had a single nave opening onto an apse; this small building, probably a secondary religious building that was reserved for prayer, was bounded on the south by what could be interpreted as one or more attached hermit cells. This disposition is reminiscent of the two small conjoined rooms found at the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, interpreted as the cell and the oratory of St. Radegund, dating to the middle of the sixth century.41 The second phase, dated to between the end of the sixth century and beginning of the seventh, saw the cells replaced by an annex to the oratory, which assumed a commemorative and funerary function. Many questions remain, however, about the origins of the other secondary chapels and communal buildings, and about the links between Île Saint-​ Honorat and the nearby island of Sainte-​Marguerite. The latter, also occupied in late antiquity, seems to have been the site of significant construction, with a maritime villa built there, most likely during the Roman Imperial period.42 Another site with a possible monastic function is the building, fortified during

Rosa-​Maria Dessi and Michel Lauwers, “Désert, église, île sainte: Lérins et la sanctification des îles monastiques de l’antiquité à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge, ed. Yann Codou and Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2009), 277–​9. 40 Yann Codou, “Aux origines du monachisme: le dossier de Saint-​Honorat de Lérins,” in L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule du IVe au IXe siècle, ed. Michèle Gaillard (Turnhout, 2014), 291–​310. 41 Yvonne Labande-​ Mailfert, “Poitiers:  Abbaye Sainte-​ Croix,” in Premiers monuments chrétiens de la Gaule, ed. Noël Duval, 2 vols. (Paris, 1996), 2:284–​9. 42 Annie Arnaud, “Les îles de Lérins, Sainte-​Marguerite et Saint-​Honorat (Cannes, Alpes-​ Maritimes),” in Des îles côte à côte. Histoire du peuplement des îles de l’antiquité au Moyen 39

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late antiquity, perched on an escarpment of the nearby Île de Porquerolles, which evokes the image of cells and brings to mind the writings of John Cassian on the hermitages of the Îles d’Hyères.43 With respect to Marseille itself, while it is generally accepted that John Cassian was the founder of two urban monasteries there,44 one male and one female, their exact location remains unknown, as well as their relationship with the Abbey of Saint-​ Victor, located on the site of the eponymous saint’s tomb.45 The foundation of a monastery in relation to a venerated tomb, often of earlier date, was not an uncommon practice. The presence of a community assured the protection of the saint’s grave and controlled the access of pilgrims to the site, although it is still difficult to determine whether the community consisted of a group of ordinary clerics or monks from the very beginning. A  well-​ known example of this is the Abbey of Saint-​Germain at Auxerre, where the early Christian oratory of Germanus’ villa was gradually incorporated into the basilica between the sixth and eighth centuries (when the monastic community became established there), before being converted into a crypt in the ninth century.46 The mausoleum of the Carolingian abbey at Saint-​Quentin was erected around the late antique tomb of the martyr.47 The same process also took place at Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune (Switzerland) where the monastic community, attested as early as 515, was organized around a succession of six churches erected in the early Middle Ages on the site of a funerary space and the mausoleum of an important figure from the second quarter of the fourth century.48 Influenced by Cassian, Castor of Apt (d. before 436) founded his monastery in 426. Although its location has not been identified, an attempt has been made to link it to the remains excavated at Saint-​Estève de Ménerbes.49 This



Âge (Provence, Alpes-​Maritimes, Ligurie, Toscane), ed. M. Pasqulini, P. Arnaud, and C. Varaldo, Bulletin archéologique de Provence, supplément 1 (Aix-​en-​Provence, 2003), 175–​90. 43 Jean-​Christophe Tréglia, “L’occupation des îles d’Hyères durant l’antiquité tardive,” in ibid., 127–​32. 44 Jean-​Pierre Weiss, “Jean Cassien et le monachisme provençal,” in Saint-​Victor de Marseille. Études archéologiques et historiques. Actes du colloque Saint-​Victor, Marseille, 18–​20 novembre 2004, ed. Michel Fixot and Jean-​Pierre Pelletier (Turnhout, 2009), 179–​85. 45 Michel Fixot and Jean-​Pierre Pelletier, “Introduction,” in ibid., 6. 46 Christian Sapin, ed., Archéologie et architecture d’un site monastique. 10 ans de recherche à l’abbaye Saint-​Germain d’Auxerre (Xe–​XXe siècles) (Paris, 2000). 47 Michèle Gaillard and Christian Sapin, “Autour de la tombe de saint Quentin: histoire et archéologie d’un culte (milieu IVe–​début VIIIe s.),” in Gaillard, L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule, 271–​88. 48 Alessandra Antonini, “Le site archéologique de l’abbaye,” L’abbaye de Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune, Archéothéma 36 (Sept.–​Oct. 2014), 24–​31. 49 Yann Codou, “Sur les monastères, des éclairages archéologiques nouveaux,” in L’antiquité tardive en Provence (IVe–​VIe siècle). Naissance d’une chrétienté, ed. Jean Guyon and Marc Heijmans (Arles, 2013), 134–​5.

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site, for which few parallels are known, is organized around a central court (perhaps an atrium), which contains a quatrefoil basin. Along the eastern side of the court is what appears to be a funerary basilica, flanked by a portico that links it to funerary areas on the northern and southern sides. The identification of the features as those of a monastery is mainly based on the fact that the anthropological study of the skeletons remains identified only male remains. More than any other site, the complex of Saint-​Estève poses questions relating to the criteria used to distinguish monasteries from generic ecclesiastical sites for which we possess no written records dating to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.50 Staying in Provence, the archaeological remains at the monastery of Saint-​ Jean, founded by Caesarius in the town of Arles at the beginning of the sixth century, have transformed our understanding of the site. The excavation revealed a vast basilica dating to the first half of the sixth century and in use until the ninth century, necessitating a rereading of the religious topography of both the town and the quarter in which the building stood.51 As a result it would appear that the remains traditionally associated with the monastery of Caesarius52 were more likely linked to the early Christian episcopal complex. The historiography on the subject holds that the “monastic ideal” spread from Provence up the Rhone valley and subsequently on to the Jura Mountains.53 The Abbey of Saint-​André-​le-​Haut in Vienne, founded around 543 in a corner of the reduced late antique walls of the city perched along the Rhone, has been the site of excavations since 2008.54 They revealed a small apsed building (a mausoleum or church perhaps) which maintained—​ or developed—​a memorial function down to the ninth and tenth century. Stratigraphically, this building relates to the earliest monastery. This is also the case for the remains of artisans’ quarters discovered below the gallery of the Romanesque cloister. The monastery of the Île-​Barbe in Lyon, attested

See the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. Marc Heijmans, “Le monument chrétien hors norme de l’enclos Saint-​Césaire d’Arles,” in Guyon and Heijmans, L’antiquité tardive en Provence,  173–​9. 52 Among the many sources, see Paul-​Albert Février, “Arles: Monastère Saint-​Césaire,” in Duval, Premiers monuments chrétiens de la Gaule, 1:121–​2. 53 Alain Dubreucq, “Lérins et la Burgondie dans le haut Moyen Âge,” in Codou and Lauwers, Lérins, 195–​227. 54 Anne Baud, Nathanaël Nimmegeers, and Anne Flammin, “L’abbaye de Saint-​André-​ le-​Haut à Vienne: origine et développement d’un monastère de moniales,” in L’origine des sites monastiques. Confrontation entre la terminologie des sources textuelles et les données archéologiques, Actes des 4èmes journées d’études monastiques, Baume-​les-​Messieurs, 4–​5 septembre 2014, ed. Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, BUCEMA, Hors série 10 (2016), https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​14485 (date of last access: 8 April 2019).

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from the early fifth century, has recently been the subject of reappraisal.55 This research has allowed the excavator to define the monastic topography, which calls to mind the situation at Lérins, with its network of secondary cult sites. During the Romanesque period, three buildings were erected to structure the religious space around the abbatial church of Saint-​Martin, in effect creating a cloistral square. There are strong indications of an early origin for the church of Saint-​Martin. One feature that undoubtedly has an early origin is the church of Saint-​André, at the eastern end of the island, where excavation has revealed the remains of a building with a funerary function (mausoleum/​church) with sarcophagi dating to the sixth century.56 It was most likely at the Île-​Barbe that Romanus, the first of the Jura fathers and founder of Condat (modern Saint-​Claude, founded 430–​5), Lauconne (Saint-​Lupicin), and Balme (Saint-​Romain-​de-​Roche), was educated. At the earliest of these sites, Condat, archaeological test trenches in the former abbey (now the cathedral), as well as in the former abbatial palace, have allowed us to question once again the motif of the retreat into the desert, as ceramic artefacts suggest that the site of the foundation was already occupied during the Roman Imperial period, although the exact nature of this occupation remains unclear (was it a staging post or a rural farm?).57 We know almost nothing about the earliest monastery apart from the remains of two apses found in the choir of the cathedral, one built on top of the other, dating to before the eleventh century. Two post-​build constructions, partially identified in the lower layers of the former abbatial dwellings and stratigraphically earlier than the year 1000, could also be dated to the first decades of the monastery and could correspond to the description of the foundation in the Vita patrum Jurensium.58 At Saint-​Lupicin, a small late antique funerary monument that was found in the Romanesque church has been interpreted as the tomb of the founder, although it contains no bones.59



Charlotte Gaillard, “L’abbaye de l’Île-​Barbe à Lyon (Ve–​XIIIe siècles):  archéologie et topographie d’une fondation monastique insulaire” (PhD diss., Université Lyon Lumière II, 2016). 56 Charlotte Gaillard, “Étude archéologique de l’église Saint-​André (monastère de l’île-​ Barbe, Lyon),” HAM 20/​2 (2013): 311–​22. 57 Sébastien Bully, “Archéologie des premiers monastères dans le Centre-​ Est de la France: conditions d’implantation et de diffusion, topographie historique et organisation,” BUCEMA 13 (2009): 257–​290, http://​cem.revues.org/​index11085.html (date of last access: 9 April 2019); Sébastien Bully, “Famille d’églises et circulations: le cas de l’abbaye de Saint-​Claude ( Jura) du Ve au XVIIIe siècle,” in Espace ecclésial et liturgie au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque de Nantua de novembre 2006, ed. A. Baud (Lyon, 2010), 75–​89. 58 François Martine, ed. and trans., Vie des Pères du Jura, SC 142. 59 Sébastien Bully, Morana Caušević-​ Bully, and Aurélia Bully, “Coffrage de bois et coffrage de pierre du Ve s.:  la tombe présumée de Saint Lupicin ( Jura),” in Le bois dans l’architecture et l’aménagement de la tombe:  quelles approches? Actes de la table-​ronde 55

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The monastery of Romainmôtier (Switzerland) was also one of the foundations of the Jura fathers,60 something that seems to be supported by the archaeology.61 The extensive excavations of the site show that the first monks established themselves in a small late antique foundation, possibly an artisans’ workshop that reused two wooden-​framed buildings. Following this, a single-​aisled church with an apse bordered by two annexes was built and dedicated to St. Peter. This was replaced in the seventh or eighth century by a larger building with the same plan, but with the addition of an eastern annex. At the same time the church doubled in size on the southern side, where a second religious building with a quadrangular choir was built, and the older buildings were replaced by a stone structure. The evolution of the latter is complex and the presence of a sophisticated baths area means that its function is not fully understood; was this an infirmary, the abbot’s quarters, or a lay palace? The early medieval monastery thus presents as an ensemble formed by two parallel churches with conventual buildings placed at an angle to them, forming the basis of a future cloister. The multiplication of religious buildings into a family of two or three churches (in some cases more) would seem to be one of the paradigms of monasteries in late antique and early medieval Gaul.62 But many unanswered questions relating to their origins and respective functions remain.63

The Merovingian Period Research carried out at Aniane since 2011 has shed light on the establishment founded there in the last decades of the eighth century and thought to have been the “spear-​head of the movement to ensure the triumph of the Benedictine Rule and of the cenobitic form of Frankish monasticism.”64 Even though, in the context of this reform, we see the emergence of a new organization around a cloistral square bordered by a single sanctuary (that fulfills



d’Auxerre 15–​17 octobre 2009, tome XXIII des mémoires publiés par l’AFAM, ed. F. Carré and F. Henrion (Saint-​Germain-​en-​Laye, 2012), 117–​22. 60 See Jean Daniel Morerod, ed., Romainmôtier, histoire de l’abbaye (Lausanne, 2001). 61 Peter Eggenberger and Jachen Sarott, “Romainmôtier (Suisse), un monastère au passé millénaire,” in Cluny et ses influences en Europe. Dossiers d’Archéologie HS 19 (2010): 48–​53. 62 Yann Codou, “Églises multiples et identité monastique dans la Provence médiévale,” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 586–​610. 63 Jacques Le Maho, “Le monastère de Jumièges (France) aux temps mérovingiens (VIIe–​ VIIIe siècle): le témoignage des textes et de l’archéologie,” HAM 9 (2003): 315–​22; Bully, “Famille d’églises et circulations,” 79–​85. 64 Laurent Schneider, “Une fondation multiple, un monastère pluriel:  les contextes topographiques de la genèse du monastère d’Aniane d’après l’archéologie et la vie de saint Benoît (fin VIIIe–​IXe s.),” in Bully and Sapin, L’origine des sites monastiques, http://​ cem.revues.org/​14481 (date of last access: 9 April 2019).

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all of the necessary functions), along the lines of the model plan of St. Gall,65 at Aniane itself the pre-​existing multifarious organization persists. The foundation of the first basilica, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was followed in 782 by the addition of the church of Christ the Savior 30 meters further away. A  third structure was erected (perhaps dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene) between these two churches prior to the middle of the twelfth century, while a fourth church, Saint-​Jean, appeared 250 meters from the medieval monastic center. This last figures as one of the gateways to the medieval village walls—​ although we should not assume that it had the same purpose in the early medieval period—​and it is associated with a funerary space from the second third of the ninth century. Looking at the monastery today, one can barely make out the Carolingian organization that would prevail at Benedict’s own monastery at Inde.66 This is also the case at the contemporary monastery of Landévennec, which developed out of a single sanctuary, simply doubling the oratory/​mausoleum of the founder.67 At Môtiers (Switzerland), excavations of a foundation only attested in the textual sources from 1093 have demonstrated the existence of a church of St. Peter as early as the sixth or seventh century, followed by a second, Notre Dame, placed alongside it in the eighth or ninth century.68 On a completely different scale, Agaune also possessed two religious buildings, but here they were laid out in a line owing to the topography of the site. The site also included a baptismal complex and the palace of the lay abbot69 or of the bishop, preserved on the southern side of the churches.70 A  similar linear organization was also prevalent at the Abbey of Saint-​Denis, where, between the seventh century and the beginning of the ninth, four religious buildings connected by a long portico formed the northern limit of the atrium of the Dionysian basilica.71 The funerary function of such a “rosary chain of churches” is extremely significant, perhaps even an essential and determining feature. The excavations

On the origins of the cloister, see Christian Sapin, “De la cour au cloître carolingien,” Cahiers de Saint-​Michel de Cuxa 46 (2015): 21–​34. Ibid.,  32–​3. 67 Annie Bardel, “L’abbaye Saint-​Gwénolé de Landévennec,” Archéologie médiévale 21 (1991): 51–​101. 68 Jacques Bujard, “Aux origines du prieuré Saint-​Pierre de Vautravers:  complications monastiques et vallonnières,” in Complications neuchâteloises. Histoire, tradition, patrimoine, ed. E. Hertz and F. Wobmann (Neuchâtel, 2014), 30–​7. 69 On lay abbots see the articles by Rosé and Devroey in this volume. 70 Antonini, “Le site archéologique de l’abbaye,” 24–​31. 71 Charles Kraemer and Thomas Chenal, “D’amé et Macteflède à Imma:  approche topographique du monastère féminin du Romarici mons, entre le VIIe et le IXe siècle,” in Bully et al., Colomban et son influence, 331–​52. 65

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carried out at the Saint-​Mont have allowed for the identification of at least two early medieval buildings from the seven religious buildings mentioned in the (mostly late) textual sources.72 The first, Saint-​Pierre, a simple, rectangular construction, more than likely housed no more than one sarcophagus. A second building identified a few dozen meters to the south is notable, however, for the presence of around eighty formae-​type tombs (pre-​constructed rectangular niches that were regularly reused).73 While such a high number of these tombs is exceptional, this burial form may have been specific to religious communities and bears similarities to the Merovingian funerary churches at Saint-​Gertrude (phase 2) and at Nivelles (Belgium).74 At the abbey of Manglieu, two religious buildings mentioned in the Life of St. Bonnet (written just after 700) and confirmed through archaeological investigation are present within the area of the cloister: Notre-​Dame was built on the site of an oratory of the domain granted to the community, while Saint-​Sebastien may also have been built on a building of the domain or an earlier central-​ plan structure (perhaps a mausoleum).75 Finally, during the first decades of the female monastery at Hamage, founded in the second quarter of the seventh century,76 the community possessed only a single church, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. It was situated outside the main enclosure and the first generations of the community were buried there. The wooden structure was rebuilt numerous times down to the twelfth century, even though a second church, dedicated to Mary, had been erected within the enclosure around 700. This church was used primarily for female burials, although there were also a number of male burials. The two religious buildings were laid out parallel to each other, a few dozen meters apart. Here, it is still difficult to interpret the layout in relation to the enclosure (or enclosures), given the restrictions related to access that were associated with a community of  nuns.







Charles Kraemer and Thomas Chenal, “Pour une archéologie du Romarici mons, ou le Saint-​Mont revisité (commune de Saint-​Amé–​Vosges),” Rencontres Transvogiennes 4 (2014): 57–​80; S. Bully et al., “Autour de Luxeuil: état des recherches sur les monastères d’Annegray, de Fontaine et du Saint-​Mont,” Le pays lorrain (2016): 241–​54. 73 Sébastien Bully, “Un dispositif funéraire spécifique: les formae. État de la question et nouvelles découvertes,” HAM 20.2 (2014): 480–​8. 74 Frédéric Chantinne and Philippe Mignot, “La collégiale Sainte-​ Gertrude de Nivelles: réexamen du dossier archéologique,” HAM 20.2 (2014): 513–​19. 75 Damien Martinez, “Les premiers monastères d’Auvergne à la lumière de la documentation textuelle et archéologique (Ve–​Xe siècle): état de la question,” in Bully and Sapin, L’origine des sites monastiques, http://​cem.revues.org/​14484 (date of last access: 9 April 2019). 76 Etienne Louis, “Une église monastique du haut Moyen Âge dans le nord de la France: le cas d’Hamage.” In Gaillard, L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule, 357–​85. 72

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These enclosures at Hamage have been identified archaeologically as a series of perpendicular ditches reinforced on the interior by a palisade of planks held in place by posts. The main enclosure, which has an irregular rectangular form,77 surrounds the Marian church, the quotidian buildings of the community, and perhaps also areas of craft production (writing tablets, bronze, glass).78 These remains at Hamage are exceptional, especially given the fact that there are very few monastic enclosures known from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The fortified wall at the abbey of Landévennec, dated to the end of the eighth century, was formed of two courses of very large blocks which encase an internal body; it would seem to have been built on top of an earlier, narrower, drystone structure.79 At Romainmôtier, an enclosure was identified on the southern side of the monastery, where it incorporated a small stream of the Nozon, which was possibly reinforced by a dyke wall.80 The monasteries of Annegray and Luxeuil, founded by the Irish monk Columbanus in the last decade of the sixth century, have been the subject of a new wave of research over the past ten years.81 At Annegray, site of Columbanus’ first foundation, a landscape archaeological study combined with results from excavation and geophysical prospection suggests that the site had previously been occupied by a Gallo-​Roman sanctuary.82 The place chosen for the foundation was also located close to a road, although it has not been possible thus far to identify any structural remains of the early medieval phase of the monastery.83





Etienne Louis, “Espaces monastiques sacrés et profanes à Hamage (Nord), VIIe–​IXe siècles,” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 435–​72. Etienne Louis, “Les indices d’artisanat dans et autour du monastère de Hamage (Nord),” in Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisanales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle, ed. Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, BUCEMA, Hors série 8 (2015), https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13684. 79 Bardel, “L’abbaye Saint-​Gwénolé de Landévennec,” 51–​101. 80 Eggenberger and Sarott, “Romainmôtier (Suisse),” 48–​53. 81 Sébastien Bully et Christian Sapin, “Les monastères en Europe occidentale (Ve–​Xe siècle): topographie et structures des premiers établissements en Franche-​Comté et en Bourgogne. Projet collectif de recherche [PCR],” BUCEMA 15 (2011), https://​journals. openedition.org/​cem/​11948 (date of last access:  8 April 2019); for a synthesis of the research see Sébastien Bully and Emmet Marron, “L’instant Colomban:  conditions de fondation et premiers éléments de topographie des monastères d’Annegray et de Luxeuil,” in Bully et al., Colomban et son influence, 139–​63. 82 Emmet Marron, In His Silvis Silere:  The Monastic Site of Annegray—​Studies in a Columbanian Landscape (Galway, 2012). 83 Emmet Marron and Sébastien Bully, “Recent Archaeological Work on the Site of the Columbanian Monastery of Annegray (Haute-​Saône),” in Vivre dans la montagne vosgienne au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque de Gérardmer-​Munster (30 août–​1er septembre 2012), ed. C. Kraemer et J. Koch (Nancy, 2017), 187–​206. 77

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It is, however, becoming clear that the foundation of the monastery of Luxeuil shortly thereafter formed part of a political strategy of constructing a monastic domain at the limits of both dioceses and kingdoms, as evidenced by the choice of an antique settlement founded at the confluence of a number of routes. Luxovium boasted a therapeutic baths sanctuary that was still visible in the seventh century and may have also had other natural resources such as salt. The image evoked by the hagiographical account of Jonas of Bobbio (d. after 659)  of a retreat into the desert, thus loses some of its credibility. The Gallo-​Roman town, located within a castrum, was home to a Christian community from late antiquity.84 Recent excavations carried out on the extramural church of St. Martin have shown that the sector of the town in which it was situated was abandoned in the Roman period, before being reoccupied by a late antique necropolis. Around the year 500, on the site of this necropolis, a mausoleum or a funerary enclosure was augmented to form the huge funerary basilica of St. Martin, laid out in three aisles that opened onto a quadrangular apse and two funerary annexes. This basilica, completely filled with sarcophagi, became part of the monastery upon its foundation in the late sixth century. Subsequently, around 600 c e, an apsidal crypt was added, which became the location of the tomb of Abbot Valbert in 670. Throughout the seventh century and at the beginning of the eighth, an ad sanctos monastic necropolis developed around the apse of the church of Saint-​Martin. At the same time, monastic inhumations were made in a second church, possibly dedicated to St. Mary, immediately to the north of the abbatial church of St. Peter. Dating to the fifth century, the church of St. Mary also predates the monastery and may have later formed part of a double church organization along with the abbatial church of St. Peter. The result of these investigations is that the monastic topography of Luxeuil is inherited from an early Christian ecclesiastical conglomeration, the exact nature of which is still unknown. There is evidence for what would appear to be a Merovingian monastic building constructed in the remains of a vast Gallo-​Roman structure (found in the courtyard of the gothic cloister). The presence of a monumental, most likely public, antique building may have influenced the choice of location of the monastery within the town.85 At both Annegray and Luxeuil there have been no indications to date of any structures that are explicitly indicative of an Irish influence in terms of

Sébastien Bully, Aurélia Bully, and Morana Čaušević-​Bully (with the collaboration of Laurent Fiocchi), “Les origines du monastère de Luxeuil (Haute-​Saône) d’après les récentes recherches archéologiques,” in Gaillard, L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule, 311–​55. 85 Ibid., 316–​17 and 355.

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the topography of the sites. This is not the case at Hamage, mentioned above, where the excavation revealed a number of subcircular huts, dating to the second half of the seventh century and tentatively compared to contemporary dwellings found in Britain and Ireland.86 This brings us to the question of the evolution from cells to communal buildings. Toward the end of the seventh century, alongside these cells and perpendicular to the church of St. Mary in Hamage, a large wooden building was constructed. The numerous hearths within this structure, combined with a clear series of subdivisions, would seem to indicate personal spaces, although goods were stored centrally. A large room on the southern end of the building had a communal function. This building was replaced by a new wooden structure in the eighth century, this time parallel to the church. The new three-​aisled building contained a dozen small rooms (cells?) surrounding three central, communal rooms. In addition, the building boasted numerous hearths, latrines, and an external oven. This site thus provides an excellent synthesis of the evolution of monasteries, with a gradual communalization of space which reached its climax with the construction of a cloistral square in the ninth century. The excavations carried out at the Abbey of Saint-​Cybard at Angoulême also revealed a communal building dating to the end of the sixth century, consisting of a long hall along which at a later date, in the ninth or tenth century, small rooms, interpreted as cells, were placed.87 Another example of an early medieval communal building built on the remains of a late antique structure was revealed within the cloister of the Abbaye-​aux-​Dames de Saintes.88 The building consists of a large central space with a big hearth, to which at least four other rooms were connected, suggesting that there was a system of heating similar to a hypocaust. Such a subdivision and hierarchy of space, as well as indications of provisions for domestic comfort, have led to comparisons with certain buildings represented on the model plan of St. Gall, dating to the first quarter of the ninth century. The paucity of archaeological data, however, does not yet allow for the definition of a typical plan



Etienne Louis, “Sorores ac fratres in Hamatico degentes: naissance, évolution et disparition d’une abbaye au haut Moyen Âge: Hamage (France, Nord),” De la Meuse à l’Ardenne 29 (1999): 23. 87 Brigitte Boissavit-​Camus, “Saint-​Cybard:  l’invention d’un lieu (VIe–​XIe siècles),” in Saint-​Cybard. De l’abbaye au CNBDI. Histoire d’un site, réédition numérique (2004), www. alienor.org/​publications/​bibliotheque-​saint-​cybard/​PDF/​Saint-​Cybard.pdf (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 88 Christian Vernou, “Vestiges archéologiques du haut Moyen Âge à l’Abbaye-​aux-​Dames de Saintes (fouilles de 1986  à 1988),” in Monastères entre Loire et Charente, ed. Cécile Treffort and P. Brudy (Rennes, 2014), 219–​34. 86

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of monastic construction in Gaul, even if there was a communalization of living spaces. (S.B.)

Conclusion Late antique monastic communities in Italy and France do not seem to have been very structured, which may explain their frequent disappearance in Italy when faced with the significant changes of the sixth century, from the Gothic wars through the arrival of the Lombards. Following the establishment of Bobbio at the beginning of the seventh century, monastic foundations began to increase in number once again, especially during the last quarter of the seventh century thanks to favorable conditions such as the conversion of the Lombard monarchy to orthodox Catholicism. In France, on the other hand, an earlier institutionalization of monasteries ensured their survival and longevity. By engaging in a dialogue with the written sources, archaeology allows for a reconsideration of the conditions and mechanisms of the foundation of many sites, sometimes nuancing and sometimes challenging the motif of the foundation in the desert portrayed by hagiography. Monasteries were frequently founded in areas that were already inhabited, and on residential sites. It can be difficult, however, to determine whether there was a continuity of occupation on many sites, and to interpret the role and function of the antique elements within the early monastic architecture and topography. A more detailed understanding would give insight into the motivations that led to the choice of certain sites (such as the villa of Nero at Subiaco, or even the sanctuary of Jupiter and Apollo at Montecassino).89 The reuse of pre-​existing buildings also presents new questions concerning the legal status of the sites that monks occupied: who gave the authorizations—​in the case of public land—​and who made the donations, transfers, and spoliations?90 Although the role of the bishops is important, numerous foundations originated from the private initiatives of the traditional Roman aristocracy, as well as the Burgundian, Frankish, and Lombard aristocracies and the royal families. Monastic foundations were often very closely connected to the territory in which they were established, from an economic as well as a social and

Maria Grazia Fiore Cavaliere, “Monachesimo prebenedettino e benedettino: note di topografia monastica,” in Sublaqueum-​Subiaco. Tra Nerone e San Benedetto, ed. Maria Grazia Fiore Cavaliere (Roma, 1995), 13–​24. 90 Luchina Branciani, “Origine e sviluppo dell’eremitismo nella valle sublacense,” in Le valli dei monaci, ed. Letizia Ermini Pani (Spoleto, 2012), 585–​635. 89

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institutional perspective. We can point for instance to the similarities between the far-​removed monasteries of Luxeuil and Bobbio, particularly in terms of the political conditions and the choice of  sites. It is difficult to identify a model for the living quarters of the earliest monasteries in France and Italy, because of the great variety present in the excavated evidence—​in clear contrast to the common and clear language used in the written sources. The notion of “imported models”—​whether oriental (Kellia, grottoes, etc.) or Irish (roundhouses/​huts)—​must be dealt with very carefully, particularly considering the scarcity of the evidence. The archaeological evidence must also be interpreted in the light of the didactic textual sources (especially vitae). A communalization of space seems to have developed between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with the emergence of structures that appear to have replaced individual cells. In order to construct a clearer picture, however, more work must be carried out on the living spaces in these communities.91 A  new approach would eventually emerge allowing us to understand the normalization of this communal lifestyle with the adoption of the cloister model, which enjoyed particular success in the West from the Carolingian period onwards.92 For the earlier period, however, the case of the monastery of Brescia, organized around a number of ‘courtyards’, is an exception to the rule. Although there was certainly a higher degree of organization in the early medieval period than in late antiquity, numerous charters, particularly in the Lombard kingdom, still make reference to monasteries that were in effect nothing more than small groups, in some cases of individuals from the same family, often female, who lived a life of seclusion in a simple house where they cared for the poor.93 Unfortunately, given the fact that such buildings bear no clearly visible signs of organization or codified structure, these monasteries remain invisible from an archaeological perspective. On another scale, but still difficult to detect archaeologically, are the dual-​sex monasteries that emerge in France during the Merovingian period.94 Finally, a major difference between France and Italy is undoubtedly the use of “families” of churches within a monastery, a form of organization that does not emerge in Italy until the eighth century, and even then in a much

On this see Bully and Sapin, Au seuil du cloître. Sapin, “De la cour au cloître carolingien.” 93 On house ascetics and consecrated women, see the article by Magnani in this volume. 94 See Anne-​ Marie Helvétius, “L’organisation des monastères féminins à l’époque mérovingienne,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Münster, 2011), 151–​69. and the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 91

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less structured manner than in Gaul. In addition, more research is required to understand the presence of baptisteries within monasteries linked to pilgrimage sites (such as Tours and Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune, or on the plan of St. Gall), and perhaps also the role played by monasteries in the cura animarum.95 (S.B., E.D.)

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Sofia Uggé, “I battisteri in ambito monastico nella tarda antichità e nell’alto medievo,” in L’edificio battesimale in Italia, ed. Daniela Gandolfi (Bordighera, 2001), 385–​403.

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Sébastien Bully and Eleonor a De stefanis Delouis, Olivier, and Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, eds. La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–VIe siècle). Cairo, 2015. Destefanis, Eleonora. “Archeologia dei monasteri altomedievali tra acquisizioni raggiunte e nuove prospettive di ricerca.” Post-Classical Archaeologies 1 (2011): 349–82. Dey, Hendrick and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Duval, Noël, ed. Premiers monuments chrétiens de la Gaule. 2 vols. Paris, 1996. Ermini Pani, Letizia, ed. Committenza, scelte insediative e organizzazione patrimoniale nel medioevo. Proceedings of the International Conference (Tergu, September 15th–17th 2006). Spoleto, 2007.  ed. Gli spazi della vita comunitaria. Proceedings of the International Conference (RomaSubiaco, June, 8th–10th 2015). Spoleto, 2016.  ed. Teoria e practica del lavoro nel monachesimo altomedievale. Proceedings of the International Conference (Roma-Subiaco, June 7–9 2013). Spoleto, 2015.  ed. Le valli dei monaci. Proceedings of the International Conference (Roma-Subiaco, May 17th–19th 2010). Spoleto, 2012. Gaillard, Michèle, ed. L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule du IVe au IXe siècle. Turnhout, 2014. Helvétius, Anne-Marie. “L’organisation des monastères féminins à l’époque mérovingienne.” In Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, edited by Gert Melville and Anne Müller, 151–69. Münster, 2011. Jenal, Georg. Italia ascetica atque monastica. Das Asketen- und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/250–604). 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1995. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformations d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2015. Louis, Etienne. “Une église monastique du haut Moyen Âge dans le nord de la France: le cas d’Hamage.” In Gaillard, L’empreinte chrétienne en Gaule, 357–85.   “Les indices d’artisanat dans et autour du monastère d’Hamage (Nord), VIIe–IXe siècle,” in Bully and Sapin, Au seuil du cloître, 215–31 (http://cem.revues.org/13684). Marazzi, Federico. Le città dei monaci. Storia degli spazi che avvicinano a Dio. Milan, 2015. Marron, Emmet. In His Silvis Silere: The Monastic Site of Annegray—Studies in a Columbanian Landscape. Galway, 2012. Martinez, Damien. “Les premiers monastères d’Auvergne à la lumière de la documentation textuelle et archéologique (Ve–Xe siècle): état de la question.” In Bully and Sapin, L’origine des sites monastiques (http://cem.revues.org/14484). Reveyron, Nicolas. “Forma monasterii:  essai sur l’organisation de l’espace monastique comme mise en forme de l’identité ecclésiologique.” HAM 20.2 (2014): 439–47. Sapin, Christian, ed. Archéologie et architecture d’un site monastique. 10 ans de recherche à l’abbaye Saint-Germain d’Auxerre (Xe–XXe siècles). Paris, 2000. Sapin, Christian. “De la cour au cloître carolingien.” Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 46 (2015): 21–34. Schneider, Laurent. “Une fondation multiple, un monastère pluriel:  les contextes topographiques de la genèse du monastère d’Aniane d’après l’archéologie et la vie de saint Benoît (fin VIIIe–IXe s.).” In Bully and Sapin, L’origine des sites monastiques (http://cem.revues.org/14481). Somma, Maria Carla, ed. Cantieri e maestranze nell’Italia medievale. Proceedings of the International Conference (Chieti-San Salvo, May 16th–18th 2008). Spoleto, 2010.

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Archaeology of the Earliest Monasteries in Italy and France Stasolla, Francesca Romana. “Il monachesimo in Italia dalle origini a Gregorio Magno: modalità insediative, architetture, organizzazione topografica e spaziale.” In Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto Medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–April 6th 2016), 321–54. Spoleto, 2017. Uggé, Sofia. “Lieux, espaces et topographie des monastères de l’antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge: réflexions à propos des règles monastiques.” In Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 15–42.

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Nuns and Monks at Work: Equality or Distinction between the Sexes? A Study of Frankish Monasteries from the Sixth to the Tenth Century Isa b e l l e   Ré al ( tr a n slate d b y L o chin Brouillard) Was there equality between the sexes in Frankish monasticism? Historians today agree that monastic life was conceived of at its inception as non-​ gendered. The men and women who chose such a life all aspired toward the same ideal:  living as perfect Christians. The paths that they followed in order to reach that ideal—​the desert, peregrination, private life, or life within a community—​varied, but the criterion of gender was not determinative in their decision-​ making. All shared a number of principles (asceticism, chastity, prayers, charity) drawing on an accepted canon of foundational texts (the Gospels, treatises, sermons, rules), which, though they might have been written with one sex or the other in mind, were used in an interchangeable manner.1 The charismatic role and the functions that these religious men and women performed for the lay community were as important, perhaps even more important in the case of consecrated virgins, whose angelic purity was believed to make their prayers more potent.2 The holiness of these monks and nuns, now “equal in Jesus Christ,” brought them closer to becoming “angels.” They were neither feminine nor masculine, and comprised a non-​gendered group distinct from that of the carnal, earthly lay people, leading Gisela Muschiol, Jo Ann McNamara, and other

Albrecht Diem, “The Gender of the Religious:  Wo/​ men and the Invention of Monasticism,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennet and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 439–​42; Albrecht Diem, “On Opening and Closing the Body:  Techniques of Discipline in Early Monasticism,” in Körper er-​fassen. Körpererfahrungen, Körpervorstellungen, Körperkonzepte, ed. Kordula Schnegg and Elisabeth Grabner-​Niel (Innsbruck, 2010), 91. 2 Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Le sexe des anges,” in De la différence des sexes. Le genre en Histoire, ed. Michelle Riot-​Sarcey (Paris, 2010), 101–​30 and 246–​51. 1

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scholars who have followed in their wake to suggest the idea of a monastic “third gender.”3 We might wonder at the fact that Roman society, built upon the difference between the sexes (among other stark divisions), should have produced a way of life that ignores this same difference. The Christian faith itself conveyed contradictory messages about the equality between men and women, and the discourse that prevailed in the end promoted masculine superiority.4 Is it possible that monastic men and women stood out as exceptions to the rule, escaping the established norms? I was steered toward these questions while studying the daily tasks of nuns in the early Middle Ages,5 and by comparing them to their male counterparts, not only within the framework of their spiritual functions, but also in that of the manual labor integral to monastic life, which included community services, work in the fields or the workshops, and medical and hospitable functions. Monastic labor, it seems, offers an interesting window onto the ways in which gendered differences played out in the environment of the cloister. For the sixth to the tenth century, the two types of sources that provide the most information on daily life in monasteries are monastic rules and hagiographies. Monasticism, the fertile soil for a rich diversity of forms of religious life until the ninth century, produced a great number of normative texts (about thirty of them identified to date), among which are an exceptional collection of rules specifically addressed to nuns.6 These rules,





Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994); Gisela Muschiol, “Men, Women, and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World:  East and West, 300–​900, ed. L. Brubaker and Julia M.  H. Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 198–​217; Nira Pancer, “Au-​delà du sexe et du genre:  l’indifférenciation des sexes en milieu monastique (VIe–​VIIe siècles),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 219.3 (2002): 299–​323; Jo Ann McNamara, “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian Gender System,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York, 1999), 1–​24; Jo Ann McNamara, “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden, 2002), 199–​209; Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 34–​51; Helvétius, “Le sexe des anges,” 110–​13. 4 McNamara, “Unresolved Syllogism,” 1–​24; Michel Lauwers, “L’institution et le genre: à propos de l’accès des femmes au sacré dans l’Occident médiéval,” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 2 (1995): 279–​313; Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber, “Masculin/​féminin,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident Médiéval, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-​Claude Schmitt (Paris, 1999), 655–​60. 5 Isabelle Réal, “Tâches et gestes quotidiens des moniales en Gaule franque (VIe–​Xe siècle):  fragments de vie domestique,” in La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et Occident (IVe–​Xe s.), ed. Maria Mossakowska and Olivier Delouis (Cairo, 2018), 203–​36. 6 See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. See also Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle des Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005); Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule:  Some 3

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intended to organize communal life, and in particular to evenly divide the activities of the day between the opus Dei, the lectio divina, manual labor, and time for rest and meals, are well suited to inform us about the everyday tasks of nuns. From the ninth century, monastic life was progressively standardized according to the model of the RB.7 Through the example of holy founders, abbots, or abbesses, hagiographical narratives, for their part, presented an ideal monastic lifestyle meant either to reinforce or add to the teachings of the existing rule, or to make up for the absence of a rule by granting to its audience a vivid and concrete model to follow.8 If we keep in mind the pedagogical role of these vitae, aimed above all at educating newcomers,9 we can begin to gather from them enlightening evidence for the monastic model promoted at the time they were written. In order to analyze the differences in the discourses and models endorsed by the sources, it is necessary to include a significant sample of such narratives written between the sixth century and the beginning of the eleventh, and to include the Lives of both male and female saints.10 None of these sources was meant to describe reality. They reflect, rather, an ideal model that allows us to grasp a system of representations. On the one hand, this system is rich with information about the gendered distribution of manual labor in the monastic milieu. On the other hand, we can identify some areas possibly exempt from these gendered categories, which potentially created a “third gender” common to both religious men and women.

Were Monks and Nuns Assigned to the Same Tasks? Work was one of the essential elements of cenobitic life, punctuating a monk or nun’s daily routine along with reading and the divine office.11 In his De opere



Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elisabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 53–​84; Gérard Moyse, “Monachisme et réglementation monastique en Gaule avant Benoît d’Aniane,” in Sous la règle de saint Benoît. Structures monastiques et société en France du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne (Geneva and Paris, 1982), 3–​19. 7 Joseph Semmler, “Le monachisme occidental du VIIIe au Xe siècle:  formation et réformation,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 68–​89. See also the articles by Kramer, and by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 8 Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Hagiographie et réformes monastiques dans le monde franc du VIIe siècle,” Médiévales 62 (2012): 34. 9 See for instance the conclusion to Vita Hathumodae 28. 10 About forty saints’ Lives were chosen on the basis of their narrative taking place in a monastic environment, twenty-​f ive of them concerning female saints. 11 Jacques Dubois, “Le travail des moines au Moyen Âge,” in Le travail au Moyen Âge. Une approche interdisciplinaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Colette Muraille-​Samaran

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monachorum, Augustine (d. 430) laid down the theoretical principles that justified the necessity of manual labor for monks: taking up Paul’s saying that “if any man will not work, neither let him eat” (2 Thess. 3:10), he applied it to the monks as being required to earn their living through toil and sweat.12 This idea would often be reiterated in rules,13 and was accompanied from the fifth century by another foundational principle that Benedict, without being the first or the last to do so,14 brought to the fore: work is the remedy to idleness (otium), abhorred in Christian thought (RB 48.4).15 Other arguments were also used as a rationale: for instance, labor enabled the monastery to care for the poor by sharing with them a portion of its production (RcuiV 12.1). Some rules presented it as an exercise in obedience (RB 5.7–​9), a form of humility (RB 6.49–​50), and an abnegation of individual will, especially when the chores were imposed rather than being picked (RCaeV 29.1–​2). Work was even interpreted as penance for the monks who had shown neglect or been found at fault.16 In fact, whether it stemmed from a need or an obligation, work always entailed spiritual advancement. From this theoretical vantage point, no distinction was drawn between nuns and monks. As for the internal organization of labor, there must have been as many different systems as there were different communities, but some structural features can be highlighted: a hierarchical distribution of chores that involved many degrees of responsibility, teamwork, and a schedule based on weekly rotations. Regarding the first, in the most important communities we find three highest officers (prior, cellarer, porter) who share key functions (general administration, management of goods, and contact with the outside world). Below them are certain “team leaders” (in some sources called deans (decani/​ decana),17 seniores,18 or praepositae19) who oversee a small group of monks or nuns performing a specific task. Finally, we have those who carry out these tasks, often chosen from among the most recent arrivals. In certain rules, the teams act in relay with each other to cover different jobs (cooking, cleaning,



(Louvain-​la-​Neuve, 1990), 61–​100; Pierre Bonnerue, “Concordance sur les activités manuelles dans les règles monastiques anciennes,” Studia Monastica 35.1 (1993): 69–​96. André Mandouze, “‘Au travail, les moines’: un mot d’ordre de saint Augustin,” in Avec et pour Augustin, ed. Christine Mandouze and Luce Pietri (Paris, 2013), 485–​500. 13 RM 86.18–​99; RFer 28.1–​2; RcuiV 12.3. 14 RMac 8.2; RM 13.44, 16.46, 50.1–​2, 50.7, 85.7; RCaeV 15.1. 15 See also RCaeV 15.1 and IsA X; Jacques Biarne, “La vie quotidienne des moines en Occident du IVe au VIe siècle,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 1 (1987): 3–​19. 16 RFer 21.4–​5; RB 48.23; RColC 9.2; RcuiV 12.18–​35. 17 RB 21; Vita Leobae 4; Vita Hathumodae 20. 18 RCaeV 4, 8, and 31; RcuiV 24; RDon 6.2; Gertrude, De virtutibus quae facta… (c. 700); Vita Aldegundae prima 22; Vita Bertillae 2. 19 RCaeV 35; IsA 24. 12

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baking, table waiting in the refectory, brewing), according to weekly shifts from one Sunday to the next.20 Again, both religious men and women seem to have followed the same organizational model. The question remains whether this non-​gendered understanding of work extended to the manual chores specifically assigned to either monks or nuns. As will soon become clear, the prescriptions expressed by rules, just as much as the anecdotes in the vitae, paint a stark picture of the manual work of monks and nuns, which seems to have been mostly determined by their sex.

Nuns at Work The first work prescribed to the nuns by the rules was household work, which Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) defined as “any physical service, may it be in the kitchen or in any task required for daily needs” (RCaeV 14). The Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (RcuiV), written a century later, provides more detail:  cooking, bread-​making, brewing, serving in the refectory, laundry, taking care of the fire, and preparing the baths21 were all tasks requiring a daily rotation. Hagiographical texts, and particularly those from the seventh century, emphasize these various activities, setting up, as a model to follow, the humbling toil of the female saints, especially when they were queens.22 The vitae therefore show these noblewomen cooking, cleaning, washing the dishes, cleaning shoes, washing clothes, baking bread, melting wax, or making candles.23 The hagiographers underscored these degrading tasks with such insistence because they were tailoring their discourse to an aristocratic audience, who found it harder to be subjected to ascetic discipline. Besides these domestic chores, the only manual activity clearly prescribed by the rules addressed to nuns revolved around textile work. Caesarius goes into particular detail when he covers the different tasks involved:  lanificii cura (which probably refers to spinning and weaving), tailoring of clothes, dyeing, and needlework-​like embroidery (RCaeV 4, 16, 27–​8, 44–​5). Donatus (d. after 658)  repeats these prescriptions almost word for word in his rule (RDon 62–​3), specifying that these activities are exclusively intended for the

RM 18.2–​3 and 31.2; RCaeV 14.2; RFer 38.9; RcuiV 12; RDon 67.2. RcuiV 11 and 12. See also RDon 26.1 and 67.1; RColV. 22 For more details see Réal, “Tâches et gestes quotidiens.” 23 Vita Radegundae I.23–​4; Vita Bathildis 11; Vita Sigolenae II.16; Vita Sadalbergae 21, 23, and 25; Vita Odiliae 11; Vita Austrebertae 10; Vita Aureae 6.5; Vita Aldegundae prima 27; Vita Aldetrudis 2; Vita Liutbirgae 30.

20 21

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nuns and not for people from outside the monastery, whether they be clerics or relatives.24 Likewise, the only type of work suggested by Benedict of Aniane in his Institutio sanctimonialium is the weaving of wool and linen, and the making of clothes (IsA 13). Such a restriction is also echoed in the hagiographical sources, especially from the Carolingian era, which ascribe to St. Herlinda and St. Relinda, for instance, the making of “palliola ornate with pearls and gold,” or mention the talents of Liutberga, who was trained from her childhood in the “rudiments of textile work (artem texturae)” and who later taught to young girls these muliebrium operum artifex (“many arts of women”).25 Some of these precious fabrics have, moreover, come down to us, often as relics, confirming that this occupation truly was practiced in women’s monasteries; the most impressive is the tunic embroidered by Queen Bathilda.26 One last type of activity appearing in the sources relates to the care of the sick, the poor, and guests.27 These caregiving, caritative, or hospitality functions were directed toward different social groups that need to be dealt with separately in order to show their nuances. The sick who are most often referred to in the rules and the vitae were, in fact, the nuns themselves. The obligation to provide care to one’s sisters was held up as an indispensable virtue on the ladder of perfection leading to sainthood, and also as crucial to the model of the good abbess, which explains the recurrence of such episodes in both the rules28 and the vitae.29 In contrast, mentions of hospitable and caritative functions performed toward people from outside the cloister are found inconsistently from one rule to the other, and vary depending on the degree of the monastery’s openness to the secular world. Thus, in RCaeV, which is the basis for RDon, the great care taken to respect enclosure appears to limit, as much as possible, hospitality and charity: the parlor is the only space of contact with guests, who are forbidden to enter the monastery and share a meal there, while the task of distributing leftovers



RCaeV 46 and 51; RDon 67.4. Vita Harlindis et Relindis 5; Vita Liutbergae 28 and 22. Valérie L. Garver, “Learned Women? Liutberga and the Instruction of Carolingian Women,” in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. Janet Nelson and Patrick Wormald (Cambridge, 2007), 121–​38. 26 Jean-​ Pierre Laporte and Naomi Moore, “Tissus médiévaux de Chelles et de Faremoutiers,” in Tissu et vêtement. 5000 ans de savoir-​faire, ed. Monique Depraetere-​ Dargery (Guiry-​en-​Vexin, 1986), 153–​72; Mildred Budny and Dominic Tweddle, “The Maaseik Embroideries,” Anglo-​Saxon England 13 (1984): 65–​96. 27 See the article by Brenner in volume II. 28 RCaeV 32 and 42; RcuiV 4.12, and c. 15.9; RDon 12.1–​11. 29 Vita Radegundis I.23–​4, 29, and 37; Vita Radegundis II.8; Vita Rusticulae 19; Vita Bathildis 11; Vita Bertillae 2; Vita Sadalbergae 27; Vita Leobae 15; Vita Hathumodae 10 and 15; Vita secunda Austrebertae 16; Vita Austrudis 16. 24

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to the poor is handed over to the provisor.30 The RcuiV, influenced by the RB, however, emphasizes that the role of hostess is reserved for the abbess, and anticipates that the nuns will receive “all who arrive outside in the guesthouse, just as their dignity requires,” which implies the existence of a real guesthouse supervised by a porter or doorkeeper.31 In the same way, from the ninth century, IsA recommends the building not only of a hospitale pauperum—​located “outside, close to the church where the priests and their servants carry out the divine office,” and for which the priests would be responsible—​but also “inside of the monastery, an asylum where only the widows and poor women may be hosted and fed,” and which, in this case, would be in the nuns’ care (IsA 28). It is not uncommon to find the female saints in hagiographical sources healing the sick, having traveled to see them, or performing caritative work by feeding, washing, and clothing the poor.32 Yet it remains difficult to apprehend, beyond these hagiographical topoi, the actual practices and structures that had been set up. We learn through a detail in a miracle story that there were medici in Nivelles at the start of the seventh century, and only the late vita of St. Odilia, written in the tenth to eleventh century, mentions that a hospice (hospitale) was built below the monastery of Hohenburg, to make it more accessible to the “disabled and the sick.”33 Apart from domestic chores, textile work, and the care given to ill nuns, and eventually to guests and the poor, the rules written for nuns do not prescribe any other kind of work. The Lives of the female saints are not much more revealing. Only one of them describes a nun working in the garden, at Eboriac.34 Another hints at the copying of manuscripts by the blessed Harlind and Relind, but does so in order to justify the existence of a number of evangeliaries, preserved a century after their death, at the monastery of Aldeneick.35





RCaeV 38, 39, 42, 53, and 65; RDon 56.3, 57.1, and 58. RcuiV 1.8, 3.10, and 3.21–​3. Albrecht Diem, “Rewriting Benedict: The ‘Regula cuiusdam ad virgines’ and Intertextuality as a Tool to Construct a Monastic Identity,” Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007): 313–​28; Louise de Seilhac, “La Règle de saint Benoît dans la tradition au féminin,” Regulae Benedicti Studia 16 (1987): 57–​68. 32 Vita Radegundis I.4, 17–​19, 27, 30, and 33; Vita Sigolenae II.16 and III.17; Vita Aldegundae prima 17; Vita Opportunae III.16; Vita Bathildis 12; Vita Bertillae 6; Vita Geretrudis 3; Vita Aldegundae prima 19 and 23; Vita Waldetrudis 58; Vita Hathumodae 5; Vita Odiliae 11; Vita Eustadiolae 6; Vita Leobae 12. 33 Gertrude, De virtutibus … 5; Vita Odiliae 14. 34 Vitae Columbani abbatis discipulorumque eius, Life of Columbanus 17.12. 35 Vita Harlindis et Relindis 12. Alain Dierkens, “Les origines de l’abbaye d’Aldeneick (première moitié du VIIIe siècle): examen critique,” Le Moyen Âge 85 (1979): 389–​432.

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Monks at Work For their part, male saints’ Lives and the rules written for monks offer a much wider and more diverse spectrum of manual tasks than was the case with sources for religious women. According to many rules from the sixth century, monks did not shirk domestic chores such as cooking, bread-​making, waiting tables, cleaning, and clothes washing.36 In addition, however, they could practice different skilled trades such as weaving fishnets or making shoes.37 RM and RFer advise monks to copy books and “decorate the pages with their fingers.”38 Added to these activities are agricultural work, animal husbandry, gardening, wood chopping, and fishing.39 Certain rules even mention the selling of monastic produce, referring to a part of the crops or artisanal products.40 These different activities can also be found in various instances in the hagiographies. Most occur outside the monastery; the monks reclaim the land,41 chop wood,42 plough, sow,43 reap,44 strengthen the hedges,45 plant, prune, and protect the vines from predators,46 tend to the mill,47 herd their flocks,48 and fish in the rivers or the sea.49 Within the walls of the cloister, they build and renovate buildings50 or make books.51 In comparison, domestic chores are seldom prescribed. Nearly absent from hagiographical narratives before the ninth century (except for mending in two vitae52), their appearance comes about at the time of the diffusion of the RB, and it is therefore not a coincidence when they are found in particular in the vitae of founders or

RM 18, 19, 21.3, 23, 30.1, 95.17–​18; RB 35, 46.1; RFer 38; RColC II.4; RTar 10.1 and 19.6. RM 50, 75.4, 86.6, and 86.27; RB 46.1 and 48.24; RMac 30; RFer 28.13. 38 RM 54.1; RFer 28.10–​12. 39 RO 43; RM 19.22, 86.27, and 95.11; RB 41.2–​4, 46.1, 48.7, and 66.6; RTar 9.9–​11 and 12.1; RFer 26.5–​7 and 28.9–​13. 40 RM 17.16 and 85; RB 57.4; RTar 11.2 and 12.2. 41 Vita Bertuini 8; Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 59 and Life of Bertulf 23; Vita Iohannis 7; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 24. 42 Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 24; Vita Ermelandi 12; Vita Germani abbatis Grandivallensis 5; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 13. 43 Vitae Patrum Iurensium 10; Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 28 and Life of Attala 4. 44 Vita Agili 32; Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 20–​1 and 23; Vita Filiberti 15; Vita Iohannis 16. 45 Vitae Columbani, Life of Bertulf, 23. 46 Vita Ansberti 9; Vitae Columbani, Life of Bertulf 21 and 22. 47 Vitae Columbani, Life of Attala 3 and Life of Bertulf 18; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 52 and 57. 48 Vitae Columbani, Life of Attala 6. 49 Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 18–​19; Vita Filiberti 9. 50 Vita Bertuini 9; Vitae Columbani, Life of Attala 6; Vita Ermelandi 4; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 13 and 170. 51 Vita Ansberti 7; Vitae Columbani, Life of Attala 6. 52 Vitae Columbani, Life of Attala 6; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 173. 36 37

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reformers such as Benedict of Aniane, John of Gorze, or Stephen of Obazine, which serve as mirrors for the monks.53 In addition, rules and hagiographies insist on a hospitality-​providing role for the monks. Not only are they often portrayed welcoming visitors in the appropriate guesthouse,54 but some sources also show them receiving the poor and the sick in the xenodochia.55 It is clear that, with a few exceptions,56 male monasteries were open to the world. Moreover, monks enjoyed a relative freedom that allowed some to leave the enclosure of the monastery with the permission of their superior, sometimes traveling great distance.57

Did Nuns and Monks Bypass Gender Norms? This comparative study of the daily chores of nuns and monks demonstrates how the system of representations reflected by our sources clearly identifies specific spaces and functions for each sex. This gendered determination of the nuns’ and monks’ roles was doubtlessly ingrained in contemporary medieval minds. Caesarius’ preamble to his rule for nuns attests to this fact:  “And, because many things in monasteries of women seem to differ from the customs of monks, we have chosen a few things from among many, according to which the elder religious can live under rule with the younger, and strive to carry out spiritually what they see to be especially adapted for their sex” (RCaeV 2). Donatus, building from the same premise—​“since the rules of the aforesaid fathers [Benedict and Columbanus] were written for men and not for women”—​therefore instructs the nuns of Jussa-​Moutier to only draw from these two rules “all that is proper for the special observance of the female sex.”58 Is then the monastery only a replica of society, founded on the same gendered categories?





Vita Benedicti abbatis Anianensis 7–​8, 12, 14, 42, 52; Vita Iohannis abbatis Gorziensis 62–​ 3, 76–​7; Vita prima sancti Vulmari 3; Vita Prima Eusitii, *373. See Giulia Barone, “La vie quotidienne dans une grande abbaye réformée: Gorze au Xe siècle” and Michel Aubrun, “Le travail manuel dans les monastères et les communautés religieuses au XIIe siècle: l’exemple du Limousin,” in La vie quotidienne des moines et chanoines réguliers au Moyen Âge et temps modernes, ed. Marek Derwich (Wroclaw, 1995), 131–​40 and 173–​77. 54 Vitae Columbani, Life of Columbanus 33; Vita Filiberti 8 and 10. 55 Vita Agili 29; Vita Ansberti 13; Vitae Patrum Iurensium 29. 56  RAV. 57 Vita Filiberti 23 and 42. 58 RDon Prologue. 53

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The Monastery as Mirror of the Secular World The monastic space does indeed appear as a reflection of the world insofar as this specialization of the chores between monks and nuns directly imitates the social order that allocates to each sex its own sphere: women are assigned to domestic tasks and textile work (the opus feminile par excellence), inherent to the “home” and therefore to the private sphere, whereas men are associated with manual labor and interaction with the outside world.59 Similarly, the necessity of claustrum or enclosure, an essential feature of monasticism as a whole, seems to have matched the medieval perception of female nature, seen as dominated by a frail constitution and requiring special care.60 Such a perception explains why the legislators decided, very early on, to impose a stricter enclosure on nuns, meaning to protect them from external aggressions and temptations and, in so doing, preserving their chastity and the efficacy of their prayers.61 Caesarius of Arles, whose rule for virgins is the first to emphasize strict enclosure, demanded that nuns be “hidden” (retrusae) until their death (RCaeV 2 and 50), while this same demand was relaxed in his rule for monks into an encouragement to persevere in monastic life until death (RCaeM 1.1). Aurelianus of Arles (d. 551) is the only one to impose the same kind of enclosure on both monks and nuns in his two rules (RAV 2 and RAM 2). A mostly female phenomenon at the start, such confinement becomes even more severe in the Carolingian period, again more so in the case of nuns than monks.62 Enclosure, however, was justified based not only on an assumption of feminine weakness, but also on masculine superiority,63 placing women in a position





Ludolf Kuchenbuch, “Opus feminile:  das Geschlechtverhältnis im Spiegel von Frauenarbeit im früheren Mittelalter,” in Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Hans W. Goetz (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1991), 139–​75; David Herlihy, Opera muliebria: Women at Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), 75–​81; Jean-​Pierre Devroey, “Men and Women in Early Medieval Serfdom:  The Ninth-​Century North Frankish Evidence,” Past & Present 166 (2000):  3–​30; Valerie L. Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2009), 224–​68. 60 Klapisch-​ Zuber, “Masculin/​ féminin,” 655–​ 60; Jacqueline Murray, “Femininity and Masculinity,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret C. Schaus, S. Mosher Stuard, and Thomas M. Izbicki (New York, 2006), 284–​7. 61 Jacques Biarne, “Cloître, clôture, peregrinatio: la frontière spirituelle du moine dans le monde antique d’Occident,” in Frontières terrestres, frontières célestes dans l’antiquité, ed. Aline Rousselle (Paris, 1995), 401; Muschiol, Famula Dei, 178–​91. 62 Jane T. Schulenburg, “Strict Active Enclosure and Its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience, 500–​1100,” in Distant Echoes: Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984), 51–​86. See also the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 63 Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber and Florence Rochefort, “Clôtures,” Clio. femmes, genre, histoire 26 (2007): 6, http://​journals.openedition.org/​clio/​5273 (date of last access: 18 August 2018); Lauwers, “L’institution et le genre,” 279–​81. 59

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of inadequacy and establishing a necessary relationship of dependency upon men regarding matters such as liturgy, political protection, temporal management, manual labor, obligations in the secular world, and sometimes even in hospitality functions.64 This assumption of inadequacy made the nuns’ cloistering that much more effective, since men replaced them in a number of roles, especially those requiring one to leave the monastery. A comparative study reveals that the rules written for nuns, included those inspired by RB, tend to eliminate travel and work outside the monastery completely.65 It is thus possible to understand the interest in, as well as the success of, so-​called double monasteries from the seventh century, whose structure relied on the complementarity of the functions of the two sexes, with a community of monks attached to the service of nuns.66 The double monastery of Nivelles, for example, became a model of harmony as St. Gertrude (d. 659) “entrusted the management of the community, for the outside, to good and faithful administrators among the brothers and, for within the enclosure of the monastery, to spiritual sisters.”67 The Carolingian reforms increased the subordination of these female monasteries under a masculine authority by submitting them directly to the power of bishops and by reinforcing the rules of claustration, thus diminishing the abbess’s autonomy in one fell swoop.68

The Monastery as Transfiguration of the World If monastic daily life reflected binary gender categories, was there then a third category—​a “third gender”—​shared by both religious men and women, not discernible among the laity? Chastity has been considered by some as key to achieving this third gender category, since, by turning their back on sexuality, monks and nuns would have freed themselves from gender norms prevalent among the laity.69 Renouncing one’s body, however, was not an equal process



Kaspar Elm, “Le personnel masculin au service des religieuses au Moyen Âge,” in Les religieuses dans le cloître et dans le monde des origines à nos jours, ed. Nicole Bouter (Saint-​Etienne, 1995), 331–​4; Hedwig Röckelein, “Hiérarchie, ordre et mobilité dans le monachisme féminin,” in Hiérarchie et stratification sociale dans l’Occident médiéval (400–​1100), ed. François Bougard, Dominique Iogna-​Prat, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout, 2008), 206–​7. See also the article by Griffiths in volume II. 65 Louise de Seilhac, “L’utilisation de la Règle de saint Benoît dans les monastères féminins,” in Atti des 7° congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto medioevo, Norcia/​ Subiaco/​Cassino/​Montecassino, 29 settembre–​5 octobre 1980, vol. 2 (Spoleto, 1982), 527–​49. 66 Helvétius, “Hagiographie et réformes monastiques,” 40–​1. See the articles by Helvétius, and Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 67 Vita Geretrudis 3. 68 Schulenburg, “Strict Active Enclosure,” 51–​86. 69 McNamara, “Chastity as a Third Gender,” 199–​209. 64

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for religious men and women.70 It is no coincidence that most of the treatises on virginity are addressed to women; the most well known are Tertullian’s (d. after 220) Ad uxorem, Cyprian’s (d. 258) De habitu virginum, Ambrose’s De virginibus, John Chrysostom’s (d. 407)  and Gregory of Nyssa’s (d. 394)  De virginitate, and Augustine’s De sancta virginitate. As was the case for enclosure, only RAM demands from both monks and nuns a vow of virginity.71 Likewise, in hagiographical sources, chastity turns out to be much more significant for female asceticism, as if, because of their intrinsic weakness, women have to make extra efforts to tame their libido.72 If they are able to achieve this prowess, then they are described by their hagiographers as acting viriliter—​that is, as acting as courageously as a men.73 Their gender thus fades so that it can be subordinated to, or even merged with, masculinity.74 On the other hand, monks always operate within the framework of masculinity since, while wrestling with lust, they display a quality associated with martial prowess: courage.75 In both cases, the higher standard is set according to masculinity and not a third, neutral gender. On the path leading to holiness, the criteria are at first glance the same for men and women. Upon a second glance, however, the demands and means advocated to achieve sanctity sharply diverge. Women must indeed transcend their natural weakness in order to perform feats that can measure up to

70



71







Peter Brown, The Body and Society:  Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1987). Albrecht Diem, “…ut si professus fuerit se omnia impleturum, tunc excipiatur. Observations on the Rules for Monks and Nuns of Caesarius and Aurelianus of Arles,” in Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte, ed. Vistoria Zimmerl-​Panagl, Lukas J. Dorf bauer, and Clemens Weidmann (Berlin and Boston, 2014), 221–​2. 72 Jane T. Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex:  Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–​1100 (Chicago, IL, and London, 1998), 127–​75; Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, “L’image des moniales dans les exempla,” in Derwich, La vie quotidienne, 477–​97; Felice Lifshitz, “Priestly Women, Virginal Men: Litanies and Their Discontents,” in Bitel and Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, 87–​102; Murray, “Femininity and Masculinity,” 285; Lynda Coon, “Gender and the Body,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3: Early Medieval Christianities c.600–​c.1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2014), 433–​52. 73 Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Virgo et virago:  réflexions sur le pouvoir du voile consacré d’après les sources hagiographiques de la Gaule du Nord,” in Femmes et pouvoirs des femmes à Byzance et en Occident (VIe–​XIe siècle), ed. Stéphane Lebecq, Alain Dierkens, Régine Le Jan, and Jean-​Marie Sansterre (Lille, 1999), 189–​203; Julia M. H. Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe,” Past & Present 146 (1995): 18–​20. 74 Katrien Heene, The Legacy of Paradise: Marriage, Motherhood and Woman in Carolingian Edifying Literature (Frankfurt, 1997), 248–​54. 75 McNamara, “Unresolved Syllogism,” 9; Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and the Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004),  24–​42.

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those of their male counterparts.76 If we consider, for example, the monastic ideals that should theoretically apply to both religious men and women, we can observe that, among the models suggested to nuns in the sixth and seventh centuries, humility is attained through domestic chores. This is the only kind of work deemed degrading enough for these high-​bred nuns.77 As stated above, male saints’ Lives from the same period associate obedience and humility not with community services but with agricultural work. It is only beginning in the ninth century that certain vitae depict male saints lowering themselves to carry out domestic chores, often within the walls of the monastery, in a period in which agricultural work becomes less prevalent.78 Conversely, the portrayal of Carolingian nuns performing hospitality functions becomes common at this same time.79 It is therefore the widespread diffusion of RB that brings about a certain symmetry, though never perfect, in the system of representations. The monastery, however, provided a sphere of action that was shared by both monks and nuns in the context of their spiritual mission: reading, teaching, and transmitting the sacred texts.80 Although the task of copying manuscripts is neither very frequent nor stressed in the rules and the Lives of female saints, historians know through other sources that such an activity was widespread among nuns. According to Caesarius’ hagiographer, the nuns of Saint-​Jean at Arles “did not cease to transcribe beautifully the holy books, with their own mother as their teacher,” even though RCaeV never mentions such activity (Vita Caesarii, 230–​1). The Vita’s sponsor was probably the abbess of Saint-​Jean and it is therefore likely that she herself wanted to highlight this activity of her nuns. Other evidence similarly points to the fact that certain female monasteries ( Jouarre, Chelles, Faremoutiers, Rebais, Andelys-​sur-​ Seine, and Saint-​Jean de Laon) were the site of active book production.81 In the





Smith, “Problem of Female Sanctity,” 3–​37; John Kitchen, Saint’s Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography (New York and Oxford, 1998). It seems to me, contra Diem, “Gender of the Religious,” 444, that virtues, vices, and sins have a gender. 77 See Réal, “Tâches et gestes quotidiens.” 78 Dubois, “Le travail des moines au Moyen Âge,” 75–​80. 79 See Vitae of Leoba, Liutberga, Opportuna, Hathumoda, and Odilia. Also Jane T.  Schulenburg, “Women’s Monasteries and Sacred Space:  The Promotion of Saints’ Cults and Miracles,” in Bitel and Lifshitz, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe,  68–​86. 80 Alison Beach, “Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the Twelfth-​ Century Scriptorium,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts:  Religion in Medieval Society, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 57–​75. 81 Rosamond McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century,” Francia 19.1 (1992): 4–​5. See also Rosamond McKitterick, “The Diffusion of Insular Culture in Neustria between 650 and 850: The Implications of the Manuscript 76

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area of Paris in the seventh and eighth centuries, several manuscripts from this period have been attributed to Jouarre and Saint-​Jean de Laon.82 Similarly, at Chelles, Abbess Berthild sent voluminibus multis librorum (“numerous volumes of books”), made on site, to help set up new communities in England (Vita Bertillae 6). At Nivelles, in the same period, Gertrude imported manuscripts from Rome, and, a generation later, the monastery was able to grant a certain sister, Begge, “the relics and books of the Holy Gospels” necessary to establish Andenne.83 We also find scriptoria on the other side of the Channel. Around 735, Abbess Eadberg of Minster sent books to Boniface (d. 754), including one embellished with golden letters.84 Trained in this renowned monastic school, Leoba (d. 782) in turn recreated a great intellectual center in her monastery, Tauberbischofsheim (Vita Leobae 7 and 11). At the end of the eighth century and in the ninth century, a few female monasteries were still famed for the activity of their scriptoria: Chelles, very dynamic under the abbacy of Gisela between 785 and 810, and Notre-​Dame of Soissons under Abbess Theodrade, the sister of Adalard of Corbie, produced beautiful manuscripts.85 Made at the monastery itself or acquired at great cost, books were therefore present in every community, female as well as male, because they were the very foundation of meditation and knowledge of  God.86 The rules thus insist that the nuns be able to read and know the Psalter by heart, exactly like the monks.87 Abbess Caesaria the Younger (d. c. 561) vigorously repeated this principle to Radegund (d. 587) when she founded Poitiers, specifying that all who entered should learn to read and learn the Psalter by heart.88 Both the young and new members of the monastery were taught





Evidence,” in La Neustrie. Les pays au Nord de la Loire de 650 à 850, ed. Hartmut Atsma (Sigmaringen, 1989), 395–​432; Rosamond McKitterick, “Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–​9th Centuries (Aldershot, 1994), 22–​36. 82 Suzanne Martinet, “Les manuscrits de Sainte-​Marie-​Saint-​Jean de Laon au VIIIe siècle,” in L’art du haut Moyen Âge dans le nord-​ouest de la France, ed. Dominique Poulain and Michel Perrin (Greifswald, 1993), 263–​76. See also Jan Gerchow, Katrinette Bodarwé, Susan Marti, and Hedwig Röckelein, “Early Monasteries and Foundations (500–​ 1200):  An Introduction,” in Crown and Veil:  Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York, 2008), 29–​32. 83 Gertrude, De virtutibus 10. 84 Boniface, S. Bonifatii et Lulli epistolae 30 and 35, MGH Epistolae 1, 281 and 286. 85 McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria,”  2–​17. 86 Rosamond McKitterick, “Le rôle culturel des monastères dans les royaumes carolingiens du VIIIe au Xe siècle,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 117–​30. 87 RCaeV 7 and 18; RcuiV  24–​6. 88 Caesaria, “Letter to Richild and Radegund” (c. 552–​557), in Caesaria, Œuvres monastiques I, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and J. Courreau, SC 345, 476–​95.

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by the primiceria89 or by seniores.90 St. Rusticula (d. 632), the future abbess of Arles, learned the psalms “lying in the lap of one of the sisters” (Vita Rusticulae 6). Scholars have demonstrated that these schools were at times open to girls and even boys from the lay elite.91 There are even references to school furnishings, such as the stylus and wax tablets at Jussa-​Moutiers in the mid-​seventh century.92 The abbess, able to expound upon any reading, embodied the magistra par excellence for the whole community;93 Caesarius thus sent his sister Caesaria to another monastery “so that she learns what she will teach and that she be first a disciple before becoming a magistra.”94 At the beginning of the eighth century, Leoba successively studied under Abbess Tetta of Wimborne and Eadburga of Minster, who taught her poetry.95 In turn, she became the magistra of a number of nuns who would later go on to become abbesses and pass down her knowledge.96 Nothing, therefore, distinguishes the education of nuns from monks: their letters and other writings attest to a similar level of instruction.97 As for the Lives of female saints, the perfect knowledge of sacred letters is almost always presented as an essential virtue, thereby conveying a model of erudite sanctity that again signals the importance placed on reading and studying in many female monasteries, in particular in the vitae produced at Arles, Poitiers, Jouarre, Chelles, and Nivelles in the seventh century, and at Bischofsheim, Aldeneick, Ganderscheim, and Hohenbourg in the eighth to the tenth centuries.

Conclusion The ideal of a non-​gendered, unisex model inherent in the beginning of monasticism seems to have given way early on to the demands of daily life. Unsurprisingly permeable to the social frameworks from which they sprang, monastic ideals came to assimilate, at least from the sixth century on, the

RCaeV 35; Caesaria, “Letter to Richild and Radegund”; RDo 4.7 and 12.1. RcuiV 24; IsA 22. 91 Jean Verdon, “Recherches sur les monastères féminins dans la France du Nord au IXe–​XIe siècles,” Revue Mabillon 59 (1976): 49–​96; Pierre Riché, Éducation et culture dans l’Occident barbare, VIe–​VIIIe siècle (Paris, 1962), 500–​3. 92 RDon 8.2, based on RB 55.19. 93 Vita Caesarii 194–​7; Vita Geretrudis 3; Vita Leobae 7 and 11; Boniface, Epistolae 29, 280–​1. 94 Vita Caesarii  194–​7. 95 Vita Leobae 7; Boniface, Epistolae 29, 280–​1. 96 Vita Leobae 11; Riché, Éducation et culture,  426–​7. 97 Riché, Éducation et culture, 509. McKitterick, “Women and Literacy,” 22–​36; Garver, “Learned Women?” 121–​38; Gerchow et al., “Early Monasteries and Foundations,” 29. 89 90

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distinction between the sexes and its corollary: the rule of male authority.98 One of the arguments relied on a specific conception of female asceticism, based on the erasure of the sexual body of the woman. Enclosure appears to have been one of the prevalent measures deployed to better control this dangerous corporeality. Nuns therefore had to depend upon the services provided by monks, which were meant to complement their own inabilities. Their sphere of action consequently became restricted to what lay within the walls of the cloister: no trips or work outside the monastery, and hospitality functions lessened. The Carolingian reforms reinforced these gendered norms by furthering the power imbalance between the nuns and the rest of the clergy. While the assignment of most daily tasks was made according to binary gender categories, and while ascetic practices, especially regarding chastity, demanded greater effort on the part of women, equality seemed within reach in the field of culture and erudition. This equality regarding knowledge is certainly the most significant innovation introduced by monasticism. Did the “third gender,” common to both nuns and monks, in fact comprise the learned—​the masters of Latin grammar and the sacred letters—​of both sexes?

Primary Sources Rules 3RP: Regula patrum tertia, in Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., Les règles des saints Pères, vol. 2, SC 298, 499–​543. IaS: Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis (816–​17), ed. A. Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2, 421–​56. RAM: Aurelianus of Arles, Regula ad monachos, in Albert Schmidt, “Zur Komposition der Mönchsregel des Heiligen Aurelian von Arles I,” Studia Monastica 17 (1975) 237–​56; more complete in PL 68, 385–​96. RAV: Aurelianus of Arles, Regula ad virgines, PL 68, 399–​408. RB: Regula Benedicti, ed. and trans. Jean Neufville and Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 181–​2; also ed. Rudolf Hanslik, CSEL 75, 2nd ed. RCaeV: Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad virgines, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, SC 354, 35–​272; translated as Maria Caritas McCarthy, ed. and trans., The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction (Washington, DC, 1960). RColC: Columbanus, Regula coenobialis, in Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker (Dublin, 1970), 142–​69. RColV: Regula Columbani ad virgines, in O. S eebaas, “Fragment einer Nonnenregel des 7 Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 16 (1896): 465–​470.

Contra Pancer, “Au-​delà du sexe et du genre,” 299–​323.

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Isabelle  Réal RcuiV:  Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, PL 88, 1051–​1070 (new edition by Albrecht Diem in preparation). RDon: Regula Donati, in Adalbert de Vogüé, “La Règle de Donat pour l’abbesse Gauthstrude, texte critique et synopse des sources,” Benedictina 25 (1978): 219–​313. Regula “Psallendo pro sancta devotione,” in F. Masai, “Fragment en onciale d’une règle monastique inconnue démarquant celle de saint Benoît,” Scriptorium 2 (1948): 215–​20. RFer:  Regula Ferreoli, ed. Vincent Desprez, “La Regula Ferrioli:  texte critique,” Revue Mabillon 60 (1982): 117–​48. RMac: Regula Macharii, in Les règles des saints Pères, vol. 1, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 297, 287–​389. RM: Regula magistri, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC  105–​7. RTar: Regula Tarnatensis, in Fernando Villegas, “La ‘regula monasterii Tarnatensis’: texte, sources et datation,” Revue bénédictine 84 (1974): 7–​65.

Vitae Vitae Abbatum Habendensium (BHL 73, 358, 7322), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 4, 208–​28. Vita Agili abbatis Resbacensis (BHL 148), AASS, Aug. 6 (1743), 569–​87. Vita Aldegundae prima (BHL 244), AASS, OSB 2 (1669), 807–​15; trans. in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg with E. Gordon Whatley (Durham, NC, and London, 1992), 237–​54. Vita Aldetrudis abbatissae Melbodiensis (BHL 253), AASS, Feb. 3 (1865), 514–​16. Vita Ansberti (BHL 519), Analecta Bollandiana 1 (1882): 179–​91. Vita Aureae (BHL 814), in F. Dolbeau, ed., “Vie et miracles de sainte Aure, jadis vénérée à Paris.” Analecta Bollandiana 125.1 (2007): 17–​73. Vita posteriora Austrebertae (BHL 832), AASS, Feb. 2 (1658), 419–​23; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 304–​25. Vita Austrudis (BHL 556), ed. W. Levison, MGH SS RM 6, 66–​78; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 289–​303. Vita Bathildis reginae (BHL 909), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 475–​508; French translation in G. Duchet-​Suchaux, “Vie de sainte Bathilde.” Bulletin du Groupement archéologique de Seine et Marne 25 (1982): 30–​6. Vita Benedicti abbatis Anianensis et Indensis auctore Ardone (BHL 1096), ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 15/​1, 198–​220; French translation in Vie de Benoît d’Aniane, ed. F. Baumes and Adalbert de Vogüé (Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2001). Vita Bertilae Kalensis (BHL 1287), ed. W. Levison, MGH SS RM 6, 95–​109; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 279–​88. Vita Bertuini (BHL 1306), ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS RM 7, 175–​82. Vita Caesarii (BHL 1508–​1509), in Vie de Césaire d’Arles, ed. and trans. G. Morin, M.-​J. Delage, and M. Heijmans, SC 536. Vitae Columbani (Lives of Columbanus, Attala, and Bertulf; BHL 1898): Jonas of Bobbio, Vitae Columbani abbatis discipulorumque eius, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 4, 1–​152. Vita Eligii (BHL 2478), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 4, 634–​761. Vita Ermelandi (BHL 3851), ed. W. Levison, MGH SS RM 5, 674–​710. Vita Erminonis episcopus et abbatis Lobiensis (BHL 2614), ed. W. Levison, MGH SS RM 6, 461–​470.

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Nuns and Monks at Work from the Sixth to the Tenth Century Vita Prima Eusitii Cellensis (BHL 2754), in P. Labbe, Novae bibliothecae manuscriptorum librorum 2 (Paris, 1657), 372–​6. Vita Eustadiolae (BHL 2772), AASS, Jun. 2 (1698), 131–​3; translated in McNamara et  al., Sainted Women, 106–​11. Vita Filiberti (BHL 6805), ed W. Levison, MGH SS RM 5, 568–​604. Vita Geretrudis (BHL 3490), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 447–​64; De virtutibus quae facta sunt post discessum beatae Geretrudis abbatisse (BHL 3495), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 464–​71; Virtutum sanctae Geretrudis continuatio (BHL 3495), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 471–​4; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 220–​33. Vita Germani abbatis Grandivallensis (BHL 3467), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 5, 4–​40. Vita sanctae Glodesindis abbatissae Mettensis (BHL 3562), AASS, Jul. 6 (1729), 203–​10; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 137–​54. Vita Gregorii abbatis Traiectensis auctore Liudgero (BHL 3680), ed. O. Older-​Egger, MGH SS, Supplementa tomorum 15.1, 63–​79. Vita Harlindis et Relindis (BHL 3755–​6), AASS Mar. 3 (1668), 386–​92. Vita Hathumodae (BHL 3763), ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 4, 165–​175; translated in Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-​Century Saxony: The Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim, ed. Frederick S. Paxton (Washington, DC, 2009). Vita Iohannis abbatis Gorziensis (BHL 4396), in La Vie de Jean, abbé de Gorze, ed. and trans. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1999). Vita Iohannis Reomaensis (BHL 4424): Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Iohannis abbatis Reomaensis, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 3, 502–​17. Vita Juniani (BHL 4562), AASS, Aug. 3 (1867), 38–​46. Vita Leobae abbatissae Biscofesheimensis auctore Rudolfo Fuldensi (BHL 4845), ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS Supplementa tomorum 15.1, 118–​31; translated in C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-​ Saxon Missionaries in Germany (London, 1954), 204–​26. Vita Liutbirgae (BHL Novum Suppl. 4936), ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 4, 158–​64; translated in Paxton, Anchoress and Abbess. Vita Madelbertae abbatissae Melbodiensis (BHL 5129), edited and translated in Paul Bertrand, “La vie de sainte Madelberte de Maubeuge: edition du texte (BHL 5129) et traduction,” Analecta Bollandiana 115.1–​2 (1997): 39–​76. Vita Odiliae abbatissae Hohenburgensis (BHL 6271), ed. W. Levison, MGH SS RM 6, 24–​50. Vita Opportunae auctore Adalhelmo Sagiensi (BHL 6339), AASS, Apr. 3 (1866), 62–​73. Vitae Patrum Iurensium (BHL 2665/​5073/​7039), in Vie des Pères du Jura, ed. and trans. F. Martine, SC 142. Vita Radegundis I (BHL 7048): Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis I, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 364–​77; La Vie de sainte Radegonde, ed. and trans. Y. Chauvin, R. Favreau, Y. Labande-​Mailfert, and G. Pon (Paris, 1995). Vita Radegundis II (BHL 7049): Baudovinia, Vita Radegundis II, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 2, 377–​95. Vita Rictrudis (BHL 7247):  Hucbald de Saint-​ Amand, Vita sanctae Rictrudis abbatissae Marcianensis, ed. Jean Mabillon, AASS, OSB 2, 939–​950; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 197–​219. Vita Rusticulae or Marciae (BHL 7405), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 4, 337–​351; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 119–​36.

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Isabelle  Réal Vita Sadalbergae (BHL 7463), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 5, 40–​66; translated in McNamara et al., Sainted Women, 176–​94. Vita Sigolenae (BHL 7570), AASS, Jul. 5 (1727), 628–​37. Vita prima sancti Vulmari abbatis Silviacensis (BHL 8748), AASS, OSB 3.1, 229–​39. Vita Waldetrudis (BHL 8776), ed. J. Daris, Analectes pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique de la Belgique 4 (1867): 218–​35; French translation by A. Noirfalise, in Sainte Waudru devant l’histoire et devant la foi. Recueil d’études publié à l’occasion du treizième centenaire de sa mort, ed. J. M. Cauchies (Mons, 1989), 47–​72. Vita Wandregisili (BHL 8804), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS RM 5, 1–​24.

Secondary Sources Diem, Albrecht. “The Gender of the Religious:  Wo/men and the Invention of Monasticism.” In Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, edited by Judith M. Bennet and Ruth Mazo Karras, 432–46. Oxford, 2013.   “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West.” In Western Monasticism ante litteram:  The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik Dey and Elisabeth Fentress, 53–84. Turnhout, 2011. Dubois, Jacques. “Le travail des moines au Moyen Âge.” In Le travail au Moyen Âge. Une approche interdisciplinaire, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse and Colette MurailleSamaran, 61–100. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1990. Garver, Valérie L. “Learned Women? Liutberga and the Instruction of Carolingian Women.” In Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, edited by Janet Nelson and Patrick Wormald, 121–38. Cambridge, 2007. Helvétius, Anne-Marie. “Hagiographie et réformes monastiques dans le monde franc du VIIe siècle.” Médiévales 62 (2012): 33–48.   “Le sexe des anges.” In De la différence des sexes. Le genre en Histoire, edited by Michelle Riot-Sarcey, 101–30 and 246–51. Paris, 2010.   “Virgo et virago:  réflexions sur le pouvoir du voile consacré d’après les sources hagiographiques de la Gaule du Nord.” In Femmes et pouvoirs des femmes à Byzance et en Occident (VIe–XIe siècle), edited by Stéphane Lebecq, Alain Dierkens, Régine Le Jan, and Jean-Marie Sansterre, 189–203. Lille, 1999. Lauwers, Michel. “L’institution et le genre: à propos de l’accès des femmes au sacré dans l’Occident médiéval.” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 2 (1995): 279–317. McKitterick, Rosamond. “Nuns’ Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century.” Francia 19.1 (1992): 1–35.   “Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages.” In Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–9th Centuries, 22–36. Aldershot, 1994. McNamara, Jo Ann. “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours.” In The World of Gregory of Tours, edited by Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood, 199–209. Leiden, 2002.   “An Unresolved Syllogism:  The Search for a Christian Gender System.” In Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities:  Men in the Medieval West, edited by Jacqueline Murray, 1–24. New York, 1999.

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Nuns and Monks at Work from the Sixth to the Tenth Century Murray, Jacqueline. “Femininity and Masculinity.” In Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, edited by Margaret C. Schaus, S. Mosher Stuard, and Thomas M. Izbicki, 284–7. New York, 2006.   “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and the Monastic Identity.” In Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, edited by Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, 24–42. Cardiff, 2004.   “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” In Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, 34–51. Philadelphia, PA, 2008. Muschiol, Gisela. Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern. Münster, 1994. Réal, Isabelle. “Tâches et gestes quotidiens des moniales en Gaule franque (VIe–Xe siècle):  fragments de vie domestique.” In La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et Occident (IVe–Xe s.), edited by Maria Mossakowska and Olivier Delouis, 203–36. Cairo, 2018. Schulenburg, Jane T. Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100. Chicago, IL, and London, 1998.   “Strict Active Enclosure and Its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience, 500–1100.” In Distant Echoes:  Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1, edited by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank, 51–86. Kalamazoo, MI, 1984. Smith, Julia M.  H. “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe.” Past & Present 146 (1995): 3–37.

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Ascetic Prayer for the Dead in the Early Medieval West G o rdon B l e n n emann

Introduction: Definitions and Social Dimensions of Intercessional Prayer Despite the common association of monasteries with intercession in the early Middle Ages, the religious, cultural, and social practice of prayer extended beyond the narrow ascetic–​monastic sphere.1 In keeping with both Old Testament and early Christian traditions, prayer was understood as an expression of brotherly love that was the duty of all Christians, and not as the exclusive obligation of a few ascetic specialists. Even when prayer served the primary function of worship, the idea of intercession was at least implied—​a functional complementarity reflected in the so-​ called double command of love: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” (Mark 12:30–​ 31). By late antiquity, the charitable dimension of prayer was integral both to ecclesiology and to the development of Christian social concepts.2 Prayer ensured the connection of the people to God and guaranteed the functional unity of the ecclesia, defined in particular as a communitas sanctorum, a community forged between the living and the dead, with a special emphasis on the saints.

On this and the following, with further literature, see Patrick Henriet, La parole et la prière au Moyen Âge. Le verbe efficace dans l’hagiographie des XIe et XIIe siècles (Brussels, 2000),  19–​54. 2 For Christian definitions of society between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages see Martin Heinzelmann, “‘Adel’ und ‘Societas sanctorum’:  soziale Ordnungen und christliches Weltbild von Augustinus bis zu Gregor von Tours,” in Nobilitas. Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle and Werner Paravicini (Göttingen, 1997), 216–​56. 1

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The special power of prayer was not only rooted in ritual but also linked to the inner disposition of the individual at prayer. Jesus himself enjoined his followers “always to pray” (Luke 18:1). Paul further developed the concept of perpetual prayer, arguing that it was, above all, a symbol of the inner disposition of the Christian and thus the foundation of an exemplary life. This principle could be best put into practice in the particular social space of the monastery, in which the liturgy might generate a perpetual connection between heaven and earth. The eschatological utopia of a heavenly ecclesia thus became a partial reality within the monastery. While religious men and women carried out spiritual tasks with a desire for perfection, separated from the rest of society in imitation of the original Apostles, monastic forms of prayer could, in turn, function as models for the prayer of the laity, as seen, for example, in the influential Anglo-​Saxon prayer manuals from the eighth and ninth centuries.3 Together, the prayers of ascetics and the laity generated a collectively imagined community of prayer. The function of religious communities as special places for intercession was by no means limited to the commemoration of the dead. To judge by the so-​called Antiphonary of Bangor, a collection of liturgical chants assembled between 680 and 691, the monks of Bangor Abbey in Ireland asked forgiveness for blasphemers and the wicked, protection for travelers, blessing for their benefactors, and aid for the sick and imprisoned. They prayed for the newly baptized, for priests, for their abbot, for the brothers in the community, and, importantly, for peace for the people and the king.4 Such a range of petitions shows that, as oratores (“the ones who pray”), the monks of Bangor felt obliged to pray for the common good.

The Multiple Functions and Meanings of Memoria: A Historiographical Outline Despite the apparent breadth reflected in this example, the ascetic—​and more specifically monastic—​intercession for the dead and its rich repertoire of ritual forms stand, justifiably, at the center.5 The early medieval culture of memoria



Jean-​Paul Bouhot, “Des livres pour prier,” in Prier au Moyen Âge. Pratiques et expériences (Ve–​XVe siècles), ed. Nicole Bériou, Jacques Berlioz, and Jean Longère (Turnhout, 1991),  23–​9. 4 F. E. Warren, ed., The Antiphonary of Bangor: An Early Irish Manuscript in the Ambrosian Library at Milan 2 vols. (London, 1893–​5), 1:fols. 20v–​21v, 2:22–​3 and 64–​6. For the history of the collection, see Michael Curren, The Antiphonary of Bangor and the Early Monastic Liturgy (Dublin, 1984). 5 For a survey of the research, see Arnold Angenendt, Offertorium. Das mittelalterliche Meßopfer, 3rd ed. (Münster, 2014), 265–​8. For the ritual aspects, see Arnold Angenendt, 3

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and the associated forms of material gifts given pro anima6—​for the salvation of benefactors and their living and dead relatives—​to religious communities has rightly attracted particular interest from scholars. But the spiritual principles and motivations of memory, its liturgical practice, and its economic benefits have not always been understood as interconnected. Research that stresses the religious and liturgical aspects of community-​building within the context of memory7 has long stood opposite studies grounded in social, economic, and legal history that emphasize the creation of community ties through practices of memoria.8 The anthropological model of the gift economy, especially as developed by Marcel Mauss, has also had a clear impact on scholarship.9 More recent studies have connected these lines of inquiry, not least to give more weight to the religious motivations of the gift givers, and thus to the spiritual patterns of memory and religious foundations. This has also led to the refinement of the anthropological model itself. Two aspects in particular have emerged: the special connection to the dead, and the fact that medieval contemporaries generally did not seem to expect clearly defined counter-​g ifts in exchange for donations. For the laity, membership in the ritual and spiritual community of the monastery was more significant, with its prospects of prestige and above all participation in the spiritualia, the spiritual gifts. A donation from the secular to the monastic sphere was directed primarily to the saints, and particularly to the patron saints of the monastery, who served as mediators with God and Christ. In this way, the idea of the transformation from gift to sacrificial offering moves into the foreground, and can be seen as a parallel to the Eucharistic sacrifice.10 The question of the comparative







“Theologie und Liturgie der mitterlalterlichen Totenmemoria,” in “Memoria.” Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (Munich, 1984), 79–​199. 6 Philippe Jobert, La notion de donation. Convergences, 630–​750 (Paris, 1977); Michael Borgolte, “Stiftungen: eine Geschichte von Zeit und Raum,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 20 (2010): 39–​56. For the different forms of foundations, see Angenendt, Offertorium,  268–​9. 7 Schmid and Wollasch, “Memoria”; Dieter Geuenich and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1994), esp. Joachim Wollasch, “Das Projekt ‘Societas et Fraternitas,’ ” 11–​31; Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten,” in Die Wirklichkeit und das Wissen. Mittelalterforschung, historische Kulturwissenschaft, Geschichte und Theorie der historischen Erkenntnis, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle, Bernhard Jussen, Andrea von Hülsen-​Esch, and Frank Rexroth (Göttingen, 2011), 99–​155. 8 See, for example, Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 9 Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don:  forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” Année sociologique n.s. 1 (1923–​4): 30–​186. 10 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts. Morts, rites

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weighting of the earthly and eschatological dimensions of the gift, however, remains open.11 Generally speaking, purely anthropological approaches that focus on gift-​ giving risk ascribing a materialistic character to the contemporary understanding of the connection between the living and the dead. This fails to take into account the various practices associated with concern for the salvation of the dead and the very complex theological debates that have until now received little scholarly attention. There were, indeed, sometimes heated disputes regarding the efficacy of intercession, as well as about its form and the status of those who performed it. The most promising studies of the theological foundations of intercession stress the importance of the Christian ideal of caritas, especially in the context of memoria and its associated economic, social, and religious practices.12 The meaning of caritas was also rooted in the liturgy, and especially in the emerging interpretation of the Eucharist as the central act of remembrance of Christ’s atonement on the cross and figure of the highest love.13 Connecting the gifts of believers to the Eucharistic sacrifice had a particularly strong impact on the meaning of the mass as an important form of memory. We should not, however, overlook the fact that the mass did not become a preponderant form of liturgical commemoration until the late and post-​Carolingian period. More research is needed to determine to what degree other liturgical forms of intercession did (or did not) move into the background. Further, we need to consider more carefully whether doubts expressed about the efficacy of prayers for the dead ebbed away or continued to influence the thought and practice of subsequent periods.

Defining Intercession for the Dead: Liturgical Forms and Ideas from Late Antiquity to Carolingian Times Liturgical forms of commemoration of the dead proliferated from the Carolingian and post-​Carolingian period onwards, finding their greatest manifestation in Cluny’s memorial system, as well as in the reformed monastic



et société au Moyen Âge (diocèse de Liège, XIe–​XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1997); Eliana Magnani, “Transforming Things,” in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-​Modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen, 2003), 269–​84. 11 François Bougard, “Conclusion,” in Sauver son âme et se perpétuer. Transmission du patrimoine et mémoire au haut Moyen Âge, ed. François Bougard, Cristina La Rocca, and Régine Le Jan (Rome, 2005), 488. 12 Michel Lauwers, “La prière comme fonction sociale dans l’Occident médiéval (Ve–​XIIIe siècles),” in La prière en latin de l’antiquité au XVIe siècle. Formes, évolutions, significations, ed. Jean-​François Cottier (Turnhout, 2006), 209–​28. 13 Angenendt, Offertorium, 114–​21.

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communities of the tenth and eleventh centuries.14 It might seem surprising in this context that the Christianity of late antiquity initially had no particular investment in the memory of and liturgy for the dead. Christian burial was oriented around pagan burial practices until the end of the second century, and it was only at the beginning of the third century that the first efforts were made to remove Christian tombs from pagan burial sites and to place them closer to the saints, particularly the graves of martyrs. Ecclesiastical funeral rites were first introduced in the middle of the fourth century, a delay consistent with the fact that tombs initially belonged to the family of the deceased and were therefore private. The private rituals there could include offerings for the dead. The funerary banquet—​an agape—​would later be remodeled in ritualistic form as part of the celebration of the mass. While congregational worship was at first limited to a general remembrance of the dead—​as was the case, for instance, in Rome—​the more elaborate private forms of commemoration eventually moved into the liturgical context in connection with material gifts for the bereaved and for religious communities.15 It was first and foremost Augustine (d. 430)  who, building on the work of earlier Christian apologists like Tertullian (d. after 220)  and Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), assigned prayers, gifts, altar offerings, and alms from the living family as forms of caritas with the power to help the sinful deceased to be credited with an acceptable life.16 For the valde boni (those who died without sin) such forms of caritas assumed a function of thanksgiving. For the valde mali (the truly wicked) any help came too late. It was those with an uncertain salvation status—​the non valde mali and non valde boni, the intermediate categories of the dead—​who required particular care from the living. These distinctions reflect a crucial shift from older concepts of the afterlife that did not involve such moral categories. But Augustine rooted his views on this matter in Second Maccabees (2 Macc. 12:42–​43), where Judas Maccabeus takes a collection of money from his soldiers to send to the Temple in Jerusalem as an offering to accompany prayer for the dead. For Augustine, this story mirrored the connection between sin offering and intercession, and at the



Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1500) (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 219–​52; Susan Boynton, “La liturgie de Cluny avant l’abbatiat d’Hugues:  problématique de la recherche,” in Cluny. Les moines et la société au premier âge féodal, ed. Dominique Iogna-​Prat et al. (Rennes, 2013), 137–​44. 15 Éric Rebillard, Religion et sépulture. L’église, les vivants et les morts dans l’antiquité tardive (Paris, 2003); Ulrich Volp, Tod und Ritual in den christlichen Gemeinden der Antike (Leiden, 2002). 16 Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide, spe et caritate 29, in Aurelii Augustini Opera XIII/​2, ed. Ernest Evans, CCSL 46, 110; Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 54–​6. 14

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same time strengthened his claims for the superior power of Eucharistic atonement.17 Since the living thus rendered atoning offerings through prayers and material gifts, the path to connect the remembrance of the dead with the celebration of the mass stood open. A number of liturgical and theological traditions played a role here. The Gallic mass tradition included the so-​called post nomina or diptych prayer after the offering by believers, in which the name of the person making the offering was also mentioned.18 Following Augustine, who was among the first to mention a form of ritual intercession that includes the naming of the names of the living and the dead as part of the Eucharistic prayer, this practice emphasized the efficacy of the offering for the living as much as the dead.19 In an eschatological context, the entry of a name into a diptych (a list that was used liturgically) was related to the hope of meriting the desired place in the heavenly Book of  Life. Mass traditions from the Irish/​Anglo-​Saxon context reflect not only the idea of the naming of the living and the dead, and especially of benefactors, but also characteristic insular habits in connection with the global practice of penance.20 Indeed, penance there underscored the idea of liturgical reparation by the living on behalf of the dead. Arnold Angenendt has identified this liturgical form as a contractual mass (Vertragsmesse), for which an agreement would be established for substitutional penance for the living as well as for the deceased benefactor by means of prayer and offerings. This idea first appears in a prayer from the so-​called Bobbio Missal, dating to the end of the seventh century.21 Another significant milestone is reflected in Pope Gregory the Great’s (d. 604) Dialogues, where he connects intercession and the sacrificial offering of the mass with his conception of the afterlife.22 The capacity of such an offering to save the souls of the dead was rooted in the New Testament



Joseph Ntedika, L’évolution de la doctrine du purgatoire chez saint Augustin (Paris, 1966),  64–​6. 18 Angenendt, Offertorium, 250–​2; Els Rose, “The Ritual of the Names:  A Practice of Intercession in Early Medieval Gaul,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 51 (2017): 2–​18. 19 Martin Klöckner, “Das eucharistische Hochgebet bei Augustinus:  zu Stand und Aufgaben der Forschung,” in Signum pietatis. Festgabe für Cornelius Petrus Mayer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Adolar Zumkeller (Würzburg, 1989), 461–​95. 20 Angenendt, Offertorium, 252–​6. On continental and insular traditions of penance, see Rob Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe: 600–​1200 (Cambridge, 2014). 21 E. A. Lowe, ed., The Bobbio Missal: A Gallican Mass-​Book (ms. Paris Lat. 13246), with notes and studies by André Wilmart, E. A. Lowe, and H. A. Wilson (London, 1991), 130 and 438; see also Yitzhak Hen and Rob Meens, eds., The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul (Cambridge, 2004). 22 Angenendt, Offertorium,  256–​7. 17

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idea of the power of the Church to bind and to loose, a power particularly claimed by the papacy. Gregory illustrated the efficacy of the Eucharistic offering through the actions of his central protagonist, Benedict of Nursia, who succeeded in saving two dead nuns who had been excommunicated, and thereby reclaimed them for the community.23 What was crucial was that the gifts that the laity brought forward to the altar as part of the Eucharistic offering passed through the hands of ascetic or monastic men and women. Prayer and offering, the liturgical essence of the communion of the living and the dead, thus depended upon the ritual agency of the religious. It is not difficult to draw a direct logical line from Gregory the Great’s connection of the efficacy of intercession through prayer with Eucharistic offering by monks and nuns to the sanctity or purity of the latter and the desire for many mass offerings from the “pure hands” of the monk-​priests of the Carolingian period.24 While from the eighth century onwards, the monastic liturgy seems to have focused more and more on the celebration of the mass, it is difficult to follow this shift beyond the large communities closely connected to royal power.25 This development must be considered within the broader context of the transformation of liturgy. As a consequence of the Carolingian adaptation of the Gregorian Sacramentary through the so-​called Hadrianum, the memorial service was now a distinct component of the canon of the mass.26 Over the course of the eighth century, it also became common to remember the dead at each hour of the divine office.27 Although Benedict of Aniane developed a monastic Office of the Dead in the hope of establishing uniformity, the memorial liturgy was still, to a large extent, established according to local traditions, as in St. Gall.28





Gregory the Great, Dialogues II 23.5, 208. Arnold Angenendt, “Mit reinen Händen:  das Motiv der kultischen Reinheit in der abendländischen Askese,” in Arnold Angenendt, Liturgie im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Flammer and Daniel Meyer (Münster, 2004), 246–​68. On Carolingian developments, see Renie S. Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford, 2016). 25 Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II:  c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 647–​51; Julian Hendrix, “La liturgie monastique avant Cluny:  la contribution carolingienne,” in Iogna-​Prat et al., Cluny, 129–​36. 26 Cécile Treffort, L’Église carolingienne et la mort. Christianisme, rites funéraires et pratiques commémoratives (Lyon, 1996), 90–​3. 27 Ibid., 101–​4; Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 134–​6. 28 Julian Hendrix, “The Confraternity Books of St. Gall and Their Early Liturgical Context,” Revue bénédictine 120 (2010): 295–​320. 23

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Another important phenomenon in the Carolingian context are the so-​ called confraternities of prayer or prayer associations.29 The prayer association of Attigny (762) is considered to be the oldest recorded example.30 Monasteries played a major role in the written documentation of such confraternities and the networks of prayer that they established. Primary examples of this are the so-​called libri vitae or libri memoriales.31 While these texts became more numerous by the ninth century, there are strong indications that the earliest may have been produced in the seventh century.32 Alongside confraternities that focused on a single monastic community, such as those documented in Weißenburg in 776/​733 and Fulda in 863,34 are the large confraternity books, such as the Liber memorialis of Reichenau (started in the ninth century), which encompassed virtually the entire Carolingian Empire.35 At first, monks and clerics remained among themselves, but, conscious of their obligation to pray for the realm, they came to incorporate the king and his family more prominently into their associations of prayer. From the second half of the ninth century on, the names of lay people are also to be found more often among the thousands of entries, making libri memoriales, especially of the late Carolingian period, a valuable source for large social networks and political alliances.36 Erasures in these manuscripts also make it clear that prayer networks could be annulled and individuals erased from the collective memory.37



Angenendt, Offertorium,  280–​5. MGH Concilia II/​1, 72–​3; Karl Schmid and Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Voraussetzungen und Wirkung des Gebetsbundes von Attigny,” Francia 2 (1974): 71–​122. 31 Eva-​ Maria Butz and Alfons Zettler, “The Making of the Carolingian libri memoriales:  Exploring or Constructing the Past?” in Memory and Commemoration in Brown Medieval Culture, ed. Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen, and Mary Franklin-​ (Aldershot, 2013), 79–​92. 32 See the testament of Bishop Bertram of Le Mans (27 March 616), in Das Testament des Bischofs Berthramn von Le Mans. März 616. Untersuchungen zu Besitz und Geschichte einer fränkischen Familie im 6. und 7. Jahrhundert, ed. Margarete Weidemann (Mainz, 1986). 33 Michael Borgolte, “Eine Weißenburger Übereinkunft von 776/​77 zum Gedenken der verstorbenen Brüder,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 123 (=N.F. 84) (1975), 1–​16 (with an edition of the association). 34 Janneke E. Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744–​c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012), 271–​6. 35 Johanne Autenrieth, Dieter Geuenich, and Karl Schmid eds., Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau (Hanover, 1979). 36 Eva-​Maria Butz, “Eternal amicitia? Social and Political Relationships in the Early Medieval libri memorales,” in De amicitia: Friendship and Social Networks in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Katariina Mustakallio and Jussi Hanska (Rome, 2015), 155–​72. 37 Rainer Hugener, “Gestrichen aus dem Buch des Lebens:  Tilgungen in der mittelalterlichen Gedenkenüberlieferung,” in Damnatio in memoria. Deformation und Gegenkonstruktionen in der Geschichte, ed. Sebastian Scholz, Gerald Schwedler, and Kai-​ Michael Sprenger (Cologne, 2014), 203–​24.

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The consolidation of memorial practice in connection with the growing importance of the Eucharistic sacrifice contributed to the emergence of a variety of masses for special occasions—​the so-​called missae speciales.38 The previously mentioned Bobbio Missal reflects the full spectrum, extending from the simple votive mass (a mass celebrated for a special purpose or occasion) right up to a missa pro principe (mass for the prince).39 The sacramentaries from the eighth and ninth centuries—​often produced in monastic scriptoria—​show that this multiplication and diversification of special masses intensified further during the Carolingian period.40 Masses could be celebrated for nearly every occasion and need. What is crucial in this context is the previously noted emergence of the understanding of the Eucharist as a form of substitutional atonement and individual penance for the dedicatee of the votive, and particularly memorial, mass. But the function of the mass was not limited to individual forgiveness of sins and the associated hope of salvation. The Eucharistic offering was also part of a system of collective penance for the assurance of stability for the Carolingian kingdom.41 Large monasteries that faced this task, like St. Gall or Fulda, built more altars in their churches and had the majority of their monks ordained into the priesthood.42 The concept of Eucharistic penance and the clericalization of monasticism were thus interwoven. This represents a clear change from the earlier model of the monastery as a lay community in which mass was performed more or less frequently by a priest from outside. Given the ancient roots of the earlier tradition, it is not surprising that the clericalization of monasticism in the ninth century sometimes met with disapproval. Regino of Prüm’s critique of mass celebrations without a congregation, for example, was clearly aimed at the celebration of votive masses by monks.43



Arnold Angenendt, “Missa specialis:  zugleich ein Betrag zur Entstehung der Privatmessen,” in Angenendt, Liturgie im Mittelalter, 111–​90. 39 Lowe, Bobbio Missal, 419–​35 (votive masses) and 492–​96 (missa pro principe); Rob Meens, “Reforming the Clergy:  A Context for the Use of the Bobbio Missal,” in Hen and Meens, Bobbio Missal, 154–​67; Mary Garrison, “The missa pro principe in the Bobbio missal,” in ibid., 187–​205. 40 Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy:  An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels K. Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 61–​134. 41 Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–​840 (Cambridge, 2010). 42 Angelus A. Häußling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier. Eine Studie über die Messe in der abendländischen Klosterliturgie des frühen Mittelalters und zur Geschichte der Meßhäufigkeit (Münster, 1973). 43 Regino of Prüm, Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiaticis, ed. Hermann Wasserschleben (Leipzig, 1840), 1:193; see also Arnold Angenendt, “Stiftung und Fürbitte,” in Frömmigkeit—​Theologie—​Frömmigkeitstheologie. Contributions to European 38

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The clericalization of monasticism was not crucial for all innovations in the ritual practice of remembrance of the dead. From the ninth century on, for example, it was common to read from the community’s rule and to recite the names of the saints from the martyrology in the chapter house at Prime.44 By the eighth century, there were also commemorative registers that listed the days of death and names of relatives and patrons so that the community might honor them on their anniversaries.45 The Annales necrologici of Fulda, for instance, were created in 779 and continued until 1065.46 These registers and the martyrology were both organized in calendrical form so that the names of the ordinary dead and the saints of the day could be read out together. This practice became firmly established in the long term in the so-​called Chapter Office, from which arose a specific type of liturgical manuscript, the Chapter Office book. Later, so-​called contracts or pacts of confraternity were also concluded in chapter, giving the inclusion of the laity in the prayer community of the monastery a strong juridical base.47 As the entire monastic community came together for the office of Prime, the daily reading of the names of the dead there was more effective than a memorial mass for making the dead present within the community.

Challenging the Traditional Narrative: Theological and Gendered Perspectives The belief that the offering made during the mass celebration functioned as a form of substitutional penance for the dead was built upon the theological foundation of Gregory the Great’s aforementioned view of the afterlife and the associated concept of intercession articulated in his Dialogues. Recent research suggests that Gregory’s understanding of intercession and surrogate sin offerings for the dead was part of the larger debate concerning the question of the soul’s status after death.48 It seems that Gregory argued



Church History. Festschrift Berndt Hamm, ed. Gudrun Litz, Heidrun Munzert, and Roland Liebenberg (Leiden, 2005), 10. Jean-​Loup Lemaître, “Liber capituli: le livre du chapitre, des origines au XVIe siècle. L’exemple français,” in Schmid and Wollasch, “Memoria”, 625–​48; on the chapter house, see the article by Cochelin in this volume. 45 Jan Gerchow, Die Gedenküberlieferung der Angelsachsen (Berlin, 1988). 46 Janneke E. Raaijmakers, “Memory and Identity: The Annales necrologici of Fulda,” in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina U. Pössel, and P. Shaw (Vienna, 2006), 303–​22. 47 Arnold Angenendt, “Cartam offere super altare: zur Liturgisierung von Rechtsvorgängen,” Frümittelalterliche Studien 36 (2002): 1–​26. 48 Matthew Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cults in the Age of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 2012), 85–​148. 44

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against extreme materialistic and rationalistic positions that cast doubt upon the activity of the soul after death, and in consequence questioned the efficacy of prayer and offering of the living for the dead. This theological discussion was not only conducted in Roman and Byzantine contexts, as shown by the death accounts of individual nuns from the Neustrian monastery of Faremoutiers, recorded in the second half of Jonas of Bobbio’s (d. after 659) Vita Columbani.49 Jonas’s primary aim was to assert that only a lifetime of good works and a concern for individual purity and the moral integrity of the community could open the path to salvation. In other words, intercession could have a great impact on the protection of the living from moral temptation and could strengthen the solidarity of the community. Even the most fervent intercession for the dead, however, had no influence on the soul’s salvation status. It is thus not surprising that stories of dying nuns sometimes recount how the women were brought back to life for a short time so that they could rectify unsettled disputes with their fellow sisters.50 We should not underestimate the meaning of such assertions, as they clearly demonstrate the complexity of early medieval concepts of intercession and the afterlife. Such narratives point to another as yet unsolved problem: the particular meaning of intercession and memory within female religious communities.51 This issue revolves around the question of how the slow aligning of liturgical theory and practice regarding the celebration of the mass changed the perception of the religious function of female communities.52 The privileging of the mass in the context of memoria brought a disadvantage:  religious women could not celebrate mass, and this could diminish the attractiveness of female religious communities for patrons as a location of death remembrance.53 We can see, however, that religious women contributed in various







For the following aspects, see the forthcoming study of the Faremoutiers episodes in Albrecht Diem, Quidam pater—​quaedam mater; Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Hagiographie et réformes monastiques dans le monde franc du VIIe siècle,” Médiévales 62 (2012), 33–​47; Jamie Kreiner, “Autopsies and Philosophies of a Merovingian Life:  Death, Responsibility, Salvation,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22 (2014): 113–​52. 50 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani 2.12, 259–​62. 51 For gendered aspects of early medieval liturgy, see Gisela Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World:  East and West, 300–​900, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia Mary Howard Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 198–​216. 52 For a survey of the history of religious women in the Early Middle Ages, see Anne-​ Marie Helvétius, “Le monachisme féminin en Occident de l’antiquité tardive au haut Moyen Âge,” in Monachesimi d’oriente e d’occidente nell’alto medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–​April 6th 2016), 2 vols. (Spoleto, 2017), 1:193–​230. 53 See the article by Griffiths in volume II.

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ways to the celebration of the mass: by singing the antiphons and hymns, by sharing the greeting of peace, and by receiving both the bread and the wine of the Eucharist.54 The liturgical functions of women, such as the sacrificial offering or the organization of the Eucharist celebration without priests,55 whose traces go back perhaps as far as the ninth century, could also have counterbalanced the gender disadvantage, even when such celebration was not necessarily legitimized through official consecration. The exercise of an ecclesiastical office in the broadest sense was sufficient, although it remains unclear if this could also include the involvement of women in the actual consecration.56 The connection between the celebration of mass and memory in female communities is also apparent in a number of other contexts. Hagiographic and normative sources from the seventh century, for example, refer to the celebration of mass as a form of memory for the deceased sisters or abbesses, although it is not always easy to determine whether the mass was thought of as an act of intercession or merely as a memorial celebration. In the prologue to his Regula ad virgines, Donatus of Besançon (d. after 658), in contrast to other witnesses, gives a rather straightforward view: he asks the nuns to pray for him as a friend of the community, and, later, to make Eucharistic offerings on his behalf after his death. He thus distinguishes clearly here between the prayers of the nuns as a form of intercession and an expression of the bond of caritas among the living, and the Eucharistic offering as a form of penance and memoria for the dead. But the Eucharistic celebration is exclusively linked to the nuns; no specific mention is made of a celebrating priest.57 The Life of the Abbess Bertilla of Chelles makes it clear that Eucharistic offerings would be made daily there for the salvation of believers.58 Bertilla also saw to it that, after the death of the Merovingian Queen Balthild, a number of places of worship would contribute to her memory through the celebration of the Eucharist. The Vita Balthildis (post 680) thus provides en passant evidence (and about fifty years before the prayer association of Attigny) of a kind of prayer network organized around Balthild.59

For the following, see Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994), 186–​9 and 221. 55 Jean Leclercq, “Eucharistic Celebrations without Priests,” Worship 55 (1981): 160–​5. 56 For two differing positions, see Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford 2007); and Angenendt, Offertorium, 199–​201. 57 Donatus of Besançon, Regula ad virgines, ed. Victoria Zimmerl-​Pannagl (Berlin, 2015), 239–​40. 58 Vita Bertillae 6, MGH SS RM 6, 106. 59 Vita Balthildis A 15, MGH SS RM 2, 502. 54

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The Liber memorialis compiled at the double monastery of Remiremont in the ninth century, but with portions probably dating back to its foundation around 620, is another early testament to the formation of prayer networks linked to or even initiated by religious women.60 The deep involvement of female religious in the developments of the Carolingian period is visible in the mass formula recorded in the same Liber memorialis borrowed from the contractual mass discussed above in connection with the Bobbio Missal. This formula expressed the idea of intercession as a reward for donating to the monastery.61 The Liber memorialis of the female community of San Salvatore–​ Santa Giulia in Brescia, perhaps created in 856, contains a similar mass formula, but it ensured intercession across the network of all the benefactors, including those who lacked the means to make donations but instead rendered services in kind to the monastery.62 It is not surprising that these examples of joining memory and the mass offering in female communities originate in the context of monasteries that were under royal and episcopal influence. The emphasis on mass as a part of the liturgical practice of female communities reveals the possibilities for control and normative framing by ecclesiastical authorities, since these communities were bound to the clerics who celebrated their masses. On the other hand, the Frankish kings, in their role as protectors, safeguarded the independence of the royal female monasteries through privileges of immunity and special freedom from episcopal power.63 From late antiquity, continued interest in the prayer of religious women for the dead and their intercession in general was based above all on appreciation for their particular purity, which in the public mind was linked to their chastity.64 According to Matthew 22:30, the lives of virgins were angelic, such that their liturgical singing was also understood as an earthly equivalent of the heavenly choir of angels.65 The so-​called laus perennis, the perpetual psalmody that was practiced in a number of Burgundian and Frankish male, female,

See Michèle Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 2006), 274–​304. 61 Eduard Hlawitschka, Karl Schmid, and Gerd Tellenbach eds., Liber memorialis von Remiremont, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1970), I/​1, 1–​3; see also Angenendt, Offertorium, 254. 62 Dieter Geuenich and Uwe Ludwig eds., Der Memorial-​und Liturgiecodex von San Salvatore/​ Santa Giulia in Brescia (Hanover, 2000), 178; see also Angenendt, Offertorium, 255. 63 Helvétius, “L’organisation des monastères féminins à l’époque mérovingienne,” in Female “vita religiosa” between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Vienna, 2011), 161 and 167–​8, with further literature. 64 See the article by Muschiol in volume II. 65 Anne-​Marie Helvétius, “Le sexe des anges au Moyen Âge,” in De la différence des sexes. Le genre en histoire, ed. Michèle Riot-​Sarcy (Paris, 2010), 103–​30.

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and double monasteries from the beginning of the sixth century onwards brought a more formal sophistication to these ideas.66 Referring to Matthew 18:3 (“Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”), childlike innocence was taken as a complementary model.67 Because of its popularity, the angelic life could be seen in secular and ecclesiastical circles as a threat to their authority.68 Just like the previously mentioned monks of Bangor, female religious prayed for the salvation of the living and dead, but also for the social and political order. The female monasteries and particularly the abbesses therefore assumed public functions concurrent to those of the clergy.69 Bishops, in particular, sought to minimize the importance of the virgins by downplaying the importance of chastity. At the same time, they aimed to advance the charisma of purity for clergy by imposing upon clerics some of the monastic ideals, such as the vita communis or even celibacy.70 As we saw in the case of Chelles, the prayer of female religious could be linked in a complementary pairing with the mass, which normally could only be performed by the clergy. Accordingly, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) had already placed monks, clerics, and virgins side by side in order to attribute equal value to their prayer.71 The efforts of the Carolingian reformers of the eighth and ninth centuries to categorize and standardize suggest at first glance that such tendencies of assimilation between monastics and clerics with regard to purity and charisma of angelic living were reversed. The reform Synods of Aachen from 816 to 819, to take one important example, drew a clear line between clerics and monks, although this meant little in the context of the female vita religiosa.72





Philippe Bernard, “La laus perennis dans la Gaule de l’antiquité tardive:  état des questions et éléments d’un bilan,” in Sine musica nulla disciplina. Studi in onore di Giulio Cattin, ed. Franco Bernabei and Antonio Lovato (Padua, 2006), 39–​69. See also the article by Jeffrey in this volume. 67 Hubertus Lutterbach, “Die Mönche—​ besondere Gotteskinder? Die Bedeutung der geistlichen Kindschaft für das christliche Klosterleben,” in Generations in the Cloister:  Youth and Age in Medieval Religious Life, ed. Annette Kehnel and Sabine von Heusinger (Münster, 2008), 34–​64. 68 Helvétius, “Sexe des anges,” 121–​9. 69 Helvétius, “Le monachisme féminin.” 70 Josef Semmler, “Le monachisme occidental du VIIIe au Xe siècle: formation et reformation,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993), 69–​70. 71 Caesarius of Arles, Œuvres monastiques, vol. 1, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, SC 345, 354–​7; see also Helvétius, “Sexes des anges,” 115–​16. 72 For the general context, see the article by Kramer in this volume; Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre. For the consequences for the female vita religiosa, see Thomas Schilp, Norm und Wirklichkeit religiöser Frauengemeinschaften im frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1998); Franz J. Felten, “Auf dem Weg zu Kanonissen und Kanonissenstift: Ordnungskonzepte der weiblichen vita religiosa bis ins 9. Jahrhundert,” in Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm 66

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The demand for the ritual purity of priests (celibacy) enabled the clerics to absorb to a certain extent the angelic purity of monks and nuns.73 The parallel phenomenon of the esteem of the mass had increased to such a degree that the prayer of ordinary monks and nuns was now subordinated. Monks could compensate for the loss of angelic purity through the priesthood and its associated ritual purity. Child oblates, once adult monks, were especially esteemed as priests, since they had access to sound academic training and could claim purity for themselves, as competitors to the religious women.74 The angelic purity of the latter was in fact increasingly challenged in reference to their human sinfulness.75

Liturgical Communities of Prayer beyond the Cloister: The Implications of the Laity The devaluation of the prayers and intercession of female religious and monks outside the priesthood seems primarily to have been the result of theological and ecclesio-​political disputes. What has been little studied, however, is the question of the degree to which such ideas took hold in the general consciousness.76 The close connection between the Eucharist and individual penance certainly created the preconditions for the popularization of monastic votive and memorial masses. But this relegated the laity to the position of the circumstantes, as mere observers, and reduced the possibilities for their active participation in commemoration. It seems, moreover, that the majority of the laity rarely had the opportunity to attend and participate in mass, which suggests that this was not a central liturgical performance for most believers.77 One particularly touching episode in Gregory of Tours’ (d. 594)  Liber in gloria martyrum sheds light on this particular aspect. A  mother mourns for her young son, whom she had previously handed over to the monks of the Burgundian monastery Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune. The grief-​stricken woman visits his grave every day and directs her lamentations to heaven until the monastery’s patron, the martyr Maurice, finally appears to her in a dream. He



und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6.  bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Christine Kleinjung (Korb, 2011), 71–​92. 73 Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice,” 206–​10. 74 Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden 1996). 75 Helvétius, “Sexe des anges,” 123. 76 For the liturgical implications of the laity, see McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints, 102–​25. 77 Peter Browe, Die Pflichtkommunion im Mittelalter (Münster, 1940).

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bids her to cease her mourning, as her son is finally enjoying “the abode of the eternal life in the company of the saints.” He then instructs her to go to the monastery the following day, where she will be able to “hear his voice among the choir of monks,” as proof of his eternal life in heaven. The next morning, during the singing of the antiphons at Matins, the mother does indeed hear her child’s voice among the monks.78 Gregory of Tours here underscores the vital importance of the prayers of monks for the entire community of believers, as exemplified by the bereaved mother. This example also makes apparent the emotional bond between the community of the living and that of the dead, which was not merely ritually manufactured in the singing of the monks. The voice of the son testified to eternal life in the hereafter, and also reminded the mother of the perfect community in heaven. The basis for this story was ultimately the medieval belief in the special power that the angelic singing of the nuns and monks created in the earthly context in unison with the singing of the heavenly hosts. The son’s grave in the above episode clearly functions as a place of memory for his mother. While Gregory provides no indication as to the grave’s location, we do know that the monastery’s church at Agaune served as a burial site and was surrounded by cemeteries.79 This anecdote thus offers a glimpse into the connection between the monastic liturgy and the monastic church as a burial site. Despite continued criticism, a completely rigorous restriction on lay graves in monasteries could not be enforced, especially since the nobility had the financial means and the necessary social influence to arrange for a tomb in the church. Occasionally vestibules and porticos were used as a compromise.80 The church tomb attracted continual interest among the laity, since burial ad sanctos or, perhaps even more importantly, close to the altar and other places of ritual action would ensure perpetual proximity to the monastic liturgy. The increasing importance of the mass and prayer for the atonement and memory of the dead intensified this tendency.81 The as yet understudied similarities between the formulas of grave inscriptions and the entries in memorial books and necrologies indicate that the tomb also took



Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum, MGH SS RM 1.2, 88. Antonella Antonini, “Archéologie du site abbatial (des origines au Xe siècle),” in L’abbaye de Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune, 515–​2015, I. Histoire et archéologie, ed. Bernard Andenmatten and Laurent Ripart (Saint-​Maurice, 2015), 59–​109. 80 Sebastian Scholz, “Das Grab in der Kirche: zu seinen theologischen und rechtlichen Hintergründen in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-​ Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 84 (1998):  270–​ 306; Arnold Angenendt, “In porticu ecclesiae sepultus: ein Beispiel von himmlisch-​irdischer Spiegelung,” in Angenendt, Liturgie im Mittelalter, 295–​310. 81 See Scholz, “Das Grab in der Kirche,” 283–​5. 78

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on complementary functions, like the memorial mass or even the reading out of names of the dead from the necrologies during the office of Prime.82 In addition to the altar, the liturgical choir, and the chapter house, the grave became a space of memory in which a wide circle of believers could participate in the special memorial function of the monastery. Thus the grave inscription for the first abbot of Remiremont, Amatus (d. after 628), called on all believers to pray for the forgiveness of his sins.83 His wish was quite reasonable, given that his grave was located at the entrance to the church. Augustine had already underscored the ability of the grave to trigger prayer and at the same time emphasized the function of names in the grave inscriptions as a medium of visualizing the deceased.84 Such requests for intercession in the formulas of grave inscriptions became more common from the late eighth century onwards.85 This speaks to a persistent and even intensified “democratization” of ritualized memory that stands beside forms of liturgical remembrance of the dead such as the monastic memorial mass. The relationship between all of these forms of memoria requires further exploration.

Conclusion: Prayer and the Early Medieval Public Sphere In conclusion, let us return to the broad social meaning of intercession stressed at the beginning, as it developed on the basis of biblical models over the course of late antiquity and the early medieval period. The cultural practice of remembrance of the dead turns out to be, as Otto Gerhard Oexle stressed, a “globalizing social phenomenon” (ein totales soziales Phänomen).86 On that basis, memorial practice in the ascetic and monastic context should be interpreted primarily as a form of “social action.”87 Rituals served to negotiate forms of social organization within the early medieval world. Prayers for the dead constituted only one, albeit a central, form of intercession. Much research remains to be done on the connection of different forms of intercession, as well as the relationship between liturgical memory and historical

Sebastian Scholz, “‘Durch eure Fürbitten ist er Gefährte der Heiligen’: Grabinschriften als Ausdruck des Totengedenkens im Mittelalter,” in Bücher des Lebens—​lebendige Bücher. Katalog, ed. Peter Erhart and Jakob Kuratli (St. Gall, 2010), 153–​61. 83 Vita Amati Habedensis 11 and 13, MGH SS RM 4, 219–​20. 84 Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda 6, ed. Joseph Zycha, CSEL 41, 630–​1. 85 Scholz, “ ‘Durch eure Fürbitten’,” 153–​4. 86 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Memoria als Kultur,” in Memoria als Kultur, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen, 1995), 39. 87 Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Memoria und Memorialbild,” in Schmid and Wollasch, “Memoria”, 394. 82

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remembrance.88 This relationship can be found, again, in the Antiphonary of Bangor, with its list of abbots in the form of a liturgical hymn, whose function extended beyond the liturgical memorial for the deceased abbots.89 The monks of Bangor brought to life the real story of their community in the antiphony. But we can only understand the social importance of liturgical memory when we equally consider the local contexts of specific religious communities and the overarching meaning of intercession. It is useful to start with local contexts of discourse and interaction, rather than defined groups of actors. For example, how would a figure like Caesarius of Arles be classified? As a bishop, he participated intensely in the theological and normative framing of monastic intercession, but he also entrusted himself to the very same monastic intercession as a believer. To the extent that the salvific impact of intercession was tied to the prayer of religious men and women, bishops had a strong interest in controlling their liturgical agency. It is thus tempting to attribute greater force of control to the theological discourses of spiritual ministers than to the actual religious practices of local societies in the context of religious communities.90 But it is clear in the methodical interactions of such different levels of discourse and action that early medieval ideas of socialization and the public sphere crystallized around the cultural practice of intercession through religious communities as special social locations.

Bibliography Angenendt, Arnold. Liturgie im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Thomas Flammer and Daniel Meyer. Münster, 2004.   Offertorium. Das mittelalterliche Meßopfer. 3rd ed., Münster, 2014. Brown, Peter. The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Western Christianity. Cambridge, MA, 2015. Choy, Renie S. Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms. Oxford, 2016. Dal Santo, Matthew. Debating the Saints’ Cults in the Age of Gregory the Great. Cambridge, 2012. Geuenich, Dieter, and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds. Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Göttingen, 1994.



Rosamond McKitterick, “Geschichte und Memoria im Frühmittelalter,” in Bücher des Lebens—​lebendige Bücher. Katalog, ed. Peter Erhart and Jakob Kuratli, 153–​61 (St. Gall, 2010),  13–​30. 89 Warren, Antiphonary of Bangor, 1:fol. 36v, 2:33 and 81–​2. 90 Steffen Patzold, Kleine Welten. Ländliche Gesellschaften im Karolingerreich (Constance, 2015). 88

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Gordon Blennem ann Häußling, Angelus A. Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier. Eine Studie über die Messe in der abendländischen Klosterliturgie des frühen Mittelalters und zur Geschichte der Meßhäufigkeit. Münster, 1973. Helvétius, Anne-​Marie. “Le monachisme féminin en Occident de l’antiquité tardive au haut Moyen Âge.” In Monachesimi d’oriente e d’occidente nell’alto medioevo. LXIV Settimana di Studio (Spoleto, March 31st–​April 6th 2016), 2 vols., 1:193–​230. Spoleto, 2017. Hen, Yitzhak, and Rob Meens, eds. The Bobbio Missal:  Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul. Cambridge, 2004. Hendrix, Julian. “La liturgie monastique avant Cluny: la contribution carolingienne.” In Cluny. Les moines et la société au premier âge féodal, edited by Dominique Iogna-​Prat et al., 129–​36. Rennes, 2013. Magnani, Eliana. “Transforming Things.” In Negotiating the Gift: Pre-​Modern Figurations of Exchange, edited by Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen, 269–​84. Göttingen, 2003. Muschiol, Gisela. Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern. Münster, 1994.   “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West.” In Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia Mary Howard Smith, 198–216. Cambridge, 2004. Oexle, Otto Gerhard, “Memoria als Kultur.” In Memoria als Kultur, edited by Otto Gerhard Oexle, 9–​78. Göttingen, 1995. Paxton, Frederick S. Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY, 1996. Raaijmakers, Janneke E. “Memory and Identity:  The Annales necrologici of Fulda.” In Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina U. Pössel, and P. Shaw, 303–​22. Vienna, 2006. Rose, Els. “The Ritual of the Names: A Practice of Intercession in Early Medieval Gaul.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 51 (2017): 2–​18. Schmid, Karl, and Joachim Wollasch, eds. “Memoria.” Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter. Munich, 1984. Scholz, Sebastian. “‘Durch eure Fürbitten ist er Gefährte der Heiligen’: Grabinschriften als Ausdruck des Totengedenkens im Mittelalter.” In Bücher des Lebens—​lebendige Bücher. Katalog, edited by Peter Erhart and Jakob Kuratli, 153–​61. St. Gall, 2010. Scholz, Sebastian. “Das Grab in der Kirche:  zu seinen theologischen und rechtlichen Hintergründen in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter.” Zeitschrift der Savigny-​Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 84 (1998): 270–​306. Treffort, Cécile. L’Église carolingienne et la mort. Christianisme, rites funéraires et pratiques commémoratives. Lyon, 1996.

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Monastic Identity in Early Medieval Ireland L isa M .   B ite l

For more than a century, one question pestered historians of medieval Irish monasticism:  not “was it different?” but “how different was it” from Continental monasticism? Nationalist scholars of the early twentieth century tended to emphasize the distinctive features of Irish Christianity, such as seventh-​century squabbles with the Anglo-​Saxons over the date of Easter, singular tonsures, and the Irish fondness for pilgrimage.1 Above all, scholars pointed to the absence of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) in Ireland before the introduction of Continental monastic orders in the twelfth century.2 No single monastic model, rule, or set of customs prevailed during the early Middle Ages. According to John Ryan, author of the foundational Irish Monasticism (1931), Benedict was too easy, too legalistic, and too Roman for Ireland. Ryan noted proudly, if not accurately, that Continental monastic reforms “connected with the names of St. Benedict of Aniane and the monks of Cluny” were “largely a return to the Irish system,” which he regarded as sterner and simpler.3 As essays in this volume show, the practice of what we now call Christian monasticism took discrete form wherever men and women created it. Despite the normalizing principles behind monastic communities, local circumstances and environments shaped ascetic practices and monastic identities. Even when communities shared rules and liturgies, they were never completely alike. Their internal demographics, the relative literacy of their members, their wealth, architecture, communal spirituality, and numerous



Robin Flower, “‘The Two Eyes of Ireland’:  Religion and Literature in Ireland in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries,” in The Church of Ireland, A.D. 432–​1932, ed. William Bell and N. O. Emerson (Dublin, 1932), 66–​75. 2 James F. Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical. An Introduction and Guide (Dublin, 1979), 211–​17; Aubrey Gwynn and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland. With an Appendix to Early Sites (Harlow, 1970), 102–​11, 745–​9. 3 John Ryan, Irish Monasticism: Origins and Early Development (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 411–​13. 1

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other details of religious habitus made each monastic community different, whether it included hundreds of Christians or just a few. Still, in one important sense, Irish communities will remain forever unique in the history of Christian monasticism simply because early Irish monastics wrote more about themselves than any other literati in early medieval Europe. Beginning in the sixth century, Irish scribes loosed a torrent of texts in multiple genres and two languages, Latin and the vernacular, that offer evidence for the history of monasticism. The vernacular legal material alone probably includes more manuscript pages relevant to monasticism than the entire corpus of Anglo-​Saxon writing from the same period. Ecclesiastical canons, penitentials, annals, dynastic histories, genealogies, hundreds of saints’ Lives, poetry, hymns, and “secular” tales of kings and pre-​Christian heroes, among other Irish texts, yield insights into Christian life, spirituality, and monastic ideals of the early medieval period. Most, if not all, authors of this vast literature lived in religious communities.4 Together with material evidence—​and there are large quantities of that, as well5—​the documentary record makes clear that monasticism in Ireland was never a static or uniform institution. The bounty of Irish evidence has revealed a few obvious themes. First, although scholars used to call all Irish religious settlements “monasteries” or “churches,” many religious settlements were not monasteries—​at least, not in the sense of a community composed entirely of monks or nuns. Instead, major religious settlements were (in the words of one historian) “multi-​ functional ecclesiastical establishments” that included vowed monastics among their residents, similar to English minsters. The Irish, like Christians elsewhere, used local idioms for their religious places and communities, calling them variously ecclesia/​eclais, cella, civitas, domnach, and monasterium.6 Some settlements may have specialized in parochial, monastic, or commemorative occupations, but most probably pursued a mix of religious purposes.

James Carney, “Language and Literature to 1169,” in A New History of Ireland, Vol. 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí, Ó Cróinín (Oxford, 2008), 451–​510; Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin, An Introduction to Early Irish Literature (Dublin, 2009); Kathleen Hughes, Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources (Ithaca, NY, 1972). 5 Aidan O’Sullivan, Finbar McCormick, Thomas R. Kerr, and Lorcan Harney, Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400–​1100: The Evidence from Archaeological Excavations (Dublin, 2013), 139–​78; Tomás Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual, and Memory (New Haven, CT, 2010). 6 Colmán Etchingham, “The Organization and Function of an Early Irish Church Settlement: What Was Glendalough?” in Glendalough: City of God, ed. Charles Doherty, Linda Doran, and Mary Kelly (Dublin, 2011), 53. See also T. M. Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), esp. ­chapter 6: “The Organisation of the Early Irish Church,” 241–​81. 4

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Second, Irish monastic identity depended more on the ritual observance of spatial boundaries within religious settlements than upon social withdrawal and isolation. Vowed men and women who dwelt on the small, intimate, and intensely rural landscapes of Ireland had no towns to flee or riches to give away. They regarded a modest concentration of population with a church as the equivalent of a Continental city (civitas)—​yet these were the places they fled to, rather than from, when joining the monastic project. The Irish counted their wealth and prestige in cattle and clients; kings lived much like farmers, except that they probably fed better. Monastics lived among—​and like—​farmers and kings. The permeability of Irish religious communities, more than any other condition, has misled modern scholars into construing Irish monasticism as disorganized or lax. Third, no single rule bound the behavior of Irish monastics. Each religious settlement lived by its own saintly patron’s rule. Yet ascetic ideals and habits changed over time, as vowed men and women integrated their settlements into local political and economic structures. The blending of vowed and lay people, male and female, in Irish religious settlements permitted a kind of social mixing that contradicted Continental monastic rules, particularly in relation to gender. It was not always easy to maintain a distinctive ascetic lifestyle amid the normal traffic of rural life. Periodically, reformers and revivalists of the Middle Ages, such as the Célí Dé of Ireland, redrew and strengthened the boundaries of monastic life and space. One typical aim of reformers was the reinforcement of gender segregation. Religious communities could survive accusations of rich living or politicking, but not charges of sexual misbehavior. In Christian moral theology, women caused this kind of trouble. Women symbolized the dominance of human bodies over human will. In monastic literature, women offered the temptations of social and sexual intercourse that lured ascetics from their vows. Hence gender was one of the dominant vocabularies of recurring monastic reforms, and one of the reformers’ most reliable strategies was the reordering and segregation of monastic spaces.

The Idioms of Irish Monastic Life Monasticism was unheard of when Christians first came to the eastern coast of Ireland in the fourth century (if not earlier) as slaves, refugees, and traders from Britain and Gaul. Christians brought the idioms and rituals of Roman Christianity, along with exotic liturgical objects, spoken Latin, written Scriptures, and new ideas about sacral architecture. They built small, squarish 299

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churches of wood and turf based on practical Gaulish and Romano-​British models, and set about preaching and baptizing.7 The earliest Christian document from Ireland—​a defensive letter from Bishop Patricius to colleagues in Britain toward the end of the fifth century—​ claimed that men, women, and children rushed to convert. In reality, it probably took a long time for many Irish to identify as Christians and to begin passing the religion from one generation to the next. News of experiments in religious asceticism reached Patricius, now called St. Patrick, who reported that the children of pagan chieftains were turning themselves into monachi et virgines Christi (monks and vowed virgins.) Patrick also mentioned viduas et continentes (widows and celibates) who dedicated themselves to Christianity, despite the opposition of parents or, in the case of slaves, their masters.8 The so-​called Apostle of Ireland did not, however, mention anchorites in the Irish wilderness or cenobitic communities. Monasticism was well under way in the seventh century when the earliest Irish hagiographers wrote. The Irish landscape had been transformed since Patrick’s day by ubiquitous settlements with specifically Christian purposes. Tírechán, bishop, scholar, and author of a late seventh-​century collection of Patrician anecdotes, asserted that the saint had sponsored and staffed numerous church-​based communities around Ireland during the second half of the fifth century. Some were for women, some for men, and some for both. The author recalled, as just one example, “a blest maiden” named Mathona, sister of Benignus, who “had left the secular life”: [Mathona] took the veil (pallium) before Patrick and Rodanus. She was a nun (monacha) to them, and she went out across the mountain of the Uí Ailella and set up a free church at Tamnach; she was honored by God and by men, and she swore an alliance with his successors upon Rodanus’ relics, and they used to feast together. Afterward they put bishops at the holy church in Tamnach …9

Mathona’s establishment represents the prevalent features of religious communities in Tírechán’s time. The writer understood Mathona to be

Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland, 36–​47; Lisa Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints:  How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford, 2009). 8 Patrick, Confessio 41–​2. Text and translation available online at Anthony Harvey et al., Confessio: St. Patrick’s Confession (Hypertext Stack) (Dublin, 2011), www.confessio.ie (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 9 Ludwig Bieler, ed. and trans., Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979), 140–​3 (modified translation). See also ibid., 158–​9; Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland,  252–​4. 7

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the well-​born sister of Bishop Benignus (Benén), who famously succeeded Patrick as bishop of Armagh (Ard Macha) in Ulster. Tírechán also believed that Mathona had renounced her home in the midlands to build a church—​or occupy an existing property—​far away at Tamnach (modern Tawnagh, in Co. Sligo.) In the fifth century, a noblewoman would never have traveled across the island to Sligo unless her kin had married her off to a Connacht lord. Nonetheless, according to Tírechán, Mathona was veiled by the founder of another church at Dumach (also Co. Sligo). The oath she swore later upon Rodanus’ relics and the resulting commensality between the Tamnach and Dumach groups established a historical partnership. Tírechán also noted Patrick’s part in Mathona’s project—​“she was a nun to them”—​emphasizing that both Tamnach and Dumach remained under the oversight of Armagh, Patrick’s primary foundation in Ulster.10 The writer further assumed a hierarchy of religious establishments built on partnerships between female monastics and ordained or vowed men who were not necessarily bound also by kinship.11 From Tírechán’s time on, Irish hagiographers routinely conferred both sanctity and monastic status on the fifth-​and sixth-​century founders of religious settlements. They depicted saints building and staffing church-​based communities, much as Tírechán did for Patrick and Mathona. Hagiographers sometimes blurred the extent of their protagonists’ authority, however. Two prominent founders of historically important religious settlements, St. Brigit (d. c. 525) of Kildare (Cill Dara, Co. Kildare) and St. Áed mac Bricc (d. c. 589) of Rahugh (Ráith Áeda, Co. Westmeath) were portrayed in seventh-​ and eighth-​century texts as both monastic and parochial leaders, probably on the model of St. Martin of Tours (d. 397) and Pope Gregory I (although Brigit was no bishop, despite a notorious passage in her ninth-​century vita that claimed so).12 According to Áed’s eighth-​century hagiographer, the saint was already a young man when he left his royal family to become a youthful hermit at Enach Midbren; although he lacked early monastic training, he went on to found several religious settlements for men and women. The hagiographer referred to him as both Abbot and Bishop Áed.13 Brigit’s first



David N. Dumville, “Auxilius, Iserninus, Secundinus, and Benignus,” in Saint Patrick A.D. 493–​1993, ed. David N. Dumville et al. (Woodbridge, 1993), 89–​105; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland, 400–​1200 (London and New York, 1995), 154–​68; Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland,  252–​5. 11 Bieler, Patrician Texts, 132–​3, 146–​7, 154–​5, and 160–​1; Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland,  43–​7. 12 Donncha Ó hAodha, Bethu Brigte (Dublin, 1978), 6, 24. 13 William Watts Heist, ed., Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae. Ex codice olim Salmanticensi nunc Bruxellensi (Brussels, 1965), 165–​81, sec. 7, 14.

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hagiographer (Cogitosus, fl. 650, who wrote before Tírechán) claimed that she achieved trans-​regional authority over all Christian communities in the province of Leinster, as well as over women’s communities everywhere in Ireland.14 Cogitosus, like other hagiographers, asserted his saint’s leadership of a network (paruchia or parochia) of church-​based settlements, shrines, and hermits’ abodes in proximity to her primary community, which was conveniently located near one of the political hubs of Leinster.15 Irish monastics translated the most basic concepts of Christian asceticism and monastic life into Irish terms with generous parameters.16 During the long conversion period from roughly the fifth century to the seventh, Irish church leaders organized ordained clergy, monastics, their dependents, and other Christians into paruchiae. Some paruchiae seem to have been territorially defined, like parishes and dioceses on the Continent, and presided over by bishops. The leaders of other paruchiae were abbots or abbesses. A handful of wealthy, prominent religious communities, backed by the patronage of powerful kings, tried to maintain trans-​regional paruchiae like Kildare. The heirs to Patrick’s Armagh claimed loyalty and dues not only from Tamnach and Dumach but also from many other settlements across Ireland. Complex religious communities like these often had an abbot or abbess and a bishop or two in residence. In structure, these major paruchiae resembled typical dioceses; in geographic claims, they looked more like confederations of priories obedient to a monastery. In operation, paruchiae paralleled the hierarchical clientage that bound kings to warrior-​lords, and lords to farmers and other legal inferiors.17 As political dynasties rose and fell so did paruchiae, and vice versa. Benedict never used familia to designate the monastic community in his rule, although he used kinship terms to explain the relationships between the members. Familia translated into Irish muinter, which meant an extended kin group headed by a patriarch. Sometimes hagiographers used familia to mean





Cogitosus, Vita S.  Brigidae, AASS, Feb. 1 (1658), 135–​ 41; Lisa Bitel, “Ekphrasis at Kildare: The Imaginative Architecture of a Seventh-​Century Hagiographer,” Speculum (2004): 605–​27. 15 Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints, 113–​18. On Irish dioceses/​paruchiae, see John Blair and Richard Sharpe, Pastoral Care Before the Parish (Leicester, 1992); and Colmàn Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland, A.D. 650 to 1000 (Maynooth, 1999), as well as his many articles on the subject. 16 Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland, 12–​46; Ailbhe MacShamhráin, Nora White, and Marie Fingleton, eds., Early Christian Ecclesiastical Settlement in Ireland 5th to 12th Centuries (Dublin, 2009–​14), http://​monasticon.celt.dias.ie/​bibliography.php (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 17 Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 240–​64. 14

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the followers or retinue of a saint who lived together in an enclosed community. St. Brigit and her nuns comprised the familia or muinter of Kildare. Her successors as abbess of Kildare and their followers were part of the familia too. Yet if an author referred to familia Brigidae rather than familia Cille Dara then familia usually meant paruchia: that is, all the saint’s followers in all her associated communities, including Kildare.18 The Old Irish translation of monachus was manach (pl. manaig); the Irish manaig, however, did not always or even typically resemble the monachi of Merovingian Francia or Augustine’s Canterbury. The use of the term was much more fluid. Some eighth-​and ninth-​century Irish texts, especially hagiography, use monachus/​manach for a vowed ascetic, but other texts from the same period use manach to mean a tenant or laborer on ecclesiastical lands. Ríagail Phátraic (the Rule of Patrick), an eighth-​century set of customs attributed to Patrick, interprets manaig as farmers and herders who paid rents or dues to ecclesiastical lords. Vernacular legal tracts of the same period lay out a schedule of ritual services owed by ordained clerics to manaig and their families.19 Manaig held semi-​ecclesiastical status. If married, they were expected to be monogamous. The Cáin Adomnáin (Law of Adomnán, abbot of Iona, d. 697), a proclamation exempting non-​combatants from wartime violence, includes manaig and their wives among the protected classes, so long as they live under the guidance of “an appropriate, learned, pious confessor.”20 Irish canons dating to about 725, which were based on the decrees of both indigenous synods and late antique ecclesiastical councils, further required manaig to limit conjugal sexual relations to certain days of the week.21 The most common Irish term for a nun was caillech. Caille was the Old Irish word for “veil” (Latin pallium); a caillech was therefore a veiled woman. In religious texts, the term did not denote age or sexual status (that is, whether virgin, widow, or other kind of vowess, cloistered or not). Whereas Latin offered a slew of words for vowed women—​virgines, sanctimoniales, monachae, sorores, vellatae, ancillae Dei, or simply puellae and mulieres—​all these nuances



Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland, 126–​30. J. G. O’Keefe, “The Rule of Patrick,” Ériu 1 (1904):  216–​24; Catherine Swift, “Early Irish Priests Within Their Own Locality,” in Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-​Edwards, ed. Thomas M. Charles-​Edwards and Fiona Louise Edmonds (Woodbridge, 2011), 29–​40. The classic legal source is Corus Béscnai (“The Regulation of Proper Behavior”), in Corpus iuris Hibernici:  Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum, ed. D. A. Binchy, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1978), 520–​36, 903–​5, 1312–​21. 20 Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., Cáin Adamnáin: An Old-​Irish Treatise on the Law of Adamnan (Oxford, 1905), sec. 34. 21 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL, 1990), 154–​64. 18 19

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were caught in the single Irish word caillech.22 As Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha has shown, the range of meaning for caillech was clearly extensive in early medieval Ireland.23 Caillech aithrige, for instance, was a penitent woman who retired to a monastic community, presumably in her mature years. The wives of some manaig—​“from porter to priest”—​also held the title of caillech aithrige and were required to wear veils signifying their religious status.24 Yet in poetry and historical king-​tales of the period, a caillech might simply be an old woman, a married woman, or a hag with mysterious powers. The clues to the monastic identity of a community or an individual were few in early Ireland. Irish writers translated monastic terms flexibly because religious communities did not maintain Continental-​style barriers between monks and nuns, or between vowed monastics and lay people. Instead, monastics sought others ways to identify themselves and advertise their religious vocations.

The Boundaries of Monasticism In the early Middle Ages, male and female Irish monastics typically lived under the authority of an abbas or abbatissa, epscop (episcopus), princeps, or airchinnech (a hereditary manager of ecclesiastical community and property), or some combination of these, depending on the size and location of the community. Whereas female religious leaders were always vowed women, not all airchinnig were either ordained or vowed men. Some seem to have been patriarchs of donor families or hereditary managers of religious settlements. Nonetheless, Irish legal texts treated the position of airchinnech as a semi-​religious office and thus qualitatively different from the manager of other kinds of property.25 It was probably difficult to distinguish small monastic communities from ordinary farmsteads.26 The saints’ Lives suggest that religious men and



See the article by Magnani in this volume and Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2  vols. (Aldershot, 2000), 1:26–​30. 23 Mairín Ní Dhonnchadha, “Caillech and Other Terms for Veiled Women in Medieval Irish Texts,” Éigse 28 (1994): 71–​96. 24 Meyer, Cáin Adamnain, sec. 24; Ludwig Bieler and Daniel A. Binchy, ed. and trans., The Irish Penitentials (Dublin, 1963), 54–​5. 25 Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 2009), 42, n. 26; Richard Sharpe, “Some Problems Concerning the Organization of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland,” Peritia 3 (1984):  259; Liam Breatnach, “The First Third of Bretha Nemed Toísech,” Ériu 40 (1989): 1–​40; John Barry, “The Distinction between Coarb and Erenagh,” Irish Ecclesiastical Record 94 (1960): 90–​5; Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland,  74–​83. 26 See the article by Díaz in this volume for similarities to Visigothic Spain. 22

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women—​including monastics, priests, heirs to church lands, contractual clients of church communities, and retired lay people—​occupied all sorts of settlements, ranging from ordinary family farms and isolated hermitages to proto-​cities. It was easy, however, to spot a rich monastic complex. Armagh, Clonmacnois, Glendalough, and Kildare, along with a few others, featured a founder’s shrine, multiple churches, sculpted monuments, graveyards, and subcommunities of women, students, and/​or visitors. Well-​to-​do settlements were surrounded by enclosing walls, sometimes multiple and concentric, with a ditch.27 Yet observant monastics do not seem to have been associated with any one type of settlement. The layout of settlements, revealed by continuing archaeological investigation, sometimes hints at the religious identity and uses of particular sites. Of many women’s communities, though, nothing is left but place-​names: cell, for example, a word too succinctly translated as “monastery” or “church”; or a female personal name that signals a place where vowed women once lived.28 Ties of kinship contributed to the flexibility and variety of religious communities. Local families got involved in the founding, funding, and maintenance of communities that housed their sons and daughters. Both vernacular laws and ecclesiastical canons of the seventh to ninth centuries governed the distribution of church properties and offices at the death of an abbot or abbess. The kin of principle donors, the kin of the founding saint, or the kin of resident manaig might be heirs to the whole enterprise, depending on local tradition and specific political circumstances.29 Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish which customs prevailed, given that the term to designate the head of a religious community, comarb (feminine comarbae), could be used to indicate either the “heir” of the founding saint or the heir of the founding family. In the latter case, family succession to churches, along with their tenants and estates, sometimes passed from a comarb to his kinsman—​possibly his own son—​over three or four generations.30 Irish breithemoin (singular breithem;



Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland, esp. 8–​9, 57–​9; O’Sullivan et al., Early Medieval Ireland, 74–​87, 139–​53. 28 Gregory Toner, Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) (Dublin, 2010), www. dil.ie/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018); Lisa Bitel, “Convent Ruins and Christian Profession: Toward a Methodology for the History of Religion and Gender,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe:  New Perspectives, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 1–​15. For a similar difficulty on the Continent, see the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, Giorda, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 29 Liam Breatnach, “The First Third,” secs. 11–​13. 30 Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Churches,” 328; Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 157–​72; Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988). 27

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law-​keepers and arbiters) assumed that certain families produced generations of clerics, monks, and (let us call them) nuns, just as others produced lawyers or poets or farmers. Despite laws prohibiting women’s inheritance of family lands, the abbess of Kildare, for example, was still comarbae Brigte long after St. Brigit’s kinswomen had ceased to rule the monastic and episcopal complex dedicated to her.31 Likewise, the “heirs” to Armagh, comarbai Patraic, were never Patrick’s British relatives. Kinship, real or fictive, was the principle by which management of religious settlements passed from one generation to another. Although it is difficult to map the interrelations of political boundaries, royal dynastic strategies, and religious leadership, religious settlements large and small were part of the wider clientage system that was at the root of Irish society. The historian Donnchadh Ó Corráin has argued, based on evidence from monastic annals, that prominent and prosperous religious communities were often managed by a “cadet” branch of the local tribal rulers. Whatever the size and functions of a religious settlement, its successful governance required regular personal contact with non-​monastic personnel. The gates of a church community opened to all sorts of short-​and long-​ term visitors, including retired lay people, pilgrims, political leaders, and passing travelers. If the hagiographers can be trusted, ordinary sinners sought guidance from men and women who had renounced ordinary life for one of ritualized prayer and self-​sustaining labor. Wealthier religious communities hosted markets, judicial courts, festivals, and other periodic public gatherings. They were “proto-​urban centers,” in the words of one historian, where goods and news arrived, by river or track, from ships anchored at the coast.32 Hagiography and legal texts also refer frequently to the workers and artists who labored at religious settlements. Every prosperous estate had an iron-​worker and wood-​carver. Recent archaeological finds at Clonfad (Cluain Fáda, Co. Westmeath) show that it was an economically vibrant settlement where comb-​makers and bone-​workers labored for their ecclesiastical lords. The community also had smiths, workers of fine metals, and weavers.33





Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Churches,” 328; F. J. Byrne, “Church and Politics, c. 750–​c. 1100,” in Ó Cróinín, New History of Ireland,  671–​2. 32 Charles Doherty, “The Monastic Town in Early Medieval Ireland,” in The Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non-​Roman Europe: Ireland, Wales, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Russia from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century, ed. Howard B. Clarke and Anngret Simms (Oxford, 1985), 45–​75; O’Sullivan et al., Early Medieval Ireland,  175–​8. 33 Paul Stevens, “A Monastic Enclosure Site at Clonfad, Co. Westmeath,” Archaeology Ireland 20.2 (2006): 8–​11. 31

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Religious communities of ordained, vowed, and secular Christians also produced three other resources fundamental to medieval Irish society. First, they offered a purportedly neutral, protected space for the performance of treaties and legal judgments. Second, larger religious settlements housed scribes who could record political events in monastic annals. Some settlements were wealthy enough to subsidize schools with scriptoria and libraries, where learned men (and possibly women) created the rich and varied canon of early Irish literature. Given that a single manuscript typically required a flock of sheep or herd of cows for its vellum, communities that supported scholars must have been quite rich. Third, complex settlements such as Armagh, Kildare, and Clonmacnois, among others, offered a critical mass of nobles, scholars, workers, and slaves who formed the audience for both political and ecclesiastical rituals.

How to Spot Monasticism Irish monastics of the seventh to ninth centuries composed behavioral protocols, although not in formal rules like the RB. Instead, Irish writers used canonical rulings and penitentials, along with hagiographic episodes, to set the parameters of monastic life and space. Together with laws of status, contracts, and property, these texts suggest how religious personnel were to conduct their lives both inside their communities and when they ventured out. The behavior of vowed men and women, more than dress or location, marked genuine monastics. The earliest set of Irish penitentials, written in the seventh or eighth century, was probably composed much earlier. A certain St. Finnian addressed his list of penances to both men and women living under ecclesiastical governance. There are two possible candidates for authorship. St. Finnian (d. 589), who supposedly founded Ireland’s first monastery (Mag Bile or Movilla, Co. Down) is the most likely author, but some scholars favor Finnian (d. 549) of Cluain Iraird (Clonard, Co Meath).34 The penitential’s author—​let us call him Finnian—​claims to rely on Scripture and “the opinions of a few very learned men” for his material, but Cassian’s (d. 435)  influence lurks in his lines. Certainly, Irish writers of the seventh century were well aware of other forms of monastic life. The plasticity of monastic identity in Ireland is clear in Finnian’s decision that monks (monachi) were not to baptize converts or receive alms; simultaneously, however, he decreed that any priest who took

Charles-​Edwards, Early Christian Ireland,  291–​3.

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alms was expected to baptize new Christians. Apparently in communities besides that of Finnian, monks were baptizing while priests were absconding with the alms.35 It is unclear whether Finnian’s audience included only monastics or also targeted “secular” priests, deacons, and manaig with their families. Penances were clearly weightier for Christians who took religious vows, yet the ambiguity of the penitential vocabulary poses problems for modern interpreters. For instance, a mulier (woman) who became pregnant and bore a child earned six years of fasting on bread and water; after that, she could once again “put on a white robe and be declared a virgin.”36 Obviously, mulier referred here to a vowess. If the father of the nun’s child was a cleric, he too earned six years of fasting, after which he could return to his religious duties. If the father was a lay man, he earned only three years’ fasting for impregnating the nun (puella Dei) in question and causing her to “lose her crown.” The guilty lay man was prohibited from sleeping with his wife while carrying out his penitential fast.37 Especially stiff penances fell upon “any cleric or woman” (clericus, mulier) who practiced magic of any kind; the woman in question should probably here be understood as a vowess. Above all, the author was determined to categorize sinners by distinguishing genuine monastics from other Christians. The far more rigorous penitential attributed to Columbanus (d. 615), the famous Irish exile who founded monasteries in France and Italy, used Finnian’s text as its model.38 Irish canonists drew, in turn, on Continental models in order to classify and organize ecclesiastical personnel in tidy conceptual hierarchies. Monks and nuns, they declared, should be celibates living in communities set apart from other Christians, governed by abbots or abbesses respectful of episcopal authority.39 Yet, in Irish landscapes, it was nearly impossible for monastics to achieve genuine isolation. Even settlements hopefully named díserta (“deserts” or hermitages) were never far from farms and kings’ halls. Irish homesteads, including church settlements, were typically dispersed but located close enough for intervisibility, economic cooperation, social exchange, and protection from the constant raiding that constituted Irish medieval politics.

Bieler and Binchy, Irish Penitentials,  92–​3. Ibid.,  78–​81. 37 Ibid.,  88–​9. 38 Columbanus, Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S.  M. Walker (Dublin, 1997), 132–​3,  172–​3. 39 Friedrich Wilhelm Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung (Aalen, 1966), 147–​52. 35

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Hagiographers insisted that determined ascetics could escape familiar society. A  seventh-​century homily noted that “White martyrdom is when someone parts for the sake of God from everything that they love, so that they may suffer fasting and hard work.”40 The need to escape Ireland propelled Columcille to Scotland, Columbanus to Thuringia, and St. Brendan over the seas. Others sought wilderness closer to home. The inhabitants of remote hermitages, such as Church Island and Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichíl), managed to survive from year to year, despite periodic raiding by Vikings: “Étgal of Scelec was carried off by the heathens, and died shortly afterwards of hunger and thirst,” noted an annalist in 824.41 Although hagiographers and canonists admired hermits, they opposed monastic isolation and pilgrimage without abbatial permission. The saints’ Lives tell tales of traveling monks and nuns assaulted or killed by bandits, beasts, and demons.42 Penitentialists prohibited vowed women from traveling long distances or moving about from place to place, whether alone or in the tempting company of vowed men.43 Without the buffer of physical distance, communities of observant Irish monastics invented other means of religious segregation. Eighth-​century canonical decrees postulated a hierarchy of mundane and profane spaces with varying levels of access. The holiest space of a religious settlement, inside the founder’s church or shrine, was open only to monastics and priests. Lay people “not much given to sin”—​presumably manaig and their families—​ could enter the open green outside the monastic walls.44 Cogitosus described how a low wall separated vowed men and women, who occupied two discrete areas near the altar of the main church at Kildare in the seventh century, while lay people stood at the back of the church.45 Still, neither walls nor rules actually prevented intruders who ignored the markers of sacred space.





Péadraig Ó Néill, “The Background to the Cambrai Homily,” Ériu 32 (1981):  137–​47; Westley Follett, Céli Dé in Ireland: Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), 54–​6; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, “Hiberno-​Latin Literature to 1169,” in Ó Cróinín, New History of Ireland, 379; Carney, “Language and Literature,” 492; O. Davis and T. O’Loughlin, eds., Celtic Spirituality (New York, 1999), 370. 41 Annals of Ulster, in CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts: The Online Resource for Irish History, Literature and Politics (Cork, 1997), www.ucc.ie/​celt/​index.html, U824.9 (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 42 Lisa M. Bitel, Isle of the Saints:  Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 228–​34. 43 Bieler and Binchy, Irish Penitentials,  54–​5. 44 Wasserschleben, Die irische Kanonensammlung, 175; A. D. S. MacDonald, “Aspects of the Monastery and Monastic Life in Adomnán’s Life of Columba,” Peritia 3 (2010): 295–​6. 45 Cogitosus, Vita S. Brigidae, col. 789A.

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The monastic annals tell sad tales of churches looted and burned by feuding Irishmen long before the Vikings arrived.46 Monastics also tried to identify themselves by behaving differently from ordained men and lay people. Most importantly, they spent a lot of time praying and processing in their churches and at the tombs of saints on behalf of their kinfolk, neighbors, dependents, and rulers. As the eighth-​century legal tract Bretha Nemed Toísech established, the ideal Christian community was supposed to support several cadres of religious personnel, each with a different ritual purpose: a sinless superior (airchinnech), devout monks (manaig craibdech); the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the seven grades of the church with their divisions and with their proper functions being in it; people praying for those who serve it, serving people obedient with regard to seeking permission and to bell and psalm and prior and the sacrament, penitents attending the sacrifice under the direction of a confessor with pious sayings.47

The legal author was describing an exemplary mix of secular and regular clerics with semi-​clerical personnel, all tidily sorted into their appointed spaces. Few settlements, however, could have afforded seven grades of ordained ecclesiastics as well as a confessor for penitents.

The Language of Monastic Reform Sometime in the late 700s, the Irish bishops Dublitir and Caenchomrac left the monastery of Finglas (now a suburb of Dublin). Awaiting them on the green outside the walled settlement was a vowed woman who requested permission to enter the women’s area (lis caillech) within the monastic wall. Bishop Dublitir snapped at her, “Go back the way you came, and curse your face!”48 His companion, Caenchomrac, immediately dropped to the ground and lay prone in the mud. “What is this?” Dublitir demanded. Caenchomrac responded, “You have committed a grave sin by rejecting the unfortunate old woman.” Thus admonished, penitent Dublitir also prostrated himself.

Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Viking Afterthoughts,” in Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age, ed. H. B. Clarke, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, and Raghnall Ó Floin (Dublin, 1998), 421–​52. 47 Breatnach, “The First Third,” 8–​9. 48 E. J. Gwynn and W. J. Purton, ed. and trans., “The Monastery of Tallaght,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 29C (1911–​12): 115–​80; also available at www.ucd.ie/​tlh/​trans/​ gp.pria.29.001.t.text.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018) (henceforth abbreviated as Tamlachta). 46

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Meanwhile, Caenchomrac ordered that the caillech be admitted to Finglas and offered a cow and a cloak in compensation (Tamlachta 130).49 The anonymous author who recounted this story around 820 ce was, like Dublitir, a céile, literally a “client” or “servant,” of God. Céli Dé were strict ascetics active in southeast Ireland between about 750 and 900, although individual Céli also lived in religious communities elsewhere. Written works by and about Céli Dé spread beyond their few settlements. The need for gender segregation in monastic communities was a recurring theme in their moralizing texts. As Dublitir’s mistake shows, however, segregation was difficult to practice correctly. Dublitir’s offense was not keeping the caillech out of the monastery but refusing to hear her petition. The caillech had observed strict gender protocols. She had not knocked boldly on the gate but had quietly bided time in public space. She had humbly requested a bed in the segregated women’s area of Finglas. In this and other texts, the Céli Dé wrote positively about ascetic and penitent women such as the old caillech, but they nonetheless promoted far stricter guidelines for the definition of monastic spaces and uses of them than did authors of hagiography or laws. They shunned any physical contact with the unconverted: that is, with anyone outside their communities, even donors. They purposely located new monasteries at a distance from other churches and other settlements. They disapproved of lazy priests and ill-​defined pastoral duties, and the involvement of local nobilities in the affairs of ecclesiastical establishments—​although they obligingly composed behavioral rules for lay people under their direction (like manaig), including rules for the sexual conduct of married Christian couples. The monastic ideals of the Céli reveal, in reverse, life in a typical religious settlement; the reformers objected first and foremost to contact with non-​ascetics and to porous gender barriers. The Céli first appeared in the eighth century to promote a neo-​Cassian style of monastic life. They turned up at Lis Mór, Daire na Fland, and Dair Inis in Munster, then at a pair of new monasteries founded exclusively for them. The first settlement was Tamlachta (Tallaght), founded in 774 when the king of Leinster granted a parcel in the flatlands south of the Shannon estuary to the monk Máelruain. Máelruain had left Tipperary with a bag of relics and an ascetic program, hoping to settle far from interference by local chieftains or ecclesiastical powerhouses such as Armagh to the north and Kildare to the south. He had trained under his kinsman Fer Dá Crích at

Elsewhere in the text, Céli Dé reproved anyone who cursed: Tamlachta 36.

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Dair Inis, a venerable monastery on the Blackwater whose scholars had compiled the important canonical collections of the eighth century.50 In the 760s, Máelruain founded Finglas, future site of Dublitir’s mistake, at a spot four or five miles north of Tamlachta. Later generations called these new communities the “two eyes of Ireland,” either for their monks’ vigilant observance or for their position on the coast near sea routes to the rest of Christendom.51 Máelruain attracted eager disciples, most notably Máeldithruib, another important reformer who later became abbot of Tír Da Glas in modern Co. Tipperary. Around 819, an anonymous follower of Máeldithruib at Tamlachta recorded the deeds and ideals of Céli Dé founders in a series of anecdotes, including the tale of Dublitir and the caillech. Other literate Clients of God also documented their practices in martyrologies with informative marginalia, penitentials, assorted devotional and liturgical texts, and lists of oentaid or confraternities of Céli Dé communities.52 In addition, annalists at older religious settlements dutifully kept track of the obits of important Céli Dé.53 The anonymous Tamlachta narrative describes like-​minded men who conscientiously practiced seclusion, yet were sometimes forced into contact with unreformed Christians. The Céli Dé worried about all the ways that outsiders might infiltrate the boundaries of a monastery. Several anecdotes in the Tamlachta text advised against taking contributions or hearing confessions from anyone but other vowed ascetics (Tamlachta 4, 23, 35, 54). One story describes an innocent old hermit who dozed off on a donated blanket and awoke in a panic after having the first sexual dream of his life. After he washed the blanket, he slept peacefully (Tamlachta 67). Another anecdote warned against receiving any tidings of life outside the enclosure; it was “not [Máelruain’s] custom,” the author wrote primly, “to ask visitors for news, but only to make sure that [visitors] got whatever they came for. For it might harass and disturb [a monk] to hear news of the outside.” Máelruain would then “send [the visitor] away gently and kindly.”54 The Céli Dé did not recruit other monastics; they claimed to disdain the operations of senchella (literally “old churches,” meaning mainstream and unreformed).



Ó Cróinín, “Hiberno-​Latin Literature,” 391–​2. Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., The Triads of Ireland (Dublin and London, 1906), sec. 8. 52 Osborne Bergin, Richard Irvine Best, and Michael A. O’Brien, eds., The Book of Leinster: Formerly Lebar Na Núachongbála. 6 (Dublin, 1983), 1683 (370c). 53 Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., Félire Óengusso Céli Dé (London, 1905), 167; Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds., The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131) (Dublin, 1983), for 791. The most recent discussion of Céli Dé works is Follett, Céli Dé in Ireland, esp. 1–​23. 54 Tamlachta 2, and see also 24.

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Nonetheless, visitors seeking spiritual guidance apparently flocked to Tamlachta and other observant communities. They badgered Máelruain with questions about everything from how much beer a monk might drink on ordinary days, to how many nights per week married couples were allowed to have sex, and how much butter monks ought to give to beggars. Even though Máelruain and other Céli Dé seem to have endorsed some of the typical responsibilities of manaig, they dealt only with lay people in formal relations of ainmchairde (literally “soul-​friendship”). Such a relationship was based on the lay person’s vow to accept strict spiritual direction from the Céli Dé, not unlike the relationship of modern Catholic tertiaries or lay orders to their priests (Tamlachta 14). For example, in one story, a man who had rigorously abstained from sex with his wife for three years sought out an ascetic for additional guidance, yet received nothing but scorn because he had not vowed permanent chastity (Tamlachta 21). Characters in the Tamlachta text constantly sought to reconcile necessary social interactions with the principles of religious abstinence. Still, even communities of Céli differed in monastic practices, which occasionally caused arguments among them, as depicted in the episode of Dublitir, Caenchomraic, and the caillech. The Tamlachta stories emphasize the prevention of sin through a program of bodily control.55 In one story, the vowess Copar sought advice from her brother and monastic superior, St. Molaise of Daim Inis. She confessed to trouble with repressing her carnal desires. Molaise sympathized but reminded her that concupiscence was “a third part as strong again in women as in men,” coming of a completely natural “excess of blood in the body” that afflicted women. After a year of fasting, Copar still displayed “strong currents” of immorality caused by overeating. Molaise finally approved of her when, after he poked her with a pin, not a single drop of blood oozed from her body. Copar was cured of the human condition. “In the future,” Molaise advised her, “stick to this regime until you die” (Tamlachta 60–​1). Self-​flagellation, cross vigils, genuflections, and unceasing prayer were additional tools for fighting concupiscence. Observant monks may have differed over gruel rations and genuflections, but they held a single opinion about the main source of sin: the touch of a male body with a female body, or even the mere possibility of contact. In Máelruain’s community, monks could converse with pious vowed women

Westley Follett, “Women, Blood, and Soul-​Friendship:  A Contextual Study of Two Anecdotes from the Tallaght Memoir,” in Gablánach in Scélaigecht:  Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, ed. Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett (Dublin, 2013),  53–​68.

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only if the meeting took place “on the slab by the cross at the [main] gate, or in the enclosure where the nuns live,” overseen by male and female chaperones (Tamlachta 62). Such elaborate protocols of gendered interaction were not typical of Irish religious communities. The Céli Dé were not anti-​women, but convinced that women were more susceptible to calls of the flesh. Around the same time that the Céli flourished, men’s monasteries elsewhere in Christendom also began to exclude women from churches and shrines.56 Given the increasingly limited access of lay people to church sanctuaries and crypts, pious women of the early Middle Ages soon found themselves shut out of the most important sites of Christian practice. Still, despite the trope of women-​as-​humanity in Céli Dé stories, the same texts demonstrated that vowed women, too, could practice strict observance if they observed the ritual boundaries that defined monastic bodies and spaces. The nameless visiting caillech taught Dublitir a lesson in manners, while her anecdote reaffirmed the practice of gender segregation as integral to monastic self-​definition. Likewise, Copar, who threatened her brother and other monks simply by bleeding when pricked, was quite capable of de-​sexing and destroying her own body. The women in these texts symbolized both sin and its suppression by successful monks. The equation was familiar to other European monastics. The Céli Dé defined themselves in relation to existing religious communities in early medieval Ireland. They did not suffer inexact terms for monasticism, and knew exactly what the words manach and caillech should mean. Twentieth-​century historians, notably Kathleen Hughes, interpreted the Céli Dé as a reform movement aimed at divesting pastoral and episcopal functions from monastic communities.57 Yet the Céli never sought to change or undermine senchella. Historians responding to Hughes’s teleology have pointed to signs that the early episcopal organization of Irish churches continued to arrange pastoral care for lay people throughout the Middle Ages. Bishops and priests sometimes resided in settlements with monastics, who tended to their own liturgical duties, and lay people who interacted with both groups of religious personnel.58 As in other Christian societies of the period, the Irish built and rebuilt the kinds of monasticism that worked best for them.

Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, “Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space:  Symbol and Practice,” in Medieval Purity and Piety:  Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York, 1998), 353–​76. 57 Craig Haggart, “The Céli Dé and the Early Medieval Irish Church: A Reassessment,” Studia Hibernica 34 (2006–​7): 17–​62. 58 Richard Sharpe, “Some Problems Concerning the Organization of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland,” Peritia 3 (1984): 230–​70; Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland; Etchingham, “ Organization and Function”; Follett, Céli Dé in Ireland. 56

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The Céli Dé began to fade from history at the same moment that Scandinavian raiders intensified assaults on Irish coasts. Vikings hit both senchella and Céli Dé communities:  monastic rigor apparently did not prepare Christians to repel pagan invasion. Many smaller religious settlements in Ireland, Britain, and Francia disappeared forever. Women’s foundations, in particular, seem to have declined after the raids, although it may be that writers of annals and saints’ Lives simply neglected to mention vowed women and their religious operations after 800.59 In Ireland, Scandinavian newcomers eventually settled down, married into Irish families, and became Christians. They did not, however, fund many monasteries. They were more interested in urban religious institutions for the port towns they built in Ireland. The story of Christian monasticism in early medieval Ireland has been rewritten many times since Patrick boasted about converting monks and nuns. Máelruain, who aimed to create authentic asceticism at Tamlachta, may not even have recognized Patrick’s recruits as genuine monastics. The Cistercian pioneers who came to Ireland in the twelfth century could not fathom the religious efficacy of Irish monasteries. When they built proper square stone cloisters, Irish monks insisted on sleeping in huts outside the walls. Monastics of one generation could not always recognize the idioms and principles of earlier ascetics. The monastics of early medieval Europe never produced a stable, universally shared definition of Christian monasticism. Instead, they constantly adapted their identities, establishments, and practices to local politics, environments, gender systems, and other contexts. Vowed monastics existed in relation to other classes of Christians who lived with, near, or at a safe distance from them. The most important historical question to ask about early medieval Irish monasticism is not how different it was from monasticism elsewhere, but whether the Irish example of flexible monastic identities, so prevalent in the bountiful Irish documentary record, suggests the diversity of monasticisms elsewhere in Europe during the first Christian millennium.

Bibliography Bitel, Lisa M. Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland. Ithaca, NY, 1990. Bitel, Lisa. Landscape with Two Saints:  How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe. Oxford, 2009.

For female monasteries in medieval Ireland, see Dianne Hall, Women and the Church in Medieval Ireland, c.1140–​1540 (Dublin, 2008).

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Lisa M. Bitel Carey, John. King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writing. Dublin, 2000. Charles-​Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge, 2000. De Paor, Liam. Saint Patrick’s World: The Christian Culture of Ireland’s Apostolic Age. Dublin, 2007. Doherty, Charles. “The Monastic Town in Early Medieval Ireland.” In The Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non-​Roman Europe:  Ireland, Wales, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Russia from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century, edited by Howard B. Clarke and Anngret Simms, 45–​75. Oxford, 1985. Doherty, Charles, Linda Doran, and Mary Kelly, eds. Glendalough: City of God. Dublin, 2011. Etchingham, Colmàn. Church Organisation in Ireland, A.D. 650 to 1000. Maynooth, 1999. Follett, Westley. Céli Dé in Ireland:  Monastic Writing and Identity in the Early Middle Ages. Woodbridge, 2006. Gwynn, Aubrey, and R. Neville Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses:  Ireland. With an Appendix to Early Sites. Harlow, 1970. Hughes, Kathleen. The Church in Early Irish Society. Ithaca, NY, 1966. Kenney, James F. The Sources for the Early History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical. An Introduction and Guide. Dublin, 1979. McCone, Kim. Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. Maynooth, 2000. Ó Carragáin, Tomás. Churches in Early Medieval Ireland:  Architecture, Ritual, and Memory. New Haven, CT, 2010. Ó Carragáin, Tomás, and Sam Turner. Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe: Conversion and Consolidation in the Early Middle Ages. Cork, 2016. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh. Clavis litterarum Hibernensium:  Medieval Irish Books & Texts (c. 400–c. 1600). Turnhout, 2017. Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí, ed. A New History of Ireland, Vol. 1:  Prehistoric and Early Ireland. Oxford, 2008. O’Sullivan, Aidan, Finbar McCormick, Thomas R. Kerr, and Lorcan Harney. Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400–​1100: The Evidence from Archaeological Excavations. Dublin, 2013. Ryan, John. Irish Monasticism: Origins and Early Development. Ithaca, NY, 1972. Sharpe, Richard. “Some Problems Concerning the Organization of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland.” Peritia 3 (1984): 230–​70.

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Constructing Monastic Space in the Early and Central Medieval West (Fifth to Twelfth Century) M iche l L auwe rs ( t r an slate d b y M atthe w M att ingly) The practice of asceticism may represent a rupture with the world, but in the early medieval West it notably encouraged the establishment of “small worlds,” to use the expression of Wendy Davies to describe the numerous, largely cloistered groups that came to replace the social and political institutions of the ancient world.1 The structure of these small monastic worlds was defined, in the first place, by a way of life regulated according to written norms and by the establishment of well-​defined, hierarchically organized complexes of space. Several contributions to this volume demonstrate that this twofold process, characteristic of the history of Western monasticism, emerged only gradually. It took centuries for religious experience to become equated with a disciplined way of life, let  alone a single monastic rule,2 and for the conception and establishment of a topography specific to the requirements of monastic living to develop.

Cosmos and Paradise: The Monastery as a Microcosm of the Universe Even before their material organization was fully defined, monks had developed certain lines of discourse for praising the unique nature of their living space. In particular, the monastery was held to represent the center of the world. In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great (d. 604) relates a vision that

Many thanks to Alison Beach, Isabelle Cochelin, and Albrecht Diem for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this text. 1 Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (London, 1988). 2 See notably the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume.

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appeared to St. Benedict one night in his monastery of Montecassino, as he kept prayerful vigil in his chamber before the night office: The venerable Benedict stood in the upper chamber of his tower … before which stood a large building where his disciples slept. As the brothers took their rest, Benedict, the man of God, having anticipated the time of prayer, was already keeping vigil. While he stood at the window, peering out into the night and praying to almighty God, suddenly he beheld a brilliant light from above, penetrating the darkness and driving it aside, its splendor surpassing even the light of day. An amazing thing then happened. As he later described it, before his eyes the entire world (omnis mundus) was gathered together as if in a single ray of sunlight.3

The monastery, whose buildings the abbot observed, was a reflection of the cosmos. Contemplation transformed the establishment into a supernatural space in relation to the entire universe. Gregory makes no reference to the topography of the site, but he does mention two places: a tower that served as both observatory and abbot’s residence, and a common building where the brothers of the community slept. The latter, illuminated by divine light, stood for the totality of the monastic complex, which itself was a symbol of the cosmos. This type of discourse, of which many examples could be cited, proved to have a long history. Five centuries later, a text composed at the monastery of Fleury places the monastery at the center of the universe while identifying it as a prime place for observing the stars and constellations.4 Henceforth, contemplation of the heavens would have a locus designatus within the cloister; stars were identified according to their position relative to the common buildings that comprised the claustral quadrangle, in particular the dormitory and the refectory, whose windows constituted further points of reference. It was likewise within the cloister that the religious of Saint-​Victor of Paris, in the first half of the twelfth century, contemplated the cosmological diagram, either painted on the wall or traced on the floor, to support the teaching of their master, Hugh, author of the Descriptio mappe mundi and a treatise on Noah’s Ark (accompanied by images), held to be a prefiguration of the Church.5



Gregory the Great, Dialogues 2.35, 10–​26. Horologium stellare monasticum (saec. XI), in Consuetudines Benedictinae variae, saec. XI–​saec. XIV, ed. Giles Constable, CCM 6, 17–​18. See Joël Minois, “L’Horologium stellare monasticum a-​t-​il été écrit pour Fleury? Une approche géométrique et astronomique,” in Abbon, un abbé de l’an mil, ed. Annie Dufour and Gillette Labory (Turnhout, 2008), 47–​68. 5 Patrick Gautier Dalché, La “descriptio mappe mundi” de Hugues de Saint-​Victor (Paris, 1988); Patrice Sicard, Diagrammes médiévaux et exégèse visuelle. Le “libellus de formatione arche” de Hugues de Saint-​Victor (Paris and Turnhout, 1993). 3

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Thus inscribed in the cosmic order, monasteries were specially marked by divine grace and assumed the qualities of Paradise, as clerical and monastic scribes employed the rhetoric of the locus amoenus. If many of these establishments appear to have been founded in hostile “deserts,” places of trial and diabolic temptation, the holy life of the religious was capable of transforming these penitential outposts into veritable “camps of God” (Gen. 32:1–​3) or delightful gardens. In Praise of the Desert, written by Eucherius of Lyon in 428, was one of the first Latin texts to employ this rhetoric in order to draw attention to a monastic locus. While the island of Lérins, just off the coast of Provence, is here likened to a desert, it is also called “fertile,” a “holy land,” a “paradise” possessing “flowing waters,” “lush green grass,” and “brilliant flowers.”6 A century later, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) described the monastery as a new Noah’s Ark, “a harbor of peace and devotion” where God has desired to welcome the monks “as if into the refuge of Paradise.”7 Cassiodorus (d. c. 583) touted the monastery he had founded on his estate at Vivarium for its irrigated gardens, the channeling of a nearby river, mastery of the ocean tides, and the development of a fishpond.8 In several manuscripts, the earliest dating from the eighth century, this description is accompanied by an illustration depicting the site with its two churches, both surrounded and traversed by flowing waters that converge to form the fishponds. In one of these images, surging water and a dove appear to descend from heaven, suggesting a kind of baptism of the monastery and its places of cult (see Figure 16.1). Similarly, the abbey of Jumièges was established, according to the author of the Life of its founder, Philibert, on “fertile ground” atop a “marvelous hill,” “surrounded on all sides by water,” and distinguished by the “greenness of its grass,” “fragrant flower gardens,” and “abundant vineyards.”9 The development of monastic habitations gave occasion for the authors of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to reflect for the first time on God’s

Eucherius, De laude eremi, ed. S. Pricoco (Catane, 1965). On this text, see Conrad Leyser, “This Sainted Isle: Panegyric, Nostalgia, and the Invention of Lerinian Monasticism,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in honor of R.A. Markus, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 188–​206; Rosa Maria Dessì, and Michel Lauwers, “Désert, église, île sainte: Lérins et la sanctification des îles monastiques de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge,” in Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge, ed. Yann Codou and Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2009), 234–​7. 7 Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 234 in Césaire d’Arles. Œuvres monastiques, vol. 2, ed. Joël Courreau and Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 398, 82. 8 Cassiodore, Institutiones 1.29 (de positione monasterii Vivariensis sive Castellensis), ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1937), 73. 9 Vita Filiberti, MGH SS RM 5, 588. 6

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Figure 16.1  Drawing of the monastery of Vivarium in a copy of Cassiodorus’ Institutiones, following Kassel, Hess. Landesbibl., MS Theol. 2° 29, fol. 27v.

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special presence in these specific places. In this way, as Robert Markus has suggested, the monastic experience played an important role in the process of giving spatial expression to the sacred and developing a doctrine of cultic places.10

Community and Cloister: The Monastery as a Spatialized Complex In the early Middle Ages, however, the spatial organization of monasteries does not seem to have been the object of precise norms. The RB, which made stabilitas one of the foundations of the monastic experience, makes provision for an enclosure (described as the claustra monasterii in ­chapters 66 and 67), but without specifying its exact form. Cut off from the surrounding society, the monastery should “be arranged in such a way that everything necessary may be found within its interior (intra monasterium): water, mill, garden, as well as workshops where the different trades can be practiced”; “the monks therefore should have no need to wander outside (foris)” (RB 66). While the RB identifies the functions needed to sustain the autonomy of these small worlds separated from the ordinary world, it does not define a binding topographic model.11 The material structure of subsequent foundations, in fact, reveals a great deal of diversity, with forms and features remaining highly fluid.12 At the same time, while everywhere assuming different forms and progressing according to different rhythms, some general developments can be perceived. The practice of prayer and asceticism, born in the solitude of the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, developed in western Europe within a progressively communal framework.13 At Condat (f. 435) in the Jura Mountains,







See Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), part 3. On the process of sacred spatialization, see Michel Lauwers, Naissance du cimetière. Lieux sacrés et terre des morts dans l’Occident medieval (Paris, 2005); and Dominique Iogna-​Prat, La Maison-​Dieu. Une histoire monumentale du christianisme au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2006). 11 Beat Brenk, “Benedetto e il problema dell’architettura monastica prima dell’anno mille,” in L’Europa e l’arte italiana. Per i cento anni della fondazione del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 22–​27 settembre 1997, ed. Max Seidel, 16–​39 (Florence, 2000); reprinted in Beat Brenk, Architettura e immagini del sacro nella tarda antichità (Spoleto, 2005), 151–​61. 12 Kimberly Bowes, “Inventing Ascetic Space: Houses, Monasteries and the ‘Archaeology of Monasticism’,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrick Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 315–​51. See also the article by Brooks-​Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 13 On communal prayers, see the articles by Jeffery, Billett, and Blennemann in this volume.

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Abbot Oyend transformed the hermits’ individual cells into a single structure in which the monks could take their rest in common. A disciple writing between 512 and 515 relates how Oyend “wanted to bring together under a single roof (una mansio)”—​described as a xenodochium—​“those who already came together in a single building (una aedicula) for their meal.” According to this report, the restructuring of the buildings took place after a fire, but we know nothing else about the circumstances of this transformation, clearly presented as a break with the practices of the East.14 In 567, the Council of Tours prescribed that a common building (schola), where the brothers were to take their rest, be built at all monasteries in place of individual cells.15 In a few exceptional cases, archaeologists have identified these arrangements on the ground. For example, at fifth-​century Lérins, perhaps a period during which a common rule of life was being adopted, the ascetics who had arrived decades earlier appear to have abandoned buildings interpreted by archaeologists as individual cells in order to bring those activities regarded as more communal within a single structure.16 At the site of Hamage, a foundation of nuns in northern Gaul, a large communal building replaced the huts that had served as individual cells since the time of the foundation, although this does not seem to have taken place before the eighth century.17 These developments help us to understand better the attention with which St. Benedict contemplated the building in which the brothers slept, a place emblematic of the religious community that he intended to strengthen. It was only in the seventh century that the building of common rest became designated as the dormitory (dormitorium), while the term refectory (refectorium) came to be applied to the hall where the religious shared their meals.18 The emergence of such vocabulary suggests an institutionalization of communal life, together with the appearance of buildings with clearly defined functions, replacing, albeit gradually, rooms with more polyvalent uses.



François Martine, ed. and trans., Vie des Pères du Jura, SC 142, 422–​3. Charles De Clercq, ed., Les canons des conciles mérovingiens (VIe–​VIIe siècles), vol. 2, trans. Jean Gaudemet and Brigitte Basdevant (Paris, 1989), 360. 16 Yann Codou, “Aux origines du monachisme en Gaule (Ve–​XIe siècle):  les fouilles de l’église du Saint-​Sauveur, Lérins, île Saint-​Honorat, Alpes-​Maritimes,” HAM 19 (2013): 63–​71. On the problematic question of a rule intended for the monks of Lérins, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume and Jean-​Pierre Weiss, “Lérins et la ‘Règle des Quatre Pères’,” in Codou and Lauwers, Lérins, 121–​40. 17 Étienne Louis, “Espaces monastiques sacrés et profanes à Hamage (Nord), VIIe–​IXe siècle,” in Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident medieval, ed. Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2014), 435–​72. 18 Pierre Bonnerue, “Éléments de topographie historique dans les règles monastiques occidentales,” in Studia Monastica 37.1 (1995): 57–​77. 14

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New kinds of communities, whose members were expected to remain until death, also permanently altered monastic space. According to the Rule of Isidore of Seville (d. 636), “a separate place (uno loco) should be set aside for the burial of the brothers, so that a single place (unus locus) might embrace those in death whom the unity of charity brought together during life.”19 A monk of Fulda, writing in the middle of the ninth century, identified the funerary space designated for the religious of the monastery as the cimiterium, specifying that this term derived from a Greek word whose Latin equivalent is none other than dormitorium.20 The decisions of the Carolingian authorities, particularly those made during the councils held at Aachen in 816–​17, intended to standardize monastic life in the Frankish Empire by imposing the RB on all religious establishments. While their application is uncertain (and in some cases provoked resistance), these rulings must have accelerated the process of communalization.21 It is likely that certain guidelines related to the reorganization of religious houses were distributed at that time. A letter of 818 or 819 from Archbishop Hetti of Trier (d. 847) to Bishop Frotharius of Toul (d. 849/​50) inquires about the execution of imperial orders concerning the construction or reconstruction of certain common buildings (although it is true that in this precise case it was destined, not for monks, but for canons on whom the common life was being imposed).22 Notably, a council of 813 prescribed that canons should reside within enclosed quarters (in claustris) and “sleep together in a dormitory and take their meals together in a refectory.”23 However, precise norms relative to the spatial organization of monasteries are no more to be found in the legislation of this age than they were in the writings of the preceding centuries. The monastic capitulary of Benedict of Aniane contains only two remarks in this regard. The first (already attested to at the beginning of the seventh century in the Rule of Isidore of Seville) concerns the adjacency of certain buildings frequented by the brothers throughout the day (and night), specifically the dormitory and the church (ut dormitorium iuxta oratorium constituatur), to allow the recently awakened monks to arrive in the choir for the offices without difficulty.24 The second remark,

Isidore of Seville, Regula monachorum 24, PL 83, 894. See also the article by Díaz in this volume. Candidi Vita Eigilis, MGH SS 15/​1, 230. 21 On the Carolingians and the RB, see the article by Kramer in this volume. 22 Michel Parisse, La correspondance d’un évêque carolingien. Frothaire de Toul (ca. 813–​847) (Paris, 1998), 142–​5, no. 29. 23 Council of Tours (813), c. 24, in MGH Concilia 1/​1, 289. 24 Legislatio Aquisgranensis. Synodi secundae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica, 10 July 817, c. 21, in CCM 1, 478. See also the Regula S. Benedicti Anianensis 55, in CCM 1, 530; 19

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which strongly echoes ancient monastic rules, reinforces the commitment to the cloistered life. Despite the monks’ possession of numerous external properties, often at a great distance from the monastery, the religious are “not to travel (ut non circumeant) from one domain to another unless necessity so requires,” nor should “these domains be entrusted to the care of monks.”25 In this way, the Carolingian regulations distinguished between good and bad traffic both in and around the monastery. They were intended to promote pious movement, or, in any case, movement that took place within the monastery, while proscribing that which would cause the monks to wander outside their house. In his commentary on the RB, the monk Hildemar (fl. c. 845), writing in the middle of the ninth century, makes recommendations for the proper dimensions of the monastic enclosure, which he calls the claustra. This space should be neither too small nor too vast so that the monks can find what they need and properly carry out all of their activities without leaving the enclosure. Here they were safe from unwelcome encounters with the laity or strangers to the community (as could occur if the enclosed space were too lax), and without being forced to transgress its limits (if the space proved too constrained). According to Hildemar, it was up to the abbot to organize a claustral space favorable to the stabilitas of the community. Hildemar even relates that, according to many accounts (dicunt multi), the claustral space ought to measure 100 feet on all sides.26 The integration of monasteries within royal, and later imperial, structures also promoted the reorganization of monastic buildings. In the eighth and ninth centuries, religious establishments became important pillars of support within the structure of power; they offered intercessory prayer on behalf of the leaders (a form of sacred legitimization), provided them with a source of wealth and manpower, and served as places of hospitality.27 In order better to perform the multiple societal functions they now assumed, the Frankish monks undertook numerous building (or rebuilding) projects.28 Because of





Capitulare Monasticum 58, in MGH Capit. 1, 347; Collectio capitularis Benedicti Levitae 58, in CCM 1, 551. 25 Legislatio Aquisgranensis. Synodi primae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica, 23 August 816, c. 24, in CCM 1, 464. See also the Regula S. Benedicti Anianensis 20, in CCM 1, 521; Capitulare Monasticum 26, in MGH Capit. 1, 345; Collectio capitularis Benedicti Levitae 26, in CCM 1, 548. 26 Hildemar, Expositio regulae 4 and 67, ed. Ruppert Mittermüller (Regensburg, 1880), 183 and 615, edition reviewed and corrected by the Hildemar Project, www.hildemar.org (date of late access: 10 April 2019). 27 See the articles by Devroey and Blennemann in this volume. 28 See the article by Cohen in this volume.

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their size and the forces they mobilized, these grand projects sometimes raised tensions within the religious communities themselves. This was the case at Fulda where, in 812, exhausted by the prestigious transformations desired by Abbot Ratgar, the religious brought their complaint before Charlemagne: “We ask of you most merciful emperor, that we abandon the immense and superfluous building projects and other useless works that have greatly fatigued the brothers while those dependent on us outside languish. Rather, let us do all things according to measure and with discretion.”29 Monastic complexes that date from this era witnessed several possible large-​ scale arrangements. In some important centers, multiple places of worship existed within the enclosure—​ not always easy to identify materially—​ connected to the other buildings by a system of galleries and courtyards facilitating movements between the different parts of the monastery.30 Federico Marazzi has demonstrated just such an arrangement, spread out and with multiple points of focus, at the site of San Vincenzo al Volturno, which was the object of important excavations over several decades (see Figure 16.2).31 An eleventh-​century illustration representing the Carolingian monastery of Centula/​Saint-​Riquier appears to bear witness to a similar layout (see Figure 16.3).32 The enclosure, with its courtyards and galleries, was very similar to the palace complexes of Paderborn, Ingelheim, and Aachen, which were themselves inspired by late antique models.33 Another arrangement, which could be described as more streamlined, distributing the monastic buildings around a single central space, was also implemented during the Carolingian era. The Gesta of the abbots of Fontenelle, reporting on the construction work undertaken during the





Supplex libellus monachorum Fuldensium 12, in CCM 1, 324. See Josef Semmler, “Studien zum Supplex Libellus und zur anianischen Reform in Fulda,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 69 (1958): 268–​98. On the abbacy of Ratgar, see Janneke E. Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744–​c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012), 99–​131. 30 See the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 31 Federico Marazzi, “San Vincenzo al Volturno: l’impianto architettonico fra VIII e XI secolo, alla luce dei nuovi scavi della basilica maior,” in Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture. Proceedings of the International Conference (Castel San Vincenzo, September 23rd–​26th 2004), ed. Flavia De Rubeis and Federico Marazzi (Rome, 2008), 323–​90; Federico Marazzi, “La règle et le projet:  réflexions sur la topographie du monastère de Saint-​Vincent au Volturne à l’époque carolingienne,” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 227–​54. 32 See Carol Heitz, Recherches sur les rapports entre architecture et liturgie à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 1963); and Carol Heitz, L’architecture religieuse carolingienne. Les formes et leurs fonctions (Paris, 1980). 33 On the complex of Paderborn, see Sveva Gai, “Il complesso palaziale di Paderborn e il formarsi di una vita communis nella sede episcopale di nuova fondazione,” in De Rubeis and Marazzi, Monasteri in Europa occidentale, 181–​210.

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Figure  16.2  Reconstitution of the monastic complex of San Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy in the ninth century, according to Federico Marazzi. Drawing by Simona Carracillo.

abbacy of Ansegisus (807–​33), provide the first description of just such an arrangement. The monastery was laid out around a quadrangular court bounded by the church, dormitory, refectory, and another edifice called simply a domus—​a plan that corresponds to what is now known as a cloister.34 Although material examples of this arrangement for the eighth and ninth centuries are still few, archaeological evidence does exist for the monasteries of Lorsch, Reichenau, Landévennec, and Hamage, as well as for communities of canons, as at Reims, Rouen, and Autun.35 This type of arrangement is further depicted in the famous Plan of St. Gall, which lays out the spaces and functions regarded as necessary for a grand imperial abbey. Some were places indispensable to the devotional and common life of the monks; others were intended for novices or the infirm, as well as the various guests (often prestigious) that the monastery would

MGH SS 2, 296–​7; Pascal Pradié, ed. and trans., Chronique des abbés de Fontenelle (Saint-​ Wandrille) (Paris, 1999), 166–​9 (Gesta Ansigisi). 35 Beat Brenk, “Il problema della struttura a quattro corpi (claustrum) nei conventi paleocristiani e altomedievali,” in Brenk, Architettura e immagini, 163–​72; P. K. Klein, ed. Der mittelalterlicher Kreuzgang. Architektur, Funktion und Programm (Regensburg, 2004); Christian Sapin, “De la cour au cloître carolingien,” Cahiers de Saint-​Michel de Cuxa 46 (2015): 21–​34.

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Figure 16.3  Engraving of the monastic complex of Centula/​Saint-​Riquier, from a drawing by Paul Petau (1612), reproducing a miniature from the eleventh century.

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be expected to welcome; still others were designated for activities related to industry, crafts, or storage. The plan constitutes not only the first representation of a monastery, but also the first witness to a multiplicity of workshops (officina) providing for the various functions that comprised a great monastic complex, ranging from the recitation of the Divine Office to the raising of livestock. There is, in fact, no other text, normative or narrative, that provides such precise details, and, even supposing that there were material remains, archaeology on its own would be unable to identify with certitude most of the specialized buildings sketched on the Plan of St. Gall. At the center of the plan is a large church adjacent to a cloister linking the main communal buildings (dormitory, refectory, kitchen, and cellar). Crossed by four paths (quattuor semitae pertransversum claustri), the cloister appears to have encouraged and even given structural form to movement within the monastic space. As Alfons Zettler has remarked, the plan also provides limits and lines of demarcation, not to be crossed, between different parts of the compound:  for example, between the common monastic space and the external school or the guest buildings, or between the monastic kitchen opening onto the cloister and the buildings for pilgrims.36 Defining both function and space, the Plan of St. Gall was intended to regulate movement, much in the same way that monastic customaries would some decades later. Between the various buildings that made up the monastic complex, there were at once points of exchange and areas of seclusion, both of which the monks were expected to have internalized.37 Around the year 840, the monk Bruno Candidus recalled that, at the end of the abbacy of Eigil (d. 822), there had been some discussion concerning the construction and location of a new monastery at Fulda: The venerable man [Eigil] had in mind to reconstruct the cloister of the monastery (claustrum monasterii). He therefore summoned the council of the brothers and asked them where it was preferable to be built. Some advised



Alfons Zettler, “Public, Collective and Communal Spaces in Early Medieval Monasteries:  San Vincenzo and the Plan of Saint Gall,” in De Rubeis and Marazzi, Monasteri in Europa occidentale, 267 and 271, fig. 5; Alfons Zettler, “Spaces for Servants and provendarii in Early Medieval Monasteries: The example of the Virtual Monastery on the Plan of Saint Gall,” in Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisanales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle, ed. Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, BUCEMA, Hors série 8 (2015), https://​journals.openedition.org/​ cem/​13624 (date of last access: 10 April 2019). 37 On this last point, see Isabelle Cochelin, “Deux cuisines pour les moines: coquinae dans les coutumiers du XIe siècle,” in Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieu clos (VIe–​XIXe siècle), ed. Falk Bretschneider, Julie Claustre, Isabelle Heullant-​Donat, and Elisabeth Lusset (Paris, 2015), 89–​113.

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Figure 16.4  Plan of St. Gall, St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1092.

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it should be constructed to the south of the church in the same manner as the previous cloister. Others thought it would be better to place it on the western side according to the Roman custom because of its proximity to the martyr [St Boniface] who rested in this part of the church. The brothers voiced their agreement with this proposition, and even those who were of the other opinion gave their consent. With all of them thus united, the work was carried out as required.38

The organization of monasteries therefore became the object of sustained reflection during the Carolingian era. While there were certainly diverse realizations, all of them demonstrated a distinct “monastic rationale,” in the sense intended by Max Weber, which enabled the religious to give order and significance to the places they frequented. Conceived in this context, the central cloister emerged over the course of the following centuries as the preferred system in the West. The monastery of Cluny, as described in the customary produced during the abbacy of Odilo and as reconstituted today by archaeologists, thus presented in the eleventh century a layout similar to that depicted on the Plan of St. Gall. The cloister surrounded by the principal church and the communal buildings constituted both the heart of the monastery and the most enclosed space of the whole complex, while the other buildings formed a ring around its periphery.39 Numerous monasteries would adopt this system in which all the buildings were centered around an inner cloister. By the twelfth century, the cloister (which earlier had mostly served to link various communal buildings together) had become a full-​fledged space in its own right, as highly regarded as the diverse places of cult found in monastic complexes in former times. The development of exegetical reflections on the cloister, best exemplified by Hugh of Fouilloy’s twelfth-​century treatise De claustro animae—​an exploration of the multiple senses of the “material cloister,” “the spiritual cloister,” and “the cloister of the soul,” known under several different titles, including De claustro materialis and De claustro spiritualis—​ epitomizes the evolution whereby the claustrum was transformed, as noted



Candidi Vita Eigilis, MGH SS 15/​1, 231. Anne Baud and Gilles Rollier. “Liturgie et espace monastique à Cluny à la lecture du Liber tramitis, ‘de descriptione monasterii’ et données archéologiques,” in Espace ecclésial et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Anne Baud (Lyon, 2010), 27–​42. On the Cluniac customaries, see Isabelle Cochelin, “Discipline and the Problem of Cluny’s Customaries,” in A Companion to the Abbey of Cluny in the Middle Ages, ed. Scott Bruce and Steven Vanderputten (Leiden, forthcoming).

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above, into the center of the universe. This work or parts of it appear in more than five hundred manuscripts.40

Sacralized Territory: The Monastery and Its Environment As the topography of monasteries was beginning to crystalize, religious were also organizing their collections of dependencies, often numerous and widely dispersed, through the use of new land management tools based on the use of writing and the preparation of lists. Legal instruments, inventories, and polyptychs were all developments of the eighth and ninth centuries.41 Historians have shown that the Carolingian polyptychs, which record the lands and legal rights held by monasteries, organized these properties in a kind of concentric structure. Starting from the center and progressing to the periphery, monastic scribes and administrators could take a virtual stroll from one possession to the next.42 The ideal relationship between an enclosed monastic center and the surrounding lands under its jurisdiction was the result of an equilibrium between the interiora and the exteriora, two concepts that recur frequently in the writings of the monks.43 External affairs were only entrusted to experienced religious, as was the case with John of Gorze, whose biographer, clearly familiar with the legislation of Benedict of Aniane, explained how John, reluctant to visit possessions far from his establishment, administered them from the monastery by summoning and commissioning agents (ministri), who were most likely lay men. “Whenever an important reason forced him to travel to a site to resolve a situation, after bringing it as swiftly as he could to its conclusion, he would hurry back to the monastery without even taking the opportunity to eat.”44 The same author also points out that



For an inventory of the manuscripts as well as a bibliography, see the “Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge.” www.arlima.net/​eh/​hugues_​de_​fouilloy.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 41 See the article by Devroey in this volume. 42 On the spatial logic at work in the management of monastic lands from a Weberian perspective, see Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Puissants et misérables. Système social et monde paysan dans l’Europe des Francs (VIe–​IXe siècles) (Brussels, 2006), esp. 591–​600. 43 Michel Lauwers, “Interiora et exteriora, ou la construction monastique d’un espace social en Occident entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle,” in La società monastica nei secoli VI–​XII. Sentieri di ricerca. Actes du Colloque organisé à Rome par le Centro Europeo Ricerche Medievali de l’Université de Trieste et l’École française de Rome, 12–​13 juin 2016, ed. Marialuisa Bottazzi, Paolo Buffo, Caterina Ciccopiedi, Luciana Furbetta, and Thomas Granier (Trieste and Rome, 2016), 59–​88. 44 John of Saint-​Arnulf, La Vie de Jean, abbé de Gorze, ed. and trans. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1999), 114–​15.

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Abbot Ansteus of Saint-​Arnould in Metz, although “constantly occupied with external affairs (res extra), never lost sight of what concerned the purity of his life, his conduct, or the vigilance necessary for his abbatial office.” All the care taken by this abbot “to construct the inner life” (interioribus extruendis) was ordered to this purpose.45 Within the community, certain religious were specially tasked with managing external affairs. According to the customs of Fleury (d. 1000), as reported by Thierry of Amorbach (d. c. 1018), the prior was responsible both for “outside necessities” and for managing the servants and other agents of the monastery; the text also mentions outposts of the abbot and the dean in the vicinity of the monastery.46 In reality, the boundary between interiora and exteriora is difficult to trace. It was the result of a process:  a gradual progression of complex material arrangements and symbolic practices, such as a succession of nested cloisters (rather than a simple enclosure), a system of gates and doors (some of which the documents label “internal,” while others are designated “middle,” “last,” or “external”), or a series of courtyards and atria progressively isolating monastic living spaces from the surrounding world.47 The progressive integration of monasticism in the West into social structures and power relations during the early and central Middle Ages promoted contacts and exchanges between the religious and the outside world, and even led to the presence within certain monastic spaces of non-​consecrated individuals, such as serfs and other dependents, tradesmen, pilgrims, and distinguished guests. The monks responded by marking out places for themselves that were (more) sealed off or even secret, sometimes described as the septa monasterii or secreta septa. In his commentary on the RB, Hildemar remarks that guests are becoming more and more numerous in the monasteries of his day, and that the dormitory of the monks, for example, should be clearly “separated from the rooms of the laity,” “for they are permitted to stay up until the middle of the night, and can talk during the day,” while the monks are supposed “to keep silence and pray.”48 The institution of the cloister, which formed a



Ibid.,  96–​9. Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat, eds., with the collaboration of Gillette Labory, Consuetudines Floriacenses antiquiores, in L’abbaye de Fleury en l’an mil (Paris, 2004), 179, and  176–​8. 47 Eleonora Destefanis, “Ad portam monasterii:  accessi e spazi liminari nei monasteri dell’Occidente altomedievale (secoli VI–​IX),” in “Per diversa temporum spatial.” Scritti in onore di Gisella Cantino Wataghin, ed. Eleonora Destefanis and Chiara Lambert (Vercelli, 2011), 51–​84. Regarding the Irish world, where this system of multiple cloisters was more formalized than elsewhere, see the article by Bitel in this volume. 48 Hildemar, Expositio regulae 67, 611. 45

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dedicated and exclusive space at the heart of the monastery, participated in this evolution.49 In the context of this distinction between interiora and exteriora, inside objects, associated with the space that was most enclosed, came to be considered sacred, while external objects referred to the profane world. The sacredness of the inside objects is affirmed by the monastic rules. According to the RB, all goods located within the monastic enclosure ought to be considered in the same manner as “the sacred vessels of the altar” (RB 31).50 The Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, a text connected with the Columbanian movement, perhaps arranged by Jonas of Bobbio (d. after 659)  for the women’s community of Faremoutier, prescribes that the utensils set aside for the service of guests should be “handled and stored as if they were consecrated by God” (ac si sacrata Deo) (RcuiV 3.22). According to this rule, every object brought into the interior of the cloister had to be subject to some kind of sanctifying ritual: before being stored in the cellar, it was to be placed before the oratory of the monastery (RcuiV 3.12).51 The manner in which the Plan of St. Gall depicts the interiora (understood broadly here to include buildings frequented by the laity) confers on its buildings a particular nature that formerly had been reserved for places of cult.52 In the same period in which the Plan was conceived, a ritual of benediction was likewise developed, intended to mark off the buildings that constituted the enclosed space. Carolingian sacramentaries, in fact, made provision for the recitation of prayers of benediction during organized processions through the “regular” spaces, including the church, dormitory, refectory, cellar and storehouses, kitchen, scriptorium, infirmary, etc.53 Monastic customaries of the eleventh century, for example those describing Cluny, depict similar processions in which the entire community moved through the cloister and its connected buildings, stopping at each station for prayer.54 By



See the article by Cochelin in this volume. On the sacred goods of the monastery, see Valentina Toneatto, Les banquiers du Seigneur. Évêques et moines face à la richesse (IVe–​début IXe siècle) (Rennes, 2012), 247–​53. 51 Albrecht Diem, “The Stolen Glove:  On the Hierarchy and Power of Objects in Columbanian Monasteries,” in Shaping Stability:  The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 51–​67. 52 Michel Lauwers, “Circuitus et figura: exégèse, images et structuration des complexes monastiques dans l’Occident médiéval (IXe–​XIIe siècle),” in Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 43–​110. 53 See Jean Deshusses, Le sacramentaire grégorien. Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, vol. 3, 2nd ed. reviewed and corrected (Fribourg, 1992), 239–​45, no. 496, as well as 245–​7, nos. 497–​500. 54 Baud and Rollier, “Liturgie et espace monastique à Cluny.”

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treating the buildings within the enclosed space as an ensemble, the liturgy thus promoted a kind of diffusion of the sacred. The process of sacralization eventually came to involve the monastic possessions situated beyond the cloister.55 Privileges of immunity and exemption, which protected the places where monks held rights over land and persons, served to confirm the special nature of the areas surrounding the monastery.56 Charters that conferred or confirmed their status of exemption were the first medieval documents to institute precise territorial limits. Boundaries of inviolable lands belonging to the monastery were often clearly demarcated with signposts, crosses, or elements of the landscape. The transformation of ecclesiastical institutions that took place in the second half of the eleventh century, in which monks (or former monks) played a key role, further accelerated this movement.57 One consequence of the reformers’ activity was the sharp distinction drawn between the clerical orders and the laity, the sacred and the profane. The RB was one of the authorities invoked to affirm the sacred character of a church’s collected possessions, which included places of cult, liturgical vessels, vestments, lands, and other dependencies, by virtue of the claim that “everything the Church possesses is sacred.”58 The “things of the Church,” including its external possessions, were understood to have been “consecrated to God,”59 and therefore ought not to be subject to any infringement, for “not only is the interior holy, but the exterior as well.”60 The sanctification of the monastic lands surrounding an abbatial center was a process ritually constructed and solemnly staged. In 1095, for example, while he was at Cluny to consecrate the great abbey church then being rebuilt,





Maximilian Diesenberger, “Wahrnehmung und Aneignung der Natur in der Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium,” in Text—​ Schrift—​ Codex. Quellenkundliche Arbeiten aus dem Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, ed. Christoph Egger and Herwig Weigl (Vienna, 1999), 9–​33; Nicolas Schroeder, “In locis vaste solitudinis: représenter l’environnement au haut Moyen Âge. L’exemple de la Haute Ardenne (Belgique) au VIIe siècle,” Le Moyen Âge 116 (2010): 9–​35; Nicolas Schroeder, “Organiser et représenter l’espace d’un site monastique. L’exemple de Saint-​Hubert du IXe au XIIe siècle,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 89 (2011): 711–​45. 56 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999). 57 Patrick Henriet, “Corporalia et spiritualia, ou l’église et le corps en contexte ‘grégorien’: à propos d’une formule de Placide de Nonantola (Liber de honore Ecclesiae, 1111–​1112),” in Matérialité et immatérialité dans l’Église au Moyen Âge. Actes du Colloque de Bucarest, 22–​23 octobre 2010, ed. Stéphanie Daussy, Catalina Gîrbea, and Brindusa-​Elena Grigoru (Bucharest, 2012), 143–​54. 58 Placidus of Nonantola, Liber de honore ecclesiae 149, MGH Libelli 2, 633–​4. 59 Ibid. 52, 589. 60 Massimo Fornasari, ed., Collectio canonum in V libris (Turnout, 1970), 3:148. 55

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Pope Urban II (r. 1088–​99) set aside an area around the monastery to be placed under a “sacred ban” (see Figure 16.5).61 No doubt this represented an exceptional case, but, between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth, several monastic complexes witnessed a similar connection between the consecration of the abbey church and a delimitation of the territory surrounding the monastery.62 This new conception of monastic space, which now included the monks’ landed possessions, occasioned the project of compiling all of the written acts documenting a monastery’s possessions into a single book called a cartulary, which in turn contributed to securing and territorializing the rights of the religious.63 It also engendered new forms of representation. The plan prepared for the abbey of Marmoutier in Alsace during the middle of the twelfth century (known only through copies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) represents the monastery’s property within three nested spaces using a combination of geometric elements, illustrations, and text (see Figure 16.6).64 A rectangle at the center of the page contains four figures illustrating different places of worship (the abbey church with its two-​towered westwork and an oversized door that appears to belong at the same time to both the church and the monastic enclosure; a parish church; and two chapels), in addition to elements of vegetation (a reference to its fecundity) and a circle (a spiritual symbol) representing the enclosed monastic space. This central rectangle is, in turn, inscribed within a diamond containing sixteen buildings, each of which is identified by a caption listing the domains that comprised the “march” of Marmoutier, a privileged region close to the monastery where the monks held a majority of the rights over lands and persons. This diamond, in its turn, is inscribed within a large rectangle, divided at the corners into triangles where the possessions furthest from the monastery are listed. The plan thus distinguishes between three zones:  the monastic site (to which the Plan of St. Gall had limited itself ), the march (corresponding to

Didier Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, Xe–​XVe siècle (Lyon, 2001), 133–​93. Florian Mazel, “Lieu sacré, aire de paix et seigneurie autour de l’abbaye de Saint-​Gilles (fin IXe–​début XIIIe siècle),” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 46 (2011): 229–​76. 63 See the article by Bruce in this volume and Pierre Chastang, Lire, écrire, transcrire. Le travail des rédacteurs de cartulaires du Bas Languedoc (XIe–​XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2001). 64 Charles-​Edmond Perrin, Essai sur la fortune immobilière de l’abbaye alsacienne de Marmoutier aux Xe et XIe siècles (Strasbourg, 1935); Uta Kleine, “Die Ordnung des Landes und die Organisation der Seite:  Konstruktion und Repräsentation ländlicher Herrschaftsraüme im vorkartographischen Zeitalter (Elsass, 12. Jahrhundert),” in Aufsicht—​Ansicht—​Einsicht. Neue Perspektiven auf die Kartographie an der Schwelle zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Tanja Michalsky, Felicitas Schmieder, and Gisela Engel (Berlin, 2009), 229–​61. 61

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Figure  16.5  The “sacred ban” around the abbey of Cluny defined by Pope Urban II in 1095, according to D. Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, Xe–​XVe siècle (Lyon, 2001), 164.

that which the Cluniacs called the sacred ban), and the possessions on the periphery. The plan of Marmoutier remains abstract, portraying as homogenous areas that were not so in reality, especially as the inventory of lands it precedes contains a mix of possessions that the monks had owned in the ninth century (but later lost), as well as those acquired in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While clearly a highly idealized picture of the abbey and its property, the plan’s inclusion of lands (even those far removed from the abbey 336

Figure  16.6 Inventory-​plan of the abbey of Marmoutier (Alsace) in the mid-​twelfth century, according to an eighteenth-​century copy, following C.-​E. Perrin, Essai sur la fortune immobilière de l’abbaye alsacienne de Marmoutier aux Xe et XIe siècles (Strasbourg, 1935), 8.

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center) is innovative, serving to integrate the monastery more closely into its surrounding environment. A spatialized complex, an organized territory, and even a microcosm of the universe: the Western medieval monastery was a kind of laboratory of representations and practical applications of  space.

Bibliography Baud, Anne, and Gilles Rollier. “Liturgie et espace monastique à Cluny à la lecture du Liber tramitis, ‘de descriptione monasterii’ et données archéologiques.” In Espace ecclésial et liturgie au Moyen Âge, edited by Anne Baud, 27–​42. Lyon, 2010. Bonnerue, Pierre. “Éléments de topographie historique dans les règles monastiques occidentales.” Studia Monastica 37.1 (1995): 57–​77. Bottazzi, Marialuisa, Paolo Buffo, Caterina Ciccopiedi, Luciana Furbetta, and Thomas Granier, eds. La società monastica nei secoli VI–​XII. Sentieri di ricerca. Actes du Colloque organisé à Rome par le Centro Europeo Ricerche Medievali de l’Université de Trieste et l’École française de Rome, 12–​13 juin 2016. Trieste and Rome, 2016. Brenk, Beat, Architettura e immagini del sacro nella tarda antichità. Spoleto, 2005. Bully, Sébastien, and Christian Sapin, eds. Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisanales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle. BUCEMA, Hors série 8 (2015) (http://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13574). De Rubeis, Flavia, and Federico Marazzi, eds. Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture. Rome, 2008. Dessì, Rosa Maria, and Michel Lauwers. “Désert, église, île sainte:  Lérins et la sanctification des îles monastiques de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge.” In Lérins. Une île sainte de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge, edited by Yann Codou and Michel Lauwers, 231–​279. Turnhout, 2009. Destefanis, Eleonora. “Ad portam monasterii:  accessi e spazi liminari nei monasteri dell’Occidente altomedievale (secoli VI–​ IX).” In “Per diversa temporum spatial.” Scritti in onore di Gisella Cantino Wataghin, edited by Eleonora Destefanis and Chiara Lambert, 51–​84. Vercelli, 2011. Devroey, Jean-​Pierre. Puissants et misérables. Système social et monde paysan dans l’Europe des Francs (VIe–​IXe siècles). Brussels, 2006. Dey, Hendrick, and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. La Maison-​Dieu. Une histoire monumentale du christianisme au Moyen Âge. Paris, 2006. Lauwers, Michel. “Circuitus et figura:  exégèse, images et structuration des complexes monastiques dans l’Occident médiéval (IXe–​XIIe siècle).” In Lauwers, Monastères et espace social, 43–​110. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident medieval. Turnhout, 2014. Lauwers, Michel. Naissance du cimetière. Lieux sacrés et terre des morts dans l’Occident medieval. Paris, 2005.

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The Economy of Byzantine Monasteries M iche l   Ka p lan ( tr a n slate d b y M ich ael   Webb) The Byzantine Empire was, above all, the pars orientis of the Roman Empire and the cradle of Christianity and monasticism. Nevertheless, some interesting parallels can be drawn between the economic and political history of Eastern and Western monasticism throughout the Middle Ages. This Roman East was radically diminished by Arab expansion, which deprived the empire of its richest provinces from both monastic and economic points of view, and also by Slavic invasions. The empire reconquered the Balkans up to the Danube in the middle of the eleventh century, but in the east it barely managed to extend past Antioch in Syria and Edessa in Upper Mesopotamia, even as it expanded in this same period into the southern Caucasus region and up to areas that were never Roman. This expansion was short-​lived, as the east was overwhelmed by the Turks in the second half of the eleventh century, which ended with the arrival of the crusaders. Although the crusaders recovered a portion of Asia Minor, they took what Byzantium held east of the Taurus. Already greatly reduced in the Balkans by the emergence of the Bulgarian and Serbian states, the remains of the empire were dismembered in 1204 after the Fourth Crusade. The restoration of 1261 was followed by a slow but relentless withdrawal before the advance of the Ottomans, in the face of which the Athonite monasteries were almost the only ones to maintain any kind of independence. The scarcity of extant archival sources makes the study of the economy of Byzantine monasteries difficult.1 The situation is paradoxical because the few preserved monastic archives are the only ones that allow historians to

There was, however, a general cadastral survey in Constantinople, which is known only through a few partial copies. The best example is Nicolas Svoronos, “Recherches sur le cadastre byzantin et la fiscalité aux XIe–​XIIe siècles: le cadastre de Thèbes,” Bulletin de correspondance héllenique 83 (1959): 1–​166 (= Études sur l’organisation intérieure, la société et l’économie de l’Empire byzantin (London, 1973), ­chapter 3.

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paint a picture of the Byzantine rural economy. Rigorous studies of the high period have focused on Egypt, where archaeological excavations have added to the information provided by the numerous monastic papyri that have been preserved. But extant archives from Mount Athos only begin in the eleventh century, and only for two communities by this time. Since the publication of these archives and those of Patmos has expanded over the last fifty years, the development of the history of the Byzantine rural economy is principally based upon the archives of monasteries whose economic importance grew, although they were certainly not the only economic actors.

Poverty, Alms, Work, Land: How to Feed the Monks? Egypt2 saw the birth of two types of monasticism: groups of hermits, with community buildings (including annexes for service and work) and groups of kellia, generally of two or three cells, each with a senior monk and one or two disciples; and congregations or cenobitic houses, such as the foundations of Pachomius in Middle Egypt in the region of Thebes including Tabenna, characterized by communal life within a space enclosed by a wall.3 The Evangelist’s verse that founded monasticism—​“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21)—​also gave birth to trends seen in other regions, notably in Syria, where monks refused all work and therefore refused any monastic economy, since they were supposed to live only on alms. Whether this movement did not exist in reality or was rapidly stifled in Egypt matters little, as it only appeared marginally in Egyptian sources. The products made by monasteries that accepted work were, above all, artisanal.4 The most common production was wickerwork, but the monks made all sorts of items, especially cloth. Those who could also copied manuscripts, more than was necessary for their institutional religious life.

See the impressive synthesis in Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009), 471–​565, supplemented by Ewa Wipszycka, “Resources and Economic Activities of the Egyptian Monastic Communities (4th–​8th Centuries).” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 41 (2011):  159–​263; see also Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in the Byzantine World (Cambridge, 2010). 3 On the institutional aspect, see Michel Kaplan, “Monasteries:  Institutionalisation and Organisation of the Space in the Byzantine World until the End of the Twelfth Century,” in Diverging Paths: The Shape of Power and Institution in Medieval Islam and Christianity, ed. John Huston and Ana Rodriguez (Leiden, 2014), 321–​50. See also the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Giorda in this volume. 4 See Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte, for a broad overview. 2

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The description of Pachomian monasteries, organized in houses of monks or nuns who practiced the same crafts (carpenters, blacksmiths, cobblers, fullers, tanners, potters, weavers, tailors, bakers, etc.) shows the importance of these activities. These products were clearly intended for sale, sometimes made in response to outside orders, and thus provided money that was used to procure what was necessary for the life of all kinds of monastic groups. Pachomian monasteries had boats that plied the Nile, not only to supply each other, but also to sell their surplus. Almost every monastery had land at their disposal, whether the monks kept the property they held before entering the monastery or inherited it afterwards, or the property was transferred to monasteries directly. When they did not have any land, at least in the Pachomian system, they leased it and cultivated it themselves. Egyptian monasteries were therefore well integrated into their local economies. Theodore, Pachomius’ second successor, denounced this frenzy: it diverted monks from their primary activity, prayer, and the seeking of perfection which would permit them to recover fundamental unity with their creator. The prosperity of Egyptian monasticism was therefore linked with that of the valley and delta of the Nile, and that of the desert oases, which did not falter until at least the seventh century, if not well after the Arab conquest. This increased the importance of the steward in these institutions, including within groups of hermits. In Palestine, there were three different situations. Monasticism in the Gaza region is not well understood from the economic point of view.5 By contrast, monasticism in Jerusalem was characterized by the importance of foundations to house pilgrims and associated with very wealthy elites. These monasteries essentially survived on income in kind and on cash provided by land donated to them. Even with these types of revenues, and even if we do not know much about the development of their properties, they were indeed part of the economy. Work is rarely mentioned in the (mostly hagiographical) sources that allow us to understand the lives of the monks in the Judean desert and the Jordan valley. The most consistent group of sources is that from a monk of the Laura of Sabas, Cyril of Scythopolis.6 Work there was very limited; as a source of revenue for the monasteries of the Roman East, it occupied a secondary place after alms and donations. Sabas received 1,000 solidi twice from Emperor Anastasios; later, according to his vita, he refused

Bénédicte Lesieur, “Le monastère de Séridos sous Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza:  un monastère conforme à la législation impériale et ecclésiastique?” Revue des études byzantines 69 (2011): 6–​40. 6 Eduard Schwartz, ed., Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig, 1934). 5

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an endowment from Justinian (r. 527–​65), an ultimate concession to the ideal that only God would provide necessities. The lauras of the Judean desert consequently would not have acquired any estates, which is logical considering the environment.7 But, judging from the importance of the steward, they were still part of the local economy. When Sabas’ master Euthymios was about to die, his monks chose as his successor Helias, steward of the lower monastery, a dependency of Euthymios’ main establishment.8 Syrian monasticism is known through Greek and Syriac sources which do not differ greatly from one another in their portrayal of monasticism.9 The principal Greek work is the History of Philotheos of Theodoret, metropolitan of Cyrus from 423 to around 460.10 Contrary to his Syriac counterpart, Raboula of Edessa (metropolitan 412–​36), Theodoret advocated that monks work; what he described, with one exception, however, suggests the opposite. Work was limited to copying and to cultivating the garden within the cloister. The monks therefore lived largely on alms, as what they received was proof that God approved of their vocation. Having to work for a living was a sign of sin; it was good for the weak, but not for those who had attained perfection. On the other hand, monasteries could own property, whose revenues constituted a form of deferred alms, and they were thus deeply involved in the domanial economy. Despite Basil of Caesarea’s (d. 379) desire to establish a certain equilibrium between manual labor and other work, we know next to nothing about the economies of the monasteries of Asia Minor and the Balkans. Nor do we know more about those in Constantinople.11 Two observations about two famous monasteries in that city and its suburbs will suffice. Located on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, the monastery of the Acemetes, who came from Syria, practiced laus perennis (perpetual prayer).12 The name Acemetes signifies “those who never sleep,” indicating that they never ceased to pray, a

On the origin of the term laura, see Michel Kaplan, “L’implantation des monastères du mont Athos à Thessalonique, Xe–​milieu XIIIe siècle,” in Villes méditerranéennes au Moyen Âge, ed. Élisabeth Malamut and Mohammed Ouerfelli (Aix-​en-​Provence, 2014), 135–​46. 8 Life of Euthymios (BHG 648), c. 39, in Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis,  58–​9. 9 See Philippe Escolan, Monachisme et église. Le monachisme syrien du IVe au VIIe siècle. Un monachisme charismatique (Paris, 1999). 10 Theodoret of Cyrus, Histoire des moines de Syrie, ed. and trans. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-​Molinghen, SC 234 and 257; English translation, A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1985). 11 Gilbert Dagron, “Les moines et la ville:  le monachisme à Contantinople jusqu’au concile de Chalcédoine,” Travaux et mémoires 4 (1976): 229–​76; reprinted in La romanité chrétienne en Orient. Héritages et mutations (London, 1984), ­chapter 8. 12 On late antique and early medieval monastic liturgy, see the article by Jeffery in this volume. 7

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lifestyle incompatible with manual labor. But we have no concrete information about their means of living. They participated in the foundation around 463 of the monastery of St. John the Baptist of Stoudios, which, to guess from the social position of its patrician founder, Stoudios, was richly endowed.13 This discretion of the sources on monastic economy is representative of its relatively secondary importance at the time. To understand this, we must turn to imperial and ecclesiastical legal sources. First, one of the goals of the Council of Chalcedon (451) was to force monks to obey, as they were seen to be incorrigible anarchists who were often extremist supporters of dogmatic deviance.14 Canon 4 placed monasteries under the authority of the local bishop, an authority that monks rejected because most of them were lay men. Canon 24, which prohibited the alienation of monastic property, reveals that both monasteries and monks themselves generally possessed some. In the following century, Justinian’s legislation showed the actual place of monasticism in the economy. Justinian carefully distinguished monasteries from churches and religious institutions devoted to welfare. Although he issued a law about monasteries, it dealt primarily with monastic life and evoked material goods only in relation to new converts and their heirs.15 As part of his great novella on the alienation of Church property, Justinian treated monastic property separately and relatively briefly.16 The alienation of Church property was a significant issue, but monasteries were of minor importance in that context. Since there were many monasteries everywhere, we can deduce that their wealth caused few problems, either—​improbably—​because of good management or more likely because of its relative lack of importance. We have seen that certain monasteries had a steward who could play an important role; yet it was not until the Second Council of Nicaea (787) that the existence of such a position became obligatory (canon 11) in monasteries, more than three centuries after it was required for bishoprics.17 The disadvantage of legal texts is their generality; it is thus impossible to know how they were applied. Justinian’s texts simply show that monastic

Olivier Delouis, “Saint-​ Jean-​ Baptiste de Stoudios à Contantinople” (PhD diss., University of Paris 1, 2005), 21–​34. 14 See the article by Brakke in this volume. 15 Novella 5 (535), in Corpus Juris Civilis 3: Novellæ, ed. Rudolf Schoel and Wilhelm Kroll (Berlin, 1963), 28–​35. 16 Novella 120 (544), in ibid., 578–​591. 17 Nicée II, in Σύνταγμα τῶν θείων καὶ ἱερῶν κανόνων, ed. Georges Rhallès and Michel Potlès, vol. 2 (Athens, 1852), 590. 13

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property existed and that it posed the same sorts of problems as ecclesiastical property in general. We are forced to assume that, for two centuries, well-​ endowed monasteries followed the same unfavorable path as other major landowners. As the widespread use of perpetual emphyteusis shows, this was a favorable period for small and medium peasant landowners, always very present in the Roman East.18

Economic Expansion and the Growth of Monastic Fortunes The economic recovery that occurred early in the eighth century was not unique to the Byzantine world.19 While accounts are not numerous, one among them is significant, even though it comes from a later source. In Paphlagonia, Anthusa of Mantinea was at the head of a double monastery. Her miraculous intervention allowed the third wife of Emperor Constantine V to bring twins to term through a difficult pregnancy, which led the empress to bestow upon her numerous estates.20 At the beginning of the ninth century, we can observe the foundation of monasteries by very powerful aristocrats, wealthy landowners who provided them with much land. This was the case with the family of Theodore the Studite (d. 826). Under the guidance of his uncle Plato and with a part of his family, he withdrew to one of his family’s many properties in Bithynia to found the monastery of Sakkoudion, which was far from being the only one held by these aristocrats.21 By the grace of the Empress Irene (r. 797–​802) made hegumen (abbot) of St. John the Baptist of Stoudios, a rich monastery that had become an imperial one, Theodore rapidly found himself in charge of five monasteries, including four that his family owned.22





Michel Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle. Propriété et exploitation du sol (Paris, 1992), 163–​9. Peter Sarris, “Large Estates and the Peasantry in Byzantium, c. 600–​1100,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 90 (2012): 29–​50, disagrees. 19 See Alan Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–​1200 (Cambridge, 1989); I  follow Angeliki Laiou and Cécile Morrisson, The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge, 2008), who place the economic expansion a century earlier than Harvey. 20 Life of Anthusa (BHG 2029h), in Synaxarium Constantinopolitanum, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, AASS, Propylæum Novembris (Brussels, 1902), cols. 848–​52. See also Cyril Mango, “St. Anthusa of Mantineon and the Family of Constantine V,” Analecta Bollandiana 100 (1982): 401–​9; reprinted in Byzantium and Its Image: History and Culture of the Byzantine Empire and Its Heritage (London, 1984), ­chapter 17. 21 In the order in which they were likely written: Michel le Moine, Life of Theodore the Studite, (Life B) (BHG 1754), c. 5, PG 99, cols. 241A–​B; Life of Theodore the Studite (Life A) (BHG 1755), c. 6, PG 99, col. 121B–​C; Life of Theodore the Studite (Life C) (BHG 1755d), ed. V. Latišev, VV 21 (1914), c. 10, 262–​3. 22 Delouis, “Saint-​Jean-​Baptiste de Stoudios,” 201–​30. 18

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Irene had so favored monasteries that her successor, Nikephoros (r. 802–​11), took action against them, especially the imperial ones. He compelled them to give up half of their land while continuing to pay the same taxes; he submitted the paroikoi (peasants who were perpetual tenants, not landowners) to the hearth tax (kapnikon), from which Irene had exempted them. The presence of paroikoi is telling, as they were the farmers of the great domains.23 The wealth of the imperial monasteries was undoubtedly older, but it is clearly reflected here. Theodore of Stoudios was a theoretician of a rigorous and rationally organized cenobitism who clearly strove to give monasteries the social, and therefore economic, power that they had lacked when opposing the iconoclastic emperors. While this was not enough to prevent the return of iconoclasm from 815 to 843, the movement had begun. In the next century, monasteries could be counted among the powerful. In the 934 law of Romanos I  Lekapenos, they appear alongside senior officials, civil dignitaries, and bishops on the list of those whom the emperor (anxious to protect the small family farms that provided taxes and soldiers) prohibited from acquiring property sold or given by the poor.24 These prohibitions were renewed up to the novella of Basil II (976–​1025) from 1 January 996. But this novella also reveals, through his effort to protect them, the existence of small village monasteries with fewer than ten monks; these were to remain owned by the villagers and were poorly endowed.25 Yet the assessment made by Nikephoros II Phokas (963–​9) in a novella dated to 964 and dedicated to monastic property is clear: And now, observing what happens in the monasteries and other sacred establishments, I see an obvious disease … During every hour God made they strive to acquire thousands of measures of land, valuable buildings, herds of horses, cattle, camels, and other beasts in ever-​increasing numbers. They bring the attention of their entire soul to these things, rendering the monastic life similar to the lay, consumed with numerous and vain preoccupations.26



In 809/​10 Theophanes compared these actions to the ten plagues of Egypt. Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. Carolus de Boor (Leipzig, 1883), 486–​7. 24 Novella 3, c. 2, in Nicolas Svoronos, Les novelles des empereurs macédoniens concernant la terre et les stratiotes. Introduction, édition, commentaires, ed. P. Gounaridis (Athens, 1994), 84–​5. See also Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 399–​444. 25 Novella 14, in Svoronos, Les novelles des empereurs macédoniens, c. 5 Γ 1, 208. 26 Novella 8 (964), prologue 1, in ibid., 157. 23

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The Foundation of Lavra: A Major Breakthrough in the Monastic Economy This same emperor, however, played an important role in what seems to be a major turning point in the monastic economy: the foundation of Laura, to this day the most important monastery of Athos. The records of this foundation are considerable. Its founder, Abraamios, is well known from two versions of his Life.27 He was born between 925 and 930 in Trebizond into an aristocratic family also settled in Constantinople; his Lives describe him as a model student, then a teacher so brilliant that he aroused the jealousy of his colleagues. Thereafter he decided to become a monk under the name of Athanasius and traveled to various Bithynian monasteries, including that of the powerful aristocrat Michael Maleinos. There he met Maleinos’ nephew, a lay man and the future emperor Nikephoros Phokas (r. 963–​9). Finally, Athanasius withdrew to the latest fashionable place of eremitic life: Athos. When Nikephoros went on the expedition that allowed the empire to reconquer Crete (960–​1), he stopped at Athos to take Athanasius along for spiritual support.28 After his victory, the emperor entrusted Athanasius with six pounds of gold to found a monastery at the tip of the Athonite peninsula, where he intended to retire.29 Nikephoros could therefore be considered the co-​founder of this monastery with Athanasius; he was also its owner. When he became emperor in 963, the monastery became imperial, along with all of Nikephoros’ other assets. The foundation charter (typikon) of Lavra and its regulations (hypotypôsis)—​ both enacted by Athanasius but the text of the latter surely revised around 102030—​and Athanasius’ will (diatypôsis)—​dated to the 990s at the latest31—​are extant. Two vitae, which interpret the foundation in light of what it became in the half-​century following Athanasius’ death (probably in 1002), also survive. There are also partially preserved archives from both Lavra and other monasteries. In his typikon, Athanasius condemned Athonite monks who cultivated their fields, planted vineyards (clearly to produce wine in surplus), or



Life A  by Athanasius of Panagiou (BHG 187), in Vitæ duæ antiquæ sancti Athanasii athonitæ, ed. Jacques Noret, CCSG 9 (Louvain, 1982), 3–​124; Life B, anonymous (BHG 188), in ibid., 127–​213. 28 Typikon of Athanasius, 1.17–​20, in Die Haupturkundem für die Geschichte der Athosklöster, ed. Philipp Meyer (Leipzig, 1894), 103; reprinted Chestnut Hill, MA, 2005. English www.doaks.org/​research/​publications/​books/​byzantine-​monastic-​ translation:  foundation-​documents-​a-​complete (date of last access: 13 August 2018). 29 Life B, 23.149, l. 9; Typikon, in Meyer, Die Haupturkunden, 104, l. 10. 30 Meyer, Die Haupturkunden, 130–​40. 31 Ibid., 123–​30. Paul Lemerle, “Introduction,” in Actes de Lavra I. Des origines à 1204, ed. Paul Lemerle et al. (Paris, 1970), 20–​1; Noret, Vitæ duæ antiquæ, cxxii, n. 51. 27

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otherwise improved what they had acquired.32 Yet he also ordered a number of productive investments, such as drilling into the mountain to irrigate the fields and gardens of Lavra33 and the construction of a port which was to serve commercial needs.34 Moreover, Lavra had income: Nikephoros Phokas granted them an annuity of 244 nomismata in 964, John Tzimiskes 244 more in 972,35 and Basil II a siteresion of 10  “great talents of silver” in 978.36 The total was around 600 or 700 nomismata, at that time more than enough to feed 150 monks. The imperial endowments definitively replaced alms. Lavra also received two monasteries and all of their property: the imperial monastery of St. Andrew of Peristerai (f. 871–​2), near Thessaloniki,37 and the patriarchal monastery of Gomatou, near Athos.38 In the latter case, this was an epidosis, the donation of a declining monastery to another in order to restore it and renew its monastic life. Like all the aristocrats of the time, Athanasius acquired lands where paroikoi worked, watched over by his monks living there in dependencies (metochia), and he invested in order to increase revenues that were already in excess of what was needed to supply the monks.

Monasteries as Major Economic Agents: The Role of the Aristocracy and of the Imperial Power Two groups of Athonite records, those of Lavra and of Iviron (f. 978/​9, one of Lavra’s first daughter houses, also on Mount Athos but inhabited by Georgians), contain sufficient information to show how active these monasteries were as economic agents.39 Not content with receiving donations, they bought, exchanged, consolidated, and converted wastelands into cultivated fields at a time when their fiscal exemption only concerned boats, not property taxes and surtaxes. One act shows, for example, how Iviron pushed to be given the monastery of Kolobou in 980, which itself had previously received other monasteries in Thessaloniki and Chalkidiki. Thus within two years of its foundation, Iviron held some 80,000 modioi of land (around 8,000 hectares

Typikon, in Meyer, Die Haupturkunden, 106, l. 10–​19. Life A, 81.37; Life B, 25.151–​3 and 36.168. 34 Life A, 108.5; Life B, 35.7–​21, 166. 35 Typikon, in Meyer, Die Haupturkunden, 144, l. 33–​115, l. 1. 36 Lavra, no. 7, in Lemerle et al., Actes de Lavra I, 112–​14. 37 Vie d’Euthyme le Jeune (BHG 655), ed. Louis Petit, in Bibliothèque hagiographique orientale 5 (1904): 41; Typikon, in Meyer, Die Haupturkunden, 119, l. 24–​30. 38 Lavra, no. 8, in Lemerle et al., Actes de Lavra I, 117. 39 Rosemary Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843–​1118 (Cambridge, 1995); and Konstantinos Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins (fin du Xe–​milieu du XIVe siècle) (Paris, 2006). 32 33

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or the equivalent of 800 peasant tenures). The most telling act with regard to its economic plan is the judgment that the judge Nicholas rendered in 995 that settled a dispute between the monastery and the landowning peasants of Siderokausia (a village near Kolobou), in favor of the peasants.40 The battle to control the lower part of the area along the sea, uncultivated up to that point, had been bitter. The monks possessed a metochion in the village, which the peasants did not protest. But they had also sent other paroikoi to take the land that the peasants were clearing. The document thus shows the monks using their possessions and their men to profit, like the peasants, from economic expansion. We leave the Athonite records for a moment to note a trend that was possibly not new but only now documented:  the foundation or re-​foundation of an important monastery by members of the aristocracy, starting with the imperial family.41 Some were relatively modest, such as the monastery and charitable institution founded by the judge and historian Michael Attaliate (d. c. 820). Although he was from an aristocratic family of moderate importance, he had to renounce his inheritance to provide his sisters with a dowry. He therefore owed all that he possessed to his salary as a judge in Constantinople; married twice, he had a son but was a widower who inherited nothing from his wives. He held five estates in Macedonia and, in the region of Raidestos (Tekirdağ) in Thrace, the port of Propontide, which was the outlet of the wheat from Thrace. Michael purchased a spot in Constantinople on which he intended to construct a monastery, with an annex in Raidestos that would serve as a charitable institution. He obtained chrysobulls (imperial letters) for these buildings, founded in March 1077, from Michael VII (1075) and Nikephoros III Botaneiates (1079), which conferred them exemptions from an impressive list of surtaxes, though not the property tax, and the status of autodespoton, common for the previous decade.42 This status protected the monastery from the claims of episcopal and imperial officers: neither emperors nor bishops had the right to intervene in the affairs of a monastery with such a privilege. The foundation served to pray for the soul of the founder in perpetuity and supported the poor. But it remained family property and was intended to

Jacques Lefort, Nicolas Oikonomidès, and Elene Metreveli, eds., Actes d’Iviron, I. Des origines au milieu de XVe siècle (Paris, 1985), no. 9, 160–​3; map at 81. 41 Margaret Mullett, ed., Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries (Belfast, 2007). 42 Paul Gautier, “La Diataxis de Michel Attaliate,” Revue des études byzantines 39 (1981): 5–​ 143. For an analysis and study, see Paul Lemerle, Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin (Paris, 1977), 68–​112; and Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins, 36.

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produce a surplus, one third of which was reserved for the monastery and the rest for Michael’s son Theodore and his descendants.43 The same logic, but for a monastery of much bigger proportions, applied to the foundation by Gregory Pakourianos (d. 1086)  at Petritzos (today Bačkovo), near Plodviv (Philippoupolis) in Bulgaria, a community that has remained active down to the present. Gregory was a Georgian aristocrat who left his home at the head of a group of faithful horsemen to fight for the Byzantine emperor. He was a friend of Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–​1118) and helped him seize power in 1081. Named commander in chief of the western forces, he fought both the Normans who had landed from southern Italy and the Cumans who had crossed the Danube. Gregory’s fortune, partially inherited from his brother, Apasios, was immense, and he had no heir.44 He left all of his property to the monastery that he founded and dedicated to the Virgin in 1083 to serve as a place for his companions to retire.45 The monastery obtained the status of autodespoton. Its main purpose was to offer on behalf of Gregory and Apasios the perpetual prayers of the monks for the salvation of their souls; in addition, it had to give periodic donations to the poor and run numerous almshouses. Here again, surplus revenues were expected and distributed. Half went to the monastery’s reserves; when these reached a secure amount, the money was used to purchase more land. The other half was to be given as a gift to the employees of the monastery, the salaried and the paroikoi who cultivated the land; in this way, they had a stake in the prosperity of the entire enterprise.46 Monasteries, it seems, were now expected to provide a surplus.47 There are many examples of these large foundations, including several at Constantinople founded by imperial couples. The Virgin Full of Grace,



Michel Kaplan, “Why Were Monasteries Founded?” in Mullett, Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries, 28–​42; Michel Kaplan, “Why Were Monasteries Founded in the Byzantine World in the 12th and 13th Centuries?” in First International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium: Change in the Byzantine World in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Ayla Ödekan, Engin Akyürek, and Nevra Necipoğlu (Istanbul, 2010), 408–​13, reprinted in Pouvoirs, église et sainteté. Essais sur la société byzantine (Paris, 2011), 549–​63. 44 For a map of Gregory’s possessions, see Lemerle, Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin, 176. 45 Paul Gautier, “Le typikon du sébaste Grégoire Parkourianos,” Revue des études byzantines 42 (1984): 5–​145. 46 Kaplan, “Why Were Monasteries Founded?”; Kaplan, “Why Were Monasteries Founded in the Byzantine World?”; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 337–​9; Lemerle, Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin, 116–​91; Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins,  83–​4. 47 Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 342–​3; Jacques Lefort, “The Rural Economy, 7th–​12th Centuries,” in The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou, 3 vols. (Washington, DC, 2002), 1:231–​310; Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins, 189. 43

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for example, was founded by Irene Doukaina, wife of Alexios I Komnenos, between 1110 and 1118. Christ Pantocrator, a monastery that included a hospital and clinic for the poor, was founded by John II Komnenos (r. 1118–​43) in 1136, and its enormous triple church, destined to be a family mausoleum, still dominates the Golden Horn (Zeyrek Camii). While these monasteries were major players in the Byzantine economy, it is also interesting to analyze smaller foundations and study their impact on the economy. Average monasteries similarly participated in and benefited from the economic expansion of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.48 It is no coincidence then that, by the eleventh century, the steward was the expected successor to the hegumen.49 There were also much less prominent monasteries. As we have seen, Basil II’s law of 1 January 996 prescribed that monasteries with fewer than ten monks remained the responsibility of the villages.50 One example of such small monasteries is found in the Life of Cyril Phileotes (d. 1110).51 Cyril retired to the monastery that his brother Matthew had founded upon a ruined church that was held by his family. Cyril’s subsequent fame extended to the court and he was visited by Alexios I Komnenos and his family. With the goal of granting the monastery of the holy man a fiscal exemption, the emperor asked Cyril who the proprietor of the monastery was, and Cyril explained that it was built upon a few fiscal units (the author used the technical cadastral term stichos). A peasant proprietor usually did not hold more than one unit, or even a fraction of one. Thus, although Cyril’s family was fairly prosperous, its monastery still did not reach the limit of ten monks defined by Basil II.52 We know of the existence of this monastery because of Cyril’s Life, but no source remains to illustrate how it functioned economically. Through time, the great Athonite monasteries evolved in different ways. Lavra acquired considerable amounts of property at the end of the tenth century and beginning of the eleventh, first in Macedonia and then in Thrace.



See Michel Kaplan, “Retour sur le dossier du monastère de la Théotokos Éléousa à Stroumitza,” Zbornik Radova Vizantološkog Instituta 50 (2013): 479–​82, for an example of a medium-​size monastery founded by a bishop on his private property. 49 See Michel Kaplan, “Les moines et leurs biens fonciers à Byzance du VIIIe au Xe siècle: acquisition, conservation et mise en valeur,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 209–​ 23, reprinted in Pouvoirs, église et sainteté, 479–​95; and Michel Kaplan, “The Evergetis Hypotyposis and the Management of Monastic Estates in the Eleventh Century,” in The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-​Century Monasticism, ed. Margaret Mullett and Alan Kirby (Belfast, 1994), 103–​23. 50 See above, n. 25. 51 Vie de Cyrille le Philéote (BHG 468), in La vie de saint Cyrille le Philéote, moine byzantin († 1110), ed. and trans. Étienne Sargologos (Brussels, 1964). 52 Michel Kaplan, “Les élites rurales byzantines:  historiographie et sources,” Les élites rurales méditerranéennes au Moyen Âge (Ve–​XVe siècle), MEFRM 124.2 (2012): 306. 48

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The pace of these acquisitions slowed between 1030 and 1089; at this time the monastery retained 47,052 modioi in the themes (Byzantine administrative districts) of Boleron and Strymon, to which must be added its property in Peristerai near Thessaloniki and Chalkidiki, and part of the peninsula of Kassandra. In 1115 it received an important donation from Nikephoros Kephalas:  four estates of an undefined size in Macedonia and Thrace, and houses at Traianoupolis in Thrace. Expansion then stopped again until the end of the twelfth century, when Lavra obtained the very large estate of Gomatou on the isle of Lemnos, in theory one third of the island, just under 20,000 modioi. In addition to houses, animals, and paroikoi, not counting exemptions for its boats, before 1204 Lavra held 100,000 modioi. The only other monastery whose archives for this period are still extant is that of St. John the Theologian on the island of Patmos.53 The history of this monastery, however, was quite different from those discussed above. Its founder, Christodoulos, arrived on the island in 1087 to establish a monastery to which Alexios I Komnenos immediately granted land: the entire island of Patmos with four other small neighboring islands that were no more fertile (totaling about 34,000 modioi), plus an estate on the more fertile island of Leros (worth about 9,000 modioi). But Alexios forbade the monastery from acquiring anything else. These lands were insufficient to provide properly for the monks, who at first numbered around twenty but rose to twenty-​four by the middle of the next century. A grant in wheat and money provided by the fiscal estates of Crete before 1157 was largely sufficient to nourish the monks; the fact that this source of revenue was in Crete leads us to the more general question of monastic commerce.54 In 978 Lavra swapped with Iviron a boat exempted from 6,000 modioi (36 barrels) for an island near Athos. This boat was not intended to sell products of the monastery’s estates locally, but to conduct long-​range commerce to Constantinople and beyond. At the time of Lavra’s foundation, Athanasius built a port close by, probably to house the sailors in this inhospitable area, but also to answer Lavra’s economic needs. In 1045 Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 1043–​55) severely limited the trade of the Athonite monks: he permitted their boats to go to Thessaloniki as usual, but forbade them to go further than Ainos, east of the delta of Evros (Maritsa);55 this meant that they

Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins, 73–​83, and annex 2, 257–​60. On commerce, see Michel Kaplan, “Monks and Trade in Byzantium from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” in Trade in Byzantium: Papers from the Third Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, ed. Paul Magdalino and Nevra Necipoğlu (Istanbul, 2016), 55–​64. 55 Protaton no. 8, in Actes du Prôtaton, ed. Denise Papachryssanthou (Paris, 1975), 226–​7. 53

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had to sell their merchandise far from the capital’s highly profitable market. In addition, Monomachos reproached the monks “for trading here and there like lay people.” At the height of its commercial prosperity, Lavra benefited from 16,000 exempted modioi for seven boats.56 The boats were even more necessary for a monastery like that of Patmos, situated on an island. Besides the boat exempted in 1088 by Alexios I  Komnenos, it had boats donated by its founder, Christodoulos. In 1186 it held tax exemptions for three ships totaling 1,500 modioi (9 barrels). Between this date and 1204 the monastery doubled its transport capacity, as well as its number of monks. These boats sold meat and cheese; since meat was strictly forbidden in the monastery, its production was solely for trade. The monastery of St. John the Theologian is, thus, a good example of a monastery that produced goods to sell and thrived in part from this trade.

Monks Become Outstanding Managers These observations lead us to consider the economic behavior of monks. Note first that, in theory, every monastery had a steward. His importance became such that, as mentioned above, from the eleventh century, he was the presumed successor to the hegumen. The typika often described in detail everything regarding the monastery’s finances. Problems with controlling the monastery’s lands and the peasants who worked them inevitably rose as these properties multiplied. The oldest and generally smaller monasteries that had been given to a more important one, or whole villages acquired by the monastery, became metochia, where monks resided to monitor their development. The examples we have mentioned should not imply that all monasteries enjoyed a prosperous economy. Nikephoros Phokas’ novella of 964 evokes monks obsessed with financial gain but also monasteries in extreme economic distress, and then analyzes the causes of such distress. Certainly, monasteries saw their property grow but, too often, donors gave lands without the means of production to run them. Since the law forbade the sale of monastic property, monks could not mobilize their capital to invest but were constrained to search unceasingly for ways to exploit their lands. Thus, in the novella, the emperor prescribed that, instead of founding new monasteries or giving land to monasteries incapable of developing them, donors should give to those in



See Mirjana Živojinović, “The Trade of Mount Athos Monasteries,” Zbonik Radova Vizantološkog Instituta 29–​30 (1991): 101–​16.

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distress “servants, cattle, sheep, and other animals,” in order to help them to develop their own land.57 It is in this context that, during the eleventh century, the charistike, a conditional donation “to charity,” was developed on the initiative of bishops in charge of decaying monasteries.58 A lay person, called the charistikarios, would receive a supposedly poor monastery for one, two, or three generations in order to manage it. In exchange, once the livelihood of the monks was assured and its charitable obligations were met, any further surplus would be kept by the charistikarios. Foundation charters made by aristocrats, which multiplied at the end of the eleventh century, formerly forbade that their own foundation ever be given in charistike. During the same period, the patriarch John of Antioch addressed a vigorous attack against the charistike to Alexios I Komnenos: when prosperous monasteries were entrusted to lay persons in such a manner, the latter rushed to take away all the building materials of their supposed protégé, or opted to reside in the monastery at its expense, even if it was a female monastery, etc.59 Good charistikarioi did, however exist:  Michel Psellos (d. after 1077), for example, obtained the monasteries that he had requested but also others that asked to be placed under his control. According to Michel’s own account, he had had to spend a significant amount on Medikion in Bithynia before he himself got anything in return. Nevertheless, this institution of the charistike would die a natural death. Instead of risking the depredations of unscrupulous lay people, candidate monasteries, as well as the ecclesiastical authorities supervising them, preferred to find another monastery capable of managing and investing, and thus the distressed monastery would be entrusted to it in epidosis. Such a process of consolidation favored the strongest monasteries. How were the lands of the monasteries used? In 1085 the monastery of Strumica (ancient Tiberioupolis, now in Macedonia) received 500 modioi with twelve peasants with holdings besides their houses, and six teams of draft animals, sufficient to work this land. At this stage the land was, therefore, cultivated with direct labor, peasants working for a remuneration left undefined in the sources. This did not last: in 1152 each peasant was equipped with



Svoronos, Les novelles des empereurs macédoniens, 160. On this institution, see a synthesis by Michel Kaplan, “Les monastères et le siècle à Byzance: les investissements des laïques au XIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 27 (1984): 71–​83, reprinted in Byzance. Villes et campagnes (Paris, 2006), 123–​37. See also Mark C. Bartusis, Land and Privilege in Byzantium: The Institution of Pronoia (Cambridge, 2013), 116–​18 and  153–​9. 59 Paul Gautier, ed., “Réquisitoire du patriarche Jean d’Antioche contre le charisticariat,” Revue des études byzantines 33 (1975): 77–​132. 57

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a pair of oxen and a specific tenure; the 1,000 modioi then given to the monastery permitted them to extend their tenure to the size matching what their ploughs could farm.60 Besides his peasants’ tenures, Gregory Pakourianos, founder of the Petritzos monastery, had forty-​seven teams of draft animals that qualified as despotic (belonging to the master, as opposed to those of the paroikoi), which were used to cultivate the despotic land that the hegumen was forbidden to sell and on which salaried farmers had to work as outlined by the typikon. These forty-​seven teams meant little compared to the number of villages and estates held by the monastery and worked by the paroikoi. Such sections of the land directly exploited by monasteries (reserves) were therefore usually secondary, but they did exist. One might also wonder just how involved the monks and nuns were beyond the use of particular managerial methods, in the economic expansion that occurred in the empire. We have seen this in terms of trade, but it is also true of the countryside. They not only acquired lands, but also actively participated in developing new lands. We have seen above that the monks of Iviron quarreled with the villages of Siderokausia, in Chalkidiki, over the development of the swampy coastal plain within the area, formerly a simple pasture for animals. At the beginning of the twelfth century, another category of texts began to appear: archives (praktika) that inventory the possessions of monasteries. These include, village by village, a list of paroikoi with a cursory description of their family, their equipment, and their tenure, in addition to the fiscal income that the monastery received and the despotic lands (the reserve) managed directly by the monks. One of the best studied praktika is that of Radolibos, located 80 kilometers east of Thessaloniki.61 During the course of the eleventh century, a village community of independent peasants and landowners still existed, but comprised only a dozen or so members; it was next to a domain held by the fisc and cultivated by paroikoi. The village and the domain were given before 1090 to a Georgian aristocrat with no children, Symbatios Pakourianos, who bequeathed it in the same year to his wife, Kale, who later became a nun.62 Since Symbatios had wanted to be buried at Iviron and to be assured of perpetual prayer for the benefit



See Kaplan, “Retour sur le dossier.” Jacques Lefort, “Le cadastre de Radolibos, les géomètres et leurs mathématiques,” Travaux et mémoires 8 (1981):  269–​313; and Jacques Lefort, “Radolibos, population et paysage,” Travaux et mémoires 9 (1985): 195–​234. Both articles are reprinted in Jacques Lefort, Société rurale et histoire du paysage à Byzance (Paris 2006), 105–​54 and 161–​200. 62 Jacques Lefort, Nicolas Oikonomidès, and V. Kravari, eds., Actes d’Iviron, II. Du milieu de XVe siècle à 1204 (Paris, 1990), no. 44, 150–​6.

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of his soul, she in turn bequeathed the village of Radolibos to the monastery in her 1098 will.63 She had obtained from the imperial government the right to collect not only the taxes of the paroikoi64 but also the tax due to the fisc from those who remained independent peasants.65 Kale died soon after, before 1103—​the year in which the monks obtained an official document that designated them as owners of the estate.66 This village is one of the best documented in the archives of Iviron.67 The total size of the approximately 120 tenures was 3,600–​3,700 modioi, not including the lands that three aristocrats held in the village. Then came the nineteen despotic fields totaling 100 modioi, a good example of the ratio between the reserve and the tenures. This example is illustrative of what held true for monastic lands in general until the end of the empire. Most of them were allotted to small farmers, and the reserve, save for the vineyards, was of secondary economic importance. The case of Radolibos, as owned by Iviron, permits us to make another observation: over the course of the twelfth century, its arable area grew to encompass land of lesser quality that was harder to develop, particularly the slopes of the valley in which the village stood. Owing to population growth, this newly cultivated land became indispensable, even profitable, if agricultural prices increased or if peasants were able to exploit the new market that the broader demographic and commercial expansion offered. The demand for cereals, as well as wine, cheese, and fruit, increased. Agricultural prices in general rose, thus increasing the profitability of farming; this allowed people to live on smaller farms and made it worthwhile to cultivate marginal lands. At Strumica, as mentioned above, peasants who had once been without land were enriched, and within two generations became tenant farmers with teams of draft animals. With reserves that were not extensive but devoted to high value products, monasteries gained prosperity partially as the result of the higher levies on farmers who were now more prosperous.68 This, in combination with the process of consolidation we already observed that favored the richest and most powerful monasteries, meant that the Byzantine monastic economy was particularly prosperous on the eve of the Fourth Crusade.

Ibid., no. 47, 170–​83. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre,  356–​7. 65 Lefort et al., Actes d’Iviron, II, no. 48, 183–​8. 66 Ibid., no. 52 (1103), 203–​11. 67 Ibid. no. 53, 248–​83. 68 See Laiou and Morrisson, Byzantine Economy, 96–​146. 63

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The Trauma of 1204 and Its Consequences The capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 and the division of the empire among the Latin powers completely changed the political situation, however. Even though monasteries had previously suffered invasions from time to time, and even though some of them surely perished after the Turkish conquests in Asia Minor, the empire had guaranteed them overall prosperity in peacetime. After 1204 this phase ended until the restoration of  1261. The empire in exile at Nicaea enjoyed great economic prosperity. The emperor of Nicaea, John III Vatatzes (r. 1222–​54), began to restore the monastery of Lembos, located on a mountain near Smyrna. In the thirteenth century, this patriarchal monastery experienced a period of uninterrupted expansion starting with John III (largely before 1235), for which the largest acquisition was an area of about 13,500 modioi along the Gulf of Smyrna. By the time that the cartulary of Lembos ended in 1294, the monastery possessed approximately 20,000 modioi of land.69 Another example, unfortunately unique, of Nicaean prosperity is a monastery with relatively humble origins:  Theotokos (Virgin) of Boreine, located on a hillside near the city of Philadelphia. This monastery was founded in the beginning of the thirteenth century by a blacksmith from that city for his father, his brother, and his son Maximios. Maximios gave the monastery a typikon in 1247 and turned it into a prosperous establishment.70 At that time it already had two metochia, one given by a regional aristocrat and another that was purchased, as well as neighboring fields. In 1258, according to an act of Michael VIII, the monastery’s endowment had increased substantially: five metochia rich in precious objects, much like the mother house, 100 pieces of land, albeit mostly small ones, but also two important estates (one being around 2,000 modioi). The animals listed give a sense of the monastery’s acquired wealth: 9 teams of draft animals for wagons and 15 for cultivation, 8 mares, 17 donkeys, 5 mules, 300 pigs, 70 cows, 50 wild buffalo, and about 150 sheep. Through the founding and operation of this monastery, a middle-​class family rose to become aristocratic in this prosperous region, which would not be conquered by the Ottomans until 1390.71

Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins,  56–​61. Jacques Bompaire, Jacques Lefort, Vassiliki Kravari, and Christophe Giros, eds., Actes de Vatopédi, I. Des origines à 1329 (Paris, 2001), no. 15, 152–​62. 71 Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins, 38; Kaplan, “Why Were Monasteries Founded in the Byzantine World?” 410–​11.

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In Europe, where the territorial situation was much more confused after 1204, nearly all of the remaining documents come from Athos. The monasteries there seem either to have lost nothing, like Vatopedi, or very little, like Iviron. Lavra lost the estate it had acquired just before 1204 on the island of Lemnos, confiscated by the Venetians, but regained it once the island was reconquered.72 For other monasteries, the impact was quite varied. The Serbian monastery of Chilandar, founded only in 1198, is one of the few that we know acquired a village during this period (in 1227), in the valley of Strymon. The monastery of Prodrome near Serres, less sheltered from these events, probably suffered the loss of most of its property under the Latin occupation.73

In the Storm, Only Monasteries Keep Afloat Although the empire at Constantinople was restored in 1261 and recovered a good portion of the southern Balkans, in the following two centuries it had to face both the growth of the Serbian Empire and the Ottoman advance, as well as the upheaval brought by two civil wars in the beginning and middle of the fourteenth century. The Ottomans practically eliminated the Byzantines from Asia Minor and crossed into Europe, taking Gallipoli in 1354. They made Adrianople (Edirne) their capital and took Thessaloniki in 1394; although they surrendered the latter after being crushed by the Mongols at Ankara in 1402, they definitively retook it in 1430. In this very difficult period, many monasteries demonstrated great political skill. For example, Timios Prodromos of Serres managed to secure donations both from the Serbs and from two Byzantine emperors who were in conflict with one another, Andronikos II and his grandson Andronikos III. In 1328, when the grandson triumphed, the monastery managed to establish good relations with the influential John Kantakouzenos, who later became John VI in 1347 when he usurped the throne for several years from John V Palaiologos (r. 1341–​90), son of Andronikos III. The monastery emerged from its ruined state in 1269 and grew to hold more than 5,000 modioi (500 hectares) by 1309, double that in 1321, and more than 27,000 in 1355.74 It also owned houses and workshops in the town of Serres. For that matter, the investment



Smyrlis, La fortune des grands monastères byzantins,  54–​5. On the evolution of the wealth of this monastery, see ibid.,  85–​95. 74 Ibid.

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by monasteries in urban areas, notably those of Athos in Thessaloniki, had become a constant.75 The evolution of the property of the Athonite monasteries during the final century of Byzantine rule has been the subject of recent research. Regarding the enterprising spirit of these institutions, the active manner in which they rented their best land to winegrowers with fixed-​term contracts that allowed them to take into account economic shifts is now well documented.76 More recently, it is the entire economy of the Athonite monasteries within the context of the Byzantine Empire battling against the Ottomans that has been analyzed.77 The imperial government tried unceasingly to gain rights over land so that it could then grant them, particularly to soldiers, in the form of a lifetime annuity or pronoïa.78 Even where monasteries were not necessarily deprived of their land, which was supposed to be unalienable, they did lose all income from it. Emperor John V Palaiologos took such measures in 1375 concerning the lands recovered from the Serbs after their defeat by the Ottomans in 1371 at the Battle of Maritsa. His son Manuel II (r. 1391–​1425) issued a similar order in 1408–​9 for the lands regained from the Ottomans in Thrace after their defeat at Ankara. Nevertheless, background mechanisms favorable to monasteries persisted. In order to preserve what they could in the face of repeated invasions (Bulgarian, Serbs, Ottomans), aristocrats would give their property to nearby monasteries that would, at least, pray for them. Once Byzantine power returned, monasteries retained their holdings (as monastic property was inalienable) and the most powerful houses would instead attempt to acquire new properties given to them by the emperor from public property obtained when he recovered it from the invaders or from confiscated lands (occasionally though, from monasteries). Even when the empire had been reduced to the region around Constantinople, the Byzantine ruler was still acting in the same manner. Then another invasion occurred and aristocrats granted their property once again to monasteries, often the same ones. Some groups of monasteries, such as those of Mount Papikion in Thrace, located

Christophe Giros, “Présence athonite à Thessalonique, XIIIe–​XVe siècles,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 57 (2003): 77–​132. For the previous period, see Kaplan, “L’implantation des monastères du mont Athos.” 76 Michel Kaplan, “Quelques remarques sur les contrats de bail pour les vignes du monastère de Vatopédi,” in Byzantium, State and Society: In Memory of Nikos Oikonomidès, ed. Anna Avraméa, Angeliki Laiou, and Evangelos Chrysos (Athens, 2003), 283–​95. 77 Raúl Estangüi-​Gómez, Byzance face aux Ottomans. Exercice du pouvoir et contrôle du territoire sous les derniers Paléologues (milieu XIVe–​milieu XVe siècle) (Paris, 2014). 78 Ibid., esp.  242–​54. On the pronoïa, as a last resort, see Bartusis, Land and Privilege in Byzantium, which is not entirely convincing. 75

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in the foothills of the Rhodopes, were destroyed along with their archives; the Ottomans probably seized their property. The invaders stopped, however, at the border of Athos (as defined in 943 and still extant today). They also left the Athonite monks a good section of their property. Monks were therefore the only part of the aristocracy that consistently increased their holdings and therefore their economic power, at least until 1453.

Conclusion Byzantine monasteries, which in the first centuries lived off alms and the artisanal and agricultural work of the monks, later became a major economic power alongside the state and the emperor. Their power did not reside solely in land and rural production, since monks did not disdain trading. It is difficult to identify precisely when this shift occurred, but it seems to have coincided with the economic turnover around 750, which simultaneously saw the Byzantine economy (and not only Byzantium’s) begin to grow for more than five centuries and the initial rise of great aristocratic foundations outside Constantinople. The hegumens were among the powerful men whom the emperors of the tenth century sought to prohibit from acquiring land. The foundation of the monastery of Lavra jointly by the monk Athanasius and the future emperor Nikephoros Phokas in 961 marked a second turning point. Public authorities (such as Alexios I  Komnenos at the end of the eleventh century) happily drew at times from this new wealth to reestablish their finances and army, while other monasteries gave themselves or were given to lay aristocrats to manage and to try to restore. Even before the decisive blow to Byzantine public power dealt by the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the provisional dismemberment of the empire, the great monasteries (the only ones for which we really have sources) took a decisive step: they became the principal private economic power of the empire and the one that prospered by far the most during those difficult times. It is true, however, that the perspective of a historian is somewhat skewed, since the only extant archives from the end of the empire are those from Patmos79 and Athos, both of which managed partly to escape the consequences of Ottoman rule.

Nicolas Vatin, “Les Patmiotes contribuables ottomans (XVe–​XVIIe siècle),” Turcica 38 (2006): 123–​53; J. C. Alexander, “The Monasteries of Meteora during the First Two Centuries of Ottoman Rule,” Jarhbuch des österreichischen Byzantinistik 32 (1982): 95–​103.

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Bibliography Bartusis, Mark C. Land and Privilege in Byzantium: The Institution of Pronoia. Cambridge, 2013. Estangüi-Gómez, Raúl. Byzance face aux Ottomans. Exercice du pouvoir et contrôle du territoire sous les derniers Paléologues (milieu XIVe–milieu XVe siècle). Paris, 2014. Giros, Christophe. “Présence athonite à Thessalonique, XIIIe–XVe siècles.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 57 (2003): 77–132. Harvey, Alan. Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200. Cambridge, 1989. Kaplan, Michel. “Les élites rurales byzantines: historiographie et sources.” Les élites rurales méditerranéennes au Moyen Âge (Ve–XVe siècle), MEFRM 124.2 (2012): 299–312.   “The Evergetis Hypotyposis and the Management of Monastic Estates in the Eleventh Century.” In The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Monasticism, edited by Margaret Mullett and Alan Kirby, 103–23. Belfast, 1994.   Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle. Propriété et exploitation du sol. Paris, 1992.   “L’implantation des monastères du mont Athos à Thessalonique, Xe–milieu XIIIe siècle.” In Villes méditerranéennes au Moyen Âge, edited by Élisabeth Malamut and Mohammed Ouerfelli, 135–46. Aix-en-Provence, 2014. [Kaplan (2014a)]   “Monasteries:  Institutionalisation and Organisation of the Space in the Byzantine World until the End of the Twelfth Century.” In Diverging Paths: The Shape of Power and Institution in Medieval Islam and Christianity, edited by John Huston and Ana Rodriguez, 321–50. Leiden, 2014. [Kaplan (2014b)]   “Monks and Trade in Byzantium from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century.” In Trade in Byzantium: Papers from the Third Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, edited by Paul Magdalino and Nevra Necipoğlu, 55–64. Istanbul, 2016.   “Quelques remarques sur les contrats de bail pour les vignes du monastère de Vatopédi.” In Byzantium, State and Society:  In Memory of Nikos Oikonomidès, edited by Anna Avraméa, Angeliki Laiou, and Evangelos Chrysos, 283–95. Athens, 2003.   “Why Were Monasteries Founded?” In Mullett, Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries, 28–42.   “Why Were Monasteries Founded in the Byzantine World in the 12th and 13th Centuries?” In First International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium: Change in the Byzantine World in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, edited by Ayla Ödekan, Engin Akyürek, and Nevra Necipoğlu, 408–13. Istanbul, 2010. Laiou, Angeliki, and Cécile Morrisson. The Byzantine Economy. Cambridge, 2007. Lefort, Jacques. “Radolibos, population et paysage.” Travaux et mémoires 9 (1985): 195–234.   “The Rural Economy, 7th–12th Centuries.” In The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, 3 vols., 1:231–310. Washington, DC, 2002. Lemerle, Paul. Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin. Paris, 1977. Mullett, Margaret, ed. Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries. Belfast, 2007. Sarris, Peter. “Large Estates and the Peasantry in Byzantium, c. 600–1100.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 90 (2012): 29–50. Smyrlis, Konstantinos. La fortune des grands monastères byzantins (fin du Xe–milieu du XIVe siècle). Paris, 2006.

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THE CAROLINGIANS TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

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The Historiography of Central Medieval Western Monasticism Fe l ice L ifshitz

Bringing Chaos out of Order: Beyond the Rule of Benedict Unlike Eastern monastic historiography, for which historians have never constructed a coherent narrative,1 the story of central medieval Latin monasticism once seemed to be simplicity itself. The sixth-​century Rule produced at Benedict of Nursia’s Montecassino (RB), which observers likened to Mount Sinai as a source of sacred law, was said to have been quickly adopted in all Western monasteries outside Iberia.2 However, “the rule came to be far too laxly followed in many Benedictine monasteries, and in 910 the order of Cluny was founded to renew its strict observance.”3 The efforts of tenth-​century monastic reformers associated with Cluny transformed decadent monasteries into observant institutions and guaranteed that the RB “became for three centuries the uncontested source of all European religious life.”4 Thus, one survey of medieval Western monasticism covered the central Middle Ages in eight pages devoted to “the formation of a Benedictine tradition and the contribution of Cluny.”5





Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–​850 (Cambridge, 2007), 8. 2 Giorgio Falco, “Voci Cassinensi nell’alto Medioevo,” and Ezio Franceschini, “La questione della regola di S. Benedetto,” in Il monachesimo nell’alto medioevo e la formazione della civiltà Occidentale (8–​14 aprile, 1956) (Spoleto, 1957), 15–​34 and 221–​56; Maur Cocheril, Études sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal (Lisbon, 1966), 29 and 52–​60. 3 Aubrey Gwynn and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, vol. 3:  Ireland (Harlow, 1970), 102. Useful snapshots of scholarship concerning Cluny can be found in two collections of previously published essays: Helmut Richter, ed., Cluny. Beiträge zu Gestalt und Wirkung der Cluniazensischen Reform (Darmstadt, 1975); and Noreen Hunt, ed. Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (London, 1971). 4 Mayeul de Dreuille, From East to West: A History of Monasticism (New York, 1999), 93. 5 Janet Burton, Medieval Monasticism: Monasticism in the Medieval West from its Origins to the Coming of the Friars (Oxford, 1996), 11–​18. 1

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Regions that could not be made to conform to this pattern were treated as monastic tabulae rasae. For instance, scholars were loathe to accord monastic status to the hermitages, minsters, and communities of recluses that dotted the Scottish landscape during the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries because they apparently made do without formal rules, while the plethora of monastic forms that thrived on the Iberian peninsula during those centuries (family monasteries functioning as agricultural communes, dual-​sex monasteries, and patrimonial monasteries) were dismissed as undisciplined and bizarre anarchy.6 Only a smattering of dissonant scholarly voices rejected the generally dominant understanding of “proper” monasticism as cenobitic, regular, and (above all) Benedictine:  a 1907 study of Kanonissenstifter (“foundations for canonesses”) treated the RB as an instrument of oppression, rather than as the venerable epitome of the monastic spirit, and a 1978 study puckishly argued that the spirit of the RB was antithetical to the development of learned culture, owing to (among other things) its limitations on speech.7 The contribution by Díaz in this volume demonstrates that Iberian forms are no longer being measured unfavorably against some purported Benedictine ideal; instead, peasant communities that were established in Iberia as monastic structures, paving the way for dual-​sex monasteries, are being taken seriously in their own right as part of a diverse monastic landscape. Meanwhile, archaeologists in Scotland are approaching their eighth-​ and ninth-​century evidence without any preconceptions concerning “what an early monastery was.”8 Flourishing Scottish monastic communities such as Portmahomack, high-​caliber production centers planned ab initio to include specialized craft areas, are now discussed with reference to their material culture, rather than to their rules.9 Indeed, it is increasingly recognized that





On recluses, more generally, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in volume II. On late antique Spanish monasticism, see the article by Díaz in this volume. See also Ian B. Cowan and David E. Easson, Medieval Religious Houses of Scotland, with an Appendix on the Houses of the Isle of Man (New York, 1957; 2nd ed. 1976), x–​xi and 2–​4; Cocheril, Études sur le monachisme, 67–​124; José Mattoso, Le monachisme ibérique et Cluny. Les monastères du diocèse de Porto de l’an mille à 1200 (Louvain, 1968), 373–​5. 7 K. Heinrich Schäfer, Die Kanonissenstifter im Deutschen Mittelalter. Ihre Entwicklung und innere Einrichtung im Zusammenhang mit dem Altchristlichen Sanktimonialium (Stuttgart, 1907; reprint Amsterdam, 1965). On the term “Kanonissenstifter,” see Irene Crusius, “Sanctimoniales quae se canonicas vocant: das Kanonissenstift als Forschungsproblem,” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius (Göttingen, 2011), 30–​5. Arno Borst, Mönche am Bodensee, 610–​1525 (Sigmaringen, 1978), 48–​51 and 65. 8 Martin Carver, “An Iona of the East: The Early-​Medieval Monastery at Portmahomack, Tarbat Ness,” Medieval Archaeology 48 (2004): 7. 9 Peter Yeoman, “Investigations on the May Island and Other Early Medieval Churches and Monasteries in Scotland,” and Cecily A. Spall, “Reflections on the Monastics Arts:  Recent Discoveries at Portmahomack, Tarbat, Easter Ross,” both in The 6

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following a rule at all was relatively rare before 800, and a contested notion long after that date.10 As is clear from the discussions by Scott Bruce and Rutger Kramer in this volume, two conclusions are now generally accepted. The first is that the RB only achieved preeminence as part of an early ninth-​ century project of religious correctio by the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40) and his associate Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) (a project that built upon, but went far beyond, the efforts of Louis’s predecessors). The second is that even these efforts did not lead to the universal adoption of the RB. As Phillip Rousseau and Albrecht Diem demonstrate in this volume, Benedict of Aniane’s efforts to unearth, collect, and transmit a host of disparate late antique and early medieval monastic rules constituted the key process by which the very notion of normative observance, rather than specific adherence to the RB, came to prominence. Benedict of Aniane effectively publicized the existence of a wide variety of rules, such as the seventh-​century rule of Fructuosus of Braga.11 He tried to persuade his contemporaries that the various rules all concorded with one another, and that the RB contained the most perfect expression of an underlying unified monastic ideal, but this was a unity that “thrive[d]‌on the reality of diversity, not in spite of it.”12 The “fluidity of Carolingian monasticism” is front and center in Kramer’s essay, as it is in other recent work on the period. Julian Hendrix, for instance, noted how monastic rules “typically travelled in packs,”13 even at St. Gall, possessor of what is considered the best available copy of the RB (in the ninth-​century codex St. Gall Stiftsbibliothek 914).14 The vibrancy of monastic life in that community did not come from exclusively following the RB to the letter, but rather from the willingness of the monks to take inspiration from letters, tractates, rules, customaries, and biographies







Archaeology of the Early Medieval Celtic Churches, ed. Nancy Edwards (Leeds, 2009), 227–​ 44 (esp. 231–​3 and 239–​41) and 315–​32 (esp. 329). See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume; also Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 54. 11 Paula Barata Dias, “A recepção da Regula Monachorum de S.  Frutuoso na cultura carolíngia,” in IV Congresso Internacional de Latim Medieval Hispânico. Lisboa, 12–​15 de outubro de 2005, ed. Aires A. Nascimeto and Paulo F. Alberto (Lisbon, 2006), 345–​59. 12 See the article by Kramer in this volume. 13 Julian Hendrix, “Monastic Life at Reichenau and St. Gall,” www.stgallplan.org/​en/​ index_​plan.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). This digital humanities project centers on the Plan of St. Gall, an artifact whose nature and function has been vigorously debated for decades (see the articles by Cohen and Lauwers in this volume). 14 Bruce L. Venarde, ed. and trans., The Rule of Saint Benedict (Cambridge, MA, 2011), from this codex.

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associated with various monastic leaders. That mix of sources, combined with local traditions, generated a robust, and unique, spiritual and intellectual culture. As virtually every contribution to this volume can attest, the field of monastic historiography has moved toward a new appreciation for the extreme diversity of the modes of medieval monastic life,15 whether for men, or for women (who have emerged from the shadows of near-​total neglect to be recognized for their “pivotal role” and “profound cultural importance”),16 or for dual-​sex communities.17 If the trend toward celebration of diversity continues, specialists may soon be in a position to treat each and every European community as a unique expression of the monastic impulse, given the understanding that (like St. Gall) even models of Benedictine observance such as Cluny and Montecassino drew their own (often shifting) customs from a variety of sources.18 Furthermore, scholars are increasingly moving beyond a focus on organized communities, as they work to integrate recluses both male and female, as well as the many women who practiced asceticism in domestic settings, into the history of monasticism.19 It now seems unavoidable as well as desirable that scholars continue “bringing chaos out of order” to reveal the “remarkable range of experiences and practices” that characterized medieval Western monasticism.20 It is no small irony that the Italian peninsula, once hailed as the source of disciplined Western homogeneity, currently seems to boast the highest level of monastic heterogeneity, primarily because it is there that the longstanding absence of a coherent narrative for Eastern developments impinges most forcefully on visions of Western orderliness. Over the decades, specialists have painted an ever more complex picture of the monastic landscape on



Diversity even constitutes the dominant theme of Jones’s discussion of monastic life in Anglo-​Saxon England in his article in this volume. 16 Gert Melville and Anne Müller, eds., Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages:  Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts (Münster, 2011), preface, ix. 17 The article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume surveys the “astonishing variety of configurations” that dual-​sex communities displayed. 18 Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Rules and the ‘Rule’ at Tenth-​Century Cluny,” Studia Monastica 19 (1977):  307–​20; Mariano Dell’Omo, “La regola vissuta:  consuetudini monastiche e cultura spirituale a Montecassino tra alto e basso Medioevo,” in I fiori e’ frutti santi. S. Benedetto, la regola, la santità nelle testimonianze dei manoscritti cassinesi, ed. Mariano Dell’Omo (Milan, 1998), 47–​60. 19 See the contribution by Magnani in this volume and the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in volume II. 20 Hendrik Dey, “Bringing Chaos out of Order: New Approaches to the Study of Early Western Monasticism,” in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 20. 15

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the peninsula and its associated islands during the central Middle Ages:  as entirely Greek and specifically Basilian (1938); as a fundamentally Latin world spurred to a spiritual renaissance through the influence of Eastern hermits and ascetics (1961 and 1963); as a hodgepodge of Italo-​Byzantine eremitical, cenobitic, and combination forms such as the laura, which put individual cells under the authority of a single leader (1963); as a bubbling cauldron of dynamic experimentation, creativity, and originality in which variegated Italo-​Greek and Greco-​Oriental forms sat cheek by jowl with “traditional” houses such as Montecassino and Cava (2001); and, finally, as a diverse indigenous mix of wandering ascetics, cloistered monks, household religious, solitary hermits, and cave monastics whose practices cannot simply be explained as imports from somewhere else (Ramseyer in this volume).21 Although contributors to this volume were encouraged to take Byzantine developments into account where relevant, the vast majority of the essays in this section (aside from Ramseyer and Howe) are completely silent on the matter. The default orientation for scholarship on central medieval monasticism appears to treat East and West as entirely separate spheres. Yet John Howe argues that the Italian peninsula was not atypical in this regard, and calls on scholars to recognize the existence of multiple points of East–​West contact and Eastern influence all over Europe throughout the central Middle Ages. If researchers in fact pick up this baton, the project of bringing chaos out of order could expand exponentially in the future.

Beyond Cluny: Monastic Reform in the Central Middle Ages As we have seen, the classic narrative of Western monastic history posited a post-​Carolingian decline, arrested by Cluniac reform. Manifold causes for this decline were cited, some external to the affected monasteries themselves, such as a purported breakdown in secular order that indirectly impacted monastic health, or the supposedly pernicious effects of lay influence on monastic

Lynn Townsend White, Jr., Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily (Cambridge, MA, 1938); Bernard Hamilton, “The City of Rome and the Eastern Churches in the Tenth Century,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 27 (1961):  16 and 25, and P. A. McNulty and B. Hamilton, “Orientale lumen et magistra latinitas:  Greek Influences on Western Monasticism (900–​1100),” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–​1963. Études et mélanges, vol. 1 (Chevetogne, 1963), 183 and 186 (both articles reprinted in Bernard Hamilton, Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (London, 1979)); Silvano Borsari, Il monachesimo bizantino nella Sicilia e nell’Italia meridionale prenormanne (Naples, 1963); Giovanni Vitolo, “Le ricerche in ambito meridionale,” in Dove va la storiografia monastica in Europa? ed. Giancarlo Andenna (Milan, 2001), 159–​282.

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communities.22 From this perspective, establishing the liberty of monasteries from lay “interference” was the key to Cluny’s success, as the community built on its own exemption from secular control (replaced by the protection of the see of Rome). Coming to grips with central medieval Western monasteries thus required historians to get a handle on their political, social, cultural, and economic (in short, secular) contexts. This posed a methodological challenge, because the vast majority of the sources used to (re)construct central medieval politics, institutions, and aristocratic networks (such as charters and memorial books) were produced by—​and ultimately for—​monastic communities. Beginning in the 1970s, increased attention to discourse facilitated the critical analysis of these “sources” as interested attempts to constitute social memory and construct identities.23 By asking hard questions about the circumstances of redaction and the contexts of transmission of sources, specialists reconceptualized documents as attempts to shape a situation rather than as neutral records of events. For instance, the production of cartularies and the establishment of archives by monasteries were re-​visioned as ideologically loaded strategic weapons of reformers whose main goal was to defend monastic property against lay claims.24 Eventually, the very notion that the central Middle Ages was marked by political and institutional breakdown, violence, and a predatory warrior aristocracy came to be seen as a purposeful misrepresentation fabricated by prolific and persuasive eleventh-​century (male and female) monastic





Barbara H. Rosenwein, Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 1982), 40–​3, 55–​6, 83, and 101–​3; Giancarlo Andenna, “La storiografia su Cluny in Italia nel XX secolo,” in Andenna, Dove va la storiografia monastica? 305–​6. H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford, 1970), xvi, described how “Cluny’s foundation charter of 909 was already a manifesto of radical opposition to the incursions of lay feudalism into the spiritual sphere.” For another example of the assumption that secular “interference” damaged monastic communities, see Peter O’Dwyer, Céli Dé: Spiritual Reform in Ireland, 750–​900 (Dublin, 1977), xi–​xiii, 15–​16, and 193. 23 Isabelle Rosé, “Les moines et leur vie communautaire du IXe au XIIe siècle,” in Ecclesia in medio nationis:  Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (Leuven, 2011), 13–​19 and 33–​4, as well as her contribution to this volume. For a recent case study, see Luigi Andrea Berto, “Oblivion, Memory, and Irony in Medieval Montecassino: Narrative Strategies of the ‘Chronicles of St. Benedict of Cassino’,” Viator 38 (2007) 45–​61. For an example of how scholars once uncritically accepted the emplotments embedded in their “sources,” see Constance Britain Bouchard, ed., The Cartulary of Flavigny, 717–​1113 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), vii and 4. 24 See the article by Bruce in this volume. See also Florian Mazel, “Monachisme et aristocratie aux Xe–​XIe siècles: un regard sur l’historiographie récente,” and Nicolas Ruffini-​Ronzani and Jean-​Francois Nieus, “Société seigneuriale, réformes ecclésiales: les enjeux documentaires d’une révision historiographique,” in Vanderputten and Meijns, Ecclesia in medio nationis, 69, and 86 and 93. 22

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historians eager to promote the myth that monastic reformers brought order out of disorder.25 As a result of this sort of discursive analysis, the idea that “lay influence” could only be damaging to monasteries has now largely vanished, replaced by an understanding that monasteries and monastic personnel were thoroughly enmeshed and actively engaged in their own societies.26 The relationship between secular elites and monastic communities was sometimes fraught, but on the whole it was symbiotic, and was solidly anchored in place from the Carolingian period onwards (as demonstrated by Kramer and Rosé in this volume).27 Furthermore, lay aristocrats of all stripes, including lay abbots and lay abbesses, have emerged as at times exemplary leaders who strengthened the monastic communities under their control (sometimes even against vociferous monastic opposition).28 Finally, most specialists are now persuaded that Cluny did not implacably stand for a program of monastic independence from worldly authorities; instead, it affectionately supported secular rulers, above all the German emperors, until the “radical reform” of the late eleventh century.29 The focus of much recent scholarship on Cluny has largely been on reconstructing details of daily life inside the Cluniac mother house









Patrick Geary, “Monastic Memory and the Mutation of the Year Thousand,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts:  Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 26 and 32. 26 For instance, one cannot comprehend the political structures of the German empire without taking into account the noble Kanonissenstifter of Saxony, and vice versa (Crusius, “Sanctimoniales,” 28–​9). See also Mazel, “Monachisme et aristocratie,” 60–​75; and Marios Costambeys, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics and the Abbey of Farfa, 700–​900 (Cambridge, 2007), 52–​3. 27 See also see the articles by Raajmakers, Contreni, Devroey, and Kaplan in this volume for other aspects of monastic embeddedness in “the world.” Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch, “Die Gemeinschaften der Lebenden und Verstorbenen in Zeugnissen des Mittelalters,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 1 (1967):  365–​405, was an important early study of the dynamic; Mariel Pérez, “El control de lo sagrado como instrumento de poder: los monasterios particulares de la aristocracia altomedieval leonesa,” Anuario de estudios medievales 42 (2012): 799–​822, is a recent variation on the theme. 28 Mazel, “Monachisme et aristocratie,” 50–​ 9; Gordon Blennemann, Die Metzer Benediktinerinnen im Mittelalter. Studien zu den Handlungsspielräumen geistlicher Frauen (Husum, 2011), 256; Scott Wells, “The Warrior Habitus:  Militant Masculinity and Monasticism in the Henrician Reform Movement,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (New York, 2010), 57–​85, esp. 69–​80. The groundbreaking work in this regard was Franz J. Felten, Äbte und Laienäbte im Frankenreich. Studie zum Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche im früheren Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1980). 29 Mazel, “Monachisme et aristocratie,” 65. The groundbreaking work was Robert G. Heath, Crux Imperatorum Philosophia: Imperial Horizons of the Cluniac Confraternitas, 964–​ 1109 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1976). 25

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and its affiliates, rather than on the community’s role in the movement to liberate monasteries from lay control.30 But the significance of Cluny as a historiographic theme has never been confined to the subject of monasticism. As Joachim Wollasch wrote in 1967, “A considerable proportion of all that is written about the Middle Ages is devoted to the subject of the abbey of Cluny.”31 The sheer amount of attention paid to Cluny scarcely diminished in subsequent decades.32 While one school of thought challenged the tradition of “pan-​Clunism” (tracing all significant developments in Europe from the tenth century onwards to the influence of Cluny),33 a rival approach continued to tout the transformative impact of the Cluniac movement.34 Alongside scholarly articles insisting that Cluny did not furnish the blueprint for the new organizational models of the Roman Church and of various secular monarchies during the eleventh and twelfth centuries,35 or that Cluny was not responsible for the Crusades, the Reconquista, the pilgrimage route to Santiago, and the Romanization of the Iberian peninsula,36 relatively recent works intended for the educated public still put Cluny at “center stage in the turbulent theatre that was Europe … the hub of the wheel whose spokes extended to every country in Europe and before long as far as the Holy Land.”37 To judge by the essays in this volume,







For instance, Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism:  The Cluniac Tradition c. 900–​1200 (Cambridge, 2007); Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, “The Sociomusical Role of Child Oblates at the Abbey of Cluny in the Eleventh Century,” in Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, ed. Susan Boynton and Roe Minkok (Middleton, CT, 2006), 3–​24. 31 Joachim Wollasch, “A Cluniac Necrology from the Time of Abbot Hugh,” in Hunt, Cluniac Monasticism, 179. 32 Cristina Andenna, “Studi recenti sui canonici regolari,” in Andenna, Dove va la storiografia monastica? 106. 33 For the nineteenth-​century origins, and (partial) twentieth-​century rejection, of pan-​ Clunism, see Noreen Hunt, “Cluniac Monasticism,” in Hunt, Cluniac Monasticism, 1. 34 For instance, H.  E.  J. Cowdrey, “Cluny and the First Crusade,” Revue bénédictine 83 (1973):  285–​311; Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion:  Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002). For a critique of this most recent stage of pan-​Clunism, see David Nirenberg, “Engaging Order and Exclusion:  Reflections on a Recent Book by Dominique Iogna-​ Prat,” Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005): 389–​96. 35 Constance Britain Bouchard, “‘Feudalism,’ Cluny, and the Investiture Controversy,” in Medieval Monks and Their World:  Ideas and Realities. Studies in Honor of Richard E.  Sullivan, ed. David R. Blanks et  al. (Leiden, 2006), 81–​91; Giles Constable, “Cluny and the Investiture Controversy,” in The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays (Münster, 2010), 179–​86. 36 Adeline Ruquoi, “Cluny, el camino francés y la reforma gregoriana,” Medievalismo 20 (2010): 97–​122, esp. 98–​101; Giles Constable, “Cluny and the First Crusade,” in Abbey of Cluny, 197–​211. 37 Edwin Mullins, Cluny: In Search of God’s Lost Empire (Oxford, 2006), 77 and 79. 30

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however, both belief in the centrality of Cluny and the desire to revisit and recalibrate the degree of Cluniac influence have now waned considerably.38 More important, however, than the eclipse of pan-​ Clunism, has been the broader rethinking of the nature of “reform” (as discussed in Steven Vanderputten’s and Christopher Jones’s contributions to this volume), now seen by many specialists as a self-​interested discursive strategy periodically utilized by activists to legitimate their own political and spiritual agendas.39 The very idea that monastic history is marked by periods of catastrophic decadence followed by waves of heroic revival through reform is increasingly seen as the creation of polemicists in tenth-​, eleventh-​, and twelfth-​century monasteries who rewrote their pasts (including through the introjection of a “black legend” of the laity).40 For instance, Gaillard’s study of Lorraine revealed healthy, vital, and stable communities in the region during the second half of the ninth century, invalidating the negative pronouncements made by reformers during the 920s, and replaced the received homogenizing narrative with a series of unique stories of thriving, dynamic houses.41 Although specialists have generally retained the term “reform” in connection with the developments of the period, they utilize it with a newfound sophistication, governed by a commitment to the recognition of diversity across institutions in terms of physical space, customs, liturgy, and resources.42 A minority of scholars, such as Anna Taylor, have gone so far as to eschew entirely both the term and the concept of “reform.” Taylor studied monastic houses that were displaced from their cultural centrality by the tenth-​century rise of cathedral schools and courtier-​ bishops.43 Despite their resulting



Cluny is central (and necessarily so) to the discussions in the articles by Bruce, Rosé, and Vanderputten in this volume, but is otherwise hardly accorded any outsized significance by contributors to this volume. 39 Rosé, “Les moines et leur vie communautaire,” 34–​7. 40 Ruffini-​Ronzani and Nieus, “Société seigneuriale, réformes ecclésiales,” 94–​9; John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–​304. 41 Michèle Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 2006). 42 Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process:  Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 11–​13; Rosé, “Les moines et leur vie communautaire,” 40–​2; Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 4; Alexis Wilkin, “Communautés bénédictines et environnement économique, IXe–​ XIIe siècles:  réflexions sur les tendances historiographiques de l’analyse du temporel monastique,” in Vanderputten and Meijns, Monastic Reform as Process, 118. However, Billett (in this volume) represents a counter-​current to the dominant trend, for he finds that “liturgical evidence often invites interpretation according to the older conventions.” Billet affirms many aspects of the classic narrative of central medieval Western monasticism in relation to the spread of the Benedictine cursus. 43 Anna Taylor, Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800–​1050 (Cambridge, 2013). 38

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sociocultural marginalization, these communities remained spiritually and intellectually vibrant, as evidenced by the verse saints’ vitae at the core of the monastic educational curriculum. These epic Lives, verse adaptations or versions of pre-​existent prose vitae, had long been dismissed as testaments to the abysmal cultural level of central medieval monasteries, yet Taylor argued that they revealed a sophisticated educational and intellectual culture centered on the synthesis of pagan/​classical and Christian culture.44 In sum, most scholars now understand central medieval Europe to have witnessed a broad Carolingian-​ era movement of correctio (discussed by Kramer in this volume), followed by innumerable local reforms, but do not view any of these movements as necessitated by laxity, decay, or lay “interference.”

Women: Limited Visibility For most of the twentieth century, medieval religious women were invisible to scholarship, and Lina Eckenstein’s 1896 Woman Under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-​Lore and Convent Life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500 was the main resource available to those interested in their stories. Jean Leclercq was exceptional for including nuns as early as 1968 in his arguments concerning the importance of books and learning to medieval monastic spirituality.45 Equally unusual were the contemporaneous efforts by Bernard Hamilton to demonstrate the active engagement of tenth-​century Roman matrons in the foundation and endowment of women’s communities.46 Yet most specialists resisted or sidestepped evidence concerning religious women well into the 1990s. Despite the attention lavished on Cluny, it was not until 1987 that Marcigny-​ sur-​Loire—​a priory for high-​born nuns that formed a double community with Cluny—​received a full study.47 As late as 2011 it was still possible to assert that gender history had minimally impacted the study of central medieval monasticism.48 In fact, coverage remains spotty, with most work concentrated in



Ibid., 10. Jean Leclercq, “Books and Reading in Medieval Cloisters,” in Aspects of Monasticism, ed. Jean Leclercq, trans. Mary Dodd (Kalamazoo, MI, 1978; first published in French, Paris, 1968), 284–​5 and 291–​2. 46 Bernard Hamilton, “The Monastic Revival in Tenth-​Century Rome,” Studia Monastica 4 (1962): 35–​68, esp. 42–​3 and 52–​7; Bernard Hamilton, “The House of Theophylact and the Promotion of the Religious Life among Women in Tenth-​Century Rome,” Studia Monastica 12 (1970): 195–​217, esp. 196 and 216. 47 Else M. Wischerman, Marcigny-​ sur-​ Loire. Gründungs-​und Frühgeschichte des ersten Cluniacenserinnenpriorates (1055–​1150) (Munich, 1986). 48 Rosé, “Les moines et leur vie communautaire,” 23. 44

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later centuries.49 Nor has “progress” been unidirectional. Half a century after Hamilton spotlighted female participation in tenth-​century Roman monastic matronage, a study of the same wave of aristocratic euergetism confined itself to the activities of Prince Alberic.50 A 1980 call for papers on women and medieval monasticism by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank was a major catalyst to research in the field. It resulted in many conference panels during the early 1980s, and in the publication of three volumes of articles.51 Much of that early work was compensatory, for instance arguing simply that women’s houses existed throughout the Italian peninsula during the early and central Middle Ages.52 But recent work on women religious has been transformative, contributing to the historiographical shift away from homogenizing reform narratives toward recognition of local variety. Women’s houses often resisted the imposition of any reforms (such as attempts to introduce claustration) or rules that threatened to negate the traditions of their communities, while every women’s community that did embrace the RB adapted it in unique ways to fit its own needs, including by retaining “irregular” local practices.53 Work on non-​Benedictine women’s monasticism has reached similar conclusions. The Council of Aachen (816/​17) produced Institutiones for canons and canonesses, neither of which was intended (or received) as a “rule” to be followed precisely, but functioned as general guidelines to be adjusted to individual circumstances.54 Thus, each and every Kanonissenstift (best paraphrased as “house of canonesses”) had its own unique habit, which, moreover, the canonesses wore only while performing the liturgy; otherwise they wore worldly clothing, which must have varied even more.55



Annalisa Albuzzi, “Il monachesimo femminile nell’Italia medioevale:  spunti di riflessione e prospettive di recerca in margine alla produzione storiografica degli ultimi trent’anni,” in Andenna, Dove va la storiografia monastica? 131–​89. 50 Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, “Aristocratic Euergetism and Urban Monasteries in Tenth-​Century Rome,” in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 273–​87. 51 John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank, eds., Medieval Religious Women, 3  vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984–​95). 52 Dorothy de F. Abrahamse, “Byzantine Asceticism and Women’s Monasteries in Early Medieval Italy,” in ibid., 1:31–​49. 53 Hedwig Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis der benediktinischen Reformen des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts:  Gorze, Cluny, Hirsau, St. Blasien und Siegburg,” and Katrinette Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen: die Adaption der Benediktsregel im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert,” in Melville and Müller, Female vita religiosa, 275–​328 (esp. 279–​81) and 235–​ 73 (esp. 244, 248, 253, and 269–​70); Charlotte Warnke, “Das Kanonissenstift St. Cyriacus zu Gernrode im Spannungsfeld zwischen Hochadel, Kaiser, Bischof und Papst von der Gründung 961 bis zum Ende des Investiturstreits 1122,” in Crusius, Studien zum Kanonissenstift, 201–​73. 54 Crusius, “Sanctimoniales,” 14. 55 Ibid.,  31–​3.

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Recent research on religious women has done more than reinforce the overall trend in monastic historiography from lamenting decadence to celebrating diversity. Some scholars have gone so far as to describe religious women as “public” figures: active, pious, educated members of the medieval clergy who administered both parish churches and schools (as Schäfer argued more than a century ago).56 Kanonissenstifter were intended to fulfill important public and political roles, such as the education of aristocratic girls who would return to the world to govern, manage property, and raise children, and memorial functions for the families of the governing elites—​activities that should not be coded as “private” or domestic.57 Numerous scholars are overcoming a longstanding tendency to treat religious women as mere pawns in the policies of their aristocratic families, thereby denying them both vocations and agency. A study of San Salvatore/​Santa Giulia emphasized the political savvy of the administrators of the house as they negotiated with their various benefactors. The women’s political agility was part and parcel of their broader successes in the economic and intellectual arenas, and of their reputation as reliable providers of social services.58 Similarly, a study of the female houses of Saint-​Glossinde and Saint-​ Pierre-​aux-​Nonnains in Metz demonstrated how those women navigated their world. Over centuries they developed their own policies and practices, both internally and externally, to create heterogeneous communities with an extensive series of sociopolitical and intellectual-​cultural roles.59 Like their Brescian counterparts, the nuns of central medieval Metz acted on the public stage in the interests of their own institutions, for instance through intensive historiographical efforts to style themselves as königsnah (“close to the monarch”).60 Cohen’s contribution to this volume is exemplary in its treatment of the communities of Gernrode and Essen as both politically engaged through their own agency and genuinely committed to the spiritual life.61 But the full integration of women into the monastic narrative has hardly become



Schäfer, Die Kanonissenstifter im Deutschen Mittelalter, 30, 76ff., and 172ff. See also Crusius, “Sanctimoniales,”  12–​13. Crusius, “Sanctimoniales,” 15–​22 and 27. For later centuries, see Sabine Klapp, “Geistliche Frauen—​mächtige Frauen? Die Äbtissinnen von Buchau im späten Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Frauen in Württemberg, ed. Sigrid Hirbodian, Sabine Klapp, and Tjark Wegner (Ostfildern, 2016), 81–​106. 58 Gabriele Archetti, “Il monachismo bresciano nella storiografia di fine secolo,” in Andenna, Dove va la storiografia monastica? 462–​70. 59 Blennemann, Die Metzer Benediktinerinnen,  17–​18. 60 Ibid.,  255–​6. 61 The articles by Blennemann and Raajmakers (in this volume) also treat central medieval religious women as both significant (including politically, for instance in the Christianization of Europe) and devout. 56

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standard; many scholars of central medieval monasticism still either ignore the existence of women completely or mention them only minimally or in passing. A few special features have distinguished the historiography of women’s houses (when they have not been simply overlooked). First, whereas the tendency in the male monastic narrative has been to celebrate periods of reform, it has been much more common for historians of women’s monasticism—​ and of women’s history in general—​to emplot their histories in terms of decline.62 The decline-​and-​fall scenario can be magnetically attractive even to scholars in a position to know that the evidence points in other directions. One influential article elegantly traced the supposedly catastrophic effects of the imposition of “strict active enclosure” on women’s communities as part of the Carolingian reform movement: enclosed women could not take business trips to manage estates, network, and fundraise, resulting in a dramatic decline in women’s monasticism.63 Yet, previous work had already shown that the legislated norms of Carolingian reformers concerning enclosure were often blatantly disregarded (a conclusion subsequently confirmed),64 and a contemporaneous charter-​based study revealed a plethora of new women’s houses in the tenth and eleventh centuries (enough to constitute a “feminist revival”), houses whose abbesses in fact traveled extensively on business.65 Another peculiar characteristic of the study of medieval religious women has been a tendency to conceptualize their spirituality in terms of visual culture (or, to a lesser extent, aurality).66 The vast majority of the scholarship that has taken this approach has concerned the high and later Middle Ages, and so it has not necessarily been clear to what extent “visuality” might





See Catherine Peyroux, “Lands of Women? Writing the History of Early Medieval Women in Ireland and Europe,” Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 217–​27. Classic examples include Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia, PA, 1981); and Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, 1992). 63 Jane Tibbets Schulenberg, “Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (c. 500–​1100),” in Nichols and Thomas Shank, Medieval Religious Women, 1:51–​86, esp. 71–​7. 64 Schulenberg (ibid., 69–​71) simultaneously accepted and ignored the conclusions of Jean Leclercq “La clôture: points de repère historiques,” Collectanea cisterciensa 43 (1981): 366–​ 76. For the widespread rejection of claustration by women’s communities in the ninth and tenth centuries, see Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen,” 251 and 271. 65 Mary Skinner, “Benedictine Life for Women in Central France, 850–​1100,” in Nichols and Thomas Shank, Medieval Religious Women, 1:87–​113, esp. 89. 66 For instance, Morgan Powell, “The Speculum Virginum and the Audio-​Visual Poetics of Women’s Religious Instruction,” in Listen Daughter:  The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant J. Mews (New York, 2001),  11–​26. 62

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also characterize early and central medieval religious women.67 The verdict of recent work, however, appears to be in: religious women in the Western central Middle Ages were intellectually and textually, rather than visually or aurally, oriented, and were deeply committed to Latin literacy and literary practices.68 Réal’s innovative approach in this volume shows that the gendered division of labor in the outside world was mirrored in almost every regard within monastic communities; however, she found no gendered distinctions in terms of the intellectual world of book learning, or in practices of visuality and aurality. Future progress in the historiography of women’s monasticism will likely involve certain methodological commitments:  to skepticism in the face of older printed editions, and to the exploitation of new manuscript evidence. Whereas a twentieth-​century editor glossed a text that clearly referred to a major school in a female community so as to nudge the reader toward seeing only a “Singschule” there, the text’s recent English translator rendered the passage so as to describe instruction “in the reading of sacred texts.”69 Meanwhile, manuscript-​based work has the capacity to break the grip of the sweeping generalizations that can limit the visibility of medieval women. It may seem reasonable, for instance, to assert that religious women were excluded from sacred spaces during their menstrual cycles on the purported grounds that Carolingian-​era thinking unambiguously rejected Pope Gregory I’s tolerationist teachings on the topic and instead embraced the pollution anxieties evident in certain penitentials.70 Yet analysis of religious women’s manuscripts from the Carolingian era shows clearly how they not





Caroline Walker Bynum, “Foreword,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Jeffrey F Hamburger and Susan Marti, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger (New York, 2008), xiii–​xviii, esp. xvii. 68 A selection of recent scholarship attesting to this includes Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia:  A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (New  York, 2014); Katrinette Bodarwé, Sanctimoniales Litteratae. Schriftlichkeit und Bildung in den Ottonischen Frauenkommunitäten Gandersheim, Essen und Quedlinburg (Münster, 2004); Hartmut Hoffmann, Schreibschulen und Buchmalerei. Handschriften und Texte des 9.–​11. Jahrhunderts (Hanover, 2012), esp. 37–​159; Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson, eds., Hrotsvit of Gandersheim:  Contexts, Identities, Affinities and Performances (Toronto, 2004); Martina Giese, ed., Die Annales Quedlinburgenses (Hanover, 2004); Virginia Blanton, V. O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, eds., Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue (Turnhout, 2015). 69 Bernd Schuette, ed., Vita Matildis posterioris 2, MGH SRG 66, 150; Crusius, “Sanctimoniales,” 21; English translation in Sean Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Matilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid Washington (Washington, DC, 2004), 92. 70 Gisela Muschiol, “Liturgie und Klausur:  zu den liturgischen Voraussetzungen von Nonnenemporen,” in Crusius, Studien zum Kanonissenstift, 129–​48, esp. 135–​7. 67

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only embraced but also publicized Gregory’s views, with the intention to invalidate the restrictive teachings of the penitentials.71

The Re-​Sacralization of Central Medieval Monastic Historiography There was a time when secular historians of monasticism (that is, individuals not themselves in religious orders) normatively limited themselves to the “bedrock” of charter evidence to produce a purely external (to the monasteries) narrative of governance and geopolitical strategies.72 That time is long past.73 The 1980s and 1990s were marked by “the return of the religious.”74 The study of “spirituality,” a historico-​religious discipline for which “devotion” is a key concern, has been steadily gaining ground.75 Increasingly, the concerns of, and types of sources used by, secular and religious scholars of medieval monasticism have converged.76 Subjects such as canon law, theology, liturgy, scriptural exegesis, and devotional confessional practices are attracting attention from a broad range of specialists who now argue that, “for ecclesiastical institutions, liturgy and ritual formed the foundation of corporate identity.”77 In this age of historiographical re-​sacralization, the orientation of secular historians has evolved along with their source base. Immersion by historians in the full range of materials produced and utilized by monastic communities has increased both our understanding of, and our appreciation for, the lived experiences of our research subjects.78 Adam Cohen’s picture of  the medieval monastic artist at work (in this volume) is replete with sympathetic acknowledgments of the devotional dimensions of their activities. He describes, for instance, how “Buildings, metalwork, frescoes, and manuscripts



Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, 59–​61 and 102–​5. For instance, White, Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily, 6. The key early works in this transformation were Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1941); and Jean Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1957). See also Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, “Orientation for the Reader,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly (New York, 2011), 5. 74 Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “Bilan et perspectives de l’histoire monastique au pays de Montalembert et de dom Besse,” in Andenna, Dove va la storiografia monastica? 63 and 65. 75 Gregorio Penco, “La storiografia monastic italiana tra aspetti istitutionali e indirizzi culturali,” in ibid., 34. 76 Iogna-​Prat, “Bilan et perspectives,” 58–​9. 77 Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity, 4. 78 For instance, the discussion of the practice of penitential confession in Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia, 158–​60. 71

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were all created and used as vehicles to enable monastics not just to demonstrate their religious devotion but also to articulate a range of ideas and to provide vehicles for spiritual contemplation and ascent,” and how monastics used “material objects to assist in their spiritual ascent toward perfect union with God in this world and the next.” This phenomenon is also a by-​product of the implosion of the decadence-​and-​reform emplotment of medieval monasticism. With charges of laxity exposed as a discursive strategy, it becomes harder to treat medieval monks and nuns as anything other than pious people trying their best to be devout, or (as John Contreni depicts them in this volume) as eager, committed learners investigating a range of texts in a quest to cultivate their own virtue. Evidence that used to be seen as proof of decay has been re-​evaluated:  central medieval texts that generations of scholars dismissed as mediocre classicizing poetry are now seen as deeply spiritual exercises, and manuscripts that similar generations dismissed as “incomplete or imperfect bibles” are now recognized as perfectly calibrated accoutrements for liturgical celebrations and devotional reading.79 Between the linguistic turn and the return of the religious, for a while it looked as if the economic history of monasteries as “real practice” was being pushed to the margins.80 Some specialists even went so far as to charge monastic historians outright with euphemizing domination and concealing socioeconomic violence, by failing to emphasize how monastic communities depended upon managing, and indeed exploiting, peasant labor.81 Taken as a whole, however, the contributions to this volume show that the danger was overstated. Kaplan, Rosé, and above all Devroey describe the roles of monasteries as elite economic and political powerhouses, seigneuries with dependent labor, that both reinforced and benefited from hierarchical social structures, while Cochelin’s evocation of monastic daily life recognizes the spiritual aspirations of her subjects without suppressing the harsh reality of communities in which lay servants performed manual labor for aristocrats.

Bibliography Andenna, Giancarlo, ed. Dove va la storiografia monastica in Europa? Milan, 2001. Blennemann, Gordon. Die Metzer Benediktinerinnen im Mittelalter. Studien zu den Handlungsspielräumen geistlicher Frauen. Husum, 2011.

Taylor, Epic Lives and Monasticism; Richard Gyug, “Early Medieval Bibles, Biblical Books and the Monastic Liturgy in the Beneventan Region,” in Boynton and Reilly, Practice of the Bible, 34–​60, esp. 35. 80 Wilkin, “Communautés bénédictines,” 104–​8 and 128–​9. 81 Ibid., 134–​45 and 149–​50. 79

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Historiography of Central Medieval Western Monasticism Bodarwé, Katrinette. Sanctimoniales Litteratae. Schriftlichkeit und Bildung in den Ottonischen Frauenkommunitäten Gandersheim, Essen und Quedlinburg. Münster, 2004. Boynton, Susan. Shaping a Monastic Identity:  Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125. Ithaca, NY, 2006. Crusius, Irene, ed. Studien zum Kanonissenstift. Göttingen, 2001. Dey, Hendrik, and Elizabeth Fentress, eds. Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Felten, Franz J. Äbte und Laienäbte im Frankenreich. Studie zum Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche im früheren Mittelalter. Stuttgart, 1980. Gaillard, Michèle. D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne. Paris, 2006. Hollis, Stephanie. Anglo-​ Saxon Women and the Church:  Sharing a Common Fate. Woodbridge, 1992. Hunt, Noreen, ed. Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages. London, 1971. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. Order and Exclusion:  Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards. Ithaca, NY, 2002. Lifshitz, Felice. Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia:  A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture. New York, 2014. Melville, Gert, and Anne Müller, eds. Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts. Münster, 2011. Nichols, John A., and Lillian Thomas Shank, eds. Medieval Religious Women. 3  vols. Kalamazoo, MI, 1984–​95. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century. Philadelphia, PA, 1982. Taylor, Anna. Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800–​1050. Cambridge, 2013. Vanderputten, Steven. Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100. Ithaca, NY, 2013. Vanderputten, Steven, and Brigitte Meijns, eds. Ecclesia in medio nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages. Leuven, 2011. Wemple, Suzanne Fonay. Women in Frankish Society:  Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900. Philadelphia, PA, 1981.

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Sources for the History of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (c. 800–​1100) Scott G .   B ruc e

The library … was then a place of long, centuries-​old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not be to ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.1

Introduction Imagining the contents of monastic libraries in the central Middle Ages (c. 800–​1100) also encompasses a contemplation of their loss. The violence of plunderers, the rapaciousness of early modern book-​hunters, and the destruction wrought by fire, moisture, and vermin have taken such a toll on these once formidable collections that only a small fraction of the manuscripts painstakingly produced by monastic scribes have survived the last millennium to hint at the lost horizons of a vibrant textual culture.2 It has been estimated, in fact, that only a small fraction (less than 10 percent) of the books produced in the early Middle Ages have survived.3 To take one egregious example of this destruction, in the tenth century the brethren of the abbey of Novalesa in Piedmont fled before the advance of Muslim raiders, leaving behind not only their home but also the six thousand books in their library.4 Fortunately, many of the administrative documents, volumes of legislation, and compilations of devotional literature composed in medieval abbeys

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. Richard Dixon (New York, 2014), 306. On monastic libraries, see the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in volume II. 3 See Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden, 2011). 4 Chronicon novaliciense 4.26 [sic for 4.25], MGH SS 7, 108: “Et inter cetera delati sunt libri sex mille.” 1

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have endured to inform us about the lived experience and religious ideals of cloistered monasticism in Carolingian and post-​Carolingian Europe. This article makes no claim to treat every source relevant to this topic. It begins by cleaving closely to three genres of medieval texts that are arguably the most important for our understanding of monasticism in this period: charters (libri privilegiorum, preceptorum sive cartarum), rules and customaries (regulae et consuetudines), and saints’ Lives (passiones et vitae sanctorum plurimorum). Taken together, these sources provide unparalleled insight into the ways in which monks interacted with the world outside their abbeys, comported themselves in their cloisters, and imagined and promoted their ideals of sanctity. The richness of these texts as sources for monastic history is commensurate with the challenges involved in parsing the information that they contain, especially since medieval authors had their own interests and agendas in mind when composing, deploying, and preserving these documents. For this reason, this article will also highlight some of the difficulties presented by these sources in our reconstruction of the medieval past and some of the ways in which material culture has enhanced our understanding of monastic history in this period. The exclusion from this discussion of service books, sermons, patristic commentaries, exegetical material, histories, and other texts copied and read by monks is a practical necessity that does not in any way suggest their lack of importance for the study of medieval monasticism, as the other articles in this section make clear. The same is true for artistic production.5

Charters Monastic charters preserve in writing the grants, donations, and sales of property to and by a religious house, as well as the transfer of privileges to a cloistered community by kings, bishops, and popes.6 Individual monastic charters are unassuming documents that preserve in formulaic language a moment in time when an abbey entered into or renewed a relationship with a member of the clergy or with a lay man or woman and their family that was important enough to record for future reference. Despite their laconic nature, charters are expressive of a host of historical information that rarely surfaces in religious texts. The path-​breaking modern study, which used the evidence

See the article by Cohen in this volume. For general orientation, see Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 222–​39 (­chapter 14: “Charters and Cartularies”).

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of monastic charters (those of Cluny) to reconstruct the changing social and political structures of an entire region, was Georges Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise, published in 1953.7 The contents of charters allow us to map the landholdings of religious communities and thereby plot their influence in secular society; to chart their relationships with elite and lesser families, who relied on the monks and nuns for redemptive prayers, often over many generations; and to make informed inferences about the role of gift-​g iving in central medieval culture. Their witness lists are invaluable sources for the names of the office-​holders in these abbeys and their relationship to local aristocratic families, as well as for the agency of lay women in these transactions, whether as consenting partners of their spouses or as independent actors (most often in the case of widows). Even the literary confections of these documents promise to tell us something about the ways in which nuns and monks wished to preserve and remember the social relationships that underlie each of these transactions. No single source survives from the central Middle Ages in the same abundance as monastic charters because of the efforts taken by monks and nuns to safeguard in their archives the valuable information that they contained. The raw numbers are staggering.8 The brethren of Fulda produced about two thousand charters in this period.9 The monks of Cluny composed even more—​almost three thousand charters that can be dated before 1049—​in no small part thanks to the enthusiasm of abbots such as Maiolus (954–​94) and Odilo (994–​1049) in promoting the efficacy of Cluniac prayers in releasing the souls of the Christian faithful from the torments of purgatory.10 Lastly, more than eight hundred individual charters written at the monastery of St. Gall before the year 920 survive in their original form.11 This collection is especially precious because most of the early medieval charters known to us today are later copies preserved in massive compendia known as cartularies.



Georges Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1953). See, for example, the inventory of original French charters dated before 1121 available at www.cn-​telma.fr//​originaux/​index/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 9 Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.  744–​c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012), 198–​213. 10 Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter:  The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); and Matthew Innes, “On the Material Culture of Legal Documents:  Charters and Their Preservation in the Cluny Archive, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam Kosto (Cambridge, 2013), 283–​320. 11 Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), 77–​134; and Matthew Innes, “Archives, Documents and Landowners in Carolingian Francia,” in Brown et al., Documentary Culture and the Laity, 152–​88. 7

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In the past two decades, monastic cartularies have become the object of intense study in their own right.12 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars tended to treat cartularies as static repositories of original charters and paid no attention to their structure and purpose. But, in fact, as Patrick Geary has taught us, “each cartulary is the result of a process of neglect, selection, transformation, and suppression.”13 The monks who compiled cartularies made selective and creative use of the documents they had at hand. Institutional crises often prompted the creation of a cartulary and inflected its contents. The cartulary compiled by the brethren of St. Calais in 863 to dispute the claims of the bishop of Le Mans is one such example.14 Some cartularies comprise earlier charters copied verbatim; others contain summaries of relevant information culled from them; and still others preserve forged charters created with the intention of forwarding the interests of the monastic community. Every cartulary is thus expressive of the choices that nuns and monks made in the preservation and manipulation of the documents relevant to the history of their abbeys. Charters can also provide evidence about central medieval culture that has nothing to do with their original purpose. For example, charters from the abbey of Cluny allow us to glimpse administrative interactions between the monks and local Jews in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a commerce attested in no other source from Cluny in this period and completely at odds with Abbot Peter the Venerable’s (d. 1156)  stinging invective against the Jews written in the 1140s on the eve of the Second Crusade.15 Moreover, as the work of Georges Duby and Barbara Rosenwein has shown, these sources are crucial for our understanding of aristocratic society.16 Indeed,



Exemplary in this regard is Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance:  Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1996), esp. 81–​114. See also Dominique Iogna-​ Prat, “La confection des cartulaires et l’historiographie à Cluny (XIe–​XIIe siècles),” in Les cartulaires. Actes de la table ronde organisée par l’École nationale des chartes et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 5–​7 décembre 1991), ed. Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse (Paris, 1993), 27–​ 42; Georges Declercq, “Originals and Cartularies: The Organization of Archival Memory (Ninth–​ Eleventh Centuries),” in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout, 2000), 147–​70; and Constance B. Bouchard, “Monastic Cartularies: Organizing Eternity,” in Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth (Toronto, 2002), 22–​32. 13 Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, 83. 14 See Walter Goffart, The Le Mans Forgeries: A Chapter in the History of Church Property in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, 1966). 15 For a convenient summary of the evidence, see Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion:  Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 278. 16 See Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles; and Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter. 12

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we know more about influential land-​owning families in the central Middle Ages from monastic charters than we do from any other source that survives from this period. For example, on the basis of hundreds of charters preserved by the monks of Gorze and St-​Maximin in the ninth and tenth centuries, John Nightingale has argued that “relations with monasteries had a crucial role in the elite’s inheritance strategies, strengthening the position of direct heirs at the expense of competing interests of the wider kin.”17 This important insight relies heavily on the record-​keeping habits of cloistered communities. As with many sources for monastic history in this period, research on charters and cartularies progresses apace with the availability of source materials.18 New editions of significant texts continue to appear in print, sometimes with facsimile reproductions of the charters themselves, though not with the regularity that one would like.19 Fortunately, in the past decade, online resources for the study of charters have opened up this field of research to a new generation of scholars by making the source materials much more easily accessible. To take one example, in the case of the abbey of Cluny, scholars can use the Cartae Cluniacenses Electronicae (CCE) maintained by the Westfälische Wilhelms-​Universität in Münster to search the contents of the Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny edited by Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel and originally published in six volumes from 1876 to 1903.20 The CCE is especially welcome because the editors of the Recueil died before they could complete the indexes to their edition and the absence of any instruments of reference makes their important edition of the Cluniac charters difficult to use. Unfortunately, despite the central importance of monastic charters for medieval scholarship, many individual charters and voluminous cartularies remain unpublished.





John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform:  Lotharingia, c.  850–​1000 (Oxford, 2001), 8. 18 For a sample of new directions of research, see the essays collected in Jonathan Jarrett and Allan S. McKinley, eds., Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters (Turnhout, 2013). For charters from early medieval England in particular, see Simon Keynes, “Anglo-​Saxon Charters:  Lost and Found,” in Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters:  Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Vareham (Aldershot, 2008), 45–​66. 19 See, for example, the first three volumes of Hartmut Atsma and Jean Vezin, eds., Les plus anciens documents originaux de l’abbaye de Cluny, vols. 1–​3 (Paris, 1997–​2002); and Constance Bouchard, ed., The Cartulary of Montier-​en-​Der, 666–​1129 (Toronto, 2004). 20 Cartae Cluniacenses Electronicae, www.uni-​muenster.de/​Fruehmittelalter/​Projekte/​ Cluny/​CCE/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018). See also the Chartes de la Bourgogne du Moyen Âge (CBMA), www.cbma-​project.eu (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 17

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Rules and Customaries In the early ninth century, the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) emerged as the most authoritative handbook for cloistered life in western Europe. Written in the sixth century by an otherwise obscure Italian abbot known as Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 540), the RB was a concise work comprising a prologue, seventy-​two short chapters, and an epilogue that promoted a set of religious principles for monks informed by the firsthand experience of its author. After two centuries of relative obscurity, the RB became popular in the Carolingian period, in no small part because of imperial sponsorship by Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40), both of whom believed that the efficacy of monastic prayers were instrumental for the military success and spiritual well-​being of their kingdom.21 To this end, they sought to impose uniformity of practice and worship on the cloistered communities in the Frankish heartlands. At the Aachen Assemblies of 816/​17, Abbot Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) promoted the adoption of one rule and one custom (una regula, una consuetudo) in all of the abbeys of the realm. The one rule was the RB, while the one custom was Benedict’s own supplementary regulations to it.22 While the promotion of the RB by the Carolingians elevated this sixth-​century text to the status of regula sancta in the monasteries of western Europe, there was considerable resistance to the adoption of a single set of ancillary legislation, as individual abbeys clung tenaciously to their age-​old customs. The RB carried an unprecedented authority in the post-​Carolingian period, but the interpretation of its text posed numerous problems for monastic legislators. To begin with, by the turn of the first millennium, it was already hundreds of years old and some of its late antique Italian terminology regarding articles of clothing and units of measurement were alien to the vocabularies of monks who lived north of the Alps. When Paul the Deacon (d. c. 799) sent Charlemagne a manuscript of the RB copied from the exemplar believed to have been written by Benedict himself, he felt the need to include a letter explaining words and phrases in the RB that would have been unclear to the great king and his religious advisors.23 Moreover, while the laconic character of the RB was part of the appeal of this text, it also left



For the most accessible introduction to the centrality of monasticism to the political ambitions of the Carolingians, see Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, II, c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 622–​53. See also the articles by Diem and Rousseau, and Kramer in this volume. 22 Joseph Semmler, “Benedictus II: una regula, una consuetudo,” in Benedictine Culture, 750–​1050, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven, 1983), 1–​49. 23 Paul the Deacon, Epistula ad regem Karolum de monasterio sancti Benedicti, in The Rule of Benedict, ed. Bruce Venarde (Cambridge, 2011), 230–​43. 21

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readers with an impressionistic understanding of its principles. For example, the author placed a strong emphasis on the cultivation of silence among monks, but later readers were left to puzzle out the distinction between the word “silence” (silentium) and the several cases in which the RB refers to “the utmost silence” or “total silence” (summum silentium or omne silentium).24 In the middle of the ninth century, Hildemar of Corbie (fl. c. 845) attempted to reconcile these distinctions in the Expositio regulae sancti Benedicti (Expositio 38). To make matters worse, the centuries separating the composition of the RB and its widespread adoption in northern Europe also witnessed the development of aspects of Christian devotional practice that had no precedent in Benedict’s lifetime, such as the cult of the dead. By the eleventh century, most monks were also ordained priests, who occupied much of their day with funerary masses intoned for the souls of the faithful departed to free them from the fires of purgatory.25 This emphasis on near-​constant liturgical activity came at the expense of manual labor, which was increasingly performed by servants, despite the recommendation of the RB that true monks, like the Apostles, should live by the work of their hands (RB 48). Because the precepts of the RB were not always clear and did not always bear directly upon the devotional practices current in cloistered communities around the turn of the first millennium, monastic commentators augmented its tenets with supplementary customs of their own devising. From the eighth century onwards, we find monks explaining in lengthy commentaries those parts of the RB that resisted a straightforward interpretation, commentaries like the expositio composed by Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel (d. c. 840).26 At the same time, cloistered communities preserved their own local customs, first as oral traditions and later in expansive collections of monastic legislation known as customaries.27 Monastic customaries were often





RB 38.5 (summum fiat silentium), 48.5 (cum omni silentio), and 52.2 (cum summo silentio). See the article by Blennemann in this volume. See also Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “Les morts dans la compatibilité céleste des moines clunisiens autour l’an mil,” in Religion et culture autour de l’an mil. Royaume capétien et Lotharingie, ed. D. Iogna-​Prat and J.-​C. Picard (Paris, 1990), 55–​69; and more generally Giles Constable, “The Commemoration of the Dead in the Early Middle Ages,” in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, edited by Julia M. H. Smith (Leiden, 2000), 169–​95. 26 Smaragdus, Expositio in regulam sancti Benedicti, ed. Alfred Spannagel and Pius Engelbert, Smaragdi abbatis expositio in regulam S. Benedicti, CCM 8; English translation in David Barry, Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel: Commentary on the Rule of Benedict (Kalamazoo, MI, 2007). See also Matthew D. Ponesse, “Smaragdus of St. Mihiel and the Carolingian Monastic Reform,” Revue bénédictine 116 (2006): 367–​92. 27 Kassius Hallinger, “Consuetudo:  Begriff, Formen, Forschungsgeschichte, Inhalt,” in Untersuchungen zu Kloster und Stift (Göttingen, 1980), 140–​66; Susan Boynton and Isabelle 24

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elaborations on the RB, but they offer much more in terms of immediate and detailed historical information about the lived practice of medieval monasticism than the laconic precepts provided by Benedict’s little handbook.28 These compilations treat topics as diverse as liturgical ceremonies, the duties of monastic officials, and the instruction of novices. The function of these texts for medieval readers is a subject of some debate, in particular the degree to which a given customary was descriptive or directive in character.29 There is some indication that large abbeys like Cluny recorded their customs in writing because of disagreements among the brethren about received tradition, as was the case for the late eleventh-​century ordo Cluniacensis by Bernard.30 But there is also ample evidence to suggest that monks composed customaries to serve as models of religious practice for distant communities.31 In both cases, customaries were primarily commemorative and indicative in character and tend to reflect actual customs rather than the normative ideals of monastic legislators. It is clear, however, that customaries did not carry the universal authority of the RB and thus were not, in the words of Gert Melville, “understood by the entire monastic congregation to be generally binding.”32 Irrespective of their original purpose, monastic customaries provide us with invaluable information about lived experience in cloistered communities, and are unrivalled in their scope and detail by other sources from this period.33 In recent years, historians have mined them for evidence and insight on a wide range of topics, including the role played by oblates in the liturgy; the principles of monastic silence and the use of sign language in cloistered communities; regulations for the care of sick monks and the protocols





Cochelin, eds., From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny/​Du coeur de la nuit à la fin du jour. Les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2005); Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville, eds., Regulae—​Consuetudines—​Statuta. Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del Medioevo (Münster, 2005); and Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines, eds., Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (Turnhout, 2014). 28 Lin Donnat, “Les coutumiers du Moyen Âge et la règle de saint Benoît,” Regulae Benedicti Studia 16 (1989): 37–​54. 29 See, for example, Hallinger, “Consuetudo”; Lin Donnat, “Les coutumiers monastiques:  une nouvelle entreprise et un territoire nouveau,” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 3 (1992):  5–​21, esp. 14–​16; and Anselme Davril, “Coutumiers directifs et coutumiers descriptifs: d’Ulrich à Bernard de Cluny,” in Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of Day,  23–​8. 30 Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis sive Consuetudines, in Vetus Disciplina Monastica, ed. M. Herrgott (Paris, 1726; reprint Siegburg, 1999), 136–​364. 31 Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources,” in Malone and Maines, Consuetudines et Regulae, 27–​72, with references to earlier literature. 32 Gert Melville, “Action, Text, and Validity:  On Re-​Examining Cluny’s Consuetudines and Statutes,” in Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of Day, 77. 33 See the article by Cochelin in this volume.

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governing their interaction with healthy brethren in the abbey; and the rites performed in preparation for the imminent death of individuals, including the duties of relevant officials, final communion for the dying monk, and the preparation of his body for burial.34 Moreover, the customaries allow us to reconstruct in detail aspects of monastic practice otherwise rendered invisible owing to a paucity of relevant source material. For instance, liturgists and architectural historians have turned to descriptions of rituals and buildings in these texts for insight into the content and orchestration of corporate worship and its physical setting, in the absence of liturgical manuscripts and monastic structures surviving from this period.35 These studies, aided immeasurably by the availability of new critical editions of some of the most important texts, have moved the customaries of the central Middle Ages into the mainstream of contemporary monastic scholarship. The series Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum (1963–​present), in particular, has been instrumental in publishing critical editions of monastic legislation from the Middle Ages.36

Saints’ Lives Stories about the virtues and the miracles of Christian saints were the most popular narrative texts produced and consumed by monks and nuns in the central Middle Ages.37 Saints’ Lives provided models of virtuous behavior for pious readers and presented their holy subjects as active intercessors between heaven and earth. Christian hagiography is a literary form with a long history: the earliest accounts of martyrdom date back to the second century.38





See, respectively, Susan Boynton, “The Liturgical Role of Children in Monastic Customaries from the Central Middle Ages,” Studia Liturgica 28 (1998): 194–​209; Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900–​ 1200 (Cambridge, 2007); Riccardo Cristiani, “Integration and Marginalization: Dealing with the Sick in Eleventh-​Century Cluny,” in Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of Day, 287–​95; and Frederick S. Paxton, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages/​Le rituel de la mort à Cluny au Moyen Âge central (Turnhout, 2013). 35 Susan Boynton, “The Customaries of Bernard and Ulrich as Liturgical Sources,” Kristina Krüger, “Monastic Customs and Liturgy in the Light of the Architectural Evidence: A Case Study on Processions (Eleventh–​Twelfth Centuries),” and Carolyn M. Malone, “Interprétation des pratiques liturgiques à Saint-​Bénigne de Dijon d’après ses coutumiers d’inspiration clunisienne,” in Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of Day, 109–​30, 191–​220, and 221–​50, respectively. 36 See, most recently, Candida Elvert and Pius Engelbert, eds., Willehelmi abbatis constitutiones Hirsaugienses, 2 vols., CCM 15. 37 On early medieval hagiography as a source for missionary activity in this period, see the article by Raaijmakers in this volume. 38 See the article by Helvétius in this volume. See also Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Martyr Passions and Hagiography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford, 2008), 603–​27; Eric Rebillard, 34

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It is also a derivative genre: most saints’ Lives drew their authority from the repetition of themes and conventions borrowed from late antique traditions of sacred Christian biography.39 In Latin literature, Evagrius’ translation of Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Martin of Tours, both written in the late fourth century, exerted a profound influence on the structure and content of most of the saints’ Lives composed over the next millennium, including those written about women.40 Library catalogues from the central Middle Ages articulate both the ubiquity of hagiography in the lives of medieval monks and the variety of venues in which the brethren ruminated on these stories. Saints’ Lives played a central role in the liturgy as the primary reading on the feast day of a given saint, but time restrictions prevented the nuns and monks from reading more than a few chapters at a time, especially during the night office, the round of prayers celebrated in the middle of the night.41 Likewise, the refectory often resounded with stories about the saints. From late antiquity, monks and nuns habitually read hagiographical works aloud to one another while they were eating, so that the words might nourish their souls at the same time that the food nourished their bodies (see, for example, RB 38 on the duties of the weekly reader). In the early twelfth century, Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny took for granted that his brethren knew the saints’ Lives written by and about Pope Gregory the Great because “[t]hey are recited and heard and read and understood daily and almost without interruption by innumerable and even unlearned and simple brothers.”42 Lastly, times set aside for private reading allowed individual monks and nuns to read saints’ Lives at their leisure in a quiet corner of the cloister or the seclusion of their cell. In 1040, for









ed., Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, (Oxford, 2017); and Michael Lapidge, The Roman Martyrs: Introduction, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford, 2018). 39 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, 2013), esp. 504–​86 on “The Literature of Sanctity.” For examples, see Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, eds., Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 1995). 40 Julia M. H. Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe, c. 780–​ 920,” Past & Present 146 (1995): 3–​37. See also Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg, eds., Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham, NC, 1992); and the article by Alciati in this volume. 41 On this point, see Tjamke Snijders, “Celebrating with Dignity:  The Purpose of Benedictine Matins Readings,” in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth–​Thirteenth Centuries), ed. Steven Vanderputten (Turnhout, 2011), 115–​36. 42 Peter the Venerable, Contra Petrobrusianos 256, ed. James Fearns, CCCM 10, 151; translated in Giles Constable, ed., Three Treatises from Bec on the Nature of Monastic Life (Toronto, 2008), 11, n. 28.

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example, we find brethren of Cluny borrowing copies of hagiographical literature for this very purpose.43 While most authors of medieval hagiography patterned their work on the authoritative models of the Lives of Antony and Martin, some departed from received tradition and tailored their stories to address contemporary concerns, often invoking the voices of their holy subjects to lend their authority to current issues. Since the 1960s, historians have become much more adept both at recognizing the conventions of this genre and at parsing the information particular to the historical milieu in which the work was written.44 This sensitivity to the limits and possibilities of saints’ Lives as sources for medieval history has generated a vast industry of scholarship. Many recent studies have been especially attentive to the importance of examining the variations introduced during the rewriting of hagiography, in no small part because the repetition of age-​old literary models exerted such a dominant influence in this conservative genre.45 Hagiography remains central to our understanding of ideals of sanctity and the promotion of Christian virtue in the central Middle Ages, but this genre can also provide answers to questions about the ways in which monks and nuns made use of these texts beyond their obvious devotional purpose. Historians are beginning to appreciate that medieval readers were not limited in the ways in which they understood the contents of saints’ Lives as sources for information about the world around them. For example, in the middle of the ninth century, we find Ratramnus of Corbie consulting the Life of Christopher in his abbey library to determine whether the dog-​headed



Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis 2.190, ed. Peter Dinter, CCM 10, 262–​3. On the custom of book borrowing by individual monks at eleventh-​century Cluny, see Karl Christ, “In Caput Quadragesimae,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 60 (1943): 33–​59. 44 See, for example, Friedrich Lotter, “Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen,” Historische Zeitschrift 229 (1979):  298–​ 356; Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography,” Past & Present 127 (1990): 3–​38, reprinted in Frankish History: Studies in the Construction of Power (Burlington, VT, 2013), no. II; Patrick Geary, “Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal,” in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca (Binghamton, NY, 1996), 13–​ 20, reprinted in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 9–​29; James Palmer, Early Medieval Hagiography (Kalamazoo, MI, 2018). 45 See, for example, Samantha Herrick, Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy (Cambridge, 2007); and Samantha Herrick, “Studying Apostolic Hagiography:  The Case of Fronto of Périgueux, Disciple of Christ,” Speculum 85 (2010): 235–​70; as well as the volumes edited by Monique Goullet, Martin Heinzelmann, and Christiane Veyrard-​Cosme:  La réécriture hagiographique dans l’Occident médiéval. Transformations formelles et idéologiques (Ostfildern, 2003); Miracles, vies et réécriture dans l’Occident médiéval. Actes de l’Atelier “La réécriture des Miracles” (IHAP, juin 2004) et SHG X–​XII. Dossiers des saints de Metz et Laon et de saint Saturnin de Toulouse (Ostfildern, 2006); and L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures (Ostfildern, 2010). 43

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men (cynocephali) who allegedly dwelt in the far north of Europe had humans souls and were therefore open to the possibility of salvation through their conversion to Christianity.46 Hagiography was an important resource in this case because some versions of the Life of Christopher depict him as a dog-​ headed man. In Ratramnus’ opinion, his successful conversion to Christianity opened up the possibility that others like him could be saved, despite their monstrous appearance. Moreover, scholars have become acutely aware that monks may have had a more nuanced understanding of saints’ Lives than the modern word “hagiography” implies. In fact, the arbitrary distinctions between “historical” sources and “hagiographical” sources that have preoccupied historians of the Middle Ages for over a century are anachronisms that have limited our comprehension of “hagiography” as an important source for monastic “history.”47 Perhaps the most important development in the study of monastic hagiography in the central Middle Ages is the new attention being paid to saints’ Lives written in poetic meter.48 Long dismissed as derivative of its original source material and therefore not useful for historical research, verse hagiography has remained a largely uncharted frontier in medieval monastic scholarship. But poetic composition and consumption clearly played a formative role in the education of the brethren and had a strong currency in the world outside the classroom. As Anna Taylor has argued, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, monks composed thousands of metered lines of hagiography to promote the saintly patrons of their abbeys, to educate young monks in classical literature and devotional themes, to spar with other poets for the valued patronage of important lords and prelates, to refute the claims and resist the encroachment of other monastic communities, and to provide spiritual ruminatio for their brethren.49 Verse hagiography was not strictly the







For what follows, see Scott G. Bruce, “Hagiography as Monstrous Ethnography: A Note on Ratramnus of Corbie’s Letter Concerning the Conversion of the Cynocephali,” in Insignis Sophiae Arcator: Essays in Honour of Michael Herren on his 65th Birthday, ed. Gernot Wieland, Carin Ruff, and Ross C. Arthur (Turnhout, 2006), 45–​56. 47 The locus classicus remains Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–​114. See also Ian Wood, “The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West,” in East and West: Modes of Communication. Proceedings of the First Plenary Conference at Merida, ed. Evangelos Chrysos and Ian Wood (Leiden, 1999), 93–​109; and Anna Taylor, “Hagiography and Early Medieval History,” History Compass 7 (2013): 1–​14. 48 Jean-​Yves Tilliette, “Les modèles de sainteté du IXe au XIe siècle d’après le témoignage des récits hagiographiques en vers métriques,” in Santi e demoni nell’alto medioevo occidentale (secoli V–​XI) (Spoleto, 1988), 381–​406; and François Dolbeau, “Un domaine négligé de la littérature médiolatine:  les textes hagiographiques en vers,” Cahiers de civilisation médievale 45 (2002): 129–​39. 49 Anna Taylor, Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800–​1050 (Cambridge, 2013). 46

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domain of male authors. In the tenth century, Hrotswitha of Gandersheim made poetic adaptations of many legends of the saints for an audience of female readers.50 The recent discovery of the value of verse hagiography as a historical source is without doubt the most important advance in scholarship on the literary culture of medieval abbeys in the past two decades, but, with dozens and dozens of these poems still unedited and unstudied, research in this new field of inquiry has only just begun.

Monastic Materials The tissue of evidence for the history of Christian monasticism in Carolingian and post-​Carolingian Europe is particularly thick, but even in their abundance the surviving texts do not tell the full story of the cloistered life in this period. In recent decades, scholars have turned with greater frequency than ever before to non-​textual sources to illuminate aspects of medieval monastic history. Manuscripts play an important role as historical sources, not only for the texts that they contain, but also for what their production and movement reveal about material resources and networks of knowledge exchange in cloistered communities.51 Books had a symbolic potency that made them attractive as diplomatic gifts at the highest level of medieval society, often to the benefit of monastic communities.52 In the early ninth century, Louis the Pious received from Emperor Michael II a modest manuscript written in Greek uncials containing the theological works and letters of Dionysius the Areopagite. Unable to read the book, Louis deposited it at the Abbey of Saint-​ Denis, where the remains of Dionysius lay buried.53 This Greek manuscript soon served as the basis for two Latin translations of the corpus Dionysiacum made by monks of Saint-​Denis, which played an important role as conduits



Hrosvit, Opera Omnia, ed. Walter Berschin (Munich and Leipzig, 2001); French translation:  Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, Œuvres poétiques, trans. Monique Goullet (Grenoble, 2000). 51 For recent examples, see Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson, eds., The European Book in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2018); and Sven Meeder, The Irish Scholarly Presence at St. Gall: Networks of Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (London, 2018). For the Carolingian period in particular, see McKitterick, Carolingians and the Written Word, 135–​210. 52 J. Lowden, “The Luxury Book as Diplomatic Gift,” in Byzantine Diplomacy, ed. J. Shepherd and S. Franklin (Aldershot, 1992), 249–​60. See the article by Gajewsky and Seeberg in volume II. 53 Paris, BnF, grec 437, viewable online through www.gallica.bnf.fr (date of last access: 18 August 2018). See Anna Taylor, “Books, Bodies, and Bones: Hilduin of St-​Denis and the Relics of St. Dionysius,” in The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross (Toronto, 2013), 25–​60.

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of Greek learning to Western monasteries.54 And, as Carmela Franklin has shown, early medieval manuscripts, even the smallest fragments of them, had afterlives that bear witness to the use and reuse of monastic books well beyond the Middle Ages.55 Like manuscripts, the relics of the saints and the ornate containers that housed them (reliquaries and portable altars) have been the subjects of intense study in recent decades. As Julia Smith has argued, the collection of sacred remains provides insight into the daily practices of monastic devotion that are not always evident in the surviving texts.56 These materials traveled great distances from points of origin in the Holy Land or sacred cities such as Rome to the monasteries of northern Europe, allowing us to track the networks of communication and commerce that facilitated their movement and to reconstruct the systems of elite patronage required for the acquisition of prestigious relics, like fragments of the True Cross.57 Reliquaries themselves have invited scrutiny as objects that mediated the devotional experience of relics for the viewer and thereby constructed and controlled the religious experience of their contents.58 Despite their popularity, medieval criticism of devotional practices involving relics and reliquaries betrays a lack of unanimity about the purpose of holy remains. For example, mystery shrouds the origins of an exquisite ninth-​century gold talisman in the shape of a cross that allegedly contained hair of the Virgin Mary, but medieval tradition holds that it was discovered around the neck of Charlemagne (crucem auream, quae in collo eius pependit) when Emperor Otto III opened his tomb in Aachen in the year 1000.59 The





See Michael Lapidge, Hilduin of Saint-​Denis:  The Passio S.  Dionysii in Prose and Verse (Leiden, 2017), 61–​2 (on the dates) and 70–​1 (on the identity and method of the translators). On Eriugena’s translation and its reception, see Timothy R.  Budde, “The Versio Dionysii of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of the Manuscript Tradition and Influence of Eriugena’s Translation of the Corpus Areopagiticum from the Ninth through the Twelfth Century” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2011). 55 Carmela Vircillo Franklin, Material Restoration:  A Fragment from Eleventh-​ Century Echernach in a Nineteenth-​Century Parisian Codex (Turnhout, 2010). 56 Julia M. H. Smith, “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 700–​1200),” Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 145. 57 On the early medieval relic trade and the literature it inspired, see Martin Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des Reliquienkultes (Turnhout, 1979); Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra:  Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, 2nd. ed. (Princeton NJ, 1990); and Julia M.  H. Smith, “Old Saints, New Cults:  Roman Relics in Carolingian Francia,” in Smith, Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West, 317–​39. 58 Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–​circa 1204 (College Park, PA, 2012). 59 Thietmar, Chronicon 4.47, ed. Robert Holzmann, MGH SRG n.s. 9, 285. On Charlemagne’s relic collection and its influence, see Hahn, Strange Beauty, 179–​83. 54

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emperor’s habit of wearing a personal reliquary would have been completely at odds, however, with the opinion of his most learned monastic councilor, Alcuin (d. 804), who derided carrying relics or Gospel texts in this way as a “superstition befitting the Pharisees” (pharisaica superstitio).60 No source for monastic history in the central Middle Ages is as evocative as the Plan of St. Gall, a schematic blueprint for an ideal abbey preserved in an early ninth-​century manuscript.61 While the Plan does not represent any particular monastery, the spatial organization of its church and monastic precincts relative to nearby workshops and gardens has called attention to the fact that the experience of the cloistered life extended well beyond the claustrum in this period.62 Beginning with Kenneth Conant’s excavation of the abbey of Cluny between 1927 and 1950, monastic archaeology matured rapidly over the course of the twentieth century.63 New excavations have privileged a holistic approach to the environment in which the brethren lived, taking the focus away from the primary buildings of the monastic community (the church, the cloister, etc.) and drawing attention to less-​studied structures, such as latrines, as well as overlooked aspects of an abbey’s infrastructure, including its waterways and fish ponds.64 Garbage pits and refuge piles can tell us as much about monastic life as the remains of buildings. The animal bones excavated at the Cluniac dependency of La Charité-​sur-​Loire reveal details about the diet of the brethren that are absent in written sources.65 These discoveries have, in turn, informed new research in medieval environmental history, in







Godefridus J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden, 1995), 354–​5, with reference to other Carolingian authors who voiced the same concern. 61 Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen, MS 1092, viewable online at www.stgallplan.org/​en/​ index_​plan.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). The classic study remains Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall, 3 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1979). See also Giles Constable, “Carolingian Monasticism as Seen in the Plan of St. Gall,” in Le monde carolingien. Bilan, perspectives, champs de recherches, ed. Wojciech Falkowski and Yves Sassier (Turnhout, 2009), 199–​217; and the articles by Lauwers (with an image of the Plan) and Cohen in this volume. 62 See the article by Cochelin in this volume. 63 See the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. See also Kenneth Conant, Cluny. Les églises et la maison du chef d’ordre (Mâcon, 1968). State-​of-​the-​question surveys on monastic archaeology include Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, “The Archaeology of Monasticism: A Summary of Recent Work in France, 1970–​1987,” Speculum 63 (1988): 794–​825; and Graham Keevill, Mick Aston, and Teresa Hall, eds., Monastic Archaeology (Oxford, 2001). 64 See the article by Röckelein in volume II. 65 Frédérique Audoin-​Rouzeau, Ossements animaux du Moyen Âge au monastère de La Charité-​sur-​Loire (Paris, 1986).

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which monks played a decisive role in the management and exploitation of natural resources.66

Conclusion The central Middle Ages (c. 800–​1100) is a period rich in textual and material sources for the history of monasticism in western Europe. In the centuries following the creation and collapse of Charlemagne’s sprawling empire, many cloistered communities turned to writing to preserve and promote their relationships with the lay patrons whose donations sustained them, with like-​minded religious institutions that inspired them, and with the holy men and women whose intercession protected them. Cartularies, customaries, and works of hagiography all cast light on the ways in which monks and nuns made use of the written word to articulate and confect their sense of purpose as communities of intercessory prayer, as emulators of an angelic way of life, and as protégés of the saints themselves. Despite the dispersal and destruction of almost every monastic library from this period, the centuries-​ old murmuring of texts composed in abbeys around the turn of the first millennium urges us to question old presumptions and ask new questions about the significance of the cloistered life in medieval Europe.

Bibliography Bartlett, Robert. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ, 2013. Bruce, Scott G. “Hagiography as Monstrous Ethnography:  A Note on Ratramnus of Corbie’s Letter Concerning the Conversion of the Cynocephali.” In Insignis Sophiae Arcator:  Essays in Honour of Michael Herren on his 65th Birthday, edited by Gernot Wieland, Carin Ruff, and Ross C. Arthur, 45–​56. Turnhout, 2006.   Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism:  The Cluniac Tradition, c.  900–1200. Cambridge, 2007. Constable, Giles. “The Commemoration of the Dead in the Early Middle Ages.” In Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, edited by Julia M. H. Smith, 169–​95. Leiden, 2000. Fouracre, Paul. “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography.” Past & Present 127 (1990):  3–​38, reprinted in Frankish History:  Studies in the Construction of Power (Burlington, VT, 2013), no. II.



See generally Richard C. Hoffmann, “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 631–​69. See also the article by Berman in volume II.

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Scott G. Bruce Geary, Patrick J. Phantoms of Remembrance:  Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, NJ, 1996. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. Order and Exclusion:  Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards. Ithaca, NY, 2003. Lifshitz, Felice. “Beyond Positivism and Genre:  ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative.” Viator 25 (1994): 95–​114. Lotter, Friedrich. “Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen.” Historische Zeitschrift 229 (1979): 298–​356. Palmer, James. Early Medieval Hagiography. Kalamazoo, MI, 2018. Rosenwein, Barbara H. To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter:  The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049. Ithaca, NY, 1989. Smith, Julia M. H. “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe, c. 780–​920.” Past & Present 146 (1995): 3–​37.

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Questions of Monastic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy and Sicily (c. 500–​1200) V a l e rie Ra m sey e r Monasticism in medieval southern Italy and Sicily has often been described using binary terms such as Greek/​Latin, East/​West, Basilian/​Benedictine, and anchoritic/​cenobitic. As a border region between the Carolingian and Byzantine empires, and an area where both Greek and Latin were used as liturgical languages, it is all too easy to view this part of Europe as a place where “Eastern” and “Western” practices met and mixed, creating a hybrid type of monasticism that can seem strange to Carolingian and Byzantine historians alike. Yet the use of categories such as Greek and Latin, and East and West causes the region to be viewed from the point of view of other traditions. It ignores indigenous practices and customs, seeing everything as an import from somewhere else. It also masks the diversity of monastic lifestyles characteristic of the region, which included wandering ascetics, cloistered monks, household religious, solitary hermits, and cave monasticism. Finally, it paints a static view of the area’s monasticism, which instead was a dynamic phenomenon owing to the constant influx of new peoples and novel religious traditions.

Monasticism in the Late Antique Era From the very beginning, monks in southern Italy and Sicily embraced both cenobitic and anchoritic forms of monasticism, and lifestyles and activities varied greatly. The monastery built in the mid-​sixth century in Squillace, Calabria, by the Roman consul and senator Cassiodorus contained communities of monks leading both solitary and communal existences. Cassiodorus himself was a scholar-​monk, and the monastic lifestyle he promoted in his Institutiones was a communal one based on learning and moderation, without the type of self-​mortification characteristic of the Desert Fathers. His monastery became an important center of Christian learning in the sixth century,

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with monks engaged in scholarship, translation, and manuscript production.1 In contrast, the protagonist of Book 2 of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, St. Benedict, rejected book learning, instead choosing to engage in extreme ascetic practices similar to those of Antony. He also preferred a solitary existence in the forest over life in a community. Even in his later years, after attracting disciples and establishing a monastery where the monks led a communal life under his strict guidance, work and prayer were the main activities rather than scholarship.2 Montecassino and its founder, St. Benedict, are two of the best-​known features of early Italian monasticism. Nonetheless, much of what we know about the abbey’s beginnings is shrouded in mystery and mythology. The majority of our information about both the monastery’s early history and the Benedictine Rule (RB) comes from later Carolingian sources, in particular texts written by church reformers such as Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) and Paul the Deacon (d. c. 799). A major goal of these reformers was the standardization of monastic life based on the RB, and as part of their reform program they created a master narrative that linked Montecassino and the RB to the protagonist of Book 2 of Gregory’s Dialogues.3 According to this account, after the destruction of the abbey of Montecassino by the Lombards in c. 577, the exiled monks brought the original codex of the RB with them to Rome. After the abbey’s refoundation in the eighth century, Pope Zachary (r. 741–​52) returned the text of the rule to the abbey; at the end of the same century, the monks gave the manuscript to Charlemagne, who brought it to France. This account about the origins of Montecassino and the RB had become commonplace in the Carolingian world by the early ninth century, although there is no clear evidence from before Charlemagne’s time to substantiate any of these claims. In fact, the exact origins of the RB used in Carolingian

See the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, Lauwers, and Contreni in this volume. See also Salvatore Pricoco and Sandro Leanza, “Spiritualità monastica e attività culturale nel cenobio di Vivarium,” in Atti della Settimana di studi su Flavio Magno Aurelio Cassiodoro, Cosenza-​Squillance, 19–​24 settembre 1983 (Cosenza, 1986), 357–​77. 2 On the gendered division of work in late antique and early medieval Europe, see the article by Réal in this volume. 3 See the articles by Diem and Rousseau, and Kramer in this volume. See also Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule:  Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observances in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram:  The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 53–​84; Mariano Dell’Omo, “Montecassino altomedievale:  i secoli VIII e IX. Genesi di un simbolo, storia di una realtà,” in Il monachesimo italiano dell’età langobarda all’età ottoniana (secc. VIII–​IX). Atti del VII Convegno di studi storici sull’Italia benedittina, Nonantola (Modena) 11–​13 settembre 2003, ed. G. Spinelli (Cesena, 2006), 165–​92. 1

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monasteries remain unknown, and evidence from the eighth century suggests that the Carolingian version of the rule may not have come from Montecassino.4 Yet, wherever the origins of the RB lay, its promotion by Carolingian reformers, and its purported connection to Montecassino, created an important link between the Italian abbey and both Carolingian rulers and the papacy in the eighth century and beyond. The abbey was one of the few institutions in southern Italy to have a close relationship with both Rome and northern Europe prior to the eleventh century.

Italo-​Greek Monasticism For Byzantine Sicily there is very little documentary evidence for monasticism for the seventh and eighth centuries. Greek hagiographical sources from this time focus almost exclusively on episcopal saints, as well as on the apostolic origins of some of the region’s more important dioceses. Nonetheless, some of these vitae also exalt a monastic lifestyle, such as the Life of Zosimo of Syracuse, who was a monk in the monastery of Santa Lucia before his election as bishop of the city in 642.5 With the Muslim conquest of the island, beginning in the ninth century, however, a new hagiographical tradition arose based on Sicilian monks fleeing Muslim armies and settling on the mainland. A series of Greek monastic bios or vitae, written between the ninth and twelfth centuries, chronicle the lives of these new monastic heroes and provide important information about monasticism and monastic communities in both Greek-​and Latin-​speaking zones of southern Italy and Sicily.6 The protagonists of this new Italo-​Greek hagiography were peripatetic ascetics who alternated between anchoritic and communal existences. Like the monk-​pilgrims of late antiquity whose lives focused on the theme of xeneteia (exile), the protagonists of these Greek Lives were perpetual pilgrims who spent large portions of their life traveling.7 Their wanderings were often

Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule,” 71–​4; Dell’Omo, “Montecassino altomedievale,” 174–​5. Augusta Acconcia Longo, “Il contributo dell’agiografia alla storia delle diocesi italogreche,” in Ricerche di agiografia italogreca, ed. Augusta Acconcia Longo (Rome, 2003), 183–​4 and 192. 6 See the article by Howe in this volume. See also David Paul Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality of the Italo-​Greeks (Thessaloniki, 1991); Enrica Follieri, “I santi dell’Italia greca,” Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici 34 (1997):  3–​36; Mario Re, “Italo-​Greek Hagiography,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis, 227–​58 (Farnham, 2011); G. Da Costa-​Louillet, “Saints de Sicile et d’Italie méridionale aux VIIIe, IXe et Xe siècles,” Byzantion 29–​30 (1959–​60): 89–​173. 7 Gennaro Luongo, “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci,” in Pellegrinaggi e itinerari dei santi nel Mezzogiorno medievale, ed. Giovanni Vitolo (Naples, 1999), 47–​51. 4 5

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focused on finding secluded places where they could lead an eremitic existence centered on extreme ascetic practices and hesychia, the use of prayer and inward meditation to gain a closer relationship to God.8 However, the monks also visited holy sites in places such as Rome and Jerusalem, sought out other famous ascetics who could further their religious education, and participated in diplomatic missions at the behest of rulers or communities. Later in life they gained thaumaturgical powers and attracted large numbers of disciples. Although a solitary existence was seen as the highest monastic ideal in the Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources, communal forms of monasticism were also praised and promoted. Most of the monks began their careers in a monastic community, and a communal life was often seen as necessary in order to strengthen a monk before heading out into the wilderness. As explained in the Life of the tenth-​century monk Fantinos the Younger, only after living twenty years in a monastery under the authority of an abbot did the saint gain control over his passions, allowing him to seek out an isolated existence in the mountains of Lucania.9 Similarly, the saints for whom Lives exist all headed monastic communities, generally at the end of their lives, after long periods of isolation. Although in the Lives the saints at times expressed annoyance at having to abandon solitude because of the demands of their followers, they nonetheless believed that serving others took precedence over their own desire for a contemplative life. They saw it as a divine command to concern themselves with the salvation of others as much as with their own.10 Far from rejecting cenobitic forms of monasticism, these monk-​saints preferred an anchorite lifestyle for themselves but built communal monasteries for the welfare of others. In the Life of Leo-​Luke, cenobitic monasticism was even the preferred lifestyle. At the beginning of his vita, Leo-​Luke was warned about the dangers of a wandering, ascetic existence and was told to attach himself to a monastery.11



Agostino Pertusi, “Rapporti tra il monachesimo italo-​g reco e il monachesimo bizantino nell’alto medio evo,” in La chiesa greca in Italia dall’VIII al XVI secolo. Atti del II Convegno internazionale interecclesiale, Bari, 3 vols. (Padua, 1972–​3), 2:477. 9 Enrica Follieri, ed. and trans., La Vita di San Fantino il Giovane (Brussels, 1993), ­chapter 9. 10 Enrico Morini, “Aspetti organizzativi e linee di spiritualità nel monachesimo greco in Calabria,” in Calabria Cristiana. Società Religione Cultura nel territorio della Diocesi di Oppido Mamertina-​Palmi, ed. S. Leanza (Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro), 1999), 306–​7; Luongo, “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci,” 51. 11 Vita di San Leone Luca di Corleone 5, AASS, Mar. 1 (1668). 8

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Monastic Lifestyles and Organization in the Early Middle Ages The monastic communities found in both the Greek and Latin sources show a wide diversity in terms of size, organization, and lifestyle. In the Italo-​ Greek hagiographical texts, some communities appear to have been large communal-​style houses with extensive landholdings. According to the Life of Leo-​Luke, the abbey of Mount Mula grew to over one hundred monks during the saint’s abbacy, with the result that new fields and vineyards were planted to support the larger population.12 The monks of the cave monastery built by Saint Elias the Cave Dweller in Calabria also engaged in agricultural activities, clearing lands and reorganizing the rural community surrounding them. The monastery occupied a number of different caves, including ones reserved for wine storage, milling, and salt-​making.13 Charter evidence for the female monastery of St. Gregory Armeno in Naples shows the tenth-​ century abbesses actively managing the convent’s estates, leasing out lands and involving themselves in disputes to protect their landholdings and economic resources.14 According to the Life of St. Sabas, monks inhabiting the forest of Mercourion in northern Calabria practiced a variety of lifestyles. Some lived alone in caves, some in small groups of two or three, and some in larger communities headed by an abbot.15 St. Philip in Agyrium in Sicily contained a mix of anchorites and cenobites, while the cenobitic abbey of Montecassino housed ascetics who lived in isolated cells. In Naples there were examples of monks in monastic communities who embarked on individual searches for religious perfection.16 Thus, solitary and communal forms of monasticism coexisted peacefully in the region, and no reform movements arose to promote one form over another. Noble patronage of monasteries was a well-​established principle by the time of Gregory I. His letters give evidence of wealthy patrons building monasteries either for others to inhabit or as places for their own retirement. Sometimes noblemen or women would turn their houses into monasteries



Ibid., 14. Vita sancti Eliae Spelaeote abbate 38 and 40–​3, AASS, Sept. 3 (1750); Stéphanos Efthymiadis, “Les saints d’Italie méridionale (IXe–​Xe s.) et leur rôle dans la société locale,” in Byzantine Religious Culture: Studies in Honor of Alice-​Mary Talbot, ed. E. Fisher, S. Papaioannou, and D. Sullivan (Leiden, 2011), 353; Agostino Pertusi, “Aspetti organizzativi e culturali dell’ambiente monacale greco dell’Italia meridionale,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti II Settimana Internazionale, Mendola (Milan, 1965), 395. 14 Patricia Skinner, Women in Medieval Italian Society, 500–​1200 (Harlow, 2001), 116–​17. 15 Orestes, Vita et Conversatio Sancti Patris Nostri Sabae Iunioris 7, ed. and trans. J. Cozza-​ Luzi (Rome, 1891). 16 Giovanni Vitolo, Caratteri del monachesimo nel mezzogiorno altomedievale (secc. VI–​IX) (Salerno, 1984), 14–​15, 18. 12 13

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either before or after their deaths.17 After the Lombard conquest of southern Italy, noble patronage of monastic communities continued, and rulers and nobles built family monasteries in order to promote and legitimize their authority. Some of these foundations, such as Santa Sofia in Benevento and San Salvatore in Alife, were female monasteries. Although in a few cases dynastic houses grew large and powerful, in most cases family monasteries were small and politically insignificant in comparison with their counterparts in northern Europe. Moreover, the building of religious houses was not an activity reserved for the wealthy alone. Charter evidence also contains examples of lay families and individuals of modest means building and administering religious houses, some of which contained monks.18 Cities in Puglia contained urban monasteries under the authority of citizens.19 In both Lombard and Byzantine regions, the foundation of a monastery usually came about through individual initiative and did not involve local church officials. Individuals did not need permission from bishops or other church leaders to build their foundations, and bishops rarely participated in the foundation or administration of monasteries in the early medieval era.20 Most of the monasteries found in the early medieval charters and hagiographical sources were small, humble affairs that often lasted only one or two generations. Frequently, a community disappeared after the founder’s death.21 Furthermore, there is often confusion in the documents over whether a religious house was a church, a monastery, or a combination of the two. Monks and monasteries regularly participated in pastoral care in places such as Campania and Puglia, while churches at times contained both priests and monks working side by side.22 When looking at the material remains of





Gregory the Great, Registrum, III.58; V.50; VI.44; IX.10, 54, 163, 165, 181–​2, 233; X.1, 18; XIII.21, in Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum, MGH Epistolae. 18 Valerie Ramseyer, The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 850–​1150 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 62–​8 and 72–​85. 19 Jean-​Marie Martin, La Pouille du VIe au XIIe siècle (Rome, 1993), 665–​7. 20 Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 48–​ 9 and 63–​ 6; Vera von Falkenhausen, “I monasteri greci dell’Italia meridionale e della Sicilia dopo l’avvento dei Normanni: continuità e mutamenti,” in Il passaggio dal domino bizantino allo stato normanno nell’Italia meridionale. Atti del II Convegno internazionale di studi sulla civiltà rupestre medioevale nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia, Taranto-​Mottola, 31 October–​4 November 1973 (Taranto, 1977), 197–​9. 21 Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 72; Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 89–​90; Falkenhausen, “I monastery greci,” 203. For proprietary foundations in northern Europe, see the article by Rosé in this volume and the article by Lyon in volume II. 22 Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 69–​72; Martin, La Pouille, 659. 17

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religious houses, it can often be difficult to distinguish a church from a monastery.23 Thus, in Byzantine and Lombard regions alike, the line between the secular and regular clergy was often blurred. Lombard monasteries were rarely centers of political power in the early medieval era, and we hardly ever find monks exercising political authority or involving themselves in political affairs. Italo-​Greek hagiography suggests that monks could at times exercise political power, serving as ambassadors or mediators of disputes. However, such power was informal and episodic, and in the hagiography monks mostly kept their distance from centers of power. In contrast, archaeological evidence has shown that in at least some Byzantine regions monks did exercise political power in the ninth and tenth centuries. In northern Calabria, fortifications originally built in the early Lombard era were turned into fortified monasteries surrounded by lay populations. These monasteries exercised political and military functions for the Byzantine administration and served as centers of refuge for the lay population in times of war.24 In Basilicata, monks organized with the local population against military raids.25 Italo-​Greek monks thus played an important role in the recolonization of lands during the period of Byzantine expansion, building rural settlements in uninhabited areas, and putting the surrounding lands under cultivation with the aid of lay populations.26 There is only limited evidence for written monastic rules before the eleventh century, and it is unknown how widespread the RB was in the region. With the exception of Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno, there is virtually no evidence for the RB before 1050. Some documents dating to the pre-​Norman era mention monastic communities in cities such as Naples and Salerno that followed rules based on a communal lifestyle, although it is unknown whether these rules were written down or transmitted orally.27 Some of the Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources from the ninth and tenth centuries mention kanones, which could refer to some sort of rule; however,



See the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. See also Aldo Messina, “Caratteristiche dell’edilizia rupestre brindisina,” in Quando abitavamo in grotta. Atti del I  Convegno internazionale sulla civiltà rupestre. Savelletri di Fasano (Brindisi) 27–​29 Novembre 2003, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto, 2004), 37. 24 Giuseppe Roma, “Rossano tra tardo antico e alto medioevo:  la documentazione archeologica,” in San Nilo di Rossano e l’Abbazia greca di Grottaferrata, ed. Filippo Burgarella (Rome, 2009), 47–​50. 25 Annick Peters-​Custot, “Les communautés grecques de Basilicate à l’époque byzantine,” in Histoire et culture dans l’Italie byzantine. Acquis et nouvelles recherches, ed. André Jacob, Jean-​Marie Martin, and Ghislaine Noyé (Rome, 2006), 569. 26 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 98–​100. 27 G. A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge, 2007), 56–​7; Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 103. 23

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most scholars believe that Italo-​Greek monks in the pre-​Norman era modeled themselves on the teachings and behavior of charismatic leaders rather than a written rule.28 Yet, even if the RB had little success in the region prior to the Norman era, virtues such as obedience, charity, and manual labor—​ characteristic of Benedictine and other communal forms of monasticism—​ figure prominently in the sources, both Latin and Greek.29 Before the eleventh century, monasteries in Lombard regions were not spiritual or intellectual centers for the formation of the region’s clergy.30 The monks themselves received their training either within a monastic community or by attaching themselves to an older, more experienced monk who taught both by example and exhortation. In the Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources, most monks were trained by a spiritual father, who, after a period of preparation, would tonsure his disciple and dress him in monastic garb, sometimes giving him a new name as well. Some monks combined education in a cenobitic community with training by a mentor. Overall the sources suggest that the preparation and formation of monks took diverse forms. Similarly, the role of education and attitudes toward books and learning differed from one monk to another, and from one monastic community to another.31 Monks in southern Italy and Sicily did not renounce ties to family and society, and in many cases family members remained central to a monk’s life. The late antique tradition of widows becoming household religious after their husband’s death continued to be a popular practice, and in some instances men took the monastic habit but remained at home with their families.32 In the case of small monastic foundations administered by either families or consortia, it was not unusual for a family member of an abbot to inherit the abbacy upon the abbot’s death.33 Italo-​Greek hagiography also demonstrates the centrality of family ties to monks in the region. The saint-​ monks frequently accepted family members into their monastic communities or built new ones for relatives to inhabit. St. Fantinus, for example, after convincing his family to convert to a monastic life, built two monasteries, one for his father and one for his sister and mother.34 Some of the monks

Luongo, “Interari dei santi italo-​g reci,” 45; Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 90. Morini, “Aspetti organizzativi e linee,” 287–​95 and 303–​4. 30 Martin, La Pouille, 565. 31 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality,  90–​4. 32 Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 99–​100. See also the article by Magnani in this volume. 33 Falkenhausen, “I monasteri greci,” 201–​2. 34 Follieri, La Vita di San Fantino 16–​17. See also De S. Luca Abbate Confessore 15, AASS Oct. 6 (1794); De S Vitale Siculo Abbate ordinis S Basilii Armenti et Rapollae in Italia 16, AASS Mar. 2 (1668); Orestes, Vita et Conversatio Sanctorum Patrum Nostrorum Christophori et Macarii

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maintained relationships with family members who remained in the world.35 In some cases, veritable monastic families emerge whose members converted as a group, then traveled and lived together from time to time. For example, SS Sabas and Makarios and their parents, Christopher and Kale, all converted to a monastic life. Although they spent time apart pursuing their own religious lives, they reunited on a number of different occasions, including when Sabas and Makarios personally buried their parents after they died.36 Furthermore, the line between monastic life and the secular world could be blurred. Monks appear in charters as property holders participating in a variety of legal agreements, often in the company of family members.37 The saints in the Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources were well integrated into their surrounding communities, providing services for local populations and their rulers.38 Thus, despite their quest for solitude and isolation, monks never completely abandoned their families or the secular world. Cave monasticism is a well-​known phenomenon in parts of southern Italy and Sicily, stretching back into the earliest days of Christianity. Generally connected to eremitical lifestyles, cave-​dwelling monks appear frequently in the Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources, and archaeological evidence has confirmed the existence of remote cave dwellings where monks led a rigorous ascetic existence far away from the world. Yet some cave monasteries were larger, more elaborate structures, built in or near population centers. In whatever form they took, these cave hermitages and monasteries formed part of the medieval renaissance in cut-​rock architecture characteristic of parts of Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria. Not only were churches and monasteries dug out of rock at this time, but a large number of troglodyte villages appeared as well. Moreover, archaeological research over the past fifty years has shown that most of the rupestrian religious houses were not isolated structures but integral parts of troglodyte settlements, serving the religious needs of the surrounding lay population and at times playing important economic and political roles as well. Although the reasons for the renewed interest in cut-​rock architecture are unclear, it nonetheless



5 and 7, ed. and trans. J. Cozza-​Luzi (Rome, 1892); Vita di S. Nilo fondatore e patrono di Grottaferrata 28 and 82, ed. and trans. Germano Giovanelli (Grottaferrata, 1966–​72). 35 Vita di Sant’Elia il Giovane 25 and 39, ed. and trans. Giuseppe Rossi Taibbi (Palermo, 1962); Follieri, La Vita di San Fantino 15–​16; Orestes, Vita et Conversatio Sanctorum Christophori et Macarii 8–​9; Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 104. 36 Orestes, Vita et Conversatio Sancti Patris Nostri Sabae Iunioris; Orestes, Vita et Conversatio Sanctorum Patrum Nostrorum Christophori et Macarii. 37 Re, “Italo-​Greek Hagiography,” 242; Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 104–​5. 38 Luongo, “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci,” 51–​2.

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represented a return to pre-​Roman building techniques that offered effective solutions for meeting the challenges of an environment characterized by hot, dry summers, scarce water resources, and limited access to forests and wood. In places such as Puglia and Sicily, where soft, porous rock formations lent themselves to easy excavation, cave dwellings provided natural climate control in both cold winters and hot summers, access to a supply of clean water, and the ability to forgo wood as both a building and heating material.39 Much scholarship has been devoted to the issue of Greek versus Latin monasticism in the region, in particular the origins of Greek Christianity and the question of whether Greek monasticism and ascetic values presented unique regional characteristics that differed from other parts of the Byzantine Empire.40 Greek Christianity existed in some places, such as Sicily, from the very beginnings of Christianity, while in other areas, such as Calabria and Lucania, Greek as a liturgical language arrived later on. In the past, scholars have tried to pinpoint particular moments when new waves of Greek-​speaking monks arrived in southern Italy, with the resulting spread of Byzantine forms of monasticism. Some have hypothesized that the monophysite or iconoclast controversies led to the fleeing of orthodox clerics to Italy, while others suggest that the Arab conquests of the Near East and North Africa resulted in a large influx of educated Greek-​speaking elites into places such as Sicily and Rome in the seventh century. Later Italo-​Greek hagiographical sources contend that Muslim raids in Sicily and Calabria caused the displacement of clerics and holy men to the mainland and then north into Lombard regions. The Byzantine reconquest of parts of southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries also brought Greek clerics to the region. In the end, the movement of Greek-​speaking people, both clerical and lay, into Latinate areas was a constant during the Middle Ages, even if it most likely intensified in certain eras, such as the seventh century and during the period of Byzantine reconquest. Moreover, the Byzantine colonization of places such as Calabria and Lucania occurred at the hands of the laity as well as the clergy.41 Much overlap existed between Latin and Greek practices in medieval southern Italy, making it difficult at times to neatly distinguish Greek from Latin Christianity. Certain practices now associated with Greek Orthodoxy,

Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, Civiltà delle grotte. Mezzogiorno rupestre (Naples, 1988); Valerie Ramseyer, “Cave Dwellings,” in A Companion to Mediterranean History, ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (Chichester, 2014), 219–​33. 40 On monasticism in the Byzantine Empire, see Kaplan (among others) in this volume. 41 Silvano Borsari, Il monachesimo bizantino nella Sicilia e nell’Italia meridionale prenormanne (Naples, 1963), 7–​22; Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality,  42–​4. 39

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such as clerical marriage, were characteristic of both Latin-​and Greek-​ speaking Christians in the region. Inventories for religious houses in some cases include manuscripts written in both Latin and Greek, while calendars and liturgical texts from Lombard regions contain bilingual hymns and lists of feast days for both “Eastern” and “Western” saints. The region had monastic communities in which Latin-​speaking and Greek-​speaking monks resided side by side, as well as monasteries which alternated between Greek and Latin abbots. Moreover, in the pre-​Norman era, diverse monastic lifestyles were found in both Greek and Lombard territories, and Greek and Latin monastic communities displayed similarities with regard to lifestyles, practices, and organization.42 Although language differentiated the two, it would be incorrect to regard Greek and Latin monasticism as two distinct entities with clearly defined variations.

Monastic Reform in the Tenth through Twelfth Centuries Over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, large monasteries based on the RB with extensive landholdings, networks of dependent religious houses, and sophisticated administrative apparatuses arose on the mainland. The refoundations and growth of the abbeys of Montecassino and San Vincenzo al Volturno mark the beginnings of this new phase of monastic history. Both of these abbeys had been destroyed and abandoned in the 880s as a consequence of Muslim attacks, and when monks returned in the tenth century they worked hard on reestablishing their landed patrimonies and on gaining privileges from lay and ecclesiastical leaders. With the aid of Lombard rulers, the monks of both Montecassino and San Vincenzo waged battle against local lay lords, eventually creating compact areas of property holdings in and around the abbeys where the monks exercised political as well as religious power. At the same time, the two abbeys participated in the continuing economic revival of the area, building new population centers and clearing lands for expanding agricultural activities. They created networks of dependent religious houses and participated in pastoral care via the churches under their authority. They also built castles and fortresses and raised armies to help protect their landholdings and settlements.43 In the eleventh century, other abbeys in the region similarly acquired extensive landholdings and networks of dependent religious houses. Some

Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape,  85–​92. G. A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge, 2007), 23–​31, 341–​2, and 432–​3.

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of these were new foundations and some were old, and patronage from both Lombard and Norman rulers served as an important impetus for their growth. For example, the princes of Benevento donated lands and granted privileges to the monastery of Santa Sofia, while the princes of Salerno helped the Abbey of the Holy Trinity of Cava expand into a major monastic power. The Norman rulers who followed continued to support these abbeys, while at the same time funding the building and growth of new monastic foundations, such as the abbey of Venosa. Noble families, both Lombard and Norman, also provided important support for these and other monasteries. Some of these abbeys eventually exercised political and military power on behalf of the Norman dukes and kings.44 A few of these newly endowed abbeys grew large enough to become veritable monastic empires. For example, over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries the abbey of Cava amassed extensive landholdings and gained control over 100 dependent houses on both the mainland and Sicily. At the same time, the monks developed an efficient administrative apparatus for the governance of their dependencies and built two territorial lordships where they exercised political, religious, and economic power over the inhabitants. The abbey of Cava provided important political and military services for the Norman rulers, thus exercising political power at both the local and central level. Cava was one of a handful of abbeys in the region to benefit from the Normans’ policy of centralizing monastic organization and placing smaller houses under the authority of larger monastic communities. In addition, its monks gained exemption from episcopal authority from Pope Paschal II. Meanwhile, the abbey continued the tradition of monasteries engaging in pastoral care, even increasing its pastoral activities in the Norman era. Finally, Cava brought monastic reform to other abbeys in the region, sending monks to the abbey of Venosa in 1140 to aid with reform efforts there, and dispatching a group of monks in 1176 to staff the royal monastic foundation of Monreale in Sicily.45 Female houses in the region also grew to become active religious and economic forces. The Convent of San Salvatore at Goleto, founded as a double house by William of Vercelli (d. 1142)  in 1135, received the patronage of Norman and Angevin rulers, as well as of the local nobility. Both the female and male members of the monasteries were under the authority of the

Ibid., 84–​105, 340–​62, and 430–​46. Ramseyer, Transformation of a Religious Landscape, 159–​92; Vito Lorè, Monasteri, principi, aristocrazie. La Trinità di Cava nei secoli XI e XII (Spoleto, 2008).

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abbess, who was elected by the chapter of nuns. The monastic community held extensive landholdings, woodlands, and water resources and controlled a number of dependent houses, both male and female, growing to become one of the most important religious, political, and economic powers in the region of Irpinia and beyond.46 Many of the large abbeys in the region adopted the RB in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and some of the founders and abbots of these monastic communities had ties to Cluny. For example, Alferius, the founder of the abbey of Cava, and Peter, the third abbot of the monastery, both spent time at Cluny during their youths, and without a doubt the Burgundian abbey exerted an influence on their later monastic careers. Nonetheless, important monasteries following the RB in the region did not become part of the Cluniac network and, although Cluniac customs were introduced into abbeys such as Cava, they were blended with local monastic traditions.47 Popes from Rome traveled to the region at various points in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to promote the reform of both the secular and the regular clergy. However, changes to the monastic landscape in the eleventh century were brought about above all by indigenous reformers, such as Abbot Peter of Cava and Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino (d. 1087). Similarly in the twelfth century, monastic reform was centered on local men such as John of Matera (d. 1139), founder of the abbey of Pulsano, and William of Vercelli, founder of the abbey of Montevergine. Monastic reform movements emanating from northern Europe had little success in the region. Only a handful of monasteries belonged to the Cistercian Order prior to the late twelfth century, and only three Carthusian houses were ever built, despite the fact that the founder of the Carthusian Order, Bruno of Cologne (d. 1101), spent his later years in Calabria. The military orders and the Augustinians likewise made few inroads in the region.48 Although open to outside influences, monastic reform in southern Italy and Sicily in the Norman era was largely a local phenomenon. Italo-​Greek monasteries also underwent reform beginning in the eleventh century. Hagiographical sources demonstrate the growing popularity of a cenobitic lifestyle at this time, as well as the impulse to build larger communal abbeys in regions under Byzantine control. Written rules, called typika, appeared, although their inspiration came not from the RB but from

Skinner, Women in Medieval Italian Society, 176–​7. On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 47 Vitolo, “Cava e Cluny,” 199–​220. 48 Loud, Latin Church in Norman Italy, 470–​83 and 484–​92. 46

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the writings of Eastern fathers such as Basil and Theodore the Studite. In the twelfth century, typika from Greek monasteries called for a strict cenobitic lifestyle under the authority of an abbot, with the monks focused on activities such as reading, scholarship, manuscript copying, and manual labor.49 As with Latin monasteries, Greek monastic reform was largely a local phenomenon, influenced by other regions but relying mostly on models from within. Norman rulers did not seek to suppress Greek monasticism, or force Greek monks to change their practices or adopt Latin as a liturgical language. On the contrary, they patronized Greek monasteries in the same way that they did Latin ones, adhering to the same policy of centralizing monastic organization by placing smaller monastic communities under the jurisdiction of larger ones, and creating congregations of Greek monasteries. San Salvatore of Messina, for example, became the mother house for all Greek monasteries in Sicily, as well as a handful of monastic houses in Calabria. Yet, despite the tolerance shown toward Greek monks and their communities, a slow process of Latinization began that resulted in the decline of Greek monasticism over the course of the Middle Ages. Although rulers never sought an active suppression of Greek Christianity, an increasingly Latin population and the area’s integration into Latin Christian society brought about the slow disappearance of Greek monasticism, in particular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Conversely, an influx of Albanian orthodox exiles resulted in the return of Greek Christian communities in the later Middle Ages in Calabria and Sicily.50 The monastic reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries did not erase the diversity of monastic lifestyles in the region. Despite the move toward adoption of the RB and more communal forms of monasticism, the tradition of anchoritic monasticism continued in the region and was practiced by both Latin and Greek monks.51 Wandering ascetics and cave monks similarly did not disappear. Italo-​Greek saints from the Norman era continued to alternate between different monastic lifestyles. Bartholomew of Simeri (d. 1130), for example, began his career in a cloister, spent time traveling as a peripatetic monk, lived an anchoritic existence in a cave, and then built a communal monastery based on a cenobitic lifestyle. Both Adelaide, regent for the county of Sicily, and the Byzantine emperor gave gifts to Bartholomew’s monastic community.52 In addition, monasteries, both Greek and Latin, did

Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 123–​9; Pertusi, “Aspetti organizzativi e linee,” 406–​8. Loud, Latin Church in Norman Italy, 501–​12; Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 138–​42. 51 See the article by Jasper and Howe in volume II. 52 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality,  125–​6.

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not abandon the custom of allowing certain monks attached to communal houses to lead an eremitical lifestyle with the permission of their abbot.53 Monastic rules at times were hybrid, relying on different models, both local and foreign. Luke, the first abbot of San Salvatore of Messina, created a rule in the twelfth century based on typika found on Mount Athos, in Jerusalem, and in Studite monasteries, as well as the rule created by Bartholomew of Simeri.54 By the end of the Norman era, although monasticism in southern Italy and Sicily had begun to resemble more closely monasticism found in other parts of Latin Christendom, especially in Campania, it still retained unique regional characteristics inherited from earlier times.

Bibliography Acconcia Longo, Augusta. “Il contributo dell’agiografia alla storia delle diocesi italogreche.” In Ricerche di agiografia italogreca, edited by Augusta Acconcia Longo, 179–​208. Rome, 2003. Borsari, Silvano. Il monachesimo bizantino nella Sicilia e nell’Italia meridionale prenormanne. Naples, 1963. Da Costa-​Louillet, G. “Saints de Sicile et d’Italie méridionale aux VIIIe, IXe et Xe siècles.” Byzantion 29–​30 (1959–​60): 89–​173. Dell’Omo, Mariano. “Montecassino altomedievale: i secoli VIII e IX. Genesi di un simbolo, storia di una realtà.” In Il monachesimo italiano dell’età langobarda all’età ottoniana (secc. VIII–​IX). Atti del VII Convegno di studi storici sull’Italia benedittina, Nonantola (Modena) 11–​13 settembre 2003, edited by G. Spinelli, 165–​92. Cesena, 2006. Diem, Albrecht. “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observances in the Early Medieval West.” In Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, 53–​84. Turnhout, 2011. Efthymiadis, Stéphanos. “Les saints d’Italie méridionale (IXe–​Xe s.) et leur rôle dans la société locale.” In Byzantine Religious Culture:  Studies in Honor of Alice-​Mary Talbot, edited by E. Fisher, S. Papaioannou, and D. Sullivan, 347–​72. Leiden, 2011. Falkenhausen, Vera von. “I monasteri greci dell’Italia meridionale e della Sicilia dopo l’avvento dei Normanni: continuità e mutamenti.” In Il passaggio dal domino bizantino allo stato normanno nell’Italia meridionale. Atti del II Convegno internazionale di studi sulla civiltà rupestre medioevale nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia, Taranto-​Mottola, 31 October–​4 November 1973, 197–​229. Taranto, 1977. Follieri, Enrica. “I santi dell’Italia greca.” Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici 34 (1997): 3–​36. Hester, David Paul. Monasticism and Spirituality of the Italo-​Greeks. Thessaloniki, 1991. Loud, G. A. The Latin Church in Norman Italy. Cambridge, 2007.

Pertusi, “Aspetti organizzativi e linee,” 407; Loud, Latin Church in Norman Italy, 470. Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality,  126–​7.

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Valerie Ramseyee r Luongo, Gennaro. “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci.” In Pellegrinaggi e itinerari dei santi nel Mezzogiorno medievale, edited by Giovanni Vitolo, 39–​56. Naples, 1999. Martin, Jean-​Marie. La Pouille du VIe au XIIe siècle. Rome, 1993. Morini, Enrico. “Aspetti organizzativi e linee di spiritualità nel monachesimo greco in Calabria.” In Calabria Cristiana. Società Religione Cultura nel territorio della Diocesi di Oppido Mamertina-​Palmi, edited by S. Leanza, 251–​316. Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro), 1999. Pertusi, Agostino. “Aspetti organizzativi e culturali dell’ambiente monacale greco dell’Italia meridionale.” In L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti II Settimana Internazionale, Mendola, 382–​434. Milan, 1965.   “Rapporti tra il monachesimo italo-greco e il monachesimo bizantino nell’alto medio evo.” In La chiesa greca in Italia dall’VIII al XVI secolo. Atti del II Convegno internazionale interecclesiale, Bari, 3 vols., 2:473–520. Padua, 1972–3. Ramseyer, Valerie. The Transformation of a Religious Landscape:  Medieval Southern Italy, 850–​1150. Ithaca, NY, 2006. Re, Mario. “Italo-​Greek Hagiography.” In Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, edited by Stephanos Efthymiadis, 227–​58. Farnham, 2011. Skinner, Patricia. Women in Medieval Italian Society, 500–​1200. Harlow, 2001. Vitolo, Giovanni. Caratteri del monachesimo nel mezzogiorno altomedievale (secc. VI–​IX). Salerno, 1984.   “Cava e Cluny.” In L’Italia nel quadro dell’espansione europea del monachesimo cluniacense. Atti del Convegno internazionale di storia medievale, edited by Cinzio Violante, 199–220. Cesena, 1985.

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Discerning “Reform” in Monastic Liturgy (c. 750–​1050) Je sse D. B il l ett In his Colloquy, Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c. 1010) has the boys of his monastery pretend to be laborers, tradesmen, and professionals so that they may learn the Latin vocabulary for the characteristic tasks and implements of each kind of work. The ploughman tends his oxen, the hunter his hounds and nets. The monk’s occupation is the liturgy, the “work of God” (opus Dei, RB 43.3), before which nothing is to be preferred: [ MASTER]  You, boy: what have you done today? [ PUPIL]  I have done a great deal. Last night, when I heard the bell, I got out of bed and went out to the church, and I sang Nocturns with the brothers. Then we sang the Office of All Saints and Lauds. And after this we sang Prime, the seven [penitential] psalms, the litany, and the first Mass of the day. Then we sang Terce and the main Mass of the day. After this we sang Sext, and we ate and drank and had a nap. And then we got up again and sang None. And now we are here before you, ready to hear what you have to say to us. [ MASTER]  When do you want to sing Vespers and Compline? [ PUPIL]  When it is time.1

This daily horarium could be that of any reformed monastery from the ninth to the eleventh century: eight offices, two masses, and additional penitential and intercessory devotions.2 The liturgy shaped the monastic day, directed intellectual activity, and justified the support of lay patrons.



Ælfric of Eynsham, Aelfric’s Colloquy 19, ed. G. N. Garmonsway, rev. M. J. Swanton (Exeter, 1978), 43–​5 (my translation). 2 For Ælfric’s own monastery, see Ælfric, Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham 2–​12, ed. and trans. Christopher A. Jones (Cambridge, 1998), 110–​15. For a general introduction, see John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1991). On music in particular, see Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrel, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicans, 2nd ed., 29 vols. (New York, 2001), s.v. “Plainchant.” 1

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An intensive liturgical life was not, however, unique to monasteries. The horarium observed by secular clerics was no less substantial, differing from the monastic only in the selection and arrangement of texts and chants. Though some early monastic writers attacked secular clerics as liturgically incompetent, some churches, such as the greater Roman basilicas, replaced monks with clerics, viewing them as more professional liturgical experts.3 Standard accounts of the development of monastic liturgy, which describe a linear growth in quantity and complexity up to the (supposedly) crushing horarium of Cluny, therefore fail to identify any distinctively monastic character in this development.4 A distinctive monastic character can be discerned, however, when the liturgy is considered in conjunction with monastic reform. Care is needed here: recent scholarship has seriously questioned conventional hagiographic depictions of a charismatic saint definitively delivering a monastery from internal laxity and external interference, drawing the reformed house into a network of monasteries all in some way bound to conform to the example of a mother house.5 Nevertheless, liturgical evidence can often confirm that a genuine “reform” took place at the level of liturgical practice. When a monastery fully conformed to St. Benedict’s liturgical code (RB 8–​18), as can often be shown from liturgical books or from allusions in narrative sources, it distinguished itself unmistakably from communities of secular clerics or unreformed monks. Furthermore, similarities in specific details of how that liturgical code was implemented, such as chants and prayers chosen for particular days in the ecclesiastical year, can often imply the direct dependency of one house on another. Such details could not arise merely from shared written exemplars. Because early musical notation served only as an aide-​ memoire to cantors who had memorized the whole repertory, any substantial duplication of chants between two monasteries would imply that cantors from one monastery had learned the repertory from the cantors of the other. Liturgical and musical dependency functioned differently from the use of written monastic customaries. Although in the past it was assumed that ownership of a copy of the customary of, say, Cluny proved that a monastery

Jesse D. Billett, “The Divine Office and the Secular Clergy in Later Anglo-​Saxon England,” in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–​1947), ed. David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah Williams (Turnhout, 2010), 429–​71; Guy Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries: Notes for the History of the Monasteries and Convents at Rome from the V through the X Century (Vatican City, 1957), 368. 4 Doubting the conventional view of Cluny, see Jean Leclercq, “Prayer at Cluny,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 651–​65. 5 See the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 3

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followed Cluniac customs, it now seems that such written copies were studied for edification and perhaps for selective adoption, but without the commitment of obedience that would follow from welcoming teachers from a mother house.6 Liturgical music, by contrast, could not be written down in a way that obviated viva voce teaching. Since the formation of a new cantor’s memory took roughly ten years,7 liturgical sharing of this kind meant an exchange of monks between houses for long periods. In the end, a newly reformed monastery received, at the very center of its communal life, liturgical forms, texts, and melodies that expressed an intimate relationship with another house. Three major phases in early medieval monastic liturgical reform demand separate treatment:  first, the “Romanization” of the liturgy of the whole Frankish Church under the early Carolingian kings; second, responses to legislation under Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40) requiring Frankish monastic liturgy to conform to the RB; and, finally, the fresh implementation of the RB’s liturgical code in the various local monastic reform movements of the tenth and eleventh centuries, which sometimes resulted in larger liturgical networks. Not all Western monasteries went through every phase, especially if they were located outside the Carolingian territory, nor can evidence for particular phases necessarily be identified in the liturgical books of the houses that were affected (when such books survive). But these three phases may safely be said to embrace the various possibilities for liturgical reform that obtained in each period.

The Romanization of Frankish Liturgy (751–​814) The first important phase of liturgical reform took place in Frankish Gaul. There, from the middle of the eighth century, the local liturgies of the city of Rome were deliberately imitated and assimilated to native Frankish customs. The resultant Romano-​Frankish rite differed widely in details from place to place, but was marked by a pan-​European unity of form and structure.8 Documents from the reign of Charlemagne (786–​814) identify Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III (r. 751–​68), as the instigator of this change, and modern

Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources,” in Consuetudines et regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. Carolyn Marino Malone and Clark Maines (Turnhout, 2014), 39. 7 Guido of Arezzo, Epistola de ignoto cantu (ante 1033), in Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra, ed. Martin Gerbert, vol. 2 (Sankt Blasien, 1784), 43. 8 The standard account is Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy:  An Introduction to the Sources, trans. and rev. William Storey and Niels Rasmussen (Portland, OR, 1986). 6

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scholars have sometimes suggested that Pippin sought to attach Roman liturgical authority to his usurpation of the throne from the Merovingians. But liturgical materials of Roman origin circulated in Gaul long before the Carolingians’ rise to royal title, not least through the influence of Anglo-​Saxon missionaries. Moreover, all the earliest manuscript sources for the Roman liturgy survive only in Frankish copies of the eighth and ninth centuries, with the texts apparently modified for Frankish use. It is therefore difficult to be sure what texts and practices were genuinely Roman, especially when the argument is limited, as it usually has been, to the evidence of sacramentaries (the books containing the prayers recited by the officiant at mass).9 Nevertheless, more was clearly at stake than an informal enrichment of the local Gallican liturgies with Roman elements. Before the movement toward Romanization, the native liturgies of Gaul, some shaped by the work of Irish missionaries, differed in important structural points from that of Rome, as contemporary observers were aware.10 An allegorical interpretation of the Gallican order of the mass—​attributed to the sixth-​century bishop Germanus of Paris, but probably composed in the late eighth century, as its most recent editor has argued—​represents an effort to resist pressure, royal or otherwise, to abandon traditional forms in favor of Roman models.11 The progressive adoption and adaptation of the Roman form of the mass, which was most rapid where Carolingian royal authority was strongest, is seen in Frankish revisions of documents describing Roman liturgical practice known as the Ordines Romani and also in visual depictions of mass ceremonial, as in the ivory covers of the sacramentary of Drogo, bishop of Metz (823–​55) and illegitimate son of Charlemagne.12 More significant than the mass for the history of monastic liturgy was the parallel adoption by the Frankish Church of the Roman form of the divine





See Yitzhak Hen, The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877) (London, 2001), 42–​64; and Yitzhak Hen, “Rome, Anglo-​Saxon England and the Formation of the Frankish Liturgy,” Revue bénédictine 112 (2002): 301–​22. 10 On the early local traditions, see the article by Jeffery in this volume. See also Jesse D. Billett, “The Liturgy of the ‘Roman’ Office in England from the Conversion to the Conquest,” in Rome Across Time and Space: Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c.  500–​1400, ed. Claudia Bolgia, Rosamond McKitterick, and John Osborne (Cambridge, 2011), 84–​110. 11 Philippe Bernard, ed., Epistolae de ordine sacrae oblationis et de diversis charismatibus ecclesiae Germano Parisiensi episcopo adscriptae, CCCM 187; and Philippe Bernard, trans., Transitions liturgiques en Gaule carolingienne. Une traduction commentée des deux “lettres” faussement attribuées à l’évêque Germain de Paris (fin du VIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2008). A good introduction is W. S. Porter, The Gallican Rite (London, 1958). 12 Roger E. Reynolds, “Image and Text: A Carolingian Illustration of Modifications in the Early Roman Eucharistic Ordines,” Viator 14 (1983): 59–​76. 9

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office. Early monastic rules describe, in bare outline or minute detail, different patterns (or cursus) for how offices of psalmody, readings, and prayers were to be celebrated at fixed times during the day.13 The monastic communities that sang the daily offices in the greater Roman basilicas had a distinctive cursus of their own.14 It was never codified in a rule—​its pattern was only fully described in the ninth century by Amalarius of Metz (d. 850–​2)—​but its basic shape was already fixed in the early sixth century, when St. Benedict adapted it for the cursus in the RB.15 It differs from other early Western monastic offices principally in its psalmody. Surviving records of Irish and Gallican cursus demand a large quantity of psalmody that varies through the year. In the Rule of Columbanus (c. 600), for example, the nighttime offices on Sundays require thirty-​six psalms in summer and seventy-​f ive in winter. In the Regula ad monachos of Aurelian of Arles (c. 547), the Sunday midnight office and vigil require thirty-​one psalms in summer and fifty-​nine in winter.16 In both cursus, the psalms are recited in numerical order without regard to the time of day or day of the week. In the Roman cursus (at least in its ninth-​century form), however, the Sunday night office has just eighteen psalms year round. Psalms are assigned to particular offices on particular days, so that the whole Psalter is sung every week. An early version of this cursus was established in England following the Roman mission of 597.17 Perhaps it was initially through the influence of Anglo-​Saxon missionaries on the Continent that the Roman cursus eventually attained complete dominance in the Frankish kingdoms. An attempt to defend the traditional cursus survives in the anonymous Ratio de cursus qui fuerunt eius auctores (“An Account of the cursus: Who Were Its Authors?”), which links the Roman, Gallican, and Irish cursus to the Apostles and Evangelists Peter, Mark, and John.18 (It also mentions three forms of cursus known to the writer only from books: the Eastern, described by John Cassian (d. 435); the “Ambrosian,” or Milanese, mentioned by Augustine (d. 430); and the cursus described in the RB.) Written within the Continental Irish tradition of Columbanus, this

On late antique and early medieval monastic rules, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 14 On these communities, see Ferrari, Early Roman Monasteries, 372–​4; Jesse D. Billett, The Divine Office in Anglo-​Saxon England, 597–​c.1000 (London, 2014), 30, 49–​51. 15 Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., La règle de saint Benoît, vol. 5: Commentaire historique et critique (Parties IV–​VI), SC 185, 383–​643; Billett, Divine Office,  30–​52. 16 See Billett, “Liturgy of the ‘Roman’ Office,” 87–​90. 17 Billett, Divine Office, 78–​132. 18 Ratio de cursus qui fuerunt eius auctores, in Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae, ed. K. Hallinger et al., CCM 1, 77–​91. 13

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treatise was “the last desperate defense of the Irish monastic Office” against the encroachment of Roman liturgical forms.19 The Carolingians reformed the liturgy by creating model institutions, which could be imitated by other churches. The most important early model was the cathedral of Metz under Chrodegang (d. 766), who had arranged for Pippin III’s coronation by Pope Stephen II (r. 752–​7), an occasion later remembered as the beginning of liturgical reform in Frankish Gaul.20 Chrodegang made his episcopal see a second Rome, and even imitated the pope by celebrating mass at different churches through the year (a “stational liturgy”). His cathedral canons, governed by a rule of life that he composed, chanted the office following the Roman cursus.21 Later narratives transmit a garbled memory of Roman cantors having been sent to Metz, and a record survives from the time of Chrodegang’s successor, Angilramn (768–​91), listing customary payments to cantors who sang the most difficult chants in the Roman repertory.22 Royal missi were instructed to inquire whether churches had sought instruction from Metz cantors. Some of these cantors have been identified, along with an interconnected network of churches where they taught, including both cathedrals and monasteries.23 Another model of Roman liturgy was the palace chapel at Aachen, whose liturgical excellence was remembered by Einhard and anecdotalized by Notker Balbulus (d. 912).24 Leidrad, bishop of Lyon, reported to Charlemagne in 814 that, with help from a Metz cleric, he had established the ordo psallendi in his cathedral “according to the rite of the sacred palace.”25 The Abbey of Saint-​Riquier apparently followed the same model. Its octagonal church was built on the same plan, and at about the same time, as Aachen’s palatine





Peter Jeffery, “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages:  Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford, 2000), 131–​4. 20 Walahfrid Strabo, Libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum 26, ed. and trans. Alicia Harting-​Correa (Leiden, 1996), 167. 21 Martin A. Claussen, Chrodegang and the Reform of the Frankish Church:  The Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2004), 248–​9. 22 Susan Rankin, “Ways of Telling Stories,” in Essays in Medieval Music in Honor of David Hughes, ed. Graeme M. Boone (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 371–​94; Michel Andrieu, “Règlement d’Angilramne de Metz (768–​ 791) fixant les honoraires de quelques fonctions liturgiques,” Revue des sciences religieuses 10 (1930): 348–​69. 23 Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers:  The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT, 2010), 348–​52. 24 Einhard, Vita Karoli magni 26, ed. O. Holder-​Egger, MGH SS rer. Germ. 25, 30–​1; Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris 1.7, ed. Hans. F. Haefele, MGH SS rer. Germ. n.s. 12, 9–​10. 25 MGH Epistolae 4, 542–​4. 19

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chapel. In the so-​called “Psalter of Charlemagne” (BnF, lat. 13159), probably commissioned before 800 by the lay abbot of Saint-​Riquier, Charlemagne’s counsellor Angilbert (d. 814), special decoration marks the first psalm to be sung on each day at Nocturns in the Roman cursus.26 Older local liturgical traditions persisted where Frankish royal authority was marginal.27 But in the Carolingian heartland the Frankish appropriation of Roman monastic liturgy was increasingly consolidated and disseminated.

The “Benedictinization” of Frankish Monastic Liturgy The first phase of the Carolingian liturgical reform assumed that monks and clerics would follow the same Roman tradition. Abbots and bishops cooperated in furthering liturgical reform. Amalarius, bishop of Metz, sought to consult chant books obtained from Rome by Wala, abbot of Corbie (d. 836). Helisachar (d. after 837), variously styled abbot of Saint-​Riquier and of Saint-​ Aubin, shared his work on revising chant texts with Nidibrius, archbishop of Narbonne.28 The earliest complete antiphoner for the Roman office, the “Antiphoner of Charles the Bald” (BnF, lat. 17436, copied c. 860–​888), was made at a Frankish monastery, probably Saint-​Corneille in Compiègne.29 This was not at first seen to be in conflict with the increasing use of the RB as a norm of monastic governance, despite differences between St. Benedict’s liturgical code and the Roman tradition. Several of the Ordines Romani describe the liturgy of monasteries as following, simultaneously, the RB and the Roman rite; whenever the liturgy is mentioned, Roman practices are favored.30 Theodemar, abbot of Montecassino, endorsed this approach, saying that it was permissible for Charlemagne’s monks “to receive the pattern of a stricter life, while still singing in their accustomed manner.”31 (Montecassino’s liturgy

See Michel Huglo, “The Cantatorium:  From Charlemagne to the Fourteenth Century,” in The Study of Medieval Chant:  Paths and Bridges, East and West, ed. Peter Jeffery (Woodbridge, 2001), 89–​92. 27 Roger E. Reynolds, “The Visigothic Liturgy in the Realm of Charlemagne,” in Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur, ed. Rainer Berndt (Mainz, 1997), 919–​45. 28 Michel Huglo, “Les remaniements de l’antiphonaire grégorien au IXe siècle: Hélisachar, Agobard, Amalaire,” in Culto cristiano e politica imperiale carolingia (Todi, 1979), 87–​120. 29 Michel Huglo, “Observations codicologiques sur l’antiphonaire de Compiègne,” in De musica et cantu. Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper, ed. Peter Cahn and Ann-​K atrin Heimer (Hildesheim, 1993), 117–​30. 30 Ordines Romani 16, 17, 18, in Les “Ordines Romani” du haut Moyen Âge, ed. Michel Andrieu, 3 vols. (Louvain, 1931–​61), 3:145–​54, 173–​93, 203–​8. 31 Theodomar of Montecassino, Epistula ad Karolum Regem 3, in Hallinger et  al., Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae, 162. 26

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seems to have followed the RB more closely, but with the addition of Roman practices, such as long readings at Nocturns in summer as well as winter.) This permissive stance was not acceptable to a new generation of monks that rose to prominence under Louis the Pious. Reforming synods at Aachen in 816 and 817 resolved that monks were “to celebrate the office according to what is contained in the Rule of St. Benedict.”32 The right ordering of society was held to require a clear distinction between the ordo monachorum and the ordo canonicorum, with each governed by its own standards.33 While endorsing the RB for monks, the Aachen legislation imposed an expanded version of Chrodegang’s Rule on secular canons, the Institutio canonicorum.34 From the reforming monks’ perspective, true obedience to the RB—​the kind that made monks effective intercessors for their lay patrons—​included following the Rule’s liturgical code. A  contemporary commentary on the 816 legislation observes that the canon on the office is principally directed at monasteries that were accustomed to follow the Roman form. But it goes on to say that, even in the writer’s own monastery, where the form in the RB had been followed “as it were from our very cradles,” there were still corrections to be made to bring the liturgy into full conformity with St. Benedict’s prescriptions.35 Hildemar of Corbie (fl. c. 845), in his commentary on the RB, brusquely dismisses monks who continue to chant the Roman form of the office: “When you do thus—​ that is, when you sing the Roman Office—​you do not seem to be lovers of the holy Rule, but rather breakers of it; for those who love our way of life do not wish to sing any Office but that of the Rule” (Expositio 18). The success of this reform project was probably limited. Some monasteries were content to be reclassified as houses of secular canons, which obviated any need for liturgical change. Saint-​Denis was briefly a canonry before it was compelled by Louis the Pious to accept the RB in its fulness in 832. Shortly afterwards (c. 836), Abbot Hilduin composed, at Louis’s request, a saint’s office for St. Denis according to the pattern required by the RB.36 This



Synodi primae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica 3, in Hallinger et al., Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae, 458. See also the article by Kramer in this volume. 33 Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Hludovici Augusti, in Poème sur Louis le Pieux 2.954–​9, ed. and trans. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1964), 76; English translation in Thomas F. X. Noble, Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). See also the article by Rosé in this volume. 34 Institutio canonicorum, MGH Concilia 2.1, 308–​421. Jerome Bertram, ed. and trans., The Chrodegang Rules: The Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Aldershot, 2005), 96–​131. 35 Statuta Murbacensia 3, in Hallinger et al., Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae, CCM 1, 443. 36 Anne Walters Robertson, The Service-​Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-​Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1991), 41–​2. 32

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kind of central enforcement of liturgical reform by imperial missi disappeared with the fracture of the empire under Louis’s sons. From then on, liturgical development proceeded largely independently in the east and west Frankish kingdoms, as is reflected in repertorial and melodic differences recorded in later manuscripts of Gregorian chant.37 Nevertheless, narrative references suggest that a number of monasteries did indeed adopt the RB’s cursus. Manuscript evidence for this change is extremely scarce before the tenth century. Fragments of an office book copied by the scribe Reginbert of Reichenau between 817 and 846, containing psalms, canticles, and chants, survive in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Kapsul 536, SuD2815 and SuD2816.38 These are organized according to the RB’s cursus, but the psalmody is selective and some texts occur out of place. The book was apparently for private use, perhaps by a monk whose monastery had not yet fully conformed its liturgy to the RB. The transition to St. Benedict’s distinctive arrangement of the psalms through the week can be glimpsed in the “Psalter of Charlemagne” from Saint-​Riquier (BnF, lat. 13159). As has been mentioned, this was originally decorated for the Roman cursus. But midway through seven of the twelve longest psalms, which the RB says are each to be divided into two parts, a later hand has clumsily added the concluding doxology (Gloria patri) and a rough red initial to mark the beginning of the second part. A manuscript now in Trier (Stadtbibliothek, MS 1245/​597, copied at the abbey of Prüm c. 860) contains the RB, a martyrology, a set of homilies, a hymnal, a collectar with prayers and short lessons for the day offices, and, uniquely for the ninth century, a list of antiphons and responsories for the whole year arranged for the RB’s cursus—​everything necessary to implement a fully “Benedictine” liturgy.39 The list of chants is the special achievement. An antiphoner arranged for the RB’s cursus requires more chants for Sundays and feast days than a Roman (secular) antiphoner—​for example, twelve responsories at Nocturns instead of nine. To make up this deficit, the Prüm book does not add new chants, as later monastic antiphoners would; instead, it cannibalizes chants from other parts of the Roman antiphoner on which



Michel Huglo, “Division de la tradition monodique en deux groupes ‘est’ et ‘ouest’,” Revue de musicologie 85 (1999): 5–​28. 38 Klaus Gamber, “Ein Brevier Fragment aus der 1.  Hälftes 9.  Jahrhunderts,” Revue bénédictine 95 (1985): 232–​9. 39 See Petrus Siffrin, “Der Collectar der Abtei Prüm im neunten Jahrhundert (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, 1245/​597, Bl. 129v–​138v),” in Miscellanea liturgica in honorem L. Cuniberti Mohlberg, 2 vols. (Rome, 1948–​9), 2:223–​44. 37

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it draws, recycling them on one or more occasions.40 There is no evidence that other monasteries were so systematic. It seems likely that some simply drew texts and chants from their existing Romano-​Frankish liturgical books to clothe the basic framework of the RB’s cursus, recording their solutions first on wax tablets,41 and later in libelli that were eventually incorporated into complete books. For example, the “Antiphoner of Charles the Bald,” though principally organized for the Roman cursus, has one feast ordered for the Benedictine cursus—​in fact, the feast of St. Benedict. It is thus very difficult to gauge how widely the monastic liturgical reforms under Louis the Pious were implemented. Some houses certainly adopted the RB’s cursus, perhaps well before they altered their liturgical books. Many probably continued to use the Romano-​Frankish liturgy, within either the ordo monasticus or the ordo canonicus. In the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, all Western monasteries would adopt the RB’s cursus. For many, this came about through several local reform movements that drew on the documentary legacy of the Carolingian period, including the Aachen legislation requiring use of the RB’s cursus.42

Tenth-​and Eleventh-​Century Reform Movements The various tenth-​century monastic reform movements associated with the names of Odo of Cluny, John of Gorze, Gerard of Brogne, Dunstan of Canterbury, and Æthelwold of Winchester all took their inspiration from ninth-​century Carolingian texts. Odo (d. 942) left his life as a canon at Tours to follow the RB at Baume, where he studied the teachings of “Euticius” (probably Benedict of Aniane’s birth name, Witiza).43 Dunstan (d. 988), in his early career at Glastonbury, studied the commentary on the RB by Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel (written after the 816 Council of Aachen). Glosses in Dunstan’s







For this observation I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Matthew Mattingly, “A 9th-​Century Chorbuch (Trier Stadtbibliothek 1245/​597) and the Secular Origins of the Monastic Office,” delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 9 July 2014. 41 See Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli 1.5, 7. 42 It was not always the Romano-​Frankish tradition that was adapted to the requirements of the RB. For the Ambrosian rite, see Jessica Berenbeim and Matthias Röder, “Milanese Chant in the Monastery? Notes on a Reunited Ambrosian Manuscript,” in Ambrosiana at Harvard:  New Sources of Milanese Chant, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly and Matthew Mugmon (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 5–​21. For the Beneventan rite, see Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989), 30–​2. 43 John of Salerno, Vita sancti Odonis 1.22–​3, PL 133, 53–​4.

40

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own hand include special notice of Smaragdus’ insistence that monks follow the RB’s cursus.44 Every tenth-​century monastic reform movement was inspired by the Carolingian ideal. The liturgical side of these reforms had two basic ingredients:  full adherence to the RB’s cursus, and the addition of extra devotions of penitence and intercession, such as the daily Office of the Dead and the Trina oratio, in which the seven penitential psalms were recited in three groups three times daily in honor of the Trinity. These were ninth-​ century innovations, already observed at Inde under Benedict of Aniane. But they found distinctive applications in different monasteries or groups of monasteries, as is reflected in the customaries that began to be produced in this period.45 Tenth-​century reformers took for granted the Carolingian ideal of separate liturgical forms for monks and clerics. A customary like the English Regularis concordia (c. 966) will refer in passing to the RB’s cursus (ordo regularis) only in contrast to those occasions, specifically Easter and Pentecost, when monks followed the secular cursus in unity with the whole Church.46 Only oblique references reveal that the adoption of the RB’s cursus was itself part of wider monastic reform. For example, when the biographer of John of Gorze (d. 974) marvels at his ability to stay awake during the hours of darkness between the end of Nocturns and the beginning of Lauds, he is describing the institution of the RB’s intervallum for meditation.47 John’s laxer brethren continued the practice of the “second sleep” observed by secular clerics.48 The “Odbert Psalter” (Boulogne-​sur-​Mer, Bibl. mun., MS 20), copied c. 1000 for the Abbey of Saint-​Bertin, may reflect a transition from the secular to the RB’s cursus. It is decorated for the secular cursus and has an appendix of canticles for the







Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.2.4. On Dunstan’s hand, see Mildred Budny, “ ‘St Dunstan’s Classbook’ and Its Frontispiece: Dunstan’s Portrait and Autograph,” in St Dunstan: His Life, Times and Cult, ed. Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks, and Tim Tatton-​ Brown (Woodbridge, 1992), 103–​42; and Billett, Divine Office,  157–​8. 45 Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), 211–​37. On devotional practices in tenth-​and eleventh-​century customaries, see Thomas Symons, “Monastic Observance in the Tenth Century,” Downside Review 50, n.s. 31 (1932): 449–​64, and 51, n.s. 32 (1933): 137–​ 52; and Thomas Symons, “Sources of the Regularis Concordia,” Downside Review, 59, n.s. 40 (1941): 14–​36, 143–​70, 264–​89. See also the article by Blennemann in this volume. 46 Regularis concordia 54, ed. Thomas Symons (London, 1953), 53. See also the article by Jones in this volume. 47 John of Saint-​Arnulf, Vita Iohannis abbatis Gorziensis 80, MGH SS 4, 359; see also John of Saint-​Arnulf, La vie de Jean, abbé de Gorze, ed. and trans. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1999); and Lin Donnat, “Vie et coutume monastique dans la Vita de Jean de Gorze,” in L’abbaye de Gorze au Xe siècle, ed. Michel Parisse and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Nancy, 1993), 171. 48 Billett, Divine Office,  35–​6. 44

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Roman office. But it received a series of supplements evidently intended to make it useful for the RB’s cursus: a complete hymnal and a set of monastic canticles. It is hard to say whether this supplement coincided with the reform of Saint-​Bertin by Richard of Saint-​Vanne (d. 1046) in 1021; but it was, in any case, a milestone in the community’s liturgical reform. The liturgical work of tenth-​and eleventh-​century reformers is most apparent in books of chant. Two basic approaches may be discerned. A reformed monastery might simply adopt the complete chant repertory of another house, or it might adapt and supplement its existing secular repertory for the RB’s cursus. Both approaches made use of a large repertory of monastic chants composed to supplement the older Romano-​Frankish tradition, which were apparently unavailable to the compiler of the ninth-​century Prüm book.49 Unfortunately, liturgical books rarely survive from the places or periods about which we have crucial questions. Nevertheless, broad collations of later chant books can sometimes link distinctive chant repertories to particular moments of monastic reform.50 An example of the adoption of another monastery’s complete chant repertory can be seen in late medieval liturgical books from English monasteries reformed by Æthelwold (d. 984), which show strong affinities with Corbie, whence Æthelwold summoned singing teachers in the 950s. Similarly, Cluny’s distinctive chant repertory, surviving in manuscripts from the twelfth century onwards, seems to have touched every one of its daughter houses to varying degrees.51 An impressive “liturgical network” is visible in the Norman monasteries reformed by William of Volpiano (d. 1031), which all adopted the highly original chant repertory of William’s first reformed community, Saint-​ Bénigne in Dijon. The same repertory was later imposed on several English monasteries after the Norman Conquest.52 Various considerations might motivate a monastery to copy another house’s whole chant repertory. Æthelwold needed a common model to unify the practice of new monks who had all been trained in very different musical

R.-​J. Hesbert (ed.), Corpus antiphonalium officii, 6 vols. (Rome, 1963–​79), vols. 5–​6, passim. David Chadd, “Liturgical Books:  Catalogues, Editions and Inventories,” in Die Erschließung der Quellen des mittelalterlichen liturgischen Gesangs, ed. David Hiley (Wiesbaden, 2004), 43–​74. 51 Michel Huglo, “Les livres de chant notés à Cluny:  une survie à Solesmes?” Revue Mabillon 22 (2011): 39–​51. 52 Raymond Le Roux, “Guillaume de Volpiano:  son cursus liturgique au Mont Saint-​ Michel et dans les abbayes normandes,” in Millénaire monastique du Mont Saint-​Michel, vol. 1. Histoire et vie monastiques, ed. J. Laporte (Paris, 1966), 417–​72; David Chadd, ed., The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, Fécamp (Fécamp, Musée de la Bénédictine, Ms 186), 2 vols. (Woodbridge, 2000).

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traditions.53 But sometimes a major liturgical change could be imposed even on a flourishing monastic community as an expression of dominance, as happened at Montecassino, which was compelled to give up its Beneventan liturgical-​musical tradition in the course of Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century.54 A proposed change of this kind could meet fierce resistance: in the 1080s the Norman abbot of Glastonbury, Thurstan of Caen, had his armed retainers attack his monks when they refused to adopt a Norman chant repertory. A few of the monks were killed; but they seem to have successfully retained their tradition.55 A replacement of existing liturgical traditions would also attend the expulsion of a resident secular community, as happened at Saint-​Bertin in 944 and at Winchester in 964. By contrast, when a community already had a solid liturgical-​musical tradition, and there was no political motive for its replacement, a change to the RB’s cursus would require only a reorganization and supplementation of the repertory. This process can be glimpsed in a fragment from a tenth-​century chant book from the Abbey of St. Augustine, Canterbury, in which added monastic chants are copied in full, but the original secular chants only in incipit.56 Similarly minimal liturgical adaptations may also have characterized the reforming work of Richard of Saint-​Vanne (Verdun). Here we depend entirely on comparatively late sources. The chant repertory of Saint-​Vanne survives only in a thirteenth-​century antiphoner for the summer portion of the liturgical year (Verdun, Bibl. mun., MS 129). Comparison with a fourteenth-​ century breviary of the use of Verdun Cathedral (Verdun, Bibl. mun., MS 107) suggests that, at whatever date Saint-​Vanne adopted the RB’s cursus, it followed the usual practice of expanding the local cathedral repertory for monastic use. When we look in turn at the liturgical books of another house reformed by Richard of Saint-​Vanne, Saint-​Vaast in Arras (reformed in 1008 in collaboration with the bishop of Cambrai and local lay leaders),57 we do not see strong similarities to the Saint-​Vanne repertory (of the kind that link books from the monastic networks of Cluny, or William of Volpiano, or

Historia ecclesie Abbendonensis 31, in The History of the Church of Abingdon, ed. and trans. John Hudson, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2002–​7), 1:54–​7. 54 Thomas Forrest Kelly, “Abbot Desiderius and the Two Liturgical Chants of Montecassino,” in L’Età dell’abate Desiderio, vol. 3:  Storia arte e cultura, ed. Faustino Avagliano and Oronze Pecere (Montecassino, 1992), 389–​411. 55 See David Hiley, “Thurstan of Caen and Plainchant at Glastonbury: Reflections on the Norman Conquest,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 57–​90. 56 Billett, Divine Office,  328–​9. 57 Patrick Healy, The Chronicle of Hugh of Flavigny: Reform and the Investiture Contest in the Late Eleventh Century (Aldershot, 2006), 41–​2. 53

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Æthelwold). Rather, just as the repertory of Saint-​Vanne looks like a monastic adaptation of the local Verdun cathedral tradition, so the repertory of Saint-​ Vaast looks like a monastic adaptation of the local Cambrai cathedral tradition. (For Saint-​Vaast I have consulted the fourteenth-​century noted breviary Arras, Bibl. mun., MS 893; for Cambrai Cathedral, a noted antiphoner of the first half of the thirteenth century, Cambrai, Bibl. mun., MS 38.) It is obviously problematic to assume that these thirteenth-​and fourteenth-​ century sources accurately preserve the state of the repertory as it existed in the early eleventh century; and my comparison of their contents has so far extended only to a single feast day (St. Lawrence, 10 August). Nevertheless, it seems likely that Richard of Saint-Vanne did not impose the whole chant repertory of Saint-​Vanne on Saint-Vaast. (The evidence may suggest, however, that some of the “extra” chants required to adapt the Verdun and Cambrai cathedral traditions for the RB’s cursus were shared between these two reformed houses: this could imply a measure of liturgical cooperation.)

Conclusion We have discerned crucial changes in the Western monastic liturgy in three of its most important modes of reform: the Romanization of the Frankish liturgy in the eighth century; the ideological turn toward the liturgical code of the RB in the ninth century; and the local implementation of this ideal in the various reform movements of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Current attempts to deconstruct the concept of monastic reform, emphasizing continuity and local particularities, invite a fresh consideration of how apparent liturgical dependencies between reformed monasteries are to be understood. The imitation of the liturgy of Saint-​Bénigne, Dijon, first in Normandy and then in England, was closely tied to the political aspirations of the patrons of William of Volpiano, namely, the dukes of Normandy, who became kings of England. The same might be said of Æthelwold’s royally supported work in England. The absence of similar liturgical networks in the Lotharingian reforms associated with John of Gorze and Richard of Saint-​Vanne may reflect the absence of the influence of a powerful emperor, king, or duke. But whether or not a monastery was part of a larger liturgical network, the very fact of conforming to the RB’s cursus was itself a profound mark of reformed monastic identity. Little has been said here about the verbal, musical, and ceremonial content of early medieval monastic liturgy, which was probably of far greater daily importance to the liturgy’s participants than the bare following of a 428

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liturgical code. We can know little of the monastic experience of liturgical prayer. Monks were apparently disinclined to write liturgical commentaries. It was only in the eleventh century that Adémar de Chabannes (d. 1034) added an appendix to Amalarius’ Liber officialis offering an allegorical interpretation of the RB’s pattern of the daily office.58 We get occasional glimpses in monastic writing of the “spice of compunction” in chanting the psalms.59 The usually pedantic Hildemar surprises us with a reference to the “full enjoyment of that invisible light” made possible through attention to the words of liturgical prayer (Expositio 19). A fuller understanding must be gleaned from monastic compositions for use in the liturgy, which open a window onto the monastic life of meditation on the Bible, structured by the liturgical calendar and shaped by the typological interpretations of the Fathers.60 The chants of mass and office were adorned with added music and words (sometimes inaccurately grouped under the name of “tropes”), or with harmonizing vocal lines, known as organum.61 The bulk of creative work was devoted to new compositions for the cult of the saints, which engaged composers across religious and political boundaries.62 More difficult for us to grasp is the corporate quality of the liturgy, which was experienced as a forum for the attainment of individual self-​knowledge, but in such a way that this knowledge could not be possessed outside its communal performance.63 Even the solitary offices recited by the new hermit-​ monks of the eleventh century, as at Fonte Avellana under Peter Damian







Adémar de Chabannes, De regula sancti Benedicti praecipue abbatis, in Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia, ed. Jean-​Michel Hanssens, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1948–​50), 3:272–​94; Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–​ 1034 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 108–​9 and n. 50. 59 Karl F. Morrison, “‘Know Thyself ’:  Music in the Carolingian Renaissance,” in Committenti e produzione artistico-​letteraria nell’alto medioevo occidentale, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 1992), 1:393. 60 Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, 3rd ed. (New York, 1982), 149–​60; Joseph Dyer, “The Psalms in Monastic Prayer,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany, NY, 1999), 59–​89; William Flynn, Medieval Music as Medieval Exegesis (Lanham, MD, 1999), 107–​38; Jesse D. Billett, “Sermones ad diem pertinentes:  Sermons and Homilies in the Liturgy of the Divine Office,” in Sermo doctorum: Compilers, Preachers, and Their Audiences in the Early Medieval West, ed. Maximilian Diesenberger, Yitzhak Hen, and Marianne Pollheimer (Turnhout, 2013), 339–​73. 61 Alejandro Enrique Planchart, ed., Embellishing the Liturgy:  Tropes and Polyphony (Aldershot, 2009). 62 Page, Christian West and Its Singers, 383–​428; Ritva Jonsson, Historia. Études sur la genèse des offices versifiés (Stockholm, 1968). 63 Morrison, “ ‘Know Thyself ’,” 394 and 415. 58

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(d. 1072/​3), were felt to be fundamentally corporate.64 Similarly inaccessible to the modern researcher is the physical experience of the liturgy over a monk’s lifetime. As Christopher Page has suggested, a plainsong melody principally existed as a feeling in the throat, a sensation in the ear and a penumbra of associations created by years of repetition, by the lengthening and shortening of days or by the arrival and disappearance of seasonal fruits at the common table. Many singers could add associations that reached to the deepest layers of their childhood memory when joys and injustices were felt with an especial keenness.65

But an awareness of our limitations perhaps serves only to highlight the importance of liturgy in any consideration of monastic reform. Few changes in a monastery’s life had such power to touch the core of personal or communal identity.

Bibliography Billett, Jesse D. The Divine Office in Anglo-​Saxon England, 597–​c.1000. London, 2014.   “The Liturgy of the ‘Roman’ Office in England from the Conversion to the Conquest.” In Rome Across Time and Space: Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500– 1400, edited by Claudia Bolgia, Rosamond McKitterick, and John Osborne, 84–110. Cambridge, 2011. Chadd, David. “Liturgical Books: Catalogues, Editions and Inventories.” In Die Erschließung der Quellen des mittelalterlichen liturgischen Gesangs, edited by David Hiley, 43–​74. Wiesbaden, 2004. Dyer, Joseph. “The Psalms in Monastic Prayer.” In The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, edited by Nancy Van Deusen, 59–​89. Albany, NY, 1999. Flynn, William. Medieval Music as Medieval Exegesis. Lanham, MD, 1999. Harper, John. The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Century. Oxford, 1991. Hen, Yitzhak. The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877). London, 2001.   “Rome, Anglo-Saxon England and the Formation of the Frankish Liturgy.” Revue bénédictine 112 (2002): 301–22. Hiley, David. “Thurstan of Caen and Plainchant at Glastonbury:  Reflections on the Norman Conquest,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 57–​90. Huglo, Michel. “The Cantatorium: From Charlemagne to the Fourteenth Century.” In The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West, edited by Peter Jeffery, 89–​101. Woodbridge, 2001.



Peter Damian, Epistola 28 (“Dominus vobiscum”), in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel, MGH Epistolae 4/​1, 248–​78. 65 Page, Christian West and Its Singers, 443.

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Discerning “Reform” in Monastic Liturgy   “Division de la tradition monodique en deux groupes ‘est’ et ‘ouest’.” Revue de musicologie 85 (1999): 5–28. Jeffery, Peter. “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours.” In The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, edited by Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, 99–​143. Oxford, 2000. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi. 3rd ed. New York, 1982. Morrison, Karl F. “‘Know Thyself ’: Music in the Carolingian Renaissance.” In Committenti e produzione artistico-​ letteraria nell’alto medioevo occidentale, 2 vols., 1:369–​ 479. Spoleto, 1992. Page, Christopher. The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. New Haven, CT, 2010. Planchart, Alejandro Enrique, ed. Embellishing the Liturgy: Tropes and Polyphony. Aldershot, 2009. Rankin, Susan. “Ways of Telling Stories.” In Essays in Medieval Music in Honor of David Hughes, edited by Graeme M. Boone, 371–​94. Cambridge, MA, 1995. Reynolds, Roger E. “The Visigothic Liturgy in the Realm of Charlemagne.” In Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur, edited by Rainer Berndt, 919–​45. Mainz, 1997. Robertson, Anne Walters. The Service-​Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-​Denis:  Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages. Oxford, 1991. Vogel, Cyrille. Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, trans. and rev. William Storey and Niels Rasmussen. Portland, OR, 1986.

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Correctio between Cloister and Court In the late 820s, a group of disgruntled monks traveled from the monastery of Moyenmoutier to the imperial court of Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40) in Aachen. They did so in order to lodge a complaint against their abbot, whom they accused of mismanagement and unsatisfactory leadership for his refusal to allow the monks access to the resources they needed to “live a regular life.”1 The dispute had already simmered for quite a while. Two imperial missi—​ Bishop Frotharius of Toul (814–​849/​50) and Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel (d. c. 840)—​had been sent to make sense of the situation, which itself was the result of an earlier settlement between the community, the emperor, and the abbot.2 They wrote in their report that the trust between monks and abbot had been broken to such an extent “that without [Louis’] judgment, nothing would be done,” and that the monks “would rather be expelled from the monastery and live like beggars on the road” than be thwarted by false promises again.3 In order to prevent the situation from escalating any further, the missi gave the monks permission to travel to Aachen to present their grievances directly; in their report they warned Louis about this, giving him time to prepare.

I would like to thank the editors of this volume, as well as Albrecht Diem, Max Diesenberger, Stephen Ling, Ingrid Rembold, Diarmuid Ó Riain, Graeme Ward, and Veronika Wieser for their help writing this article. It was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) F42: Visions of Community. 1 Frotharius, La correspondance d’un évêque carolingien. Frothaire de Toul (ca. 813–​847) avec les lettres de Theuthilde, abbesse de Remiremont, ed. and trans. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1998), Epistola 3, 94. 2 Ibid., Epistola 3, 96. 3 Ibid.

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In the Carolingian world at the turn of the ninth century, court and cloister were connected in many intricate ways.4 Monasteries were not only “powerhouses of prayer” but also economic and administrative hubs, as well as cultural and educational centers.5 Their role in intellectual networks strengthened the ideological framework around the empire. Moreover, they played a vital part in the propagation of the ecclesiastical reform movement nowadays commonly referred to as correctio.6 Aimed at consolidating and redefining the interdependence between various parts of the Church, correctio implies a holistic political culture of rhetoric, admonition, and advice that was formulated at a local level as much as it was fostered at court.7 Almost paradoxically, an individualized approach for each community was required for this interaction to work in the monastic world. The Frankish Church thrived on diversity and had the ability to accommodate many different varieties of the same core message; more than superimposing new norms over local traditions, the correctio movement aimed to solidify existing structures and beliefs.8 Whatever issue was at hand—​from the treatment of monastic property to the role of the abbot or the position of the monastery within the empire—​it could not be treated in isolation. Anything that needed to happen required a fundamental understanding of monastic communities and their place in the world.





Richard Sullivan, “What was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St Gall and the History of Monasticism,” in After Rome’s Fall:  Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), 251–​87. 5 Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, II: c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 622–​53; Rosamond McKitterick, “Le rôle culturel des monastères dans les royaumes carolingiens du VIIIe au Xe siècle,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 117–​30; Stéphane Lebecq, “The Role of Monasteries in the Systems of Production and Exchange of the Frankish World between the Seventh and the Ninth Centuries,” in The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham (Leiden, 2000), 121–​48. See also the articles by Blennemann, Contreni, and Devroey in this volume. 6 Steffen Patzold, “‘Einheit’ versus ‘Fraktionierung’: zur symbolischen und institutionellen Integration des Frankenreichs im 8./​9. Jahrhundert,” in Visions of Community in the Post-​Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–​1100, ed. Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne (Farnham, 2012), 375–​90; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Karl der Große: Denkart und Grundauffassungen—​die von ihm bewirkte Correctio,” 45; Janet Nelson, “Revisiting the Carolingian Historische Zeitschrift 198 (1964):  306–​ Renaissance,” in Motions of Late Antiquity: Essays on Religion, Politics and Society in Honour of Peter Brown, ed. Jamie Kreiner and Helmut Reimitz (Turnhout, 2016), 331–​46, esp. 331–​3. 7 Julia Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–​1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2008), 345–​62. 8 Raymund Kottje, “Einheit und Vielfalt des kirchlichen Lebens in der Karolingerzeit,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 76 (1965):  323–​42; Rosamond McKitterick, “Unity and Diversity in the Carolingian Church,” in Unity and Diversity in the Church, ed. R. N. Swanson (Oxford, 1996), 59–​82. 4

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One Rule to Order Them All Frankish rulers recognized that monasteries played a significant part in the extension of their authority. Thus, the assertion that monastic life in the Frankish Church ought to be governed through a single “Holy Rule,” the Regula Benedicti (RB) was as much a power play as it was a religious concern.9 It seemed a small gesture at first: even though many monasteries in the Frankish realms predated the Carolingians’ rise to prominence by several generations, and all had their own way of life and liturgical practice, the famously flexible RB was often already part of these consuetudines.10 By singling out that rule, the Carolingians turned their concern for correct monastic practice into a political statement, which gave them the momentum they needed to effectuate ever greater reforms.11 This becomes clear in the so-​called Concilium Germanicum of 742–​3, the first major council organized under Carolingian supervision. Its stipulation that “monks and nuns should strive to order their world and to live according to the Rule of St. Benedict, and to govern their own life accordingly” marked the first time that the RB was elevated to such a status.12 The council in its entirety similarly reflects a desire to establish a kind of reciprocal order in the realm.13 It was, for instance, decided that priests were subordinate to their bishops, and that counts should aid bishops in combating pagan tendencies.14 The Concilium Germanicum represents a first attempt by the Carolingian family to participate in discussions on the state of the Church, a move which saw them continue traditions and institutions developed by their Roman examples and Barbarian predecessors.15 This was to be a cooperative experiment, in which, ideally, the clergy—​who would have included abbots and monks—​helped the





Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule:  Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Space of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik W. Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 53–​84. 10 Gérard Moyse, “Monachisme et réglementation monastique en Gaule avant Benoît d’Aniane,” in Sous la Règle de saint Benoît. Structures monastiques et sociétés en France du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne (Geneva, 1982), 3–​19. 11 Josef Semmler, “Benediktinische Reform und kaiserliches Privileg:  die Klöster im Umkreis Benedikts von Aniane,” in Società, istituzioni, spiritualità. Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, vol. 2., ed. Girolamo Arnaldi et al. (Spoleto, 1994), 820–​3. 12 Concilium Germanicum, ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2/​1, 4. 13 Monika Suchan, Mahnen und Regieren. Die Metapher des Hirten im früheren Mittelalter (Berlin, 2015), 136–​42. 14 Concilium Germanicum,  3–​4. 15 Mayke de Jong, “Charlemagne’s Church,” in Charlemagne: Empire and Society, ed. Joanna Story (Manchester, 2005), 108–​9. 9

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ruler shoulder his responsibility for the “advice how the law of God and the way of life of the Church … might be re-​established.”16 The concord between clergy and court presented in capitularies and conciliar acts provided a veneer of sanctity, of divinely approved consensus, to the proceedings, and simultaneously consolidated the underlying order.17 The Capitulary of Herstal (779) reiterated ideals of cooperation and mutual responsibility, asserting the supremacy of archbishops in matters pertaining to correctio, and reminding “monasteries which have been based on a monastic rule” that they really “are to live in accordance with that rule.”18 This concern for order may also account for Charlemagne’s efforts to endorse a standard version of the RB, based on a copy procured from Montecassino in the late eighth century.19 The new standard against which all monks would be measured was kept in Aachen, allowing the court to monopolize access to it.20 Carolingian insistence on the RB was moreover explicitly combined with political aspirations. When Charlemagne instructed his missi on the kingdom-​wide renewals of the oath of loyalty in 789 and 802, he specified that one oath by the abbot was sufficient for communities striving to live according to the RB.21 This became a reason for the Carolingians to actively promote and institutionalize their version of monasticism, as it would enable rulers to command the loyalty of a powerful intellectual regional force through the agency of just one person.22 Tying monasteries into a court-​ controlled discourse, the Carolingians aimed to embed them within an overarching structure which, they imagined, would help hold the realm together.





Concilium Germanicum, 2; Oliver Guillot, “L’exhortation au partage des responsabilités entre l’empereur, l’épiscopat et les autres sujets, vers le milieu du règne de Louis le Pieux,” in Prédication et propagande au Moyen Âge: Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-​Thomine (Paris, 1983), 87–​110. 17 Christina Pössel, “Authors and Recipients of Carolingian Capitularies, 779–​829,” in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini et al. (Vienna, 2006), 253–​74. 18 Capitulare Haristallense, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 47; Steffen Patzold, Episcopus. Wissen über Bischöfe im Frankenreich des späten 8. bis frühen 10. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern, 2008),  65–​8. 19 Klaus Zelzer, “Zur Stellung des textus receptus und des interpolierten Textes in der Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti,” Revue bénédictine 88 (1978): 212–​18. 20 Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2011), 136–​7. 21 Capitulare Missorum 3, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 67; Capitulare Missorum Generale 2, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 92. 22 Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Großen (Sigmaringen, 1993), 195–​201. 16

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The Paradox of Property The emphasis on life according to a rule gave monastic communities a special place within the Church, while simultaneously integrating them into a larger social whole.23 Exchanging immunity for regularity allowed monasteries to cultivate an independent status as large-​scale landowners—​supported by the aristocratic families upon whose land the communities had originally been founded, and embedding them firmly within the Carolingian state.24 As they grew in wealth and influence, however, the risk of corruption also increased, so that monks could end up caring more about their possessions than their charitable purpose.25 Controlling and using monastic wealth remained a point of contention in the Carolingian era, and measures to protect property became a means of curtailing its importance in the everyday lives of monks.26 Lay rulers or bishops used the harmful effects of worldly possessions as a justification to limit monastic access to property, enabling the monks to focus on their core duties. Conversely, precisely because of the longevity of monasteries, it became equally important to harness the support they could provide. This resulted in capitularies like the Notitia de servitio monasteriorum, issued around 819.27 This capitulary lists the services rendered by individual monasteries to the empire, ranging from prayers for political stability and the salvation of the imperial family to military service.28 In return for nominal control over their possessions, monastic communities were now explicitly tasked





Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule,” 68–​70; Josef Semmler, “Iussit … princeps renovare … praecepta:  zur verfassungsrechtlichen Einordnung der Hochstifte und Abteien in die Karolingische Reichskirche,” in Consuetudines monasticae. Festgabe für Kassius Hallinger, ed. Joachim F. Angerer and Josef Lenzenweger (Rome, 1982), 97–​124. 24 Matthew Innes, “Archives, Documents and Landowners in Carolingian Francia,” in Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam Kosto (Cambridge, 2013), 152–​88; Matthew Innes, “Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe:  New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Aldershot, 2008), 247–​ 66; Barbara Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 99–​134. 25 Janet Nelson, “Making Ends Meet: Wealth and Poverty in the Carolingian Church,” Studies in Church History 24 (1987):  25–​35; Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2006), 109–​39 and 211–​35. 26 David Ganz, “The Ideology of Sharing:  Apostolic Community and Ecclesiastical Property in the Early Middle Ages,” in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 1995), 17–​30. 27 Heinrich Wagner, “Zur Notitia de servitio monasteriorum von 819,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 55 (1999): 417–​38. 28 Notitia de servitio monasteriorum, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 350. 23

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with providing for the empire, both materially and spiritually.29 Through the medium of worldly possessions, the dynamics between empire and monasteries became defined by the intersection between independence and integration. The pastoral power of lay rulers and bishops increased, and their responsibility for the protection of monastic purity grew accordingly.30 The monasteries, for their part, were made ever more aware of the importance of the assistance expected of them, both material and spiritual.31 Having anchored monasteries into the world, monastic reforms thus became an essentially holistic endeavor.32 Those involved in correctio were aware that no single part of the Church could function in isolation.33 To reform the office of bishop was to reevaluate the position of monasteries and the monks living there. To define the function of abbots was to redefine the function of the bishops and worldly rulers who guaranteed the existence of monastic communities. To ensure monastic purity was to take responsibility for worldly affairs that tested the resolve of the monks dependent on the protection of bishops and secular rulers.34 This interdependence was given an extra dimension when, in the wake of the debate over monastic possessions, it became a matter of increasing importance to classify communities properly—​to distinguish canons from monks.35 This debate had already started in the eighth century with the Rule of Chrodegang of Metz (742–​ 66), and stipulations at the Council of Ver (755) that distinguished between religious communities “either under the order of a rule in a monastery, or controlled by a bishop under the order of the canons.”36 It culminated in the question posed by Charlemagne in 811, whether or not “we” were actually good Christians, and whether monks could really be deemed monks if

Arnold Angenendt, “Donationes pro anima: Gift and Countergift in the Early Medieval Liturgy,” in Davis and McCormick, Long Morning of Medieval Europe, 131–​54. 30 Miriam Czock, “Early Medieval Churches as Cultic Space between Material and Ethical Purity,” in Discourses of Purity in Transcultural Perspective (300–​1600), ed. Matthias Bley, Nikolas Jaspert, and Stefan Köck (Leiden, 2015), 23–​41. 31 Renie Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford, 2016), 147–​9. 32 Giles Brown, “Introduction:  The Carolingian Renaissance,” in Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), 1–​51, esp. 7–​8. 33 Carine van Rhijn “Priests and the Carolingian Reforms:  The Bottlenecks of Local correctio,” in Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 13 (Vienna, 2006), 219–​38. 34 Mayke de Jong, “Internal Cloisters:  The Case of Ekkehard’s Casus sancti Galli,” in Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz (Vienna, 2000), 209–​21. 35 De Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism,” 627–​30. 36 M. A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2004); Concilium Vernense, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 35.

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they did not hold to the RB.37 It was now up to Charlemagne’s heir, Louis the Pious, to help design an answer.

Responsibility and Normativity: An Empire in Action Combining his father’s legacy and the expectations of his subjects with his own political aptitude and vision, Louis the Pious’s appearance on the imperial scene in 814 showed him to be a ruler who took his responsibilities seriously.38 This included a concern for Church reforms.39 In 813 Charlemagne had already organized five councils throughout the realm to “improve the condition of the churches.”40 Louis took the next step and called for a series of councils at Aachen between 816 and 819, so that, according to the Annales Regni Francorum, “many matters regarding the condition of the churches and monasteries were brought up and settled.”41 The texts that were produced in the wake of these events demonstrate how far the correctio movement had come since the mid-​eighth century, and how it had ingrained itself in Carolingian self-​perception.42 At the same time prescriptive and reflective of the need to establish order, the massive Institutio canonicorum and its companion piece, the Institutio sanctimonialium, as well as the Capitulare ecclesiasticum and the Capitulare monasticum, represented attempts at consolidating all the progress made thus far, while also pushing the agenda further.43 The decrees of the Synod of Aachen of 816–​17, ambitiously dubbed Capitulare monasticum in the MGH edition, dealt exclusively with monastic matters:  practical instructions and communal regulations designed to supplement the RB.44 In that sense, it is noteworthy that the deliberations were



Janet Nelson, “The Voice of Charlemagne,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-​Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford, 2001), 81; Lotte Kéry, “Kritik Karls des Großen an den Mönchen: zur Einordnung der Klöster in Reich und Diözese,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 58 (2006): 9–​48. 38 Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–​840 (Cambridge, 2009), 14–​58. 39 Josef Semmler, “Renovatio regni francorum: die Herrschaft Ludwigs des Frommen im Frankenreich 814–​829/​830,” in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–​840), ed. Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1990), 125–​46. 40 Annales Regni Francorum, in Carolingian Chronicles, trans. B. W. Scholz (Ann Arbor, MI, 1970), 95. 41 Ibid., 105. 42 Karl-​Ferdinand Werner, “Hludovicus Augustus: gouverner l’empire chrétien. Idées et réalités,” in Godman and Collins, Charlemagne’s Heir,  28–​54. 43 Michèle Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 2006), 121–​47. See also the article by Billett in this volume. 44 Capitulare monasticum, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 344–​9. The volume Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae: consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni, ed. Josef Semmler, CCM 1, 37

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held exclusively by the abbots of the empire, not by the “bishops, abbots and nobles” usually seen at such gatherings. Its aim—​to solidify an agreed-​upon status quo rather than advocating massive changes to an existing system—​ also translates to an emphasis on (Roman) papal and imperial authority in the prologue.45 These decrees mark an important step in the self-​definition of monasteries and the self-​identification of abbots as leaders of communities with an imperial purpose, coupled with a specific set of norms. Through its presentation as a collective effort and its focus on the internal life of monasteries, the Synod of Aachen proposed part of a definition of “monasticism” by insisting on its regularity—​preferably that of the RB.46 The prefatio of the worldly counterpart of the Decrees of the Synod of Aachen, the Capitulare ecclesiasticum, similarly specifies its scope by calling the participants to “sanction these chapters useful for the Church.”47 As this capitulary is ostensibly aimed at bishops and thus more focused on the pastoral side of things, the importance of Church possessions and episcopal control is paramount once again, but the stipulations stop outside the cloister: only the election of abbots and the eligibility of slaves to enter a monastery are mentioned, implying that the internal autonomy of monasteries had become a fait accompli—​an observation echoed, for example, in an early ninth-​century ordo from the area of Salzburg.48 With this capitulary, an attempt was made to regulate all clergy under episcopal supervision; the text was not just for reading, but also for teaching and guiding the priests and canons who were doing a less-​than-​stellar job “partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness.” They, too, required a regula to keep them on the straight and narrow; it was a niche that the Institutio canonicorum aimed to fill. The Institutio canonicorum (henceforth IC) is a text by bishops, for bishops, and it aimed to explain a “pattern for the way of life” in terms applicable to



recognizes several versions: see Josef Semmler, “Zur Überlieferung der monastischen Gesetzgebung Ludwigs des Frommen,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 16 (1960):  309–​88, but see also Veronika Lukas, “Additio I:  die sogenannte Collectio capitularis Benedicti Levitae,” www.benedictus.mgh.de/​studien/​ (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 45 Rutger Kramer and Clemens Gantner, “Lateran Thinking: Building an Idea of Rome in the Carolingian Empire,”Viator 47 (2016): 1–​26. 46 Josef Semmler, “Benedictus II:  una regula—​una consuetudo,” in Benedictine Culture 750–​1050, ed. Willem Lourdaux and Daniel Verhelst (Leuven, 1983), 1–​49. 47 Capitulare ecclesiasticum, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 276–​9. 48 Semmler, “Benediktinische Reform,” 822; van Rhijn, “Priests and the Carolingian Reforms,” 226. Ordo 30, ed. H. Schneider, MGH Ordines de celebrando concilio, 591–​4; Max Diesenberger, Predigt und Politik im frühmittelalterlichen Bayern. Karl der Große, Arn von Salzburg und die Salzburger Sermones-​Sammlung (Berlin, 2016), 98–​101.

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all clerics.49 A  highly self-​reflective work, it is concerned as much with the burdens of pastoral power carried by bishops as it is with the performance of their charges.50 As such, while the part that reads like a regula only comes at the end, the core of the IC is a massive florilegium of patristic material which treats the personality of members of the clergy, their rights and duties, and their ideal moral composure.51 The prologue makes abundantly clear that it was a collection that had been made with the help of the emperor and his court library.52 It was Louis who put the bishops in a position to become teachers to the Church, who safeguarded a pristine copy of the IC in the palace archive, and who ordered the archbishops who had not attended the proceedings to ensure that they, too, knew this text to the letter.53 Within this monumental composition, two pivotal chapters mark the transition between the florilegium and the canonical regula. The first of these explains the difference between monks and “Christians in general,” specifying the essential role of individual poverty for monks. All believers should live “according to [their] different gifts” and follow the guidance provided by the texts in the IC, but only monks need to follow the apostolic ideal of poverty.54 The next chapter explains how those communities “who wish to be counted among those bearing the nomen of the canonical profession” ought to behave.55 Canons retained a pastoral function despite their seemingly monastic lifestyle, and were required to “make themselves an example to others” by being visible in the world to their flock. They needed a thorough education to shield them from temptation—​and bishops especially so, as their pastoral responsibility included canons and canonesses, monks and nuns.56 In accordance with its ambition to treat the entire Church, the IC also came with a booklet for “holy women who live according to the canons.”57 This

Institutio canonicorum, ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2/​1 (henceforth IC), 312–​ 421; Jerome Bertram, trans., The Chrodegang Rules: The Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Aldershot, 2005), 96–​131. 50 Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, Their Families and Careers in North-​Western Europe, c.800–​c.1200 (Cambridge, 2015), 81–​5. 51 Patzold, Episcopus, 129–​40. 52 IC, 312; Werner, “Hludowicus Augustus,” 101–​2; Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” 356–​7; Philippe Depreux, “Louis le Pieux reconsidéré? À propos des travaux récents consacrés à ‘l’héritier de Charlemagne’ et à son règne,” Francia 21 (1994): 199–​200. 53 Hludowici Imperatoris Epistolae ad Archiepiscopos Missae, MGH Concilia 2/​ 1, 459; Bertram, Chrodegang Rules,  171–​4. 54 IC 114, 397. 55 IC 115, 397. 56 David Ganz, “Conclusion:  Visions of Carolingian Education—​ Past, Present, and Future,” in The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan (Columbus OH, 1995), 272–​5. 57 IC, 313.

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Institutio sanctimonialium (IS) would give these women a “model of living,” which would enable them “to attend the bridegroom on his arrival and so be found worthy to enter into his chamber.”58 The council’s instruction again appeared in the form of a florilegium combined with a set of regulations, albeit shorter and with more emphasis on personal behavior.59 It betrays eschatological concerns: in emphasizing episcopal supervision in a material and spiritual sense, it indicates that these sanctimoniales were more like monks in that their education was not for pastoral purposes, but geared toward individual salvation.60 Their service to the empire was to be a shining example to its subjects, their purity an aid to the salvation of  all.61 Such eschatological and salutary concerns underpinned correctio as a whole.62 Whether active or passive, pastoral or exemplary, everybody was expected to work toward the salvation of everybody else, under the supervision of their pastors.63 From the point of view of the court, canonical communities had been defined, the function of bishops and monastic communities had been reassessed accordingly, and correctio could continue as it should.

Realities and Ideals: Benedict of  Aniane Given this emphasis on the collective nature of correctio, it seems almost counterintuitive that one man has been associated with the monastic reforms more than anyone else—​Benedict of Aniane (d. 821).64 This is surprising, as his name is not mentioned in any of the texts emanating from court. The sources that do mention him are predominantly narrative, date from after his death, and use Benedict more as a liminal figure between the ideals and the



Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis, ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Conc. 2.1, 422–​56. 59 See Katrinette Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen: die Adaption der Benediktsregel im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Vienna, 2011), 238–​58. 60 Valerie L. Garver, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 73–​4, 114–​15,  130–​1. 61 Gerhard Schmitz, “Aachen 816:  zur Überlieferung und Edition der Kanonikergesetzgebung Ludwigs des Frommen,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 63 (2007): 497–​545. 62 James Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2014), 130–​58, esp. 150. 63 Mayke de Jong, “Imitatio morum: The Cloister and Clerical Purity in the Carolingian World,” in Medieval Purity and Piety:  Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York, 1998), 49–​80. 64 Dieter Geuenich, “Kritische Anmerkungen zur sogenannten ‘anianischen Reform’,” in Mönchtum—​Kirche—​Herrschaft 750–​1000. Josef Semmler zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Dieter R. Bauer et al. (Sigmaringen, 1998), 99–​112. 58

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realities of reform, and less as the prime mover of monastic correctio across the empire. It was the monk Ardo, stationed at Aniane, who wrote the Vita Benedicti Anianensis shortly after Benedict’s death. The text does not depict Benedict as a defiant abbot, but rather as a young aristocrat who struggles to find a way to combine his idealism with the realities of monastic life.65 His journey ends in Aachen, where he is brought to help shape Louis’s ideals of correctio.66 In this narrative, Benedict becomes one of the most important reformers of the realm through the agency of the emperor, who even founds the monastery of Inda close to the palace so as to keep Benedict nearby.67 In this idealized court, Ardo stresses the importance of cooperation and harmony over conflict and power struggles. He had ulterior motives: elevating Inda to imperial status, and making Benedict into a saintly courtier, allows the author to argue that Aniane, by virtue of being Benedict’s original foundation, was the “head of all the monasteries in the realm.”68 Ardo’s main concern was to prove that his peripheral community continued to fulfill its stated function within the empire, and thus deserved further recognition, which superseded the need to depict accurately the relation between emperor and abbot. Another text featuring Benedict of Aniane shows the importance of monasticism from a courtly point of view. This is the Carmen in honorem Hludowici, composed by Ermoldus Nigellus (d. 838) in the later 820s. In this panegyric, Benedict enters the picture immediately after Louis sends his missi to take stock of the empire. Instead of asking these missi to oversee the monasteries as well, Louis sets up a secondary mission for monks who were to set “an example and standard for the brothers.”69 They are stationed in a new foundation in the shadow of the palace, close enough for Benedict to help run the





Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule,” 70–​7. Ardo, Vita sancti Benedicti abbatis Anianensis, in The Emperor’s Monk: Contemporary Life of Benedict of Aniane, trans. Allen Cabaniss (Elms Court, 1979; reprint Kalamazoo, MI, 2008); German translation by Gerhard Schmitz et  al., www.rotula.de/​aniane/​index. htm (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 67 Rutger Kramer, “Teaching Emperors:  Transcending the Boundaries of Carolingian Monastic Communities,” in Meanings of Community across Medieval Eurasia ed. Eirik Hovden, Christina Lutter, and Walter Pohl (Leiden, 2016), 314–​18. 68 Walter Kettemann, “Subsidia Anianensia:  Überlieferungs-​und textgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Witiza-​ Benedikts, seines Klosters Aniane und zur sogenannten ‘anianischen Reform’ ” (PhD diss., Gerhard-​Mercator-​Universität Duisburg, 2000), 123–​9. 69 Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Hludovici Augusti, in Poème sur Louis le Pieux et épîtres au Roi Pépin, ed. and trans. Edmund Faral (Paris 1932; reprint 1964), 92–​5; English translation in Thomas F.  X. Noble, Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer (Philadelphia, PA, 2009), 155. 65

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empire, yet monastic enough to preserve his purity. It was this foundation, Inda, that allowed both emperor and abbot to fulfill their “God-​loved responsibility”: Benedict as a father to all the monks—​Ermold made sure to point out the parallels between him and his sixth-​century namesake—​and Louis as a “caesar and abbot at once.”70 These sources present a seductive narrative, seemingly confirmed when the Astronomer, Louis’s biographer writing in the early 840s, also singled out Benedict of Aniane as being responsible for the monastic reforms of the time.71 Owing to narratives such as these, Benedict has often been depicted as the one instigating the reforms, the driving force behind an inactive and floundering emperor. His role in these narratives, however, is not to be the architect of correctio but to act as the emperor’s spokesperson for all things monastic. Even within the Vita Benedicti, Benedict’s imperial activities took place at the behest of the court: in a telling scene, Ardo shows how Louis had to ensure that Benedict would not forget his responsibilities—​by patting down the abbot’s sleeves to check for notes he might have forgotten.72 Benedict of Aniane was nonetheless a major participant in the debate over correctio, as demonstrated by his two major works: the Codex regularum, a collection of existing monastic rules, and the Concordia regularum, his attempt to show how the diversity between these rules does not preclude their inherent similarities with the RB.73 This latter work especially shows the fluidity of Carolingian monasticism.74 Benedict’s aim was to educate, not to enforce: to promote unity by emphasizing the importance of love for one’s fellows rather than blind adherence to a rule.75 As he reiterates in his verse preface, the “true way,” the true regula sancta, resides not in any one rule but in the “many different flowers” grown by the fathers.76 Even in a work as seemingly monolithic as the Concordia regularum, the ideal thrives on the reality of diversity, not in spite of  it.77

Ermoldus, Carmen,  96–​7. Astronomus, Vita Hludowici Imperatoris, MGH SRG 64, 377. 72 Ardo, Vita Benedicti 35. In the English translation by Cabaniss this passage is misinterpreted to mean that Benedict is checking Louis’s sleeves. 73 Martin Claussen, “Benedict of Aniane as Teacher,” in Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of John J. Contreni, ed. Cullen J. Chandler and Stephen A. Stofferahn (Kalamazoo MI, 2013), 73–​87. 74 Renie Choy, “The Deposit of Monastic Faith:  The Carolingians on the Essence of Monasticism,” Studies in Church History 49 (2013): 74–​86. 75 A common theme throughout Benedict’s work: see Choy, Intercessory Prayer,  48–​75. 76 Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, ed. Pierre Bonnerue, CCCM 168A, 4. 77 See Diem and Rousseau in this volume.

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It is in this light that we should view the flexible attitudes toward the RB in the commentaries by Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel and Hildemar of Corbie (fl. c. 845), both composed in the first half of the ninth century.78 Both, for instance, reflect on the duration of the novitiate by referring to conciliar decisions and ongoing debates, rather than by presenting their own universal solution.79 According to them, it was the debate that kept correctio going, not the decisions cast by a single authoritative voice. Smaragdus’ and Hildemar’s goal was not just to ensure proper Benedictine practice. It was equally important for them to (re)define the place of individual monastic communities within the evolving Frankish Church, and to appropriate and redirect courtly correctio in a practically applicable way.80 We are allowed another glimpse of Carolingian monastic policy in action in two letters sent from Aachen by the Reichenau monks Grimaldus and Tatto around the year 817. They had traveled to Aachen to acquire an officially sanctioned copy of the RB from the palace library.81 Their success is attested in a first letter, to the librarian Reginbert, which accompanied a corrected version of the RB.82 A  second letter, addressed to their abbot, Haito, suggests that a secondary agenda had been to gain insight into the monastic customs they saw enacted during their stay at the imperial court, or in the nearby monastery of Inda.83 The monks thus report on “the honorable customs (morum honestorum) regarding the order of the rule” they witnessed, before offering points of improvement for their own monastery.84 Although these letters were not intended for wide circulation, their contents touch upon a more general discourse at the time. Even if not all of the voices in this debate spoke equally loudly, they were all in dialogue—​and they all







Hildemar, Expositio regulae; Smaragdus, Expositio in regulam Sancti Benedicti, ed. Alfred Spannagel and Pius Engelbert, CCM 8; English translation in Smaragdus of Saint-​ Mihiel, Commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. David Barry (Kalamazoo, MI, 2007). 79 Smaragdus, Commentary on the Rule, 325 and 452–​3; Hildemar, Expositio regulae 58. 80 Matthew Ponesse, “Smaragdus of St. Mihiel and the Carolingian Monastic Reform,” Revue bénédictine 116 (2006):  367–​92; Josef Semmler, “Die Beschlüsse des Aachener Konzils im Jahre 816,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 74 (1963):  48–​9; Mayke de Jong, “Growing up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and His Oblates,” JMH 9 (1983): 99–​128. 81 Wilhelm Bayer, “Aachen, Kornelimünster und die Reichenau in karolingischer Zeit,” in Aachen. Zum Jahre 1951 (Neuß, 1951), 55–​8. 82 Grimaldus and Tatto, Epistola Reginberto Magistro, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae 5, 302. 83 Grimaldus and Tatto, Epistola cum XII capitulis, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae 5, 305. 84 Ibid. 78

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agreed that debates and competition were needed to ensure that things continued to get better all the time.85

Mirrors for Monks Although many sources present monastic correctio as primarily court-​driven, the idea depended on the cooperation of the monks. Self-​reflection, education, and debate were key themes in many monastic writings, and intellectuals were often very proactive in their support of this agenda. Exiled during the upheavals of the early 840s, Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849), abbot of Reichenau, composed his Liber de exordiis to continue teaching his community in his absence. Having described everything critical to monastic life, his final thoughts treat secular hierarchies as part of the same system responsible for keeping the “body of Christ” (that is, the Church) together.86 It is noteworthy that this sentiment, this emphasis on interdependence, echoes a remark in an 825 capitulary.87 As much as there was a monastic model for the empire, there were also imperial ideals to shape the self-​awareness of monasteries.88 Correctio also generated controversy.89 Some monasteries, faced with the proposals of 816–​19, felt forced to declare themselves communities of canons rather than change their traditions. This development would (temporarily) divide institutions like Saint-​Hilaire and Nouaillé in Poitiers, Marmoutier and Cormery near Tours, and Saint-​Denis near Paris.90 The reform of Saint-​Denis spanned decades, starting in 817 when the abbey went canonical and a breakaway community was established at a cella at Mours. It ended around fifteen years later in a compromise which also involved the correct disposition of the community’s property, the rights of the monks, and the duties of the abbot.91 Cases such as these (in this

This remained visible in later reforms: see Vanderputten in this volume. Walahfrid Strabo, Libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum: A Translation and Liturgical Commentary, ed. Alicia L. Harting-​Correa (Leiden, 1996), 195–​7. 87 Admonitio ad omnes regni ordines, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1; Olivier Guillot, “Une ordinatio méconnue:  le Capitulaire de 823–​ 825,” in Godman and Collins, Charlemagne’s Heir, 455–​86. 88 Thomas F. X. Noble, “The Monastic Ideal as a Model for Empire,” Revue bénédictine 86 (1976): 235–​50. 89 Janet Nelson, Opposition to Charlemagne (London, 2009). 90 Semmler, “Benedictus II,” 13–​17; Karine Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (York, 2005), 57–​67. 91 Josef Semmler, “Saint-​ Denis:  von der bischöflichen Coemeterialbasilika zur königlichen Benediktinerabtei,” in La Neustrie. Les Pays au Nord de la Loire de 650 à 850. Colloque Historique International, ed. Hartmut Atsma (Sigmaringen, 1989), 106–​11. 85

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case exacerbated by the prestige of the monastery and the political importance of its abbot, Hilduin) show that reforms did not happen overnight, and that empire-​wide developments could impinge on individual monastic reforms and vice versa.92 Rather than dividing Carolingian monasticism into opposing teams, correctio was rarely a clear-​cut case of imposition versus opposition. The challenge was to establish consensus within each community, to deal with existing interests, and to adapt the spiritual and material matters to the new circumstances.

Beyond the Carolingian Experiment The foundations laid under the Carolingians became a benchmark for the monasticisms that followed.93 Interdependence remained crucial; communities were encouraged to continue their correctio along the lines set out by the court, while responsibility for reforms was coupled with an increase in authority for the rulers taking the initiative.94 The Carolingian paradox of embedding monasteries within a larger framework while simultaneously ensuring their independence led to various new directions in monastic thinking once the centripetal force of the Carolingian court gradually gave way to a multitude of competing interests.95 The Cluniac reforms, which started in the early tenth century, reflect one outcome: an attempt to disentangle monastic presence from worldly interference by allying communities with the papacy—​although lingering questions over landed properties meant that the link with the surrounding region and its local power brokers was never fully lost.96 Around the same time, the Carolingian holistic model for correctio was reinvented at the monastery of Gorze in Lotharingia, which was backed by the Ottonian dynasty both through material support and through the strategic appointment of abbots.97 The Ottonians had a vested interest



Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 13–​15. 93 Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” 358–​60; Rosamond McKitterick, “The Church,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, III: c. 900–​c. 1024, ed. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1999). 94 Joachim Wollasch, “Monasticism: The First Wave of Reform,” in Reuter, New Cambridge Medieval History, III, 163–​85. 95 Costambeys et al., Carolingian World, 379–​427. 96 Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St. Peter:  The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 97 John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform:  Lotharingia c.  850–​1000 (Oxford, 2001). 92

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here, as monasteries were vital for the material and symbolic support of the itinerant kingship that they practiced.98 Authority and support also played a role in the decision of King Edgar the Peaceful of England (r. 957/​9–​75), his wife, Ælfthryth, and his bishops to adopt and adapt the Carolingian experiment.99 A cooperative project between kings, archbishops, abbots, and minsters, their collective efforts resulted in the Regularis concordia, issued around 970.100 These regulations elevated the RB to an unprecedented level of prominence, and took measures toward harmonizing liturgical practices throughout the realm, in the process putting them in the service of the state.101 Throughout the tenth century, the urge to control monastic life and wealth remained palpable, as did the willingness of monasteries to submit to external control, especially when it worked in their favor.

Epilogue: Getting Better All the Time Whenever questions of monastic purity, property, and propriety intersected with issues of order and authority, the Carolingians were there to arbitrate and to ensure that monasteries did their jobs properly.102 A  conflict surrounding the megalomania of Abbot Ratgar of Fulda (r. 802–​17) led to the composition of an official booklet of complaints—​the Supplex libellus—​ which was presented to Charlemagne. According to the vita of Ratgar’s successor, however, the conflict was quelled only after Louis the Pious personally delivered a sermon at the monastery.103 As noted in the introduction, two imperial missi, Abbot Smaragdus and Bishop Frotharius of Toul, could see no other option than to allow the monks of Moyenmoutier, frustrated by their abbot’s mismanagement of the resources, to complain directly to the



John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c.936–​1075 (Cambridge, 1993). 99 Simon MacLean, “Monastic Reform and Royal Ideology in the Late Tenth Century: Ælfthryth and Edgar in Continental Perspective,” in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century:  Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–​1947), ed. David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah Williams (Turnhout, 2010), 255–​74. 100 Barrow, Clergy in the Medieval World, 92–​7; see also Francesca Tinti, “Introduction,” in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-​Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2005), 1–​16. 101 Simon Keynes, “Edgar, rex admirabilis,” in Edgar, King of the English, 959–​975:  New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), 40–​8. See also the article by Jones in this volume. 102 Mayke de Jong, “Sacrum palatium et ecclesia:  l’autorité religieuse royale sous les Carolingiens (790–​840),” Annales: histoire, sciences sociales 58.6 (2003): 1247–​51. 103 Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–​c.900 (Cambridge, 2012), 99–​130. 98

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emperor.104 Such issues affected the efficacy of monastic liturgy, and thus the very fabric of the realm.105 This dynamic governed the correctio movement as a whole.106 As shown by the juxtaposition of courtly initiatives and monastic reactions, participants in these debates had to be flexible and open to compromise. They needed to be resolved quickly; but the personal relation between monks and abbot, or between court and cloister, often required a personal touch: correctio on a case-​by-​case basis. Attempts by the court to proactively regulate monastic life, liturgy, and the pursuit of salvation depended on the acceptance of these regulations. Courtly responsibility for individual communities went well beyond merely material support, and ended up bolstering the authority of the rulers involved. To complete the circle, the expectations of the reformers were reflected in texts emanating from monastic communities, which were used to prepare for the next round of correctio. The religious ideal represented by Carolingian monasticism was shaped by its use as a political tool, while the recognition of the political importance of the monasteries grew as their religious presence became stronger and more organized. The paradox presented by monastic communities in a material world could not be resolved. But that never stopped the Carolingians from attempting to channel the productive tensions caused by this paradox to the benefit of all willing to work for the greater good.

Bibliography Barrow, Julia. The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, Their Families and Careers in North-​Western Europe, c.800–​c.1200. Cambridge, 2015.   “Ideas and Applications of Reform.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, 3:  Early Medieval Christianities, c.  600–1100, ed. Thomas F.  X. Noble and Julia M.  H. Smith, 345–62. Cambridge, 2008. Choy, Renie. Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms. Oxford, 2016. Claussen, M.  A. The Reform of the Frankish Church:  Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century. Cambridge, 2004. Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World. Cambridge, 2011. de Jong, Mayke. “Charlemagne’s Church.” In Charlemagne: Empire and Society, edited by Joanna Story, 103–​36. Manchester, 2005.

Frotharius, La correspondance d’un évêque carolingien, Epistola 3, 94. De Jong. “Carolingian Monasticism,” 650–​1. 106 Janet Nelson, “Medieval Monasticism,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet Nelson (London and New York, 2002), 576–​604. 104

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Monasticism, Reform, and Authority in the Carolingian Era  “Sacrum palatium et ecclesia: l’autorité religieuse royale sous les Carolingiens (790–840).” Annales: histoire, sciences sociales 58.6 (2003): 1243–69.   “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, II: c. 700–c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 622–53. Cambridge, 1995. Diem, Albrecht. “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West.” In Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Space of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Hendrik W. Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, 53–​84. Turnhout, 2011. Geuenich, Dieter. “Kritische Anmerkungen zur sogenannten ‘anianischen Reform’.” In Mönchtum—​Kirche—​Herrschaft 750–​1000. Josef Semmler zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Dieter R. Bauer et al., 99–​112. Sigmaringen, 1998. Kettemann, Walter. “Subsidia Anianensia:  Überlieferungs-​und textgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Witiza-​ Benedikts, seines Klosters Aniane und zur sogenannten ‘anianischen Reform’.” PhD diss., Gerhard-​Mercator-​Universität Duisburg, 2000. Noble, Thomas F.  X. “The Monastic Ideal as a Model for Empire.” Revue bénédictine 86 (1976): 235–​50. Patzold, Steffen. Episcopus. Wissen über Bischöfe im Frankenreich des späten 8. bis frühen 10. Jahrhunderts. Ostfildern, 2008. Pössel, Christina. “Authors and Recipients of Carolingian Capitularies, 779–​ 829.” In Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Richard Corradini et al., 253–​74. Vienna, 2006. Raaijmakers, Janneke. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–​ c.900. Cambridge, 2012. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY, 1999. Semmler, Josef. “Benedictus II: una regula—​una consuetudo.” In Benedictine Culture 750–​1050, edited by Willem Lourdaux and Daniel Verhelst, 1–​49. Leuven, 1983.   “Benediktinische Reform und kaiserliches Privileg: die Klöster im Umkreis Benedikts von Aniane.” In Società, istituzioni, spiritualità. Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, vol. 2., edited by Girolamo Arnaldi et al., 787–832. Spoleto, 1994. van Rhijn Carine. “Priests and the Carolingian Reforms:  The Bottlenecks of Local correctio.” In Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Richard Corradini, 219–​38. Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 13. Vienna, 2006. Zelzer, Klaus. “Zur Stellung des textus receptus und des interpolierten Textes in der Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti.” Revue bénédictine 88 (1978): 205–​46.

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Carolingian Monastic Schools and Reform Jo hn J. Con treni

Monastic communities in the post-​Roman world and the Carolingian age, often despite themselves, became major forces in the creation of a new European culture. Perhaps nowhere better can the crucial role that monks played in fashioning the civilization of the first Europe be observed than when they established and maintained schools and developed techniques and programs for learning when no other institution in the West was doing so.1

Schools in Monasteries Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 540) famously referred to the monastery as a “school for the service of the Lord,” but when he described the monastery as a scola he did not have the schoolroom in mind.2 He used a flexible Roman word that could refer to any organized group activity with a specific goal, such as a scola for singers or for soldiers. In fact, schoolrooms and education are nowhere to be found in the RB. Benedict in the sixth century assumed that monks would be literate and laid out an extensive reading program for them.3 Not only was the RB itself to be read completely through on a regular schedule, but from Easter to the beginning of Lent monks were expected to read two hours each day and were encouraged to read during their rest periods or after meals.

For a complementary exploration of this topic, see Albrecht Diem, “The Emergence of Monastic Schools: The Role of Alcuin,” in Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, ed. Luuk A.  J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1998), 27–​44. See also John J. Contreni, “Learning for God: Education in the Carolingian Age,” Journal of Medieval Latin 24 (2014): 89–​129. 2 See Richard E. Sullivan, “Schola Dominici Servitii: Carolingian Style,” Catholic Historical Review 67 (1981): 421–​32. 3 For reading in early medieval monastic rules, see Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, Sixth through Eighth Centuries, trans. John J. Contreni (Columbia, SC, 1976), 117–​19. Also Micol Long, “Monastic Practices of Shared Reading as Means of Learning,” in The Annotated Book in the Early Middle Ages: Practices of Reading and Writing, ed. Mariken Teeuwen and Irene Van Renswoude (Turnhout, 2017), 501–​28. 1

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Sunday was devoted entirely to reading. During the Lenten season the daily reading ration was increased to three hours. In addition, monks were expected at the beginning of Lent to choose a book from the library and to read it straight through. For most of the year, then, monks were expected to read at least twenty hours each week and during Lent at least twenty-​six hours. In addition, they spent many hours reading to each other during the office or listening to a weekly reader during meals (RB 48).4 While monks often receive credit as cultural heroes for their copying work in the scriptorium, it was the routinized, systemic reading program, an essential part of their “daily manual labor,” that deserves the credit. The scriptorium toiled in order to serve the monastic regimen of reading.5 As the Roman world transformed into the world of the early Middle Ages, the monastery was the only institution in the West that promoted reading and the culture of the book. As less well-​educated adults and growing numbers of unschooled children entered or were offered to monasteries, the ability to read and to understand texts could not be assumed. Monks had to become teachers, and monasteries had to take on the functions of schools. Benedict’s reading program, to judge from the last paragraph of the Rule (RB 73), pointed monks in the direction of other guides to the conversatio morum they were expected to undertake: the Old and the New Testaments, as well as John Cassian, Basil, and saints’ Lives.6 But in the centuries following Benedict monastic mentors had to start from the very beginning, literally with teaching monks the shapes of letters and their pronunciation.7 And they had to broaden the reading program vastly to include the secular and sacred literature that Benedict and his Roman contemporaries already knew. The many-​faceted Cassiodorus (d. c. 583), in his later years the founder of a monastery, composed his often-​copied Institutes of Divine and Secular Learning to outline a complete monastic reading program.8 Benedict and Cassiodorus wrote for their own monasteries. They could hardly have anticipated the explosion in the Carolingian age in the number of monastic communities and, consequently, in the number of learners and readers. Of the 1,254 monasteries in existence in the Carolingian Empire in

See also Benjamin Victor, “Aux origines de la bibliothèque monastique: la distribution du Carême,” Scriptorium 50 (1996): 247–​53. On the history of the monastic scriptorium, see the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in volume II. 6 See the articles by Diem and Rousseau, and Alciati in this volume. 7 See Riché, Education and Culture,  463–​5. 8 Cassiodorus, Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1961); English translation in Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, trans. with notes by James W. Halporn and Introduction by Mark Vessey (Liverpool, 2004). 4 5

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855, 417 of them or 49.8 percent of the total were founded between 768 and 855.9 Members of these houses could routinely be encompassed in two generational categories: monachi (monks) and scolastici (schoolboys). At Fulda, the roster of scolastici (s) that the monks (m) kept in their dependencies indicates that the school-​age population of monasteries could range from 26 percent to 49 percent of the community: Hameln (12 m to 11 s); Grossburschla (38 m to 17 s); Brunshausen (?) (23 m to 16 s); Rasdorf (32 m to 20 s); Hünfeld (33 m to 13 s); Holzkirchen (52 m to 18 s).10 But expansion and the high demands placed on communities with numerous scolastici challenged the capacity of monks to maintain high levels of Latin literate culture. The level of learning became so suspect that a king chided an abbot about the matter. Charlemagne’s letter to Abbot Baugulf (r. 779–​802) was widely distributed to “the bishoprics and monasteries which through the favour of Christ have been entrusted to us to govern.” The Epistola de litteris colendis (Letter on the Study of Literature) pointed to the monks’ shaky command of Latin grammar and their crude prose so evident in letters that came to the court full of pious sentiments, but expressed in faulty language. However, Charlemagne was interested in much more than epistolary technique. While verbal mistakes were bad enough, the errors in understanding to which they led were even worse. He reminded monks to recognize and pay attention to the figures of speech and metaphors embedded in sacred texts, for only then could they appreciate their spiritual meanings.11 Grammar and Latin prose were not mere fields of study but the doorways to holiness and spiritual wisdom, as monks such as Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel (d. c. 840) themselves came to understand.12 The Admonitio generalis (General Instruction) of 789 laid out a progression of studies that centered on reading the psalms, Tironian notes, chant, computus, grammar, and corrected catholic books.13 Intended to introduce boys in every

See Mark Stansbury, “Early-​ Medieval Biblical Commentaries, Their Writers and Readers,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 33 (1999): 79, table 2. 10 See M. M. Hildebrandt, The External School in Carolingian Society (Leiden, 1992), 147–​50. 11 See Karoli epistola de litteris colendis 29, ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capit. 1, 79, lines 29–​ 35; translated in H. R. Loyn and John Percival, The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration (London, 1975), 63–​4. 12 See Jean Leclercq, “Smaradge et la grammaire chrétienne.” Revue du Moyen Âge latin 4 (1948): 15–​22; and Matthew Ponesse, “Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel and the Carolingian Monastic Reform,” Revue bénédictine 116 (2006): 367–​92. 13 See Die Admonitio generalis Karls des Grossen 70, MGH Fontes 16, 222–​4; or Admonitio Generalis (789. m. Martio 23) 72, MGH Capit. 1, 59–​60. On Tironian notes, see Martin Hellmann, Tironischen Noten in der Karolingerzeit am Beispiel eines Persius-​Kommentars aus der Schule von Tours (Hanover, 2000). For musical notation, see Susan Rankin, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe: The Invention of Musical Notation (Cambridge, 2018). 9

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monastery and cathedral in the kingdom to the basic knowledge they would need to progress as Christians and as priests, the recommendations of the General Instruction also introduced them to different forms of written communication. The first step on the journey to Latin literacy began with reading, for which the Psalter served as the primer. Along with the substance of the psalms they learned to recognize and pronounce letters and words formed from the Latin alphabet. When they studied notae, they learned to write and decipher words expressed in stenographic forms, known today as Tironian notes. When they learned to chant, they may have been learning how to read melodies expressed in yet another written form, musical notation or neumes. Computus taught them the basic principles of calendar reckoning, along with facility in interpreting and manipulating the language of numbers, Roman numeric symbols that enabled students to perform fairly complicated arithmetical calculations. Grammar taught them to read Latin words as signs and symbols—​ the figures, tropes, and metaphors mentioned in Charlemagne’s letter to Abbot Baugulf. As boys moved through this course of reading, their masters hoped that they would emerge as fluent readers of five sets of symbols: Latin letters, stenographic notes, musical notes, Latin numerals, and linguistic concepts.14 All the reform initiatives from on high aimed to establish kingdom-​wide practice. Whether actual practice matched royal and conciliar prescriptions is another matter. In the fragmented and fractious world of the Carolingian age, around seventy schools left some record of their activities, although much of the evidence comes from episcopal statutes and proceedings of regional councils, and thus is weighted toward cathedral schools.15 Among monastic schools, Auxerre, Bobbio, Civate, Corbie, Fulda, Luxeuil, Reichenau, Saint-​ Denis, Lorsch, Saint-​Amand, St. Gall, and Tegernsee have left the clearest traces of academic schooling.16 But, even in these richly documented cases,





For this view of the General Instruction, see John J. Contreni, “ ‘Let Schools Be Established …’ For What? The Meaning of Admonitio Generalis, cap. 70 (olim 72),” in Music in the Carolingian World: Witnesses to a Metadiscipline, ed. Graeme Boone (Columbus, OH, in press). 15 See Pierre Riché, Écoles et l’enseignement dans le haut Moyen Age. Fin du Ve siècle–​milieu du XIe siècle (Paris, 1989), 99–​110, for a rapid survey, and John J. Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, II:  c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 722–​3 for a map, and 714–​15 for episcopal engagement with schools. 16 See Mayke de Jong, “Growing Up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and His Oblates,” JMH 9 (1983): 99–​128; Christine E. Eder, Die Schule des Klosters Tegernsee im frühen Mittelalter im Spiegel der Tegernseer Handschriften (Munich, 1972); David Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance (Sigmaringen, 1990); Pierre Riché, “Les écoles de Saint-​Gall des origines au milieu du XIe siècle,” in Le rayonnement spirituel et culturel de l’abbaye de Saint-​Gall, ed. Carol Heitz, Werner Vogler, and François Heber-​Suffrin 14

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what is often assumed about a monastery’s school is extrapolated from the activity of a learned monk such as Hildemar of Civate (fl. c. 845) or from its rich collection of manuscripts. We need also to be mindful of anachronism when attempting to understand these schools. School authors, curricula, schoolrooms, and academic studies took a decidedly second place to the primary purpose of schooling in monasteries. As Hildemar succinctly put it in his commentary on the RB, the monastic “school” was where young monks were trained for monastic life:  “He [Benedict] calls here the monastic discipline (monastica disciplina) a school, for there are other kinds of school: training for the secular church (ecclesiastica disciplina) is a school, there is the school of the liberal arts, and there is the school of any skill in which something is learnt.” Thus, what Benedict had in mind, according to Hildemar, was a school for monastic discipline, not the other kinds. Learning and schooling in the liberal arts in the modern sense, therefore, happened in monastic contexts at Auxerre, Corbie, Fulda, Saint-​Denis, St. Gall, and elsewhere purely in pursuit of progression in monastic life, a life that was assisted by broad reading but was not oriented toward erudition for its own sake.17 Hildemar’s vision of monastic life was inspired by reformers who aimed to establish monasteries as islands of good discipline and enhanced monastic observance. Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), the principal architect of that vision, saw his reforms and innovations codified in empire-​wide policy (except for Italy) under Emperor Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40).18 In the summer of 817, a decree issued from the palace at Aachen among other mandates stipulated that monastic schools were intended only for young monks.19 Yet, Bishop Theodulf of Orleans (d. 821) opened up the monastic schools in his diocese to the relatives of his priests with no stipulation that these young people would become monks.20 Highly educated lay people such as Angilbert (d.





(Nanterre, 2000), 37–​57; Hildebrandt, External School in Carolingian Society; Édouard Jeauneau, “Les écoles de Laon et d’Auxerre au IXe siècle,” in Études Érigéniennes (Paris, 1987),  57–​84. 17 Hildemar, Expositio regulae, 65. See also de Jong, “Growing Up in a Carolingian Monastery,” 115. 18 See the article by Kramer in this volume. 19 Synodi secundae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica V, ed. Josef Semmler, in Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae. Consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni, ed. Kassius Hallinger et al., CCM 1, 474. See also Philibert Schmitz, “L’influence de saint Benoît d’Aniane dans l’histoire de l’ordre de saint-​Benoît,” in Il monachesimo nell’alto medioevo e la formazione della civiltà occidentale (Spoleto, 1957), 401–​15; and Martin Claussen, “Benedict of Aniane as Teacher,” in Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages:  Studies in Honor of John J.  Contreni, ed. Cullen J. Chandler and Stephen A. Stofferahn (Kalamazoo MI, 2013),  73–​87. 20 Theodulf of Orleans, Erstes Kapitular 19, MGH Capit. Episc. 1, 115–​16.

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814), Einhard, Nithard, and Dhuoda (fl. 824–​44) owed something of their intellectual formations to monks and nuns.21 By the Carolingian age, the reading program intended for a few in the RB had come to serve broad social functions in a world where the boundaries between monastic and lay communities were porous. Significantly, Charlemagne wanted Baugulf ’s monks—​ and, indeed, all monks—​to impress the Christian people not only by their appearance but especially by their learning.22 The Aachen monastic decrees of 817 specified that learned monks (docti fratres) should be chosen to interact with outsiders.23 In the Carolingian age monastic communities were fully engaged with each other and with society at large, not so much islands but nodal points in a vast multi-​connection network. What monks learned in their schools prepared them “to serve teaching, pastoral, missionary, and administrative roles, all vital functions permitting monks to claim a share in the salvation of society as partners with other agencies in the secular world.”24 One need only think of the great monastic educators of the Carolingian age, Benedict of Aniane, Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel, Hrabanus Maurus, Walahfrid Strabo, Lupus of Ferrières, Paschasius Radbertus, Haimo of Auxerre, or of the great monastic communities at Corbie, Fulda, Auxerre, Tours, and elsewhere to understand how deeply plugged into the Carolingian political and social world monks were.25 For these monks the “love of learning and the desire for God” competed with service to the Carolingian family.26 Lupus of Ferrières (d. 862), renowned as a teacher and bibliophile among modern historians of Carolingian intellectual culture, was also a veteran of battle and haunted by machinations to remove him from his abbacy. He advised his twenty-​one-​ year-​old king, Charles the Bald, to choose only advisors who were experienced, well read, and holy: in other words, individuals very much like Lupus



See on this point Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson, eds., Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2007). 22 Karoli epistola de litteris colendis 79, lines 38–​42. 23 Synodi secundae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica XXVIIII. 24 Richard E. Sullivan, “The Context of Cultural Activity in the Carolingian Age,” in “The Gentle Voices of Teachers”: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan (Columbus, OH, 1995), 73. See also Richard E. Sullivan, “What Was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St Gall and the History of Monasticism,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), 251–​87; and the articles by Rosé, Kramer, Lauwers, and Cochelin in this volume. 25 See, for example, Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–​c.900 (Cambridge, 2012). 26 The phrase recalls Jean Leclercq’s influential book, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. See note 61 below. 21

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himself, whose reading could serve his king as well as his monks.27 Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), no stranger to political turmoil, served as abbot of Fulda, a monastic community that accumulated vast landed wealth, weathered conflict and intense engagement with the secular world, and still managed to cultivate learning.28

Teaching in Monastic Schools Teaching in monastery schools was primarily oral. The master read from a text or from a collection of notes put together for the occasion. We know this because students occasionally asked their teachers to prepare written copies of their tuition. Hrabanus Maurus’ instruction on what clergy needed to know originated as his personal notes on leaves of parchment culled from his reading. When his students requested a document that they could consult, his influential On the Training of Clergy was the result.29 Young Ercanbert of Fulda (d. c. 830) worried that his master’s comments on the Gospel of John would not be remembered, so the pupil copied the master’s teaching “as I heard it from your mouth (ut ab ore uestro accepi).”30 Heiric (d. c. 880), a monk from boyhood at Auxerre, studied with Lupus of Ferrières and Haimo of Auxerre (d. c. 865). His instruction with both was viva voce, but he preserved their tutelage by copying down their comments as fast as he could in Tironian notes.31 Monastic teachers did not compose treatises on pedagogy, but they did leave evidence of their teaching strategies in their books. Study of authors—​ classical, biblical, patristic, and medieval—​invariably began with a brief introduction to the author and his text that answered the “who, what, and when” questions for students and placed authors and texts in their contexts. Introductions to Virgil, the school text par excellence, are the most numerous and most varied, but Matthew the Evangelist and the more recent Bede of Northumbria (d. 735)  also required introductions for Carolingian monks.32



Lupus of Ferrières, Servati Lupi Epistulae 93, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Leipzig, 1984), 91, lines 13–​15. For Lupus’ political engagement, see John J. Contreni, “‘By Lions, Bishops Are Meant; By Wolves, Priests’:  History, Exegesis, and the Carolingian Church in Haimo of Auxerre’s Commentary on Ezechiel,” Francia 29.1 (2002): 51–​2. 28 See Raaijmakers, Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, 175–​264. 29 See Hrabanus Maurus, Hrabani (Mauri) Epistolae 3, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3, 385, lines 22–​30. Also Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum libri tres. Studien und Edition, ed. and comm. Detlev Zimpel (Frankfurt, 1996). 30 Epistolae variorum 34, MGH Epistolae 3, 358, lines 17–​18. 31 See Heiric of Auxerre, I Collectanea di Eirico di Auxerre, ed. Riccardo Quadri (Fribourg, 1966). 32 For Virgil, see John J. Contreni, “Getting to Know Virgil in the Carolingian Age: The Vita Publii Virgilii,” in Rome and Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas 27

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As teacher and student worked through the text, the first level of instruction focused on explaining words, their pronunciation, their grammatical function, and their meaning. Monks at Reichenau glossed difficult biblical vocabulary.33 Monks at Auxerre, Fleury, and other centers glossed Bede and Martianus Capella.34 Glosses to texts such as these were often transferred to glossaries, massive living dictionaries that grew by generations of accretion to record the wide-​ranging monastic reading program. Copies of the Liber glossarum could weigh from 11 kg to 13 kg and contain some 500,000 entries.35 Carolingian masters were also especially adept at using diagrams of various sorts to explain geometric and spatial relationships when words were inadequate. Their new diagrams functioned as verbal glosses that illustrated the meaning of the text.36 It is unlikely that young monks sat quietly by while their instructors read and commented on texts. Some may have taken notes on wax tablets for later study or memorization. The ubiquity of teaching texts arranged as dialogues between master and student suggests that teachers engaged their scolastici in learning by posing questions and puzzles and by expecting answers. As Alcuin (d. 804) put it, “to question wisely is to teach.”37 Wise questions put to young







F.X. Noble, ed. Valerie L. Garver and Owen M. Phelan (Farnham, 2014), 21–​45; for Matthew, see Christian of Stavelot, Christianus dictus Stabulensis. Expositio super librum Generationis Preface, lines 20–​2, ed. R.  B.  C. Huygens, CCCM 224, 59; for Bede, see C. W. Jones, ed., Accessus ad auctorem Bedam, CCSL 123C, 701–​2. 33 For the “Rz glosses,” see Elias Steinmeyer and Eduard Sievers, eds., Die althochdeutschen Glossen, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1879–​1922), 5:108–​407. 34 For Bede, see Frances Randall Lipp, “Carolingian Commentaries on Bede’s De Natura Rerum” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1962); and, generally, John J. Contreni, “Bede’s Scientific Works in the Carolingian Age,” in Bède le Vénérable. Entre tradition et postérité/​ The Venerable Bede:  Tradition and Posterity, ed. Stéphane Lebecq, Michel Perrin, and Olivier Szerwiniack (Lille, 2005), 247–​59. For Martianus Capella’s linguistically difficult allegory of the liberal arts, see Mariken Teeuwen and Sinéad O’Sullivan, eds., Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella: Ninth-​Century Commentary Traditions on De Nuptiis in Context (Turnhout, 2011). 35 See Michel Huglo, “Les arts libéraux dans le Liber glossarum,” Scriptorium 55 (2001): 3–​ 33. See also David Ganz, “Heiric d’Auxerre glossateur du Liber glossarum,” in L’École carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi, 830–​908, ed. Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Colette Jeudy, and Guy Lobrichon (Paris, 1991), 297–​312. For an online edition of the Liber glossarum, see Anne Grondeux and Franck Cinato, eds., The Liber glossarum: A Digital Edition (Paris, 2016), http://​liber-​glossarum.huma-​num.fr (date of last access:  12 June 2019). 36 See Barbara Obrist, “Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology,” Speculum 72 (1997): 33–​ 84; and Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance (Leiden and Boston, 2007). 37 See Alcuin, “Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus sapientissimi regis Karli et Albini magistri,” in The Rhetoric of Alcuin & Charlemagne: A Translation, With an Introduction, the Latin Text, and Notes, trans. Wilbur Samuel Howell (Princeton, NJ, 1941), 129, and PL 101, 939A. See also Heiric, Collectanea, 77, line 9; Martha Bayless, “Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition,” in Humour, History and Politics in

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monks included asking them how long it would take a snail to meet a swallow for lunch if the meeting place were one league away and the snail traveled at the pace of one inch a day: precisely 246.5 years! Or they might be asked to determine a number that someone else was thinking by asking arithmetically informed questions about the “hidden” number. Among the notes that Heiric of Auxerre recorded from Haimo of Auxerre’s teaching was a biblical conundrum in the fashion of Peter Abelard’s (d. 1142) later Sic et non. “How is it true what is written, ‘You hate nothing that you have made’ [Wisdom 11:25], when it is [also] written, ‘Yet, I loved Jacob, but hated Esau’ [Mal. 1:2–​3]?”38 Monastic bookshelves also document that monks followed the program outlined in the Admonitio generalis and built their schooling around the psalms, Tironian notes, chant, computus, grammar, and the catholic books.39 With the RB, the Psalter was among the first texts that young monks encountered. The psalms were recited daily during the monastic office for spiritual guidance and sustenance. Monks over the course of their lives could potentially sing the entire Psalter 2,500 times, for a total recitation of 375,000 psalms.40 Early years of repeated singing of the Latin words of the Psalter attuned young monks to the sounds, rhythms, structure, and vocabulary of Latin, which, newly refined in the Carolingian age, was a foreign language for speakers from both Germanic and Romance language regions of the Frankish realms. Facility in recognizing and reading Latin letters led to learning the notae or stenographic forms of writing such as Heiric of Auxerre used when he copied down the teaching of his masters. Students could study the notae and their alphabetic equivalents in huge compendia of some 13,000 notes.41 But it is more likely that they began to learn Tironian notes by reading a text they already knew by heart that was expressed in notae. Seven Carolingian Tironian Psalters





Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall (Cambridge, 2002), 157–​78; Riché, Les écoles et l’enseignement, 228–​30; and Nicholas Everett, “The Interrogationes de littera et de singulis causis: An Early Medieval School Text,” Journal of Medieval Latin 16 (2006): 227–​75. 38 For the story problems, see John J. Contreni, “Counting, Calendars, and Cosmology: Numeracy in the Early Middle Ages,” in Word, Image, Number: Communication in the Middle Ages, ed. John J. Contreni and Santa Casciani (Florence, 2002), 54–​8, 79–​83; Heiric, Collectanea, 114, lines 23–​5. 39 See Bernhard Bischoff, “Libraries and Schools in the Carolingian Revival of Learning,” in Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, trans. Michael Gorman (Cambridge, 1994), 93–​114. 40 For this statistic, see Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas:  A Portrait (New Haven, CT, 2013), 15. 41 See Wilhelm Schmitz, Commentarii notarum tironianarum, cum prolegomenis, adnotationibus criticis et exegeticis notarumque indice alphabetico (Leipzig, 1893) and http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b84790068 (date of last access: 18 August 2018) for a Corbie manuscript that contributed to Schmitz’s edition, now BnF, MS Paris, lat. 8777.

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survive, making this early text in the formation of young monks the most prominent document copied entirely in stenographic notation.42 Learning to read notae led to a third way of reading: reading musical notation. Suitable observation of the liturgy through proper and correct song was a contested practice during the Carolingian age. Just as Charlemagne and his advisors had observed poor grammar and clumsy expression in monastic messages, monastic chant sprouted non-​conforming varieties of melody among a people who, it was thought, must sing to God with one voice. In the General Instruction, Charlemagne attempted to harmonize discordant chant by requiring that his clergy learn the Roman method of chant, which King Pepin, his father, had substituted for Gallican chant.43 A  century later, the monk Notker of St. Gall (d. 912) recorded the persistent and disturbing variability of Frankish chants, and even concocted a conspiracy theory to account for the continuing dissonance of monastic chant. He attributed this to the sabotage of twelve Roman monks who were supposed to teach Roman chant to the Franks, but, envious of the Franks, instead taught chant incorrectly and with as much variety as possible.44 The introduction of new symbols to accompany chants, neumic notation, was an important step toward fixing and regularizing sacred song across the Carolingian landscape. Young monks learned chant through the daily liturgy as well as by learning to read neumes. Their devotion to this task is suggested by the ubiquitous scraps of neumed hymn fragments found in unlikely places: for example, along with various pen trials on the last flyleaf of a Corbie book of Tironian notes.45 It is as if monks were trying out melodies while engaged in other tasks and used blank spaces in whatever books were at hand to represent a melody graphically and then practice it. Observation of the liturgy suggests the liturgical seasons and the art of calendar reckoning that supported proper temporal observations of the seasons. But computus, the fourth branch of study recommended in the General Instruction, was by the Carolingian age much more than calculating the date of Easter, a vexing issue in the early Church that had long been

See the Psalterium tironianum from the monastery of Saint-​Germain-​des-​Prés in BnF, MS Paris, lat. 190, http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b8423835h/​f1 (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 43 See Die Admonitio generalis Karls des Grossen 78, 230; or Admonitio Generalis (789. m. Martio 23) 80, 61. 44 See Notker Balbulus, Notker der Stammler. Taten Kaiser Karls des Grossen 1.10, MGH SRG n.s. 12, 12–​15. 45 BnF, MS Paris, lat. 8777, fol. 98v. The neumed phrase is “Suscepimus deus misericordia[m]‌” (Ps. 47:10). 42

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settled by the ninth century. Computus involved calculations of all sorts, from the smallest units of time, to weights and measures, to fields and yields, and eventually to astronomical distances. Mastering the language of calculation required monks to read and to manipulate a new set of symbols, Roman numerals. Computistical studies are the purview of specialists today and may seem to have been a marginal feature of monastic schooling. But monks were as equally at home with numeracy as they were with literacy. Monasteries such as Reichenau and St. Gall were rich in computistical books of all sorts, many of which show heavy consultation.46 Hrabanus Maurus was the author of De computo and, with Alcuin, Dicuil, Adalhard of Corbie, Walahfrid Strabo, Heiric of Auxerre, Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, and others, comfortably navigated the world of numbers.47 Grammar, or grammatica, introduced young monks to literary studies. They already knew the mechanics of grammar. This stage in the progressive program of studies taught them how words functioned as signs and symbols and introduced them to the nuances of the Latin language, the “figures of speech, metaphors and the like to be found on the sacred pages,” as Charlemagne reminded monks in the letter to Abbot Baugulf.48 Grammatical studies took two tracks: the study of grammarians and the study of authors. Commentaries on texts such as Donatus’ (d. 380) Ars maior introduced them to the Latinity that Donatus taught to his star pupil, St. Jerome (d. 420). But the age of Jerome and Donatus was far different from the Carolingian age. Donatus’ grammar required explanation in a non-​Roman culture. Monks made innovations in grammatical instruction when they drew their examples from Scripture. When the composer of the Lorsch commentary taught that, for Donatus, a defective part of speech, a barbarism, affected the entire phrase in which it occurs, the monk agreed and brought Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 12:26, to bear:  “If one member suffers, all suffer together.”49 Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel “Christianized” grammar when he grounded his lessons in Scripture. His influential grammar taught monks that Latin was enriched not only because it was the language of the Bible and the language of the Church, but because Christian Latin admitted new forms to the ancient



See John J. Contreni, “Reckoning Time at Reichenau and St Gall (Computistics),” in Carolingian Culture at Reichenau and St. Gall: Tours of the Libraries of Reichenau and St. Gall (UCLA Digital Library, 2012), www.stgallplan.org/​en/​tours_​time.html (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 47 See Contreni, “Counting, Calendars, and Cosmology,” 43–83. 48 See above, p. 452. 49 See Ars Laureshamensis Expositio in Donatum maiorem III.1.34, ed. Bengt Löfstedt, CCCM 40A, 188. 46

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language. Roman Latin, for example, does not have names that end in –​b, but Christian Latin does, in Latinized Hebrew names such as “Iacob, Ioab, Ahab, Eliab, and Aminadab.”50 The progressive steps laid down in the Admonitio generalis prepared young monks for the culmination of the program, reading “catholic books” (libros catholicos). All monastic houses aimed to have a full complement of the “teachings of the holy fathers” that Benedict’s Rule recommended. The abbey of Murbach checked its holdings of Augustine’s works against his Retractationes and noted that its shelves were missing thirty-​eight titles.51 But monastic reading went beyond the Scriptures and the Church fathers to encompass the classics, pagan authors who figured prominently among the “school authors.”52 By the Carolingian age, monks were no longer asking what Athens had to do with Jerusalem and were instead, apparently without blushing, calling Aachen a “second Rome,” a “new Athens.”53 The notes that Heiric of Auxerre preserved from the teaching of his two mentors, Lupus of Ferrières and Haimo of Auxerre, perfectly illustrate the accommodation of “the love of learning and the desire for God.” Heiric thought so much of his schoolboy notes that decades later he had them done up and presented as a gift to Bishop Hildebold of Soissons (d. 884), his patron, when Heiric would have been between thirty and forty-​three years old. His notes married classical learning with divine learning, or, as Heiric put it, “one [Lupus] mastered human learning, the other [Haimo] divine learning.”54 Lupus taught from Valerius Maximus’ Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. The Suetonian excerpts proceed serially through the Caesars from Julius Caesar to Jovinianus, while the extensive extracts from Valerius cover prodigies, dreams, miracles, patience, abstinence, continence, poverty, and conjugal love, among many topics. When Lupus introduced young monks to these texts he invited them to experience imaginatively the characters and foibles of Roman emperors and the curiosities of the first-​and second-​century Roman world. Heiric grouped his notes

“B terminata Latina non inuenies. Hebrea uero sunt haec:  Iacob Ioab Ahab Eliab Aminadab.” See Smaragdus, Liber in partibus Donati 4, 7, ed. Bengt Löfstedt, Louis Holtz, and Adele Kibre, CCCM 68, 54, lines 295–​6. 51 See Eligius Dekkers, “Sur la diffusion au Moyen Âge des œuvres moins connues de saint Augustin,” in Homo Spiritalis. Festgabe für Luc Verheijen OSA zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. C. Mayer, and K. H. Chelius (Würzburg, 1987), 448. 52 Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter. Entstehung und Wandlungen des Lektürekanons bis 1200 nach den Quellen dargestellt (Munich, 1970). 53 Richard E. Sullivan, Aix-​la-​Chapelle in the Age of Charlemagne (Norman, OK, 1963), ­chapters 2 and 6. 54 Heiric, Collectanea, 77, line 13.

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from Haimo of Auxerre under the title Scolia quaestionum, and many of the excerpts do consist of puzzle-​like questions based on the Bible. “If greed is the root of all evil [1 Tim. 6:10], how is pride the beginning of all sin [Eccl. 10:15]?” Haimo’s answer, presumably worked out in dialogue with his pupils (and later generations of pupils whose masters used Heiric’s notes), was that greed never occurred without pride and pride never without greed, in effect making the biblical statements complementary rather than oppositional, as they might first appear to the unschooled reader.55 The school texts that we read today, such as Heiric’s Collectanea or Hrabanus Maurus’ De institutione clericorum, or the rich glosses on Martianus Capella, and even the surviving manuscripts of Carolingian schoolbooks, fail to capture the personal bonds that linked magistri and their scolastici. Although they belonged to two different generations, teachers and their students were enrolled in the same life-​long monastic community. The space set aside for study was not set aside from the monastery. What students learned as young scholars permeated and complemented their everyday lives as young monks and priests in training. Occasionally, a particularly talented student—​a Godescalc of Orbais, a Walahfrid Strabo, a Lupus of Ferrières, a Haimo of Auxerre, a Hrabanus Maurus, a Notker of St. Gall, or a Heiric of Auxerre—​ would emerge from the vast anonymity of monastic communities to become an author and to leave some record of his learning and the schooling that lay behind it. For women, denied the opportunity to become “soldiers of the Church” as priests, the anonymity is nearly total. Dhuoda’s learning and that of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (d. after 973) remind us how much intellectual capital went untapped. The 816 Council of Aachen’s reform of women’s communities directed that women fill their time with prayer, reading, and handwork.56 While their prayer and reading remain largely invisible to us, the books that women copied for their own communities and for others remain to testify that they avidly consumed and produced Christian wisdom and participated in the practice of the Christian cult.57 To judge from the

Ibid., 127, lines 15–​17. Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis (Concilium Aquisgranense a.  816) 14, MGH Concilia 2, Concilia aevi Carolina 1/​1, 448, lines 18–​20. 57 Bernhard Bischoff, “Die Kölner Nonnenhandschriften und das Skriptorium von Chelles,” in Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und 81), 1:16–​ 34; Rosamond McKitterick, Literaturgeschichte, 3  vols. (Stuttgart, 1966–​ “Frauen und Schriftlichkeit im Frühmittelalter,” in Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Hans-​Werner Goetz (Cologne, 1991), 65–​118; T.  A.  M. Bishop, “The Scribes of the Corbie a-​b,” in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis 55

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sophisticated questions they asked, they also thought deeply about what they learned.58 Benedict’s promotion of reading to achieve holiness brought schooling into the monastery and made some monasteries “centers of learning.” But religious life in these communities was tempered by frequent ritual feasting and drinking and relative abundance, and was not as ascetic as sometimes imagined.59 In this environment of learning and conuiuium, life-​long bonds were forged between teachers and students and among fellow students. Their letters (Alcuin’s famously, but many others as well) are filled with reminiscences of connections forged in schools.60 Writing in 1691, Jean Mabillon (1632–​1707), a Benedictine monk and the founder of early modern medieval monastic studies, defended monks against the charge of anti-​intellectualism. His Traité des études monastiques vindicated medieval monks as enlightened scholars who combined the love of God with the love of learning. Two and a half centuries later, Jean Leclercq (1911–​93), another Benedictine who greatly influenced modern medieval monastic studies, argued the case for a vigorous early medieval monastic theology







the Pious (814–​840), ed. Peter Godman and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1990), 523–​36; Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004), 8–​21. 58 For the evidence for female schooling, see Contreni, “Carolingian Renaissance,” 716–​20. See Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils, ed. Pierre Riché (Paris, 1975). See also Janet L. Nelson, “Dhuoda,” in Wormald and Nelson, Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, 106–​20. 59 See John J. Contreni, “What Was Emperor Augustus Doing at a Carolingian Banquet (Anth. Lat.2 719f )?,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 146 (2003):  372–​94; Bernhard Bischoff, “Caritas-​Lieder,” in Mittelalterliche Studien, 2:56–​73; and, D. A. Bullough, Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-​Drinkers:  Aspects of Community and Conflict in the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1991). 60 For Alcuin, see Mayke de Jong, “From Scolastici to Scioli: Alcuin and the Formation of an Intellectual Elite,” in Houwen and MacDonald, Alcuin of York, 45–​57; and Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation (Leiden and Boston, 2004), 110–​17. For Lupus of Ferrières, see Alberto Ricciardi, L’Epistolario di Lupo di Ferrières. Intellectuali, relazioni culturali e politica nell’età di Carlo il Calvo (Spoleto, 2005), 30–​4, and 91–​4. See also Appendix ad Alcuini epistolas 2, Candidus(?), MGH Epistolae Karolini Aevi 2, 484–​90; Epistolae variorum Carolo Magno regnante scriptae 39, Candidus, ibid., 557–​61; Epistolae variorum 41, “Grammaticus quidam Germanicus,” ibid., 563–​5. See further John J. Contreni, “The Carolingian School: Letters from the Classroom,” in Giovanni Scoto nel suo tempo. L’organizzazione del sapere in età carolingia, ed. Claudio Leonardi and Enrico Menestò (Spoleto, 1989), 81–​111; Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi, “Una proposta di nuova attribuzione ad Almanno di Hautvillers,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 76 (2009): 7–​28; Marco Mostert, “Using and Keeping Written Texts: Reading and Writing as Forms of Communication in the Early Middle Ages,” in Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 2012), 1:71–​96; John Van Engen, “Letters, the Lettered Voice, and Public Culture in the Carolingian Era,” in Scrivere e leggere, 403–​25.

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equally as rich as the later scholastic theology that in modern eyes all but obscured the intellectual achievements of monks. These campaigns may seem curious, given how much credit monks earned for their work of copying and saving important classical texts during the “Benedictine centuries” of the early and central Middle Ages.61 But, as Mabillon and Leclercq saw, monks were not about saving classical learning for generations yet to come. Their manuscripts, the texts they contained, and the reading and investigations they invited were but instrumenta virtutum, “tools for the cultivation of virtues” (RB 73), tools that monks began to wield in their schools.

Bibliography Claussen, M. A. “Benedict of Aniane as Teacher.” In Discovery and Distinction in the Early Middle Ages:  Studies in Honor of John J.  Contreni, edited by Cullen J. Chandler and Steven A. Stofferahn, 73–​87. Kalamazoo, MI, 2013. Contreni, John J. “The Carolingian Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, II:  c. 700–​c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 709–​57. Cambridge, 1995. Contreni, John J. “The Carolingian School: Letters from the Classroom.” In Giovanni Scoto nel suo tempo. L’organizzazione del sapere in età carolingia, edited by Claudio Leonardi and Enrico Menestò, 81–​111. Spoleto, 1989. Contreni, John J. “Counting, Calendars, and Cosmology: Numeracy in the Early Middle Ages.” In Word, Image, Number:  Communication in the Middle Ages, edited by John J. Contreni and Santa Casciani, 43–​83. Florence, 2002. Contreni, John J. “Learning for God: Education in the Carolingian Age.” Journal of Medieval Latin 24 (2014): 89–​129. de Jong, Mayke. “From Scolastici to Scioli: Alcuin and the Formation of an Intellectual Elite.” In Alcuin of York:  Scholar at the Carolingian Court, edited by Luuk A.  J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. MacDonald, 45–​57. Groningen, 1998. de Jong, Mayke. “Growing Up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and His Oblates.” JMH 9 (1983): 99–​128. Diem, Albrecht. “The Emergence of Monastic Schools: The Role of Alcuin.” In Alcuin of York: Scholar at the Carolingian Court, edited by Luuk A. J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. MacDonald, 27–​44. Groningen, 1998. Eder, Christine E. Die Schule des Klosters Tegernsee im frühen Mittelalter im Spiegel der Tegernseer Handschriften. Munich, 1972. Ganz, David. Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance. Sigmaringen, 1990. Hildebrandt, M. M. The External School in Carolingian Society. Leiden, 1992.

Jean Mabillon, Traité des études monastiques, divisé en trois parties (Paris, 1691), 5 (part I title), 7–​8, 396–​400. Mabillon’s formulations anticipated Jean Leclercq’s L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1957), trans. Catharine Misrahi as The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 2nd. rev. ed. (New York, 1974).

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Carolingian Monastic Schools and Reform Jeauneau, Édouard. “Les écoles de Laon et d’Auxerre au IXe siècle.” In Études Érigéniennes, 57–​84. Paris, 1987. Leclercq, Jean. “Smaradge et la grammaire chrétienne.” Revue du Moyen Âge latin 4 (1948): 15–​22. Ponesse, Matthew. “Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel and the Carolingian Monastic Reform.” Revue bénédictine 116 (2006): 367–​92. Raaijmakers, Janneke. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–​ c.900. Cambridge, 2012. Rankin, Susan. Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe:  The Invention of Musical Notation. Cambridge, 2018. Riché, Pierre. “Les écoles de Saint-​Gall des origines au milieu du XIe siècle.” In Le rayonnement spirituel et culturel de l’abbaye de Saint-​Gall, edited by Carol Heitz, Werner Vogler, and François Heber-​Suffrin, 37–​57. Nanterre, 2000. Sullivan, Richard E. “The Context of Cultural Activity in the Carolingian Age.” In “The Gentle Voices of Teachers”: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, edited by Richard E. Sullivan, 51–​105. Columbus, OH, 1995. Sullivan, Richard E. “Schola Dominici Servitii: Carolingian Style.” Catholic Historical Review 67 (1981): 421–​32. Sullivan, Richard E. “What Was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St Gall and the History of Monasticism.” In After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, edited by Alexander Callander Murray, 251–​ 87. Toronto, 1998. Victor, Benjamin. “Aux origines de la bibliothèque monastique: la distribution du Carême.” Scriptorium 50 (1996): 247–​53.

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Monastic Economics in the Carolingian Age Je a n -​P ie rre De vroey ( tr a n slate d b y M ichael   Webb) The notion of the monastic economy evokes two main questions: how did communities of men and women who chose to fulfill the ideal of cenobitic life cope with their economic necessities, and how did these communities interact with their environment (in the microeconomic sense) and with the structure and general economic trends of their time (in the macroeconomic sense)? Many scholars believe that monasteries had vibrant economic exchanges with their surroundings and played a significant role in the resurgence of trade in northwest Europe during the seventh to ninth centuries.1 According to Henning, who argued against this commonly held opinion, however, the goal of total autarky (which relates back to the original ideal of Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 540) of self-​sufficiency) during the Carolingian period had a consistently negative effect on the mercantile economy.2 Recent analyses of monastic economics are more nuanced than those of a few decades ago, when historians recognized Carolingian abbots among the principal agents of growth during the Early Middle Ages and identified them as entrepreneurs in the modern sense of the word.3 Research into monastic practices and ethos (the significance of the rationality of management, good government, etc.) demonstrates the importance of ideas and

Stéphane Lebecq, “The Role of Monasteries in the Frankish World,” in The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham (Leiden, 2000), 121–​48. 2 Joachim Henning, “Early European Towns: The Way of the Economy in the Frankish Area between Dynamism and Deceleration, 500–​100 ad,” in Post-​Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, 1:  The Heirs of the Roman West, ed. Joachim Henning (Berlin and New York, 2007), 3–​40. 3 Dieter Hägermann, “Abt als Grundherr,” in Kloster und Wirtschaft im frühen Mittelalter, Herrschaft und Kirche. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Wirkungsweise episkopaler und monastischer Organisationsformen, ed. Friedrich Prinz (Stuttgart, 1988), 345–​85; and, with more nuance, Pierre Toubert, L’Europe dans sa première croissance. De Charlemagne à l’an mil (Paris, 2004). 1

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institutions in economic development. Studies have also emphasized the intensification of agricultural work, the impact of the monastic economy on the world (and vice versa), and the effects of an increased demand for goods for the king so that he could perform his role in the defense and stability of the Christian res publica. The transition from ideal types to actual material realities must be investigated, with all of the nuances that depended on the geographical, social, and political environments of the communities of monks. At the end of the Carolingian period, the increasing importance of canons in the clerical economy added further complexity to the aforementioned mechanisms by introducing players more naturally intertwined with the dynamics of the century, further complicating the understanding of the interaction between religious communities and the economy in general.4 First, a caveat concerning the extant sources used to reconstruct economic life. During the Carolingian period, most sources, beyond the normative ones (e.g. monastic rules and statutes) that carried theoretical information, and rare passages from Lives and miracle collections, were primarily concerned with the economy of large male monasteries (e.g. polyptychs, acts detailing the allocation of lands and revenue for the sustenance of the monks such as the mensa fratrum, etc.). While archaeology allows for the reconstruction of daily life within monasteries, written sources largely leave the mundane organization of small male institutions and of most female monasteries in the dark; we therefore cannot address these here.

The Notion of Monastic Economy The ideal of a collective life sheltered from the world strongly influenced monastic foundations. But did this result in a self-​enclosed monastic economy? The pragmatism of Benedict of Nursia concerning questions of daily life and his desire to link confinement (the need to remain cloistered) with openness (the duty of hospitality outlined in RB 52–​3) must be taken into account, since this balance placed monastic communities on the edge of, rather than outside, the world.5 The office of porter (in charge of taking care of the poor



Alexis Wilkin, “Communautés religieuses bénédictines et environnement économique, IXe–​XIIe siècles: réflexions sur les tendances historiographiques de l’analyse du temporel monastique,” in Ecclesia in Medio Nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (Leuven, 2011), 101–​50. 5 On this same issue through the early and central Middle Ages, see the article by Lauwers in this volume.

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and travelers, among other things) was one of the first to become subject to regulations and to be assigned specific revenue.6 It became a premier position provided for in monastic budgets from the beginning of the second half of the eighth century, absorbing a significant part of the revenues gathered from tithes and nones on monastic property held by royal vassals. The tithe, a 10 percent levy on income derived from church property (not to be confused with parish tithes), was owed to its ecclesiastical owner by the lay people who held it. It was combined with another tax (one ninth) called a none or double tithe. At Corbie, in 822, the collection of tithes and double tithes was used to fund hospitality. These were also implemented on the lands that provided income for the abbot at Lobbes (at the time of the donation of the abbey to the bishop of Liège in 889), where they funded the gatehouse and hospital.7 Charlemagne emphasized the obligation to pay these taxes and parish tithes (a portion of which was for taking care of the poor) during the great crises of 779, 792–​4, and 805–​7, all of which were accompanied by famines. This suggests that hospitality at the gates of monasteries and other ecclesiastical institutions probably played more than an occasional role in expanding entitlements to food. The care of the poor, a task carried out by monks and nuns, was an integral part of the discourse of the legitimization of Carolingian kingship. Among the examples of the reciprocal acculturation of religious and royal practices typical of the Christian empire’s ideological construction is Charles the Bald’s 851 directive to the monks of Saint-​Denis “to receive [the poor of Christ] … in our place, to feed and clothe them, and to wash their feet.”8 How could two potentially contradictory types of need in the material existence of monasteries—​the necessitas fratrum (the brothers’ need), which was part of the peaceful life of the cloister, and the utilitas or the negotia ecclesiae (the service and business of the Church) in the world—​ be resolved except by multiplying the defenses against outside interference? To safeguard their cenobitic ideal, Carolingian monks erected three barriers: (1) only the abbot and a few monastic officers managed relations with the outside world; (2)  all that was necessary for the manual labor of the brothers was situated within the cloister;9 and (3) places that were

Adalhard of Corbie, Statuta seu Brevia Adalhardi abbatis Corbeiensis 2, ed. Josef Semmler, CCM 1, 355–​422. 7 Giles Constable, “Nona et decima: An Aspect of Carolingian Economy,” Speculum 25 (1960): 224–​50. 8 Egon Boshof, “Untersuchungen zur Armensfürsorge im fränkischen Reich des 9. Jhs.,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 58 (1976): 265–​67. 9 See the article by Cochelin in this volume. 6

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desolate yet rich in natural resources were found to house the brothers and were defended by sanctifying them and granting them immunity from outside interference.10 Thanks to these precautions, by necessity and from the very beginning, monasteries were able to be economic players in five broad ways:11 • As large landowners and agricultural producers, using the land and labor of others to provide the goods necessary for communal life. • As a particular group of consumers, not just in terms of the quantity and quality of the goods they needed but also with regard to time (monks ate differently from others in accordance with liturgical time and alimentary restrictions) and the need for distinct products (wine and fish, materials for the vestry, the scriptorium, and the infirmary) and raw materials (for construction sites and monastic workshops). One of the biases stemming from the myth of the “eremitic life” is the belief that the monks were not significant consumers; archaeology clearly shows that this was not true. • As traders, reselling and exchanging products or objects in surplus, to procure others or to satisfy the external demands outlined under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40) as “monastic service.” • As managers of property and wealth. The obligation to organize monastic domains gave rise to a “practical rationality,” numerous aspects of which historians associate with a “Benedictine mentality.” This includes the organization of administrative documents, the use of arithmetic, the mental organization of space to create lists of places that represented a veritable geographic guidebook, and the strict control of time made necessary by adherence to the canonical hours. This rationality was also marked by physical investments, in particular in everything that involved hydrologic projects (mills, fishponds), viticulture, and forestry. • As reservoirs of wealth. Monasteries served as material and political support not only for the regional aristocracy, which had increased the number of foundations and pious donations (Eigenklöster),12 but also for the Carolingian sovereigns who used them and their property to reinforce their power base and the acts of the Christian empire.13

See the article by Rosé in this volume for more on immunity. Wilkin, “Communautés religieuses bénédictines.” 12 See the article by Rosé in this volume and the article by Lyon in volume II. 13 See the articles by Kramer and Contreni in this volume.

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The Monastic Economy as oikonomia Medieval social and political order, without any distinction between the Carolingian Church and secular politics, inherited the Aristotelian concept of oikonomia, the administration of the household, through the intermediary of Christian tradition. This applied as much on a spiritual level (the domus Dei, the “house of God”) as on a physical one. The “house” was at the center of Benedict of Nursia’s (d. c. 540) thinking when he enacted his Rule (the monastery as the house of God, the abbot as father and administrator, the monks as brothers, etc.), as it was in Adalard of Corbie’s (d. 827) statutes and Hincmar of Reims’ (d. 882) On the Governance of the Palace (De ordine palatii). The order of the world was thus based on the Augustinian concept of domestic peace that established the relationship between the powerful and the weak according to the dual notion of the responsibility and autonomy of the father as head of the household.14 This paternalism also permeated social relationships in both monastic families and lay lordships. The pastoral authority that the abbot exercised over his monks was, however, balanced by Benedict’s requirement that all important decisions—​which must be understood as those that concerned the property of the monastery—​ had to be discussed by the entire community, even by the youngest brothers (RB 3.1–​3).15 This method of collective decision was, at least in theory, justified by the principle of Christian communal unity, which required that all wealth was held in common: “Let all things be common to all, as it is written. And let no-​one call or take to himself anything as his own [cf. Acts 4:32]” (RB 33). Communion was meant in not only a spiritual sense but also a physical one, as in the sharing in common of property. Through the Christian tradition, the Carolingians also took from antiquity the rejection of disorder (anomia) and the old concept of good government and legislation (eunomia), which is the basic regulation for a sound currency, the just price, etc. The involvement of monasteries in production and trade was subordinated to an ethical-​moral economy that covered monastic needs and service. This economy simultaneously imposed the rationality of management (the principle of effectiveness), the justification of surplus as a means to procure from somewhere else (if possible by trade) the things that could not be internally produced, the rejection of lucre and avarice in establishing a just

Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Haus und Ökonomie im früheren Mittelalter,” in Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff et al. (Sigmaringen, 1988), 101–​22. 15 On the appearance of the chapter house c.  800, see the article by Cochelin in this volume.

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price for monastic merchandise (set below the market value), and the needs of the monks. One part of this monastic rationality (the ability to account for and predict needs, the written customs of a domain, the organization of services, etc.) was able to spread not only laterally through interactions among Carolingian elites but also downwards through the instructions given to the monasteries’ local agents. The instructions that Hincmar of Reims wrote to those in charge of land management are lost, but the obligations for the reeve, called the Gerefa, offer an example for England.16 The actions of the abbot were also rational with regard to value and ability if he implemented rules (ars, industria) that ensured the good governance of the monastery and transmission of the rules to his successors.17 The statutes dictated by Adalard of Corbie (822) regulated daily schedules, and taught the monks and their successors charged with divine services the means to better accomplish their tasks. This pedagogical aspect is particularly clear in the chapters entitled ratio (covering both “computation” and the methods of accounting and managing), as can be seen in this chapter heading: “[III] On the supply of grain. The account (ratio) and quantity of the supply of grain (annona) and bread, in what manner and in what quantity the annona should come to the monastery each year, and in what way the person responsible must divide up the bread.”18 Adalard systematically outlined the method that should be followed and all the information needed for calculation, so that everything could be applied or modified as needed. This management technique taught not only the organization of work and the evaluation of necessary amounts, but also time management, since provisioning a large monastery was carefully regulated in both time and space by the monthly installments of food produced outside the monastery by people other than monks. The idea that a true monk was one who lived by working with his hands, as laid out in RB 48, served as a simple theoretical model necessary for asceticism, unlike those for other times and places. The ideal of manual agricultural labor was interpreted by Western monks who followed the





Jean-​Pierre Devroey, “Ordering, Measuring, and Counting: Carolingian Rule, Cultural Capital and the Economic Performance in Western Europe (750–​900),” http://​difusion. ulb.ac.be/​vufind/​Record/​ULB-​DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/​124981/​Holdings (date of last access: 18 August 2018). 17 Hägerman, “Abt als Grundherr,” 360. Ludolf Kuchenbuch, “Ordnungsverhalten im grundherrlichen Schriftgut vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter. Rezeption, Überlieferung und gesellschaftliche Wirkung antiker Gelehrsamkeit vornehmlich im 9. und 12. Jahrhundert, ed. Johannes Fried (Munich, 1997), 196–​202. 18 Adalhard of Corbie, Statuta seu Brevia Adalhardi 3. 16

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RB, not as a need to work in the fields, but rather as work in the garden and in processing and cooking food.19 Under normal conditions, the time set aside for monks to perform any type of manual labor (four hours a day except during the winter; RB 48) was insufficient to produce enough food to feed them; some of the agricultural work around the monastery therefore had to be done by servants or employees. Despite the strong reaffirmation of the Christian ethic of self-​sufficiency, monastic communities never had pure and simple domestic economies governed exclusively by the logic of autarky and isolationism, even if these were essential and permanent elements of their economic ethos. They were simultaneously the center of a sometimes considerable territory, developed with the help of agricultural laborers, and an ensemble of lordships inhabited by hundreds, or even thousands, of dependents. They were also great enterprises that produced and consumed agricultural and artisanal surplus. They were therefore directly involved in an exchange economy and had links with the outside world.

The Mobilization of Monasteries in Service of the Christian Empire From the sixth century, monastic regulations sought to protect the internal stability and peace of the monastic community and the salvation of the monks within the cloister by entrusting the management of the exteriora (all that was associated with the world outside the cloister) to the abbot and a small group of experienced monks (the provost, the porter, the monk in charge of the hospital, etc.). These duties became more important and complex as the Church integrated into the empire. In the ninth century, the ideal type of abbot described in the biographies of Adalard of Corbie or Wala of Bobbio was a great courtly officer. The position combined skills and agency based on education, frequent visits to the court, and regular participation in events (such as annual assemblies and expeditions) and public functions (including princely wardship, embassy, missions of inspection, etc.). Since monastic asceticism was practiced apart from the world but did not wholly reject it, specific choices needed to be made concerning internal organization, and intercessors were required. To ensure a community’s internal peace and stability, the abbot assumed the responsibility for relations with the external

For other models, see the article by Ramseyer in this volume and the article by Berman in volume II.

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world and managed the community’s holdings as best as he could. According to Abbot Lupus of Ferrières, poverty is a hindrance to religion. In the case of all our villas the work and the management belong to me and me alone, but the true enjoyments of the fruits go, according to my disposition of affairs, to the brothers in common. In this way religion does not lessen the secular power, nor does the secular power lessen religion.20

The role of the abbot as an intermediary between the two worlds was guided by the ideal of life (the ethos) formulated by the RB (the necessitas fratrum) and by material and spiritual mobilization (utilitas) in the form of prayers, annual donations, and services (including military) required from the monasteries to serve the Christian empire. The Notitia de servitio monasteriorum of 819 indeed compelled certain monasteries to give annual donations to the royal budget and to provide military service. The elites of the Church (both prelates and abbots) were closely integrated into the political milieu by close links between monasteries, the royal house, and the court, and through the major duties that came with holding power. The notions of necessitas and utilitas determined the ethical dimensions of the actions of a Christian leader. Necessity was the justification for action, and utility the basis for the distinction between business (a legitimate action), commerce (a private activity), and usury (a forbidden act). This ethic was transposed by the Carolingian intellectual elite into the sphere of the royal government. With respect to the faithful, the king had the same duty as the abbot had to his monks: the preservation of stability. It should not be assumed, however, that the dynamic developed by these models functioned in a systematic way. In reality, there was surely a succession of circumstantial demands and situations (notably crises), even though the Carolingian royalty retained its strong programmatic ambitions until the end of the reign of Charles the Bald. The multiplication of inventories of domains starting in the 780s, and especially after the monastic reforms of 816–​19, reflects the need to order monastic property both to ensure the stability of the spiritual project—​by allocating the necessary supplies to the community—​and to mobilize its resources for the benefit of the empire. Once again, these methods of dividing goods did not respond exclusively to a programmatic logic but often to the hazards of power, as monastic holdings could be mobilized according to alliances and conflicts among aristocrats. Both in the model of organization adopted in polyptychs

Lupus of Ferrières, Epistolae 1.58 and 1.62, ed. and trans. Léon Levillain, 2 vols. (Paris, 1927–​35), 75 and 77.

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and monastic statutes, and in the Capitulare de villis, the requirements for stability were taken into account. These two models were based on a logic of centralization. According to the Capitulare de villis, in the curtes (administrative centers) attached to royal service, regular transfers ensured the daily provisioning of the sovereign and his retinue, and covered the needs of royal troops on military expeditions. Within the territory of a monastery, the curtes mobilized labor and assembled agricultural and artisanal products to store or redistribute them toward the monastic center, its subsidiaries (priories, hospitals), and the centers of royal power. This proximity of inspiration and organization was rooted in the shared ideological models and values, and in the political habits and practices brought about by the inclusion of the Church as a membra regni.

The Organization of  Land The hypothesis that economic rationality could have guided the management of Carolingian monastic property allowed for a renewal of the study of ninth-​century polyptychs of the great abbeys between the Seine and the Rhine, and particularly for an analysis of how the principles exhibited in monastic statutes were enacted in the organization of property and goods.21 To acquire the alimenta (food, clothing, and lodging) necessary for the monks’ communal life, supplies either had to be produced internally or procured and brought to the monastery. This principle of centrality, which was at the core of monastic property networks, was based on management that was divided into three functional parts, as shown, for example, by the Breve memorationis of Abbot Wala of Bobbio (834) and the later polyptych (862).22 The Bobbio Valley, dotted with oratories (occupied by monks) whose operations were devoted to agriculture and livestock, contained a small population of libellarii (peasants holding land provisionally against a fee and the commitment to improve the grounds), concentrated in modest settlements near the oratories. The valley also had two salt works (able to meet all local needs), agricultural land including meadows for hay and vineyards, and an oak wood that was home to 2,000 pigs. These resources, however, placed under the supervision of the internal provost, were not sufficient to provide for all the needs of the monastery.

Adriaan Verhulst and Josef Semmler, “Les statuts d’Adalhard de Corbie de l’an 822,” Le Moyen Âge 68 (1962): 91–​123 and 233–​69; Toubert, L’Europe dans sa première croissance. 22 On Bobbio, see the article by Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 21

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With other external cellae (small dependencies located nearby within a radius of 80 to 140 kilometers), they formed a supply network centered on Bobbio that ensured the continuous provisioning of all the products consumed daily by the brothers. Properties further away along the Ligurian coast and Lake Garda provided essential resources such as fish (dried or salted) and oil that could be transported once a year to the abbey. Goods from properties located in Tuscany, more than 300 kilometers from Bobbio, were only taken in cases of absolute necessity; their crops were probably generally sold for money.23 As in Adalhard’s Statutes for Corbie (822), Wala of Bobbio’s text described not only the organization of production and the flow of products that were needed to ensure the safe and steady provisioning of the community, but also the theoretical distribution of tasks and resources within the monastery and among monks, visitors, and lay workers. The overall spirit of the document is characterized by a search for managerial efficiency to secure the stability of the monastery. Other methods of organization similarly ensured the integration of distant properties to benefit the monastic center. Long-​distance transport and courier systems were organized using tenant farmers’ equipment (beasts of burden, carts) or from the holdings of horsemen along the main roads. Most monasteries either owned a small river fleet or had access to the boats and navigational skills of certain tenants.24 The organization of resources in space was coupled with the management of time. The first example of a system of monthly deliveries (mensaticum) was at Fontenelle at the end of the eighth century, a system that would later be copied or reinvented at Cluny in the eleventh century, as well as at other ecclesiastical institutions.25 The duty to supply the monastery devolved successively to different holdings and the responsible monastic officers. In a political organization dominated by the logic of mediation and relations between the elites who held power, the spatial organization of large monastic properties ensured the transfer of news, products, raw materials, and labor. This has been demonstrated by studies of the transportation and courier networks of Saint-​Germain-​des-​Prés and Prüm. Both were joined to the emporia (commercial centers) of the English Channel and the North Sea,

Marie-​Aline Laurent, “Organisation de l’espace et mobilisation des ressources autour de Bobbio,” in Les élites et la richesse au haut Moyen Âge, ed. ed. Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout, 2010), 479–​94. 24 Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Économie rurale et société dans l’Europe franque (VIe–​IXe siècles), vol. 1: Fondements matériels, échanges et lien social (Paris, 2003). 25 Georges Duby, “Économie domaniale et économie monétaire: le budget de l’abbaye de Cluny entre 1080 et 1155,” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 7.2 (1952): 167–​8. 23

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and to the political and religious centers of power.26 Monastic transactions within these areas were facilitated by the granting of commercial privileges (the exemption from market dues, the creation of markets and fairs) and the employment of secular agents (stewards managing monastic domains, and abbey vendors). The choice between commerce and autarky often invoked in historiographical debates is a false dichotomy. A good observer of the realities of the monastic economy, Caesarius, the former abbot of Prüm, who oversaw the production of the 1222 copy of the 893 polyptych, noted that “the amount of wine and salt from the curtes was so abundant that the surplus had to be sold almost by necessity.”27 Transport of heavy goods permitted agricultural products to be sent biennially to the monastery, its priories, and the royal palaces of Aix and Worms. From the eighth century onward, in the region around Paris, Saint-​Denis and Saint-​ Germain-​des-​Prés took advantage of this centralization to sell their surplus wine at the great fair attended by Frisian and Anglo-​Saxon merchants.28 The monastic courier system was distinguished by its continuous operation, speed, endpoints, and geographic range. At Prüm (and also Saint-​Germain-​ des-​Prés and Wissembourg), the system linked the monastery, its priories, its storehouses, and the places of power in the Frankish Rhineland:  the royal residences at Aix and Frankfurt, and the episcopal cities of Cologne, Metz, and Verdun. The backbone of this second area of traffic was the basin of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. This connected the area of monastic exchange with the regional networks of power and trade. Economics cannot be separated from politics.

The Monastic Enclosure and the Neighboring Environment The topos of monastic solitude notwithstanding, many recently discovered or newly interpreted sources show that monasteries often extended into surrounding landscapes. These sources also contradict images both of pioneer monks clearing new spaces and of enclosed monastic spaces with no impact on the surrounding area.29 For example, archaeological sources for Fulda have

Devroey, Économie rurale et société. Ingo Schwab, ed., Das Prümer Urbar (Düsseldorf, 1983), 172. 28 Lebecq, “Role of Monasteries in the Frankish World.” 29 René Noël, “Moines et nature sauvage dans l’Ardenne du haut Moyen Âge (saint Remacle à Cugnon et à Stavelot-​Malmedy),” in Villes et campagnes au Moyen Âge. Mélanges Georges Despy, ed. Jean-​Marie Duvosquel and Alain Dierkens (Liège, 1991), 563–​97; Chris Wickham, “European Forests in the Early Middle Ages: Landscape and Land Clearance,” in L’ambiente vegetale nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1990), 481–​3; Nicolas 26 27

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been compared with the hagiographical account composed by Eigil (c. 800) concerning the creation and first years of the community founded by Sturm in 740 within the forested Odenwald mountain range.30 According to the vita, the saint found a terrifying desert in a place called Bochonia, in the middle of a dense silva (woodland) populated only by wild beasts, and thus suitable for monastic solitude and manual work (clearing). Excavations have shown, however, that the countryside was actually quite varied, with fields, pastoral land, and indeed dense and widespread silva. There the first monks found a large Merovingian stone building, modeled on a large Roman farm (villa rustica).31 There must also have been a cultivated area providing for the curtis (the administrative center of the manor), discovered by archaeologists in the territory ceded to Sturmi (d. 779) by Carloman. Moreover, the privilege of immunity for Fulda’s monastic territory reflects the purely symbolic character of this “empty” (vasta) space, given that it was part of the agricultural properties of the fisc, and farmers of the surrounding land crossed through it to exploit its wealth. The history of Fulda therefore fits within the long tradition of using the topos of the cenobitic desert. According to an account from the end of the eighth century, San Vincenzo al Volturno (further discussed below) was founded around 700 in a silva densissima in the mountains of central Italy. Archaeological excavations have shown, however, that it was placed at the site of a Roman villa, in an environment largely managed by human beings.32 In fact, monasteries founded in the countryside, beginning in the seventh century, present a repetitive morphology: a central territory defended by immunity and a monastic enclosure containing everything needed for communal life (cellars, workshops, gardens, and orchards).33 After his return from exile in Jumièges (765), Sturmi undertook work at Fulda to structure a monastic space that conformed to the RB: “If it can be done, the monastery should be so situated that all the necessaries, such as water, the mill, the garden, are enclosed, and the various arts may be plied inside the monastery, so that there may be no need for the monks to go about



Schroeder, “Organiser et représenter l’espace d’un site monastique:  l’exemple de Saint-​Hubert du IXe au XIIe siècle,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 89 (2011): 711–​ 46; Nicholas Schroeder, Terra familiaque Remacli. Études sur le milieu social et matériel de l’abbaye de Stavelot-​Malmedy, VIIe–​XIVe siècle (Brussels, 2012). 30 See the article by Raaijmakers in this volume. 31 On the reuse of lay buildings by early monks and nuns, see the article by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 32 Wickham, “European Forests in the Early Middle Ages,” 481–​3. 33 See the article by Díaz in this volume.

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outside, because it is not good for their souls” (RB 66). Mustering the necessary workers, Sturmi had a canal dug that brought water into the monastery to power mills and provide for the other needs of the monks, “so that the vigor of the stream would enrich the monastery of God” (ita ut fluminis impetus laetificaret coenobium Dei).34 Artisanal work carried out at Fulda (the manufacture of weapons, glass, combs, etc.) probably occurred within the monastic complex.35 This is the same ideal that is reflected graphically in the layout of the Plan of St. Gall, and ideologically in the statutes promulgated at Murbach, Corbie, and Bobbio in 820/​830. In other places, one or more settlements were present around the monastery. At San Vincenzo al Volturno, there was a borgo (a concentrated settlement) next to the workshops near the church of San Vincenzo Maggiore that made precious objects (enamels, glassware, metalwork, goldsmithing, and bone and ivory artifacts). Built outside the monastery complex, on the site of a Roman villa rustica, it was occupied by simple dependents who engaged in industrial activities including the manufacturing of glass and pottery. These workshops and the rest of the settlement consisted of simple rural structures.36

Inside “Monastic Cities” At Fulda, the community started by Sturmi developed into a vast monastic city that already numbered 300–​400 monks and oblates at his death in 779, and almost 600 at the apogee of the monastery under the abbacy of Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856). The village around the abbey church can be estimated to have had many more inhabitants, probably several thousand in total, which made it a veritable town in terms of concentration of wealth, artisanal production, and consumption. The large rural Carolingian monasteries, however, did not usually bring about a lasting process of urbanization. Prüm, for example, only obtained a charter for the small village at the foot of the abbey in the thirteenth century. Despite signs of urban development in the eleventh century, Saint-​Riquier fell into obscurity after the foundation of Abbeville.

Eigil, Vita S. Sturmi 20, MGH SS 2, 375. Thomas Kind, “Das karolingische Kloster Fulda: ein ‘monasterium in solitudine’: seine Strukturen und Handwerkproduktion nach den seit 1898 gewonnenen archäologischen Daten,” in Henning, Post-​Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement,  396–​9. 36 Riccardo Francovich and Richard Hodges, Villa to Village:  The Transformation of the Roman Countryside in Italy, c.400–​1000 (London, 2003), 92–​9. 34 35

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Close proximity to the laity (excluding the farmers and their families who cultivated the lands surrounding the monastery) could indeed lead to the questioning of monks’ discipline. This concern may explain why, in some cases, no lasting urban settlement developed around a given monastery. In 863, Lobbes’s monastic territory probably encompassed, in addition to its gardens, several fields of arable land and farms directly entrusted to monastic officers and workers. The population of agricultural day laborers who provided ancillary services lived in a small village with a church (for which parochial services were provided by a small chapter of canons), 200 meters from the monastery. On other properties organized along the model of a great bipartite manor (with the reserve and demesne, and the village of tenants), the village is found several kilometers from the monastery. At Prüm, the main curtis was 5 kilometers away in the village of Rommersheim, where the parish church was also located and where, in 861, a market and mint were established. The transfer of these rights to Prüm itself in 1016 did not bring with it any dynamic of urbanization. Within the monastery’s network of lands, which spanned the entire valley of the Lower and Middle Rhine, modestly sized urban clusters instead developed where commercial infrastructures already existed (such as at Duisburg or Deventer), or around priories that served as nodes in the abbey’s transportation network (such as Münstereifel, Altrip, or St. Goar).37 The first market granted to Lorsch by Otto I  in 956 was located in Bensheim an der Bergstrasse, the village closest to the monastery. Desiring not to intermingle with lay people, the monks of Lorsch owned boats (824) and a port at Zullestein (846), 10 kilometers as the crow flies from the abbey, where the River Weschnitz (which flows past the abbey) meets the Rhine. There are many more examples that show how the presence of a monastery could either stimulate or drain agricultural wealth and artisanal production. Depending on the environment, macroeconomic effects could extend beyond the bounds of the monastic economy itself, while at the same time holding back the process of urbanization. These contradictions are also visible in the environment of certain urban and suburban monastic centers (such as Tours and Reims). A monastic settlement could function as a sort of anti-​city, a project of isolation from the city

Devroey, Économie rurale et société; Devroey, Jean-​Pierre and Massimo Montanari, “Città, campagne, sistema curtense (secoli IX–​X),” in Città e campagna nei secoli altomedievali 2 (Spoleto, 2009), 793.

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and the “world” that in certain cases translated into a real opposition to the city, not only ideologically but also operationally. A monastery could indeed become an alternative to the city, a new city (a “rural city,” so to speak) that removed some authority and prestige from the city center.38 Nevertheless, it could not prevent the concentration of wealth in the urban territory from which it managed its property. This was the case for the oldest monasteries founded on the outskirts of cities, such as Saint-​Martin at Tours, Saint-​Victor at Marseille, Saint-​Remi at Reims, and Saint-​Germain at Paris. As for the regions in which the city remained the undisputed center of civil and religious organization, monasteries were either built in the city center (as at Brescia or Reggio Emilia) or attracted the remnants of urban life (as at Arras).39 At Arras, the monastery of Saint-​Vaast was founded outside the old Roman city in the seventh century. In 867, Charles the Bald’s constitution granted the monks half of the revenues from the settlement (vicus) “called the New Villa next to that monastery” (qui vocatur Nova Villa juxta monasterium ipsum situm) with a tavern (taverna) and, for the office of chamberlain, the revenues from a second tavern located in vico monasterii. According to the charter of 867, the provost of Saint-​Vaast was authorized to sell the surplus wool produced on the abbey’s property on the local market, perhaps, as Verhulst suggests, to independent workers in the nova villa.40 Between 883 and 888, after a Viking raid destroyed the civitas of Arras, the abbey (except for its churches), and the settlement next to the monastery, Raoul (son of Evrard of Frioul), the lay abbot of Saint-​Vaast, fortified the abbey; in 890 it was called a castrum and castrum sive monasterium for the first time. At the center of the later medieval town, the fortification encompassed 5.25 hectares and included the king’s palace, the parish church, and probably the former vicus monasterii. The abbey’s character as a fortified center was so striking that, in 890, King Eudes found it necessary to emphasize that Saint-​Vaast was still an abbey, whose monastic character should not be disturbed.41

Monastic Economy and Early Medieval Society Quantifying the macroeconomic effects caused by the monastic economy is obviously an impossible task. A  qualitative approach brings nuance to the hypothesis of an autarkic confinement of productivity within the monastery

Devroey and Montanari, “Città, campagne, sistema curtense,” 779. Ibid.,  797–​9. 40 Adriaan Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-​West Europe (Cambridge, 1999), 53–​4. 41 Ibid., 60. 38

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(which would return to the notion, dear to Henri Pirenne, of a domanial economy without markets). Depending on the regional environment, monasteries produced, ordered to be produced, sold, and exchanged products and raw materials at the local or regional level to cover their material needs. This became even more urgent once the “public service monasticism” of Charlemagne and his successors made this wealth available for public use and assistance to the poor. As a general rule, artisanal activities and the integration of the great monasteries of the eighth and ninth centuries into public affairs had an indirect impact on the economy. They can in some ways be characterized as what are called externalities in economic theory. But we must beware of all generalizations. Managerial practices were very different depending on the size of the monastery. Small monastic institutions were content to live off their tenants’ work and even to lease their domains (as suggested by the Rule of the Master, cited by Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) in the Concordia regularum in order to reinforce the isolation of the monks). The great royal monasteries, however, had abbots who were close to the Carolingian court and held properties and income that were deeply entangled in public affairs. Chronological and regional differences must also be taken into account. In England, recent archaeological finds show a greater concentration of material wealth, artisanal activity, and trade with commercial and artisanal emporia on the coast in monasteries than in centers of royal power. More numerous interactions between monks and their subjects or lay neighbors, which can be seen in England and in many suburban institutions on the Continent, demonstrate how and why certain monasteries participated directly in the dynamics of urbanization. But the permeability of cloisters can also be understood in the context of religious events such as pilgrimages, through which the grouping of people favored the emergence of fairs (e.g. that of Saint-​Trond). Finally, the quantitative success of cenobitic monasticism, starting with the proliferation of rural foundations in the seventh century, and the choice of numerous communities of clerics in urban or suburban churches to embrace the monastic vocation, suggests that the pressure exerted by monasteries upon the economy should not be underestimated. As noted above, the monk of the early Middle Ages was anything but the largest producer of what he consumed. For the ninth century these needs can be evaluated in the regulations establishing the portion of the income or goods reserved to provide food and clothing for the monks (mensa monachorum): on average, ten family farms were needed to sustain a single monk in a given community, including the servants working at the monastery and the poor fed there. 481

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Estimates of the size of Church holdings vary from a third of cultivated land (in Francia at the beginning of the ninth century) to a quarter (in Anglo-​ Saxon England in the mid-​eleventh century), with many differences between the portion controlled by the secular Church and that of the regular Church depending on the region and period.42 The concentration of land into the hands of monasteries, mainly in the seventh and eighth centuries, also led to an important shift in the pattern of exchange and access to land.43 Monks were at the peak of an economic and social pyramid whose base consisted of peasant families. This base was broad:  the Council of Aachen in 816 divided religious institutions into three categories, from 400 manses (the smallest) up to 8,000. Each of the largest (3,000–​8,000 manses) supervised tens of thousands of peasants according to the requirements of the monastic economy. The latter were geared primarily toward producing grains such as wheat and spelt, mobilizing cattle and the manual labor of tenants to work the cultivated land, organizing long-​distance trade, and raising cash revenue. Areas with dense monastic holdings such as those at the heart of the Frankish kingdom between the Seine and the Rhine, formed extended areas of monetary exchange, while the economy of the rest of the empire (Germany to the east of the Rhine, and northern Italy) used little currency. These elements constituted the base of an expanded production stimulated by the charitable role entrusted to the Church, especially to monks and nuns, and by its insertion into the res publica. This increased demand meant an intensification of agricultural and artisanal production by men and women organized and supervised within monastic lordships. These monastic territories were also organized in such a way that the tenants and their offspring were part of the extended monastic family. They were dependents of and protected (as the monks willingly highlighted in their miracle accounts) by the saint of the monastery (homines sancti N), both inside and outside the boundaries of the monastic territory. Their protection outside was illustrated by the lists of forains (dependents born on the manor who lived elsewhere) and of men and women who had renounced their freedom in order to dedicate themselves to the saint (and in this way become dependent to the monastery) which multiplied from the ninth century onward.44 To what extent did monks exercise a specific form of lordly domination over their laborers? Monastic sources overwhelmingly dominate the

Devroey, Économie rurale et société,  274–​8. John Blair, The Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005). 44 Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Puissants et misérables. Système social et monde paysan dans l’Europe des Francs (Ve–​IXe siècles) (Brussels, 2006), 465–​6. 42

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documentation of Carolingian property, making comparison to other sources of power impossible. Verhulst’s ideas, expanded by Morimoto, emphasize the contribution of the monks to the establishment of the bipartite system in the central Frankish regions. This system for organizing large properties involved a twofold division of the territory of each villa: the seigneurial reserve (mansus indominicatus), dominated by grain farming and done in large part by tenants; and the peasants’ tenures, organized into small farms run by families.45 This hypothesis has been challenged, not only because of the geographic diversity of domanial organization, but also because of the variety of functional choices made by monks: for example, direct management supported by the use of daily agricultural laborers or by domestic serfs in the central domains and near the abbeys, or the use of money as an alternative to rents. Following the emergence of new religious ideas and reforms, monks never ceased to explore diverse ways to provide for their material needs and to meet their economic obligations. From the eighth century on, the raison d’être of the domanial system deployed in large monastic lordships was no longer solely to provide for the material needs of the monks. The wealth of monasteries also had to respond to legitimate political demand and this compelled the system to develop the means to manage, produce, and distribute surplus products and labor. To complement this macroeconomic assessment, allowances should also be made for the “creative” destruction of monastic wealth through the use of precaria (temporary land tenures), and by civil wars and Scandinavian incursions of the ninth and tenth centuries. These caused a significant, though disputed, portion of monastic property to be seized by secular clergy and lay people. Pillaging and destruction also facilitated the transfer of artisanal and commercial activities to fortified cities, as well as the centralization of the food supply within these urban centers. In some cases, a monastery that had itself been fortified and stood at the heart of a town might even profit from such evolutions.

Bibliography Bougard, François. “Adalhard de Corbie entre Nonantola et Brescia (813):  commutatio, gestion des biens monastiques et marché de la terre.” In Puer Apuliae. Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean-​Marie Martin, edited by Errico Cuozzo et al., 1: 51–​67. Paris, 2008.

For a recent comparative review, see Jean-​Pierre Devroey and Alexis Wilkin, “Autour de Yoshiki Morimoto: Les structures agricoles en dehors du monde carolingien, formes et genèse,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 90 (2012): 245–​469, www.persee.fr/​issue/​ rbph_​0035-​0818_​2012_​num_​90_​2 (date of last access: 18 August 2018).

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Jean-Pierre Devroey Devroey, Jean-​Pierre. “Ad utilitatem monasterii: mobiles et préoccupations de gestion dans l’économie monastique du monde franc.” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 224–​40.   Économie rurale et société dans l’Europe franque (VIe–IXe siècles), vol. 1: Fondements matériels, échanges et lien social. Paris, 2003.   “The Economy,” In The Early Middle Ages:  Europe, 400–1000, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 97–129. The Short Oxford History of Europe. Oxford, 2001.   “L’espace des échanges économiques: réseaux d’échanges et systèmes de communications dans le monde franc au IXe siècle.” In L’espace des échanges économiques. Réseaux d’échanges et systèmes de communications dans le monde franc au IXe siècle, 347–92. Spoleto, 2003.   Puissants et misérables. Système social et monde paysan dans l’Europe des Francs (Ve–IXe siècles). Brussels, 2006. Devroey, Jean-​Pierre and Massimo Montanari, “Città, campagne, sistema curtense (secoli IX–​X).” In Città e campagna nei secoli altomedievali 2, 777–​808. Spoleto, 2009. Feller, Laurent. Paysans et seigneurs au Moyen Âge. VIIIe–​XVe siècles. Paris, 2007. Hägermann, Dieter. “Abt als Grundherr.” In Kloster und Wirtschaft im frühen Mittelalter, Herrschaft und Kirche. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Wirkungsweise episkopaler und monastischer Organisationsformen, edited by Friedrich Prinz, 345–​85. Stuttgart, 1988. Kuchenbuch, Ludolf. Bäuerliche Gesellschaft und Klosterherrschaft im 9. Jahrhundert. Studien zur Sozialstruktur der Familia der Abtei Prüm. Wiesbaden, 1978.   “Probleme der Rentenentwicklung in den klösterlichen Grundherrschaften des frühen Mittelalters.” In Benedictine Culture 750–1050, edited by Willem Lourdaux and Daniël Verhelst, 132–72. Leuven, 1983. Lebecq, Stéphane. “The Role of Monasteries in the Frankish World.” In The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, edited by Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham, 121–​48. Leiden, 2000. Lesne, Émile. Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France. 6 vols. Lille, 1910. Oexle, Otto Gerhard. “Haus und Ökonomie im früheren Mittelalter.” In Person und Gemeinschaft im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Althoff et al., 101–​22. Sigmaringen, 1988. Schroeder, Nicholas. Terra familiaque Remacli. Études sur le milieu social et matériel de l’abbaye de Stavelot-​Malmedy, VIIe–​XIVe siècle. Brussels, 2012. Todeschini, Giacomo. “Linguaggi teologici e linguaggi amministrativi: le logiche sacre del discorse economico fra VIII e X secolo.” Quaderni storici 34 (1999): 597–​616. Toneatto, Valentina. Les banquiers du Seigneur. Évêques et moines face à la richesse (IVe–​début du IXe siècle). Rennes, 2012.   “Élites et rationalité économique: les lexiques de l’administration monastique du haut Moyen Âge.” In Les élites et la richesse au haut Moyen Âge, edited by Jean-Pierre Devroey, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan, 71–99. Turnhout, 2010. Toubert, Pierre. L’Europe dans sa première croissance. De Charlemagne à l’an mil. Paris, 2004. Wilkin, Alexis. “Communautés religieuses bénédictines et environnement économique, IXe–​XIIe siècles:  réflexions sur les tendances historiographiques de l’analyse du temporel monastique.” In Ecclesia in Medio Nationis:  Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, edited by Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns, 101–​50. Leuven, 2011.

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Missions on the Northern and Eastern Frontiers, c. 700–​1100 Ja n n e ke Ra a ijm a ke rs

Indeed they were mostly monks (monachi) who came to preach.1

To Bede (d. 735), penning his account of the conversion of the peoples inhabiting the British Isles, the involvement of monks and monasteria in mission and in pastoral activity was nothing unusual. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede described how Irish monks arrived on Britain’s northern shores to proclaim the word of God, while monks from Rome preached in the south. Churches were built and kings granted land to religious men and women to establish monasteries. From the perspective of the established forms of monastic life of the later Middle Ages, the involvement of ascetics in the mission may seem paradoxical. Baptism, confirmation, and other sacraments pertaining to the cure of souls are after all officially the domain of secular priests; monks and nuns should serve God through prayer and the divine office, preferably in the tranquility of solitude, their movements limited by the obligation of stability. In practice, however, the ascetic training of fasting, continence, and obedience turned out to be a good grounding for the tasks of a preacher in foreign lands. To some, moreover, the possibility of shedding one’s blood for God, the so-​called “red martyrdom,” was a desirable alternative to the spiritual rewards of monastic life and its white martyrdom, which was gained through asceticism and a renunciation of everything one loved.2 I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin, and Mayke de Jong, Emilia Jamroziak, Jaap-​Hein Vruggink, and Ian Wood for their valuable criticisms and helpful suggestions on drafts of this article. 1 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.3, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 221. 2 Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White and Blue Martyrdom,” in Ireland in Early Medieval Europe:  Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David N. Dumville (Cambridge, 1982), 21–​46.

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Monks, nuns, and their communities played a key role in the spread of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe—​an enormous, culturally and geographically diverse area, stretching from the Frisian coast up to Denmark and the fjords of Scandinavia, and down the Danubian plain. These regions bordered on kingdoms and empires that had long been Christian: the Frankish realm (later the German kingdom) and Byzantium—​successors to the old Roman Empire where Christianity had become the predominant religion in the fourth and fifth centuries. The focus of this chapter is on Frisia and Saxony in the eighth and ninth centuries, while the mission to the Scandinavians and Hungarians in the tenth and eleventh centuries is used as material for comparison. In the region between the North Sea and the Weser, aristocratic and royal families initiated and supported the foundation of monasteries and their involvement in the establishment of Christianity, because religious, political, and social interests intersected here. In Scandinavia, however, monasteries appeared late, although there is evidence of individual monks preaching and of an interest in the Scandinavian mission among English, Irish, French, and German monasteries. In Hungary, Christianization seems initially to have been a royal affair, with the king investing profoundly in monastic foundations from the start, soon followed by aristocratic families who imitated his example.3 There was never one model of missionary monasticism but many, depending on the religious men and women involved and especially the sociopolitical context. The slow advance of Christianity as the religious norm for large parts of Europe included the initial conversion of “pagans,” as well as the process of continuously instructing and correcting communities that were already Christian. Currently, historians tend to distinguish between these two processes, defining the first as mission and the second as Christianization or evangelization. It is important to remember, however, that early medieval authors did not make this sharp division and that missionary activity and the reform of erroneous behavior of Christians were in fact closely linked.4 Monks and nuns, moreover, played a role in all phases. The diffusion of Christianity did not rest solely on the efforts of missionaries and their foundations and the support of kings and nobility. Trade played a very important role, and so did cultural proximity. Long before missionaries set foot in Denmark and Sweden, the people of Scandinavia had become

See also the article by Jamroziak in volume II. Ian N. Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400–​1050 (Harlow, 2001), 3.

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acquainted with their religion through contacts with Christian merchants in emporia abroad and at home. In his description of the conversion of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Picts, Bede singled out the contribution of Rome and the Irish, whom he admired greatly. He ignored the influence of the nearby communities of Christian Britons, whose Christianity went back to the days of the Roman Empire, and the presence of a Frankish princess and her bishop at the court of Kent, just preceding the arrival of Roman monks in the kingdom of her husband.5 It was these often longstanding contacts with Christians and an awareness of their beliefs and habits, however, that paved the way for the missionaries, whether they were monks or clerics.

Willibrord and Boniface’s Foundations Regarding the involvement of monasteries in the spread of Christianity in Frisia and Saxony, we are best informed about the foundations of two Anglo-​ Saxon monks, Willibrord (d. 739)  and Boniface (d. 754). While hagiographical sources promoted these two monks as “apostles” of the Frisians and the Germans respectively, pioneers of the mission, Willibrord and Boniface had in fact been preceded by other missionaries from the British Isles and Francia.6 In addition, they did not work on their own but collaborated with Austrasian aristocratic families who wished to convert and integrate the northern territories in the Frankish realm, and therefore willingly acted as patrons and protectors of this monastic “movement.” Among them, the family of the Pippinids, better known as the Carolingians, was most prominent, even before they claimed the title of king of the Franks. Together, these Christian noble families and monastic leaders founded several religious communities.7 Boniface, who only worked for a few years in Frisia, would actually spend most of his career in Hesse, Thuringia, and Bavaria, regions in which Christianity had long been present, even if in forms and variations that would not always meet the monk’s approval. The foundations of Willibrord and Boniface, however, provide a good starting point for discussing the role of monasteries in the progress of Christianity, as they are relatively well attested

Ibid., 11; Ian N. Wood, “Some Historical Re-​Identifications and the Christianization of Kent,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout, 2000), 31–​4. 6 For linguistic evidence of Frankish involvement in establishing Christianity east of the Rhine, see Dennis H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World (Cambridge, 1998). See also Wood, Missionary Life,  11–​12. 7 Kay van Vliet, In Kringen van Kanunniken. Munsters en Kapittels in het Bisdom Utrecht 695–​ 1227 (Zutphen, 2002), 39–​42, 72–​3, and 90. 5

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in the historical sources. With the diverse situations of their foundations—​ some were located near regions where pagans lived, while other communities were farther removed from the mission area—​they also highlight the various facets of this religious transformation and the ways in which monasteries could contribute to it. Charters, letters, foundation histories, and biographies allow us a glimpse of what life in these monastic cells may have looked like in the early days. Members led a regular life, observing what was probably a mixture of prescriptions from the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), the teachings of the Irish monk Columbanus, and the examples set by the Apostles and the first Christian communities as they were recorded in the books of the New Testament.8 Archaeologically little is known of their foundations, with no standing buildings that can be dated to the period in which the missionaries were active. Extant material remains do, however, reveal the importance of food production, proper water supply, and a kind of demarcation. At Susteren, one of Willibrord’s foundations, archaeologists discovered a well, remnants of a rectangular stone building, a small round building, something that seems to have been a baptismal font, and fragments of an earth wall or ditch that enclosed the settlement. The stone buildings date to the ninth century, but underneath there is evidence of a timber-​framed construction.9 In Elst, another of Willibrord’s foundations, the monks used an abandoned Gallo-​Roman temple as a quarry to build the foundation of their first church, a simple hall church with rectangular choir.10 Fulda, one of Boniface’s foundations in Hesse, was built near water and trade routes. The monks probably initially used the ruins of a Frankish villa, while clearing the site and erecting a church in stone.11 These were no temporary accommodations; the residents of these cells intended to stay.12 Willibrord’s male communities were populated by clerics and “wandering monks” (monachi peregrini or fratres peregrini), who often came from abroad



Josef Semmler, “Instituta sancti Bonifatii:  Fulda im Widerstreit der Observanzen,” in Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen. Kultur—​Politik—​Wirtschaft, ed. Gangolf Schrimpf (Fulda, 1996), 79–​103. 9 Henk Stoepker, “Middeleeuws klooster op het Salvatorplein, Susteren,” Publications de la Société historique et archéologique dans le Limbourg 129 (1993): 317–​21; Henk Stoepker, “Susteren and Brunssum: Recent Excavations of a Medieval Monastery and a Church in Limburg (The Netherlands),” in Religion and Belief in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe (Zellik, 1997), 89–​92. 10 Julianus E. A. T. Bogaers, De Gallo-​Romeinse tempels te Elst in de Over-​Betuwe (The Hague, 1956), 40–​60 and 195–​202. 11 Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastery of Fulda, c.744–​c.900 (Cambridge, 2012), 28–​9, 43; and also the article by Devroey in this volume. 12 Regarding the archaeological remains of the early monasteries elsewhere in Europe, see the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume. 8

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and combined an ascetic way of life with an active role in society as preachers of Christianity. Boniface also initially recruited helpers from abroad, mostly from his native region, Wessex. These foreigners were later joined by recruits from the neighboring areas.13 Local Christian families followed the example of the Frankish elite and offered their children as oblates. They desired religious training for some of their children and possibly wished also to safeguard their position or to move up in a changing order, in which Christianity became the predominant religion and one with the Frankish king at its head.14 The recruitment of locals, however, was a time-​consuming process that demanded good contacts and the willingness among the population to invest in this Christian movement. A monk of Werden later noted the difficulties that Liudger (d. 809), continuing the work of Boniface and Willibrord, encountered in his attempts to recruit new members for his recent foundation in Westphalia: “The faith of the Saxons and Frisians was undeveloped and he could not persuade anyone to abandon the secular way of life and lead the life of a monk.”15 Even at Fulda, a community so important to the establishment of an ecclesiastical infrastructure in Saxony in the 770s, the monks had difficulty tying Saxon families to their community. Apart from an occasional conversion (the Saxon Count Hessi spent his last days in Fulda and died there), the involvement of Fulda in mission did not immediately result in a structural increase in Saxon recruits and titles to Saxon lands. This was related to the lack of success of missionaries in attracting new converts, but also to the political situation. As long as the area remained subject to Frankish military intervention, Fulda was not able to gain a firm foothold in Saxony and to establish long-​lasting relations with the local nobility.16 An effective method for increasing the number of missionaries from the local population was to buy captives. We know that the missionary Anskar (d. 865), working in Denmark, bought Danish and Slav boys and purchased their freedom “so that he might train them for God’s service.”17 The advantage of these children was that they knew the language and customs of the regions

Stefan Schipperges, Bonifatius ac socii eius. Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung des Winfrid-​Bonifatius und seines Umfeldes (Mainz, 1996), 190–​2. 14 Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image:  Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1996), esp. ­chapters 6 and 8. 15 Fundatio monasterii Werthinensis, in Die Münsterischen Chroniken des Mittelalters, ed. Julius Ficker, (Münster, 1851), 353. 16 Eckhard Freise, “Studien zum Einzugsbereich der Klostergemeinschaft von Fulda,” in Die Klostergemeinschaft von Fulda im früheren Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmid et  al., 3  vols. (Munich, 1978), 2:1164–​77. 17 Rimbert, Vita Anskari 15, MGH SRG 55, 36–​7. 13

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that Anskar hoped to convert. Some of them stayed with him in Hamburg, while he sent others to his monastery in Flanders.18 Bishop Amandus, who in the seventh century preached on the Scheldt, bought captives and sent them to monasteries, presumably for religious training, among whom were many future bishops and abbots, as the Life of Amandus proudly recounted.19 It is not clear, however, whether Willibrord and Boniface employed the same tactic. The children entrusted to Willibrord and Boniface were trained with the view to preparing them to carry on the work of their teachers. As places of constant mutual correction and enforcement of discipline, monasteries were believed to train future preachers well for their job, especially when they had entered the monastery at a young age. They learned how to read and write Latin, the language of the Church, by singing psalms and studying Christian literature, above all Scripture. Senior monks constantly corrected their behavior in accordance with the Christian values and customs that they hoped these young recruits would pass on to their future audiences. For their formation, they had easy access to texts about holy men and women, as well as the living example of their teachers.20 In addition to training future preachers and model Christians, these monastic foundations produced and kept the manuscripts that were essential to missionary work. But not all religious communities were immediately equipped for such an undertaking. Many of the books used by Willibrord and Boniface came from their homelands. Famously Boniface asked an Anglo-​Saxon abbess for a copy of the Epistles of Peter in letters of gold “to impress honor and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I  preach.”21 For such a showpiece, Boniface turned to the well-​established scriptoria of southern England. Apparently his own communities were not (yet) capable of supplying such luxury manuscripts; when he wrote to Abbess Eadburga in 735, Amöneburg, Ohrdurf, and Fritzlar were still small communities that were mostly aimed at training preachers and instructing the local population in proper Christian behavior.22 Not all of the manuscripts that these preachers used, however, were imported. Some of their monastic foundations produced their own

Ibid. 8 and 15, 30 and 36–​7. Vita S. Amandi 9 and 13, MGH SS RM 5, 435 and 438. 20 Catherine Cubitt, “Monastic Memory and Identity in Early Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, ed. William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrell (London and New York, 2000), 253–​76. 21 Boniface, The Letters of Saint Boniface 35, trans. Ephraim Emerton and with a new introduction and bibliography by Thomas F. X. Noble (New York, 2000), 43. 22 Semmler, “Instituta sancti Bonifatii,” 79–​103. 18 19

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manuscripts. Utrecht and Fulda had scriptoria in their early days, as did Liudger’s foundations in Werden and Münster. Many of the manuscripts written in these monasteries were books for everyday use, produced particularly to aid instruction in the Christian faith, rather than showpieces in golden letters. Examples are the baptismal vow and the Short List of Superstitious and Pagan Practices, which records religious practices of dubious character. These eighth-​century texts, written in both Latin and the vernacular (Old Dutch or Old Saxon), were transmitted as part of a missionary manual. They were composed to aid local mission, providing the user with the formula for the ritual of baptism and a checklist of religious practices that were not considered proper Christian behavior.23 The manuscripts produced in Liudger’s monasteries contain marginal notations in various languages; both the notations and the hands in which they were written betray a mixture of descent. Among the manuscripts is a glossary with translations of Latin words into Old English or an Old High German dialect, which was probably used by monks who wished to deepen their knowledge of Latin to be able to study Scripture.24 The codices thus also show the mixture of geographical origins of Liudger’s collaborators. Willibrord and Boniface made sure that they could rely on a number of religious communities, some of which were right in the middle of the region where they worked, offering direct access to accommodation and schools, while others were further removed from the “frontline.” A case in point is Willibrord’s network of communities, which was spread over the dioceses of Trier, Tongeren/​Maastricht, and Cologne. As long as the political situation north of the Rhine was stable, Willibrord worked in Utrecht. When the situation grew more tense—​for example in 714 when the Frisian leader Radbod and his troops expelled the Franks from Utrecht—​Willibrord and his companions moved either to Susteren (granted by Pippin II and his wife to offer the refugees shelter) or to Willibrord’s monastery in Echternach, which was even further south.25



Marco Mostert, “Communicating the Faith:  The Circle of Boniface, Germanic Vernaculars, and Frisian and Saxon Converts,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren 130; Michael Glatthaar, Bonifatius und das Sakrileg. Zur Germanistik 70 (2013):  87–​ politischen Dimension eines Rechtbegriffs (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 435–​599. 24 Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff, eds., 799. Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit. Karl der Große und Papst Leo III. In Paderborn. Beiträge zum Katalog der Ausstellung, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1999), 2:483–​5 and 490–​1. 25 Camille Wampach, ed., Geschichte der Grundherrschaft Echternach im Frühmittelalter. Untersuchungen über die Person des Gründers, über die Kloster-​und Wirtschaftsgeschichte auf Grund des Liber aureus Epternacensis (698–​1222) (Luxemburg, 1930), 1.2, no. 24, 57–​60. 23

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The creation of these kinds of networks, which as a whole supported mission but whose individual cellae could have different tasks, is also visible elsewhere. When Anskar was appointed bishop of the new diocese of Hamburg in 831, the Frankish emperor granted him the monastery of Turholt in Flanders “as a possible place of retreat.”26 Turholt, identified by historians as either Turnhout or Torhout, was a considerable distance from Saxony and Denmark where Anskar preached, but it was close to important ports on the Flemish coast (this holds true for both Turnhout and Torhout) and therefore relatively easily reached by boat. Besides being a place of retreat, Turholt provided Anskar and his collaborators with food and other necessities. So when Anskar lost Turholt as a result of the re-​division of the empire after the death of Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40), he was no longer able to support the group of monks who had come to help him in his mission. Many of them returned to their home monastery.27 Women did not work on the frontline of mission, but they did play an important role in the spread of Christianity.28 The female houses founded by Boniface as part of his network all lay in the Main area, near Mainz and Würzburg, which had been subject to Frankish overlordship since the sixth century. Boniface entrusted the supervision of these communities to religious women from his homeland, who had followed him to the Continent. The women’s convents under Willibrord’s care were led by the daughters of powerful local aristocratic families, who had often also initiated the foundation of these monasteries.29 Although women could not be priests, they could provide the local population with a living example of exemplary Christian behavior and inspire them to conversion by winning their admiration. In addition, women’s monasteries offered a safe haven for widows and a place to educate the daughters of local aristocrats. An eleventh-​century Life of Boniface claims that Boniface called in women to nurture (nurtrire) and educate (imbuere) the clerics and sons of noble families.30 It is unclear whether the nuns indeed taught boys and men. It does seem that the nuns of Willibrord’s



Rimbert, Vita Anskari 12, 34; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum I.18, MGH SRG 2, 24–​6. 27 Rimbert, Vita Anskari 21, 46–​7. 28 Yitzhak Hen, “Milites Christi utriusque sexus: Gender and the Politics of Conversion in the Circle of Boniface,” Revue bénédictine 109 (1999): 17–​31; Gisela Muschiol, “Königshof, Kloster und Mission: die Welt der Lioba und ihre geistlichen Schwestern,” in Bonifatius. Apostel der Deutschen. Mission und Christianisierung vom 8.  bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz Felten (Stuttgart, 2004), 99–​114; Barbara Yorke, “The Bonifacian Mission and the Female Religious in Wessex,” Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 145–​72. 29 Van Vliet, In Kringen van Kanunniken, 41–​2, 76–​7, and 89–​94. 30 Quarta Vita Bonifatii, MGH SRG 57, 95. 26

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foundation in Pfalzel taught boys, at least occasionally. It was here that Boniface met Gregory, the grandson of the abbess, whose training had probably been the responsibility of the nuns.31 And we do know that Boniface’s female collaborators instructed local girls.32 These female communities were thus not strictly cut off from local society, as later hagiographers, influenced by monastic regulations, sometimes wish us to believe. One of Boniface’s associates was Leoba (d. 782), a relative and nun from Wessex, who had come to the Continent in the 730s. Her biographer, writing some hundred years later, was clearly struggling to fit this learned woman, who had traveled far and who, according to heavenly visions, had been destined to preach (verba praedicationis), within the confines of recent monastic reforms that tied monks and nuns strictly to the cloister. He described Leoba as a charismatic intermediary, to whom the local population could turn for help in times of distress, and one who was a welcome guest at the royal court, which she nevertheless “despised like poison.”33 Male and female communities played an equally important role as new, powerful focal points of family identity and commemoration for local aristocrats.34 In this respect as well, they contributed to Christianity’s firm rooting in regions at the Christian frontier, and also aided their further integration in the Frankish realm. The Saxon Count Hessi, mentioned above, was one of the first Saxon nobles who submitted himself to Charlemagne. He was also one of the first monks of Saxon origin in Fulda, the monastery where he retired after a violent career, and where he died in 804. His daughter did not enter an existing monastery, but founded the convents of Karsbach and Wendhausen on family land, in Franconia and Saxony, and made her own daughter abbess of one of these female houses.35 These next generations of Christian Saxons associated themselves with the imperial elite by following the example of the Frankish ruler, their new lord, and his magnates: they founded their own monasteries, making their own sons and daughters their abbots and abbesses and demanding their prayers for the salvation of their souls. Their bodies were buried in the abbey church or in the monastery’s cemetery, protected by the holy power of the relics, which they had brought from Francia and Rome in order to insert themselves into a

Liudger, Vita Gregorii Abbatis Traiectensis, MGH SS 15, 63–​79. Boniface, Epistolae 96, MGH Ep. sel. 1, 216–​17. 33 Rudolf, Vita Leobae, MGH SS 15, 118–​31. 34 See also the article by Isabelle Rosé in this volume and the article by Jonathan R. Lyon in volume II. 35 Frederick S. Paxton, Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-​Century Saxony: The Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim (Washington, DC, 2009), 29–​31. 31

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powerful, supra-​regional network of holy patronage and intercession.36 The monasteries kept their memory alive and rewrote the histories of these Saxon families, now placed within a Christian framework. The religious communities founded by Willibrord, Boniface, and their successors were the nodes in a network set up to strengthen and preserve their work. Their most important tasks were the training of local clergy, the offering of exemplary models of Christian life to inspire the remodeling of life according to Christian standards, and the production and provision of food and other necessities such as manuscripts. Monasteries also fulfilled these tasks in other regions along the Christian frontier. Most importantly, in the long run, they provided the starting point for an enduring ecclesiastical infrastructure. What were once small monastic cells developed into seats of dioceses, large royal abbeys, and communities of canons, with their own networks of churches and cellae. Some of these communities continued to support the spread of the Christian faith at the frontier of Christianitas. Echternach, for example, shifted its attention from Frisia to Saxony and supported Bishop Willehad in his missionary work in the region of the Weser estuary.37 Monasteries like Fulda, where monks specialized in prayer and mass, increasingly monopolized intercession with the sacred and commemoration of the dead on behalf of local families east of the Rhine, absorbing many small family monasteries and proprietary churches into their web of prayer.38 By gaining control over such abbeys—​for example through the granting of special privileges and titles to land—​the Carolingian king aimed to control the local elite and to prevent the monasteries from becoming focal points of regional power and independence.39 Many of Boniface’s foundations became royal abbeys in the 770s and early 780s; they were situated in the northeastern periphery that Charlemagne wanted to integrate further into his kingdom, and close to the Saxon frontier that was the target of his military expeditions.40



Hedwig Röckelein, Reliquientranslationen nach Sachsen im 9.  Jahrhundert. Über Kommunikation, Mobilität und Öffentlichkeit im Frühmittelalter (Stuttgart, 2002). 37 Anskar, Vita Willehadi, MGH SS 2, 382. 38 See the article by Blennemann in this volume. 39 Matthew Innes, “People, Places and Power in Carolingian Society,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong, Frans Theuws, and Carine van Rhijn (Leiden, Boston, MA, and Cologne, 2001), 412–​19. 40 Josef Semmler, “Karl der Grosse und das fränkische Mönchtum,” in Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. 2: Das geistige Leben, ed. Bernard Bischoff (Düsseldorf, 1965), 271; Ulrich Hussong, “Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsabtei Fulda bis zur Jahrtausendwende,” Archiv für Diplomatik 31 (1985): 104–​8, with further references. 36

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At the same time, local aristocrats tied themselves to these royal abbeys to gain access to spiritual as well as political patronage. It is difficult to establish whether Fulda—​with all its cellae and churches, some of which had housed precious relics of Roman martyrs since the 830s—​was involved in local pastoral care. While Abbot Ratgar (r. 802–​17) had replaced the monks living in the dependencies with lay people, the churches and land of Fulda seem in general in the eighth and ninth centuries to have been administered and maintained by Fulda monks. There is evidence that at least certain hours of the divine office and masses celebrated in the cellae’s churches were open to the public, and that priest-​monks heard the confessions of locals in spiritual need.41

Contrasting Models of Mission: Scandinavia and Hungary The first known mission to Scandinavia was led by Archbishop Ebbo of Reims (d. 851) in 823. He was followed soon by Anskar, the missionary monk from Corbie, who then became bishop of Hamburg, as mentioned above. Because of a lack of sources, the achievements of both Ebbo and Anskar in Denmark and Sweden are difficult to determine, as is the degree of involvement of monasteries in their strategies to establish Christian life in these regions.42 The Life of Anskar (869–​76), our primary source for the contribution of both men to the Scandinavian mission, describes Anskar and his collaborators working mainly from the monastery of Hamburg and, after its destruction in 845, from the monastery of Rameslo, founded by a devout lady to accommodate the refugees from Hamburg who had managed to escape the Viking attack. Further north, in Denmark and Sweden, kings allowed churches to be built and provided each ministering priest with a house, but did not initiate the foundation of monasteries.43 Anskar’s mission suffered great hardships:  besides the Viking attacks on Hamburg and Birka, a civil war in 854 brought to power a new leader with his own entourage and an end to many of the contacts that Anskar had established at the royal court. What happened after the death of Anskar (d. 865) and his successor Rimbert (d. 888) is unclear. The first reported success

Rudolf of Fulda, Miracula sanctorum in Fuldenses ecclesias translatorum, MGH SS 15, 328–​ 41; Raaijmakers, Making of the Monastery of Fulda, 187–​8 and 223. 42 Eric Knibbs, Anskar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-​ Bremen (Farnham, 2011). 43 Rimbert, Vita Anskari 16, 24, and 28, 37–​8, 52–​3, and 59; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis I.23, 29–​30. 41

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of Christianity is the conversion of the Danish ruler Harold Bluetooth (r. c. 958–​986) around 960 by the priest Poppo, presumably an associate of the archbishop of Cologne.44 Adam of Bremen (d. 1081/​5) skipped this event in his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-​Bremen, written in 1066–​7 as a means of promoting his own church.45 Instead he asserted that Unni, archbishop of Hamburg-​Bremen (918–​36), had done all the hard work, preparing Harald’s conversion.46 Historical evidence for the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia is extremely problematic and scanty.47 Anskar’s mission seems to have been the best recorded, but the least successful. Among the sources are sagas, transmitted orally for generations before they were written down from the thirteenth century onwards. These sagas focus on the heroic actions of the rulers, who used Christianity to consolidate their power. In these stories, mission was the prerogative of kings, who were assisted by an occasional bishop or priest, often brought in from abroad. According to Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), the Norwegian ruler Hákon, for example, invited a bishop and priests from England to boost the spread of Christianity in his kingdom.48 Clerics preaching Christ’s message often found shelter in the royal household or in the homes of the members of the elite.49 Folk tales only occasionally recall the involvement of monks, such as the story told about the Irish monks, the “holy men of Selja,” who hid in a cave and were martyred.50 Besides some Irish ascetics, we know that Anglo-Saxon monks had been active as missionaries in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.51 There is, however, hardly any evidence, either written or archaeological, that



Michael H. Gelting, “Poppo’s Ordeal:  Courtier Bishops and the Success of Christianization at the Turn of the First Millennium,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 6 (2010): 101–​33. 45 Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronographia a. 966, MGH SS 6, 351; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis II.25, 83–​4. 46 Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis, I.59 and II. 3, 57–​8 and 62–​4. 47 Haki Antonsson, “The Conversion and Christianization of Scandinavia:  A Critical Review of Recent Scholarly Writings,” in Conversion and Identity in the Viking Age, ed. Ildar Garipzanov (Turnhout, 2014), 49–​73; Lesley J. Abrams, “The Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” Anglo-​Saxon England 24 (1995): 213–​49; Peter Sawyer, “The Process of Scandinavian Christianization in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” in The Christianization of Scandinavia: Report of a Symposium Held at Kungälv, Sweden 4–9 August 1985, ed. Birgit Sawyer, Peter Sawyer, and Ian N. Wood (Alingsås, 1987), 68–​87. 48 Abrams, “Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” 217–​18. See also Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis II.37 and IV.34, 98 and 268. 49 Lesley J. Abrams, “Eleventh-​Century Missions and the Early Stages of Ecclesiastical Organisation in Scandinavia,” Anglo-​Norman Studies 17 (1994): 21–​40. 50 Tore Nyberg, Monasticism in North-​Western Europe, 800–​1200 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2000), 69; Barbara Crawford, “Holy Places in the British Isles: Some Parallels to Selja,” in Two Studies in the Middle Ages, ed. Magnus Rindal (Oslo, 1996), 7–​29. 51 Abrams, “Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” 213–​49. 44

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they established religious communities like the foundations of Willibrord and Boniface. According to modern scholarship, it took roughly a hundred years from the conversion of the first Scandinavians to Christianity before the first monasteries appeared in Scandinavia.52 To set up an ecclesiastical structure, kings relied on bishops, not monasteries. Until the establishment of fixed sees in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries (at the earliest), bishops in Scandinavia apparently traveled around or were based at the royal court. The first bishoprics were founded in the area under the king’s direct control, and it was the king himself who appointed the bishops. When monasticism finally gained ground, some monasteries first recruited monks from abroad, particularly from England.53 The monastic cathedral chapter that the Danish king Erik Eiegod founded in Odense around 1095 to promote the cult of his brother Cnut (murdered there in 1086) recruited monks from Evesham, an English community that had enjoyed strong ties to the Danish royal family since the early eleventh century.54 The first Cistercian monasteries in Norway, founded in the 1140s, were daughter foundations of Fountains Abbey and Kirkstead Abbey, Yorkshire. Monks from Clairvaux founded Sweden first’s Cistercian house around 1142, and many of Denmark’s Cistercian monasteries were established with the help of French or English monks.55 Most monasteries were small initially and often the identity of the founder is uncertain. Kings seem to have been involved, as well as bishops and lay magnates, such as Dag Eilivsson, who in the first half of the twelfth century founded the Gimsøy nunnery in eastern Norway and made his daughter its abbess.56 How can we explain the rather late establishment of monastic life in Scandinavia? Josef Semmler has suggested that the monastic reforms of Louis the Pious and Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) in the 820s had repercussions for the involvement of monasteries in the mission. According to him, the reforms, which considered preaching and pastoral care the tasks of secular



Nora Berend, ed. Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy:  Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–​1200 (Cambridge, 2007), 25–​6; Michael H. Gelting, “The Kingdom of Denmark,” in ibid., 96; Abrams, “Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” 226, n. 65, and 244–​9. 53 Nyberg, Monasticism in North-​Western Europe, 76; Abrams, “Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” 213–​49. 54 Peter King, “The Cathedral Priory of Odense in the Middle Ages,” Sagabook of the Viking Society 16 (1962–​5): 192–​214; John Bergsagel, “Songs for St. Knud the King,” Musik & Forskning 6 (1980): 152–​66. 55 James French, The Cistercians in Scandinavia (Kalamazoo, MI, 1992), 27–​98. 56 Sverre Bagge and Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, “The Kingdom of Norway,” in Berend, Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy,  151–​3. 52

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priests, forced monasteries to reevaluate their objectives, sometimes resulting in severe crises. As a consequence, monasteries in the Frankish realm became reluctant to offer their assistance in the missions to pagan neighbors.57 So when in 826 Louis the Pious called together his magnates to discuss the conversion of the Danes, he was met by a wall of silence; nobody wished to participate.58 In the end, the abbot of Corbie pushed forward the monk Anskar to take on the imperial assignment. The author of the Life of Anskar, which recounts the meeting, could well have brought out the silence of the participants to highlight Anskar’s courage and the difficulty of his task. Although Louis’s reforms did cause a reorientation of monastic life, the consequences should not be exaggerated. For all the attempts to tie monks and nuns closer to the cloister, monasteries continued to play a role in mission.59 The reasons for the relatively late establishment of monastic life in Scandinavia, if the extant sources do not mislead us, must not be sought in Francia, but in Scandinavia itself. Missionary monks never operated in a vacuum; they depended on kings and local nobility for support and for monasticism to take root, and apparently the Scandinavian elite at first favored other forms of religious life and organization. Political crises caused by power struggles between local chieftains in the build-​up to the formation of stable kingdoms may well have been a factor that slowed the establishment of monastic life.60 That monastic reforms did not necessarily thwart the involvement of monasteries in the mission is confirmed by the example of Hungary, which, like Scandinavia, converted to Christianity in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Since the end of the ninth century Hungarian-​speaking peoples had settled in this region, once a sphere of activity for Frankish, Bavarian, and Byzantine missionaries. They brought with them new belief systems, and it is not clear to what extent local Christian communities that had been established with the aid of the bishops of Salzburg, Passau, and other sees survived the Hungarian conquest.61 Under the leadership of the Árpád dynasty, Hungary developed from a group of semi-​nomadic tribes into a Christian kingdom in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, with Stephen as the first crowned

Semmler, “Karl der Grosse,” 284–​ 7; James Palmer, “Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii and Scandinavian Mission in the Ninth Century,” JEH 55 (2004): 245–​6. 58 Rimbert, Vita Anskari 7, 27. 59 Constable, “Monasteries, Rural Churches and the cura animarum,”  366–​8. 60 Abrams, “Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” 220–​1. 61 Walter Pohl, Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk im Mitteleuropa, 567–​822 n. Chr. (Munich, 1988), 310–​23; Nora Berend, Joszef Laszlovsky, and Béla Zsolt Skakács, “The Kingdom of Hungary,” in Berend, Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy, 319–​24. 57

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Christian king of the Hungarians (1000/​1). As in Scandinavia, the establishment of royal power and the spread of Christianity went hand in hand. Unlike in Scandinavia, however, monasteries appeared from the beginning. Monks and ascetics played an important role in the spread of the Christian faith, which seems to have been imposed from above. They first came from abroad, from southern German areas, northern Italy, and possibly Poland, as well as from the Byzantine Empire. Like Willibrord and Boniface, these monks brought books with them. Hungary’s monasteries possessed liturgical manuscripts from southern Germany, the Rhineland, Lotharingia, and northern Italy. These reveal the region of origin and the geographical scope of the network of the missionaries working in Hungary, although we need to take into account that quite a few of these manuscripts were imported by the Hungarian king and donated to churches in his realm.62 Monks from abroad populated the monasteries founded by the Hungarian rulers and later also by noble families. Aristocrats soon followed the example set by their king to support monastic foundations and use their abbey churches as burial places. The majority of these monasteries adopted the RB, but there were also some Greek monastic foundations, which were similarly supported by the king and his magnates.63 As there was no fully developed parish structure in Hungary in the eleventh century, monks preached the Christian faith and undertook the cure of the souls. The Synod of Esztergom in 1033 was the first to prohibit the involvement of monks in preaching, baptism, and the giving of absolution. Subsequent synods repeated these decrees.64 These gatherings increasingly sought to regulate the life of monks and canons, just as the councils organized under the auspices of Emperor Louis the Pious had done.

Conclusion Missionaries needed books, writing cases, liturgical vessels, crosses, portable altars, and relics. They also needed tents for spending the nights while

Berend, Laszlovsky, and Zsolt Skakács, “Kingdom of Hungary,” 334–​6. See the article by Jamroziak in volume II. János M. Bak et al., eds. and trans., The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary 1000–​ 1301 (Bakersfield, CA, 1989); Marie-​Madeleine de Cevins, “Les paroisses hongroises au Moyen Âge,” in Les Hongrois et l’Europe. Conquête et intégration, ed. Sándor Csernus and Klára Korompay (Paris, 1999), 341–​57; Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Les paroisses en Bohême, en Hongrie et en Pologne (XI–​ XIII siècles),” in Le istituzioni ecclesiastiche della “Societas Christiana” dei secoli XI–​XII. Diocese, pievi e parocchie. Atti della sesta settimana internazionale di studio Milano, 1–​7 settembre 1974 (Milan, 1977), 187–​98.

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traveling, as well as more permanent places for shelter in dangerous times, and in which to educate new generations of teachers who could continue and consolidate the work they had started. Many missionaries, having been raised in monasteries themselves, founded monastic communities on the land that they received from royal families and local aristocrats to support their work. These monasteries were situated in areas where Christianity was already present, sometimes at the border of Christian realms, sometimes further inland. From there, missionaries fostered missionary activities to the outside. Their monasteries provided schools to train preachers, as well as libraries and scriptoria in which texts were composed and copied to support mission. These monastic missionary activities led to the formation of a strong monastic culture within the newly Christianized territories only if the local nobility and kings chose to encourage this form of life, as the cases in Frisia, Saxony, and Hungary show. In Hungary the king took the initiative, while in Frisia and Saxony noble families supported the foundation of monasteries, alongside the Frankish king. From the late eighth century on, the Frankish king increasingly sought to control these monastic foundations, and in particular those in the regions bordering on Saxony, which was the focus of his military expeditions.65 In Scandinavia, on the other hand, monasteries were founded relatively late. These differences illustrate that (missionary) monks never worked in a vacuum but always in close collaboration with the laity. Monasteries formed a vital link in the complex process of Christianization once they attracted the aristocracy. These religious communities tied local families to their patron saint as well as to their secular benefactors. In the end, this was how monasteries contributed to the spread of Christianity: not so much through baptizing pagan peoples, which they certainly also did, but rather by making already Christianized local families part of their familia. Furthermore, monasteries acquired and built churches and cellae, which, in addition to their importance for the administration and cultivation of the monastery’s estates, formed a sacred infrastructure. Clustered around the mother community, these churches were centers of religious activity in their own right, providing the local faithful with the opportunity to interact with the divine.

Bibliography Abrams, Lesley J. “The Anglo-​Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia.” Anglo-​ Saxon England 24 (1995): 213–​49.

Semmler, “Karl der Grosse,” 255–​89.

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Missions on the Northern and Eastern Frontiers   “Eleventh-Century Missions and the Early Stages of Ecclesiastical Organisation in Scandinavia.” Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1994): 21–40. Antonsson, Haki. “The Conversion and Christianization of Scandinavia: A Critical Review of Recent Scholarly Writings.” In Conversion and Identity in the Viking Age, edited by Ildar Garipzanov, 49–​73. Turnhout, 2014. Armstrong, Guyda, and Ian N. Wood, eds. Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals. Turnhout, 2000. Berend, Nora, ed. Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–​1200. Cambridge, 2007. Constable, Giles. “Monasteries, Rural Churches and the cura animarum in the Early Middle Ages.” In Cristianizzazione ed organizzazione ecclesiastica delle campagne nell’alto medioevo. Espansione e resistenze, 349–​89. Spoleto, 1982. Csernus, Sándor, and Klara Korompay, eds. Les Hongrois et l’Europe. Conquête et integration. Paris and Szeged, 1999. de Jong, Mayke B. “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, II: c. 700–​c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 622–​53. Cambridge, 1995. Felten, Franz J., Jörg Jarnut, and Lutz E. von Padberg, eds. Bonifatius—​Leben und Nachwirken. Die Gestaltung des christlichen Europa im Frühmittelalter. Mainz, 2007. Flechner, Roy, and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, eds, with the help of Eric Cambridge. Converting the Isles, Vol. 1:  The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World. Turnhout, 2016. Foot, Sarah. Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, c. 600–​900. Cambridge, 2006. Mostert, Marco. “Communicating the Faith:  The Circle of Boniface, Germanic Vernaculars, and Frisian and Saxon Converts.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 70 (2013): 87–​130. Nyberg, Tore. Monasticism in North-​Western Europe, 800–​1200. Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2000. Pohl, Walter, Ian N. Wood, and Helmut Reimitz, eds. The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians. Leiden, Boston, MA, and Cologne, 2001. Raaijmakers, Janneke. The Making of the Monastery of Fulda, c.744–​c.900. Cambridge, 2012. Sawyer, Birgit, Peter Sawyer, and Ian N. Wood, eds. The Christianization of Scandinavia: Report of a Symposium Held at Kungälv, Sweden 4–​9 August 1985. Alingsås, 1987. Semmler, Josef. “Instituta sancti Bonifatii: Fulda im Widerstreit der Observanzen.” In Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen. Kultur—​Politik—​Wirtschaft, edited by Gangolf Schrimpf, 79–​103. Fulda, 1996.   “Karl der Grosse und das fränkische Mönchtum.” In Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. 2: Das geistige Leben, edited by Bernard Bischoff, 255–89. Düsseldorf, 1965. Wood, Ian N. The Missionary Life:  Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400–​ 1050. Harlow, 2001. Yorke, Barbara. “The Bonifacian Mission and the Female Religious in Wessex.” Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 145–​72.

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Minsters and Monasticism in Anglo-​Saxon England Christo phe r A n drew   Jones

As the most famous monk of the early English church, the Venerable Bede (d. 735) has for centuries shaped perceptions of Anglo-​Saxon monastic life, both through his portraits of exemplary monks or nuns and through the charisma of his authorial voice, which blends piety and humility with authority. The two influences converge in the famous postscript to his Historia ecclesiastica: When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of my kinsmen, put into the charge of the reverend Abbot Benedict [Biscop] and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated. From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule (obseruantiam disciplinae regularis) and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write. At the age of nineteen I was ordained deacon and at the age of thirty, priest, both times through the reverend Bishop John on the direction of Abbot Ceolfrith.1

While writing himself into the history of his house, Bede also seems to validate a list of modern stereotypes about medieval monks: that they typically were child oblates and spent their whole lives in one place, cut off from the world; that they normally divided their waking hours between liturgical and intellectual endeavors; that they routinely entered holy orders and rose to the highest grade of priest; and that, most importantly, they observed what Colgrave and Mynors translate as “the Rule”—​where most will infer a reference to the written Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia (RB). Specialists in monastic history will immediately caution that, on all these points, Bede’s words are easily misunderstood and that his career was not, in any case, wholly typical for his time. Child oblation was then by no means the

Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum 5.24; English translation in Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A.  B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 567.

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standard entry into religious life; monk-​scholars and monk-​priests remained exceptions in early ascetic communities; and the RB, while known to Bede and admired, was one of many sources from which abbots and abbesses could improvise the “regular discipline” (regularis disciplinae) of their houses, which was taught mainly by word and example.2 If Bede’s self-​portrait appears to us a composite of medieval norms, that is because features of his career anticipate those of a more narrowly defined Benedictine way of life that would achieve dominance in western Europe between the ninth and eleventh centuries. A resolve to expose and counter the kinds of anachronistic reading that Bede’s oft-​quoted words invite has guided most recent scholarship on English monasticism not just of Bede’s day but of the whole Anglo-​Saxon period (here taken as c. 600 to c. 1100). The present chapter reviews some consequences of this turn for two important, related questions. One concerns the nature of the most common type of religious community in early medieval England, the “minster”; the other concerns the character of the tenth-​century movement to redefine English monastic life on exclusively reformist terms after an era of perceived decline.

Minsters and the Diversity of Religious Life Bede had cause to encourage a view that monasteries worthy of the name conformed to the high standards of his own Wearmouth and Jarrow, or that such conformity was at least a widely shared expectation.3 Decrees of early Anglo-​Saxon church councils also imply that seclusion and a strict way of life clearly distinguished monastic from other types of religious community.4 Led recently by Sarah Foot and John Blair, historians have discerned behind such impressions a far more complex reality: in Bede’s time, and indeed for much of the Anglo-​Saxon period, communal religious foundations were highly

On Bede’s knowledge of the RB, see especially Patrick Wormald, “Bede and Benedict Biscop,” in Famulus Christi:  Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976), 141–​4. More recently, compare Scott DeGregorio, “Bede and Benedict of Nursia,” in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov, Janet L. Nelson, and David Pelteret (Farnham, 2009), 149–​51; and Mechthild Gretsch, Ælfric and the Cult of Saints (Cambridge, 2005), 129–​33. 3 On Bede’s downplaying of diversity, see Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, c. 600–​900 (Cambridge, 2006), 21–​5. 4 See, for example, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869–​78), 3:368–​70 (Clofesho 747, nos. 19–​22) and 3:450 (Legatine Report 787, no. 4); further Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, 58–​9, and John Blair, The Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), 112–​13. 2

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diverse in character. Many of them neither resembled nor felt bound to resemble the more cultured, regular communities that held Bede’s interest.5 Foot’s many contributions to this area of research proceed from a reassessment of the Anglo-​Saxons’ own vocabulary for monasteries, the most common terms of which were monasterium in Latin and the early Old English loan word derived from it, mynster (plural mynstru). The relative homogeneity of these terms in the sources had long enabled assumptions that the communities so named were not only alike in character but essentially Benedictine from the outset, following a supposed introduction of the RB into England by Augustine of Canterbury at the behest of Gregory the Great.6 Giving a wide berth to such romantic views, other historians have seen in the terms monasterium and mynster an institution defined by the organizational needs of the early Anglo-​Saxon Church. According to this view, mynstru were religious communities established before the first Viking Age to provide pastoral care to fixed territories, and they were in many instances the direct ancestors of what later medieval English sources call “mother churches.”7 In response to this view—​sometimes called “the minster hypothesis”—​as well as to the romantic one, Foot’s work on terminology has raised the fundamental challenge that sources from the period tend to use monasterium/​ mynster for religious communities that varied greatly in size, wealth, fervor, culture, and involvement in pastoral care.8 John Blair’s sustained investigations have arrived at a similarly broad conception of the Anglo-​Saxon minster as A complex ecclesiastical settlement which is headed by an abbess, abbot, or man in priest’s orders; which contains nuns, monks, priests, or laity in a variety of possible combinations, and is united to a greater or lesser extent by their liturgy and devotions; which may perform or supervise pastoral care to the laity, perhaps receiving dues and exerting parochial authority; and which may sometimes act as a bishop’s seat, while not depending for its existence or importance on that function.9

Studies of both the earlier and later Anglo-​ Saxon Church have been transformed by this fundamental insight that, apart from their communal

Among Bede’s works, exceptional for its scathing criticism of monastic abuses is the Letter to Ecgbert; see below, note 14. For example, Cuthbert Butler, Benedictine Monachism: Studies in Benedictine Life and Rule (London, 1919), 355. 7 See Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, esp. 3–​5 and 155–​8. 8 See Sarah Foot, “Anglo-​Saxon Minsters:  A Review of Terminology,” in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), 212–​25; and Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England,  4–​6. 9 Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 3. 5

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character, early English monasteria/​mynstru did not necessarily resemble one another, much less the monasteries of other times and places. The current scholarly preference for calling these establishments minsters rather than monasteries signals the desire to avoid inapposite connotations of the latter term. This shift in perspective and terminology has invigorated the study of early English monasticism. Resemblances now stand out more clearly, for example, between the minsters of England and similar establishments elsewhere in early medieval Europe.10 Greater awareness of the diverse character of Anglo-​ Saxon religious life has proven especially useful to the study of women’s monasticism, since the medieval terms usually leveled in modern English translation as “nun”—​(sancti)monialis in Latin, nonne in Old English—​turn out to mask an underlying variety, much as monasteria and mynstru do.11 Above all, the Anglo-​Saxons’ own tendency not to distinguish minsters with pastoral missions from ones devoted to quies and prayer suggests that, in practice, they did not consider the active and contemplative lives to be mutually exclusive. Bede received from Gregory the Great the idea that a mixed life of action and contemplation was best for doctores or praedicatores in the church.12 Strict separation of monastics from the world was thus apparently not the norm in theory, much less in practice, and this feature of Anglo-​Saxon minster communities connects the age of Bede to the period of so-​called Benedictine reform in the tenth century.

The Subsidence of the Minsters and Rise of Benedictinism While calling attention to the diversity of religious life for women and men in the pre-​Viking Age, the scholarly turn toward what Blair has called “the minster-​centred world” also provides a sense of scale for the too-​familiar narratives of monastic decline in late eighth-​and ninth-​century England, and of monastic revival in the tenth.13 By many measures, the subsidence (a less prejudicial term than decline) was real, its causes and effects described vividly by contemporaries. Near the end of his life, in a letter to Archbishop Ecgbert of York (r. 732–​66), Bede warned about growing abuses of minsters

Ibid., 73–​7. On similarities to early Irish monastic institutions, see the chapter by Bitel in this volume. 11 Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols. (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2000), 1:26–​30. 12 See Alan Thacker, “Bede’s Ideal of Reform,” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-​ Saxon Society:  Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-​Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1983), 130–​53. 13 Quotation from Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 368.

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by their secular patrons.14 More famous still is King Alfred’s (r. 877–​99) lament for English religious culture in a preface to the Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis. After recalling how diligent clergy and monks of former times had been “in teaching and in learning as well as in all the holy services,” Alfred describes only a barren landscape at the start of his reign: Learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English, or even translate a single letter from Latin into English; and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either. There were so few of them that I cannot recollect even a single one south of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom. … When I reflected on all this, I recollected how—​before everything was ransacked and burned—​the churches [ciricean] throughout England stood filled with treasures and books. Similarly, there was a great multitude of those serving God. And they derived very little benefit from those books because they could understand nothing of them, since they were not written in their own language.15

Alfred refers only generally to “churches,” but the fate of the minsters is surely implicated in his complaint. Importantly, he nowhere suggests that clerical communities ceased to function in their other roles, but only in the maintenance of Latin culture; and the latter failing was, he claims, already pervasive before the Vikings arrived. Both points find support in the analyses of modern historians, who grant that Viking attacks took their toll on religious communities, at first primarily on the coasts but more extensively across the east and north of England after the invasion by the Great Army of 865. More detrimental to minsters everywhere were the alienation of endowments, the appropriation of sites by lay interests, and the encroachment of urban centers.16 The consequent reduction of their wealth and security left many religious communities smaller and less diverse. By Alfred’s time, the typical minster was, in Blair’s words, a “ ‘secular’ community of men in priests’ orders, living at a central site, associated in the service of one central church and (probably) the pastoral care of one mother-​ parish, but not necessarily holding assets in common, sleeping in a dormitory, or bound to any strict liturgical round. The clerics in such communities

In Christopher Grocock and I.  N. Wood, eds. and trans., Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford, 2013), 123–​61. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds. and trans., Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (New York, 1983), 124–​5. 16 See the balanced discussion by Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 291–​341. 14 15

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were often married.”17 By cultural indices too—​such as new building projects, the production of manuscripts, and the ability to write correct Latin or run schools—​these communities seem to have held few ambitions when compared to minsters of the pre-​Viking Age. Beyond the actual evidence, the persistence of a narrative of decline was very much a legacy of its usefulness to a succession of reformers, beginning with Alfred. Its escalation into a broad attack against secular clerical communities as utterly negligent and morally impure was a later development, associated with the tenth-​century “Benedictine reform” and especially with its most zealous proponent, Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester (r. 963–​84). Numerous writings attributed to him advance an argument that true monasticism, after arriving in England with the first Roman missionaries, flourished through the period described by Bede, but then fell almost into extinction.18 The most memorable version of this account is an Old English text now known as “King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries,” which Æthelwold may have penned as a preface to his own Old English translation of the RB.19 Onto a basic narrative lifted from Bede’s Historia, the text imposes a radical interpretation, made possible in part by the ambiguity of the terms monasterium and mynster: Through messengers [Pope Gregory] then eagerly admonished and instructed his representative [Augustine of Canterbury] that he eagerly build minsters (mynstra) for the praise and honor of Christ, and that he teach and establish for those servants of God the same custom that the apostles observed with their companions at the beginnings of our Christian faith: they all had one heart and one soul, nor did any of them own anything privately … but all things were theirs in common [see Acts 4:32]. And so, through the prompting of that holy man [Gregory], this same custom was well advancing and prospering for a long time in the minsters (mynsterum) of the English.20



Ibid., 342, and see also 344. See Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999), 230–​3. 19 Æthelwold’s translation of the RB is available in Arnold Schröer, ed., Die angelsächsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benediktinerregel (Kassel, 1885–​8; 2nd ed. with a supplement by Helmut Gneuss, Darmstadt, 1964). On the function of “King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries,” see Mechthild Gretsch, “The Benedictine Rule in Old English:  A Document of Bishop Æthelwold’s Reform Politics,” in Words, Texts and Manuscripts:  Studies in Anglo-​Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of His Sixty-​Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Korhammer, Karl Reichl, and Hans Sauer (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 1992), 131–​58. 20 Dorothy Whitelock, ed. and trans., “An Old English Account of King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries,” in Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church I: A.D. 871–​1204, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Christopher Brooke, and M. Brett (Oxford, 1981), 144–​5; the translation given above is mine. 17

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Immediately after this passage there is a lacuna in the text, which apparently went on to describe the collapse of authentic monasticism after its Bedan golden age (the content of the missing material can be inferred from parallels in other writings by Æthelwold).21 When the narrative resumes, we find Æthelwold lamenting that, by the start of King Edgar’s reign (r. 957/​9–​75), monks who “lived according to a correct rule” were to be found nowhere in England except at Glastonbury, and only there because Edgar’s father, King Eadmund (r. 939–​46), had recently installed them. (Notably, Æthelwold makes no mention of attempts by King Alfred to revive authentic monastic life for women, at Shaftesbury, or for men, at Athelney.)22 The text then describes Edgar’s vow to restore the minster at Abingdon, followed by other minsters elsewhere, to authentic monastic observance. In view of what is now known about the character of early English minsters, the elisions in Æthelwold’s account are glaring. While locating the origins of English mynstru in the Gregorian mission, for instance, he has tellingly altered his Latin source. The description of the vita apostolica, with its allusion to Acts 4, reflects a passage in Gregory’s Libellus responsionum, which Bede had incorporated into his Historia (at 1.27). In the Latin, however, Gregory nowhere ordered Augustine to found “monasteries” explicitly.23 That Æthelwold supplied the term reveals how he read Bede as claiming that “the pre-​Viking past was all of a piece, and all monastic.”24 He either could not fathom or simply chose to ignore the fact that the religious communities so numerous in Bede’s history were not monasteries as tenth-​century reform understood the term.25 While claiming to restore something old, the faction was effectively seeking to advance new and exclusive definitions of regular life built upon early ninth-​ century Carolingian ideas. The Frankish reformers had sought, among other things, to distinguish monks and nuns—​strict followers of the RB who owned no property—​from canons and canonesses, who could own property and had received their own written regulations for living in the Rule for Canons by Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766), as well as the Institutio canonicorum and Institutio

See Gretsch, “Benedictine Rule in Old English,” 146–​9. Whitelock, “King Edgar’s Establishment,” 148–​9. On Alfred, see Blair, Church in Anglo-​ Saxon Society, 347. 23 This point is Whitelock’s; see Whitelock, “King Edgar’s Establishment,” 145, n. 1. 24 Alan Thacker, “Æthelwold and Abingdon,” in Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. Barbara Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), 63. 25 This point and what follows are largely indebted to Patrick Wormald, “Æthelwold and His Continental Counterparts:  Contact, Comparison, Contrast,” in Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. Barbara Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), 37–​41. 21

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sanctimonialium produced by the Council of Aachen in 816.26 The category of monks and nuns had also acquired distinctiveness on the Continent through the evolution of monastic customs (consuetudines), which supplemented the basic tenets of the RB and gained force when set down in writing.27 Here too the Anglo-​Saxon reformers imitated and extended their Continental models, producing in the mid-​960s or early 970s what styled itself as a national customary for all reformed houses of monks and nuns, the Regularis concordia.28 Empowered by royal support, by testimony from Bede, and by Continental definitions of monastic life as built upon the RB, itself elaborated through myriad customs, Æthelwold went so far as to evict secular clergy from a few ancient minsters. In 964 he forcibly intruded monks into his own cathedral chapter at Winchester’s Old Minster, as well as in its neighboring foundation, the New Minster. Clerics who had long been resident in both were given the choice to become new-​style adherents to the RB or leave. Elsewhere, monks were “reintroduced” at minster sites, both those that still housed clerics and those that had been altogether abandoned (at least according to the claims of the reformers).29 In this process, Æthelwold appears to have been more aggressive than his two partners in reform, Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (r. 961–​88), and Oswald, bishop of Worcester (r. 961–​92) and archbishop of York (r. 972–​ 92). New-​style monks were first introduced to live and worship alongside the existing clerical communities at Canterbury and Worcester cathedrals, and monasticization at both proceeded gradually.30 The difference between Æthelwold and his colleagues in this regard may, as Patrick Wormald has noted, reflect that both Dunstan and Oswald had spent time in reformed





See Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World:  Secular Clerics, Their Families and Careers in North-​Western Europe c. 800–​c. 1200 (Cambridge, 2015), 71–​98, and the articles by Kramer and Billett in this volume. 27 On the reintroduction of the RB into England, see note 44, below. On one set of Carolingian supplements to the RB that formed an important precursor to Anglo-​ Saxon monastic customaries, see Mechthild Gretsch, “Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57:  A Witness to the Early Stages of the Benedictine Reform in England?” Anglo-​Saxon England 32 (2003): 111–​46. On customaries on the Continent, see the articles by Bruce and Cochelin in this volume. 28 Regularis concordia anglicae nationis, ed. Thomas Symons et al., CCM 7/​3, 61–​147. The Latin text received a complete interlinear gloss in Old English: see Lucia Kornexl, ed., Die Regularis concordia und ihre altenglische Interlinearversion (Munich, 1993). On the dating of the text, see Julia Barrow, “The Chronology of the Benedictine ‘Reform’,” in Edgar, King of the English, 959–​75, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), 211–​23. 29 For examples at Winchester and Ely, see Christopher A. Jones, “Ælfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform’,” in A Companion to Ælfric, ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2009), 106–​7. 30 See Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 352. 26

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houses on the Continent—​Dunstan at St. Peter’s, Ghent; Oswald at Fleury. Their experiences would have enabled them to notice how strange, from a Continental perspective, was Æthelwold’s insistence on monastic cathedral chapters and on monasticism, strictly defined, as the only valid form of communal religious life.31 At the height of its fervor in the mid-​970s, the network of reformed houses made up perhaps 10  percent of the total number of active minsters.32 The wealth, influence, and cultural attainments of the movement, however, combined with the often recycled propaganda from Æthelwold’s circle, have cast nearly all the secular and “unreformed” minsters of the period deep into shadow. Where direct witnesses to their activity happen to survive, as in a heavily glossed liturgical manuscript used at late tenth-​century Chester-​le-​ Street, the glimpses offered suggest both the vitality of their communities and their willing engagement with, rather than exclusion from, the culture of reformed houses.33 The evidence is thin but, especially when viewed together with that for vernacular literary production (discussed below), casts doubt on Alfred’s claim that religious and cultural ambitions had reached a nadir in all of the (probably) hundreds of still-​f unctioning minsters by the turn of the tenth century.34 Traces of liturgical and literary activity in unreformed minsters may well survive openly among the many manuscripts written or owned in later Anglo-​Saxon England that cannot now be localized further. The fact that this possibility is so easily forgotten underscores how powerful the reformers’ version of early English monastic history remains, long after its biases have been exposed.35 Just as importantly, the polemics of Benedictine reform have discouraged questions about its advocates’ own debts to the real “minster-​centered world” that they were trying to supplant. Some features of the tenth-​century English movement that appear unusual from the standpoint of contemporary monastic reforms on the Continent are easier to understand as holdovers of a clerical culture that had evolved in the minsters. The most conspicuous of those features, the monasticizing of cathedral chapters, has already been mentioned. In Æthelwold’s case, this push was perhaps another result of having

See Wormald, “Æthelwold and His Continental Counterparts,” 37–​8. Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 351. 33 Karen Louise Jolly, The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-​ le-​Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (Columbus, OH, 2012). 34 Firm numbers are hard to come by, but see Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 295–​323, especially the summary remarks on 320–​1; also 351. 35 For a similar rewriting of the history of the implementation of the RB on the Continent, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 31

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misread Bede. But broader forces may have been at work, given that Dunstan, Oswald, and others also embraced the concept, albeit more cautiously than Æthelwold. The idea that contemplative otium was incompatible with the active life of pastoral or administrative demands imposed on cathedral clergy depended on a binary opposition that, as noted above, was apparently not central to the identity of minsters in earlier centuries. The English reformers’ own brand of Benedictinism, for all its exclusionary rhetoric, inherited much the same openness in practice, as Francesca Tinti has shown.36 Monks promoted to episcopal sees were of course obligated to perform pastoral duties, and again Bede offered memorable examples such as Cuthbert and Wilfrid.37 But some of the party’s monks who were not bishops also adopted a strikingly outward-​turned stance toward the secular church. The famous homilist Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c. 1010), once a student of Æthelwold at Winchester, composed hundreds of homilies and saints’ Lives in Old English, translations of Scripture, and pastoral letters to be used by bishops when instructing diocesan clergy. His preaching texts, often of remarkable sophistication, were written ostensibly for delivery in liturgical contexts by priests, whom we should probably imagine not as solitary pastors but as members of substantial minster or cathedral communities, and not necessarily fully “reformed.”38 A second major reformist author, Byrhtferth of Ramsey (d. c. 1020), identifies secular clergy as one audience for his bilingual Latin and Old English treatise on the computus, the Enchiridion (completed c.  1011).39 Passages throughout that work sustain the fiction of lectures addressed to a classroom populated by both young monks and clerics, the latter frequently receiving Byrhtferth’s scorn.40 An ingrained assumption that active and contemplative roles were both naturally the purview of minster-​ clergy would explain why Ælfric and Byrhtferth felt no need to justify their support of the pastorate. The endurance of this type of Gregorian hybrid vocation may also be related to the



Francesca Tinti, “Benedictine Reform and Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-​Saxon England,” Early Medieval Europe 23 (2015): 229–​51, with extensive references to earlier literature. On the monastic episcopate in this period, see Tracey-​Anne Cooper, Monk-​Bishops and the English Benedictine Reform Movement: Reading London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii in Its Manuscript Context (Toronto, 2015). 38 On Ælfric generally, see Helmut Gneuss, Ælfric of Eynsham: His Life, Times, and Writings (Kalamazoo, MI, 2009); on the pastoral dimension, see Jonathan Wilcox, “Ælfric in Dorset and the Landscape of Pastoral Care,” in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Francesca Tinti (Woodbridge, 2005), 52–​62. 39 On Byrhtferth’s career, see Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds. and trans., Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion (Oxford, 1995), xxv–​xxxiv. 40 See Rebecca Stephenson, “Scapegoating the Secular Clergy: The Hermeneutic Style as a Form of Monastic Self-​Definition,” Anglo-​Saxon England 38 (2010): 101–​35. 36

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comparatively delayed, unfocused introduction into Anglo-​Saxon England of that third category of ecclesiastics termed “canons” by the Carolingian reformers. It is arguable that, from a contemporary Continental perspective, the preoccupations of a figure such as Ælfric were better suited to a canon than to a monk. The reformers in England certainly knew the distinction in theory; there the introduction of Chrodegang’s Rule for Canons appears bound up with the reform movement and with the circle of Æthelwold in particular, which produced a complete Old English translation of the Latin Chrodegang in its enlarged ninth-​century version.41 The simplest inference to be drawn from the connection is that, after Æthelwold translated the RB into Old English for monks, one of his disciples prepared the translation of a parallel rule of life for secular clergy.42 Yet there have always been difficulties with this view. It is not certain that any English community actually adopted Chrodegang’s Rule before the mid-​eleventh century, so it is unclear why the text was prioritized for translation at all.43 The earliest surviving English copy of the Latin text of Chrodegang’s enlarged Rule (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 8558–​63) dates to the first half of the tenth century. Moreover, some of the same philological analyses that link both translations (of Benedict’s and Chrodegang’s Rules) to the circle of Æthelwold also conclude that both were early efforts, datable to the period of Æthelwold’s scholarly activity at the minster of Glastonbury in the 940s to early 950s.44 For that matter, the linguistic evidence does not rule out the possibility that the Old English Chrodegang preceded Æthelwold’s translation of the RB.45 Whatever the precise chronology, the nearly contemporaneous translations might caution us that, for Æthelwold and those closest to him, the choice of a reformed, “Benedictine” monasticism over the vita canonica may not have been as clear-​cut as it came to appear in retrospect. Both Æthelwold and Dunstan began their careers in secular holy orders, and both served as clerics at the West Saxon royal court of King Athelstan (924–​39). Their

Brigitte Langefeld, ed. and trans., The Old English Version of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). 42 For other possibilities, see Barrow, Clergy in the Medieval World,  86–​7. 43 On the slender evidence for knowledge of Chrodegang’s Rule in England before the first half of the tenth century, see Langefeld, The Old English Version, 16–​17; and Barrow, Clergy in the Medieval World,  80–​1. 44 On the transmission of the RB to England, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations,  247–​9. 45 On the date of the Old English RB, see ibid., 240. On the date of the Old English Chrodegang in relation to the translation of the RB, see also Michael D.  C. Drout, “Re-​Dating the Old English Translation of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang:  The Evidence of the Prose Style,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103.3 (2004): 341–​ 68; also Langefeld, The Old English Version,  85–​7. 41

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conversions to reformed monastic life occurred in adulthood and came, as often for monastic saints, at the end of a period of searching and experiment. Dunstan’s quest led him to Glastonbury, where, according to Æthelwold’s own later testimony, the only true monks in England were to be found at that date (c. 940). Whatever form of life Dunstan encountered at Glastonbury, it was almost certainly not Benedictinism as Æthelwold envisioned it by the time he set about reforms at Abingdon or Winchester. Well into the second half of the tenth century, the new monastic party had to look back to its secular clerical origins to supply some essential resources. Jesse Billett has shown that, at the very core of monastic life, in the liturgy, reformed communities typically relied on office books of the secular church, which had to be extensively adapted to meet the different requirements of the horarium as laid out by the RB.46 The actual boundary, then, between reformed and unreformed minster communities began as something less solidly defined than Æthelwold’s perspective from the 960s would acknowledge. And this permeability must have continued through the remainder of the Anglo-​Saxon era. Some of the much-​abused clerics did take up Æthelwold’s offer to convert and remain in the newly reformed communities, or they left but returned later. Even in the generation after Æthelwold, when child oblation was presumably a more frequent option, adults continued to enter monastic houses after formative experiences in the clerical or lay saeculum. Ælfric himself, though he would become a most rigorous reformer, seems to have begun his career not as an oblate but under the tutelage of a secular minster or manorial priest.47 Ælfric’s outpouring of texts for multiple audiences (monastic, clerical, and lay) calls attention to another striking feature of the tenth-​century English monastic reformers, namely their ambitious uses of the vernacular. Like so many other emphases of the movement, this one has been traced to Æthelwold and Dunstan, who from early in their careers promoted bilingual studies in the classroom, first at Glastonbury, then at Abingdon and Winchester.48 The first results of this project were collaborative and took the form of copious, linguistically inventive Old English glosses to the Psalms and to the Latin prose treatise De virginitate by the curricular favorite, Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709). These and numerous Old English writings that followed

Jesse D. Billett, The Divine Office in Anglo-​Saxon England, 597–​c. 1000 (London, 2014), 186–​ 96. See also the article by Billett in this volume, as well as Christopher A. Jones, ed. and trans., Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham (Cambridge, 1998), 69–​70. 47 Jones, “Ælfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform’,” 104–​8. 48 Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, 372–​83. 46

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reveal Æthelwold’s interest in normalizing translation-​equivalents for certain Latin terms. The list of such works includes his own vernacular version of the RB, the anonymous translation of Chrodegang’s enlarged Rule, and the vast writings of Ælfric. Also associated on linguistic grounds with Æthelwold’s Winchester school are a partial translation of the reformers’ customary, the Regularis concordia, a gloss to the school text known as the Expositio hymnorum, and a complete interlinear gloss to the RB.49 The further point to be made about the vernacular among the Anglo-​Saxon reformers is that it was not restricted to classroom use: Old English assumed an important role in preaching, pastoral care, and devotional practice, and it even began to encroach upon the liturgy proper.50 As a result, the scope and refinement of vernacular culture in later Anglo-​Saxon England appear unparalleled elsewhere in early medieval Europe, being more extensive than the comparable uses of Old High German and Old Saxon, and rivalled in the West only by Old Irish. Æthelwold and his students were, moreover, extraordinary not just in the range of their Old English writings but also in their fundamental attitudes toward the language. Their prefaces may invoke commonplaces about the vernacular as a concession to the unlearned or laity only, but the substance of the reformers’ Old English texts betrays no diffidence at all about the capabilities of the language as a medium for scholarship, regulation, or prayer.51 While the prominence of the vernacular in late Anglo-​Saxon culture is often remarked on, its relevance to the history of English monasticism is rarely considered outside the contexts suggested by the late Benedictine reform movement. Bede, as is well known, endorsed limited, basic uses of the vernacular for the ends of teaching.52 But the pre-​reform history of Old English religious prose is usually connected to the court of King Alfred or to individual courtier-​clerics around him. Among the tenth-​century reformers,





The list above is not exhaustive; on the group of “Winchester texts,” see Mechthild Gretsch, “Winchester Vocabulary and Standard Old English: The Vernacular in Late Anglo-​Saxon England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library at Manchester 83 (2001): 44–​6. 50 For examples and further references, see Christopher A. Jones, “Performing Christianity:  Liturgical and Devotional Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge, 2012), 431–​3 and 438–​43. 51 This point is cogently argued by Helen Gittos, “The Audience for Old English Texts:  Ælfric, Rhetoric and ‘the edification of the simple’,” Anglo-​Saxon England 43 (2014):  231–​66. See also Mechthild Gretsch, “Ælfric, Language and Winchester,” in Magennis and Swan, A Companion to Ælfric, 125. 52 See his Letter to Ecgbert, cap. 5, in Grocock and Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, 132–​3; also the Epistola de obitu Bedae by the monk Cuthbert, in Colgrave and Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History,  582–​3.

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certainly Æthelwold and Ælfric were aware that, by embracing the vernacular, they were continuing an older tradition.53 To see their endorsement of the vernacular as only an Alfredian legacy, however, may be to adopt too readily the reformers’ own perspective, and so to ignore the possibility that a tradition of writing, preaching, and devotion in the vernacular, rooted in the minsters and enduring there through the ninth and tenth centuries, had created the grounds for a reformist “translation program” credited to Alfred’s reign. The continuous existence of a significant number of minsters in the west and south of England deserves acknowledgment, especially in connection with two recent turns in the study of Old English. The first is a revival of scholarly support for the existence of a pre-​Alfredian Mercian tradition of religious literature in Old English: in addition to numerous poems, the more substantial prose works at issue may include the Old English martyrology, the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, hagiographies for St. Chad and St. Guthlac, items among the Blickling Homilies, and the penitential known as the Canons of Theodore.54 The second turn follows from current arguments over the Old English adaptations of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Malcolm Godden, while challenging the traditional attribution of that work to King Alfred, leaves open the possibility that both the Boethius and the closely related Old English version of Augustine’s Soliloquia were the products of a learned cleric or group of clerics active in some southern minster in the early decades of the tenth century. Godden even singles out St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, as a viable candidate.55 (As it happens, moreover, the sole surviving Anglo-​Saxon copy of Augustine’s Latin Soliloquia also contains the earliest English copy of Chrodegang’s enlarged Rule for Canons.) In emphasizing possible continuities between the Anglo-​Saxon reformers and the minster communities around them, the aim of this chapter has not been to deny that essential features of the tenth-​century movement—​such as the introduction of the office liturgy according to the RB, and the imitation of





See the general remarks in Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, 132–​3. For example, Ælfric cites the Old English versions of Boethius, of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, and of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. See Malcolm Godden, “Ælfric and the Alfredian Precedents,” in Magennis and Swan, A Companion to Ælfric, 139–​63. 54 See R. D. Fulk, “Anglian Features in Late West-​Saxon Prose,” in Analysing Older English, ed. David Denison et al. (Cambridge, 2012), 63–​74; Sharon M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (Cambridge, 2011), 41–​7; Donald Scragg, “A Ninth-​ Century Old English Homily from Northumbria,” Anglo-​Saxon England 45 (2016): 39–​49. 55 Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds. and trans., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009), 1:144. 53

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monastic customs from abroad—​were truly innovative in England at the time. The reforms brought real changes, with effects that extended through the remainder of the Anglo-​Saxon period. The gradual monasticizing of some still-​mixed communities continued; Christ Church, Canterbury, appears to have become a fully monastic cathedral only in the 1020s. Decades before the Norman Conquest, new infusions of Continental influence were also strengthening boundaries between monastic and other forms of communal life. By the second quarter of the eleventh century, monks at Canterbury were familiar with a monastic sign-​language system related to that used at Cluny (and this list of signs was translated into Old English).56 Norman monastic customs associated with Fécamp or other houses connected to the reforms of William of Volpiano (d. 1031) may likewise have made their way to England during the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–​66).57 From the same generation also comes the first solid evidence that an English secular clerical community—​in this case the cathedral chapter at Exeter under Bishop Leofric (r. 1050–​72)—​formally adopted Chrodegang’s Rule. And after the Norman Conquest, the pressures only increased to adapt Anglo-​Saxon institutions to Continental standards that sharpened distinctions between regulars and seculars, but also among regulars themselves. These and other developments, many accelerated by the Norman Conquest, further distanced the new monastic houses from the older minsters. But it was finally the proliferation of smaller local churches in this same period that most profoundly changed the old order. The unreformed minsters continued to lose their dues and pastoral charges to the new parish churches, which were often staffed by lone priests.58 The role of a religious community that familiarly, to English eyes, combined features of active and contemplative vocations was left, for a brief interval, to those monastic houses that inherited the model from the tenth-​century reformers, who in turn inherited it from the earlier minster-​based church. Though competition would soon enough return in the form of regular canons, the confidence with which an English reformed-​monastic community in the later eleventh century could embrace the mixed life can be seen at Worcester Cathedral, where monks had been gradually introduced

Debby Banham, ed. and trans., Monasteriales [sic] indicia: The Anglo-​Saxon Monastic Sign Language (Pinner, 1991); see also Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 900–​1200 (Cambridge, 2007), 108–​17. 57 Christopher A. Jones, “Monastic Custom in Early Norman England: The Significance of Bodleian MS Wood empt. 4,” Revue bénédictine 113.1 (2003):  135–68, and 113.2 (2003): 302–​36. 58 Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society,  368–​9. 56

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during Oswald’s pontificate (r. 961–​92). The reform-​minded monk-​bishop St. Wulfstan II (r. 1062–​99) and his community tenaciously clung to those features of the tenth-​century movement—​that is, its devotion to both regular life and pastoral ministry, and its cultivation of a rich vernacular culture—​that most strongly suggested continuity with the earlier world of the minsters. William of Malmesbury’s (d. 1143) vita of Wulfstan relates how at least one foreigner, au courrant on such matters, criticized the bishop for confusing the roles of monk and canon.59 But Wulfstan was actually realizing Æthelwold’s ideal, ingeniously construed from Bede, that English monasticism was to have been from its beginnings Benedictine, pastoral, and open to the possibilities of preaching and ministering in the people’s own language.

Bibliography Barrow, Julia. “The Chronology of the Benedictine ‘Reform’.” In Edgar, King of the English, 959–​75, edited by Donald Scragg, 211–​23. Woodbridge, 2008.   The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, Their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe c. 800–c. 1200. Cambridge, 2015. Billett, Jesse D. The Divine Office in Anglo-​Saxon England, 597–​c. 1000. London, 2014. Blair, John. The Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society. Oxford, 2005. Foot, Sarah. “Anglo-​Saxon Minsters: A Review of Terminology.” In Pastoral Care Before the Parish, edited by John Blair and Richard Sharpe, 212–​25. Leicester, 1992.   Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–900. Cambridge, 2006.   Veiled Women. 2 vols. Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2000. Gittos, Helen. “The Audience for Old English Texts: Ælfric, Rhetoric and ‘the edification of the simple’.” Anglo-​Saxon England 43 (2014): 231–​66. Gretsch, Mechthild. “The Benedictine Rule in Old English:  A Document of Bishop Æthelwold’s Reform Politics.” In Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-​Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of His Sixty-​Fifth Birthday, edited by Michael Korhammer, Karl Reichl, and Hans Sauer, 131–​58. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 1992.   The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform. Cambridge, 1999. Jolly, Karen Louise. The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-​le-​ Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19. Columbus, OH, 2012. Jones, Christopher A. “Ælfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform’.” In Magennis and Swan, A Companion to Ælfric, 67–​108. Magennis, Hugh, and Mary Swan, eds. A Companion to Ælfric. Leiden and Boston, MA, 2009. Tinti, Francesca. “Benedictine Reform and Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-​Saxon England.” Early Medieval Europe 23 (2015): 229–​51.



Vita S.  Wulfstani 1.7, in William of Malmesbury:  Saints’ Lives, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thompson (Oxford, 2007), 32–​5.

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Monastic Art and Architecture, c. 700–​1100: Material and Immaterial Worlds A da m S.   Cohe n

Introduction The Codex Albeldensis, a collection of canon law and history completed in 976 at the monastery of Albelda in northern Spain (Rioja), opens with an illustrated page that communicates in both word and image the attitudes and goals of the monastic scribe (see Figure 27.1): So, in the beginning of this book, the undertaking to write arose for me, Vigila the scribe, but I greatly feared being a waster of parchment—​an appropriate fear. Casting doubt aside, however, I began writing in the name of my Jesus Christ, and in this state of mind I earnestly began to produce, as the picture below shows, and laboring [or flourishing, “nitens”] reached the end. Therefore thanks be to God who deigned to help me. At last, the course of this life being run, may He deign to give [me] the eternal prize with the saints in the kingdom of heaven. Amen.1

Vigila’s statement touches on several themes fundamental to the monastic profession: a sense of fear and unworthiness, a personal connection to God (“my Jesus Christ”), thanks for the Lord’s help in his endeavors, and, above all, the desire to achieve eternal life with the saints in heaven. Although Vigila calls himself a scribe, it is noteworthy that the picture depicts him not as a writer of words but rather as an artist in the process of executing the interlace patterns characteristic of the book’s decoration. For Vigila, then, being a scribe also means being an artist, which is made evident not only by the attention he calls to it in the text (“as the picture below shows”) but also in the picture itself. The layout of the page gives the image priority: the architectural

Biblioteca del Monasterio del Escorial, MS d.I.2. Translation partly based on Catherine Brown, “Remember the Hand: Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain,” Word + Image 27 (2011): 265.

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Figure  27.1  Vigila the Scribe. Codex Albeldensis, El Escorial, Biblioteca del Escorial MS d.I.2, fol. XXIIv. Photo © Patrimonio Nacional.

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framework surrounding the seated figure at his desk creates the field for the scribal inscription, which is squeezed into the available space. Visually the picture works somewhat against the text, for, while the latter expresses Vigila’s unworthiness, the composition strongly evokes the Evangelist portraits so common in medieval Gospel books. Vigila’s activities as scribe and illuminator are thus akin to those of the Evangelists and offer the promise of a future reward in heaven with the saints. And, with the inscription that includes Vigila’s name, it gives a face, however idealized, to the monastic scribes and artists who, for most of the early and central Middle Ages, worked in conscious anonymity. Approximately thirty years earlier, in the monastery of Valeránica (Castile), a monk named Florentius similarly forged a symbiotic relationship of words and images in a sumptuously decorated copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob.2 In a beautifully framed colophon at the end of the book, Florentius also calls himself “unworthy” and thanks God for assistance in completing his work (as well he might—​the book comprises 500 folios), and he prays that he might be joined with the celestial choir in the afterlife. He adds two other fundamental monastic ideas: a devotion to the saints of his institution and acknowledgment of the authority of his abbot. At the very beginning of the book is a colorful, ornate page with overlapping diagonal grids; in the intersecting diamonds are a jumble of letters that can be deciphered to read, over and over again, “Florentium indignum memorare” (“Remember unworthy Florentius”), which couples the theme of humility with the common injunction to the reader to pray for the book’s creator. While the texts of the Florentius and Vigila manuscript pages articulate several basic monastic ideas, the visual components add other layers. Such pages display not just an artistic but also an intellectual virtuosity that accords with our expectations of early and central medieval monastic activity. At the same time, the sheer luxuriousness of these books indicates how the use of significant material resources expressed the status of individual monastic institutions even as they signaled a devotion to glorifying God. Illustrated books and their bejeweled covers, spacious monastic complexes that included magnificent churches with painted walls, freestanding sculptural crosses, precious metalwork, and textiles demonstrate that in the central Middle Ages the monastic world was steeped in imagery of all kinds. Like such phenomena as music, literature, or liturgy, art and architecture have their own

Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 80; Brown, “Remember the Hand,” with further literature.

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internal language and conventions, and it would be possible to treat the subject by considering these works according to the particularities of style or medium. To enrich our understanding of central medieval monasticism best, however, it is more useful to approach its art and architecture from the social and religious perspectives of the people who made and, above all, used these objects. Exploring representative artistic and architectural products reveals their multifaceted role in a constellation of practical and ideological issues related to monasticism, which provide the essay headings below: (1) the relationship of the monastery to the world outside; (2) the social and exegetical meanings of the built environment; (3) devotion to the saints; (4) spirituality and intellectual activities; and (5) the increase in the number of monasteries claiming adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict (RB). While these categories are useful for organizing the material according to important themes in the history of early and central medieval monasticism, it will be evident that the buildings and works of art treated in this essay are multivalent objects that were the product of many forces, contain numerous layers of meaning, and reveal more than can be restricted to a single categorical theme. In addition, almost all of the monuments (whether small-​scale works or entire buildings) were meant in some way to be tangible commemorations of either specific individuals or entire institutions, and this memorial function permeates much of central medieval monastic art. Of course, such issues as memory or status were not specific to monastics, and it comes as no surprise that various monastic forms of architectural and artistic expression were shared with church officials and lay nobles. Similarly, monks and nuns between about 700 and 1100 faced the perennial challenge already encountered by their monastic predecessors and followers: how to aspire to heaven through seclusion, spiritual devotion, and intellectual endeavors while inhabiting a material world. In the following essay, representative examples from a variety of media and a wide geographical scope provide an overview of the different ways that particular monastics addressed this challenge. They reveal similarities to the solutions adopted by men and women both earlier and later, even as they demonstrate that this central medieval period was notable for the tremendous expansion in the wealth and scope of monastic foundations compared to what had existed previously. And, while it is possible for the modern historian to discern broad trends in monasticism from the Carolingians to the beginning of the high Middle Ages—​such as the spread of large monastic foundations and the escalation of rhetoric concerned with reform—​the art and architecture examined here is most revealing of the experience of 522

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individuals or small groups who sought to express essential religious and social ideas about themselves and their place in the world.

Monasteries and the World Outside The act of entering a monastic institution did not end one’s association with one’s family or change one’s social status, especially in the central Middle Ages, when a large percentage of monks and nuns were members of the upper class. Families maintained personal interest in specific foundations, and the largesse of the laity who increasingly invested in monasticism led to a dramatic expansion of monasteries between the eighth and eleventh centuries. They even served a funerary function for the aristocratic laity.3 A typical example is the new female monastery founded at Gernrode (Saxony-​Anhalt), which Count Gero (d. 965), a close supporter of Emperor Otto I, established as a royal foundation of canonesses around 960 in honor of his deceased and childless son, Siegfried. His widowed daughter-​in-​law, Hathui, served as the first abbess; she and Gero were both buried near the high altar of the grand new church dedicated to St. Cyriakus (whose relics Gero personally obtained in Rome).4 Preserving family memory was a critical function of female monastics in the central Middle Ages, as demonstrated at Gernrode and also at Essen. In the latter, the idea is distilled materially in several richly crafted liturgical crosses in gold, enamels, and gems—​in particular the so-​called Mathilda-​ Otto Cross (see Figure 27.2). An enamel plaque at the base of the cross shows two figures, clearly and proudly labeled:  Abbess Mathilda and Duke Otto (of Swabia), her brother, both of whom are depicted grasping the staff of a golden processional cross. It has been suggested that the cross was given by Mathilda to the abbey church at Essen (now the cathedral) in commemoration of Otto’s death (982); whether or not this is the case, the representation is a harmonious expression of familial piety in particular and the cooperation between court and cloister in general.5





See the article by Blennemann in this volume. Charlotte Warnke, “Das Kanonissenstift St. Cyriacus zu Gernrode im Spannungsfeld zwischen Hochadel, Kaiser, Bischof und Papst von der Gründung 961 bis zum Ende des Investiturstreits 1122,” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius (Göttingen, 2001), 201–​73. 5 Jutta Frings and Jan Gerchow, eds. Krone und Schleier. Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöster (Munich, 2005), 272, cat. no. 152; Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 2008). 3

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Figure 27.2  Mathilda-Otto Cross. Essen Treasury. Photo by Jens Nober (Essen) © Dom­ schatz Essen.

The desire of the laity to demonstrate piety and be remembered through monastic prayer need not be restricted to female institutions. In his 910 foundation document for the abbey of Cluny (Burgundy), William the Pious (d. 918), duke of Aquitaine and count of Auvergne, stated explicitly that the establishment of the monastery on his lands was in large measure so that there would be a perpetual community of monks offering prayer on behalf of him and his family. The first abbey church on the villa grounds, known today as Cluny I, was dedicated in 927 but quickly had to be replaced with a larger structure, Cluny II, begun around 955 and finally completed in the early eleventh century. Numerous liturgical processions in the cloister and church were an important part of the Cluniac ritual (as they were in independent monasteries influenced by the Cluniac way of life, such as Farfa, north of Rome), and a particular feature of the church was the western narthex (avant-​nef) called the “Galilee,” which had an altar (or perhaps several) that allowed the monks to say additional masses in honor of the dead. Like other 524

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monastic architectural elements, the Galilee incorporated a range of exegetic ideas about Christ, sacred topography, and the spiritual goal of the monk for eternal life.6 Monasteries recorded the names of their dead, and those affiliated with the institution, in a confraternity book called the liber vitae. One example from the New Minster, Winchester, produced around 1030, includes a frontispiece that shows King Cnut and Queen Ælfgifu/​Emma prominently donating a golden altar cross.7 Above them are Christ and the patron saints of the monastery, Mary and Peter, and angels descend to give the royal couple signs of their earthly and heavenly reward. Below, a group of monks look up at them with gestures that suggest the act of prayer in which they engage to perpetuate the memory of their benefactors; the central monk prominently holds an open book that is surely the liber vitae itself, and the double-​page representation of the Last Judgment that follows makes clear what is at stake.

The Built Environment: Practice and Theory The period between the eighth and eleventh centuries was marked by the increasing size and sophistication of monastic complexes as more institutions were founded or enlarged for monastics practicing a communal (cenobitic) lifestyle. The challenges of housing and attending to the needs of a community were substantial; evidence for the physical structures and layout of these cenobitic sites must be gleaned from a combination of archaeological data, textual accounts, and early modern renderings, all of which must be evaluated with great care. The so-​called Plan of St. Gall has long dominated discussion of medieval monastic architecture in the Carolingian period. This detailed rendering of a monastic complex was created in the monastery of Reichenau (on an island in Lake Constance) and sent to Abbot Gozbert of nearby St. Gall sometime

For Cluny in general, see the article by Rosé in this volume. For its art and architecture, see Kristina Kruger, “Architecture and Liturgical Practice: The Cluniac galilaea,” in The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium, ed. Nigel Hiscock (Turnhout, 2003), 138–​59; Kristina Kruger, “Monastic Customs and Liturgy in the Light of the Architectural Evidence: A Case Study on Processions (Eleventh–​Twelfth Centuries),” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny/​Du coeur de la nuit à la fin du jour. Les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Âge, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 191–​220. 7 Simon Keynes, ed., The Liber vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey Winchester: British Library Stowe 944, Together with Leaves from British Library Cotton Vespasian A.  VIII and British Library Cotton Titus D.  XXVII, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 26 (Copenhagen, 1996). 6

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between 816 and 837.8 On five pieces of parchment stitched together (in total measuring 112 by 77.5  cm), hundreds of captions identify approximately fifty buildings and such other components as gardens and fences. The longstanding view—​that the plan was the product of an official policy promulgated at the 816/​17 Council of Aachen to regulate monastic practice—​has been overturned, but scholars are divided about the degree to which the plan was meant to be an idealized intellectual exercise or a practical guide to building. Such precise details as the dedications of altars in the church to specific saints, the disposition of breweries (one for monks, one for guests), or the number of toilets distributed among the monks’ dormitory, abbot’s house, infirmary, school, and different guest quarters, suggest a concrete level of planning in which the needs of residents and visitors were carefully considered. At the same time, there is too much about the plan that is impractical, ambitious, or idealized to imagine its use as an actual blueprint. Indeed, the new monastic church at St. Gall begun under Gozbert around 830 did not conform significantly to what was on the plan, and neither does any other church or monastery in the Carolingian realm. In short, the Plan represents a blend of the real and the ideal and is a reflection of both practical and ideological aspects of Carolingian monasticism.9 The extensive archaeological excavations of the monastic complex at San Vincenzo al Volturno (Molise) confirm and expand our understanding of the St. Gall plan and reveal not only material but also ideological aspects of the built monastic environment.10 Established in the eighth century on the grounds of a fifth-​century Roman villa, the monastery was led briefly by Ambrosius Autpertus (d. 784), a noted Frankish theologian, but it was Abbot Joshua who enlarged it tremendously between 792 and 817. He transformed the old church and monastery into a grand complex that included a large





St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1092. For a good overview, see Charles McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600–​900 (New Haven, CT, 2005), 163–​72, and the useful website www.stgallplan.org (date of last access: 18 April 2019). For an image of the Plan, see Figure 16.4 in the article by Lauwers in this volume. 9 Richard Sullivan, “What was Carolingian Monasticism? The Plan of St Gall and the History of Monasticism,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), 251–​87; Giles Constable, “Carolingian Monasticism as Seen in the Plan of St Gall,” in Le monde carolingien. Bilan, perspectives, champs de recherches. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers, Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale 18–​20 novembre 2004, ed. Wojciech Fałkowski and Yves Sassier (Turnhout, 2009), 199–​217. 10 See Figure 16.2 in the article by Lauwers in this volume. See also Richard Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages: The Rise and Fall of San Vincenzo al Volturno ( London, 1997); Flavia de Rubeis and Federico Marazzi, eds., Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture (Rome, 2008). 8

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basilica dedicated to St. Vincent (San Vincenzo Maggiore). This required the clearing and leveling of a significant amount of land and the disposition of a substantial quantity of Roman and early medieval spolia. As in the St. Gall plan, there were distinct zones for the monks and the laity, although the identification of individual buildings is still debated. The new basilica, 63.5 meters long by 28.3 meters wide, was in keeping with the scale of other monastic churches being constructed throughout the Carolingian realms and was approximately three times longer than its eighth-​ century predecessor, which was transformed into a reception room for visiting lay people. Emulating ancient Roman practice, Abbot Joshua inserted a monumental inscription in bronze letters across the new church’s facade that recorded his name and responsibility for the new building. The church was richly furnished on the interior with marble opus sectile (cut-​stone) pavements and frescoes that demonstrated the magnificence and grandeur of the institution. The west end of the church terminated in a triple apse, in keeping with regional building practice (seen, for example, at Montecassino and St. Sofia in Benevento), but the annular crypt built around 820 provided access to newly acquired relics of the saint and clearly evoked the sixth-​century ring-​shaped crypt at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.11 This most sacred space of the Volturno crypt, near the cruciform relic chamber, contained niches painted with bust-​ length figures in prayer. It is likely that one of these is Abbot Joshua, and the picture helped to fix his memory in the institutional fabric of the monastery by associating him with the saints of the church. Like the scribal work of Florentius, this was another strategy to help ensure the ultimate salvation of the saintly abbot.

Commemoration and Salvation A similar memorial strategy was followed by one of Joshua’s successors, Abbot Epiphanius (824–​42), who erected a small chapel in the San Vincenzo complex. The crypt contains his large tomb, and on the surrounding walls Epiphanius is shown with a square halo kneeling at the foot of Christ’s cross (see Figure 27.3). The fresco decoration, informed by the exegesis of Ambrosius Autpertus, combines apocalyptic themes suitable for a funerary context with images that highlight the humility of the Virgin, the midwives at the Nativity, and Christ on the cross, all of whom serve as fitting exemplars for the chief



Werner Jacobsen, “Saints’ Tombs in Frankish Church Architecture,” Speculum 72 (1997): 1107–43.

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Figure 27.3  Abbot Epiphanius, San Vincenzo al Volturno, crypt interior. Photo AGF Srl /​ Alamy Stock Photo.

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monastic virtue of humility.12 Epiphanius’ insertion into the Crucifixion scene underscores the link between Christ’s sacrifice and the abbot’s hoped-​for salvation; like the earlier painting of Abbot Joshua, it helped secure his memory among the monks and visitors to the church. A monumental analogue to the Epiphanius fresco is the great stone cross set up at the monastery of Monasterboice (County Louth, Ireland) at the beginning of the tenth century.13 Like most monastic sites in Ireland, the layout of Monasterboice was a ringed enclosure with, in this case, three concentric earthen ramparts;14 as in the Plan of St. Gall and at San Vincenzo, these distinguished hierarchical zones of different social and religious status. Measuring some 5.5 meters high and carved out of a single block of sandstone, the cross is covered with sculpted reliefs that, like earlier crosses, feature a panel of Paul the Hermit and Antony, early monastic exemplars from the Egyptian desert.15 An inscription on the base reads, “a prayer for Muiredach, who had this cross made.” Although there are several individuals to whom this might refer, it is most likely to be Muiredach mac Domhnall, an important abbot of Monasterboice (and abbot-​elect of Armagh), who died in 923. The culmination of the complex sculptural program is the ringed crosshead (simultaneously the intersection of the cross arms), which highlights the Crucifixion on one side and the Last Judgment on the other. These are tangible expressions of Abbot Muiredach’s prayer that he be judged favorably after death and his soul accepted into heaven.

Romanitas San Vincenzo Maggiore was one of several monastic churches throughout Europe—​ including above all Saint-​ Denis and Fulda (Hessen)—​ that consciously emulated St. Peter’s to highlight the relics of their own important saint and to forge a connection to Rome. In addition to Joshua’s use of the annular crypt, echoing the shape of the crypt of St. Peter, Epiphanius enlarged the main monastery church with an atrium, also an emulation of St. Peter’s. Romanitas could be expressed architecturally in other ways, too, and

Robert Deshman, “Servants of the Mother of God in Byzantine and Medieval Art,” Word + Image 5 (1989): 33–​70, reprinted in Eye and Mind: Collected Essays in Anglo-​Saxon and Early Medieval Art, ed. Adam S. Cohen (Kalamazoo, MI, 2010), 220–​41. 13 For an overview, see Andrew Halpin and Conor Newman, Ireland:  An Oxford Archaeological Guide to Sites from Earliest Times to AD 1600 (Oxford, 2006), esp. 321–​4. 14 See the article by Bitel in this volume. 15 This image is also on the famous, and much debated, eighth-​century Ruthwell Cross. See in general Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (Toronto, 2005).

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not only in Italy. In late seventh-​century/​early eighth-​century Northumbria, the Venerable Bede (d. 735)  records that, when Abbot Benedict Biscop (d. 690) decided to construct a church of St. Peter at Monkwearmouth, he went to Gaul to find masons who could build in stone “according to the Roman manner he loved so much.” Stone construction, unusual in the British Isles in the early Middle Ages, was understood to forge a connection with Rome.16 Bede also reports that among the many things that Biscop brought back from several trips to Italy was a series of painted panels of the Virgin, Apostles, and scenes from the Gospels and Book of Revelation; these were installed in the Monkwearmouth church. At the twin church dedicated to St. Paul at Jarrow, another Benedictine foundation established by Biscop, the disposition of other panels demonstrated the concordance of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, an idea also visually expressed in the great Roman churches. Perhaps the grandest architectural display of romanitas in all of Europe was the monumental western transept added in 802–​19 by Abbot Ratgar (r. 802–​17) to the monastic church at Fulda. At approximately 68 meters by 20 meters, the Fulda church dedicated to the Savior was already the largest basilica north of the Alps (and would remain so until the eleventh century and the construction of Cluny III); the nave width and its single flanking side aisles echoed St. Peter’s in Rome. The size and disposition of the added western transept, which measured some 75 meters by 13.5 meters, made the resemblance to St. Peter’s T-​shape unmistakable. Despite the ideological importance thus attached to Fulda’s church, the building campaign was so ambitious and, from the monks’ point of view, onerous that they complained to Charlemagne and then Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40), and successfully forced Ratgar out as abbot.

Theological Symbolism The structural aspects of buildings could be interpreted in ways that demonstrate how the physical surroundings of a monastic integrated an individual into the fabric of the larger Christian cosmos. At Fulda, for example, a monk named Candidus Brun explained in his Life of Abbot Eigil (whom he had known) the symbolism of the funerary church built by the abbot and dedicated to St. Michael in 820.17 Candidus, who himself worked at times as an

McClendon, Origins of Medieval Architecture, 72–​ 84; Rosemary Cramp, “Monastic Settlements in Britain in the 7th–​11th Centuries,” in de Rubeis and Marazzi, Monasteri in Europa occidentale, 113–​33. 17 See Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744–​c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012); Lynda Coon, Dark Age Bodies:  Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), both with further literature.

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artist, records how the round church, its crypt supported on a single central column, should be understood allegorically as a figure of Christ. The circular shape, he says, refers to salvation, the column and cornerstone to Christ himself, and the eight columns of the ground floor both to Christ’s resurrection and to the Beatitudes (in fact this is one of the earliest medieval evocations of the Resurrection (Anastasis) rotunda at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem). In the 790s, with financial support from Charlemagne, Abbot Angilbert (d. 814)  undertook a vast rebuilding campaign at Centula/Saint-Riquier (north-​east France), which included three structures connected by porticoed walkways:  the main church dedicated to the Savior and St. Riquier, a centrally planned building to Mary and the Apostles, and a small church to St. Benedict.18 Although many details about the no-​longer-​extant complex remain in doubt, texts attributed to Angilbert (known at Charlemagne’s court as Homer for his literary acumen) confirm that the disposition of the churches in a triangle was an articulation of sacred topography and part of the extensive Trinitarian symbolism that saturated Centula. This was also manifested in the three church portals, three main altars, three towers at the east end and three in the west, and 300 monks divided among three choirs with three additional choirs of thirty-​three boys to perform the office.19 A threefold symbolism was also central to William of Volpiano’s (d. 1031) new church at Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon, begun in 1001, with a three-​story rotunda added to the east end about 1018 (see Figure 27.4).20 The church as a whole was described as “wondrous” and “incomparable” by Rodulphus Glaber (d. c. 1047; the monk who, in his chronicle, coined the famous phrase about Europe being clad in a “white mantle of churches” after the year 1000). With its oculus open to the sky, the rotunda was exceptional in northern Europe. It was modeled on the second-​century Pantheon in Rome, known since the seventh century as St. Mary and All Martyrs, thus forging an institutional connection between William’s Benedictine monastery and Roman papal authority. The structure itself was intended to be a site for spiritual renewal and theosis, an anagogic progression toward light and unification

See the article by Lauwers in this volume with Figure 16.3. In general, see Susan Rabe, Faith, Art, and Politics at Saint-​Riquier:  The Symbolic Vision of Angilbert (Philadelphia, PA, 1995). 19 See in general Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity:  Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125 (Ithaca, NY, 2006). 20 Carolyn Marino Malone, Saint-​Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, totius Galliae basilicis mirabilior. Interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique (Turnhout, 2009); Carolyn Malone, “St. Bénigne in Dijon as Exemplum of Rodulf Glaber’s Metaphoric ‘White Mantle’,” in Hiscock, White Mantle of Churches, 160–​79. See the latter volume for several essays that touch on the subject of architecture and monasteries. 18

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Figure 27.4  Reconstruction of the church of Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon, 1001–​18 (C. Malone).

with God. This progression was manifested spatially through temporal and physical movement: the dark crypt, which housed the tomb of St. Bénigne, was dedicated to John the Baptist (the forerunner of Christ), the elevated choir level to the Virgin (representing the Incarnation), and the uppermost level, which was bathed in light, to the Trinity (with an altar also dedicated to 532

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St. Michael). Such complex symbolic ideas embedded in the architectural plan of the monastic church helped structure the monk’s activities and thoughts to bring him to a higher spiritual plane.

The Veneration of Saints through Architecture and Art The church of the Savior in Fulda had been modeled on St. Peter’s in Rome in large part to give appropriate architectural emphasis to the tomb of Boniface, the Anglo-​Saxon missionary to the Germanic lands.21 The monastery had been founded in 744 by Sturmi (d. 779), a companion of Boniface, and the first church was a relatively simple, single-​aisled hall measuring 26.5 meters by 17 meters, in keeping with other monastic churches of the time and perfectly adequate for a small group of monks. After his martyrdom in 754, Boniface was buried inside the church’s west entrance according to his earlier stated wishes, and around 770 Sturmi marked the tomb with a freestanding ciborium in gold and silver. The presence of the saint’s body raised the monastery’s status and attracted a wealth of donations, especially from the Carolingian royal house. Charlemagne put the abbey under his personal protection in 774, and this connection to the court enmeshed Fulda in the vast sweep of Carolingian religious, intellectual, and architectural changes. A considerable swelling of the monastic population required a larger structure, but it was as much the desire to showcase the presence of Boniface that motivated Abbot Baugulf (779–​802) to replace Sturmi’s first structure; although the tomb itself was not moved, the vast increase in the size of the church to approximately 68 meters by 20 meters meant that it was now located in the center of the church. Fulda’s next abbot, Ratgar, took this one step further when he added the monumental western transept to demarcate the tomb of Boniface, which was moved to an elevated platform at the western end. The tombs of saints were not only spotlighted architecturally but were also enhanced through precious metalwork and surrounding frescoes. The best documented case of the rich metalwork associated with a monastic church is Saint-​Denis.22 The ravages of time have meant that most such works have

On monastic missionaries, see the article by Raaijmakers in this volume. For what follows, see Raaijmakers, Making of the Monastic Community of  Fulda. 22 See Blaise de Montesquiou-​ Fezensac with Danielle Gaborit-​ Chopin, Le trésor de Saint-​Denis, 3 vols. (Paris, 1973–​7); Danielle Gaborit-​Chopin, ed., Le trésor de Saint-​Denis. Musée du Louvre, Paris, 12 mars–​17 juin 1991 (Paris, 1991). For an Ottonian female house, see Birgitta Falk, ed., Der Essener Münsterschatz (Essen, 2009). 21

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been melted down or effaced, although surviving examples, such as the mid-​ ninth-​century crypt at Saint-​Germain in Auxerre, with its frescoes depicting cycles dedicated to St. Stephen and St. Lawrence, and texts that record lost paintings in places such as St. Gall, provide a sense of what was no doubt common throughout Europe. The most impressive fresco ensemble from the early ninth century can be seen at the monastic (Benedictine) church of St. John in Müstair (canton of Graubünden, Switzerland). The vast cycle, which includes both Old and New Testament scenes, focuses on Christ in Majesty in the central apse and a monumental Last Judgment on the west wall (both common features).23 By including scenes from the Life of St. Vigilius, a local fourth-​century bishop and martyr, alongside biblical imagery, the programmers responsible for the frescoes demonstrated how Müstair and its local saint were embedded in the grand sweep of sacred history. Illuminated manuscripts also provided a forum for venerating saints. The Benedictional of Bishop Æthelwold, made in Winchester about 973, includes depictions of numerous saints, including Swithun, whose cult was promoted by Æthelwold to support his monastic reform of the Old Minster (see further below); in the image, Swithun is assimilated architecturally with a column to demonstrate how he embodies a pillar of the church.24 Similarly, the Uta Codex, produced in Regensburg around 1025 at least partly by a monk from St. Emmeram named Hartwic and destined for the nuns of Niedermünster, features a full-​page illumination of St. Erhard, who, like Swithun, was reported to have made a nocturnal visit to proclaim his support for reform, in this case for the Niedermünster foundation for women where his tomb was the focus of veneration.25 Perhaps the most spectacular early medieval manuscript associated with a saint is the famous Lindisfarne Gospels, produced in that monastery at the beginning of the eighth century. A tenth-​century colophon records that the book was written “in honor of God, St. Cuthbert and all the saints” by Eadfrith (d. 721), bishop and abbot of Lindisfarne (whose life is also attested in the writings of Monkwearmouth–​Jarrow’s most famous inhabitant, the Venerable Bede). Indeed, the book, comprising 259 folios and intricately illuminated Evangelist portraits, carpet, and decorated initial text pages, seems

See most recently Kirsten Ataoguz, “The Apostolic Ideal at the Monastery of Saint John in Müstair, Switzerland,” Gesta 52 (2013): 91–​112, with further literature. 24 London, British Library, MS Add. 35958. Robert Deshman, The Benedictional of Æthelwold (Princeton, NJ, 1995). 25 Munich, Bavarian State Library, Clm. 13601. Adam S. Cohen, The Uta Codex: Art, Reform, and Philosophy in Eleventh-​Century Germany (University Park, PA, 2000). 23

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to have been written and probably decorated by a single individual, and it seems reasonable to attribute the book to Eadfrith and accept that its production was a monumental undertaking to honor St. Cuthbert, the former abbot of Lindisfarne who died in 687 and was translated to a new shrine in the church in 698.26 Whatever else the Lindisfarne Gospels represent, the book was intimately connected to their saint by the monks; when the community fled Viking raiders in 793, eventually settling in Durham, they carried with them not only the relics of St. Cuthbert in his incised wooden coffin but also this precious Gospel book.

Spiritual Devotion and Intellectual Activity Buildings, metalwork, frescoes, and manuscripts were all created and used as vehicles to enable monastics not just to demonstrate their religious devotion but also to articulate a range of ideas and to provide vehicles for spiritual contemplation and ascent. A slightly earlier analog to the Lindisfarne Gospels, the so-​called Durham Gospels (now housed in Durham but possibly made in Lindisfarne), provides a concise example of how images were conceived and used.27 Now in fragmentary condition, the book retains a damaged but legible picture of the Crucifixion, which is understood to bind all space and time. The cross structures the page by extending on all four sides to the border of the composition, a reference to the four directions of the earth and cosmos encompassed by Christ and the cross. The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, Alpha and Omega, flank Christ’s head, and the words initium and et finis above the angels to either side indicate that Jesus is the beginning and end and signal the eternal dimension of the Crucifixion. The Roman soldiers below, wielding the lance and sponge, refer not just to the historical narrative recounted in the Gospels in which they torture Jesus but also to the way that Jesus uniquely combined in one person humanity and divinity (Christ’s transcendence of the torture is indicated by his wide-​eyed gaze and upright posture). The wound also indicates the Eucharist, as does the orant pose of Christ, which evokes the actions of the priest during the liturgy. Finally, now faint inscriptions running around the entire page add a devotional aspect to

Literature on this book, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.IV, is vast. See most comprehensively Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (Toronto, 2003). 27 Durham Cathedral Library, MS A.II.17. See Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘“Know Who and What He Is’: The Context and Inscriptions of the Durham Gospels Crucifixion Image,” in Making and Meaning: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference in Insular Art, ed. Rachel Moss (Dublin, 2007), 301–​16.

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the iconographic and theological ideas embedded in the picture. They highlight Christ’s victory over death and pray that “we”—​that is, the monastic viewer—​suffer with Christ so that eternal life might be granted to us as well. The inscription at the top is most compelling: it opens with a command to “Know who and what kind he is” (referring to Christ). In short, this inscription actively implicates the viewer in the contemplation of the visual and verbal messages of the page, a process that requires the monk to draw on a vast range of theological commentaries to achieve the fullest possible knowledge of God and to be united with him in life and death. An inscription in the Crucifixion page of the Uta Codex makes a similar point for the nuns of Niedermünster, who had recently been reformed according to the RB by Abbess Uta around the year 1000. “The life of the good meditates on/​practices (meditatur) the paradigmatic form of the cross.” What constitutes this paradigm, and upon what should the nuns meditate and imitate? The picture is a dense exegetical composition that casts Jesus as the victorious priest over death and makes references to the four cardinal directions, as well as to Augustine’s interpretation of the four arms of the cross as aspects of charity and good works. Also present are details expressing Old and New Testament typology (e.g., personifications of Church and Synagogue), the power of the living cross (which actively shoots out to bite a personification of Death), and the harmony of the cosmos (musical inscriptions and diagrams under the arms of the cross). Other illuminated pages have elements derived from Macrobius, Boethius, and Eriugena (d. 877); Hartwic, the monk involved in developing the program, had an intimate familiarity with the standard liberal arts curriculum at Chartres. The point of all of this learning, as the Crucifixion inscription makes clear, was for the monastic to understand the Christian cosmos and to emulate Christ as much as possible.28 Arguably the most complex expression of monastic learning and art making in the central Middle Ages was the treatise In honorem sanctae crucis (“In Honor of the Holy Cross”) by Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780–​856), a monk, teacher, and abbot at Fulda (see Figure 27.5).29 In thirty carmina figurata (a late antique form of figured poem)—​two prefaces and twenty-​eight compositions dedicated to the cross—​Hrabanus wove together complicated poetic arrangements, some of whose meanings could be gleaned by picking out words that were coterminous with pictorial elements layered on the grid of letters. Some of the images are manifestly figural: Christ with outstretched arms, symbols of the

Cohen, Uta Codex. Coon, Dark Age Bodies.

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Figure  27.5 Hrabanus Maurus before the Cross. In honorem sanctae crucis, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 652 fol. 33v. Photo © ÖNB Vienna.

Evangelists, and Hrabanus himself prostrate before the cross. (Some copies of this popular work also have frontispieces showing Hrabanus, accompanied by Alcuin (d. 804), presenting the book either to St. Martin of Tours or to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, and Hrabanus giving the book to Pope Gregory 537

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IV.) Most of the pages, however, feature either words (e.g. Alleluia) or various geometric shapes (squares, pentagons, pyramids, etc.) disposed in a foursquare pattern to emulate the shape of the cross itself. Individually and as a group, these compositions communicate, among other things, the cosmic, eternal, and mathematical dimensions of the cross, Christ’s unification of the divine and human substance, the harmony of the Old and New Testaments, and the redemptive power of the cross. The poems and imagery articulate the importance of the Church and the purity and virtue of monastic life, and in this regard In honorem sanctae crucis must be appreciated in two ways. First, the value of the figured poems was in their very creation; whether or not they were ever fully understood, they were an act of devotion to Christ and the cross (under which Hrabanus offers himself in humble prayer). In this the treatise is similar to Eadfrith’s Lindisfarne Gospels with its remarkably detailed interlace pages. Second, the intricate compositions offered the educated monastic viewer fertile raw material for the verbal, visual, and mental contemplatio that was fundamental to the monastic process of intellectual and spiritual elevation, much like the Uta Codex.30 The structure of sites like Saint-​Bénigne at Dijon and the text of Candidus Brun of Fulda are indications that buildings, too, were meant to bring monastics closer to God by stimulating the intellectual faculties.

Conclusion: Monastic Expansion and Reform The most fundamental concept of Christian monasticism—​that an individual should try to imitate God and seek union with the divine while on earth—​is rooted in the experience of the earliest desert monastics. Over the course of the early and central Middle Ages, this mission progressively became a collective affair as monastics increasingly (though not exclusively) joined together in communities that were supported by the laity, who gave family members and material goods in exchange for perceived spiritual benefits. Monasteries not only provided seclusion for men and women to pursue a religious life but also became repositories of family memory, as at Gernrode and Essen. In addition, many were repositories of saintly relics venerated by monastics and lay people alike. While such processes supported more monks or nuns, and larger churches and architectural complexes, they also presented

On monastic contemplation in general, with special regard to the use of the visual in that process, see the classic Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990; 2nd. ed. 2008); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​1200 (Cambridge, 1998).

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challenges to monastic seclusion; the Plan of St. Gall and San Vincenzo al Volturno indicate two responses to the problem of segregating the laity from the monastics.31 Above all, the eighth through eleventh centuries saw a dramatic increase of government involvement in monasticism by Carolingian, Anglo-​Saxon, and Ottonian rulers (and by extension their nobility), as well as the proliferation of new and reformed houses operating according to the RB. Such foundations as Saint-​Denis, Centula, and Fulda demonstrate how a connection to the royal house could turn a monastery into a center of worldly power, while the external support allowed the monks to expand their holdings, their physical structures, and their artistic treasures. Under Louis the Pious, Benedict of Aniane spearheaded a movement to regularize monastic practice throughout the empire based on the RB, and most of the objects discussed in this essay were the products of houses following this rule.32 Some, like the Uta Codex and the Benedictional of Æthelwold, explicitly articulated an ideal of reform according to their interpretations of the RB, a mandate to adopt more stringent guidelines for the benefit of the foundation’s members, the institution as an entity, and society at large. It was the Anglo-​Saxons at the end of the tenth century who, acting self-​ consciously on the model of the Carolingians, most clearly demonstrated the reciprocal relationship between court and cloister through the process of reform.33 A frontispiece to a charter (uniquely in book format) issued by King Edgar (r. 957/​9–​75) in 966 to mark his imposition of the RB at the New Minster in Winchester crystallizes this movement.34 The charter was only one part of the king’s larger enterprise to reform all the monasteries of England, which he pursued with the help of three great ecclesiastics:  Æthelwold (abbot of Abingdon and then bishop of Winchester), Dunstan (d. 988; abbot of Glastonbury and later archbishop of Canterbury), and Oswald (d. 992; bishop of Worcester and then archbishop of York). A  rich constellation of illuminated manuscripts shows that the Anglo-​Saxon reformers were unusually explicit about visually communicating their theory of monastic reform. In particular, the pictures in manuscripts associated with Æthelwold articulated the mutual theological-​political reinforcement of the secular and sacred

On this topic, see the article by Cochelin in this volume. See the articles by Kramer and Contreni in this volume. 33 See the article by Jones in this volume. 34 London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. VIII. See Adam S. Cohen, “King Edgar Leaping and Dancing Before the Lord,” in Imagining the Jew in Anglo-​Saxon Literature and Culture, ed. Samantha Zacher (Toronto, 2016), 219–​36, with further literature. 31

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realms: the king was understood in monastic terms, while monastics were cast in regal ones.35 While the effects of such Benedictine reform were probably not as extensive as the rhetoric would suggest and did not necessarily last very long, the harmonious cooperation between Edgar and Æthelwold was a remarkable expression of the desire to reshape the entire Anglo-​Saxon landscape according to the ideals of monastic ideology. In sum, the buildings and objects associated with monasteries from the eighth through eleventh centuries reveal how important material things could be for the monks and nuns who made and used them. For historians who seek to chart the development of European monastic life in the medieval world, this period is notable for the institutionalization and expansion of its monasteries—​a process for which art and architecture are important witnesses. Yet this art and architecture is also a reminder that, while general trends may be discerned, each monastery existed in a local context, and there was a great deal of variation. Artists, for example, executed their work in local styles and were inspired by but did not slavishly copy earlier models, and structural types of monastic architecture likewise depended on local conditions and traditions, both topographical and ideological. Variety and difference aside, all of the examples discussed in this essay demonstrate that works of art and architecture were a powerful method for monastics throughout early and central medieval Europe to communicate shared, intangible, values through their built environment and the materials at their command. These values were, above all, the importance of the individual foundation and the commemoration of the dead (both monastic and lay), the monastery as a site for monks and nuns to join the saints on earth and in heaven, and the use of material objects to assist in their spiritual ascent toward perfect union with God in this world and the next.

Bibliography Brown, Catherine. “Remember the Hand:  Bodies and Bookmaking in Early Medieval Spain.” Word + Image 27 (2011): 262–​78. Brown, Michelle. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. Toronto, 2003. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge, 1990; 2nd. ed. 2008.   The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge, 1998.

London, British Library, Add. MS 49598. See Deshman, Benedictional of Aethelwold; and his essays in Deshman, Eye and Mind.

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Monastic Art and Architecture, c. 700–1100 Cohen, Adam S. The Uta Codex: Art, Reform, and Philosophy in Eleventh-​Century Germany. University Park, PA, 2000. Coon, Lynda. Dark Age Bodies:  Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West. Philadelphia, PA, 2011. Crusius, Irene, ed. Studien zum Kanonissenstift. Göttingen, 2001. De Rubeis, Flavia, and Federico Marazzi, eds. Monasteri in Europa occidentale (secoli VIII–​XI). Topografia e strutture. Rome, 2008. Deshman, Robert. The Benedictional of Aethelwold. Princeton, NJ, 1995.   Eye and Mind: Collected Essays in Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval Art, edited and with an introduction by Adam S. Cohen. Kalamazoo, MI, 2010. Frings, Jutta, and Jan Gerchow, eds. Krone und Schleier. Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöster. Munich, 2005. Hamburger, Jeffrey F., and Susan Marti, eds. Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries. New York, 2008. Hiscock, Nigel, ed. The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium. Turnhout, 2003. Hodges, Richard. Light in the Dark Ages:  The Rise and Fall of San Vincenzo al Volturno. London, 1997. Jacobsen, Werner. “Saints’ Tombs in Frankish Church Architecture.” Speculum 72 (1997): 1107–​43. Malone, Carolyn Marino. Saint-​Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, totius Galliae basilicis mirabilior. Interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique. Turnhout, 2009. McClendon, Charles. The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600–​900. New Haven, CT, 2005. Ó Carragáin, Éamonn. Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition. Toronto, 2005. O’Reilly, Jennifer. ‘“Know Who and What He Is’:  The Context and Inscriptions of the Durham Gospels Crucifixion Image.” In Making and Meaning: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference in Insular Art, edited by Rachel Moss, 301–​16. Dublin, 2007. Raaijmakers, Janneke. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.  744–​c. 900. Cambridge, 2012.

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Monastic Daily Life (c. 750–​1100): A Tight Community Shielded by an Outer Court Isa b e l l e Co chelin Much can be revealed about monastic daily life by observing innovations in and through our sources. While discussing some of them in this article for the period between the late eighth century and the eleventh—​through a discussion of customaries, the claustral area (claustrum), the chapter house, the recruitment of children, and the outer court—​I will argue that we should be more critical about what have long been considered fundamental tenets of medieval monastic life, especially the literal application of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), total obedience toward the abbot, and strict separation from the secular world. While this last idea has already been challenged, much remains to be said about the complexity of the interaction between the community within the monastery and the exterior.1 Much also remains to be told about the sway of the community itself.

Customaries Monastic customaries describe the daily customs (consuetudines) of a community, whether inside or outside the choir. They are, therefore, ideal sources for exploring monastic conceptions of space and daily life. They need also to be discussed here in their own right as they tell us much about the decision-​ making process within monasteries. Customaries began to appear around the late eighth century; by the late eleventh century, however, their conditions of composition and use had changed Thank you to Susan Boynton, Albrecht Diem, Mayke de Jong, Joe Goering, Bert Roest, and Marc Saurette for their comments. All mistakes are mine. 1 Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, II:  c. 700–​c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 623; Arnoud-​Jan Bijsterveld, “Conclusions,” in Ecclesia in medio nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages/​Réflexions sur l’étude du monachisme au Moyen Âge central, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (Leuven, 2011), 211–​12.

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significantly.2 From the beginning of cenobitic monasticism, perhaps even more than any rule, including the RB, local customs, which were agreed upon and enacted in practice by the entire community, governed monastic daily life.3 Customaries emerged around the time of the progressive imposition of the RB in the Carolingian era, partly because they facilitated its adaptation to the world of the late eighth century.4 Before explaining how they were used at the time and in the following centuries, it is worth pointing out that, after the late eleventh century, they changed purpose: they were then written down to help the new influx of adult newcomers adapt to their new life—​prior to this period, the majority of new arrivals to the monastery were oblates (children given by their parents), who learned customs through the simple process of assimilation, not through the reading of customaries.5 Moreover, from the early twelfth century, customaries also began to ensure uniformity of practices within the newly emerging religious orders in which adult converts abounded.6 In the central Middle Ages, between the late eighth century and the mid-​ eleventh century, however, customaries were created, not for use within one house or one order, but rather to help other monasteries to learn about the way of life in an outstanding monastery such as Montecassino or Fleury.7 There were some exceptions. Occasionally great prelates seeking a broad reform of monastic life, often in collaboration with a secular ruler, would supervise the creation of what scholars today call, probably improperly, a customary, in the hope of imposing it on a large territory. Examples of this type of text are few, but include the Regularis concordia (Rc), written between the mid-​960s and early 970s, primarily by Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester (r. 963–​ 84) under King Edgar (r. 957/​ 9–​ 75),8 and the Decreta Lanfranci,





Lin Donnat, “Les coutumiers monastiques: une nouvelle entreprise et un territoire nouveau,” Revue Mabillon 3 (1992): 5–​21; Isabelle Cochelin, “Downplayed or Silenced: Authorial Voices behind Customaries and Customs (Eighth–​Eleventh Centuries),” in Shaping Stability:  The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 153–​73. See also the article by Bruce in this volume. 3 Jacques Dubois, “Les moines dans la société du Moyen Âge (950–​1350),” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 60.174 (1974): 11. 4 See the article by Diem and Rousseau in this volume. 5 Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image:  Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (600–​900) (Leiden, 1996); Charles de Miramon, “Embrasser l’état monastique à l’âge adulte (1050–​ 1200): étude de la conversion tardive,” Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales 54.4 (1999): 825–​49. 6 See the articles by Mancia and Melville in volume II. 7 Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources,” in Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. Carolyn Malone and Clark Maines (Turnhout, 2014), 27–​55. See also the articles by Lifshitz and Vanderputten in this volume. 8 See the article by Jones in this volume. 2

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composed by Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury (r. 1070–​89) before 1089. In most cases, however, the impulse for a customary came from the desire to know better the customs of a remarkable institution. Hence, at the end of the eighth century, a noble from Francia asked the abbot of Montecassino to write down the customs of his abbey for an as yet unidentified monastery,9 and in the early eleventh century, a German prelate asked an ex-​monk from Fleury to write down the customs from his former house for another unspecified monastery.10 Although most customaries written before the late eleventh century—​with the rare exception of those such as the Rc and the Decreta—​ paint an idealized portrait of monastic daily life, that portrait is still grounded in the practices enacted by a given community. One lesson that we can extract from customaries written in the central Middle Ages is indeed that the customs that guided the daily life of a monastery emerged from traditions created and kept by the community of monks or nuns over generations—​not statutes imposed by superiors or by a text. Ulrich of Zell (d. 1093)  and Bernard of Cluny, each the author of a late eleventh-​ century customary describing Cluny, offer a notable glimpse into how new customs had been created prior to their time:  they had to be presented in chapter by a boy, because no-​one would have hesitated to contradict one so young and lacking in authority.11 In other words, for customs to exist as such they had to be embraced by the whole community. Customaries also allow us to observe how monks and nuns conceived of their daily life and space. What did they think was worth talking about? What did they ignore? Liturgy occupied the lion’s share of their attention, but they also addressed issues such as hierarchy, distribution of food and clothing, and the rituals to integrate or leave the community for travel, major lapses, sickness, death, etc.12 In other words, much is about how “they” (or “we,” depending on the author’s status) live together. Interestingly, the customaries generally have little to say about the interactions that monks and nuns must have had with the outside world, especially with individuals present in the



Theodomar of Monte-​Cassino, Theodomari abbatis Casinensis epistula ad Theodoricum gloriosum (778–​97), ed. Jacob Winandy and Kassius Hallinger, CCM 1, 125–​36. 10 Thierry of Amorbach, Le coutumier de Fleury. Consuetudines Floriacenses antiquiores par Thierry d’Amorbach, ed., trans., and notes Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat, in L’abbaye de Fleury en l’an mil (Paris, 2004), 168–​257. 11 Ulrich of Zell, Consuetudines antiquiores Cluniacenses, PL 149, 658; Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis, in Vetus disciplina monastica, ed. Marquard Herrgott (Paris, 1726), reprint ed. Pius Engelbert (Siegburg, 1999), 310; Cochelin, “Downplayed or Silenced,” 169–​70. 12 On liturgy, see the articles by Billett and Blennemann in this volume and the article by Boynton in volume II. 9

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outer court. Hundreds of lay servants, serfs, pious lay residents, noble and poor visitors, and probably penitents and secular students, were present in a great abbey on a daily basis, but the customaries are quite laconic on this issue. Some details are offered, for instance, about the daily life of a monk living at an agricultural outpost, but they specify first and foremost how he should protect himself from contact with the outside world.13 Other passages concern the reception of passersby by the almoner and the hospitaller, but little is said about non-monastic locals such as servants or prebendaries. While charters and capitularies highlight that monasteries were key participants in the world,14 customaries prove how deeply ingrained was the monks’ and nuns’ conviction that they lived in partial isolation.

The Claustral Area The inward focus observed in customaries is also corroborated by the changes in the spatial organization of monasteries during the central Middle Ages. The layout of a cloister and around it a church, a chapter house (often with a dormitory above), and a refectory is another innovation of this period.15 The first indisputable witness to the organization of monastic life around a cloister is found in the Plan of St. Gall, dating to the 820s.16 The plan clearly illustrates





See Michèle Gaillard, “L’accueil des laïcs dans les monastères (Ve–​IXe siècle), d’après les règles monastiques,” and Eleonora Destefanis, “Le monastère face aux laïques au haut Moyen Âge: lieux de culte secondaires et accueil aux limites de l’espace monastique dans le contexte italien,” in Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle, ed. Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, BUCEMA, hors-​série 8 (2015), https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​ 13577 and https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13599 (date of last access:  23 April 2019); and Philippe Racinet, “La vie quotidienne dans les petits prieurés bénédictins (XIe–​XVe siècles),” in La vie quotidienne des moines et chanoines réguliers au Moyen Âge et temps modernes. Actes du premier colloque international du L.A.R.H.C.O.R., ed. Marek Derwich (Wroclaw, 1995), 141–​53. 14 See the articles by Devroey and Rosé in this volume and the article by Lyon in volume II. 15 De Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism,” 636–​40; and the article by Lauwers in this volume. For (geographical) variations, see Chiara Carloni, “Il chiostro come punto di passagio,” and Federico Marazzi, “Refettori e refezzione nei monasteri altomedievali: uno sguardo attraverso l’archeologia e le fonti scritte,” in Gli spazi della vita communitaria. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studio: Roma-​Subiaco, 8–​10 giugno 2015, ed. Letizia Ermini Pani (Spoleto, 2016), 207–​37 and 329–​69 (esp. 360). 16 See especially www.stgallplan.org/​ (date of last access: 23 April 2019); Peter K. Klein, ed., Der mittelalterliche Kreuzgang. Architektur, Funktion und Programm (Regensburg, 2004); and Alfons Zettler, “Spaces for Servants and provendarii in Early Medieval Monasteries:  The Example of the Virtual Monastery on the Plan of Saint Gall,” in Bully and Sapin, Au seuil du cloître, https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13624 (date of last access: 23 April 2019). 13

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the complex relationship with the world beyond the monastery that monastics conceived for themselves: they turned their backs to the secular world, thanks to the cloister, while simultaneously increasingly welcoming contact with it at their doors, interacting with guests, artisans, lay servants, etc., in the outer court.17 The name claustrum itself is telling: literally, it means “barrier.” Here one finds a subspace of the monastery that can be fully enclosed. At least by the late tenth century, from Compline to Lauds and sometimes again during resting hours (meridiana) and the chapter meeting, the claustral area (the cloister and the rooms encircling it, such as the chapter, dormitory, and refectory) was forbidden to all outside the community, especially to the laity; only visiting monastics were sometimes allowed to sleep in the dormitory, and therefore to join the community in these hours. Conversely, no-​one within the community was permitted to leave the claustral area when it was closed to the outside, with the exception of a few monastic officers charged with undertaking exceptional tasks.18 Other customs reinforced the exclusive closeness within a monastic community. For example, while the claustrum was cut off from the outside world at night, no human conversation could take place, and silence (outside the celebration of the Hours) was the norm. This did not mean a time of solitude for each monk or nun (as could be the case today, with individual cells).19 Many communal activities took place during these hours, including entering and leaving the dormitory together more than once, and celebrating Compline, Matins, and Lauds. Moreover, monks and nuns could still interact with each other through sign language, which added one more intracommunity bond and another layer of separation from the outside world.20 Between their various nocturnal liturgical activities, the monastics slept in their dormitory, a communal space par excellence that had become a standard feature (at least in Carolingian realms) less than a century or two before our





On the latter, see Richard Sullivan, “What was Carolingian Monasticism: The Plan of Saint Gall and the History of Monasticism,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History, ed. Alexander C. Murray (Toronto, 1998), 261–​87. 18 Thierry of Amorbach, Le coutumier de Fleury, 188; Liber tramitis aeui Odilonis abbatis, ed. Peter Dinter, CCM 10, 251; Ulrich of Zell, Consuetudines antiquiores Cluniacenses, 765; Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis, 152. Regarding local and regional differences, see Christopher Riedel, “Praising God Together:  Monastic Reformers and Laypeople in Tenth-​Century Winchester,” Catholic Historical Review, 102.2 (2016): 305–​9. 19 Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, “Performing Silence and Regulating Sound:  The Monastic Soundscape of Saint-​ Jean-​ des-​ Vignes,” in Resounding Images:  Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Turnhout, 2015), 51. 20 Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition (ca 900–​1200) (Cambridge, 2009). 17

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period.21 In these dormitories, the monastics had individual beds, a rare feature at a time in which beds were normally shared, but here the fear of inappropriate physical contact trumped other considerations. Depending on the house and the period, the abbot or abbess might sleep with the community or separately, and, in the latter case, in one room or a separate house inside the claustrum or in the outer court.22 At least by the late twelfth century, the abbot’s palace at Silos was located within the claustral area.23 More research is necessary regarding the position, size, and regulation of the superior’s personal space.24 Cluny was probably one of the most ascetic—​an adjective I use deliberately here, as scholars rarely associate it with this monastery, and especially for anything concerning its abbot—​on this issue. The abbots of Cluny, in fact, may have definitively moved out of the dormitory only by the later fifteenth century.25 Scholars often compare the abbot of Cluny to a monarch, but do monarchs sleep in dormitories?26

The Chapter Perhaps the most active vocal interaction within a community took place during the chapter meeting (capitulum). Benedict had already spoken in his rule of the necessity of a daily meeting, but the chapter house (also called capitulum) is another characteristic of monastic life that only made its appearance in Western monasticism in the late eighth or early ninth century.27 The chapter house illustrates both spatially and functionally the importance of the communal voice. Some scholars have seen this space in a different



Virginia Jansen, “Architecture and Community in Medieval Monastic Dormitories,” in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, vol. 5, ed. Meredith Lillich (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), 69–​70; Albrecht Diem, “Organisierte Keuschheit:  organisierte Heiligkeit. Individuum und Institutionalisierung im frühen gallo-​fränkischen Klosterwesen,” in Das Charisma. Funktionen und symbolische Repräsentation, ed. Pavlina Rychterova et al. (Berlin, 2008), 329–​31. 22 See RB 53 and 56; Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall, 3 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1979), 1:22 and 323–​4; and Jansen, “Architecture and Community,” 76–​8. 23 Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo, Palace of the Mind: The Cloisters of Silos and Spanish Culture of the Twelfth Century (Turnhout, 2012), 306. 24 Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture:  The Archaeology of Religious Women (London, 1994), 119–​20. 25 Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “The Hôtel de Cluny and the Origins of the Gallery in the Parisian Hôtel,” in Europaïsche Galeriebauten: Galleries in a Comparative European Perspective, ed. Elisabeth Kievan and Christina Strunck (Munich, 2010), 68. 26 Jean Leclercq, “Pour une histoire de la vie à Cluny,” Revue de l’histoire ecclésiastique 57.2 (1962): 389–​90. 27 See Roberta Cerone, “ ‘Regula in capitulo pronunciata fuerit’:  la sala capitolare nei monasteri medievali (secc. IX–​ XIII),” in Ermini Pani, Gli spazi della vita communitaria,  51–​83. 21

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light, depicting it as dominated by the abbot, but such a claim is not corroborated by archaeology, customaries, or terminology. For example, in the customary known as Memoriale qualiter II, written at the end of the tenth century for a female monastery, we read that “after [Terce and the morning mass], convening in chapter, their faces turned toward the east, [the nuns] should salute the cross and then, rotating humbly, incline themselves towards each other.”28 The cross is almost always mentioned in customaries, and some also indicate there was a pulpit close by where the readings were done. To my knowledge, however, there are no indications of a specific (elevated) seat for the abbot or abbess. Each day, a chapter of the RB was read in this room (though scholars are now less convinced that it was this practice that gave the chapter room its name).29 It served also to enact one of Benedict’s early requirements (RB 3) that the abbot discuss all the affairs of the monastery with his monks, the minor ones with a selected group of elders (seniores) and the major ones with the whole community, including the iuniores (those past their profession, approximately fifteen and older). The early ninth-​century commentaries on the RB by Smaragdus (d. c. 840) and Hildemar (fl. c. 845)—​further new and useful tools, in addition to the customaries, to adapt the sixth-​century rule to the ninth-​century monastic world, and additional important sources to learn about monastic daily life—​discuss this practice. Interestingly, they modify Benedict’s message to increase the importance of consultation.30 A  similar discourse can be found in contemporary saints’ Lives.31 It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that the room for these communal debates, the chapter house, appeared right around the same time. This evolution should also, perhaps, be understood in the context of the Carolingian policy regarding abbots and monasteries.32





Memoriale Qualiter II, ed. Claude Morgand, CCM 1, 270. Heidrun Stein-​Kecks, “ ‘Claustrum’ and ‘capitulum’: Some Remarks on the Façade and Interior of the Chapter House,” in Klein, Der mittelalterliche Kreuzgang, 168. 30 On these two texts, see the articles by Diem and Rousseau, and Kramer in this volume. See also Hildemar, Expositio regulae; Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel, Expositio in regulam sancti Benedicti, ed. Alfred Spannagel and Pius Engelbert, CCM 8, 81; and Isabelle Cochelin, “Discussions au chapitre (IXe–​XIe siècle): la place (réelle et symbolique) de l’abbé était-​elle si dominante?” in Des communautés aux États. Mélanges offerts à Michel Hébert, ed. Jean-​Luc Bonnaud et al., Memini. Travaux et documents, 19–​20 (2015–​16): 341–​3, http://​journals.openedition.org/​memini/​834 (date of last access: 23 April 2019). 31 For instance Candidus (Brun) of Fulda, Vita Aegil abbatis Fuldensis a Candido 6 and 20–​2, ed. Gereon Becht-​Jördens (Marburg, 1994), 8 and 17–​18. See Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744–​c. 900 (Cambridge, 2012), 244–​6. 32 See the article by Kramer in this volume.

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29

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Another fundamental function of the chapter meeting—​now known as the chapter of faults and not mentioned in the RB—​was monks’ or nuns’ confession of punishable acts or denunciation by others. These others could be brothers of any rank, including the claustral prior or the two circatores, who literally circled the claustral area to check for misbehavior, especially at night.33 The one charged with overseeing the chapter meeting—​often identified simply as “the one holding chapter” or the prior (probably to be understood here as the highest-​ranking person in the room)—​would then impose a penance, which could include immediate whipping. Many scholars tend to associate this ceremony with a trial, imagining the abbot seated as a judge, but this judicial reading is only valid for the later Middle Ages.34 In the central Middle Ages, the image is more one of Christ facing Pontius Pilate, and the goal of the exercise was primarily penitential. Indeed, the customaries do not depict this as a process dominated by an abbot or abbess, but rather as a fundamentally communal endeavor, so much so that the term conventus or conventus fratrum (the “community of the brothers”) is sometimes used as a synonym for the chapter of faults.35 The first source to mention the construction of a chapter house, an account of the deeds of the abbots of Fontenelle (later known as Saint-​Wandrille) written by Abbot Ansegisus (d. 833)  around 822–​3, tells us that the monks, unsure what to call it, were referring to it by the Greek and Latin terms for the Senate, bouleuterion and curia, in addition to the name conventus.36 Later, in monastic charters, the term capitulum (chapter) was sometimes used to refer to the whole community, to stipulate that it had agreed to a transaction made by the abbot or abbess. Thus, as practices and terminology well illustrate, this room and the activities that took place within it were first and foremost communally based. Another ritual, occasionally connected with the chapter room and one that also conveys the flavor of monastic daily life in the central Middle Ages, is the Maundy (mandatum),37 a ceremony that scholars primarily associate with

Scott G. Bruce, “ ‘Lurking with Spiritual Intent’: A Note on the Origin and Functions of the Monastic Roundsman (circator),” Revue bénédictine 109 (1999): 75–​89. 34 Elisabeth Lusset, “Excessus deliquentium in capitulo proclamantur: dénoncer le crime au sein des monastères au Moyen Âge (XIIe–​XVe siècle),” in Dénoncer le crime du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle, ed. Martine Charageat and Mathieu Soula (Bordeaux, 2014), 30–​3. 35 Cochelin, “Discussions au chapitre,” 350–​1. 36 Pascal Pradié, ed. and trans., Les gestes des abbés de Fontenelle (Paris, 1999), 170–​1. 37 Eliana Magnani, “Le pauvre, le Christ et le moine: la correspondance de rôles et les cérémonies du mandatum à travers les coutumiers clunisiens du XIe siècle,” in Les clercs, les fidèles et les saints en Bourgogne médiévale, ed. Vincent Tabbagh (Dijon, 2005), 11–​26; Jörg Sonntag, “Die Samstagfusswaschung bei Cluniazensern und Zisterziensern: Gehorsam und symbolische Demut zwischen monasticher Konkurrenz, Regel und Gewohnheit,” 33

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Holy Thursday, as the most elaborate Maundy was performed that day. This ritual consisted of two parts: the abbot and the monks washed the feet of an equivalent number of poor, either in the cloister or close to the almonry; and the abbot (often with help from some elders) washed the feet of all the monks in the chapter house. In both cases, the goal was to reenact Christ washing the feet of the Apostles after the Last Supper ( John 13). While the same ritual took place in cathedrals only on Holy Thursday, its enactment in monasteries was not thus restricted. Every day during the warmer half of the year, a few monks (usually three, chosen by rotation) washed the feet of the same number of poor in or close to the almonry.38 More importantly in the present context, the monks in charge of the kitchen ended their week of service by washing the feet of their own community every Saturday in the chapter house (RB 35.9).39 This service, including the washing of feet, was practiced in rotation and all participated. Thus any monk would have repeatedly embodied Christ to his brethren and abbot in the chapter house—​ a telling spatial choice for this ritual.

Oblation and Recruitment While the children in the monastery shared the kitchen duty just mentioned, they did not normally participate in the weekly Maundy, probably because of the problems of physical intimacy raised by the latter. They were called oblates (meaning literally “the ones offered”) or nutriti (the ones “raised”). Aged between three and the onset of puberty, they had been offered by their family to become nuns or monks. Although children had been present within monasteries since the beginning of monasticism,40 it was probably only in the Carolingian period that oblation, rather than adult conversion, became the main form of recruitment to male monastic life.41 Oblates were distinguished from adult converts (conversi). The significant increase in adult conversions





in Oboedientia. Zu Formen und Grenzen von Macht und Unterordnung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Sébastien Barret and Gert Melville (Münster, 2005), 255–​80. 38 Isabelle Cochelin, “Les famuli à l’ombre des monastères (Cluny et Fleury, Xe et XIe siècles,” in La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe). II:  questions transversales, ed. Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​ Gaubert (Cairo, 2018), 329–​30. 39 See for instance Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis, 237. 40 See the article by Giorda in this volume. 41 See de Jong, “In Samuel’s Image”; Peter Erhart, “La vie quotidienne des moines en Italie du nord jusqu’au IXe siècle d’après les sources littéraires,” in Delouis and Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines, 424; and the article by Giorda in this volume.

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in the late eleventh century and the evolution of canon law led, however, in the mid-​twelfth century, to the condemnation of oblation and thus to its steep decline.42 By then, when most converts were adults, the terms oblati and conversi took new meanings, the latter designating lay brothers.43 But the cloisters of the central Middle Ages were filled with many more children than in any previous or subsequent period, at least in male monasteries. Having been recruited in childhood to a given house, monks would have had a strong sense of identity with and connection to their monastic community, its customs, its buildings, and its legends.44 Female monasteries of the central Middle Ages, however, may not have been so different from the previous and later centuries with regard to recruitment age. Indeed, they were less affected by the condemnation of oblation in the twelfth century, as noble families continued to use female houses as (temporary or permanent) abodes for their daughters.45 Moreover, widows always constituted an important contingent of newcomers.46 While their arrival might have generated some centrifugal tensions, “family bonds created strong loyalties within the cloister.”47 Indeed, one finds sisters, aunts and nieces, mothers and daughters living in the same community more often, it seems, than one finds relatives in male monasteries.48 In his letter introducing his customary describing the customs of Cluny for the abbey of Hirsau, dating to c. 1080, Ulrich of Zell explains the motivations of parents who donated their children:  they had too many children and wanted to get rid of their handicapped ones, including those he termed “half-​ men or half-​alive.”49 One should not, however, be blinded by this complaint;



Nora Berend, “Une invisible subversion:  la disparition de l’oblation irrévocable des enfants,” Médiévales 26 (1994): 123–​36. 43 On lay brothers, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in volume II. 44 On the latter, see among others Amy Rememsnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995); and Isabelle Rosé, “Les moines et leur vie communautaire du IXe au XIIe siècle:  tour d’horizon historiographique,” in Vanderputten and Meijns, Ecclesia in medio nationis,  33–​4. 45 On oblation in female monasteries, see Penelope Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 13–​34. 46 Michel Parisse, Religieux et religieuses en Empire du Xe au XIIe siècle (Paris, 2011), 173–​89. For England see, however, Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, I: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-​Saxon England (Aldershot, 2000), 120–​34. 47 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 249. 48 Ibid., 20; and Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, c. 600–​900 (Cambridge, 2006),  150–​1. 49 Ulrich de Zell, “Ulrich of Zell’s Customary, Dedicatory Epistle and Proemium,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Cluniac Customs/​Du cour de la nuit à la fin du jour. Les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Âge, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 331. 42

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the majority of the oblates were certainly not mentally or severely physically handicapped, as Ulrich himself proves when he accuses oblates, in this same text, of monopolizing all positions of importance within monasteries. His complaint about oblation was probably due to his own vexation that he had not been given any top position within Cluny. Still, if we read between the lines of vitae, we can confirm that some parents did, in fact, give their more fragile children to the Church.50 Odo of Cluny (d. 942), who was frail at birth and who suffered with terrible headaches in adolescence, is one such example.51 It is also clear reading the RB, and especially the customaries, that much care was given to the health of the very young in monasteries. Quite possibly, many oblates owed their survival to a cloistered life, with its usually well-​f urnished infirmary, balanced diet, and relatively danger-​free existence.52 It is difficult to determine how the oblates were cared for emotionally. Variations from one monastery to the next must have been significant, and information on the issue is sparse or not necessarily trustworthy. One early twelfth-​century Life, for example, includes an anecdote that evokes the great sadness of the community of Paray-​le-​Monial at the news that one of their oblates had died in an accident.53 While the depiction of this emotional bond may have been a literary device, employed to give more panache to the miracle that ensued, the vocabulary used in customaries for child monks, commonly called infantes, is telling. This term was generally reserved either for children below the age of seven—​and most oblates were given around that age and would thus have been older—​or (as we see in monastic charters) for offspring, irrespective of age. Its use in the customaries of the central Middle Ages might well relate to the second definition and, thus, would be indicative of how much these children were considered to be an integral part of the monastic family: as adoptive and communal offspring. Oblates participated in all of the activities of the adult monks, learning customs through observation, imitation, and repetition. But they were also generally kept slightly apart in the choir, in the seating arrangement in the refectory, in the cloister, in the chapter of the adult monks, and so on. Further, each community would have dealt with its children quite differently. Eadmer of Canterbury (d. before 1130) evokes an abbot whose oblates were

Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 22–​3; and Foot, Monastic Llife in Anglo-​Saxon England,  183–​4. 51 John of Salerno, Life of St Odo, in Gerard Sitwell, St. Odo of Cluny (London, 1958), 8–​11. 52 See the article by Brenner in volume II. 53 Gilon of Toucy, Vita Hugonis Cluniacensis abbatis, ed. Herbert E.  J. Cowdrey, “Two Studies on Cluniac History: I. Memorials of Abbot Hugh of Cluny (1049–​1109),” Studi Gregoriani 11 (1978): 77.

50

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beaten excessively, and the story was probably told because the problem was not uncommon.54 At Cluny, multiple measures were put in place to prevent the possibility of sexual pollution resulting from the presence of children and adolescents.55 While cases of pedophilia were occasionally recorded, it is impossible to estimate its prevalence.56 At Fleury, however, the focus was given to the oblates’ education.57 Indeed, Fleury’s customary was written in the early eleventh century, when the Tourangelle abbey was famous for its teaching. It is thus probably not a coincidence that it speaks of free time provided to the boys, as this would have facilitated their learning process. The treatment of oblates must have varied among monasteries but also through time within the same house. Most monastic recruits in the central Middle Ages, whether oblates or adult converts, were probably from the nobility, another distinct feature of the period and one that must have helped to build internal cohesion.58 This claim of uniform social origin is impossible to substantiate for all monastics, however, and we should be aware that the conversion of the non-​noble might have left fewer traces in Lives, charters, or chronicles—​with the arresting exception of John of Gorze (d. 974), whose father might not even have been free and whose Life is so full of rebounds.59

Kitchen Duty The activities of the lay nobility from which monks and nuns were, at least in theory, most obviously excluded were fighting, begetting legitimate children, hunting, and the eating of meat. This last exclusion, however, was often ignored. Most striking were the many activities that were performed in the lay world by slaves, serfs, or servants, which nuns and monks had, again in theory, to accomplish themselves: field work (at least at harvest time), cooking, and



Eadmer of Canterbury, The Life of St Anselm, Archhishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. Richard W. Southern (Oxford, 1979), 37–​8. 55 Isabelle Cochelin, “Adolescence Uncloistered (Cluny, Early 12th Century),” in Medieval Lifecycles:  Continuity and Change, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Smyth (Turnhout, 2013),  155–​7. 56 Peter the Venerable, De miraculis libri duo, ed. Denise Bouthillier, CCCM 83/​1, 46–​7. See also the article by Steckel in volume II, and Christian Knudsen, “Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks: Monastic Misconduct in Late Medieval England” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012), 112–​13, https://​tspace.library.utoronto.ca/​handle/​1807/​ 67281 (date of last access: 10 July 2018). 57 Thierry of Amorbach, Le coutumier de Fleury, 194. 58 Parisse, Religieux et religieuses, 47. 59 See Michel Parisse, “Introduction,” in L’abbaye de Gorze au Xe siècle, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle and Michel Parisse (Nancy, 1993), 16–​17. 54

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cleaning.60 These activities would have set them apart from their lay noble counterparts in a striking way. If such had been the ideal at the time of the redaction of the RB—​Benedict quite probably did not envisage servants, and even less slaves or serfs, within his monastery, unlike other contemporary monasteries61—​by the Carolingian era, however, things had changed significantly. As discussed above, monastic compounds now comprised at least two distinct parts: the claustrum and the outer court. In the latter, at least in monasteries documented by customaries, much of the manual work and service activities were performed primarily by lay servants.62 The monks and nuns still did some manual work, such as cleaning and service, but in a much more ritualized way than their counterparts in early cenobitic communities. Kitchen service offers an apt illustration of this phenomenon. Eating well was quite probably a significant occupation of the monastics of the central Middle Ages, once their monasteries had moved beyond what may have been harsh ascetic beginnings.63 In the early twelfth century, in fact, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153)  famously criticized traditional monasteries both for the overly rich decoration of their buildings64 and for their overly plentiful and delicate food.65 This appreciation for food was counterbalanced by complex rituals (such as continuous readings during mealtimes, in accordance with the RB) and decorations on the refectory walls devised to prevent the deadly sin of gluttony.66 But who cooked these marvelous dishes, served and eaten with much solemnity? Scholars have always thought that medieval monks and nuns did their own cooking, based on RB 35, which states that all must work, in turn, for a week, in the kitchen. An examination of customaries indicates, however, that here again Benedict was not followed literally. At least in some abbeys as distinct in tradition as Fleury, Cluny, Gorze, and St. Gall, the weekly cooking service had become mostly symbolic—​a penitential activity limited to the sole preparation of beans, vegetables (cooked with lard), and possibly gruel.

On these activities in the early monastic rules, see the article by Réal in this volume. See, for example, the articles by Díaz and Giorda in this volume. 62 Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture, 74. 63 Kirk Ambrose, “A Medieval Food List from the Monastery of Cluny,” Gastronomica 6.1 (2006): 14; and Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England,  236–​7. 64 See the article by Gajewski and Seeberg in volume II. 65 Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum abbatem, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 3: Tractatus et opuscula, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais (Rome, 1963), 97. 66 Marazzi, “Refettori e refezzione nei monasteri altomedievali,” 329–​69; Diane J. Reilly, “The Cluniac Giant Bible and the Ordo librorum ad legendum:  A Reassessment of Monastic Bible Reading and Cluniac Customary Instructions,” in Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of Day, 163–​89. 60 61

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In another kitchen, very close by but set in the outer court, lay servants were in charge of the many other dishes consumed by monks.67

The Outer Court The outer court, in which the second kitchen was located, occupied around one half to three-​quarters of the whole monastic complex and housed a remarkable variety of people, some visiting, others sheltered temporarily by, praying with, or working for the monastery. The monastic sources, paradoxically, barely evoke this busy space, which explains why so little research has been focused on it. For the monks and nuns, indeed, it was simply an in-​between and a buffer zone. The world came into the outer court, but the double-​lock system (the combination of the door to the outer court and the one to the claustrum) allowed the monks and nuns to feel, if only mentally, far removed from it. It is well known that monasteries served as hotels and hospices in the central Middle Ages. Customaries often discuss the domus hospitorum (“house of the [wealthy] guests”) and domus peregrinorum et pauperum (“house of the pilgrims and the poor”), while Lives and chronicles give references to visits by glorious lords and ladies. The customary of Fleury, dating from around 1000, claims that its guest house for the wealthy was more glorious than a royal palace, except for the fact that it did not have “a crown.”68 While these houses for visitors were not always within the outer court, their inhabitants would have been present in the great courtyard if only to go to church;69 less often, in the case of special visitors and important negotiations, outsiders would also have entered the claustral area.70 There were even abbeys where the local lord had his designated space within the abbey. At St. John in Müstair, in Switzerland, the local lord-​bishop reserved the northern part of the cloister for himself.71





Anselme Davril, “Points de contact entre la Vita Iohannis Gorziensis et les Consuetudines Floriacenses Antiquiores,” in Oexle and Parisse, L’abbaye de Gorze, 186; Isabelle Cochelin, “Deux cuisines pour les moines: coquinae dans les coutumiers du XIe siècle,” in Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieu clos (IVe–​XIXe siècle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-​Donat et al. (Paris, 2015), 89–​113. 68 Thierry of Amorbach, Le coutumier de Fleury, 194. 69 Bully and Sapin, Au seuil du cloître; Julie Kerr, Monastic Hospitality:  The Benedictines in England, c.  1070–​c. 1250 (Woodbridge, 2007); Jutta Maria Berger, Die Geschichte der Gastfreundschaft im hochmittelalterlichen Mönchtum. Die Cistercienser (Berlin, 1999). 70 Sheila Bonde et al., “The Virtual Monastery: Re-​Presenting Time, Human Movement, and Uncertainty at Saint-​Jean-​des-​Vignes, Soissons,” Virtual Resources 25 (2009): 363–​77 (­f igures 7 and 8); and http://​monarch.brown.edu/​monarch/​access.html (date of last access: 30 August 2018). 71 Hans Rudolph Sennhauser, “St. Johann in Müstair als Klosterpfalz,” in Pfalz—​Kloster—​ Klosterpfalz. St Johann in Müstair, ed. H. R. Sennhauser (Zürich, 2010), 3–​28. 67

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At St. Adalbert in Egmond in Holland, all buildings for visitors, including the one reserved for the count, were set within the outer court.72 Further research is needed to determine better which monasteries kept such guests/​owners inside (the outer court or even the claustrum) and which outside; when and where in Europe this happened; and what reasons were offered for doing so. In addition to visitors, individuals participating fully in the spiritual life of the monastery could also be found within the outer court. At Saint-​Aubin of Angers, the monk Girard lived in a little house attached to the church in the early twelfth century, taking care of the sick and admired for his extreme asceticism.73 Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), her magistra, Jutta (d. 1136), and other women lived for many years as recluses in the outer court of the male abbey of Disibodenberg.74 According to the vita of Jutta, written at the demand of Hildegard, the magistra helped lay visitors by discussing their spiritual and personal issues with them.75 The presence of pious women living right outside or inside the outer court of male abbeys was indeed a common phenomenon.76 We can observe this, for instance, at the abbeys of Silos, Bec, Saint-​Jean d’Angély, Fly, and Gorze.77 In many monasteries, there were also prebendarii (prebendaries)—​individuals lodged and fed by the abbeys, often in exchange for their presence at some liturgical celebrations—​who, given their presence in church for Nocturns, must have been lodged in the outer court.78 Numerous servants were also active in the outer court. At Cluny, for instance, there might have been as many lay servants working for the abbey and its numerous visitors as there were monks within the claustral area.79





Marco Mostert, “La clôture brisée: les laïcs dans la vie quotidienne des moines aux Pays-​ Bas septentrionaux (X–​XII siècles): le cas d’Egmond,” in Derwich, La vie quotidienne des moines,  235–​6. 73 Dubois, “Les moines dans la société du Moyen Âge,” 20. 74 Gabriela Signori, “Anchorites in German-​Speaking Regions,” in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2010), 47. On reclusion, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in volume II. On Hildegard, see the articles by Mews and Griffiths in volume II. 75 “The Life of Jutta,” translated in Anna Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard:  The Biographical Sources (Turnhout, 1998), 69–​71. 76 See the articles by Magnani, and Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 77 Valdez del Álamo, Palace of the Mind, 26; Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture, 38; Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 29 and 32; Giulia Barone, “La vie quotidienne dans une grande abbaye réformée: Gorze au Xe siècle,” in Derwich, La vie quotidienne des moines, 131. 78 Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniancensis, 142, 158–​9; Michel Parisse, “Des veuves au monastère,” in Veuves et veuvages dans le haut Moyen Âge. Table ronde organisée à Göttingen (Paris, 1993), 274. 79 Cochelin, “Les famuli à l’ombre des monastères,” 333–​6. 72

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Did they also reside within the outer walls? In the description of the monastery given in the customary known as the Liber tramitis (describing Cluny in the second quarter of the eleventh century for the Italian imperial abbey of Farfa), one building contains a refectory and a dormitory for the lay servants, as if their way of life mirrored the monks’, but this section of the plan is written in the subjunctive, suggesting that it was not yet constructed, if it ever was.80 The Plan of St. Gall, which also reflects an ideal, similarly devotes a significant amount of space to the servants’ lodgings. To have all lay servants eat and sleep together in the outer court, mirroring the monastics’ life, would have been, from those same monastics’ point of view, the perfect way to increase the separation between themselves and the outside world. But the servants would have had to be willing to do so. Around 1080, Ulrich of Zell encouraged William of Hirsau to take all lay people (sometimes of relatively high status) who had chosen to devote their life to serve the abbey into the monastic compound, as the prior Gérard had already done in the Cluniac priory of La-​Charité-​sur-​Loire.81 This would definitely become the norm a few decades later, with the institution of lay brothers and sisters. Prior to that, however, older and wealthier servants probably lived in the houses grouped around the monasteries, thus participating in the progressive development of the burgus (burgh) so typical of the topography of traditional monasticism, a burgh which itself could be perceived as an additional buffer zone between the claustrum and the world.82

Conclusion There is still too little known about the spatial organization and various inhabitants of the outer court of monasteries. It is undeniable, however, that a fundamental part of what monasteries were and represented in the central Middle Ages was linked to and acted out in this space, and more research should be devoted to it. Archaeologists will continue to stand at the leading edge of such endeavors because monks and nuns of the central Middle Ages wrote only sparingly about this area. Their partial silence is illustrative of the way in which they conceived of themselves and their interaction with the outside world: although

Dinter, Liber tramitis aeui Odilonis abbatis, 206; Cochelin, “Les famuli à l’ombre des monastères,”  331–​3. 81 Ulrich of Zell, “Ulrich of Zell’s Customary,” 334–​7. 82 See for instance Mostert, “La cloture brisée,” 236–​7; Didier Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny Xe–​XIIe siècle (Lyon, 2001); and the article by Devroey in this volume.

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their monasteries were in continual and intense contact with the world, the buffer zone that the outer court with its many lay servants, residents, and visitors constituted, allowed them to imagine themselves far removed from the swarming world beyond. There was, therefore, no simple binary division, between inside and outside. The Mont Saint-​Michel, with its unusual claustral building and church at the top of the hill, and the spaces hierarchically organized below, ending with the village at the bottom, occupied at least partly by the lay servants of the abbey, perfectly illustrates this mental organization. This monastic complex, with its varying concentric circles, changed significantly with the appearance of the lay brothers and lay sisters in the twelfth century (and, of course, with the changing socioeconomic context). The new institution of conversi and conversae had no place in the RB, but neither did the outer court and its double-​lock system (the two walls) of the central Middle Ages. We must indeed be wary of imagining the RB as the norm to which medieval monastics held closely; it was rather the ideal toward which to strive. Scholars should not hesitate to question the application of many of its precepts in medieval monasteries if (archaeological and written) sources warrant it. One of its main tenets is the complete obedience to the abbot or abbess. Here again, obedience was the ideal, as was often reiterated in written sources; in practice, however, at least from the late eighth century to the late eleventh century, the tight community enclosed within a monastery’s claustral walls had a stronger collective voice than scholars have yet acknowledged. This is well illustrated by the production of customaries and the construction of the chapter house. The scholarly claim that individualism had faded away during the central Middle Ages is untenable, but there is no denying that conditions were present for a strong communal spirit (though that did not, of course, prevent clashes).83 Close-​knit thanks to recruitment, spatial organization, creative foundation legends, and singular focus on the opus Dei, the monastic communities of the central Middle Ages had an agency that might explain their overall remarkable resilience and success during these tumultuous times.

Bibliography Bonde, Sheila, and Clark Maines. “Performing Silence and Regulating Sound:  The Monastic Soundscape of Saint-​ Jean-​ des-​ Vignes.” In Resounding Images:  Medieval

Steffen Patzold, “‘Ipsorum necesse est sub hand dissensionem animas preiclitari’: les révoltes dans la vie monastique médiévale en Europe occidentale,” in Revolte und Sozialstatus von der Spätantike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit/​Révolte et statut social de l’antiquité tardive aux temps modernes, ed. Philippe Depreux (Paris, 2008), 75–​92.

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Monastic Daily Life (c. 750–1100) Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, edited by Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly, 47–​70. Turnhout, 2015. Boynton, Susan, and Isabelle Cochelin, eds. From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Cluniac Customs/​Du cour de la nuit à la fin du jour. Les coutumes clunisiennes au Moyen Âge. Turnhout, 2005. Bully, Sébastien, and Christian Sapin, eds. Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle. BUCEMA, hors-​série 8 (2015). http://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​13574. Cochelin, Isabelle. “Discussions au chapitre (IXe–​XIe siècle): la place (réelle et symbolique) de l’abbé était-​elle si dominante?” In Des communautés aux États. Mélanges offerts à Michel Hébert, edited by Jean-​Luc Bonnaud et al. Memini. Travaux et documents, 19–​20 (2015–​16): 337–​61. http://​journals.openedition.org/​memini/​834.   “Downplayed or Silenced: Authorial Voices behind Customaries and Customs (Eighth– Eleventh Centuries).” In Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, edited by Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-Latimer, 153–73. Turnhout, 2016.  “Les famuli à l’ombre des monastères (Cluny et Fleury, Xe et XIe siècles.” In La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–Xe). II: questions transversales, edited by Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, 321–44. Cairo, 2018. de Jong, Mayke, “Carolingian Monasticism:  The Power of Prayer.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, II: c. 700–​c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 622–​53. Cambridge, 1995.   In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (600–900). Leiden, 1996. Delouis, Louis, and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert, La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe siècle). I: L’état des sources. Athens, 2015. Derwich, Marek, ed., La vie quotidienne des moines et chanoines réguliers au Moyen Âge et temps modernes. Actes du premier colloque international du L.A.R.H.C.O.R. Wroclaw, 1995. Dubois, Jacques. “Les moines dans la société du Moyen Âge (950–​1350).” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 60.174 (1974): 5–​37. Ermini Pani, Letizia, ed. Gli spazi della vita communitaria. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studio: Roma-​Subiaco, 8–​10 giugno 2015. Spoleto, 2016. Foot, Sarah. Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, c. 600–​900. Cambridge, 2006. Gilchrist, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture:  The Archaeology of Religious Women. London, 1994. Johnson, Penelope. Equal in Monastic Profession:  Religious Women in Medieval France. Chicago, IL, 1991. Leclercq, Jean. “Pour une histoire de la vie à Cluny.” Revue de l’histoire ecclésiastique 57.2 (1962): 385–​408. Oexle, Otto Gerhard, and Michel Parisse, eds. L’abbaye de Gorze au Xe siècle. Nancy, 1993. Patzold, Steffen. “‘Ipsorum necesse est sub hand dissensionem animas preiclitari’: les révoltes dans la vie monastique médiévale en Europe occidentale.” In Revolte und Sozialstatus von der Spätantike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit/​Révolte et statut social de l’antiquité tardive aux temps modernes, edited by Philippe Depreux, 75–​92. Paris, 2008. Rememsnyder, Amy. Remembering Kings Past:  Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France. Ithaca, NY, 1995.

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The Double Monastery as a Historiographical Problem (Fourth to Twelfth Century) A l i s on I. B e ach a n d A n dr a Juganaru In fourth-​century Cappadocia, monks and nuns at the monastery of Annisa lived in separate quarters, with the “tagma of monks” and the “choir of virgins” set far apart on the former family estate of Macrina the Younger. Even when the whole community gathered in the common church for regular prayers and when it had guests on special occasions such as Macrina’s funeral in 379, men and women remained segregated by sex, singing the psalms of the evening service.1 In seventh-​century England, nuns and monks at the monastery of Whitby lived in an open ribbon of dwellings arranged in parallel rows that were divided from one another by a simple system of flagstone paths, with no surviving archaeological evidence of any kind of architectural structure to keep them separate.2 In twelfth-​and thirteenth-​ century France, direct contact between the women of Coyroux and the men of Obazine, some 600 to 700 meters away, was strictly limited.3 Built in a steep and inhospitable valley, the women’s house was accessible only through a kind of airlock—​a room that served as a neutral zone between their enclosure and the outside world that was accessed by two carefully locked doors, opened one at a time.4 These chronologically and geographically dispersed communities have in common one fundamental characteristic: each offered women and men the opportunity to live an ascetic life in segregation within a single institution. Scholars have long referred to these and other dual-​sex monastic communities, in all of their astonishing temporal, geographical, and organizational variety, as double monasteries.

Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina 35.3, translation in Anna Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout, 2008), 142–​3. 2 Walter Horn, “On the Origins of the Medieval Cloister,” Gesta 12.1 (1973): 38. 3 Bernadette Barrière, “The Cistercian Convent of Coyroux in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Gesta 31 (1992):  76; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture:  The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York, 1994), 68. 4 Barrière, “Cistercian Convent of Coyroux,” 78–​9. 1

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Textual sources bear witness to the presence of ascetic men and women living in proximity to one another, or even cohabitating, in the earliest years of the Christian monastic tradition. Pachomius’ fourth-​century community in Tabennese comprised one dwelling for monks and another for nuns. In Bethlehem, Jerome (d. 420)  and his Roman supporters Paula (d. 404)  and Eustochium (d. 419/​20) founded a monastery in the late fourth century with one building for monks and three separate buildings for nuns. At the same time, Rufinus of Aquilea (d. 410) and Melania the Elder (d. 410) ruled over another complex housing monks and nuns in Jerusalem. Shenoute’s White Monastery (f. 442), a monastic village of several thousand ascetics in Egypt, housed both women and men in separate precincts.5 In spite of their physical division, the community remained a single economic unit, with the monks responsible for agricultural work and other manual trades, and the nuns producing textiles and similar products. Although men and women took their meals separately within each subcommunity, all of the food was prepared in the monastery’s main kitchen to ensure equality among them.6 By the late sixth century, the compilers of the Novels of the Corpus Iuris Civilis clearly recognized the double monastery—​the monasterium duplex—​as a distinct type of monastic organization: We do not permit monks and nuns to live in the same monastery anywhere in our empire and do not permit the so-​called double monasteries (monasteria duplicia) to exist. If there is such monastery, the men shall be separated from the women; the women shall remain in the monastery in which they are, and the men shall found another monastery for themselves.7

It is telling that this early textual witness to the term “double monastery” appears in the context of a prohibition, ringing with anxiety about the potential for male–​female contact. Despite the intent of this canon to eliminate, or at least strictly control, double monasteries in the Eastern Empire, dual-​sex communities persisted in changing forms throughout the Middle Ages. In the

Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2002), 3–​4, 178; Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009), 427–​9, 578. 6 Susanna Elm, “Formen des Zusammenlebens männlicher und weiblicher Asketen im östlichen Mittelmeerraum während des vierten Jahrhunderts nach Christus,” in Doppelklöster und andere Formen der symbiose Männlicher und weiblicher Religiosen im Mittelalter, ed. Kaspar Elm and Michel Parisse (Berlin, 1992), 21–​2. See also the articles by Giorda, and Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. 7 Novella 123, 36, in Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 3, ed. R. Schoell and G. Kroll (Berlin, 1954), 619. See also Bruce W. Frier et al., eds., The Codex of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek Text Based on a Translation by Justice Fred H. Blume (Cambridge, 2016). 5

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Latin West, double monasteries flourished first from the seventh to ninth centuries. The anonymous seventh-​century General Rule for Monasteries (Regula communis), written in Visigothic Spain, clearly reflects the expectation that men and women would be living jointly.8 A long line of abbesses with jurisdiction over a wide range of inhabitants of both sexes ruled the monastery of Kildare in Ireland, possibly as early as the fifth century and surely beginning in the eighth.9 A second wave of dual-​sex foundings in the West began at the end of the eleventh century, in sync with broader currents of Church reform, and in the twelfth, bound up with the search for institutional models from the early Church associated with the apostolic awakening of the era, and particularly the female response to it. Much of what we know about these communities, however, comes from legislation seeking to shut them down and from various expressions of proximity anxiety, including shocking reports of sexual misconduct. In both East and West, dual-​sex monasticism persisted in countless changing forms, emerging from and embedded in an impressive range of distinct geographical and social contexts—​despite repeated attempts from many quarters to discredit and prohibit it.

The Idol of Origins Beginning in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in the institutional form of the double monastery centered around the search for a single point of cultural origin, a pursuit based on what Catherine Peyroux termed the “dendritic model”—​a historical approach, paralleled by contemporary trends in philology, that assumed that a trait expressed in a branch must also be located at the root.10 The debate over origins divided along both confessional and national lines, with Ireland emerging as the generally accepted winner, and the dominant narrative being that it was far-​ranging Irish missionaries who planted dual-​sex monastic communities, first in Gaul and then in England.11 In 1899, Mary Bateson published a study of double monasteries that argued for a bold new approach. She rejected outright the model that assumed an organic connection between a common root and its many branches, arguing that the double monastery was not a static cultural object passed down through time

Catherine Peyroux, “Abbess and Cloister: Double Monasteries in the Early Medieval West” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1991), 130–​5; see also the article by Díaz in this volume. 9 Peyroux, “Abbess and Cloister,” 179–​81; see also the article by Bitel in this volume. 10 Peyroux, “Abbess and Cloister,” 5. 11 Pierre-​Joseph Varin, Mémoire sur les causes de la dissidence entre l’Église bretonne et l’Église romaine (Paris, 1858), 165–​205. 8

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and across space, but rather a spontaneous expression of spirituality, “the natural sequel to an outburst of religious enthusiasm.”12 The roots of dual-​sex monastic foundations, she argued, were thus to be sought for every region individually, as they resulted from surges in ascetic enthusiasm refracted by various aspects of a particular time and local context. To support her hypothesis of the natural and spontaneous appearance of dual-​sex monastic communities, Bateson set out to refute the dominant narrative of Irish origins, in part by reframing the very definition of the institution. Working with a broader standard for the inclusion of a community in the category than her predecessors, she identified as the “germ of the institution” the “presence of ‘regular’ priests ministering to the spiritual needs of ‘regular’ women.”13 Other defining features—​contiguity to a shared church, the nature and number of shared liturgical performances, a common rule, the relative status of the abbess and abbot, a common place of burial, and so on—​evolved only in response to the particulars of time and place. This rather liberal definition allowed Bateson to gather regional evidence for a much wider array of earlier monastic foundations, and particularly in Gaul before Columbanus’ arrival there in 585. She reasoned that, if there were double monasteries in Gaul before the arrival of Irish missionaries, they could hardly have come from an Irish source.14 Jules Pargoire, whose research focused on the Byzantine world, followed a similar regional approach, albeit with a different purpose.15 He sought to contradict the notion that Justinian’s Novels had effectively put an end to the foundation of Byzantine double monasteries, adducing a more inclusive definition, similar to Bateson’s, that enabled him to cite a number of later examples from Byzantium to support his broader argument that the institutional form persisted in the East. In 1928, inspired to respond to what he saw as Bateson’s flawed argument, Stephan Hilpisch attempted both to correct and to complement her study, whose fundamental problem lay, he argued, in her definition of the institution. He offered a spatially based alternative to Bateson’s more functional approach, defining a double monastery as “a community of monks and nuns living together in such a way that the configuration of their cloister stood as a spatial and jurisdictional unity.”16 This narrower category allowed Hilpisch

Mary Bateson, “Origins and Early History of Double Monasteries.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1899): 197. 13 Ibid., 138. On the topic of priests ministering to nuns, see the article by Griffiths in volume II. 14 Bateson, “Origins and Early History of Double Monasteries,” 148. 15 Jules Pargoire, “Les monastères doubles chez les Byzantins,” Echos d’Orient 56 (1906): 21–​5. 16 Stephan Hilpisch, Die Doppelklöster. Entstehung und Organisation (Münster, 1928), 6–​10. 12

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to construct an alternative developmental model; he identified the unique origin of the double monastery as lying in the Pachomian koinonia, from which each region inherited and developed its own branch. In this game of definitions, always dominated by a shared underlying concern with origins, shifts in language served to reshape the landscape of dual-​ sex monasticism by renegotiating what could rightly be included under the umbrella of what was, in the end, an invented category.

New Directions in Research By the middle of the twentieth century, scholars had turned away from debates over institutional evolution and toward constructing typologies to differentiate among the variant species of community lumped together within the genus double monastery. Taking Justinian’s Novels as a starting point, a definitional consensus emerged among scholars focusing on early Eastern dual-​sex monasteries: a double monastery or double house was commonly defined as an institution in which monks and nuns lived separately and in which ascetics of both sexes used its properties in common. From within this very broad definition, further distinctions emerged. The segregation of monks from nuns, for example, distinguishes a double monastery from a “mixed monastery”—​a house in which monks and nuns cohabitated (and a term that the sources never use).17 Daniel Stramara referred to still another species, the “twin monastery” (although sources do not use this formula either), a house of monks and a house of nuns that were located in proximity but were not interdependent.18 In the 1980s, a number of scholars working on Western monasticism, and particularly those focused on twelfth-​century communities, challenged the validity of the category “double monastery” altogether. Penny Schine Gold argued that the term, which she considered to be anachronistic in the context of her research on Fontevraud, obscures through its breadth too many of the contours of individual religious communities; for her, the best practice was simply to describe the local purpose of the community and its arrangement for coordination between the sexes.19 Sharon Elkins shared Gold’s worries

Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994), 147 and 324. 18 Daniel F. Stramara, “Double Monasticism in the Greek East, Fourth through Eighth Centuries,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 271–​3. 19 Penny Schine Gold, The Lady & the Virgin:  Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-​ Century France (Chicago, IL, 1985), 101–​2. 17

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about anachronism and argued further that the “double monastery” label created a false sense of discontinuity between dual-​sex communities and their counterparts that housed only women in the twelfth century. Elkins suggested abandoning the double monastery as a discrete category in order to integrate dual-​sex communities into the spectrum of contemporary female monasticisms.20 Since the 1990s, scholars have returned to and reevaluated some of these earlier questions and problems. Giles Constable, for example, has argued that this type of monastic organization clearly existed in the West in the twelfth century, albeit in a variety of forms, and that these were, “in effect, if not name, double monasteries, with parallel communities of men and women.”21 Work on the monastic East has returned to the question of the effectiveness of Justinian’s Novels in eradicating double monasteries.22 Others have turned to gender-​based questions, particularly in the context of the exercise of female authority in dual-​sex houses.23 Kaspar Elm and Michel Parisse advanced the useful concept of male–​female symbiosis, a term that makes space both for the inclusion of a wide range of communities, and for a more balanced approach to such relationships that emphasizes the potential for reciprocity alongside the expectation of “men serving women” and its variant, “women burdening men with their presence,” which has predominated in much of the literature on female monastic communities of all sorts.24

Three Key Themes in the Study of Double Monasteries Rather than revisiting matters of definition or typology, and continuing the move beyond the well-​worn question “Is it or isn’t it a double monastery?” we examine below three themes relevant to the history of dual-​sex religious life that cut across time and geography: the modes and mechanisms of the genesis of symbiotic monastic communities; the theological justifications

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Sharon Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-​ Century England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), xvii–​xviii. Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 70. 22 I. M. Konidaris, “Die Novelle 123 Justinians und das Problem der Doppelklöster,” in Novella Constitutio: Studies in Honour of Nicolaas van der Wal (Groningen, 1990), 105–​16; Friedrich Schipper, “‘Wir erlauben nicht, dass in einem Kloster Mönche und Nonnen wohnen’ ( Just. Nov. 123.36):  Doppelklöster im spätantiken ostmediterranen Raum,” Kanon 17 (2005): 56–​77. 23 Alison Jeppesen, “A Reassessment of Monastic Organization.” Studia Patristica 39 (2006): 385–​92; Ekaterini Mitsiou, “Frauen als Gründerinnen von Doppelklöstern im Byzantinischen Reich,” in Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, and Michael Grünbart (Vienna, 2014), 333–​43. 24 Elm and Parisse, Doppelklöster.

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adduced in their support; and the various strategies put in place to regulate the interaction between the sexes. What follows is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive of areas of focus with potential for future research on this historically dynamic phenomenon.

The Emergence of Individual Double Communities One of the earliest forms of dual-​sex asceticism was the converted Christian household. A religious life shared by men and women, an extension of the natural family, was the foundation of many ascetic communities in late antiquity.25 This earliest connection between the natural family and the familia sacra is reflected in the very basic terminology of religious life, with its images of fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, and brothers and sisters.26 According to Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina’s monastic community at Annisa emerged through the gradual transformation of one such wealthy secular household. After Macrina made her initial vow of celibacy, her mother, Emmelia, her siblings, Naucratius and Peter, and the family’s slaves followed her example. While they initially remained together in a shared community, Naucratius and one of his slaves retreated to a remote shelter. A few years later, when Peter reached the age at which he could decide to pursue the “philosophical life” (understood here as the monastic life) and opted to remain in the same establishment with his sister and mother, the community was restructured to provide separate housing for nuns and for monks.27 The accounts about the conversion of the wealthy Egyptian householder Amun (d. c. 357) and his wife offers an example of the emergence within a secular household of a religious community of another sort. According to the fifth-​century church historian Socrates of Constantinople, the devout couple lived together in a chaste marriage for a number of years before they first repaired to entirely separate quarters and Amun later withdrew to Nitria.28 There are numerous additional reports from the early East of such monastic spouses living together within a single ascetic unit, including even a practice



Susanna Elm, “Formen des Zusammenlebens,” in Elm and Parisse, Doppelklöster,  20–​1. Ibid., 18. See also the articles by Giorda and Magnani in this volume. 27 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina 6, 9–​10, and 13–​14, translated in Silvas, Macrina the Younger, 115–​16, 118–​19, and 121–​3; Gregory of Nyssa, The Letters, trans. Anna Silvas (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2007), 10; Elm, “Virgins of God”, 79–​105; Stramara, “Double Monasticism in the Greek East,” 274–​6; Silvas, Macrina the Younger, 44. 28 Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire ecclésiastique (livres IV–​VI), ed. and trans. P. Maraval and P. Périchon (Paris, 2006). 25

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known as syneisaktism (the direct cohabitation of clergymen and ascetic women), which was eventually condemned by the Church leaders. One particularly well-​ documented example of accepted “monastic spouses” is that of Paulinus of Nola and his wife, Therasia, who started their turn to asceticism around 390. Paulinus created an ascetic network through letters, and other married couples, including Apronianus and his wife, Avita, joined him and Therasia. Paulinus’ monastic network was by no means limited to these new couples.29 Several monks from the island of Lérins came to Nola in the 420s, bringing news about Honoratus (founder of the island monastery and later bishop of Arles) and Eucherius (future bishop of Lyon). The visiting monks reported that Eucherius was living a secluded ascetic life on the island, together with his wife and his two sons, at the monastery.30 Paulinus identified Eucherius’ wife as Galla and noted that their ascetic partnership was modeled on his own marriage to Therasia.31 After the death of their newborn son, Melania and Pinianus decided to follow a similar model, becoming not monastic spouses but “siblings in the Lord.”32 The conversion of domestic households also resulted in the formation of dual-​sex religious communities in the West in the centuries that followed. Many of the double monasteries of early medieval Spain began as converted private households. The General Rule for Monasteries assumes the presence of entire families, including young children and servants, divided by sex, within some monastic communities. There are also a number of examples from the central Middle Ages. Around 1073, Countess Ita of Nellenburg (d. after 1100) continued to live in a domestic setting after her husband, Count Eberhard VI (d. c.  1078), became a monk at Schaff hausen (in modern Switzerland), the monastery that he had founded in 1049. It was only in 1080, after Eberhard’s death and with the collaboration of Ita’s son Burkhard (d. 1101/​2), that this community was formally established as the female monastery of St. Agnes, paired with the already existing all-​male monastery of All Saints. Similar spiritual impulses may have encouraged Guda of Bonnenberg and her husband, Duke Ludwig of Arnstein (d. c. 1185), to convert their castle into a Premonstratensian double monastery in 1139. Both husband and wife entered this newly established community, with Ludwig as a regular canon

See the article by Alciati in this volume. Sigrid H. Mratschek, “Multis enim notissima est sanctitas loci:  Paulinus and the Gradual Rise of Nola as a Center of Christian Hospitality,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 529–​30. 31 P. G. Walsh, trans., Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola (New York, 1967), 51.9. 32 The Life of Melania the Younger 6, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Ann Clark (Lewiston, NY, 1984),  30–​1.

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and Guda as inclusa (a solitary). Guda and her husband had been unable to have children, and, as Ludwig’s pious biographer tells the story, the ascetic life enabled Guda to have a multitude of spiritual daughters—​a claim that suggests again the close association of natural family with the sacra familia.33 There are, of course, many earlier examples of this type of institutional development, including Tabennese itself, which may have comprised only men before the arrival of Pachomius’ sister Mary. As one version of the story goes, when Mary paid a visit to her brother, she was not permitted to pass through the gates of the monastery because of her sex. In the course of the three days when she was left to stand outside the monastery, Mary decided that she too would renounce the world and become an ascetic. In response, Pachomius sent several monks to build her a monastery with a small oratory not far from his own monastery, where other women eager to share her ascetic vocation soon joined her. Pachomius attached this new female community to his own, appointing the aged Apa Peter to supervise the women. He assigned to Mary the role of abbess and provided the women with a copy of a set of rules already circulating among the monks.34 Practical considerations in the context of fourth-​century Egypt likely played a role in the attachment of the women’s community to the community of monks. As Wipszycka has argued, the impetus for the formation of the Egyptian communities came both from the difficulty of the independent ascetic way of life for women in Egypt’s harsh climate and terrain, and from liturgical necessity, as will be noted below.35 Religious women always and everywhere required at least one priest to perform for them the various sacraments that were central to their spiritual-​ liturgical life, and the line between a women’s community served by a priest or a group of priests and a double monastery is often unclear, if there indeed was one.36 Only after Gilbert (d. 1190)  founded the monastery of Sempringham (England) in 1130 as an enclosed community of nuns, did he gradually add additional communities of canons, lay sisters, and lay brothers to it.37 Surviving sources from other communities often do not reveal the order in which a particular monastery was established (whether women first and then men, or the other way around).

Vita Ludowici comitis de Arnstein, MGH Fontes 3, 326–​7. The Bohairic Life of Saint Pachomius 27, in Pachomian Koinonia, trans. Armand Veilleux, 2  vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), 2:49–​50. The First Greek Life of Pachomius 32, in ibid., 1:318–​19. 35 Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte. 36 See the article by Griffiths in volume II. 37 Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c.1130–​c.1300 (Oxford, 1995). 33

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In many cases, no single event or act marks the beginning of a double community, and no individual can be identified as its founder. Many female communities emerged from or crystallized around a rich variety of less formal groupings of religious and semi-​religious women, a phenomenon that was particularly characteristic of communities associated with the reform emanating from the monastery of Hirsau in the Black Forest in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. The eleventh-​century recluse Diemut of Wessobrunn (Bavaria), for example, seems to have attracted a circle of like-​minded women around her, gradually giving rise to a more formal community of women at what had begun as an all-​male monastery. This evolution from a cluster of religious women into a clerically recognized monastic community is clearly illustrated by the early development of Admont’s female monastery (Austria). By the eleventh century, a number of religious women had taken up residence in small dwellings around the church of St. Amand, which had belonged to the monks of Admont since 1093. During the 1140s, the community was relocated to a purpose-​built monastic enclosure just south of the men’s precinct. In other cases, a community or even a whole order was conceived from the beginning as double. Whitby, for example, was from its founding a house for both monks and nuns. The Benedictine monastery founded in Padua in 1195 was always conceptualized as a double monastery; the community comprised separate dwellings for men and for women, but the two groups shared a common church.38 Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116) founded Fontevraud (France) in 1101 as a dual-​sex community of nuns and of priests in their service. By the time of Robert’s death, there were four different cloisters within the monastery complex: one for men, one for lepers, and two for women.39

The Ideological Foundations of Shared Community When and wherever communities that hosted both male and female ascetics emerged, their proponents within the Church were faced with the task of proving that such houses, if properly organized and operated, were legitimate. This must have been a difficult undertaking, as many of the more radical experiments in shared ascetic life had triggered hostile reactions from prominent and charismatic spiritual figures. Ambrose of Milan (d. 397),

Georg Jenal, “Doppelklöster und monastische Gesetzgebung im Italien des frühen und hohen Mittelalters,” in Elm and Parisse, Doppelklöster, 42. 39 Jacques Delarun, Robert of Arbrissel:  Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce Venarde (Washington, DC, 2006), 64; Loraine N. Simmons, “The Abbey Church at Fontevraud in the Later Twelfth Century: Anxiety, Authority and Architecture in the Female Spiritual Life,” Gesta 31 (1992): 101. 38

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Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom (d. 407), and others were among those who harshly criticized what they characterized as suspect cohabitations.40 The Visigothic General Rule for Monasteries opens with an anxious statement about the dangers that a villa-​turned-​monastery might present. Many such communities, the rule asserts, were monasteries in name only, with the residents carrying on much as they had before conversion, free of any rule or imperative to serve the poor. This vocal opposition to house monasteries seems to have been based more in fear about the social and economic distraction perpetuated by lingering family ties than in anxiety about the potential they presented for sexual contact between men and women. “Scandalously,” the author laments, “they pant with passion for gain and care not for future punishment, being too keenly preoccupied with feeding their wives and children.”41 Dual-​ sex communities, however, also had powerful and articulate advocates who presented legitimizing arguments in their favor, often based on their reading of Christian Scripture. Basil of Caesarea, for example, not only accepted the proximity of the groups of monks and nuns, but went so far as to argue that such communities (in fact similar to the one in Annisa, founded by Marcrina) were patterned after the apostolic Church as it was reflected in the Book of Acts. Just like the first brotherhood (adelphotes) of Apostles in Jerusalem (Acts 1–​8), the two tagmas, if properly ordered, must be united in spirit (Acts 4:32) and share their goods (Acts 2:44). Moreover, the community of ascetics imitated the body of the Church, whose limbs (like the various components of a dual-​sex monastic community) serve complementary functions (Rom. 2:15).42 The twelfth-​ century monk-​ chronicler of Petershausen (in modern Germany) turned to the Gospels to support his confident apology for dual-​sex monasticism, arguing that there had been pious women among the Apostles.43 If men and women had worked side by side in the primitive Church, then surely they might do so, under meticulous supervision, in a monastic community. Still other twelfth-​century advocates looked to the sub-​apostolic era

Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Malden, MA, 2003), 52. 41 General Rule for Monasteries (Regula communis) 1, in Iberian Fathers, vol. 2, trans. Claude W. Barlow (Washington, DC, 1969), 177–​8. See the article by Díaz in this volume. 42 Basil of Caesarea, The Longer Responses of Basil’s Asketikon 35, in The Asketikon of St. Basil the Great, trans. Anna M. Silvas (Oxford, 2005), 238–​42. 43 Chronicle of Petershausen Preface.9, in Die Chronik des klosters Petershausen, ed. Otto Feger (Sigmaringen, 1978), 3; Alison Beach, Shannon Li, and Samuel Sutherland, Monastic Experience in Twelfth-​ Century Germany:  The Chonicle of Petershausen in Translation (Manchester, forthcoming).

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for their models. The anonymous author of the Acta Murensia, a monastic chronicle written around 1160, argued that, by including women in their community, the monks of Muri (in modern Switzerland) imitated the Church fathers who had “gathered a multitude of women around themselves on account of the love of God.”44 Supporters could also find deeper theological support in the writings of contemporary theologians. Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709)  argued in his treatise On Virginity, addressed to the nuns at the Anglo-​Saxon double monastery of Barking, that the ascetic life for both sexes is angelic, calling to mind Paul’s assertion that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3:20), which may perhaps have led the nuns to the conclusion that the monastic life, properly lived, erased gender differences.45 Both Gerhoch of Reichersberg (d. 1169) and Rupert of Deutz (d. c. 1129) argued that, while women differed from men in terms of physical sex, they were neither spiritually inferior to, nor less rational, than men.46 The reformers put this positive assessment of women’s spiritual equality into action when they founded new dual-​sex religious institutions or affiliated women’s communities to men’s houses. For Robert of Arbrissel, the proximity of women was more a test of chastity than a commingling of spiritual equals in Christ. As Simmons argued, the potential for sexual contact so evident in Robert’s initial practice of syneisaktism was later embodied in the architecture of the church that he had built for the double community at Fontevraud.47 Robert also supported the presence of both men and women, as well as the subordinate role of the men of the community as caretakers, with an interpretation of the Gospel of John that shows Jesus himself pointing the way to the proper reciprocal relationship between the sexes at Fontevraud: from the cross, Christ had handed over to Mary the role of mother to John the Evangelist and to John the role of her son and caregiver ( John 19:26–​27).48

Managing Interaction between the Sexes Although the supporters of dual-​sex religious communities tried to offer both legitimizing precedents and convincing claims of effective safety measures,

Acta Murensia 20, in Acta Murensia. Die Akten des Klosters Muri mit der Geneaologie der frühen Habsburger, ed. Charlotte Bretscher-​Gisiger and Christian Sieber (Basel, 2012), 70–​1. 45 Dagmar Beate Baltrusch-​Schneider, “Die angelsächsischen Doppelklöster,” in Elm and Parisse, Doppelklöster, 75. 46 Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 66. 47 Simmons, “Abbey Church at Fontevraud,” 100–​2. 48 Ibid., 101. 44

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the potential for direct contact between the sexes clearly continued to present problems within late antique and medieval spiritual landscapes. As noted above, some of the more radical experiments in double-​sex ascetic life were vehemently attacked by contemporaries for the unacceptable degree of sexual danger they presented. More conservative institutional forms of cohabitation also drew heated criticism, especially when it became clear that even carefully constructed and monitored barriers could break down. One notorious scandal emerged within the Gilbertine order when a young nun at the dual-​sex monastery of Watton allegedly conceived a child in the course of a sexual affair with one of the priory’s men—​an incident that apparently played out even within a carefully structured monastic complex that included a boundary wall and a “window house” (a passageway fitted with a small turning-​window between the nuns’ and canons’ cloisters).49 The contemporary reaction to these events, and notably the shockingly graphic account of the women’s violent response to the incident written by the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), reflects acute discomfort with dual-​sex communities.50 Shortly after the incident, Pope Alexander III (1159–​81) investigated complaints made by several Gilbertine lay brothers about the proximity of men and women in some of the order’s houses.51 In his Life of Paulina, Sigibod (d. after 1123) emphasized the gossip factor as central to Paulina’s (d. 1107) decision to withdraw with her female followers from the small dual-​ sex community that she had recently founded in Thuringia. He warned: Even if the holiness of both [the men and women] might strike mountains with the lightning of miracles and move mountains through the faith and excellence of prayers … unless the fear and love of God shall intercede and the diligence of the abbot shall divide the sexes with the wall of the divine Word, cohabitation will invite the accusation of our adversaries.52

The physical display of separation—​whether in the distance between buildings, the presence of dividing paths or roads, the construction of locked enclosures, or, in some cases, the elaborate regulations that governed dual-​ sex monasteries—​served to certify the sexual safety of double communities. Already by the fourth century, written sources suggest a common architectural

Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture, 93. Giles Constable, “Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order,” Studies in Church History Subsidia 1 (1978), 205–​6; Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-​Century England, 106–​11. 51 Constable, “Aelred of Rievaulx,” 223. 52 Sigibotonis Vita Paulinae 26, MGH SS 30/​2, 922.

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pattern: monasteries hosted men and women in distinct buildings, separated either by a wall or by a natural obstacle such as a river or hill. The abundant sources for the life of the White Monastery under Shenoute indicate the presence of a wall between the two quarters. Strict separation, however, seems to have remained a significant problem, since a group of monks, housed in the porter’s lodge, was charged with mediating the interactions between the superiors of the monks and the nuns.53 In his Life of Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa describes the structure of her community in some detail, noting that men, women, and children lived in separate houses. In his Small Asketikon, Basil, their brother, mirrored the well-​ ordered brotherhood (adelphotes) in place at Annisa. In several regulations54 and letters, he explicitly states that the monks and female virgins55 there were united in a single syntagma that gathered in the house of prayer.56 To prevent the free association of men and women that he ascribes to the male and female ascetics led by Eustathius of Sebaste (d. 377), Basil thoroughly regulates the interaction between brothers and sisters, stressing that any and all encounters should occur in accordance with the Gospel—​“out of concern for one’s neighbour”57—​and thus beyond “any shadow of base suspicion.”58 The senior monk (presbyteros) or nun (presbytera) was to supervise any meeting. After ruling that “monks shall not live in one monastery with nuns nor presume to have a common oratory,” the Visigothic General Rule goes on to lay out a series of regulations to control points of contact between the sexes should a community include both men and women. There were to be no communal meals or shared manual labor, and no monk was to speak alone with a nun, even should they meet by chance on a journey.59 The General Rule details the process to be followed when an abbot or monk went to the women’s monastery: the abbess was first to greet the visitor, followed by the rest of the female congregation, a process to be repeated upon his departure. Rudolf of Fulda (d. 865)  described the double monastery of Wimborne (England), from which St. Boniface had called St. Leoba (d. 782)  to assist

Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte, 580. Basil of Caesarea, Longer Responses 34 and 35, in Silvas, Asketikon of St. Basil, 236–​42. 55 Basil, Letter 170, in Basil:  The Letters in Four Volumes, vol. 2, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA, 1928), 442–​4, Basil, Letter 199, in Basil: The Letters in Four Volumes, vol. 3, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA, 1930), 102–​34. 56 Basil, Letter 207, in Deferrari, Basil: The Letters, vol. 3, 180–​92. 57 Basil of Caesarea, Longer Responses 33, in Silvas, Asketikon of St. Basil,  234–​5. 58 Ibid.; Basil of Caesarea, Shorter Responses 109 and 220, in Silvas, Asketikon of St. Basil, 333 and  392–​3. 59 General Rule for Monasteries 16, in Barlow, Iberian Fathers, 200. 53

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with his mission to Germany, as encircled by high, strong walls. No woman, Rudolf asserted, ever entered the men’s community, and no man ever entered the women’s house, with the exception of the priest who was needed to celebrate mass, and he was to leave the moment that the job was done. Any necessary communication between the abbess and the monks was to take place at a speaking-​window provided for that purpose.60 The twelfth-​century monastic chronicler Ortlieb (d. 1164) claimed that not even sisters and brothers or mothers and sons at the monastery of Zwiefalten (in modern Germany) could meet face to face without the permission of the abbot, a safeguard that may reflect enduring concern about the disruptive potential of family alliances within the community as much as anxiety about contact between the sexes.61 By the twelfth century, such assurances of high walls and distanced dwellings were no longer convincing to many, perhaps in response to heightened concerns about sexuality and ritual purity associated with eleventh-​ century Church reform. Increasing proximity anxiety led to the development of more elaborate and extreme architectural barriers and regulations to prevent or at least radically reduce all forms of contact between the sexes. The nuns’ vow from Lippoldsberg (in modern Germany, c.  1095–​1102) included their assent to strict enclosure, with the keys guarded by persons selected by the community in consultation with their male supervisor. This same supervisor was permitted to enter the enclosure to visit the sick or to accompany guests, received only with the common consent of the community. Those desiring to inspect either the cloister or the workshops were to do so expeditiously and exit quickly. Longer conversations regarding matters of importance to the community were to take place through the speaking-​window in the chapter house. Matters relating to food were to be discussed through the speaking-​window in the kitchen.62 A similar system seems to have been in place at Admont, whose Abbot Irimbert (d. 1176)  claimed that the community’s religious women were locked in an enclosure that was secured with a special three-​lock door.63 This carefully locked door was opened only for a woman to join the community, for a priest to enter to administer last rites, or to remove a nun’s body for burial. All other communication with the outside world took place

Vita Leobae 2, MGH SS 15, 123. See also the article by Raaijmakers in this volume. Ortlieb Zwiefaltensis Chronicon 20, in Die Zwiefalter Chroniken Ortliebs und Bertholds, ed. Luitpold Wallach, Erich König, and Karl Otto Müller (Sigmaringen, 1978), 90 and 92. 62 Mainzer Urkundenbuch 2/​1, ed. Peter Acht (Darmstadt, 1968), 405. 63 Bernhard Pez, Bibliotheca Ascetica Antiquo-​nova, 12 vols. (Regensburg, 1723–​40), 8:454.

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through a single small window. It is difficult to say how much of Irimbert’s account reflects organizational and architectural reality and how much is creative embellishment—​a response to, or a reflection of, proximity anxiety. At Coyroux, one or two barred and curtained windows were installed to facilitate sacramental services, pastoral care, and oversight of meetings of the women’s chapter, and complete separation was maintained in the church by a wall dividing the chancel from the nave.64 The Life of St. Stephen of Obazine specifies in detail the process of passing materials into the women’s community through a corridor with carefully locked doors at either end.65 Despite all of these measures to ensure segregation, the practical reality was that some degree of contact between the sexes, whether physical—​to facilitate, for example, the administration of the sacraments—​or aural, in the blending of male and female voices during mass or office, had always to be balanced with the call for total isolation. The liturgy, in particular, presented an unavoidable, and often desirable, point of contact between male and female performers. The regulations for Tabennese, for example, specified that, while the monks and nuns were generally to live and pray in seclusion from one another, they might come together on special occasions and under strictly controlled conditions for shared liturgical celebrations. The Lives of Pachomius describe moments in which monks visited the nuns’ monastery under supervision. In his Lausiac History, Palladius mentions that monks and nuns could participate together in funeral processions under the supervision of a trustworthy elder father.66 The voices of men and women mixed in the common church at Anissa, though they came, as noted above, from separate but coordinated choirs. And, while the General Rule for Monasteries forbade the use of a common oratory, it stipulated that, when male and female came together “in one assembly to hear the words of salvation,” that they were to be seated by sex, and conceded that one group was permitted to hear the other performing recitations and chanting liturgical songs.67 The death of a nun also occasioned the opening of a locked female enclosure to remove the body for burial, often in a common cemetery. At Admont, after the bells of the church were rung to alert the men to the death of one of

Barrière, “Cistercian Convent of Coyroux,” 77 and 79. Life of Stephen of Obazine, trans. in ibid., 80. 66 The Bohairic Life of Pachomius 27, in Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, 2:49–​50; The First Greek Life of Pachomius 32, in ibid., 1:318–​19; Palladius, The Lausiac History 37, in The Lausiac History of Palladius, ed. Cuthbert Butler (Cambridge, 1967), 109–​16. 67 General Rule for Monasteries 15 and 17, in Barlow, Iberian Fathers, 199 and 201. 64 65

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the women, the monks would process to their enclosure with a cross, candles, and a thurible. After censing the body and sprinkling it with holy water, the monks and nuns would accompany the body in procession to the main church. From the ringing of the bells, to the ceremonial removal of the body in procession from the women’s enclosure, to the celebration of the mass for the dead, this was the ritual performance of a double community, enacted across the physical barriers that separated its halves.68

Conclusion The examples offered here illustrate the array of origins, patterns of development, and forms of organization, spread across different centuries and geographical areas, of religious communities that comprised both women and men. One term, however it may be defined, clearly cannot cover the richness of forms of religious life reflected. We have, quite intentionally, not proposed any new definition, alternative terminology, or system of classification. As generations of historiography—​sometimes contentious and tendentious—​ have shown, such attempts are bound to fail. The variety is simply too great. What is clear is that the medieval monastic tradition has always included ascetic men and women who attempted to live a life that was, in some sense, shared, in an astonishing variety of configurations, and which Church authorities struggled both to justify and to eliminate.

Bibliography Barrière, Bernadette. “The Cistercian Convent of Coyroux in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Gesta 31 (1992): 76–​82. Bateson, Mary. “Origins and Early History of Double Monasteries.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1899): 137–​98. Delarun, Jacques. Robert of Arbrissel: Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce Venarde. Washington, DC, 2006. Elkins, Sharon. Holy Women of Twelfth-​Century England. Chapel Hill, NC, 1988. Elm, Susanna. “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 1994. Elm, Kaspar, and Michel Parisse, eds. Doppelklöster und andere Formen der symbiose Männlicher und weiblicher Religiosen im Mittelalter. Berliner Historische Studien, Ordensstudien 18.8. Berlin, 1992. Gilchrist, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London and New York, 1994.

Willehelmi abbatis Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, ed. Candida Elvert and Pius Engelbert, CCM 15/​2, 378.

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Alison I. Beach and Andr a Juganaru Gold, Penny Schine. The Lady & the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-​Century France. Chicago, IL, 1985. Golding, Brian. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c.1130–​c.1300. Oxford, 1995. Hilpisch, Stephan. Die Doppelklöster. Entstehung und Organisation. Beiträge zur Geschichte des alten Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens 15. Münster, 1928. Jeppesen, Alison. “A Reassessment of Monastic Organization.” Studia Patristica 39 (2006): 385–​92. Konidaris, I. M. “Die Novelle 123 Justinians und das Problem der Doppelklöster.” In Novella Constitutio: Studies in Honour of Nicolaas van der Wal, 105–​16. Groningen, 1990. Krawiec, Rebecca. Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 2002. Mitsiou, Ekaterini, “Frauen als Gründerinnen von Doppelklöstern im Byzantinischen Reich.” In Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, edited by Lioba Theis, Margaret Mullett, and Michael Grünbart, 333–​43. Vienna, 2014. Pargoire, Jules. “Les monastères doubles chez les Byzantins.” Echos d’Orient 56 (1906): 21–​5. Peyroux, Catherine. “Abbess and Cloister:  Double Monasteries in the Early Medieval West.” PhD diss., Princeton University 1991. Schipper, Friedrich. “‘Wir erlauben nicht, dass in einem Kloster Mönche und Nonnen wohnen’ ( Just. Nov. 123.36): Doppelklöster im spätantiken ostmediterranen Raum.” Kanon 17 (2005): 56–​77. Simmons, Loraine N. “The Abbey Church at Fontevraud in the Later Twelfth Century: Anxiety, Authority and Architecture in the Female Spiritual Life.” Gesta 31 (1992): 99–​107. Stramara, Daniel F. “Double Monasticism in the Greek East, Fourth through Eighth Centuries.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 269–​312. Varin, Pierre-​Joseph. Mémoire sur les causes de la dissidence entre l’Église bretonne et l’Église romaine. Paris, 1858. Wipszycka, Ewa. Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–​ VIIIe siècles). Warsaw, 2009.

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Interactions between Monks and the Lay Nobility (from the Carolingian Era through the Eleventh Century) Isa b e l l e   Ro sé ( t r an slate d b y M atthe w M attingly) The concept of interaction between monks and nuns and the lay nobility may at first seem paradoxical. After all, the monastic project had initially been conceived as a flight from society. Once monasticism was established in the West, however, its representatives quickly entered into close relations with the ruling aristocracy. The analysis that follows thus takes the perspective of social status, focusing on membership in an ordo—​a group determined by its function in society—​whether that of monks (whose role it was to pray) or that of the laity (devoted to making war) from the Carolingian era through the eleventh century. Attention will also be given to strategies of kinship and the logic of aristocratic dominance. Because I approach the problem from the perspective of social status, I have used the expressions “warrior” and “lay nobility”/​“aristocracy” interchangeably. The period from the Carolingians to the eleventh century was characterized by the prevalence of cenobitic forms of monasticism that more or less followed the Benedictine Rule (RB). At the same time, there was an almost symbiotic relationship between the monastic world and the ruling aristocracy. Both groups belonged to the same elite circles and the same kinship groups. This was an era, prior to the eleventh-​century papal reform movement, in which the “spiritual” and “temporal” remained tightly intertwined. In terms of the historiography, the relatively few case studies covering the Carolingian period stand in contrast to the abundant work on the tenth and eleventh centuries. While on one level this imbalance can be explained by the scarcity of sources from the seventh through ninth centuries, there also seems to be a certain predisposition among specialists of the latter period

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for studying royal power in relation to monastic institutions.1 While it is true that a great number of monasteries did come under imperial control, many of the texts from the Carolingian era were subsequently reworked during the seigneurial period in order to emphasize earlier royal oversight.2 In the process, an entire layer of memory—​an aristocratic one—​which was often at the origin of these foundations, was thus obliterated entirely. Furthermore, for the tenth century and early eleventh, scholars have given greater attention to the kingdoms of western Francia, Burgundy, and Italy than to England and Germany (with the exception of Lotharingia). One reason for this is the tendency of monarchs in the latter two kingdoms to involve themselves in monastic affairs. In the case of Germany, one could also cite the progressive establishment of the imperial church system (Reichskirchensystem), which generally favored monastic relationships with the episcopal rather than the lay component of the aristocracy. In what follows, I will attempt to portray the relationships between monks and the warrior nobility from the eighth through eleventh centuries by investigating the role that each group played in the process of separating the temporal and spiritual spheres, a division that would become a defining feature of eleventh-​century Church reform.

The Lay Aristocracy and its Influence on the Monastic World The Lay Aristocracy as the Source of Monastic Property and Vocations The ownership of monasteries was a fundamental concern for a warrior aristocracy that was often involved in the circumstances of their foundation. Under the Carolingians, these were very often men of the imperial aristocracy, but from the tenth century we encounter numerous princely couples taking the lead. The foundation of Cluny in 910 by Duke William of Aquitaine and his wife, Engelberga (d. 917), is but one well-​known example. This phenomenon reflected the new position attained by the wives of princely lords, and resulted in part from a desire to perpetuate the union of two kinship groups by means of a religious institution. From the beginning of the eleventh century, we begin to see the involvement of the less powerful seigneurial nobility, whose foundations essentially began as priories that were dependent on distant abbeys and that were often situated near important hubs of defense.

See the article by Kramer in this volume. Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

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Until the 1080s, new religious foundations were overwhelmingly male monasteries. The exceptions were Germany, where there were many houses of canonesses, and to a lesser degree the south of England.3 The Germanic phenomenon was a result of the enduring organization of kinship groups (Sippen), whereby daughters inherited and often transformed their patrimony into abbeys, and the preservation of homogamous matrimonial practices that gave preference to daughters entering monastic life rather than seeing them marry below their rank. Elsewhere in Europe, female establishments were founded (or refounded) by women acting on their own initiative, as, for example, at Holy Trinity in Poitiers, instituted shortly before 982 by Adela, widow of William III of Poitiers. The new foundations were endowed with property matched by rights over the land and its population (fields, waterways, dependencies, markets, etc.). It was also important to define their legal status, which remained more or less tied to the founders and their families. The latter were often involved in the selection of abbots, who were frequently members of their own kinship group. In addition, most lay nobles were heavily involved in the monasteries founded by the bishops or abbots who belonged to their family. These foundations, so numerous in the tenth and eleventh centuries, thus appear to have been, more than anything else, the initiative of families or kinship groups. The German historiography has named this type of proprietary monastery an Eigenkloster. The warrior aristocracy exercised forms of protection over monasteries, such as advocacy and lay abbacy, which are not always easy to detect in the sources.4 Lay abbots were chosen by the lay rulers and were especially prominent in the royal abbeys; advocates served as lay representatives for establishments that enjoyed immunity, exercising justice for the monks, raising contingents for the army, and levying taxes. Such practices developed in the eighth and ninth centuries when numerous abbeys, originally founded by aristocrats, passed under royal protection or obtained privileges from the sovereign. For the lay nobility, the exercise of these functions was reciprocated through influence over the choice of monastic superior or in the decisions concerning the abbey’s patrimony, often used to reward aristocratic fidelity.



Michel Parisse, Religieux et religieuses en Empire du Xe au XIIe siècle (Paris, 2011); Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 4 See the article by Lyon in volume II. 3

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Until the beginning of the twelfth century, monastic recruits would continue to be drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the nobility. Indeed, a monastic career allowed the sons of an aristocratic family to exercise power as abbots or through other monastic offices. It was also a means for their families to keep an eye on the donations they had made. Female establishments also functioned in this way, though to a lower degree, as land donations were usually less extensive; they often also served as a place of refuge for widows or for the unmarried sisters of the founders, their relatives, or their vassals. Together, these processes contributed to the crystallization of a social solidarity among the nobility, and so provided structure to regional aristocratic relations. The recruitment pool was generally determined by a monastery’s status. Small establishments were limited to the local aristocracy, while the more powerful houses—​those with a wide economic reach or a reputation for intellectual achievement, or that were famous for their way of life—​drew from a much broader base. From the eighth century until the beginning of the twelfth, we can distinguish two paths of entry into a monastery. The Carolingian age valorized oblation—​the act of “offering” one’s children to an abbey around the age of seven with the expectation that they would remain there as monks.5 This practice may be explained by the nobility’s desire to create closer ties with certain monasteries, by the high value placed on monastic virginity (better preserved in the cloister and a guarantee of prayer that was pure), and by the chronic difficulty of recruiting adults to be monks. Adult entry, however, remained the most visible path, particularly after the middle of the eleventh century, when the number of converts who had abandoned a career in the world substantially increased. Moreover, the ceremonies of entry into monastic life emphasized the postulant placing his shorn hair and leather baldric—​symbols of the warrior aristocracy in its military aspect—​upon the altar before receiving the monastic habit. The ever-​g rowing presence of late converts would serve to alter the social dynamic of religious communities, and perhaps made the break with their former way of life more complex. This explains the move at the end of the eleventh century toward written customaries, which allowed adults to learn monastic habits they had not otherwise mastered through experience.6 Despite the discourse of world rejection, then, the monasteries of the eighth through eleventh centuries were deeply integrated into the social

Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (New York,  1996). See the article by Cochelin in this volume.

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fabric. It was also common for the warrior aristocracy to be present within the monastic establishments themselves, either as guests who were to be welcomed by the monks, or because they had left their children there to be brought up. The spheres of the monastic world and the lay nobility were tightly integrated, and, in most cases, this was neither questioned nor seen as problematic.

Reconstituting Ties with Monastic Communities through Their Reform The discourse on the necessity of a monastic reform started in the Carolingian era. The goal was to distinguish between two forms of communal life based on degree of closeness to the secular world: canons, who were open to the world; and monks, who were supposed to turn their backs to the world.7 This discourse, however, became more radical in the early tenth century and changed progressively in meaning.8 Numerous sources denounce worldly influence as the cause of moral and material decadence in the monasteries, symbolized by the appropriation of monastic property by nobles who often functioned as lay abbots. In reality, however, the reforms of the ninth through eleventh centuries presumed and accepted strong ties between the lay nobility and the monastic world. These were personal restorations, relying on the determination of certain monks and abbots, and above all on their integration with the aristocracy. The reformers, in fact, were most often called in by the founders or lay abbots who held rights over an establishment. From the first half of the tenth century in Frankish, Italian, and Burgundian territories, therefore, it was lay people of stature who clearly took the initiative; kings only intervened to lend support to the reforms by means of privileges. In Germany and England, by contrast, the impetus came from kings, emperors, and bishops. These reforms overwhelmingly involved male monasteries. There were even several ancient foundations of women transformed during this epoch, under the pretense of restoration, into communities of men (Coventry and Vézelay). The reformers primarily promoted three measures that, nevertheless, neither followed the same chronology nor had the same disciplinary scope. From the ninth century to the eleventh, most of our sources allude, often somewhat vaguely, to the adoption of the RB, the chief symbol of the monastic state of life since the Carolingian era. Second, many tenth-​century

Isabelle Rosé, “Fondations et réformes à l’époque carolingienne,” in Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto medioevo. Atti della LXIV Settimana sull’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 31 Marzo–​6 Aprile 2016, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 2017), 1:397–​462. 8 See the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 7

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reforms replaced canons with monks, which entailed imposing a way of life less open to the world. Such conversions were a source of prestige for the instigators of the reform, as was the case at Saint-​Vanne of Verdun in 952, an initiative of the city’s bishop and his relatives. Finally, after the middle of the tenth century, the reforms increasingly became a matter of replacing a lay (or episcopal) abbot with a monastic one, generally a monk elected by the community. In these cases the rights of the lay proprietor were set aside, often corresponding with a return of the abbey’s temporal possessions, through which the followers of the lay abbot handed over the property under their control. The election of the abbot by the monks alone was, however, rarely upheld in the long run, since ties were often maintained between the community and the family who had exercised rights over it. At Saint-​Aubin in Angers, for example, the counts of Anjou, who reformed the abbey in 966, would continue to supervise elections there until 1036. Thus the reforms appear to have been a means for the local aristocracy to reconstitute its relationship with an abbey and its inhabitants. With few exceptions, this can be inferred from the fact that few reforming principles were sustained through the end of the tenth century. Soon after being restored, in fact, many communities found themselves once again under the authority of a lay abbot or reverted to the canonical life. The interest of the powerful was thus not in the formal aspects of the reform, but in the legitimacy that these reforms conferred upon their own authority.

Seeking Legitimacy through Monastic Communities The foundation or patronage of a monastic institution was, more than anything else, a patrimonial and family matter. Indeed, the aristocrat or family who founded a monastery came to be associated, by means of relics, with the saints honored in the sanctuary. Certain lay people even sought to identify themselves personally with their patron saints. This was the case with the viscounts of Marseille, guardians of the abbey of Saint-​Victor, who claimed the support of the martyr Victor and carried his banner in their public assemblies.9 Others invested time and resources in the production of anthropomorphic reliquaries, which served as visible manifestations of their power and of the bond maintained with that particular saint. Still others assumed the features of saintly combatants: Gerald of Aurillac (d. c. 909) and William of Gellone (d. c. 814), for example, in their warrior and heroic dimensions served

Florian Mazel, La noblesse et l’Église en Provence, fin Xe–​début XIVe siècle. L’exemple des families d’Agoult-​Simiane, de Baux et de Marseille (Paris, 2002), 134–​7.

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as models for several aristocrats in the south of France, although this was far from the image portrayed by the monastic authors of their Lives.10 Monasteries also often represented an extension of an aristocratic kinsman’s authority and property, especially in the case of an Eigenkloster. In this sense, such monasteries played a patrimonial role, allowing the family to preserve specific possessions by giving them to the monastery in order to reduce the risk that they be squandered by an heir or seized by enemies. Proprietary monasteries thus often found themselves at the center of a network of relatives, vassals, and friends, and the relative size of their gifts helped to shape the aristocratic hierarchy. These foundations also served to solidify bonds with the families making donations and placing their children there. Finally, the monastery served as a place of memory for the founder’s family, often functioning as an aristocratic necropolis, but above all as a place in which monks and nuns were obliged to commemorate and preserve the identity of the entire kinship group. The legal terms of the foundation, such as the status of the monastic land, could confer yet another source of legitimacy for the lay aristocracy. In certain cases, new abbeys fulfilled the function of freezing lands whose provenance was problematic. In 774, for example, Santa Sofia in Benevento found itself on the receiving end of numerous patrimonies that had been recently seized by its founder. Others hoped to sustain their hold over fiscal lands (public property, granted by the king to loyal subjects for a set period of time, which was intended to go back into circulation), as was the case with Girart of Vienne when he founded Vézelay in 859. These lands were susceptible to being arrogated at any moment, and transferring them to the patrimony of a monastic foundation provided a shield of protection. More generally, the idea prevailed that ecclesiastical property, including monastic patrimonies, was the equivalent of fiscal property. The control of abbeys therefore justified the retention of public privileges (justice, armed force, etc.) that nominally belonged to the king but had been exercised by the nobility since the Carolingian era. Finally, in their role as advocates, through their choice of abbots and by their involvement in founding and reforming monasteries, the lay nobility assumed (at the local or regional level) the function of protecting the Church—​a function that had been an important element of the royal model

See Paolo Facciotto, “Moments et lieux de la tradition manuscrite de la Vita Geraldi,” and Florian Mazel, “Le prince, le saint et le héros:  Guilhem de Baux (1173–​1218) et Guillaume de Gellone  alias  Guillaume d’Orange,” in Guerriers et moines. Conversion et sainteté aristocratiques dans l’Occident médiéval (IXe–​XIIe siècle), ed. Michel Lauwers (Antibes, 2002), 217–​33 and 449–​66.

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forged by the Carolingians. If Carolingian territorial princes at first received their legitimacy from royal support, from the tenth century onwards, these same princes and the seigneurial aristocracy proved themselves by imitating the standards of effective royal government with regard to foundations and endowment of monasteries. In this way, they justified their exercise of power on a limited scale. The reforms in the post-​Carolingian era provide a further witness to the role that the aristocracy intended to play in society, for the good order of monasteries had previously been a concern of the king, assisted by his bishops. This royal model survived in Germany and England, but in western Francia it was taken over by the lay aristocracy, particularly the territorial princes, followed by the local lords.

The Rise of Monastic Seigneuries at the Expense of the Lay Nobility An Intense Circulation of Lands among Monks and Lay Magnates In the course of the ninth through eleventh centuries, the lay nobility made numerous donations to monasteries, donations which should be understood in the broadest sense of the term, as the various categories of gifts were quite fluid. This considerable movement of goods has been analyzed using the anthropological theory of gift exchange.11 In this model, the lay aristocracy conferred goods on religious communities pro anima. In response, the receiving communities were required to pray for the donors and to uphold their memory. Such exchanges established the superiority of the divine gift obtained through the intercession of the monks. The key for monastic institutions had been to present themselves as privileged destinations for the gifts of the founding family, and to provide other nobles (their vassals and their friends) with a means for giving alms. Indeed, monks regarded themselves and were regarded as symbolically poor, intermediaries who redistributed gifts to the real poor. In addition, they appeared as mediators of the heavenly realm, whose prayers, heard directly by God and the saints, would aid their donors in attaining salvation. The donations by no means represented a one-​way stream flowing from giver to monastic community, however. From the Carolingian period until the 1050s, abbeys often transferred gifts pro anima back to their donors under the form of precaria (or livelli, as they were known in Italy).12 These temporary

Eliana Magnani, “Les médiévistes et le don,” Revue du MAUSS 31 (2008): 525–​44. Laurent Morelle, “Les actes de précaire, instruments de transferts patrimoniaux (France du nord et de l’est, VIIIe–​XIe siècle),” MEFRM 111 (1999): 607–​47.

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concessions (often over three decades) of ecclesiastical property to the laity, usually in return for a token rent, appeared as a kind of shared ownership of a monastery’s patrimony, as well as an instrument for managing monastic estates (often widely dispersed). Similarly, between the years 850 and 1010, monasteries across Europe entered into property exchanges (commutatio, excambium) with the lay aristocracy, in which the main goal was not the consolidation of land.13 In both of these practices, what was essential was the circulation of goods among monks and lay people, as well as the prestige conferred on the warrior aristocracy when it came into the possession of formerly monastic land. The most important monastic establishments also extended loans to the lay nobility as one more means of establishing ties with them.14 Charters from Cluny bear witness to the complexity of land circulation through donations, exchanges, purchases, and sales, but also to the alternating cycles in which the laity would lay claim to lands given to monks (petitiones, reclamationes), followed by their subsequent re-​donations (werpitiones). Taken together, these transactions led to the formation of social bonds—​sometimes renounced only to be reaffirmed later—​and they show the significance of land as a conduit for forging privileged relationships (amicitia). The laity could thus “become the neighbor of St. Peter,” and through this contact confer prestige on their own patrimonies.15 These practices had consequences for the monastic world. More than anything else, the system of gift exchange served to confirm the liturgical specialization of the monks that the Carolingian reform had endorsed. Monastic liturgy quickly took on a funerary dimension as prayers for the aristocracy’s dead were exchanged for donations. This is most clearly seen in the celebration of private masses honoring deceased individuals.16 Certain monasteries were especially representative of this phenomenon, most notably Cluny under Abbot Odilo (d. 1049). Among the innovations that Odilo helped to establish or make more widespread were the practice of soliciting lay donations in exchange for burial in monastic cemeteries (ad sepulturam),



Isabelle Rosé, “Commutatio: le vocabulaire de l’échange chrétien au haut Moyen Âge,” in Les élites et la richesse au haut Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-​Pierre Devroey, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout, 2010), 113–​38. On land consolidation in the twelfth century and later, see the article by Berman in volume II. 14 François Bougard, “Le crédit dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge: documentation et pratique,” in Devroey et al., Les élites et la richesse, 439–​78. 15 Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 16 See the article by Blennemann in this volume. 13

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encouraging entrance to the monastery just before death (ad succurrendum), the expansion of liturgical offices for the dead, and the creation in the year 1030 of a feast commemorating all the dead on 2 November (All Souls’ Day). Together, these elements contributed to a considerable expansion of the liturgy at Cluny, characterized by the recitation of an ever-​g rowing number of Psalms and by the continuous celebration of masses (laus perrenis), most notably at the moment of a monk’s death. Beyond Burgundy, monasteries were universally considered to be experts in the management of death and burial; monks accompanied the dying with their prayers, and afterwards celebrated their memory.17 As the system of gift exchange reached its height in the tenth and eleventh centuries, certain monasteries came to control large amounts of property. After the 1020s, the move toward organizing monasteries into congregations increased the opportunity for the major houses to receive donations of distant lands from the European nobility, facilitated by their network of priories. Many monasteries became vast landowners who generated the majority of their income from rents. Others, however, notably in Germany, continued to operate from a local perspective, managing their lands directly rather than through a system of priories.18

The Dominance of Seigneurial Monastic Space in Its Relations with the Laity This accumulation of landed wealth, which was the source of various rights over territory and people, explains how numerous monasteries came into possession of seigneurial domains in the tenth century.19 While this phenomenon has been studied for several communities, Cluny has received the most attention, perhaps because it was most fully realized there, or at least was more extensively documented.20 This exercise of power was the occasion for some monasteries to redefine their relationships with lay aristocrats, as

Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts. Morts, rites et société au Moyen Âge, diocèse de Liège, XIe–​XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1997). 18 Anne Wagner, Gorze au XIe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire du monachisme bénédictin dans l’Empire (Nancy, 1996). 19 See the article by Devroey in this volume. 20 For Fleury, see Annie Dufour and Gilette Labory, eds., Abbon, un abbé de l’an mil (Turnhout, 2008); for Saint-​Germain d’Auxerre, see Noëlle Deflou-​Leca, Saint-​Germain d’Auxerre et ses dépendances (Ve–​XIIIe siècle). Un monastère dans la societé du haut Moyen Âge (Saint-​Étienne, 2010); for Lérins, Montmajour, and Saint-​Victor, see Eliana Magnani Soares-​Christen, Monastères et aristocratie en Provence, milieu Xe–​début XIIe siècle (Münster, 1999); for Cluny, see Didier Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny (Xe–​ XVe siècle) (Lyon, 2001). 17

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they were able to enhance their own authority by limiting aristocratic influence. Building upon the ideas of the reformers, monastic lords were thus able to achieve their ideal of a sharp break with the world. There was no single strategy for accomplishing this, however. Some appealed to the pope (Cluny, Fleury, Montmajour, Saint-​Victor of Marseille) or the sovereign (Fleury and Cluny) in order to guarantee their rights and property, while others looked to episcopal authority (Gorze). Cluny is illustrative of the strategies that monasteries might use for building up seigneurial power insulated from aristocratic pretensions. The protection of its patrimony was guaranteed by the foundation charter of 910 and by a novel form of immunity obtained from the pope in 931 (reconfirmed in 955). The pope exempted monastic property from the ordinary structures of power by forbidding anyone to make claims on the lands or dependencies of monks. Throughout the tenth century, Cluny obtained privileges that guaranteed the monks’ undivided authority over their institution. In 994, for example, the construction of castles in the vicinity of the abbey was prohibited; then, around 1107, a specific area was delineated in which it was forbidden to levy tolls or build fortresses. The zone surrounding the monastery was thus gradually organized into a series of concentric circles, eventually made explicit at the end of the eleventh century.21 This process bears witness to the abbey’s decentralized approach toward managing its property, while also demonstrating the entrenchment of monastic dominance that was intended to be exclusive.22 Under Abbot Hugh of Semur (1049–​1109), this zone was organized into a network of monastic properties known as the obediences (oboedientiae) or deaneries (decaniae). The latter, which comprised a limited number of monks, were regarded as privileged places for peace negotiations between the monks and the laity. They functioned as places of hospitality and asylum, supplied Cluny with various commodities, and participated in the commemoration of the dead. Similar solutions can be observed elsewhere, at Saint-​Remi in Reims or Saint-​Gilles in Gard, for example, although they were less systematically applied.

For a diagram, see Figure 16.5 in the article by Lauwers in this volume. Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abaye de Cluny, 133–​93. On the decentralized management of monastic property, see Alexis Wilkin, “Communautés bénédictines et environement économique, IXe–​ XIIe siècles:  réflexions sur les tendances historiographiques de l’analyse du temporel monastique,” in Ecclesia in medio nationis:  Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages/​Réflexions sur l’étude du monachisme au Moyen Âge, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (Leuven, 2011), 101–​50.

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Conflicts with lay lords over possessions and monastic rights are universally attested. Monastic sources frequently accuse knights (milites) of violating their lands and attempting to impose their evil customs upon the monasteries. These same sources often go on to explain that these conflicts have been resolved before judicial councils of monks or in negotiations through which a penance was imposed on the offenders. The context of such disputes, as previously noted, often lay in the warrior nobility’s desire to renew its ties with the monks. For their part, the monastic lords used the judicial option to affirm their commitment to peace and to limit the influence of lay lords on their lands, often appeasing them with payments, and employing pressure from other lay men. The monks would also turn to deterrence, which essentially meant deploying curses in charters intended to protect monastic lands against potential usurpers.23 The efficacy of this strategy hinged upon the presence of the donor’s family during the ceremony at which the document was drawn up, when they would agree not to contest the transfer of property. By the end of the tenth century, a few foundations, including Cluny and Fleury, had obtained the right to pronounce excommunications—​until then the exclusive prerogative of the bishops.24 Finally, monasteries sometimes used coercive deterrence, since they had milites as vassals to whom they entrusted both the protection of their manors and military operations to maintain order against their lay neighbors. More generally, the monks turned to prayer in their efforts to win the support of the laity. The monastic liturgy has indeed been interpreted as a form of “ritual aggression” whereby the values of the warrior nobility, whose ranks supplied the majority of monks, were translated into the cloister.25 The monks of Cluny performed a spectacular penitential ritual known as a clamor, essentially a complaint made to the saints in the form of a prayer demanding that they intervene to stop lay violence.26 The monks’ intention was to impose their views on the milites who were present at the ritual and to secure their support against other aristocrats. At Sainte-Foy in Conques, Saint-​Victor in Marseille, and Fleury the monks organized processions of relics through disputed



Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, NY, 1993). 24 Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, 80. 25 See Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Feudal War and Monastic Peace: Cluniac Liturgy as Ritual Aggression,” Viator 2 (1971): 129–​57. 26 Patrick J. Geary, “L’humiliation des saints,” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 34 (1979): 27–​42. 23

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lands.27 The accounts bearing witness to these, such as those by Bernard of Angers (fl. c. 1010) or Aimon of Fleury (d. c. 1008), often describe an extraordinary punishment imposed at the conclusion of the ritual on those who dared to oppose the power of the monks. These texts thus served as veritable weapons wielded to delegitimize aristocratic violence. The role of writing in the management and resolution of conflicts between monks and laity should not be underestimated. A  large part of the hagiographic sources were, in fact, written by monks during times of crisis with their lay counterparts, often in conjunction with the publication of separate diplomatic acts denouncing seigneurial violence.28 Together, these writings thus constituted two components of a single strategy to delegitimize certain warrior practices and also to propose an idealized image of lay power, especially in its relation to the monks. After the middle of the eleventh century, a discourse advocating the Church’s resistance to lay subjection—​a theme whose origins were monastic but that subsequently took a radical turn under the reform papacy—​began to undermine these relations. This contest began with an expansion of the prohibition against simony, which was now understood as a general rejection of all lay interference in the affairs of the Church. Certain monasteries accordingly cut ties once and for all with the families of their founders, who, despite initial reform, had often maintained their influence. In this vein, in 1079, the abbots of Saint-​Victor in Marseille obtained the same legal status as Cluny from Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–​85), thus ending the guardianship of the local viscount. While control of abbatial elections became the primary issue for the reformers of the eleventh century, the Gregorian discourse had an even greater impact upon the possession of monastic land and monastic rights. Modes of shared ownership were already being displaced by the general disappearance of trade in goods (commutationes) around the year 1000. Reformist discourse encouraged the subsequent preference for one-​sided relationships whereby only monks could be on the receiving end of donations because they now perceived themselves (as will be seen below) as hierarchically superior to the warrior aristocracy. The phenomenon coincided with the first condemnations of the “evil customs” that the lay nobility are said to have imposed. This meant that the monks built up their own seigneuries by limiting—​on the level of both practice and discourse—​any other form of authority. It was an

Dominique Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu. La France chrétienne et féodale, 980–​1060 (Paris, 1999), 99–​108. 28 See the numerous contributions in Lauwers, Guerriers et moines, especially the synthesis of Michel Lauwers, “Postface,” 637–​51. 27

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outlook that became more and more widespread after 1050, and the eleventh-​ century Church reform led some monastic circles to forbid the laity to hold their property. Rhetorically, this was achieved by describing such practices in terms of theft (depredatio, exactio, invasio, usurpatio, rapacitas, praeda, raptores, rapina, evellere, spolia), injustice (calum[p]nia, forfactura, injuria, iniquitas, malefactum), and transgression (querela, discordia, peccatum, infestatio).29 This vocabulary was coined during the Carolingian era to refer to conflict/​resolution between monks and the laity, but after 1050 it invaded monastic writings and allowed for the closure of legal cases deemed to be final restitutions of Church property to the abbeys. The period of papal reform from 1060 to 1070 thus led to the “rupture in the friendship” between monks and leading lay nobles that was evident in several regions.30 Indeed, we witness an extraordinary movement of Church property (tithes, churches, chapels, etc.), transferred to the monks, who in the short run gained a significant degree of prestige and authority. The noble warriors, for their part, found themselves henceforth at the head of seigneuries that were exclusively “lay”; their rights no longer fell within the sacred sphere. This happened quickly; precaria disappeared everywhere, while the donations made by noble warriors to monasteries dried up. Their generosity was subsequently directed toward the new monasticism, as well as to the communities of canons.31

Monastic Theories Regarding Their Relation to the Warrior Nobility The drive for autonomy in the monastic sphere led monks to justify, in writing, their newfound authority, notably in their relations to other powers. From the ninth century, monastic authors began to present their own version of their relationship with the laity and to define for the latter a life ethic in line with monastic expectations. Carolingian bishops and monks devised models of behavior directed toward the king and other important lay people, defined by their right to





Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny, 260–​1; Florian Mazel, “Amitié et rupture de l’amitié: moines et grands laïcs provençaux au temps de la crise grégorienne (milieu XIe–​ milieu XIIe siècle),” Revue historique 633 (2005):  53–​ 95; Isabelle Rosé, “L’écriture hagiographique en Gallia méridionale à l’époque grégorienne (Xe–​XIIe siècle),” in La réforme “grégorienne” dans le Midi, milieu XIe–​début XIIIe siècle, ed. Michelle Fournié, Daniel Le Blévec, and Florian Mazel (Toulouse, 2013), 41–​79. 30 Mazel, “Amitié et rupture de l’amitié”; Didier Panfili, Aristocraties méridionales. Toulousain-​Quercy, XIe–​XIIe siècles (Rennes, 2010), 56–​60 and 227–​31. 31 The phenomenon of gift exchange continued, as the article by Lyon in volume II shows, but in other spheres or toward other kinds of beneficiaries.

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Figure  30.1  Heiric of Auxerre’s vision of society (second half of the ninth century). Diagram by I. Rosé.

marry and carry arms in defense of the Church.32 To earn their salvation, lay people needed to fulfill their judicial and military activities, as well as practice works of piety, notably almsgiving and pilgrimage. This is the essential background to the Vita prima of St. Gangolf, the first text about a lay saint, composed between the end of the ninth century and first half of the tenth by a cleric who may have had ties to the abbey of Varennes. Here, Gangolf became a saint by devoting himself to activities typical of secular life, such as marrying and performing military service for the king. A similar sanctioning of the nobility in its warrior function appears in the vision of society defended by the monk Heiric of Auxerre (d. c. 880) in the second half of the ninth century.33 Whereas most Carolingian models cited three orders—​clergy (leaders of society and mediators of the divine), monks (assigned to prayer), and laity (responsible for the defense of the others)—​ Heiric proposed a highly hierarchical society comprised of men who worked the land (agricolantes) and those who fought (belligerantes), as well as a monastic “third order” that prayed and guided society (see Figure  30.1). This model thus endorsed the privileged ties between monks and lay aristocrats (prayer in exchange for protection), while recognizing the new vocation of monastic priesthood that made monks mediators with the sacred on behalf of the laity.



Alain Dubreucq, “La littérature des specula:  délimitation du genre, contenu, destinataires et réception,” and Raffaele Savigni, “Les laïcs dans l'ecclésiologie carolingienne:  normes statutaires et idéal de ‘conversion’,” in Lauwers, Guerriers et moines, 17–​39 and 41–​92. 33 Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “Le ‘baptême’ du schéma des trois ordres fonctionnels: l’apport de l’école d’Auxerre dans le seconde moitié du IXe siècle,” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 41 (1986): 43–​61.

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The pastoral care that monks directed toward the warrior aristocracy emerged in the tenth century, and was characterized, at least on the rhetorical level, by a progressive subordination of the laity to the seigneurial monastic power. To begin with, this process required new models of lay saints living in the world. Two examples are Gerald of Aurillac, whose vita was composed by Odo of Cluny (d. 942) in 930, and Gangolf, about whom a new, versified Life was written by Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (d. after 973)  around 960. Their sanctity was achieved, as before, by fulfilling the duties inherent in their function (notably by procuring justice), and by distributing alms to monks and the poor, but also by assuming a monastic lifestyle (sexual abstinence, daily prayer, avoidance of combat). We see this same logic of monasticizing the laity, although in a somewhat more subtle form, in the peace councils that took place around the year 1000 on the initiative of the bishops, with the close participation of the monks. In these we find a similar desire to curb aristocratic violence by engaging warriors in the service of the Church and its protection. Alongside these models for behavior in the world are several monastic texts from the 940s, and many more from around the year 1000, all connected with Cluny, which present an even more radical discourse of edification. They valorize monastic conversion, particularly the entry ad succurrendum (when the individual is close to death), in some cases after an intense career as a warrior in the service of the Church.34 The emergence of monastic seigneuries further explains why monks developed new models of society through which they confirmed their position of dominance. Thus, in the first half of the tenth century, Odo of Cluny revived the Carolingian schema of clerics–​monks–​laity, but transformed it radically by moving the bishops aside. He proposed a dual schema that rested on the privileged exchange between good, powerful lay individuals (who provided alms and protected the Church) and reformed monks (symbolic poor and recipients of charity from the powerful). Accordingly, he placed monasteries at the center of the social exchange and monks at the summit of the hierarchy, making them not only models of behavior for the rest of society but also its mediators (see Figure 30.2). Around the year 1000, the monks began to focus less on their relationship with the lay nobility and more on that with the clerical order, seeking to affirm their own superiority. This took place in the context of their quest

Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Études clunisiennes (Paris, 2002), 93–​124; and Isabelle Rosé, Construire une société seigneuriale. Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–​milieu du Xe siècle) (Turnhout, 2008), 474–​5.

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Figure 30.2  Odo of Cluny’s vision of society (first half of the tenth century). Diagram by I. Rosé.

to obtain exemptions by which they attempted essentially to remove themselves from the oversight of their diocesan bishop.35 Abbot Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004) thus proposed a tripartite society in which the monks, united by their commitment to virginity and contemplation, stood at the top of the hierarchy, above clerics and the laity (see Figure 30.3). The latter were in turn divided into the peasantry (laboratores) and the warriors (bellatores), charged with nourishing and protecting the others respectively. In this model, the monks occupied a higher place than the clerics but did not enter into a privileged relationship with the lay aristocracy. In a similar context, at Cluny under the abbacy of Odilo, the schema of Heiric of Auxerre was revived by expanding the distance that separated the third order of monks from the world. This three-​part division, which did away with the clerical order, reserved the duty of prayer to the monks alone. This model further affirmed the monks’ ties with the laity, allowed for the consolidation of the Cluniac seigneurie in opposition to the bishops, and confirmed the abbey’s participation in the Peace of God movement (see Figure 30.4). After 1050, the monks would offer the laity even more radical paths to salvation that centered on the cloister. Contemporary monastic hagiographic texts began to emphasize that the sole means of sanctification—​and sometimes even salvation—​following a career in arms in the service of the Church, was to enter a monastery. The monastery was henceforth considered to be a

See the article by Rolker in this volume; see also Marco Mostert, The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury:  A Study of the Ideas about Society and Law of the Tenth-​Century Monastic Reform Movement (Hilversum, 1987); Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “Entre anges et hommes: les moines ‘doctrinaires’ de l’an mil,” in La France de l’an mil, ed. Dominique Iogna-​Prat and Robert Delort (Paris, 1990), 245–​63.

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Figure 30.3  Abbo of Fleury’s vision of society (c. 1000). Diagram by I. Rosé.

Figure 30.4  Odilo of Cluny’s vision of society (c. 1000). Diagram by I. Rosé.

refuge, including for adults in the prime of life. The hagiographic works on Bouchard of Vendôme (d. 1005)  and Simon of Crépy (d. c.  1081)  are prime examples of this form of conversion. The diffusion of pastoral care of this sort partly explains the soaring growth of late conversion in the eleventh century. 596

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However, nuances among different monasteries should be noted. Without doubt, the most radical position belonged to Cluny, where, under Abbot Hugh of Semur, the sole means for a lay man to serve God was to become a monk himself and to do penance for sins committed. In other establishments, such as Gellone, the boundary between the lay world and the monastery was less clear-​cut and conversion was considered more fluid. Some hagiographical texts highlighted the military career (thus minimizing the rupture with the world in entering a monastery), and others depicted adult converts called back to the world to take up arms. This was the case with William of Gellone, who, according to his vita, returned to fight the infidels on two occasions.36 Finally, there were some monasteries that did not promote a model of lay sanctity at all. Saint-​Victor in Marseille even proceeded to reverse the pattern by abandoning—​in a “Gregorian” moment—​the cult of Victor, a martyr-​ soldier associated with the viscount of Marseille (the abbey’s former protector) in favor of Abbot Isarn (d. 1048), the subject of a Life that only makes passing reference to late conversions.

Conclusion The eighth through the eleventh century was a period characterized by very close relations between monks and the lay aristocracy thanks to the recruitment of nobles to the monastic life, the unceasing back-​and-​forth exchange of property, and the fundamental role that monasteries played in legitimizing the power of the nobles. This situation nonetheless evolved according to different rhythms. The slow consolidation of monastic seigneuries led to their eventual separation from lay society, while at the same time creating bonds with it that were more hierarchical. Such bonds were justified by dictating to the lay nobility an ideal behavior that placed it in an increasingly subservient position with respect to monastic power.

Bibliography Bouchard, Constance Brittain. Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–​1198. Ithaca, NY, 1987.



On William of Gellone, see Claudie Duhamel-​ Amado, “Le miles conuersus et fundator: de Guillaume de Gellone à Pons de Léras,” and Pierre Chastang, “La fabrication d’un saint: la Vita Guillelmi dans la production textuelle de l’abbaye de Gellone au début du XIIe siècle,” in Lauwers, Guerriers et moines, 419–​27 and 429–​47.

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Isabelle  Rosé Boynton, Susan, and Isabelle Cochelin, eds. From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny. Turnhout, 2005. de Jong, Mayke. In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West. New York, 1996. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. Études clunisiennes. Paris, 2002. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique, Michel Lauwers, Florian Mazel, and Isabelle Rosé, eds. Cluny. Les moines et la société au premier âge féodal. Rennes, 2013. Jamroziak, Emilia M., and Janet E. Burton, eds. Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–​ 1400: Interaction, Negotiation and Power. Turnhout, 2006. La Rocca, Cristina, François Bougard, and Régine Le Jan, eds. Sauver son âme et se perpétuer. Transmission du patrimoine et mémoire au haut Moyen Âge. Actes de la table ronde “Salvarsi l’anima, perpetuare la famiglia” réunie à Padoue les 3, 4 et 5 octobre 2002. Rome, 2005. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Guerriers et moines. Conversion et sainteté aristocratiques dans l’Occident médiéval (IXe–​XIIe siècle). Antibes, 2002. Magnani Soares-​Christen, Eliana. Monastères et aristocratie en Provence, milieu Xe–​début XIIe siècle. Münster, 1999. Mazel, Florian. “Amitié et rupture de l’amitié:  moines et grands laïcs provençaux au temps de la crise grégorienne (milieu XIe–​milieu XIIe siècle).” Revue historique 633 (2005): 53–​95.   “Monachisme et aristocratie aux Xe–XIe siècles: un regard sur l’historiographie récente.” In Vanderputten and Meijns, Ecclesia in medio nationis, 47–75. Méhu, Didier. Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny (Xe–​XVe siècle). Lyon, 2001. Nightingale, John. Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform:  Lotharingia c.  850–​1000. Oxford, 2001. Remensnyder, Amy G. Remembering Kings Past:  Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France. Ithaca, NY, 1995. Rosé, Isabelle. Construire une société seigneuriale. Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–​milieu du Xe siècle). Turnhout, 2008.   “Fondations et réformes à l’époque carolingienne.” In Monachesimi d’Oriente e d’Occidente nell’alto medioevo. Atti della LXIV Settimana sull’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 31 Marzo–6 Aprile 2016, 2 vols., 1:397–462. Spoleto, 2017. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century. Philadelphia, PA, 1982.   To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049. Ithaca, NY, 1989. Vanderputten, Steven. Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100. Ithaca, NY, 2013. Vanderputten, Steven, and Brigitte Meijns, eds. Ecclesia in medio nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages/​Réflexions sur l’étude du monachisme au Moyen Âge. Leuven, 2011.

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Monastic Reform from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century Ste v e n V a n de rp utten Reform is one of the most frequently referenced, but least understood, aspects of monasticism’s development in the tenth to early twelfth centuries.1 Its status as a key paradigm in discussions of that period originated with contemporary apologetic commentators who relied on reform to support a broad range of auctorial agendas. Some of these individuals were seeking to justify ongoing or recent interventions by reformist agents in the life of monastic groups, while others, writing from an a posteriori perspective, used accounts of reform as a means to construct a heroic memory for past spiritual and institutional leaders, to project certain ideals relevant to the current state of monasticism, or to justify the actions of reformers living in their own age.2 All, or nearly all, of these discourses supported an interpretation of monastic reform as an abrupt, sometimes traumatic, but nearly always beneficial procedure, rooted in the desire to realize a more authentic experience of the cenobitic ideal and remediate some of the challenges facing monastic communities, such as the decline of discipline, bad leadership, and interference from secular society. This idea of reform, based on an understanding of communal development mirroring the spiritual development of an individual, envisaged short

I drew much inspiration for this chapter from Giles Constable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life:  Concepts and Realities,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 37–​67; Gert Melville, “Aspekte zum Vergleich von Krisen und Reformen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Orden,” in Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin, 2007), 139–​60; and Julia Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–​c. 1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2008, 345–​62. 2 Jean-​Marie Sansterre, “ ‘Destructio’ et ‘diminutio’ d’une grande abbaye royale: la perception et la mémoire des crises à Farfa au Xe et dans les premières décennies du XIe siècle,” in Les élites au haut Moyen Âge. Crises et renouvellements, ed. François Bougard, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan (Turnhout, 2006), 469–​85. 1

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bursts of intense, beneficial change alternating with long phases of stability, followed inevitably by laxity and decline. A recurrent argument in reformist commentaries of the time is that this communal “life-​cycle” was relevant in equal measure both to the development of specific communities and to that of monasticism in general, and that its rhythm on both of these levels roughly coincided chronologically. In other words, the state of an individual monastery could often be regarded as a reflection of the state of monastic life in general, and the emergence of “reform movements” could be interpreted as a response to a broadly observed decline.3 These views surely would not have survived the advent of modern scholarship were it not for two factors. The first relates to the emergence, from the sixteenth century onwards, of a historiography of Benedictinism as an ideology and an institutionalized movement. In particular, monastic historians relied on the notion of a “restoration” of cenobitism in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. This process was thought to have succeeded in reversing a downward trend in monks’ organization and conduct, to have restored observance of St. Benedict’s precepts, and to have laid the foundations for a growing trend toward homogenization and the creation of supra-​institutional structures for legislation and supervision. It also, according to these authors, laid the foundations for the gradual emergence in later centuries of the Benedictine order. A second factor is that secular scholarship from the nineteenth century onwards began elaborating on the notion that, in the period under review, a phenomenon had existed that was referred to by some specialists as “reform monasticism.”4 This was a movement that, through different means depending on the sociopolitical context, had pursued emancipation of monastic groups from local lords and other secular stakeholders, had led to rationalization in government, liturgical practice, and other aspects of monastic life, and, ultimately, had sought to establish a common standard in all of these domains. As an ideology for change that transcended the development of individual monastic groups, reform aimed at realizing a paradigm shift from the individual community to a cohesive, well-​organized movement and, eventually, order. But scholars’ reliance on the notion of reform as a homogenizing, beneficial procedure derived not just from the fact that it helped explain the transitions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (in

Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100 (Ithaca, NY, 2013). 4 Joachim Wollasch, “Monasticism:  The First Wave of Reform,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, III: c. 900–​c. 1024, ed. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1999), 163–​85. 3

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particular the emergence of institutions for legislation and supervision), and thus contributed to an accessible, linear narrative of monastic development in the Middle Ages. The continued appeal of reform also derived from the fact that it offered a way of disregarding monastic groups’ embedding in local or even individual contexts. Instead, it explained changes in monastic ideology, spirituality, institutionalism, and culture by referring to the interventions of charismatic individuals whose actions were guided by a widely shared, coherent reformist “program.” According to these traditional historians of monasticism, the adoption of one of these circulating programs signaled a monastic community’s incorporation into its corresponding reform “system” or “movement,” the organization and agency of which were managed from major centers of reform, such as Cluny, Gorze, Fleury, Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon, Hirsau, and several others. Few specialists would now argue that reform was a priori beneficial or necessary, or subscribe to the notion that the reformers of that period aimed to create networks of emancipated, homogenized institutions. The most significant conclusion that has emerged from recent scholarship is that “reform” has lost its self-​explanatory meaning, in that it is no longer possible to convey adequately the realities of change in monastic groups by merely referring to the intervention of reformers; and that the relevance of reform to monastic scholarship is severely compromised by a semantic legacy that may be attractive, but has little, if anything at all, to do with historical realities.5 Nonetheless, it is that attractiveness—​in that it allows for a straightforward narrative of monasticism’s development—​that prevents these recent insights from percolating either into general discussions of the period or into case studies of monastic institutionalism, culture, and spirituality. It is still common to find reference to the notions that reform functioned as the principal vector of change in all of these domains, that its homogenizing effects can be retraced to predetermined programs, and that exchanges in the context of reform were based primarily upon relations between reformist “centers” and their subsidiary institutions. It is also common to find individuals and groups that pursued change in any of the above domains being labeled as “reformers” or “reformist agents,” even when their connection to a reformist “movement” is not certain. Conversely, historians have consistently labeled “true” reformers’ actions as “reformist,” even when it can be shown that some of these individuals’ behavior as institutional and spiritual leaders matched that of their “non-​reformist” predecessors.6 These and other problems have

Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform.” Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process.

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resulted in a situation in which only a small fraction of the now immense bibliography on reform provides the reader with a discussion of the appropriateness of the term to describe what happened to monasticism in this period, or a reflection on the impact of previous uses of the term on our understanding of medieval realities.

The “First Phase” of  Reform Classic surveys of monastic history regard the transformations of the tenth century as a departure from the heterogeneous, secularized realities of Carolingian monasticism. The gradual abolition of the lay abbacy, the emergence of institutions representative of a new trend in monastic spirituality and institutionalism, and evidence relating to “waves” of reform in Aquitaine, Burgundy, Lotharingia, and England were considered proof of a trend toward emancipation and homogenization in contemporary male monasticism. The late-​nineteenth-​century historian Ernst Sackur was influential in this respect, postulating the existence of more or less independently operating monastic “movements” consisting of reformed institutions and coordinated from the aforementioned reform centers.7 Thanks to the attractive way in which he associated specific reform movements with the emergence of new political entities, particularly the European nation-​states, Sackur’s model became common currency in twentieth-​century scholarship. As regards female communities, much the same narrative of institutional development can be observed, the main difference being that the accent here lay on the supposed failure of attempts, made early in the ninth century, to distinguish between canonical and cenobitic lifestyles, and to impose one standard for all communities living under either one of these rules.8 Half a century later, Kassius Hallinger elaborated upon Sackur’s thesis in his influential study Gorze-​Kluny, arguing that different “national” or “regional” reform movements reflected the expectations of the elites in these areas regarding the role of monasticism in society. Thus he envisioned Cluniac monasticism as the “French” version of the reformist ideal, focusing on prayer service and the commemoration of the dead, whereas the customs of Gorze represented the “Eastern” version, which aimed to turn monasteries into representative sanctuaries for the lay elites and provide “cultural”

Ernst Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit bis zur Mitte des elften Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Halle a.d. Saale, 1892–​4). 8 Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–​1050 (Ithaca, NY, 2018). 7

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services to secular and ecclesiastical rulers.9 In the former middle kingdom of Lotharingia, he discerned several reform systems based upon “mixed observances” that were reflective of the mixed political allegiances of the region’s elites. According to this model, each of these systems or movements was driven by the implementation of a fully developed reformist program, which was consolidated by means of a homogenized set of monastic customs, and a shared methodology relating to architecture, liturgy, reading practices, and institutional management. Exchange of personnel, know-​how, and texts was essential to its success, and was managed from major reform centers. In Hallinger’s vision and that of many other scholars, the transitions brought about by reforms were beneficial, because emancipation from secular interference, homogenization, and especially the creation of supra-​institutional structures of supervision led to a more functional, and especially more authentic, incarnation of St. Benedict’s ideal monastery. Problems with Hallinger’s thesis became especially evident when Gorze-​ Kluny was re-​edited in 1971. Research carried out in the two decades since its original publication had yielded two key observations. The first, made possible by the growing availability of customaries in the Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum, was that Hallinger’s suspicions regarding the uniformity of internal customs in reform “systems” did not correspond with reality. Thanks to the work of Joachim Wollasch, Isabelle Cochelin, and others, we now know that reformers prior to the twelfth century did not rely on customaries to homogenize the observance and organization of communities associated with a specific reform “movement,” and that it is unlikely that any reformer of that period considered copying exactly the customs observed at one house onto those of other groups.10 The second observation was that the spread of specific liturgical, vestimentary, or other customs in a particular group of monasteries does not necessarily constitute evidence of the existence of a hierarchical or congregational reform “system.”11 Nonetheless, critics of Hallinger remained reluctant to dispel the notion that the transmission and adoption by monastic groups of specific liturgical and other practices was evidence of the existence of “reform monasticism” as



Kassius Hallinger, Gorze-​Kluny. Studien zu den monastischen Lebensformen und Gegensätzen im Hochmittelalter, 2 vols. (Rome, 1950–​1). 10 Isabelle Cochelin, “Évolution des coutumiers monastiques dessinée à partir de l’étude de Bernard,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 29–​66; see also the article by Cochelin in this volume. 11 Joachim Wollasch, Mönchtum des Mittelalters zwischen Kirche und Welt (Munich, 1973). See also the discussion of several such “systems” in Hallinger, Gorze-​Kluny. 9

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a broad, ideological movement that, irrespective of political, socioeconomic, and regional contexts, pursued a rupture with cenobitism’s early medieval past by promoting change on three levels: emancipation from lay lords’ and bishops’ control; progressive homogenization of monastic customs and government; and the creation of structures, first informal but increasingly institutionalized, of legislation and supervision.12 According to this view, the shift around the year 900 of political power to the regional and local levels, the Norman invasions, and other turbulences spurred into action monastic agents who recognized in these challenges opportunities for new beginnings. Thus, regions particularly affected by the above transitions—​such as Burgundy, Lotharingia, and Aquitaine—​were the first to see the emergence of “reform monasticism” in the early tenth century. Inherent to this reasoning was the view that individuals from the monastic sphere itself, and in particular the charismatic abbots celebrated in medieval accounts, were the driving force behind this movement of monastic “revival.” Evidently these leaders had needed the support of local secular and ecclesiastical rulers, and had by necessity developed modes for publicizing the material and spiritual benefits that could be gained from supporting the emergence of an emancipated, well-​organized brand of monastic life, which in name at least was organized according to Benedictine tradition. But the deeper reasons for reform were primarily considered an internal affair, with monasticism seeking to rediscover its primitive roots and to establish a place for itself in—​but sufficiently secluded from—​human society. These views, although they marked a major leap forward in scholars’ understanding of monastic development, have now been largely abandoned in favor of a more diversified, and more complex, understanding of monastic development and reform. Research carried out since the 1970s by Wollasch and his disciples on the abbey of Cluny and its supposed “reform system,” and in particular on its exemption from episcopal authority, its relations with secular society, and the way in which it managed its estates, has made it clear that this abbey and its network of affiliated institutions represented an exceptional case, one which was neither representative nor replicable elsewhere. Cluny’s abbots, as heads of an institution founded in the early tenth century, did not have to deal with “contextual constraints” like local customs, liturgical traditions, and, most importantly, the inevitably complicated social networks in which monastic institutions founded in earlier periods were involved.

Wollasch, “Monasticism,” 166.

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Coincidence also played a significant role in Cluny’s early development. For instance, Abbot Odo (d. 942) intervened in Cluny’s history by metaphorically “killing” the father-​founder William of Aquitaine in the original foundation charter, and claiming for his institution an “emancipated” origin; only the fact that William’s line died soon after him allowed this view to go uncontested.13 Scrutiny of the biographies of Cluny’s tenth-​and eleventh-​century abbots has revealed that Cluniac “reform monasticism” essentially constituted an ex posteriori discourse, ignoring the cumulative nature of abbatial government and projecting current situations onto former leaders’ allegedly cohesive reform strategies.14 Indeed, such cohesiveness was lacking throughout the tenth century and a good part of the eleventh. A comparison with what happened in Lotharingia illustrates the uniqueness of Cluny’s situation and the lack of justification for arguing the existence of “reform monasticism” as previously defined by Sackur and Hallinger. Scholars have long assumed that reformers in this region were unable to develop their vision of reform as fully as their Cluniac peers because they were limited in their actions by the interference and involvement of secular and ecclesiastical lords, who wished to safeguard their invested interests in monastic institutions. However, the initiative for reform in this region hardly ever came from monastic groups or agents, but from bishops and secular lords, and for reasons that had little to do with the supposed drive for emancipation. Beginning in the early tenth century, archbishops in Reims and Trier, as part of their attempts to give their office a more solid institutional footing and to present themselves as warrantors of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical stability, began transforming houses of regular canons into monasteries. The model they relied on to implement their monastic reform strategy was traditional, and depended on Carolingian antecedents.15 As regards discipline and internal organization, it was based



Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “La geste des origines dans l’historiographie clunisienne des XIe–​XIIe siècles,” Revue bénédictine 102 (1992): 135–​91; Franz Neiske, “Charismatischer Abt oder charismatische Gemeinschaft? Die frühen Äbte Clunys,” in Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Giancarlo Andenna, Mirko Breitenstein, and Gert Melville (Münster, 2005), 55–​72. 14 Isabelle Rosé, Construire une société seigneuriale. Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–​milieu du Xe siècle) (Turnhout, 2008). 15 Josef Semmler, “Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform im 10. Jahrhundert,” in Monastische Reformen im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert, ed. Raymund Kottje and Helmut Maurer (Sigmaringen, 1989), 29–​77; and Michèle Gaillard, D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne (Paris, 2006). On female communities, see Hedwig Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis der benediktinischen Reformen des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts: Gorze, Cluny, Hirsau, St. Blasien und Siegburg,” in Melville and Müller, Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster, 275–​327. 13

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on the Carolingian reforms of the early ninth century; as regards external affairs, bishops essentially perpetuated the system of proprietary monasteries.16 The same is true of a number of secular rulers, for instance Count Arnulf of Flanders (d. 965), who in the 940s and 950s pursued reform to create representational institutions of his quasi-​regal ambitions, and to subject the institutions and estates of former Carolingian houses to his undisputed lordship.17 Numerous other examples could be mentioned here. The fact that monastic groups were now expected to observe the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), and that elected abbots replaced the former lay abbots, probably made little difference to local rulers’ grip on these institutions. As regards the material aspects of reformist government, with the exception of Cluny and a number of more or less related institutions, ecclesiastical and secular lords mostly pursued a policy of continuity rather than of rupture in their relationship to monastic groups. Similar arguments have been made about the tenth-​century reforms in England.18 Assessing the impact of reform is difficult because contemporary reports tend to paint a dark picture of past situations, and claim contemporaries’ a priori preference for a homogeneous ordo monasticus.19 Making any kind of assessment of pre-​reform realities, and thus also of the realities and consequences of reform, is often difficult owing to a lack of sources.20 Customaries and other normative texts cannot be considered reliable indicators of how life at specific institutions was organized,21 even though, as





Egon Boshof, “Kloster und Bischof in Lotharingien,” in Kottje and Maurer, Monastische Reformen, 196–​245. 17 Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns, “Gérard de Brogne en Flandre:  état de la question sur les réformes monastiques du dixième siècle,” Revue du Nord 385 (2010): 271–​95. 18 Catherine Cubitt, “The Tenth-​Century Benedictine Reform in England,” Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997): 77–​94. 19 For female communities, see Thomas Schilp, Norm und Wirklichkeit religiöser Frauengemeinschaften im frühen Mittelalter. Die Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis des Jahres 816 und die Problematik der Verfassung von Frauenkommunitäten (Göttingen, 1998); and Katrinette Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen:  die Adaption der Benediktsregel im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Vienna, 2011), 235–​74. 20 John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform:  Lotharingia c.  850–​1000 (Oxford, 2007); and Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process. 21 Klaus Schreiner, “Verschriftlichung als Faktor monastischer Reform: Funktionen von Schriftlichkeit im Ordenswesen des hohen und späten Mittelalters,” in Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter. Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, ed. Hagen Keller, Klaus Grubmüller, and Nikolaus Staubach (Munich, 1992), 37–​75. 16

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has been suspected for the Regularis concordia in England, they may be taken as indicative of new practices22 or at least of a desire to change existing ones. Unquestionably the ecclesiastical and lay elites’ interest in cenobitism as the preferred form of religious communal life invigorated monasticism’s institutions and culture. One point that does seem established beyond reasonable doubt is that reformers’ initiative in internal matters focused on creating “prayer machines” consisting of groups of ascetic monks living under the RB. Another is that rulers’ high expectations regarding the ascetic reputation of these communities and the devotional performance of their membership brought them to select for abbatial office individuals of outstanding ascetic reputation, with a proven track record of intellectual qualities and a penchant for diplomacy.23 Under the patronage of these powerful lords, the injection of new material wealth, the opening or intensification of exchange routes for technical know-​how, cultural capital (including manuscripts, texts, and artistic knowledge) and expert personnel, and a context of relative institutional and political stability created the conditions for an intensification of spiritual and cultural activity, the building of new churches, and the growth of the communities, their estates, and their social networks. Abbots elected or appointed in the context of reform went to great lengths to accommodate local contexts and historical legacies. Inspection of the tenure of such leaders reveals that acts of government that scholars formerly understood as “flashpoint” interventions—​completely revolutionizing life in their institutions, and reflective of a predetermined, reformist program—​were in fact often the result of a careful build-​up of “reformist” measures taken over a relatively long period of time (up to several decades). They were also deeply rooted in local contexts, determined by geographical, political, economical, and other structures, and by traditions relating to local cultural practices, social networks, recruitment of new monks, intellectual culture, and so on.24 Another important conclusion, drawn from recent research, is that the mere pursuit by a monastic leader known to tradition as a reformist agent of any (or indeed all) of the aforementioned changes does not warrant automatically describing his individual acts of government as “reformist.” Reform was a catalyst for many things, but it was not the only,

Julia Barrow, “The Chronology of the Benedictine Reform,” in Edgar, King of the English 959–​975: New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2008), 211–​23. See also the article by Jones in this volume. 23 See the articles by Blennemann and Rosé in this volume. 24 Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns, “Realities of Reformist Leadership in Early Eleventh-​Century Flanders:  The Case of Leduin, Abbot of Saint-​Vaast,” Traditio 65 (2010): 47–​74. 22

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or even principal, catalyzing agent for change in monasticism’s development. Political, economic, and other large-​scale trends also played a major part in communities’ long-​term transformations, as did the inherent dynamic of each monastic community, and the often small but significant interventions of “non-​reformist” abbots and their associates. Monastic groups’ and their patrons’ ability to experience the material and symbolic benefits of this “professionalized” prayer regime depended in large part on personal networks, where expert staff, know-​how, and texts were exchanged.25 Since monastic and patronal interests were inextricable, we should think of these as inserted in the other elite networks of that time, and as serving hybrid interests. So the Lotharingian abbey of Gorze in the mid-​tenth century functioned as a center of learning and spiritual education for both future monastic and future episcopal leaders, and its library contained books that were destined in the first place for use by bishops, rather than by abbots or their subjects.26 Highly trained personnel moved quite freely between both worlds, and it seems justified to say that, if we may speak of reformist networks for this period, these were between people, not institutions.

The “Second Phase” of  Reform The decades following the turn of the millennium marked a significant transition in monasticism’s development. The most spectacular, if still gradual, transformation took place at Cluny. The fact that this abbey now held significant landed property controlled under a form of secular lordship allowed the setting up of a centralized system for coordinating the management of major estates.27 The possibility of extending this structure to include the government of subsidiary monastic communities subjected to the authority of Cluny’s abbot only became a realistic prospect with the granting of several papal privileges. In 1024, Pope John XIX (r. 1024–​32) granted all Cluniac monks, wherever they were, the right to refer to Cluny’s exempted status, opening the way for the establishment of institutions whose legal status was similar to that of the Burgundian mother house. This transitional phase marks the

See the article by Röckelein in volume II. Anne Wagner, Gorze au XIe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire du monachisme bénédictin dans l’Empire (Turnhout, 1996), 101–​90. 27 Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); and Didier Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny (Xe–​XVe siècles) (Lyon, 2001). 25

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origins of the ecclesia Cluniacensis, a congregational structure consisting at the end of the eleventh century of about fifteen monasteries led by an abbot but ultimately controlled by the abbot of Cluny, and about seventy priories supervised directly by the mother house.28 Further exemptive privileges, and a “wave” of new foundations (brought about by promoting the redemptive efficacy of both the monks’ commemorative service and the secular elites’ patronage), galvanized the development of the ecclesia Cluniacensis and facilitated its gradual transformation into a congregation. Contrary to received opinion in the older literature, actual attempts at homogenization—​for instance, through the use of customaries or liturgical manuals—​were not attempted prior to the later eleventh century, and even for the period around 1100 the intended normative value of these handbooks is highly doubtful.29 In contrast, some scholars have argued that the promotion of a shared methodology regarding interactions with secular society (in particular in procedures relating to lay donations and the exchange of material and spiritual goods), and the creation of a literate community focused in the first place on liturgical service, were instrumental in fostering a sense of shared purpose and identity among Cluniac groups.30 Despite these institutional developments, abbots’ “multi-​abbacy” remained central to the working and structure of the emerging Cluniac system, and, with regard to decision-​making and ultimate lordship, would not be changed by any new institutions until well into the twelfth century. It is also important to remember that, in practice, Cluniac “reform monasticism” constituted not a stable reality based on a predetermined agenda for institutional and spiritual change, but a lengthy process, the outcomes of which at any point in time were determined by numerous internal and external variables, not all of which could conceivably have been anticipated by the Cluniac leadership and thinkers of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. For instance, it seems fair to say that at least some of Cluny’s success is due to third parties supporting it for reasons unrelated to the monks’ own interests or propaganda. Numerous examples could be cited of individuals donating priories in an attempt to remove their private sanctuaries from the grip of regional lords.



Dietrich W. Poeck, Cluniacensis ecclesia. Der cluniazensische Klosterverband (10.–​ 12. Jahrhundert) (Munich, 1998); and Giles Constable, “Cluniac Reform in the Eleventh Century,” in Vom Umbruch zur Erneuerung? Das 11. und beginnende 12. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Jarnut and Matthias Wemhoff (Munich, 2006), 231–​46. 29 Burkhardt Tutsch, Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Consuetudines Ulrichs von Cluny (Münster, 1998); see also the article by Cochelin in this volume. 30 Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Agni immaculati. Recherches sur les sources hagiographiques relatives à saint Maieul de Cluny (954–​994) (Paris, 1988). 28

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It is also unclear whether donors and founders contributing to the expansion of the Cluniac “system” were always fully aware of what Cluniac monasticism represented ideologically and spiritually.31 Cluny’s particular brand of monasticism may have inspired abbots and their patrons in other regions, but the way in which this inspiration was translated into institutional and disciplinary realities is revealing with respect to the extent to which the original had been shaped by specific circumstances. The abbey of Fruttuaria is often cited as the institution most directly inspired by Cluny’s model. Founded by William of Volpiano (d. 1031), a former monk of Cluny and abbot of Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon,32 at an early stage of its existence this monastery received significant papal exemptions, creating a situation in which its subjects were protected in essentially the same way as the Cluniacs. In the late eleventh century, Fruttuaria’s Cluny-inspired customs were adopted by the leadership of several institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, most notably Sankt Blasien and Siegburg. But Fruttuaria’s development in this phase of its existence was determined just as much by the specific geopolitical and social contexts in which it was first founded as by its supposed adoption of Cluny’s institutional modes and customs. In other regions where William was active, specific political and other contexts led him to adopt different modes of monastic organization. His main foundation in Normandy, the abbey of Fécamp, also received papal privileges, loosening its ties with the local episcopacy; but it retained close links with Normandy’s duke, who had invited William there in the first place. And at Saint-​Bénigne in Dijon, his government was aimed at shaping the monastery, both in a physical and in a spiritual sense, into a representation of the cenobitic ideal; but he did not attempt to turn it into the center of an institutional network. Any ties that existed between William’s monasteries were loose at best, and evaporated after his death.33 Like Cluny’s abbots, William envisioned his “multi-​abbacy” of institutions he either founded or “reformed” as a form of lordship.

Giles Constable, “Monasticism, Lordship and Society in the Twelfth-​ Century Hesbaye: Five Documents on the Foundation of the Cluniac Priory of Bertrée,” Viator 33 (1977): 159–​224. 32 Neithard Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen Wilhelms von Dijon (962–​1031) (Bonn, 1973). 33 Neithard Bulst, “La filiation de St-​Bénigne de Dijon au temps de l’Abbé Guillaume,” in Naissance et fonctionnement des réseaux monastiques et canoniaux. Actes du 1er Colloque International du C.E.R.C.O.M., Saint-​ Etienne, 16–​ 18 septembre 1985 (Saint-​Etienne, 1991),  33–​41. 31

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Similar arguments apply to other institutions referred to as “reform centres.” Fleury’s exemptions and customary did not lead to the emergence of a “Floriac order.”34 Toward the end of the eleventh century, Sankt Blasien and Siegburg transmitted customs and government practices to other institutions; yet the logic of their respective “reform networks” remained firmly embedded in tenth-​and early eleventh-​century paradigms of monastic organization.35 The abbey of Hirsau, also situated in the empire, was able from c.  1110 onwards to transmit its own, Cluny-​inspired customs to other institutions, and to exercise considerable influence on the organization of the latter. However, before that time, exemptions from the interference of secular lords had not prevented the local bishops from remaining involved in abbatial elections.36 Even for the ensuing period, the actual existence of a “Hirsau system” of reformed houses or of “Hirsau monasticism” is—​or should be—​a point of discussion among scholars. Five factors seem to explain the extraordinary diversity of reform in western Francia: the continued involvement of ecclesiastical and secular elites; the significance of local and regional political and economical contexts for monastic institutional organization and leadership; local historical legacies and “structural constraints”; exchanges between “reformed” institutions based on the personal networks of abbots and their protectors; and finally a strong drive on the part of abbots and their reform-​minded patrons to turn their main institution into a personal interpretation of the ideal monastic community. These factors also constitute a valid way of approaching the situation in the empire, even though the evidence at first seems to suggest a much more uniform “reform landscape,” driven by a much less complex set of motivations. Emperor Henry II (r. 1002–​24; crowned emperor 1014) has long been thought of as the originator of an “imperial church system,” which aimed both to associate ecclesiastical development directly with imperial political and ideological interests, and to give the emperor a more direct and determinant role in the Church’s affairs than had been the case under his predecessors. A look at the timing and methodology of interventions at monastic institutions shows that here, too, the “reform movement” was far from being as unified as previous scholars have suggested. In a first phase, Henry sought to secure

Annie Dufour-​Malbezin, ed., Abbon. Un abbé de l’an mil (Turnhout, 2008). Josef Semmler, Die Klosterreform von Siegburg. Ihre Ausbreitung und ihr Reformprogramm im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1959). 36 Klaus Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform,” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im Deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Ottilien, 1999), 89–​124. 34

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the allegiance of the leaders of key monastic institutions in the wider Rhine valley.37 His ally there was Poppo, abbot of Stavelot-​Malmédy, who from 1020 onwards intervened in nearly two dozen institutions. The Abbey of Sankt Maximin in Trier also occupied a key role, not so much as a “reform center” in the traditional sense of the word, but as an institution where future leaders were recruited. In a second phase or movement, directed this time at Saxony and Bavaria, Henry could rely more on the support of local bishops. The current state of knowledge indicates that neither Henry nor any of his reformist allies took any interest in creating a permanent “system”  of institutions, or in founding a movement based on the shared observance of specific customs. The implications of this are that the reform centers’ supposed role as heads of contemporary reform movements has been grossly overestimated. For instance, in the eleventh century the abbey of Gorze saw its regional influence become much greater than had been the case in the tenth, primarily because it functioned as a major training center for future monastic leaders, and as a significant intellectual center.38 Similar things can be said about the abbeys of Saint-​Vanne, Stavelot, Hirsau, and other institutions. Here, as in tenth-​century “reform centers,” personal contacts and networks played a much more significant role than institutional ones, and reformist attitudes were transmitted in the first place from one generation of monastic leaders to the next. Poppo’s contemporary in Lotharingia, Richard of Saint-​Vanne (d. 1046), was involved in the reform of about a dozen institutions at the instigation of local ecclesiastical and lay rulers. Evidence that he attempted to implement a preconceived mode of reformist government, or that he deliberately replicated his leadership measures at Saint-​Vanne, is lacking. In all cases he adopted a traditional reformist policy geared at creating secluded communities of ascetic monks and securing the material future of the institutions under his care, all the while making sure that local rulers’ interests were adequately served. In his public behavior as a reformer and a charismatic leader, Richard deliberately focused attention on the abbot as mediator between the monastic and secular worlds, and contemporary and subsequent testimonies are revealing as to how much energy he and his associates expended in developing a specific, Christological view of abbatial leadership, and how little in developing new modes of monastic organization or spirituality.39

Hartmut Hoffmann, Mönchskönig und rex idiota. Studien zur Kirchenpolitik Heinrichs II. und Konrads II. (Hanover, 1993), 27–​49. Wagner, Gorze au XIe siècle. 39 Steven Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of SaintVanne and the Politics of Reform (Ithaca, NY, 2015). 37

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As we have seen for the earlier period, individuals from these centers who were subsequently appointed abbot in other institutions would not have been able to carry out a predetermined set of reformist measures copied exactly from the one pursued by their former masters. Not only did institutional realities, sociopolitical contexts, and tradition prevent them from doing so; it looks like they did not even contemplate the possibility. But the fact that they had been part of a “community of practice” where they had been first-​hand witnesses to how their abbot and his patrons managed the process of reform, and their membership of reformist networks with access to other aristocratic and elite networks, often proved invaluable assets for the communities where they took on the role of  abbot. With Cluny’s model of reform monasticism being so uniquely embedded in specific circumstances, and with other forms of traditional cenobitism determined by a significant number of contextual constraints, inspiration for fundamental renewal of the cenobitic ideal had to come from other sources. There had already been a “wave” of eremitical initiatives around the year 1000, in which seclusion, individual devotion, and poverty were propagated as the conditions for reaching an ultimate state of self-​denial and devotion. Thus Romuald of Ravenna in the early 1020s founded a double community at Camaldoli, consisting of a monastic community and a group of hermits. In 1043, one of his former subjects, Peter Damian (d. 1072/​3), became prior of the hermits of Fonte Avella, and from there launched a major campaign to convert the world to the eremitical ideal. John Gualberti (d. 1073) for his part sought seclusion for his monks by founding a community at Vallombrosa that consisted of choir monks assisted in daily labor by lay brothers.40 Traditionally inclined leaders, like the aforementioned Richard and Poppo, glorified eremitism but kept it well outside the reach of ordinary monks. Since none of those involved in reforms intended to rupture the vital relations between monks and the secular world, abbots by default had to play the role of go-​between between the two worlds. Abbots therefore became, according to this vision, “hermits in the world,”41 individuals gifted with the ability to simultaneously serve as an example to their monastic subjects and to carry out an active role in converting society at large. This shift in abbatial



On this and the above initiatives and their subsequent development, see Nicolangelo D’Acunto, ed., Dinamiche istituzionali delle reti monastiche e canonicali nell’Italia dei secoli X–​XII. Fonte Avellana, 29–​31 agosto 2006 (Negarine di S. Pietro in Cariano, 2007); see also the article by Cassidy-​Welch in volume II. 41 Phyllis G. Jestice, Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century (Leiden and Boston, MA, 1997), 170–​209.

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ideology, driven in part by many a reformer’s background in secular ecclesiastical circles, was surely one of the more innovative developments in these otherwise highly conservative circles.42 A factor that has routinely been overlooked in the study of all of these movements and initiatives is the fact that, despite their innovative drive, nearly all of them continued to refer in some way or form to the traditional institutional settings of monastic life.43 The next wave of eremitical propaganda, at the end of the eleventh century, also built upon foundations laid much earlier. Thus in 1098 Robert of Molesme (d. 1111), an individual whose views do not seem to have been fundamentally different from those of his “traditional” peers, founded Cîteaux, an institution that would be fundamentally transformed over the next few decades. Here, the strict separation between professed monks and lay brothers would prove a formula for success. The former canon of Reims and also former monk of Molesme, Bruno of Cologne (d. 1101), in 1084 established La Chartreuse, a monastery where solitude was practiced in community.44 And in 1101, the former hermit Robert d’Arbrissel founded Fontevraud, a double community led by a woman.45 These initiatives unquestionably galvanized cenobitic monasticism, influencing many communities that remained embedded in traditional institutional structures and modes of conduct but gradually began to adapt their recruitment policies, their relations with secular society, and maybe even some of their devotional practices to accommodate new expectations regarding the individual spirituality of their members and the function of monasticism in society. At Hirsau, the introduction of lay brothers, in addition to allowing the choir monks to carry out apostolic services, was a trend reflective of the growing interest in contemporary monasticism in Eucharistic office and in developing new responses to lay piety.46 It was far from obvious to contemporaries that the developments of the eleventh century would ultimately lead to the rise of institutionalized movements, and it would be many decades still before anyone thought of



Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages. Stefania Zucchini, ““Vecchio” e “nuovo” monachesimo a cavallo tra il primo ed il secondo millennio,” in Riforma o restaurazione? La cristianità nel passaggio dal primo al secondo millennio. Persistenze e novità. Atti del 26. Convegno del Centro Studi Avellaniti, Fonte Avellana, 29–​30 agosto 2004 (Negarine di S. Pietro in Cariano, 2006), 83–​100. 44 Giles Constable, “Cluny–​Citeaux–​La Chartreuse:  San Bernardo e la diversità delle forme di vita religiosa,” in The Abbey of Cluny (Münster, 2010), 241–​64. 45 Jacques Dalarun, ed., Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse dans l’ouest de la France (Turnhout, 2004). See also the articles by Jasper and Howe, and Beach and Juganaru in this volume, and the article by Griffiths in volume II. 46 Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform.” 42

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reform as a means of homogenization, or of creation of supra-​institutional networks. It was similarly far from evident at the time that the movements that ultimately developed out of these reformist initiatives would eventually consider themselves as having an identity distinct from that of “mainstream” cenobitism. That, in many senses, enhances the significance of the transformation of monasticism over the next century. There, too, the narrative that emerges from recent study of the primary evidence is much more complex, much more fractured, and certainly less linear than scholars have traditionally assumed.47

Conclusion Research carried out over the last decades has led to an understanding of reform that is at the same time highly diverse, highly contextualized, and highly reliant on the personal agency and intentions of the individuals involved. In a 1999 paper, Joachim Wollasch argued that “there were many reforms, not just one, and they need examining individually.”48 Given the current state of the art in reform studies, one might arguably take this argument one step further, saying that, as regards methodology and implications, prior to the twelfth century the reform of each individual institution represents a unique case, requiring an approach that does away with preconceived notions about the perceived uniformity of “reform monasticism,” and that allows us to distinguish between the development of reformist ideology, reformist leadership, and the realities of reform at the level of single institutions. Obviously it would be wrong to argue that reformed communities did not have anything in common, or that reformers across this period did not share certain ideas and procedures. But the differences between reformers, and between reformed groups, in both ideological and practical terms, were just as great as, if not greater than, the similarities. In addition, by looking at the innovative impact of reforms, scholars have tended to overlook the fact that reformist agency always, and very often emphatically, referenced and built upon previous institutional, spiritual, and social situations. Given the current state of the art, it seems possible to argue that interventions by reformist agents—​be they abbots, bishops, or lay rulers—​led to many changes in the monastic communities of the tenth and

Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996); see also the article by Melville in volume II. 48 Wollasch, “Monasticism,” 156. 47

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eleventh centuries. But the exact direction of these changes, and their eventual outcomes, were not always predictable, and the means to achieve them were by no means always identical.49 Both local traditions and constraints, and also reformers’ personal initiatives, and especially personal networks, played a determinant role in these processes, and should be awarded a more central place in future research on reform. This fractured reality, which emerges with increasing clarity from the primary evidence, should be not regarded as evidence of structural or other shortcomings in tenth-​and eleventh-​century reform initiatives. Rather, it should be seen as an accurate reflection of monasticism’s rooting in local and regional contexts. It should also lead us to realize that the institutional structures that emerged in subsequent centuries were far removed from the ideals of tenth-​to early twelfth-​century reformers, and certainly even further so from the daily experience of the monks and nuns who lived through the process of reform. The recent realization that the so-​called founders of the new “orders” (Cistercians, Premonstratensians, and so on) in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries did not envision founding actual, institutional structures for monastic legislation and supervision is a clear indication of the accuracy of this notion.50 Certainly it is no longer acceptable to argue, as one scholar has done, that the reforms of the second half of the eleventh century “culminated in the age of monastic orders.”51

Bibliography Barrow, Julia. “The Chronology of the Benedictine Reform.” In Edgar, King of the English 959–​975:  New Interpretations, edited by Donald Scragg, 211–​ 23. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2008.   “Ideas and Applications of Reform.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100, edited by Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith, 345–62. Cambridge, 2008. Bulst, Neithard. Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen Wilhelms von Dijon (962–​ 1031). Bonn, 1973. Constable, Giles. “Cluniac Reform in the Eleventh Century.” In Vom Umbruch zur Erneuerung? Das 11. und beginnende 12. Jahrhundert, edited by Jörg Jarnut and Matthias Wemhoff, 231–​46. Munich, 2006.



Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process. Steven Vanderputten, “The First ‘General Chapter’ of Benedictine Abbots (1131) Reconsidered,” JEH 66 (2015): 715–​34. 51 Wollasch, “Monasticism,” 184.

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Monastic Reform from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century   “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life:  Concepts and Realities.” In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, edited by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, 37–67. Cambridge, MA, 1982. D’Acunto, Nicolangelo, ed. Dinamiche istituzionali delle reti monastiche e canonicali nell’Italia dei secoli X–​XII. Fonte Avellana, 29–​31 agosto 2006. Negarine di S. Pietro in Cariano, 2007. Gaillard, Michèle. D’une réforme à l’autre (816–​934). Les communautés religieuses en Lorraine à l’époque carolingienne. Paris, 2006. Hallinger, Kassius. Gorze-​Kluny. Studien zu den monastischen Lebensformen und Gegensätzen im Hochmittelalter. 2 vols. Rome, 1950–​1. Hoffmann, Hartmut. Mönchskönig und rex idiota. Studien zur Kirchenpolitik Heinrichs II. und Konrads II. Hanover, 1993. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. “La geste des origines dans l’historiographie clunisienne des XIe–​ XIIe siècles,” Revue bénédictine 102 (1992): 135–​91. Jestice, Phyllis G. Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century. Leiden and Boston, MA, 1997. Kottje, Raymund, and Helmut Maurer, eds. Monastische Reformen im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert. Sigmaringen, 1989. Méhu, Didier. Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny (Xe–​XVe siècles). Lyon, 2001. Melville, Gert. “Aspekte zum Vergleich von Krisen und Reformen in mittelalterlichen Klöstern und Orden.” In Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven, edited by Gert Melville and Anne Müller, 139–​60. Berlin, 2007. Nightingale, John. Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform:  Lotharingia c.  850–​1000. Oxford, 2007. Poeck, Dietrich W. Cluniacensis ecclesia. Der cluniazensische Klosterverband (10.–​ 12. Jahrhundert). Munich, 1998. Schreiner, Klaus. “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform.” In Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im Deutschen Sprachraum, edited by Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal, 89–​124. St. Ottilien, 1999.   “Verschriftlichung als Faktor monastischer Reform: Funktionen von Schriftlichkeit im Ordenswesen des hohen und späten Mittelalters.” In Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter. Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, edited by Hagen Keller, Klaus Grubmüller, and Nikolaus Staubach, 37–75. Munich, 1992. Semmler, Josef. “Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform im 10. Jahrhundert.” In Kottje and Maurer, Monastische Reformen,  29–​77. Vanderputten, Steven. Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–​1050. Ithaca, NY, 2018.   Monastic Reform as Process:  Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100. Ithaca, NY, 2013. Wagner, Anne. Gorze au XIe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire du monachisme bénédictin dans l’Empire. Turnhout, 1996. Wollasch, Joachim. “Monasticism:  The First Wave of Reform.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, III: c. 900–​c. 1024, edited by Timothy Reuter, 163–​85. Cambridge, 1999.

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General At least from the twelfth century on, Western monastic life was conceived as inseparable from rules, and especially the Rule of St. Benedict (RB). The RB, which refers to itself as “law” (RB 58.10, 15), contains both penalties for those violating this “law” and procedural norms, and in this sense can be seen as a law book for monastic communities. In the high Middle Ages, monastic orders perceived their own consuetudines as legal norms, and they established their own courts and appeal stages. At the same time, monastic houses were governed by the law of the Church at large, canon law. They were, at least in theory, under the firm control of the local bishop, who consecrated churches, acted as ordinary judge, and (nominally) controlled all monastic property, to name only some episcopal rights found in canon law from very early on. Both the legal position of individual monks and nuns and that of the communities in which they lived were thus shaped by legal norms as found in monastic rules and consuetudines, secular law, episcopal legislation, conciliar canons, and papal decretals. All of these authorities were transmitted in collections that gathered hundreds or thousands of excerpts (commonly called canones) from these and other sources. With every new collection, some texts were introduced and  others were dropped; likewise the collections, once compiled, were copied more or less widely. Some remained virtually unknown, while others were used for centuries. The sending of the Liber extra in 1234 to the universities of Bologna and Paris together with a papal bull is generally counted as the first official promulgation of a canon law collection. In the early and central Middle Ages, however, canon law collections gained authority not by any formal promulgation, but rather as “private” enterprises that were more or less widely accepted as useful and indeed binding by others. It is

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this double process—​the reception of the canones into collections and the dissemination of these collections—​from which historians are able to determine when particular parts of the inherited tradition were accepted as binding by the Church. The single most important medieval collection was the Decretum Gratiani, compiled c. 1140 and never promulgated, but quickly used very widely. Over time, both older and more recent materials were added to the Decretum, and generations of legal scholars commented upon all of these texts. It was often this mixture of ancient authorities, more recent decretals, and a growing body of legal commentary on the older collections (including the older commentary) that informed debates and practices in universities, law courts, administration, and beyond. For the later Middle Ages, therefore, the relations between canon law and the monastic world can be studied, and have, in fact, already been extensively investigated through evidence of interaction between monks and scholars at the universities, through legal textbooks used there, through law suits involving university-​trained lawyers, and through intellectual debates informed by the same texts and arguments.1 Things were different, however, before the universities emerged and before the Decretum Gratiani was established as a textbook of legal studies. Pre-​ Gratian canon law is mainly studied from the various canon law collections themselves, typically containing very little if any commentary. Here, the form of presentation and the selection criteria are crucial for understanding how the particular compiler shaped canon law by assembling hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of canons taken from the vast body of tradition.

Monks and the Law Monks and monastic houses are not a prominent topic in these pre-​Gratian collections or in the scholarship on them.2 This may come as a surprise, given

For the relations between bishops and monastic houses, see the article by Sharp in volume II; on monks and universities in the later Middle Ages, see the article by Clark in volume II. For monastic canon law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Gert Melville, “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht: eine Skizze zum 12./​13. Jahrhundert,” in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Munich, 13–​18 July 1992, ed. Peter Landau and Jörg Müller (Vatican City, 1997), 691–​712. 2 For a general survey on (pre-​Gratian) canon law and monastic culture, see Gabriel Le Bras, “La part du monachisme dans le droit et l’économie du Moyen Âge,” 213; Theo Kölzer, “Mönchtum Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 47 (1961):  199–​ und Kirchenrecht:  Bemerkungen zu monastischen Kanonessammlungen der vorgratianischen Zeit,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-​Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung 69 (1983):  121–​42; Theo Kölzer, “Mönchtum und Außenwelt—​Norm und 1

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that, from early on, monks played an important role in the compilation of canon law collections. For example, Dionysius Exiguus (d. c. 540), a Scythian monk who spent most of his life in Rome, translated important canons from Greek into Latin and compiled the Collectio Dionysiana; Regino of Prüm (d. 915)  compiled an influential manual of canon law after he had entered the monastery of Sankt Maximin in Trier; and the monk Olbert (d. 1048) helped Burchard of Worms (d. 1025)  to compile his canon law collection. Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115) is almost always presented as a learned bishop, but he began his magnum opus when he was a regular canon at Saint-​Quentin. Finally, and most famously, Gratian (d. 1144/​5) was long thought to have been a monk, and it is not impossible that he was. These are, no doubt, among the most important canon law collections of the early and central Middle Ages. But all of these examples also show that collections compiled by monks are not necessarily monastic in character. The Dionysiana is above all Roman in nature. Regino compiled his collection specifically for episcopal business, as did Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres. Likewise, one can infer that the Decretum Gratiani was compiled by a teacher, a theologian, a legal scholar—​but internal evidence supporting the idea that it was compiled by a monk is meagre. So while monks frequently contributed to the production of canon law collections, including a relatively large number of major collections, this does not in itself tell us much about monastic canon law or about monastic life. There is, indeed, an intriguing gap between canon law and monasticism. Religious houses produced an abundance of normative texts, but these were, above all, rules setting the ideal for governing individual houses, groups of monasteries, and, later, religious orders. In contrast, it was synodal and papal legislation, not monastic rules, that made up the bulk of canon law as found in the major collections, and relatively little of it referred to monks and nuns. In fact, the part of canon law referring to monks and nuns was not only small but became less and less relevant in practice. Relations between (individual) religious houses and bishops varied greatly, and in times of conflict both sides relied much more on privileges than on legal norms.

Realität,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, San Diego, University of California at La Jolla, 21–​27 August 1988, ed. Stanley Chodorow (Vatican City, 1992), 265–​83. A number of important studies by Picasso are collected in Giorgio G. Picasso, Sacri canones et monastica regula. Disciplina canonica e vita monastica nella società medievale (Milan, 2006). For the works of Roger E. Reynolds, see Kathleen Grace Cushing and Richard Gyug, eds., Ritual, Text and Law: Studies in Medieval Canon Law and Liturgy Presented to Roger E. Reynolds (Aldershot, 2004).

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Monastic Canon Law There are, nonetheless, monastic contributions to ecclesiastical law and genuinely monastic legal collections. The most important of these are the Collectio of Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), the Collection in 74 Titles (74T), the Collection in Five Books (5L), and a rather large number of 74T-​ and 5L-​derivative collections that emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (for example, the collections called Angelica and Toletana).3 They have two important aspects in common:  they were produced, copied, and used mainly by monks; and they pay close attention to monastic issues such as penance, liturgy, monastic pastoral care, and monastic privileges. Concerning the last issue in particular, Abbo of Fleury and 74T show a strong pro-​monastic tendency. These collections are not normally treated as a group, and indeed sometimes they are overlooked completely. This is partly due to too narrow a definition of “canon law” by modern scholars. The only extant copy of the Collectio Toletana, for example, was long classified as a theological manuscript. In other cases, the concentration on papal reform has distracted scholars from the monastic background of major collections like 74T. Another reason for the relatively small amount of attention paid to monastic canon law has to do with the medieval rhetoric of humility. Many medieval sources stressed that the study of law did not sit easily with a monastic identity. After all, as Jerome had written, it was the “office of the monk not to teach but to weep.”4 This became a dictum, almost a proverb, quoted frequently by bishops stressing their right to supervise religious houses or by those opposing monastic studia.5 Law in particular was sometimes seen as an inappropriate subject of study. The 1139 Lateran Council, for example, banned monks and regular canons from the study of secular law or medicine. Canon law was likewise seen as dangerous to monastic humility, and the Cistercians banned the Decretum Gratiani from their libraries in 1188.6 As John of Salisbury (d.

See Douglas Adamson and Roger E. Reynolds, Collectio Toletana: A Canon Law Derivative of the South-​Italian Collection in Five Books:  An Implicit Edition with Introductory Study (Toronto, 2008); and Roger E. Reynolds, “The Collectio Angelica:  A Canon Law Derivative of the South Italian Collections in Five Books,” in Bishops, Texts and the Use of Canon Law around 1100: Essays in Honour of Martin Brett, ed. Bruce Clark Brasington and Kathleen Grace Cushing (Aldershot, 2008), 7–​28. 4 Jerome, Adversus Vigilantium, CCSL 79C, 28. 5 See Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge, 2010), 205–​8, for a bishop repeatedly quoting Jerome’s dictum; see also Cécile Caby, “ ‘Non obstante quod sunt monachi’: être moine et étudiant au Moyen Âge,” Quaderni di storia religiosa 16 (2009): 45, for its use in disputes over monastic studia. 6 Ulrich Stutz, “Die Cistercienser wider Gratians Dekret,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-​Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung 40 (1919): 73–​4. 3

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1180) asked rhetorically: “Who ever arose contrite from the study of the laws or even the canons?”7 Unsurprisingly, monks in their chronicles stressed how much prayer helped them to win cases, but hardly mentioned the lawyers they also employed.8 The discrepancy between these discourses and living practices (including the production of legal collections by monks) clearly indicates that one should not take the rhetoric of reform at face value.9 Monastic polemic was both directed against and based on legal learning. The famous Dialogus, an elaborate polemic dialogue between a Cistercian and a Cluniac monk, may serve to highlight this. Here, the same Gratian whom the Cistercian general chapter thought to be so dangerous to monks was quoted as an authority—​ by the Cistercian.10 Many monks must themselves have been well aware of this tension between condemning and using legal argument. For this reason, perhaps, the problem is addressed right at the beginning of a small canon law collection compiled for a Beneventan monastery.11 The first seven texts are authorities on sancta rusticitas (“holy simplicity”). Perhaps surprisingly, they all agree that “simplicity,” even if “holy,” could be positively dangerous. Jerome may have placed “just simplicity” over “learned malice,”12 but the compiler of the florilegium chose a different perspective when he gathered his proof texts under the heading “On learned justice being better than holy simplicity” (“De eo quod melior est docta iustitia quam sancta rusticitas”) at the very beginning of his collection. Only then did he continue with more conventional material (what makes a monk, the sins monks could commit, the six different kinds of monks, and so on). The opening canons can be read as an apology offering a





John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury 144, ed. W. J. Millor, Harold Edgeworth Butler, and Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke, 2 vols. (London and Oxford, 1955–​ 79), 2:32–​5. 8 Alain Boureau, “How Law Came to the Monks: The Use of Law in English Society at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century,” Past & Present 167 (2000): 29–​74. 9 On monasteries and reform, see the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 10 Le moine Idung et ses deux ouvrages: “Argumentum super quatuor questionibus” et “Dialogus duorum monachorum” III, 3, 30, ed. and trans. R. B. C. Huygens (Spoleto, 1980), 167 (lines 452–​4); for an English translation, see Idung of Prüfening, Cistercians and Cluniacs: The Case for Cîteaux. A Dialogue between Two Monks, An Argument on Four Questions, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, Joseph Leahey, and Grace Perrigo (Kalamazoo, MI, 1977). 11 Roger E. Reynolds, “Further Evidence for the Influence of the Hibernensis in Southern Italy: An Early Eleventh-​Century Canonistic Florilegium at Montecassino,” Peritia 19 (2005): 119–​35. 12 See Jerome’s letters on the translation of the Bible and its “simple” style for context, e.g. letters 53, 57, and 62 (all edited in CSEL 54). 7

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justification for the compiler to compose his canon law collection and for the reader to study it. As we have seen, then, legal learning was part of medieval monastic culture, and monks contributed to the production of pre-​Gratian canon law collections, but much of this is consciously hidden away by ascetic self-​ fashioning, anti-​legal polemics, or genuine modesty. As a result, one of the specifically monastic tasks of monastic canon law was to justify monastic interest in canon law. While this was of interest mainly to monastic readers, it helps to explain why specifically monastic contributions to canon law are often found at the margins of what has traditionally been studied as pre-​ Gratian canon law. Two such contributions will be studied here. My first example concerns early medieval penitential books and their influence on canon law. For the second, I will look at a pro-​monastic forgery, an important text on monastic libertas, and the (often monastic) canon law collections that transmitted it and thus introduced it into Western canon law. Both examples will serve to illustrate that monasticism had a greater impact on canon law than previously thought.

Penitentials and Canon Law In many respects, the disciplinary regime of a monastery as laid out by the RB was similar to the early medieval regime of penance for lay people. The abbot, with the support and counsel of the brethren, had to distinguish between minor and major faults, and between those committed in secret or in public; and exclusion from the monastic community was an important form of punishment. All of this—​the rituals used and the language in which monastic discipline was described and commented upon—​closely resembled penance, as Sarah Hamilton has argued.13 This also means that monastic books on penance and lists of penitential tariffs in principle could be adopted for a use well outside the monastery. While there is considerable controversy about the nature of medieval penance and the origins of the early medieval penitentials, there is no doubt that monks played an important role in developing and disseminating these books from the sixth century on.14 Irish communities seem to have played a

13



14

Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance 900–​1050 (Woodbridge, 2001), ­chapter 3. On the chapter of faults, see the article by Cochelin in this volume. In addition to Hamilton, Practice of Penance, see Lotte Kéry, Gottesfurcht und irdische Strafe. Der Beitrag des mittelalterlichen Kirchenrechts zur Entstehung des öffentlichen Strafrechts (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2006), 119–​33; Abigail A. Firey, A Contrite

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special role in this process. These penitential books were originally addressed mainly to a monastic audience, but some (more briefly, and separately) also deal with sins committed by lay people. Gradually, the penitential tariffs found here were used in the administration of penance and integrated into canon law collections used in the Church at large.15 This changing use meant that, in the long run, concepts originally developed in a monastic context influenced the moral and legal standards set for all Christians. This expansion of monastic norms to married lay people is particularly striking in the regulation of sexuality. The penances for sexual transgressions found in the penitentials are often relatively mild, but the scrutiny with which even minor sexual sins are listed, and the rather detailed timetable of periods during which married couples should abstain from intercourse, bear the hallmark of a highly regulated life—​a regular life. As noted above, it is often difficult to determine how early medieval penitentials were actually used to administer penance in the early Middle Ages. Yet, in any case, their contents were more widely transmitted not as separate penitential books but as part of canonical collections. While the number of extant manuscripts is small (often very small) for many early medieval penitential books, those penitential canons that were integrated into the canon law collections of the tenth and eleventh centuries were disseminated very widely indeed. The most important collections in this context are those of Regino of Prüm, compiled around 900, and the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, compiled before 1023. Regino assembled a collection specifically for the episcopal court—​more specifically, for the itinerant court (Sendgericht) that was part of episcopal visitations—​and, while most of his material is taken from relatively recent councils, he also makes ample use of penitential books. His own collection is divided into two separate books: on the sins of the clergy and on those of the laity. Both books begin with a sort of questionnaire resembling that found in many penitentials. Regino’s canon law collection is therefore “penitential” in both content and presentation. In the new context, the penitential texts (even if they formerly had a more pastoral character) became legal norms. At the same time, the penitential material became the subject of more refined, “legal” argumentation. Penitential books “of which the errors are certain, but the authors are uncertain” were famously condemned by a number of Carolingian councils—​the



Heart:  Prosecution and Redemption in the Carolingian Empire (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2009); Rob Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, 600–​1200 (Cambridge, 2014). 15 See Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, 41–​60, for discussion.

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most famous being the Council of Chalon in 813, from which the quotation is taken.16 In all likelihood, this is not to be understood as a condemnation of the whole genre. Rather, Regino and later compilers of canon law collections saw problems with some of the existing penitential books and thought that the solution was to produce a better penitential. This is also true for Burchard of Worms, whose Decretum was even more important than Regino’s collection in terms of the dissemination of penitential canons of mostly monastic origin. Penitential canons are found in most of the books that comprise Burchard’s Decretum, but Book 19 stands out as a separate penitential book. It contains a much enlarged version of Regino’s questionnaire, consisting of no fewer than 190 questions and answers: “Have you committed such and such? Then this is your penance.” Burchard carefully reworked this catalogue of questions and answers as to achieve greater consistency between this practical question-​and-​answer list and the main body of his Decretum. For about a century, no other collection was compiled that had a similar dissemination. Collections from the later eleventh century drew on Burchard for penitential material—​for example, those of Anselm of Lucca (d. 1086) and Ivo of Chartres—​and Burchard’s collection was still in use when the Decretum Gratiani established itself as the standard textbook of the schools. Penitential texts that might have originated in Irish monastic communities of the sixth or seventh century had thus become an integral part of canonical collections circulating in all of western Europe around 1100. In the twelfth century, however, an important change is visible: increasingly, penance was treated separately from canon law, the latter being understood in a narrower sense. The anonymous compiler of the influential Panormia, for example, copied most of his material from Ivo’s Decretum but omitted the relevant book on penance and carefully avoided penitential canons found elsewhere in his main source. This tendency to exclude penitential material was not, however, universal. The Panormia, lacking penitential canons, was soon reworked by another anonymous compiler to produce the Collection in Ten Parts. This was mainly done by adding two new books, one of them a penitential (the other one dealing with regular canons). More famously, the Decretum Gratiani covers penance at length in a separate section, De penitentia. Gratian left no doubt that penitentials were used, and should be used, both for pastoral care and for the education of priests. The major change in the twelfth century was not that penitential canons lost their old function, but

MGH Concilia 2/​1, 281.

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rather that canon law collections were increasingly produced for university-​ trained scholars and lawyers who did not themselves engage in pastoral care. Many of the earlier collections, by contrast, had been compiled by and for bishops, who were responsible for pastoral care and the education of the secular clergy. For a very long time, therefore, penitential canons were an integral part of canon law. While they were often used in pastoral and educational settings, they were also an important stimulus for moral and juridical discourse. The discrepancy among and within penitential books may have been a practical problem, but the issue was also taken up in different, more theoretical contexts. Both Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres, for example, refer in their prefaces to penitential canons when they address fundamental questions such as the nature of legal authority, the extent of a judge’s discretion, or the issue of real or perceived contradictions within canon law. The same is true for other pre-​Gratian collections, including monastic canon law works. The compiler of 5L, for example, introduced a separate rubric, “In conflictu canonum” (“Conflicting canons”), to highlight contradictions between penitential canons found in his collection. He argued that this “conflict” in fact allowed the priest to choose among different solutions according to individual circumstances: “Valde considerandum est persona: Quis, cui, quale, quantum, quare” (“Much attention has to be paid to the individual. By whom, to whom, how, how greatly, why [the sin was committed]”). Not unlike Ivo of Chartres, this eleventh-​century monk started with penitential canons but in the end articulated a very general statement on the application of canon law. Much more than just penance was at issue when penitential canons were discussed, but it was still the experience of monastic life that shaped both the texts under discussion and many of the “canonists” avant la lettre who discussed them.

Exemption and Monastic libertas My second example is drawn from the production of canon law on exemption or, more precisely, monastic libertas.17 In later medieval (and modern) canon law, “exemption” has a well-​defined legal meaning, namely the release of a person or corporation from the ordinary judge. In the case of a monastic community, this meant release from the local bishop. Older historiography has often studied the “struggle for exemption” (for instance, the famous battle

See the article by Rosé in this volume.

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between Abbo of Fleury and the bishops of Orleans c.  1000), but modern historians generally agree that the relations between monastic houses, bishop, and pope cannot adequately be described in such legal terms, and have paid attention not only to conflict but also to cooperation.18 Indeed, monastic houses (including Cluny) often achieved their goals in cooperation with the local bishop, and even when in a strong position did not seek to remove his jurisdiction. Frequently, the main issue was protection of monastic property, whether this protection was sought from the local bishop, from royal or noble houses, or indeed from the pope. Canon law collections were used for, and shaped by, these processes. As indicated above, most pre-​Gratian canon law collections had little to say on the legal status of religious houses (apart from placing them firmly under episcopal control), and perhaps even less on monastic property. In this situation, monastic compilers of canon law collections collected, improved, and occasionally forged the proof texts that, in the long run, became the legal basis for monastic exemption. The text Quam sit necessarium (QSN) is a good example. It goes back to a genuine letter of Gregory I ( JE 1504), which in the eleventh century served as a model for a pro-​monastic forgery also attributed to this monk-​pope ( JE †1366).19 The genuine version defended abbatial election against outside (episcopal) influence, and also contained a prohibition against anyone except the abbot making inventories of monastic property.20 Significantly, the collection of Abbo of Fleury, a decisively pro-​monastic work, is the only one to contain the genuine version of QSN. The forged version goes well beyond the genuine, in very general terms placing monastic property under papal protection, prohibiting (for example) “that any bishop or secular ruler henceforth presume to diminish the revenues, goods, or properties of monasteries … in any way or on any occasion.”21 Likewise, according to the forged version of QSN, Gregory the Great had prohibited the bishop from celebrating mass in a monastery, from placing his throne (cathedra) there, or from having “any power of governing or of making some ruling, however trivial, unless he is asked by the local abbot.”22 The first collection to

See Barbara H. Rosenwein, Thomas Head, and Sharon Farmer. “Monks and Their Enemies: A Comparative Approach,” Speculum 66 (1991): 764–​96. Philipp Jaffé, Samuel Loewenfeld, Friedrich Kaltenbrunner, and Paul Ewald, eds., Regesta pontificum romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum MCXCVIII, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1888). 20 Gregory the Great, Registrum 8.17, MGH Epistolae 2, 20. 21 John T. Gilchrist, ed. and trans., The Collection in Seventy-​Four Titles: A Canon Law Manual of the Gregorian Reform (Toronto, 1980), 92. 22 Ibid., 93. 18 19

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contain this partisan forgery was 74T, a monastic collection of the eleventh century that included an unusually large number of canon law authorities on monastic liberty and manipulated a number of other texts in order to extend the privileges, not of a particular religious house, but of all monks. Decisively, unlike many other monastic collections, 74T was widely spread and used. This reception is crucial to understanding whether QSN was indeed “law.” In medieval canon law, a forged canon was deemed “authentic” if it was received into canon law collections, while a genuine text not received into such collections could be regarded as apocryphal. How did this work in practice? The early reception of 74T shows how monks used law, and how they did so in constant interaction with other monastic houses.23 The monks of Saint-​Denis were among the first to get hold of a copy of 74T; they used it in the 1060s to produce a cartulary and a canon law collection in the midst of a prolonged conflict with the local bishop that culminated in 1065. Two texts in particular were served to strengthen their case:  the privilege they had obtained from Leo IX (r. 1049–​54) in 1050 and the forged QSN as found in 74T. The monks at Saint-​Denis copied the latter into their own collection and also added it to their cartulary, indicating perhaps that they valued it particularly. Other monastic houses can be shown to have observed the case closely, and to have used the same materials (74T and similar collections, QSN, and privileges). The monks at Corbie were particularly well informed about what had happened at Saint-​Denis. Building on an exceptional tradition of earlier privileges and good contacts with the papacy, Corbie too had obtained a papal privilege in 1050. The monks there copied a version of the Saint-​Denis privilege in one of their own cartularies, but modified the text to make it more general. Exchange between the two houses seems to have continued, as the extant Corbie cartulary was produced in preparation for the Roman synod of 1065 where the case of Saint-​Denis was heard, as well as the rather similar case of Corbie and its local bishop. The monks of Corbie were not the only ones to look at Saint-​Denis and its charters. Not much later, the forgers of the so-​called Magna Carta Dunstani at Westminster took the forged royal privileges for Saint-​Denis as their model to articulate their (rather lofty) view of monastic liberties in general, and the



For this and the following, see Christof Rolker, “The Collection in Seventy-​Four Titles: A Monastic Canon Law Collection,” in Readers, Texts and Compilers in the Earlier Middle Ages: Studies in Medieval Canon Law in Honour of Linda Fowler-​Magerl, ed. Kathleen Grace Cushing and Martin Brett (Aldershot 2009), 59–​72.

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privileges of Westminster in particular. For this, they also used the very canon law collection employed at Saint-​Denis and drew on the same passages—​ above all QSN. These texts, whether papal privileges, royal charters or canon law, were copied together and traveled together. Gradually, the authorities quoted in monastic cartularies, in canon law collections, at synods, and in other contexts were accepted as general norms. When Gratian included the QSN forgery (which may have been compiled by a single monastic forger) in his Decretum (C. 18, q. 2, c. 5), it had undoubtedly become part of general canon law.

Conclusions Understanding how monks participated in the legal culture of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries forces historians to think about “the law” before Gratian in contemporary terms, and reveals a monastic intellectual activity that is often overlooked. The monastic contribution to canon law is also a good case to demonstrate the dynamics of medieval legal culture, when legislation was rare but forgeries were common. Some of the collections studied here (such as Abbo’s collection, 5L, and 74T) were specifically monastic, but the way in which the texts studied here became “law” is indeed typical for pre-​Gratian canon law. Single normative texts emerged in a very local context and were used by communities that found them helpful, and this sometimes gave rise to conflicts:  for example, as noted above, the debates over penitentials at Carolingian synods, or the disputes over monastic property where QSN was quoted. Such conflicts could either diminish the authority of the relevant texts (as in the case of some, but not all, penitentials) or, on the contrary, enhance the authority of texts that were successfully quoted, as seems to have been the case with QSN. Evidently, compilers of canon law collections, when retaining or dropping single texts, were influenced by the changing acceptance of certain normative texts, while themselves of course having a decisive role in either distributing or suppressing single canons. Canon law was never the most important occupation for monks, and the monastic contribution to canon law collections is small even if one takes into account collections like 74T or 5L. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, were a formative period both for monasticism and for the legal culture of Latin Christianity, and to study the interaction between canon law and monastic culture certainly helps to understand better the changes that took place at this time. 629

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Bibliography Boureau, Alain. “How Law Came to the Monks: The Use of Law in English Society at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century.” Past & Present 167 (2000): 29–​74. Brasington, Bruce Clark, and Kathleen Grace Cushing, eds. Bishops, Texts and the Use of Canon Law around 1100: Essays in Honour of Martin Brett. Aldershot, 2008. Cushing, Kathleen Grace, and Richard Gyug, eds. Ritual, Text and Law: Studies in Medieval Canon Law and Liturgy Presented to Roger E. Reynolds. Aldershot, 2004. Hamilton, Sarah. The Practice of Penance 900–​1050. Woodbridge, 2001. Kölzer, Theo. “Mönchtum und Außenwelt—​Norm und Realität.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, San Diego, University of California at La Jolla, 21–​27 August 1988, edited by Stanley Chodorow, 265–​83. Vatican City, 1992.   “Mönchtum und Kirchenrecht: Bemerkungen zu monastischen Kanonessammlungen der vorgratianischen Zeit.” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung 69 (1983): 121–42. Le Bras, Gabriel. “La part du monachisme dans le droit et l’économie du Moyen Âge.” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France 47 (1961): 199–​213. Meens, Rob. Penance in Medieval Europe, 600–​1200. Cambridge, 2014. Melville, Gert. “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht:  eine Skizze zum 12./​ 13. Jahrhundert.” In Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Munich, 13–​18 July 1992, edited by Peter Landau and Jörg Müller, 691–​712. Vatican City, 1997. Picasso, Giorgio G. Sacri canones et monastica regula. Disciplina canonica e vita monastica nella società medievale. Milan, 2006. Rolker, Christof. Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres. Cambridge, 2010.  “The Collection in Seventy-Four Titles:  A Monastic Canon Law Collection.” In Readers, Texts and Compilers in the Earlier Middle Ages: Studies in Medieval Canon Law in Honour of Linda Fowler-Magerl, edited by Kathleen Grace Cushing and Martin Brett, 59–72. Aldershot 2009. Rosenwein, Barbara H., Thomas Head, and Sharon Farmer. “Monks and Their Enemies: A Comparative Approach.” Speculum 66 (1991): 764–​96. Stutz, Ulrich. “Die Cistercienser wider Gratians Dekret.” Zeitschrift der Savigny-​Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung 40 (1919): 63–​98.

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Eastern Influence on Western Monasticism, 850–​1050 John   Ho we

In 980, Abbot Nilus of Rossano, who had lived nearly forty years of ascetic life in Greek southern Italy, prophesied new Muslim attacks and moved north. At Capua he was received “as if he were an apostle.” He visited Montecassino, invited by its refounder, Abbot Aligernus, and there all the monks, priests, and deacons of the community, arrayed in their festal robes, honored him with candles and incense “as if he were the great Anthony come from Alexandria or better the great Benedict … risen from the dead.” Nilus was given a monastery at Valleluce for himself and his sixty Greek-​rite monks. On one occasion they celebrated their offices at Montecassino, impressing the audience with their liturgical good order as well as with a long Greek hymn that Nilus had written in praise of Benedict. About fifteen years later, Nilus moved even further north, ultimately founding the monastery of Grottaferrata near Rome, where he died in 1004. Latin Christians hailed him as a “new morning star.” Although his Greek Life hints at occasional tensions between Greek and Latin monks, it promotes an ideal of mutual respect.1 This cross-​cultural monastic interaction has many parallels. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, throughout the Mediterranean and even the transalpine world, there were frequent encounters among wandering holy men, hermits, and Latin, Greek, and Eastern Christian monks.2 Latin monasticism

The Life of Saint Neilos of Rossano 73–​8 and 85–​6, ed. and trans. Raymond L. Capra, Ines A. Muzaku, and Douglas J. Milewski (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 221–​37 and 256–​61. See also Annick Peters-​Custot, “Neilos the Younger and Benedict: The Greek Hymns Composed by Neilos in Campania,” in Greek Monasticism in Southern Italy, 1000–​1500, ed. Ines Angeli Murzaku and Barbara Crotini (Adlershot, 2018), 307–​44. The “morning star” image is from Vita prior Adalberti 15, ed. and trans. Cristian Gaşpar, in Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis Europae centralis (saec. X–​XI), ed. Gábor Klaniczay (Budapest, 2013), 95–​181, esp.  134–​5. 2 For examples of mixed Greek and Latin practices in southern Italian communities, see the article by Ramseyer in this volume. 1

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has traditionally been explained in terms of western European historical dynamics. But no spirituality is an island. Gustave von Grunebaum observed that, “from the tenth century onward, in Greek Orthodoxy and in Islam, the warrior defender of the faith is overtaken by the ecstatic saint,”3 a trend that correlates with the new mystical spirituality of the Latin high Middle Ages. Was Western monasticism affected by broader currents? At the start of the twentieth century, German scholars, building upon increased academic awareness of Byzantine reformers such as Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022), began to argue that around the millennium Greek monasticism might have significantly influenced Western monks.4 Subsequent scholars promoted the idea of a “light from the East,” sometimes too enthusiastically.5 Critics were quick to point out common paleomonastic sources that potentially explain many parallels and to argue that “on the question of Eastern and Western asceticism … comprehension of the world of oriental monks would be very difficult for a Westerner … their mental categories are different.”6 Nevertheless, while Latin monasticism marched to its own drummer, it does seem to have selectively adopted “best practices” and enthusiasms from elsewhere. To demonstrate this, it is first necessary to show that tenth-​and eleventh-​century Western monks were connected to a wider world through literary translations, cosmopolitan court cultures, ecclesiastical material culture, and, most importantly, through direct monastic encounters; then it becomes possible to indicate how such connections might have influenced monastic practice and spirituality. Here the panorama can only be sketched, but at least it is possible to draw attention to broader horizons.



Gustave E. von Grunebaum, “The World of Islam:  The Face of the Antagonist,” in Twelfth-​Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (Madison, WI, 1966), 204. 4 Karl Holl, Enthusiasmus und Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mönchtum. Eine Studie zu Symeon dem Neuen Theologen (Leipzig, 1898); Heinrich Voigt, Brun von Querfurt: Mönch, Eremit, Erzbischof der Heiden und Märtyrer (Stuttgart, 1907); Walter Franke, Romuald von Camaldoli und seine Reformtätigkeit zur Zeit Ottos III (Berlin, 1913). 5 For orientation, see Millénaire du Mont Athos (963–​1963). Études et mélanges. Actes du “Convegno international di studio” à la “Fondazione Giorgio Cini (3–​6 septembre 1963) à Venise, 2 vols. (Venice, 1963–​4), esp. 1:161–​251 and 2:49–​80. For this literature up to the 1970s, see John Howe, “Greek Influence on the Eleventh-​Century Western Revival of Hermitism.” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979), 1:3–​9. 6 André Gillou, “Il monachesimo greco in Italia meridionale e in Sicilia nel medioevo,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 30 agosto–​6 settembre 1962 (Milan, 1963), 355–​81, esp. 380–​1 (comments). For arguments against Greek influence, see Derek Baker, “‘The Whole World a Hermitage’: Ascetic Renewal and the Crisis of Western Monasticism,” in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. Marc Anthony Meyer (London, 1993), 207–​23. For more recent citations, see Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–​1200 (Oxford, 2011), 27–​8. 3

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Literary contacts between Western and Eastern monasticism were relatively rare in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.7 Greek was a prestigious language in the post Carolingian West, but, despite the love of graecisms in some tenth-​ century monastic writings (most gleaned from Greek phrases transmitted earlier), ninth-​century translators such as John Scottus or Anastasius Bibliothecarius (d. c. 878) had no worthy successors.8 An exception was Campania, where clerks in Naples and Amalfi translated from the Greek dozens of Lives of martyrs and desert monks.9 Their choice of subject matter may be significant. A special interest of Italo-​Greek monks in the Desert Fathers is suggested by their choice of names, the spiritual models applied to them, and their lifestyles. In the Italo-​Latin world, the Lives of the Desert Fathers allegedly inspired the new hermitism of Romuald.10 It is noteworthy that Latin translations made from two Greek Lives of “men of God” in tenth-​and eleventh-​century Italy—​the Lives of Alexius and of Baarlam and Iosaphat—​would later, in vernacular translations, become medieval “bestsellers.”11 The primary Greek literary contribution to Western monastic spirituality around the millennium may have been an increased interest in the severe asceticism of the Desert Fathers, even though this would have been manifested more by increased interest in earlier Latin translations than by new translations of paleomonastic literature. Other monastic contact came through cosmopolitan “court culture.” Emperors, kings, great secular lords, and bishops all advertised their God-​g iven status through grand assemblies featuring gifts, symbols, and









Jean-​Marie Sansterre, “Témoignages des textes latins du haut Moyen Âge sur le monachisme oriental et des textes byzantins sur le monachisme occidental,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 20; John Howe, Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 277–​9. 8 Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middles Age: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, rev. ed., trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Washington, DC, 1988), 126–​200. More detail in Pascal Boulhol, Grec langaige n’est pas doulz au françois. L’étude et l’enseignement du grec dans la France ancienne (IVe siècle–​1530) (Aix-​en-​Provence,  2014). 9 Paolo Chiesa, “Le traduzioni dal greco:  l’evoluzione della scuola napoletana nel X secolo,” Mittellatienisches Jahrbuch 24–​5 (1989–​90): 67–​86; Edoardo d’Angelo, “Agiografia latina del Mezzogiorno continentale d’Italia (750–​1000),” in Hagiographies, ed. Guy Philippart, 5 vols. (Turnhout, 2006), 4:41–​134; Réka Forrai, “The Readership of Early Medieval Greek–​Latin Translations,” in Scrivere et leggere nell’alto medioevo. Spoleto, 28 aprile–​4 magio 2011, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 2012), 1:293–​315. 10 Bruno of Querfurt, Vita quinque fratrum 2 and 12, ed. and trans. Marina Miladinov, in Klaniczay, Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis, 204–​5 and 254–​5. For a literary illustration, see the paleomonastic literary parallels cited throughout Peter Damian’s Vita Romualdi, ed. Giovanni Tabacco (Rome, 1957). 11 On the diffusion of the Alexius legend, see Louk J. Engels, “West European Alexius Legend,” in The Invention of Saintliness, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker (London, 2002), 93–​144, esp. 100–​10; on the diffusion of the Life of Barlaam and Iosaphat, see John C. Hirsh, Barlam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of Buddha Edited from MS Peterhouse 257 (London, 1986), xiii–​xx. 7

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ceremonies. Constantinople’s hegemony in this realm is illustrated by the efforts of late Carolingian and Ottonian emperors to adopt Greek styles.12 Courts in both East and West also attracted monastic officials and members of provincial elites who were often the monks’ principal patrons. Sacral kingship’s processions, symbolisms, and rituals therefore both affected and were affected by monastic liturgy. They shaped monastic imagination because monks linked their liturgies to the praise of God at the heavenly court. This international ceremonial community may help explain why elite monasticism, East and West, tended to develop in parallel: note, for examples, the elaboration and expansion of monastic liturgical prayer, the proliferation of liturgical books, the new written systems of musical notation, the encouragement of daily communion for monks and nuns, and imperially sponsored efforts to use monks as missionaries.13 Related to elite court culture is the material culture of religion. Pre-​ Romanesque architecture, especially in its Mediterranean traditions, synthesizes Late Antique, Near Eastern, and Greek elements. The continuing importance of cross-​cultural architectural contact is suggested by the way that the domed churches of the medieval West were located around the shores of the Mediterranean. Some details such as the high galleries found in Ottonian nunneries also seem to echo Byzantine counterparts.14 Diplomatic gifts, wedding presents, and ecclesiastical donations brought thousands of prestige items from Constantinople to the West, including icons, reliquaries, ivories, jewelry, illuminated manuscripts, and luxury textiles.15 These imports





Nicolaus Staubach, “Graecae gloriae:  die Rezeption des Griechischen als Element spätkarolingisch-​ frühottonischer Hof kultur,” in Kaiserin Theophanu. Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends, ed. Anton von Euw and Peter Schreiner, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1991), 1:343–​67. 13 Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–​1071 (Crestwood, NY, 2007), 95–​6, 152, 199–​201, 208, 226–​8, 241. 14 Jacqueline Lafontaine-​ Dosogne, “Aspects de l’architecture monastique à Byzance du VIIIe au Xe siècle:  topographie et disposition liturgique,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 186–​208, esp. 198–​9; Hiltje F. H. Zomer, “The So-​Called Women’s Gallery in the Medieval Church: An Import from Byzantium,” in The Empress Theophano: Byzantium and the West at the Turn of the First Millennium, ed. Adelbert Davids (Cambridge, 1995), 290–​306. 15 Major studies on Byzantine influence on Western art are listed in Ulrike Koenen, “Vier byzantinische Elfenbeinreliefs in Bayern zu Beginn des 11. Jahrhunderts: ihre Adaption und Wirkung als konktreter Beitrag zur ‘Byzantinischen Fragen’,” in Byzanzrezeption in Europa. Spurensuche über das Mittelalter und das Renaissance bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Foteini Kolovou (Berlin, 2012), 75–​86, esp. 75–​7. See also Krijnie N. Ciggaar, Western Travelers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium, 962–​1204. Cultural and Political Relations (Leiden, 1996), 114–​16, 206–​22, 308–​11; and Leslie Brubaker, “Material Culture and the Myth of Byzantium, 750–​950,” in Europa medievale e mondo bizantino, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Guglielmo Cavallo (Rome, 1997), 3–​41.

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directly influenced the work of the Western monks and nuns who produced ecclesiastical luxury objects. Through Byzantine ivories and reliquaries they acquired images of Mary and of the crucifix that helped shape symbols central to Western art and spirituality.16 Greek wood-​panel icons, which could be displayed in altar screens resembling a Greek iconostasis, may have contributed to the development of the chancel screen in the West that came to separate lay people from clerks.17 Relics of the True Cross proliferated in the West.18 Meanwhile, imported icons and relics helped inspire new Western cults for Nicholas of Myra, Catherine of Alexandria, and other Eastern saints.19 Encounters among monks, hermits, and wandering ascetics were probably the most important monastic contacts. Eastern holy men impressed the West. This story begins in Byzantine southern Italy, where Islamic raiders had conquered Christian Sicily and driven the Greeks of the Italian mainland into fortified settlements. Greek cenobitic monasteries lost properties and patrons, but the semi-​eremitical communities and hermits fared better. From the tenth century on, Calabria’s northern border was hailed as a “new Nitria” like the Egyptian desert of old. A dozen contemporary Greek hagiographical accounts commemorate local saints, including a father and two sons, Christopher, Macarios, and Sabas (whose lives were written by Orestes, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 986–​1005), Elias the Younger (d. 903), Elias the Cave Dweller (d. c. 960), Fantinus the Younger, and, the most famous, “the great Nilus.”20 It is difficult to classify these holy men as either hermits or monks







Anatole Frolow, Les reliquaires de la Vraie Croix (Paris, 1965), esp. 102–​15; Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “La croix, le moine et l’empereur: dévotion à la croix et théologie politique à Cluny autour de l’an mil,” in Haut Moyen-​Âge. Culture, éducation et société. Études offertes à Pierre Riché, ed. Claude Lepelley et al. (Paris, 1990), 448–​75; Howe, Before the Gregorian Reform, 280–​90. On an eleventh-​century Western monk fascinated with a Byzantine image of a crucifix, see Caecilia Davis-​Weyer, “Speaking of Art in the Early Middle Ages: Patrons and Artists among Themselves,” in Testo e imagine nell’alto medioevo. 15–​21 aprile 1993, 2 vols. (Spoleto, 1994), 2:955–​91, esp. 973–​82. 17 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL, 1994), esp. 21–​5 and 232–​49. 18 Anatole Frolow, La Relique de la Vraie Croix. Recherches sur le développement d’un culte (Paris, 1961), 109–​17, 133, 141–​2, with an appended inventory (153–​661, esp. 228–​300); Holger A. Klein, Byzanz, der Westen und das “wahre” Kreuz. Die Geschichte einer Reliquie und ihrer künstlerischen Fassung in Byzanz und im Abendland (Wiesbaden, 2004), 69–​141, 285–​7. 19 Gunther Wolf, “Kaiserin Theophanou, die Ottonen und der Beginn der St.Nikolaus-​ Verehrung in Mitteleuropa,” in Kaiserin Theophanu. Prinzessin aus der Fremde. Des Westreichs groβe Kaiserin, ed. Gunther Wolf (Weimar, 1991), 27–​38; Helmut Buschhausen, “Studien zur Mosaikikone mit dem Bild des hl. Nikolaus in Aachen-​Burtscheid,” in Byzanz und das Abendland im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert, ed. Evangelos Konstantinou (Cologne, 1997), 57–​109; Christine Walsh, The Cult of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 2007), esp. 71–​83. 20 David Paul Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality of the Italo-​Greeks (Thessaloniki, 1992), 160–​253. 16

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because, after initial training in a monastery or as a disciple, they often became hermits, accumulated followers for whom they founded communities, and then moved on.21 Byzantine Italy could not contain them. Almost all made pilgrimages to Rome.22 Some went east, including Elias the Younger, Elias the Cave Dweller, Vitalis, Fantinus the Younger (who died at Thessalonika), and Niceforus, who died on Mount Athos, having joined Athanasius the Athonite.23 Some emigrant Italo-​Greeks are only known through popular legends, such as the Calabrian Franco of Francavilla, whose companions became the patron saints of many small Apulian towns.24 Others appear as idiosyncratic names in documents: in 979 an abbot named Nicodemos lived near Salerno; in 991 Muslims killed the monk Arsenios and carried off several of his companions who lived on an island outside Amalfi; in the late tenth century the hermit Nicius near Montecassino, who had acquired followers and a patron, opened up his own Greek-​rite monastery.25 Other Greek monks trekked even further. The German court dominated by Empress Theophanu (d. 991), a Greek princess by birth, gave major ecclesiastical offices to the Calabrians Gregory of Cassano (d. 999), a courtier who died as abbot of Burtscheid, and John Philagathos (d. c.  1001), chancellor of Italy (twice), abbot of Nonantola, and bishop of Piacenza (subsequently







Jean-​Marie Martin, “L’érémitisme grec et latin en Italie méridionale (Xe–​XIIIe siècle),” in Ermites de France et d’Italie (XIe–​XVe), ed. André Vauchez (Rome, 2003), 175–​8; Valerie Ramseyer, The Transformation of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy 850–​1150 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 96–​105. 22 Francesco Russo, “La ‘peregrinatio’ dei santi italo-​g reci nelle tombe degli Apostoli Pietro e Paolo a Roma,” Bollettino della Badia greca di Grottaferrata n.s. 22 (1968): 89–​ 98; Enrico Morini, “The Orient and Rome:  Pilgrimages and Pious Visits between the Ninth and Eleventh Century,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 12–​13 (1988–​9):  849–​69; Gennaro Luongo, “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci,” in Pellegrinaggi e itinerari dei santi nel mezzogiorno medievale, ed. Giovanni Vitolo (Naples, 1999), 39–​56. 23 Panayotis Yannopoulos, “La Grèce dans la Vie de S. Élie le Jeune et dans celle de S. Élie le Spéléote,” Byzantion 64 (1994): 192–​221; Panayotis Yannopoulos, “La Grèce dans la Vie de S. Fantin,” Byzantion 65 (1995): 475–​94; βίoς Φαντίνoυ, in La Vita di San Fantino il Giovane. Introduzione, testo greco, traduzione commentario e indici, ed. Enrica Follieri (Brussels, 1993), 125–​31. 24 Luciano Tosti, “Franco, venerato a Francavilla,” in Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 15  vols. (Rome, 1961–​70, suppl. 1987, 2000), 5:1251–​2; Gregorio Penco, “Eremitismo irregolare,” Benedictina 32 (1985): 201–​21, esp. 212, lists Franco’s alleged companions. 25 Vera von Falkenhausen, “Il monachesimo italo-​ g reco e i suoi rapporti con il monachesimo benedettino,” in L’Esperienza monastica benedettina e la Puglia. Atti del Convegno di studi organizatto in occasione del XV centenario de la nascita di San Benedetto (Bari-​Noci-​Lecce-​Picciano, 6–​10 ottobre 1980), ed. Cosimo Damiano Fonseco, 2  vols. (Galatino, 1983), 1:126–​7; Martin, “L’érémitisme grec et latin,” 190–​1; Jean-​ Marie Sansterre, “Recherches sur les ermites du Mont-​Cassin et l’érémitisme dans l’hagiographie cassinienne,” Hagiographica 2 (1995): 75–​92, esp. 64–​5. 21

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anti-​ pope John XVI, 997–​ 8).26 Greek clerks were at Liège, Toul, Trier, Cologne, Mainz, Reichenau, and Hildesheim, where Bishop Godehard (1021–​ 38) had to limit hospitality at his new guesthouse to two or three days at the most because it had become too popular with “that sort of people … who wander … through regions and kingdoms … in monastic or canonical or even Greek habit.”27 Best documented is Symeon of Syracuse (d. 1035), a Sicilian raised in Constantinople who, fluent in five languages, worked for seven years as a guide in the Holy Land. Symeon retired to become a hermit on the Jordan, a monk at Bethlehem, and a monastic hermit on Mount Sinai. Sent west to collect a promised donation, he met Archbishop Poppo of Trier (1016–​47), whom he accompanied on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and whose support he subsequently enjoyed while living as a sort of stylite in the eastern tower of Trier’s old Roman “Black Gate.” Poppo secured Symeon’s papal canonization.28 There were many precedents for Symeon’s westward journey, which had included stops in France at Angoulême and at Pithiou, where his companion Cosmas died. At Dijon William of Volpiano (d. 1031) received Greek visitors who included monks from Ravenna, Barnabas genere Grecus, and Archbishop John of Corinth. Abbot Hugh of Cluny (1049–​1109) offered hospitality to Greek monks, the most remarkable being the Greek-​named Anastasius of Venice (d. 1085/​6), an ascetic Romualdian hermit instructed in both Greek and Latin letters, who had arrived at Mont Saint-​Michel in the 1020s, participated in the Berengarian controversy, and ended his long life as a hermit in the Pyrenees.29 Greek monks were received at Fleury, Marseille, and







Harald Zimmermann, “Johannes, 32 J.XVI. Philagathos, Gegenpapst,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols. (Munich, 1977–​99), 5:542–​3; Vera von Falkenhausen, “Gregor von Burtscheid und das griechische Mönchtum in Kalabrien,” Römische Quartalschrift 93 (1998): 215–​50. 27 Quotation from Vita posterior Godehardi 20, MGH SS 11, 198–​218, esp.  207, 32–​5. On Greeks in Germany, see Patricia M. McNulty, and Bernard Hamilton, “Orientale lumen et magistra latinitatis:  Greek Influences on Western Monasticism,” in Millénaire du Mont Athos, 1:200–​4; Jean Leclercq, “Les relations entre le monachisme oriental et le monachisme occidental dans le haut Moyen Âge,” in Millénaire du Mont Athos 2:51–​ 61; Axel Bayer, “Griechen im Westen im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert:  Simeon von Trier und Simeon von Reichenau,” in von Euw and Schreiner, Kaiserin Theophanu, 1:335–​41; Ciggaar, Western Travelers to Constantinople, 201–​21. 28 Michele C. Ferrari, “From Pilgrim’s Guide to Living Relic: Symeon of Trier and His Biographer Eberwin,” in Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Medieval Latin Studies, Cambridge, September 9–​12, 1998, ed. Michael W. Herren, C. J. McDonough, and Ross G. Arthur, 2 vols. (Turnhout, 2002), 1:324–​44; Alfred A. Haverkamp, “Der heilige Simeon (gest. 1035),” Historische Zeitschrift 290 (2010): 1–​51. 29 Mathieu Arnoux, “Un Vénitien au Mont-​Saint-​Michel:  Anastase, moine, ermite et confesseur († vers 1085),” Médiévales 28 (1995): 5–​78. 26

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Tours.30 Even England in the late tenth century had an Andreas Grecus residing at New Minster, and in the 1030s a Constantine tending his vineyard at Malmesbury (who on his deathbed, by revealing a pallium, indicated to the monks that formerly he must have been an archbishop somewhere).31 Exotic monks and hermits represented traditions from even further east. “Ivo, bishop from Persia” died at Ramsey in 969. At St. Bavo of Ghent in 1012, died Macarius, “archbishop of Antioch in Armenia,” whose more elaborate second vita, written a half-​century later, identifies him as an Armenian prince. Symeon the Armenian (d. 1016), who was rescued from a charge of heresy by an Armenian bishop who happened to be present at the papal court, ultimately acquired impressive noble patrons and papal canonization. Gregory the Armenian (d. before 1028, perhaps before 1021), a hermit near Pithiviers, had allegedly been bishop of Nicopolis in Armenia. Joris from “great Armenia” (d. 1032), was identified as “bishop of Sinai” in a northern French inscription published in the sixteenth century. Davinus (d. 1050), “Armenian in speech,” who died after five months’ residence in Lucca, received an eleventh-​century Life from a canon of Lucca, elevation from the future Pope Alexander II (1061–​73), and canonization from Alexander III (1159–​8).32 It is not possible to verify the exalted offices that these immigrant saints had supposedly held in their earlier lives, but the prestige of the East would be documented even by confabulated oriental backgrounds. Note the alleged Eastern origins of four of the six saints whose vitae were most frequently copied into eleventh-​ century Latin legendaries.33 The early papal canonizations of Symeon of Syracuse, Symeon the Armenian, Nicholas the Pilgrim, and Davinus have already been cited.







McNulty and Hamilton, “Orientale lumen et magistra latinitatis,” 191–​200; Robert Lee Wolff, “How the News Was Brought from Byzantium to Angoulême: Or, the Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 4 (1978): 181–​9; Jean-​Marie Sansterre, “Des moines grecs dans la région de Marseille vers le milieu du XIe siècle,” Byzantion 67 (1997): 563–​4; Ciggaar, Western Travelers to Constantinople, 163–​4 and 194–​7. 31 Hyde Register, ed. Walter de Gray Birch, in Liber vitae: Register and Martyrology of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester (London, 1892), 33; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum V 240, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (Oxford, 2007), 620–​1. Note also Krijnie N. Ciggaar, “England and Byzantium on the Eve of the Norman Conquest (the Reign of Edward the Confessor),” Anglo-​Norman Studies 6 (1982): 79–​95. 32 Gérard Dédéyan, “Les Arméniens en Occident, fin Xe au début XIe siècle,” in Occident et Orient au Xe siècle (Paris, 1979), 123–​39; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, IV 181, 483. 33 Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet, “L’hagiographie latine du XIe siècle dans la longue durée:  données statistiques sur la production littéraire et sur l’édition médiévale,” in Herren, McDonough, and Arthur, Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century, 2:281–​301, esp. 295–​6.

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Some Westerners became Orientals: Italo-​Latin monks could be found on Mount Sinai, including Bononius of Lucedio (d. 1026), papally canonized a year after his death,34 and the future Abbot John III of Montecassino (997–​ 1010); John also lived “some period of time” on Mount Athos.35 There John would have encountered other Westerners, since Latin monks, many of them Amalfitani, lived for two centuries on the holy mountain, where they impressed the author of a Georgian Life from the 1040s.36 Did these contacts influence Western monasticism? The arrival of Eastern holy men coincides with a revived Western interest in contemporary ascetic saints. New Carolingian saints were rare except for some missionary martyrs.37 In the Byzantine Empire, on the other hand, new ninth-​century saints began to appear and mid-​tenth-​century provincial saints included charismatic low-​ born hermit monks such as Basil the Younger (d. 944/​52), Paul of Latros (d. 955), Demetrianos of Chytri (d. c. 919), and Blasios of Amorion (d. c. 912), who finished his life as a hermit on Mount Athos, soon to be the home of many new saints. Greek compilers began to collect Lives of “modern saints.”38 Westerners encountered Italo-​Greek holy men who personified these ideals. It is probably no coincidence that Latin Lives of contemporary indigenous non-​elite saints first reappear in late tenth-​and early eleventh-​century Italy, the Latin region most connected to the Greek world, and surface later in transalpine Europe.39 Peter Damian (d. 1072/​3), an early leader of revived









Vita et Miracula S. Bononii 10, MGH SS 30/​2, 1023–​33, esp. 1029; Teemu Immonen, “A Saint as a Mediator between a Bishop and His Flock: The Cult of St. Bononius in the Diocese of Vercelli under Bishop Arderic (1026/​7–​1044),” Viator 39 (2008): 65–​91. 35 Chronica Monasterii Casinensis II.22, MGH SS 34, 206–​7. For more Montecassino monks in the East, see Chronica II.12, 30, 33, 52, 72 (190, 221–​3, 229–​30, 262, and 313 respectively.) 36 George the Hagiorite, Vitae of John and Euthymius 27–​9, trans. Paul Peeters, “Histoires monastiques géorgiennes, I,” Analecta Bollandiana 36–​7 (1917–​19):  8–​63, esp. 36–​8; Agostino Pertusi, “Monasteri e monaci italiani all’Athos nell’alto medioevo,” in Le millénaire du Mont Athos 963–​1963. Études et mélanges, vol. 1 (Chevetogne, 1963), 217–​51. For the RB on Athos, see Sansterre, “Témoignages des textes latins,” 14. 37 See the article by Raaijmakers in this volume. See also Pierre Riché, “Les carolingiens en quête de sainteté,” in Les fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe–​XIIIe siècle). Actes du Colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome avec le concours de l’Université de Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, 27–​29 octobre 1988 (Rome, 1991), 217–​24. 38 Alexander Kazhdan, A History of Byzantine Literature (650–​850) (Athens, 1999), 25–​9, 185–​ 225, 381–​95; Stéphanos Efthymiadis, “Le miracle et les saints durant et après le second iconoclasme,” in Monastères, images, pouvoirs et société à Byzance. Nouvelles approches du monachisme byzantin (XXe Congrès international des Études byzantines, Paris, 2001), ed. Michel Kaplan (Paris, 2006), 153–​82. 39 Howe, “Greek Influence on the Eleventh-​Century Western Revival,” esp.  1:2 and 1:16–​35. 34

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Italo-​Latin hermitism, instructed his priors that, in praising heroic sanctity, “it is more effective to use recent examples rather than older ones.”40 Eastern monks in the West were human symbols who represented a reality beyond the everyday Latin world. They wore distinctive mantles and hoods, although probably less elegant than those depicted in elite Byzantine illustrations.41 Sources emphasize a Greek monk’s winter and summer cloak, and especially his cap, which his abbot was to confiscate or rip if he should abandon monastic life; Eastern monastic travelers also had distinctive walking sticks, sometimes topped with crosses.42 Those who were not walking were supposed to travel by mule or donkey, not by horse.43 Nilus recognized these differences: “As this habit and the hairs of my beard testify [Latin monks were clean shaven], I am not a native but a Greek.”44 Some Greek monks even wore hides or rough cloth over bare legs and emaciated bodies, as if they were prophets or Desert Fathers. A tenth-​century Byzantine hagiographer depicts such an idealized hermit: His visage was green, his jowls emaciated, his feet bare, and he was all shriveled. He wore animal skin; the cape on his shoulders and the hood covering his head were like a tunic. He had a leather belt around his loins. He was hairy like a savage beast but somehow pleasing like an angel. He did not look like a man who had lived on bread, but like someone without flesh, almost without blood.45







Peter Damian, Epist. 1, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 4  vols., MGH Briefe d.  dt. Kaiserzeit 2, 77–​131, esp. 126; trans. Owen J. Blum, Peter Damian: Letters, 6 vols. (the last two with Irven M. Resnick) (Washington, DC, 1989–​2005), 2:289–​334, esp. 329. 41 Svetlana Tomeković, “Formation de l’iconographie monastique orientale (VIIIe–​ Xe siècles),” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993):  131–​52; Marina Falla Castelfranchi, “I ritratti dei monaci italo-​g reci nella pittura bizantini dell’Italia meridionale,” Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici n.s. 39 (2002): 145–​55. 42 Nikon of the Black Mountain, Regulations 75, trans. Robert Allison, in Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, ed. John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 2000), 1:406; Florin Curta, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, c. 500 to 1050: The Early Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 2011), 209 and 259–​63. 43 Theodore the Studite, Testament, ed. Olivier Delouis, “Le Testament de Théodore Stoudite: édition critique et traduction,” Revue des études byzantines 67 (2009): 77–​108, esp.  102–​3. 44 Vita prior Adalberti 15, ed. and trans. Gaşpar, in Klaniczay, Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis,  136–​7. 45 Bernard Flusin, “L’hagiographie monastique à Byzance du IXe au Xe siècle: modèles anciens et tendances contemporaines,” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993):  31–​50, esp. 31–​2; and Katarzyna Jazdzewska, “Hagiographic Invention and Imitation:  Niketas’ Life of Theoktiste and Its Literary Models,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Literary Studies 49 (2009): 257–​79, esp. 262–​3. On Greek ascetic costume, see Martin, “L’érétisme grec et latin,” 182–​3; βίoς Φαντίνoυ 1, 12, 21, 28–​9, in Follieri, La Vita di San Fantino, 400–​3, 414–​15, 422–​7,  432–​5.

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Almost all the major Italo-​Greek Lives of this period describe their heroes wearing radical prophetic hermit costumes on one occasion or another.46 Italo-​Latin hermits such as Romuald of Ravenna and certain brethren of Fonte Avellana adopted similarly radical dress.47 So did northerners who moved to Italy to become hermits, such as Theobald of Provins (d. 1066), who emulated Elijah, John the Baptist, and after them Paul and Anthony, in asperity of dress, going barefoot, and always wearing a hair shirt covered by rough pilgrimage garments.48 Hermits in prophetic penitential dress, accompanied by their mules or donkeys, soon became omnipresent in transalpine Europe, where a paleomonastic skin cape could be added to the penitential garments already attested in the West.49 The power of the hermit as a religious symbol is evident in Guibert of Nogent’s (d. 1124) description of Peter the Hermit’s (d. 1115) charisma: Whatever he did or said seemed like something divine. Even the hairs of his mule were torn out as though they were relics … Outdoors he wore a woolen tunic, which reached to his ankles, and above it a hood; he wore a cloak to cover his upper body, and a bit of his arms, but his feet were bare. He drank wine and ate fish, but scarcely ever ate bread.50

Greek monks also influenced Western monastic practice. Italo-​ Greek monks worked with their hands, in part because of the poverty of their much-​raided institutions.51 Latin Benedictine monks had their own tradition of manual labor, perhaps somewhat marginalized in larger late Carolingian and Cluniac communities,52 but Greek examples may have inspired individual Westerners such as Adalbert of Prague (d. 997), who in a mixed Greek/​Latin







Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality,  335–​7. John Howe, “The Awesome Hermit:  The Symbolic Significance of the Hermit as a Possible Research Perspective,” Numen 30 (1983):  106–​19; John Howe “Voluntary Ascetical Flagellation:  From Local to Learned Traditions,” Haskins Society Journal 24 (2012): 41–​61, esp.  51–​5. 48 Vita Theobaldi 4–​6, 8–​9, ed. AA SS OSB 6 (Paris, 1701), 156–​68, esp. 160–​3. 49 Jean Becquet, “L’érémitisme clérical et laïc dans l’ouest de la France,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente, 182–​211, esp.  194 and 203. On Western penitential dress, see Reginald Grégoire, “Cilicium Induere,” in Homenaje a Fray Justo Perez de Urbel, OSB, 2 vols. (Silos, 1976), 2:299–​320. 50 Guibert of Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos II, in The Deeds of God through the Franks, ed. Robert Levine (Woodbridge, 1997), 47–​8. 51 Peter Charanis, “The Monk as an Element in Byzantine Society,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 25 (1971), 61–​84, esp. 76–​8; Francesco Russo, “L’importanza delle opera ascetiche basiliane nella vita spirituale del monachesimo orientale dell’Italia meridionale,” Nicolaus 7 (1979): 173–​82; McNulty and Hamilton, “Orientale lumen et magistra latinitatis,” 211–​12; βίoς Φαντίνoυ 5–​6, in Follieri, La Vita di San Fantino,  406–​9. 52 See the articles by Réal and Cochelin in this volume. 46 47

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monastery distinguished himself by doing menial work; or Liutius, who, after his time in Jerusalem in the late tenth century, shocked Montecassino monks by working like a serf; or Stephen of Muret (d. 1124), who, according to his historically challenged vita, was inspired by self-​sufficient Greek hermits to embrace the eremitical life.53 Lauras (mixed eremitical and cenobitic communities) were frequent in the East and prominent in the tenth-​century reorganization of Mount Athos. This form of monastic life came to dominate the Italo-​Greek world and appears to have found echoes in the eremitical movements that led to the Camaldolese order in Italy and to hermit communities north of the Alps, some of which ultimately evolved into Carthusians and Grandmontines, while others were regularized as Benedictine, Augustinian, or Cistercian houses.54 For an explicit invocation of Greek example in order to influence Latin monastic practice, albeit in regard to a humble matter of ecclesiastical hygiene, note the monk Rodulphus Glaber’s (d. c. 1047) conclusion to a cautionary tale about a monk who spat too much: “Although it is a perfectly natural thing to do, it has long been the custom in most places altogether to refrain from spitting in church, except into specially provided receptacles which can be removed. This is especially the case amongst the Greeks, who have always kept the church’s observance scrupulously.”55 There was probably also influence on monastic spirituality. The gift of tears in prayer, mentioned continuously and frequently in Greek texts prior to the year 1000 and central to the spirituality of Symeon the New Theologian, surges in popularity in the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly in Italy.56 Repetitive genuflections made while chanting the Psalter





Vita prior Adalberti 17, ed. and trans. Gaşpar, in Klaniczay, Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis, 140–​3; Chronica Monasterii Casinensis 2.12 and 2.30 (190 and 221–​3 respectively); Vita Stephani Muretensis 6, ed. Jean Becquet, Scriptores Ordinis Grandimontensis, CCCM 8, 105–​37, esp.  108. For skepticism about direct continuity in eremitical labor systems from Greek to Latin communities in southern Italy, see Martin, ‘L’érémitisme grec et latin,” 187–​97. 54 Anne-​Marie Helvétius and Michel Kaplan, “Asceticism and Its Institutions,” in Early Medieval Christianities, c.  600–​1100, ed. Thomas F.  X. Noble and Julia M.  H. Smith (Cambridge, 2008), 275–​98, esp. 288–​90, juxtapose laura movements in East and West. See also the chapter by Jasper and Howe in this volume. 55 Rodulphus Glaber, Historiarum Libri Quinque V 7, ed. and trans. John France (Oxford, 1989),  224–​5. 56 Irénée Hausherr, Penthos:  The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, trans. Anselm Hufstader (Kalamazoo, MI, 1982), esp. 11–​87; Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution (Ve–​XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2000), 243–​50; Hilarion Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition (Oxford, 2000), 81, 90–​1, 102–​3, 208–​15, 422–​3, and 432–​3; Hannah Hunt, Joy Bearing Grief: Tears of Contrition in the Writings of the Early Syrian and Byzantine Fathers (Leiden, 2004), esp. 201–​23; Hannah Hunt, “The Reforming Abbot and His Tears,” in Spirituality in Late 53

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have a long paleomonastic, Greek, and Italo-​Greek tradition, and reappear in the West in circles around Peter Damian.57 Ascetical peregrination is another ancient tradition that flourished in Greek southern Italy and then came to characterize the newly prominent hermitism of Latin Italy and the north.58 The quest for mystical “ecstasy” in Eastern spirituality, rarely mentioned in the Latin sources in the early Middle Ages, gained new prominence in the West, particularly in the circles around Peter Damian.59 These spiritual practices have antecedents in paleomonastic literature as well as in tenth-​and eleventh-​century Greek spirituality, but, as has been seen, the renewed concern with this literature in Latin eremitical circles may itself owe something to contemporary Greek ascetical spirituality. The debate about Greek influence on Western monasticism presupposes a dichotomy that this survey and other recent work has somewhat undercut.60 There was a “golden age” of Greek monasticism, during the period from the late ninth century through the early eleventh, when the Macedonian dynasty ruled Constantinople, that featured new ascetic saints, myriads of new monasteries, and the emergence of Mount Athos as an international monastic center.61 Some participation of Latin monks in this world is indicated by the cross-​ cultural monastic interactions they documented, the Eastern immigrants they canonized, and the many non-​Latin pilgrimage sites they visited. In terms of monastic practice, Italo-​Greek emphases seem to have found echoes first in Italo-​Latin monasticism and then later in the north. On a popular level, Eastern holy men helped inspire the new hermitism of the high Middle Ages. Religious material culture—​including crucifixes, Marian images, and pilgrimage shrines—​extended symbolic aspects of Eastern spirituality to a developing Western church. How the mystical theology of the East affected the West is impossible to document absolutely, but Italians such as John of Fécamp (d. 1079) and Peter Damian, from the area of the Latin





Byzantium: Essays Presenting New Research by International Scholars, ed. Eugenia Russell (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), 13–​20. 57 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 334–​335; Kazhdan, History of Byzantine Literature, 99; Life of Neilos of Rossano 15–​17, 53–​63; Patricia McNulty, Saint Peter Damian: Selected Writings on the Spiritual Life (New York, 1959), 39–​40. 58 Leclercq, “Les relations”; Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 355–​6. See also the article by Ramseyer in this volume. 59 Hester, Monasticism and Spirituality, 392–​3. On Romualdian spirituality, see Giovanni Tabacco, “‘Privilegium amoris’:  aspetti della spiritualità romualdina,” Il Saggiatore 4 (1954):1–​20; on ecstasy in this milieu, see Howe, “Greek Influence on the Eleventh-​ Century Western Revival,” 1:142–​9. 60 Linda Safran, The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy (Philadelphia, PA, 2014), esp. 210–​38. 61 See the article by Kaplan in this volume.

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world most exposed to Greek spirituality, were in the vanguard of the new interiority. Later this cross-​cultural communication became more difficult thanks to tighter Western monastic systems and sharper conflicts between the Greek and Latin Churches. Yet sporadic instances of fruitful contact can still be documented throughout the high and later Middle Ages, especially in crusader and mendicant circles.

Bibliography Bayer, Axel. “Griechen im Westen im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert:  Simeon von Trier und Simeon von Reichenau.” In Kaiserin Theophanu. Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends. Gedenkenschrif des Kölner Schnütgen-​Museums zum 1000. Todesjahr der Kaiserin, 2  vols., edited by Anton von Euw and Peter Schreiner, 1:335–​41. Cologne, 1991. Brubaker, Leslie. “Material Culture and the Myth of Byzantium, 750–​950.” In Europa medievale e mondo bizantino, edited by Girolamo Arnaldi and Guglielmo Cavallo, 3–​41. Rome, 1997. Ciggaar, Krijnie N. Western Travelers to Constantinople: The West and Byzantium, 962–​1204. Cultural and Political Relations. Leiden, 1996. d’Angelo, Edoardo. “Agiografia latina del Mezzogiorno continentale d’Italia (750–​1000).” In Hagiographies, 5 vols., edited by Guy Philippart, 4:41–​134. Turnhout, 2006. Dédéyan, Gérard. “Les Arméniens en Occident, fin Xe au début XIe siècle.” In Occident et Orient au Xe siècle, 123–​39. Publications de l’Université de Dijon 57. Paris, 1979. Falkenhausen, Vera von. “Il monachesimo italo-​g reco e i suoi rapporti con il monachesimo benedettino.” In L’Esperienza monastica benedettina e la Puglia. Atti del Convegno di studi organizatto in occasione del XV centenario de la nascita di San Benedetto (Bari-​Noci-​Lecce-​ Picciano, 6–​10 ottobre 1980), 2  vols., edited by Cosimo Damiano Fonseco, 1:119–​35. Galatino, 1983. Forrai, Réka. “The Readership of Early Medieval Greek–​Latin Translations.” In Scrivere et leggere nell’alto medioevo. Spoleto, 28 aprile–​4 magio 2011, 2 vols., 1:293–​315. Settimane di Studio della Fondazione centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 59. Spoleto, 2012. Hamilton, Bernard F. “The Monastery of S.  Alessio and the Religious and Intellectual Renaissance of Tenth-​Century Rome.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 2 (1965): 263–​310. Haverkamp, Alfred A. “Der heilige Simeon (gest. 1035).” Historische Zeitschrift 290 (2010): 1–​51. Hester, David Paul. Monasticism and Spirituality of the Italo-​Greeks. Thessaloniki, 1992. Howe, John. Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium. Ithaca, NY, 2016. Howe, John. “Greek Influence on the Eleventh-​Century Western Revival of Hermitism.” 2 vols. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979. Leclercq, Jean. “Les relations entre le monachisme oriental et le monachisme occidental dans le haut Moyen Âge.” In Millénaire du Mont Athos (963–​1963). Études et mélanges.

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Eastern Influence on Western Monasticism Actes du “Convegno international di studio” à la “Fondazione Giorgio Cini (3–​6 septembre 1963) à Venise, 2 vols., 2:61–​70. Venice, 1963–​4. Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–​1071. Crestwood, NY, 2007. Luongo, Gennaro. “Itinerari dei santi italo-​g reci.” In Pellegrinaggi e itinerari dei santi nel mezzogiorno edieval, edited by Giovanni Vitolo, 39–​56. Naples, 1999. Martin, Jean-​Marie. “L’érémitisme grec et latin en Italie méridionale (Xe–​XIIIe siècle).” In Ermites de France et d’Italie (XIe–​XVe), edited by André Vauchez, 175–​98. Rome, 2003. McNulty, Patricia M., and Bernard Hamilton. “Orientale lumen et magistra latinitatis: Greek Influences on Western Monasticism.” In Millénaire du Mont Athos (963–​1963). Études et mélanges. Actes du “Convegno international di studio” à la “Fondazione Giorgio Cini (3–​6 septembre 1963) à Venise, 2 vols., 1:181–​216. Venice, 1963–​4. Morini, Enrico. “The Orient and Rome: Pilgrimages and Pious Visits between the Ninth and Eleventh Century.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 12–​13 (1988–​9): 849–​69. Sansterre, Jean-​ Marie. “Témoignages des textes latins du haut Moyen Âge sur le monachisme oriental et des textes byzantins sur le monachisme occidental.” Revue bénédictine 103 (1993): 12–​30. Wolff, Robert Lee. “How the News Was Brought from Byzantium to Angoulême: Or, the Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 4 (1978): 139–​89.

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THE LONG TWELFTH CENTURY

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Historiographical Approaches to Monasticism in the Long Twelfth Century Jo hn V a n   E n g e n Count Charles Forbes René de Montalembert (1810–​70), born the scion of longstanding Catholic gentry on his father’s side, was on his mother’s the son of a Scottish Calvinist family. He came of age fully a generation after the French Revolution, in an era turning back in Romantic nostalgia to pursue Restoration. Some old monastic houses were reopened, and many new houses and orders were founded from around 1840. The count would prove an intriguing hybrid, allied with the “modernist” priest Lamennais as a Catholic liberal, yet  also an ardent defender of ecclesiastical liberties (meaning “privileges”) over against the post-​revolutionary regime, positions he would publicly articulate in oratory and pamphlets.1 He also took up an ever more fervent interest in matters his generation had been reared to reject, things “feudal” and especially things “Christian,” matters the revolutionaries had meant to be done with forever. In his early education, Montalembert later observed, he heard nothing about monks—​then shut down, banished from the national French story. But he now dug into medieval history, and what he discovered there most especially was monks. He would come to envision them as the pioneering forgers of European “Christendom” and “Civilization” (two words and concepts then coming fully into their own), and as the founders or nurturers of countless French towns and cities. In 1860 this enthusiasm issued in grand prose narrating the story of these monks and their role in the making of the West, Les Moines d’Occident, depuis saint Benoît jusqu’à saint Bernard—​in all, seven volumes, the last two supplied posthumously from his scraps. The count aimed to sweep his readers along in grand rhetoric, and drew material from whatever sources lay to hand, especially Jean Mabillon’s seventeenth-​century

Charles Montalembert, Trois discours sur La liberté de l’Église, La liberté d’enseignement, et La liberté des ordres monastiques. Prononcés à la Chambre des Pairs par le Comte de Montalembert (Paris, 1844).

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Acta and Annales of the Benedictine order.2 He notes at one point that Jacques-​ Paul Migne’s volumes were just appearing, and would have made his work so much easier.3 The opening volumes were presented to Pope Pius IX in a dedicatory letter dated 21 April 1860; within a decade, translations would appear in English, German, and Italian. For the literate public of mid-​nineteenth-​ century Europe these books presented both an appealing portrait and a stirring plea, with monks made central not only to Christian religion but also to Western civilization as a whole (l’Occident). Montalembert began with three books on the Roman Empire and St. Benedict’s precursors in the East and West, and would conclude just after the Carolingian era (as Mabillon had). After completing these six volumes, he drafted a preface much longer than any of his narrative books. Here the count spoke from his heart and to his age: a passionate apologia for the Middle Ages, a soaring rejoinder to Voltaire and the Revolution. Yet, notably, he also took care to position himself between what were for him two contemporary camps which he repudiated: an ascendant ultramontane papacy on the one hand, and liberal secularists on the other. Both, he astutely noted, were invested in seeing these Middle Ages (which he treated as a plural) as characterized by an “impotent people” (l’impuissance humaine) and a “dictatorship of the Church” (la glorieuse dictature de l’Église). He viewed it differently: “I deny the dictatorship, and I still more strongly deny the human impotence. Humanity was never more fertile, more manful, more potent; and as for the Church, she has never seen her authority more contested in practice [than during the Middle Ages], even by those who recognized it most dutifully (docilement) in theory.”4 This whole section is a remarkable attempt to defend the Middle Ages against liberal secularists, while simultaneously, amid a newly ascendant ultramontane church co-​opting that era, to declare it no “ideal” age of papal monarchy either. Montalembert insisted upon seeing forms of liberty and liberalism in the Middle Ages while passionately upholding religion, and especially monks, as the single most significant factor in the making of the West. He knew full well that this was an unusual and defensive stance, and in his opening paragraph he presented himself as “vindicating Catholic and historic truth upon the ground where it has been most misconstrued, and where it still

Charles Montalembert, The Monks of the West, 2 vols. (Boston, 1870), an abridgement of the original French, Les moines d’Occident depuis saint Benoit jusqu’à saint Bernard, 6th. ed., 7 vols. (Paris, 1878). 3 Montalembert, Monks of the West, 1:138. 4 Ibid., 1:120. 2

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encounters the greatest antipathies and prejudices”—​that is, with respect to monasticism and its place in European and French civilization. His aim was to aid in the rehabilitation of religious orders.5 In fact he spent considerable time in monastic houses and was close to Père Lacordaire, the leading preacher of his day and the principle mover in the restoration of French Dominicans. Montalembert had first met with success in writing about St. Elisabeth of Hungary (d. 1231) in 1834. But the figure that captivated him most, the man whom this whole grand narrative was supposed to lead up to (though it did not reach there), was Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). This was a person the count found as stunningly effective as a spiritual writer for cloistered circles as he was influential in politics and the Church as a public actor, “the most accomplished type of the Religious,” and for whom the secret to all these achievements was “his monastic profession.” Montalembert enthused over this “grand man” of “eloquence, virtue, and courage” who could move all Europe, and yet, “If he was, and who can doubt it, a great orator (orateur), a great writer (écrivain), and a great man (personnage), that was nearly indifferent to him and indeed despite himself. He was, and above all wished to be, something entirely different: he was a monk and a saint; he lived in a cloister and worked miracles.”6 It is not hard to imagine Montalembert as perceiving in Bernard something of a prototype for himself as a public religious figure. But it should be remembered, too, that in Montalembert’s age Bernard was widely despised by enlightened rationalists as a polemicist, the persecutor of Peter Abelard (d. 1142), and the very emblem of an interfering churchman. Montalembert’s intent was, had his narrative reached so far, to present in Bernard a figure “able to combat and overcome, in Abailard, the precursor of modern rationalism.”7 Only a few years before Montalembert was born, simmering contempt for monks and their privileged estate, together with longstanding resentments over their material holdings, had erupted in violent overthrow which shut down monasteries, plundered churches, seized their properties, and turned Bernard’s own Clairvaux into a maximum security prison—​which, even today, it remains in part . This may all seem a mere diversion, since Montalembert was no professional historian. But his sweeping characterization of monks as central to the making of Europe intersected with a rebuilding of religious orders after

Ibid., 1:1. Ibid., 1:2. 7 Ibid. 5

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the Revolution that proved far more successful than almost anyone could have imagined. These new and restored orders flourished into the late 1960s, and their historians have influenced interpretation down nearly to the present. Students of monastic history should not find it hard to recognize in Montalembert’s Monks of the West narrative lines and interpretive debates that are still variously at play, if now in altered and more nuanced forms. Or one need tweak only a little his binary between papists and secularists to hear echoes of binaries still sometimes influential in our debates and narratives. And there are still other intriguing parallels. Jean Mabillon (1632–​1707), the paradigmatic monastic historian, was famed in his day initially for his edition of Bernard (1667), which would remain standard for three centuries. In our day renewed interest in monastic history has owed a great deal to the Benedictine Jean Leclercq (1911–​93), whose themes and research grew, once again, in good part out of his lead role in the making of a new edition of Bernard’s works (1957–​98). Further, and very importantly, in 1956, first for his fellow monks but with an eye for a much broader public, Leclercq set out to show how Bernard’s writings, and those of medieval monks generally, had created and thrived within a rich and distinct culture of their own making in his L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu,8 an ingenious exposition which spoke deeply to monks and also opened up monastic culture to lay people and historians. It was in reading this book for graduate exams, in about 1972, that I stumbled on the figure of Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), and proposed it as a thesis topic to my Doktervater Gerhart Ladner, who enthusiastically agreed. Leclercq here too, quietly but emphatically, set this “monastic” culture apart from a nascent scholastic culture of the twelfth century and the reigning neo-​scholastic culture of his own day, echoing in effect the famed differences between Bernard and Abelard, though (as he knew) for the last twenty or more years of his life Peter Abelard, too, was a monk living under the Benedictine Rule (RB). We might note, in a still broader vista, that Christopher Dawson’s Making of Europe (1932), of considerable influence inside and beyond academia in the earlier twentieth century, wove a grand narrative not unlike Montalembert’s, if in more professional historical form. In short, we cannot fully grasp historical interpretations of medieval monasticism over the past two centuries, no matter our own attitudes or allegiances, apart from understanding the deep and abiding influence of post-​ revolutionary debates and energies: a defiant cultural claim that monks had

Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1961).

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sustained and indeed built or rebuilt Europe during its “darkest” centuries, over against earlier Protestant and subsequent secularist insistence that they were themselves instead a significant source of that “darkness.” But we in turn must register the spiritual and cultural forces unleashed by a strikingly successful restoration of medieval orders and houses between the 1830s and the 1960s. General historians were slow to take an interest in monastic history as such but, when they did, they, if perhaps unconsciously, at times echoed or assimilated narratives and themes that were still inflected by in-​house monastic interpretation or by anti-​monastic resentment, while at the same time often relying in significant part on those sources that monks had first uncovered and edited. This is not a critique but rather a caution for historians now seeking to work out understandings of monastic life conceived as more fully entwined with medieval society and culture, and moreover as changing steadily from century to century. As Montalembert was well aware, at this same time nineteenth-​century academics had set about transforming history’s time-​ honored self-​ understanding—​as practices of archival digging and recording or rhetorical efforts at writing grand narrative—​into newer claims for establishing a “science.” Ernst Sackur’s influential study in 1891 of “the Cluniacs” opened with this assertion:  “The history of the monastic reform movement is the history of a general renaissance. It is about the creation of new conditions of life.”9 Sackur here appropriated Jacob Burckhardt’s words on the Renaissance to stake claims for Cluniac monasticism’s renewing impact on tenth-​and early eleventh-​ century Europe. Unlike Montalembert, however, Sackur had built up his scholarly case on chronicles and charters. In 1910 Elphaege Vacandard, himself a priest, published a major Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, which opened with a declaration that his was “not a work of apologetics, still less a panegyric; it [was] a straightforward (simple) effort at history (Essai d’histoire)”10—​plainly distancing himself from Montalembert. History in “scientific” form aimed to rise above centuries of nationalist or confessional polemic, or indeed the claims and counter-​claims of liberal secularists and restoration monks. The newly flourishing religious orders soon had their people join in and found their own scientific journals: Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige (1910–​, from 1880 in an earlier form), Revue

Ernst Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit bis zur Mitte des elften Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1892–​4), v. 10 Elphaege Vacandard, Vie de saint Bernard, abbé de Clairvaux (Paris, 1910), i. 9

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bénédictine (1884–​), Revue Mabillon (1905–​), Analecta Praemonstratensia (1905–​), and many more. General historians would use monastic chronicles to write political history or dig through monastic cartularies and documents to write economic and social history (as Georges Duby did with the records of Cluny in the 1940s for his thèse d’état11). Yet monks mostly continued to dominate the writing of their own history, if, as Mabillon had before, they now did so with an attention to texts and manuscripts which met or surpassed new scholarly standards. As such, their work slowly began to gain the attention of more general historians. One might mention the research of André Wilmart (1876–​1941), whose Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots (1932) modeled a sensitive sorting and presentation of complex authorial and textual issues in a sphere that general historians rarely entered, work which nonetheless would come to influence a whole generation of lay scholars of monastic spiritual life, such as R.  W. Southern. But even the first-​class monk-​historian David Knowles (1896–​1974) did not set out to write his Monastic Orders in England (1940) for general historians, nor did he plan initially to include nuns, and his delightful and wise Great Historical Enterprises (1963) presented mighty historical editorial undertakings such as the Acta Sanctorum, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and the Rolls Series from the long perspective of a monastic historian. If, then, until the mid-​twentieth century, monastic history was largely left to monks, apart from politics (“Church and State”) or economics (“rural economy”), as likewise writing church or religious history was mostly left to seminary professors, this all began to change, even quite dramatically, from the later 1950s. Even more surprisingly, by the end of the twentieth century very possibly more medieval historians were at work on aspects of religious history than on political, social, or economic subjects.12 For the eleventh and twelfth centuries in particular, the work has become so vast and varied that no short article could pretend to survey it in depth, even if limited to the past generation or so, and to discrete monastic topics. Giles Constable’s “Study of Monastic History Today,” though now over forty years old, offers excellent orientation to the literature up to the time of its publication in the 1970s.13



Georges Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Paris, 1953). See Giles Constable, “From Church History to Religious Culture:  The Study of Medieval Religious Life and Spirituality,” in European Religious Cultures:  Essays Offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Miri Rubin (London, 2008), 3–​16, with bits of personal history; John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–​304. 13 Giles Constable, “The Study of Monastic History Today,” in Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieval History, ed. Vaclav Murdoch and C. S. Crouse (Montreal, 1974), 21–​51. For a 11

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In addition, for twenty years now Constable’s Reformation of the Twelfth Century—​a book dedicated to David Knowles, Jean Leclercq, and Kassius Hallinger—​has served as a marker in this field and a point of departure. This essay presumes the reader’s interest in the seventeen contributions that follow and seeks here to situate them in a broader historiographical context, while alerting readers to a few central themes and debates, often echoed or assumed in these contributions. We begin with monastic men and women as part of medieval society. Monasteries and medieval societies in all their multiplicity did not coexist as separate phenomena, even if in the past social historians often said little about internal monastic life, and monastic historians in turn very little about the surrounding society. Rather, the two were co-​dependent—​and not just the people on monks for prayers, or monks and nuns on lay people for protection and labor. Even small monasteries could become hubs, and large monasteries grew towns around them, if they were not (as was often the case) already located on the outskirts of a town. Castles were turned into monasteries on occasion to defang a predatory family, and monasteries in turn might serve as fortresses in times of danger. Monks owned parishes in the surrounding countryside, and people came to monasteries for feast-​day processions or to visit relics and pray at shrines. All of this is presumed in our sources, and hence often revealed only indirectly, making it difficult for historians to document or describe, beyond such overtly public cases as monastic advocates in central Europe or dynasts patronizing a house or family cloister.14 In addition—​ and again this is presumed, if only rarely noted—​all monasteries depended upon a large staff of lay servants and artisans, many women and men always coming and going.15 Initial historical attempts to imagine monks and society together generated models that were often too structural in character—​thus an Eigenkloster (a proprietary monastery), or too simplistic notions of Benedictine landed incomes resting on peasant labor over against Cistercian granges with their lay brothers. Realities on the ground were disparate and regional and sometimes ethnic. Most of these paradigms also included too little about women.16 Historians have created new socio-​ religious landscapes that are more



recent narrative survey with a bibliography in several languages, see Gert Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, trans. James D. Mixson (Collegeville, MN, 2016; German original 2012). 14 See the articles by Lyon and Jamroziak in this volume. 15 See the article by Cochelin in volume 1. 16 See the article by Berman in this volume.

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piecemeal, and an attempt to survey them would require an article in itself.17 Kaspar Elm, coming from the monastic side, tried to open lines into society with volumes of papers studying, for instance, “converts” (lay adults entering houses), double monasteries (women and men), and Cistercians,18 while his student Franz Felten worked on Cistercian women.19 Michel Parisse and Bruce Venarde, coming more from the social side, have worked to include nuns alongside men, and also to take careful note of differing social classes,20 as has Constance Berman in researching the economic conditions21—​to name just a representative few. On the ground, monks and nuns needed the goods that lay people had to offer (or were made to yield), and many lay people wanted various religious goods that monks and nuns had to offer. Precisely because this was all so deeply rooted in varied medieval societies, medieval monasticism’s relation to those societies was never one thing, nor did it remain the same from one century to the next, even if houses enjoyed, as many did, continuous existence over hundreds of  years. Earlier on, scholars often related monastic houses to medieval society by way of structural correspondences:  thus a “feudal” Cluny with a singular lord abbot and many dependent priories. Going back at least to Sackur, they tried to account for different monastic forms and social relations by way of differing “reforms” and their networks. While not denying some truths here, many scholars have become more cautious in reducing monastic forms to structural social or economic models. Constable has coyly suggested that Cluny’s prominence and success perhaps owed more to its being typical for the age, saying that it “combined many of the most admired aspects of contemporary religious life—​features also found in other institutions but brought





See the article by Hirbodian in this volume. Kaspar Elm, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konversen im Mittelalter (Berlin 1980); Kaspar Elm, Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit. Katalog zur Ausstellung des Landschaftsverbandes Rheinland (Cologne, 1981); Kaspar Elm (with Michel Parisse), Doppelklöster und andere Formen der Symbiose männlicher und weiblicher Religiosen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1992). On the Cistercians, see now Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090–​1500 (London, 2013); on lay brothers and sisters, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume; on double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 19 Franz J. Felten, “Der Zisterzienserorden und die Frauen,” in Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6. bis 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz J. Felten (Korb, 2011), 199–​274. 20 Michel Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age (Le Puy, 1983); Michel Parisse, Religieux et religieuses en empire du Xe au XIIe siècle (Paris, 2011); Bruce Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 21 Constance H. Berman, Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-​Three Monasteries (Philadelphia, PA, 1986). 17

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together and epitomized, as it were, in Cluny,”22 counter to its reputation as some reforming outlier. In his Gorze-​Kluny, published in 1950–​ 1, Kassius Hallinger, himself a Benedictine monk, opened up a different and productive avenue of research by focusing on surviving written customaries which described or (in the interpretation of some) prescribed liturgical and eventually administrative observances for others to follow (or which they wished to follow). Hallinger’s own interpretation was marred by an overly institutionalized approach and nationalist impulses (also true of Sackur). In the hands of more recent scholars, however, attentive to issues of writing alongside orality and performance as mediums for shaping communities, as well as the intensely particular dynamics of local situations, the editions of consuetudines that have come out of Hallinger’s initiative, and are still coming, have opened up rich sources for liturgy, communal practices, and in-​house administration.23 Similarly, Joachim Wollasch (1931–​2015), building on a Freiburg school going back to Gerd Tellenbach and Karl Schmid, and together with his students, interpreted and edited memorial books and necrologies as revealing of practices inside houses and especially of the links among them, thus creating a way to reconstruct the Cluny nexus.24 This approach had the additional advantage of taking seriously prayers for departed souls as integral to the role of monasticism in medieval society, culminating in Cluny’s introduction of a feast day for All Souls.25 From soon after the Second World War, approaches to monasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries turned ever more toward “reform” as the real driver of the story, and especially in the explosion of new religious orders and the spiritual cultures they generated—​again, rightly or wrongly, that world of Bernard of Clairvaux. Constable’s Reformation of the Twelfth Century resisted a narrative written out of the rival rhetorical blasts and counter-​blasts plentiful in the contemporary literature, and quite deliberately treated the new orders and reforming older orders in common.26 He thus recognized the reality of



Giles Constable, “The Future of Cluniac Studies,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 1 (2012): 13. 23 See, representatively, Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, eds., From Dead of Night to End of Day:  The Medieval Customs of Cluny (Turnhout, 2005); and Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125 (Ithaca, NY, 2006). 24 Joachim Wollasch, Mönchtum des Mittelalters zwischen Kirche und Welt (Munich, 1973); and Dietrich W. Poeck, Cluniacensis ecclesia. Der cluniacensische Klosterverband (10.–​12. Jahrhundert) (Munich, 1998). 25 See the article by Blennemann in volume 1 and the article by Boynton in this volume. 26 See also Van Engen, “ ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered.” 22

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distinct forms and varied spiritual tones among groups, while not denying very real rivalries for patrons, resources, and recruits, or that smaller groups might have folded or collapsed into larger ones. Three other noteworthy interventions in this discussion of novelty and reform warrant mention here. Gert Melville, the progenitor of a large body of work on monastic life and reform by way of studies and conferences published under the rubric Vita regularis, has brought a self-​consciously Weberian perspective to bear on this story: a charismatic founder, a necessary transition toward a “rational” and “regulated” institution with “statutes” to sustain itself, yet with “flexibility” built in to allow for strategic adjustments going forward.27 For Melville, that flexibility derived chiefly from the organizational invention and model of the general chapter, which he sees replicated from the Cistercians to the Dominicans.28 The general chapter was a striking organizational move, and attempts would be made at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to impose it on traditional monastic houses (“Benedictines”) retrospectively. This form of decision-​making opens the way both to more collaborative dimensions and to more communitarian actions among otherwise disparate monastic houses.29 But not all of them worked alike in practice, nor did all of the traditional houses wish to give up their relative independence. The Cistercian General Chapter moreover was set up at the beginning to, among other things, oversee and enforce a literal and uniform observance of the RB, an agenda for which there was little historical precedent. Melville and Cygler, and many before them, especially scholars in the mendicant tradition, also tend hereby to treat this story of religious reform as continuous from Cluny or some other marker to the coming of the friars. Constable does not, nor would I. Constance Berman’s Cistercian Evolution, by contrast, aimed to decenter and deconstruct the standing narrative of Cîteaux’s astonishing expansion. She cast doubt on the legitimacy of some early documents, demonstrated that this expansion involved incorporation as much as new foundations, and insisted that, despite male resistance, women were part of the story too. To see all of this, Berman argued, one must proceed from the ground up and



For an outline of this argument, see the article by Melville in this volume. On the general chapter, see Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Karthäuser und Cluniazenser (Munich, 2002). For another perspective on the origins of the Dominican general chapter, see John Van Engen, “From Canons to Preachers:  A Revolution in Medieval Governance,” in Domenico di Caleruega e la nascita dell’ordine dei Fratri Predicatori. Atti del XLI Convego storico internazionale (Spoleto, 2005), 261–​95. 29 See the article by Röckelein in the volume. 27

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house by house, not write narratives from the normative documents. Some critics worried that she overstated her case or moved too quickly through the complexities of Cîteaux’s early documents,30 but her work cautioned scholars against merely reproducing grand narratives meant first of all to consolidate and edify the monks themselves. Steven Vanderputten’s Monastic Reform as Process focuses on the period up to the early twelfth century, and even more radically decenters the older narrative of that previous era, while regarding Cluny as something of an exception. He also casts doubt on “reform” as a self-​defining notion, and most particularly its willing reception in most instances.31 He re-​focuses attention on lay benefactors as those driving change, not the monks themselves, and insists on lay participation in the everyday realities of monastic life. In effect, Vanderputten has left entirely undiscussed, as yet, the “twelfth-​century” reforms that follow, but in any case doubts their growing somehow out of these earlier local and heterogeneous enterprises. What all this leaves open still is the notion of “reform” itself, and monastic reform in particular. The term “reform” enjoyed widespread usage at the time, but treatments of the term’s semantic field and concrete references, with its possible cultural and social meanings, has hardly expanded beyond what Gerhart Ladner and Giles Constable set out in 1977 at a conference to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Charles H. Haskins’s Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.32 Women, while largely ignored until a good generation ago, have begun to come into their own, as noted above. In fact, significant monastic women flank this period, with Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (935–​1002) just before, and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–​1179) and Herrad of Landsberg (c. 1130–​1195) at its end, and Heloise (1090/​1100–​1164) in the middle. Entering the twelfth century there were considerably fewer women than men in cenobitic life, and, even more so than men, they tended to come from higher social ranks. But their presence was real and formidable. From Bernard of Clairvaux we have some 550 extant letters addressing affairs in-​house and across Europe, and from Hildegard about 400, also speaking to matters in-​house and across Europe. Abbess Herrad was conversant with the new theological discussions in



For an attempt to strike a balance, see my review in Speculum 79 (2004): 452–​5. For a fuller discussion, see the article by Vanderputten in volume 1. 32 Gerhart B. Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 1–​19 and esp. his bibliographical note on 29–​33; see also Giles Constable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, 1982), 37–​67.

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Paris,33 and Hildegard was consulted on a theological matter by at least one Parisian master. These abbesses, like Bernard, both led and grew the houses they oversaw, and Hildegard left sermons. They were all traditional monasteries, but women also responded, and in unprecedented numbers, to the new religious energies of the early twelfth century, manifest for instance in the foundations of Fontevraud and the Gilbertine order.34 They pushed to join the Cistercians and Premonstratensians, with some success, despite resistance from the men (who shrank from either their economic or their spiritual care).35 Here historians are learning to sort norms from actual practice on the ground.36 Women monastics collaborated with men in the making of bible commentaries or sermons, and the relations between religious women and priest confessors could take place on a level playing field or even with women in the lead (as Hildegard with Volmar).37 After two generations of innovative new work on monastic history and the full incorporation of women and feminist approaches, new interpretive narratives are overdue. But that work must be at once conceptual and undertaken from the ground up. It must also read our sources subtly and between the lines, with a sense for what they presupposed in actual practice. One may see such work, for instance, in Christina Lutter’s study of women’s houses in central and eastern Europe, Gender and Knowledge, Norm and Practice, Reading and Writing.38 Similarly, the study of twelfth-​century monasticism over the past two generations has centered to a considerable degree around that explosive growth in new orders and their accompanying literary and religious cultures, “especially,” Constable says, “between about 1040 and 1160 … a period of intense, rapid, and to a high degree self-​conscious change in almost all aspects of human thought and activity.”39 That story, as noted, has only





Fiona J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 2007). 34 Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995). 35 See the article by Andenna in this volume. 36 Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004). 37 See the article by Griffiths in this volume and the essays in Fiona Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, eds., Partners in Spirit:  Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500 (Turnhout, 2014); see also Beach, Women as Scribes; and John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006). 38 Christina Lutter, Geschlecht und Wissen, Norm und Praxis, Lesen und Schreiben. Monastische Reformgemeinschaften im 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2005). Compare this to her more programmatic statement in Zwischen Hof und Kloster. Kulturelle Gemeinschaften im mittelalterlichen Ősterreich (Vienna, 2010). 39 Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 4. 33

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slowly begun moving beyond the narratives which groups like the Cistercians and Carthusians first wrote about—​and, indeed, for themselves.40 In all this, those monks and nuns for whom we have no single name—​members of so-​called older monasteries—​get cast in this narrative as inhabiting decadent and indulgent houses badly in need of being turned inside-​out, and often receive little attention in their own right. Yet from another vantage point they were then themselves just coming into their fullness if we consider their presence and influence in medieval society,41 and not only as represented by Cluny and Abbot Peter the Venerable (r. 1122–​56),42 and the architectural wonder of Cluny III. For two centuries and more they presumed and adapted elements of a Carolingian monastic heritage which included commentaries on the RB, built libraries that might contain teachings from Church fathers (especially Gregory the Great) as well as foundational learning in the arts. A first Benedictine pope reigned very briefly in the tenth century, and seven more would follow during the battles over reform and investiture (if one counts Gregory VII). Benedictines wrote most of the treasured chronicles of this period; are broadly agreed to have generated Gratian (d. 1144/​ 5), the father of canon law; fostered theological giants such as Lanfranc (d. 1089) and Anselm of Bec (d. 1109), and absorbed Peter Abelard; glossed and wrote commentaries on the Bible; and oversaw expanding chant and music in their houses—​and one could go on.43 Peter the Venerable initiated intellectual engagement with Islam and a translation of the Qur’an, as well as hefty critiques of Jews and dissident Christians.44 Abbot Peter, like many of his contemporaries, was also a refined and busy writer of letters, and Giles Constable once remarked to me that in some sense nearly all his work grew out of editing Peter’s letters and pursuing all the historical issues they raised. For all this one could multiply bibliography endlessly. But these figures and houses, so many and so disparate, do not assume the shape of a group in our current narratives, partly for organization reasons at the time (despite Hallinger’s claims), and partly because they were each so wholly enmeshed in

40



41

See, most recently, a local ground-​up study: Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Cambridge, 2017). A first outline of this point is in Van Engen, “ ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered.” 42 Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable (Cambridge, MA, 1967). 43 See the articles by Mews and Clark in this volume. 44 See, for instance, Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’ān in Latin Christendom, 1140–​1560 (Philadelphia, PA, 2009).

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their own houses and worlds. It was to capture the complex dynamics of both spiritual renewal and intellectual life at work in the cloister and the engagement too with politics and culture in the world that R. W. Southern wrote and rewrote his accounts of St. Anselm (also known as Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury).45 What needs to be explained, then, about “twelfth-​century change” is not decadence but a perception of decadence, and not a return to good old monasticism but those ardent spirits animating a new vision of what religious life could or should be.46 Much of this “Reformation,” as Constable has called it, was also cast or grasped as effecting a return to authorizing paradigms drawn from Scripture or the early monastic fathers, or to founding principles, and might be captured in phrases such as “nakedly to follow a naked Christ.”47 An influential dissertation of 1901 (published in 1906)  by Johannes von Walter (1876–​1940) pointed toward the striking phenomenon of Wanderprediger (“wandering preachers”), traveling ascetics and preachers who would eventually found new orders from among their followers.48 In 1935 Herbert Grundmann’s Religiöse Bewegungen (“Religious Movements,” a term modeled on the contemporary Frauenbewegung, or women’s suffragette movement) would emphasize an animating interior spirit, as fully active among women as men. Dominican scholars especially, among whom Marie-​ Dominique Chenu was perhaps best known, focused attention on a deliberate return to the “apostolic life” (vita apostolica)49—though in fact monks and friars each imagined such an ideal apostolic life rather differently. From the 1960s scholars placed front and center a deliberate return to simplicity of life, with voluntary poverty as its defining mark.50 This spirit manifested itself first, in many instances, notably not among monks and nuns but hermits and recluses, especially in Italy, northwest France, and perhaps southwest German





R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990). See the article by Steckel in this volume. 47 A gathering of materials on this phrase, with further references, is in Giles Constable, “Nudus nudum Christum sequi and Parallel Formulas in the Twelfth Century,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Frank F. Forrester (Leiden, 1979),  83–​91. 48 Johannes von Walter, Die ersten Wanderprediger Frankreich. Studien zur Geschichte des Mönchtums (Leipzig, 1906). 49 See Marie-​Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago, IL, 1968). 50 There is a large literature, influentially represented by Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1978). 45

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lands.51 Equally important here, as post-​war scholars first insisted,52 were multiple initiatives to regularize the life of canons across Europe, an effort which rarely worked in established collegiate houses or cathedrals and would sometimes issue instead in new religious orders.53 The movement here from inspired individuals or groups and experimental houses to new and successful religious orders was more fraught and complicated than apologetic vitae or post-​hoc narratives usually suggested. Older scholarly narratives moreover often failed to allow for considerable diversity among all these leaders and groups called “reformed”; they also failed to note intellectual and religious anxieties over affirming diversity in a moment of insisting upon return to some single ancient and authoritative norm such as the Rule of Benedict (d. c. 540) or the Rule of Augustine (d. 430).54 Bernard mirrored this tension in a thoughtful but tortured letter-​tractate on charity and obedience.55 Finally, these new orders, for all their charges against the older houses, likewise mirrored and entered into the society around them, with monks or canons often drawn now as adolescents (rather than oblates) from literate gentry and converted clerics or schoolmen; their lay brothers from the non-​literate peasantry were accounted as religious in some sense, yet were not professed monks.56 We conclude with an area of astonishing richness over the past two generations: the field of monastic thought and culture in the twelfth century, which has opened up to become a vital area of historical endeavor generally, owing in good part to monks like Jean Leclercq, the deeper scholarly initiatives of the Maurists, and more recent efforts by monks at outreach. Some monk-​scholars such as Cuthbert Butler (1858–​1934) wrote for a broader literate public on Benedictine Monachism (1919) and Western Mysticism (more



See the articles by L’Hermite-​Leclercq and by Jasper and Howe in this volume; see also, among many others, John Howe, Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-​Century Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons (Philadelphia, PA, 1997). 52 See especially the pioneering essays by Charles Dereine, including “Vie commune, règle de Saint Augustin et chanoines réguliers au 11e siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 42 (1946): 365–​406 and “La vita apostolica dans l’ordre canonial du IXe au XIe siècle,” Revue Mabillon 51 (1961): 47–​53. 53 See the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. 54 See, for instance, Giles Constable, “The Diversity of Religious Life and Acceptance of Social Pluralism in the Twelfth Century,” in History, Society, and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, ed. Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best, 29–​47 (Cambridge, 1985). 55 Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de praecepto et dispensatione. For an edition, see Bernard de Clairvaux, Le précepte et la dispense, SC 457. 56 Damian Zurro, “We all Work in Common: Medieval Cistercian Lay Brothers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2015), with further bibliography. 51

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specifically on Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard) (1922), while from 1932 the Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique began to offer scholars and religious alike learned articles treating the whole range of monastic figures and themes. Their terminology reflected older usages, whereby “asceticism” took in a whole range of bodily religious practices from the ordinary to the extreme, while “mysticism” included contemplation, meditation, and much more extraordinary experiences, as well as mysticism in a stricter sense more common today.57 Across the twentieth century, the terms “spiritual life” and “spirituality” increasingly gestured toward a broad spectrum of thought and practice which in the human pursuit of the divine opened up new vistas on intentions, conscience, interior emotions, extraordinary and revelatory experiences, and more—​including a realm that could be counted as medieval “devotions,” as in a book of 1925 by Louis Gougaud (1876–​1941), translated within two years into English.58 Undoubtedly the most influential historiographical intervention was that of Jean Leclercq, who conceived of this field as a distinct cultural and religious realm which he called “monastic theology,” a term now used broadly, often as self-​evident in meaning even as it is avoided or critiqued by others.59 It has also spawned imitators, such as the notion of a “vernacular theology” at work in the later Middle Ages. This vision deftly opened up a whole body of Latin prose writing and religious culture. These had mostly been overlooked or ignored as “pious” or “monkly,” when this historical era had otherwise become known for its “classical renaissance” (as Haskins put it), or indeed for its invention of scholastic theology, or its court romances. At the same time, the notion of a “monastic theology,” meant as a challenge, in turn created a binary, and sealed off the world of monastic culture as being its own space and quite distinct.60 Yet, if historians consider the totality of culture and intellect in this period, they must acknowledge that that was hardly the case, any more than the monks’ incomes or institutions or social interactions were sealed off.61 Canons and monks and nuns were soon collecting books coming in from Paris schoolmen, just as these libraries had earlier held classical texts, and just as schoolmen like Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) would subsequently

For an overview of authors and schools of thought, see Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the Twelfth Century (New York, 1994). 58 Louis Gougaud, Dévotions et pratiques ascétiques du Moyen Age (Paris, 1925). 59 See the article by Mews in this volume. 60 See Jean Leclercq, struggling both to defend and to redefine his categories, in “The Renewal of Theology,” in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal,  68–​87. 61 On continued social and economic interactions, see the articles by Devroey and Rosé in volume 1, and the article by Lyon in this volume. 57

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read and cite monks like Bernard and Anselm.62 In fact these new monks participated in an unprecedented wave of writing on all subjects, including transcendent religion and human experience, if also in their own distinct ways and with their own agendas and styles, as Leclercq argued. This interior turn, for instance, was patently distinct from earlier monks, who had focused mostly on hagiography and chronicles, with some sermons. But this new writing was also part of the schools and aristocratic courts, and there were crossovers. We should rightly distinguish tone, style, genre, and setting among the writings of varied groups, but we miss part of the purpose and point if we do not understand all this within a larger, interactive culture of new writing and thought. To move from the count of Montalembert’s Monks of the West to Leclercq’s “monastic theology” or Constable’s Reformation of the Twelfth Century in a single century makes for a surprising and even breathless journey. Monastic institutions and culture have become part of, even integral to, the larger story of Europe’s inventive twelfth century. Indeed, monks and nuns were at the heart of them, and must be part of the general story, not as a separate chapter but as fully participant, and often as leaders in both culture and society. The most difficult challenge, ably met in some of the articles that follow, is to move beyond monastic history written by monks and for monks, or monks as merely pawns in larger cultural and religious ideological disputes, while at the same time benefiting from all the work that monks themselves have done. Further, we have only begun to grasp how the landscape changes when we give women’s monastic foundations their full due both in religion and in society, as is now happening. In addition, it may also now be easier for historians to see medieval monks and nuns as indeed fully part of their world, and harder for us to correlate them and that reality with lives spent maintaining the divine office in choir. Nevertheless, both the men and the women were in these centuries the paradigms in their society for learning and religiosity, as well as for architecture and land management. We must find ways to hold all of this together in our narratives, and for both men and women.

Bibliography Beach, Alison I. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria. Cambridge, 2004. Berman, Constance H. The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​ Century Europe. Philadelphia, PA, 2000.

See the articles by Mancia and Clark in this volume.

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John Van  Enge n Boynton, Susan. Shaping a Monastic Identity:  Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125. Ithaca, NY, 2006. Boynton, Susan, and Isabelle Cochelin, eds. From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny. Turnhout, 2005. Coakley, John W. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York, 2006. Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1996.   “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life.” In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, edited by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, 37–67. Cambridge, 1982.   “The Study of Monastic History Today.” In Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieval History, edited by Vaclav Murdoch and C. S. Crouse, 21–51. Montreal, 1974. Cygler, Florent. Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Karthäuser und Cluniazenser. Munich, 2002. Felten, Franz J. “Der Zisterzienserorden und die Frauen.” In Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6.  bis 13. Jahrhundert, edited by Franz J. Felten, 199–​274. Korb, 2011. Golding, Brian. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300. Oxford, 1995. Griffiths, Fiona J. The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia, PA, 2007. Griffiths, Fiona, and Julie Hotchin, eds. Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500. Turnhout, 2014. Grundmann, Herbert. Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, trans. Steven Rowan, with an introduction by Robert E. Lerner. Notre Dame, IN, 1995. Jamroziak, Emilia. The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090–​1500. London, 2013. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi. New York, 1961. Lutter, Christina. Geschlecht und Wissen, Norm und Praxis, Lesen und Schreiben. Monastische Reformgemeinschaften im 12. Jahrhundert. Vienna, 2005. Southern, R. W. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge, 1990. Vanderputten, Steven. Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100. Ithaca, NY, 2013. Van Engen, John. “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150.” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–​304. Venarde, Bruce. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997.

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Sources for Monasticism in the Long Twelfth Century L aure n   M a n cia The long twelfth century (c. 1050–​1215) has been characterized by medieva­ lists as a period of “renaissance” and “renewal”; a time of the “crisis” of cenobitism and the “new” monasticism; the “discovery” of the individual; and the “Gregorian” reform. These appellations are stories told in the historiography, and are therefore susceptible to trends, schools of thought, and scholarly debate. But how did medieval monks and nuns characterize this period for themselves? What is unquestioned about the long twelfth century is that there is an increase in the type and availability of source material for historians of monasticism. Buildings still stand. Texts endure in multiple copies. Manuscripts survive more readily and in more legible hands. Translations and editions of sources abound. Scholars attribute this abundance of source evidence to the fact that the twelfth century was a documentary moment. Michael Clanchy famously called this period an age when sources transitioned “from memory to written record,” when monasteries increasingly wrote down their business dealings and recorded their histories as testaments for the future.1 This scribal impulse, however, was more than just a transition in technology from the oral to the written. It allowed for monasteries new and old to define themselves as institutions with written legacies. It enabled them to invent—​and to forge—​new documents that asserted the latest political positions, erased previous histories, and constructed specific identities. This invigorated practice of documentation caused monasteries to reach ad fontes, reforming their actions based on precedents; it ensured that monasteries could communicate with each other, codifying institutional practices around networks of abbeys over great geographical distances. For the monasteries of the long twelfth century, written records signified legitimacy, spread culture, and transformed

Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–​1307 (Malden, MA, 1993).

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vocational discourse. For the historians of the twenty-​f irst century, therefore, such records are great clues, revealing not only how monasteries performed business or what monks and nuns believed, but also how they imagined they could own their pasts, live their presents, and ensure their futures. This essay will detail the sources for monasticism in the long twelfth century, highlighting new genres and explaining how certain age-​old sources were reinvented in the period along the way. It will also warn scholars of certain pitfalls encountered when engaging with such sources, and indicate how twelfth-​century monks and nuns might have manipulated their sources to invent and institute their house’s or order’s identity.

Regulating External Relationships: Sources of Agreement, Privilege, and Immunity Several source types recorded transactions and agreements between monasteries and parties in the outside world. Charters (carta) recorded endowments, donations, tithes, tolls, and the economic growth of monasteries that, in their monks’ and nuns’ minds, reflected their spiritual wealth.2 Since many monasteries were undergoing reforms of various kinds in the long twelfth century,3 the period saw particular investment in these types of documents, both as proof to outsiders seeking to encroach on a monastery’s rights, and as codifications for insiders of their monastery’s transforming identity. The monks and nuns of the Cistercian order used pancartes (pancarta), summaries of gifts made to their monastery, rather than individual donation documents.4 An increasing number of cartularies (cartularium)—single codices collecting a monastery’s charters—​also survive from this period, since these proved particularly helpful in the latest disputes with bishops and lay lords, and in the major reform projects that characterized the long twelfth-​century moment.5

Giles Constable, Monastic Tithes from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1964); Robert Génestal, Rôle des monastères comme établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie du XIe à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1901). 3 See the article by Vanderputten in volume 1, and the articles by Lyon, and Jasper and Howe in this volume. 4 Constance B. Bouchard, “Monastic Cartularies: Organizing Eternity,” in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout, 2000), 26. 5 Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Les cartulaires. Actes de la table ronde organisée par l’École nationale des chartres et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 5–​7 décembre 1991) (Paris, 1993); Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 81–​114; Eliana Magnani, “Les moines et la mise en registre des transferts:  formules textuelles, formules visuelles,” in Cluny. Les moines et la société au premier âge féodal, ed. Dominique Iogna-​ Prat et al. (Rennes, 2013), 299–​314; André Vauchez and Cécile Caby, eds. L’histoire des 2

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One of the chief concerns of monasteries in the twelfth century was exemption (libertas) from interference by their local bishop or archbishop in their internal affairs, and immunity (immunitas, inmunitas, or emunitas) from paying homage to their local lord. While earlier medieval exemptions and immunities were granted for other reasons,6 the increasing number of exemptions in the twelfth century tended to be calls for freedom from the influence of the secular Church in the interest of monastic reform.7 Following in the footsteps of Gorze and Cluny, and building on decades of tense power negotiations between monasteries and bishops,8 Hirsau, Bec, Fécamp, and many other monasteries of the period emphasized that their abbot’s sole homage was due to the pope (libertas romana) or to the king (libertas regalis).9 Often treatises, charters, foundation documents, or chronicles asserting such exemptions were ‘found’ in the twelfth century, dated by their monk-​discoverers to the earliest days of their monastery’s foundations, recorded in a new cartulary to assert archival authenticity, and used in particular debates with external forces threatening undue influence.10 It is not only the text of these sources of agreement that delivers evidence about a monastery’s identity. The signatories themselves provide valuable information about monastic networks and prosopographies.11 The seals, inscriptions, images, and insignias associated with these documents can afford an understanding of how medieval people used semiotics to define and communicate their identities.12 Even the very material of the sources offers







moines, chanoines, et religieux au Moyen Âge. Guide de recherche et documents (Turnhout, 2003), 179–​228; see also the article by Bruce in volume 1. 6 Barbara Rosenwein, Negotiating Space:  Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 9–​17. 7 Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (New York, 1970), 9; see also the articles by Rolker and Vanderputten in volume 1. 8 Thomas F. Head and Richard A. Landes, The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Jehangir Malegam, The Sleep of the Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe 1000–​1200 (Ithaca, NY, 2013); see also the article by Tristan Sharp in this volume. 9 Jean-​François Lemarignier, “L’exemption monastique et les origines de la réforme grégorienne,” in A Cluny. Congrès scientifique, Fêtes et cérémoines liturgiques en l’honneur des saintes abbés Odon et Odilon, 9–​11 juillet 1949 (Dijon, 1950), 288–​340; Giles Constable, ed., Three Treatises from Bec on the Nature of Monastic Life (Toronto, 2008), 15–​17; Benjamin Pohl and Steven Vanderputten, “Fécamp, Cluny, and the Invention of Tradition in the Later Eleventh Century,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, 5 (2016), 1–​41. 10 Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 11 George Beech, “Prosopography,” in Medieval Studies:  An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY, 1992), 185–​226. 12 Brigitte Bedos-​Rezak, “Semiotic Anthropology: The Twelfth Century Experiment,” in European Transformations 950–​1200, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN, 2011), 426–​67.

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evidence of the most cherished documents in a monastery’s trove, evincing traces of how a document was used, worn, or displayed in its medieval context.13 Through their texts, images, and materials, charters and cartularies that were once only the purview of diplomatic historians are now fodder for historians of all kinds.

Regulating Internal Behaviors: Rules, Customaries, and Statutes Rules (regulae) and, later, customaries (consuetudines) were essential sources for the regulation of cenobitic monastic practice from its early days.14 But it was in the long twelfth century that these sources became normative tools, produced by monastic leaders hoping to impose behaviors on their own houses and throughout their larger networks. With the invention of new orders of monks and nuns, customaries especially became essential records preserving local custom, prescribing ideal practice, and codifying legislation for internal use and for export to new, fledgling, and floundering foundations. In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries particularly, many “corrupt” monasteries were refounded by new abbots who imported regulations from elsewhere to serve as the basis for their reforms and to centralize or add rigor to their orders.15 The task for the scholar using the twelfth-​century versions of these rules or customaries, then, is to assess for each individual case when and why they were recorded, how they differed from those that came before, and whether they were written to document existing practices, to be implemented internally, or to be exported to another house. As Isabelle Cochelin has shown, early customaries were often prescriptions for monasteries that wanted to emulate another institution, but customaries in the long twelfth century began to be regulations for internal use, attempting to impose uniformity. In the case of Cluny, for instance, it was only after almost two hundred years, in the fourth recorded set of customs, from 1085, that Cluniacs were writing customs for their own use, as opposed to that of another monastery.16 The “normativity” of such customs from the early twelfth century on must therefore be approached

Carol Symes, “The ‘Desire of Deeds’:  On Cherishing Medieval Charters,” English Language Notes 53 (2015): 149–​59. 14 See the articles by Diem and Rousseau and by Bruce in volume 1. 15 See the article by Vanderputten in volume 1. 16 Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources,” in Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for the Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines (Turnhout, 2014), 27–​55; and the article by Cochelin in volume 1. 13

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with caution: if the customs were prescriptions, were they practiced, or were they merely ideals? To what extent did they represent reality? How did they assert a unique identity for the monastery, different from earlier iterations? Scholars should always question the purpose, use, and effectiveness of such sources to a monastery at a particular time and place. Many normative sources were invented afresh in our period with the birth of the “new monasticism.” With the eremitic movement of the late eleventh century, exemplary individuals built hermitages, founded monasteries, and created eremitically inflected cenobitic lifestyles that they outlined in rules and customaries.17 The Camaldolese order, the Carthusian order, Peter Damian’s (d. 1072/​3) community at Fonte Avellana, and others all had new customs and rules of observance.18 As always, when rules, statutes, and customaries did not yet exist for new foundations, their orders relied on the exempla of their founders’ lives, set down in vitae, letters, and other writings until normative sources were composed. In the case of the Carthusians, for instance, Bruno of Cologne’s (d. 1101) early letters were used until customs were written by Guigo I (d. 1136) between 1121 and 1127.19 With the founding of the Cistercian order in 1098, documents like the Exordium parvum and Carta caritatis were soon conceived to regulate the lives of this new type of monk.20 The Cistercians also eventually created a supplement to the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) for their lay brothers, new positions in the monastic landscape that were not discussed by earlier regulators like Benedict (d. c. 540) or Basil (d. 379).21 In addition to the customaries, legislation became part of codifying behavior for these twelfth-​ century monks and nuns.22 Inspired in part by the Cistercians’ centralization, for instance, the Cluniacs founded their own general chapter meetings in the twelfth century, creating statutes for their houses across Europe.23







See the article by Jasper and Howe in this volume. Krijn Pansters, “Normation in Formation:  The Regulation of Religious Life and the Shape of Stability,” in Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016),  15–​17. 19 See Early Carthusian Writings: St. Bruno. Bl. Guigo. Guigo II (Leominster, 2009). 20 Jean de la Croix Bouton and Jean Baptiste van Damme, eds., Les plus anciens textes de Cîteaux. Sources, textes, et notes historiques (Achel, 1974); Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Myth of Cistercian Origins:  C.H. Berman and the Manuscript Sources,” Cîteaux 51 (2000): 299–​386. 21 Kassius Hallinger, “Woher kommen die Laienbrüder?” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 1–​104; Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Cistercian Lay Brothers: Twelfth-​ Century Usages With Related Texts (Brecht, 2000); see also the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume. 22 For instance, Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Twelfth-​Century Statutes from the Cistercian General Chapter (Brecht, 2002); see also the article by Melville in this volume. 23 Pansters, “Normation in Formation,” 36. 17

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When normative sources appear in the twelfth century for monasteries with age-​old foundations, they reveal implemented “reform” efforts. In this period, many influential reformer-​abbots, such as William of Hirsau (d. 1091), were spreading their ideals. New variations on old monastic rules and customaries, and fresh commentaries on the RB, were thus composed in this reforming spirit.24 The Roman Synods of 1059 and 1063, for example, proposed a reform of the life of canons, reviving the rigor of the observance of the Rule of Aachen, and creating a new alternative, the Rule of St. Augustine (RA, 1067), later adopted by the Grandmontines, Premonstratensians, Dominicans, and Augustinians.25 The Norman Conquest brought a wave of abbots into England who wanted to reconfigure Anglo-​Saxon monastic customs and practices, as illustrated by Lanfranc’s (d. 1089) Statuta.26 And yet, an investigating scholar must always take these claims of “reform” with a grain of salt.27 Were reforms such as these truly preceded by a period of decadence or decay, and were they as uniform and effective as their sources often assert? One cannot merely take the normative sources at their word on these matters, but must cross-​read them with other narrative sources as well.

Forging Narratives through Histories, Hagiographies, and Letters Like customaries, the histories (historia, narratio, annales, chronica, series temporum, gesta) written in monasteries sometimes circulated around a region of monasteries (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, for instance). But, more often than not, such histories survived in only one copy, serving the purpose of constructing a monastery’s identity for its own community. The twelfth-​century monk and nun have been celebrated for their heightened consciousness of the utility of documented history.28 The annals of an abbey or the deeds of an important figure were certainly useful in



For example, “Abelard’s Rule for Religious Women,” ed. T. P. McLaughlin, Medieval Studies 18 (1956): 241–​92; the Institutes of the Gilbertine Order, in Monasticon anglicanum, ed. William Dugdale, vol. 6, part II (London, 1846); Rupert of Deutz, Super quaedam capitula regulae divi Benedicti abbatis, PL 170, 477–​538; Bernard Ayglerius of Montecassino, In regulam s.  Benedicti expositio, ed. Anselm Maria Caplet (Montecassino, 1894); and Hildegard of Bingen, De regula sancti Benedicti, ed. Hugh Feiss, CCCM 226, 67–​79. 25 See the articles by Melville and Andenna in this volume; Pansters, “Normation in Formation,” 17. 26 Lanfranc of Canterbury, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed. and trans. David Knowles, rev. ed. Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 2002). 27 See the article by Vanderputten in volume 1. 28 Marie-​Dominique Chenu, “Theology and the New Awareness of History,” in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. Jerome Taylor (Toronto, 1997), 162–​201. 24

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recordkeeping, in adjudicating disputes, and in staving off menacing lords.29 But narrative histories were ripe with more. Twelfth-​century historians often wrote allegorically, casting their subjects as biblical figures to give their particular actions wider moral meaning.30 To historians like Orderic Vitalis (d. 1142) or William of Jumièges (d. after 1070), history was “the record of God’s actions,” and needed to be committed to writing for posterity, but also for exegetical study. Histories therefore regularly recorded fantastical events, inexplicable miracles, or prophecies for examination and comment by readers, or relied on biblical allusions to expose the “higher truths” of the particular past they were writing.31 Yet one does not only need a historia, with its chains of dates and events, to reveal a house’s story. An abbot’s vita could also serve to invent legend or invoke historical precedent for a monastery’s present actions or its brethren’s behaviors. Hagiography, as biography, was a kind of history,32 and no historical narratives were more regularly present in the daily life of a monastic community than the vitae of the saints important to it. But, as with cartularies, the occasion on which a particular vita was recorded (for the building of a new shrine or sanctuary, upon the acquisition of a new relic, or to legitimize the founder of a new order, for example) can be revealing. For instance, vitae and corresponding miracle stories (miracula) multiplied in England in our period, collected both in defense of Anglo-​Saxon saints against their Norman invaders, and in effort to legitimize the new Norman overlords.33 Several tools are available for uncovering the saints important to a particular monastery. The first place to look is the calendar of the house, usually placed at the front of its sacramentaries (Liber sacramentorum, sacramentarium, missale). The second place to look is the martyrology (martyrologium), which lists the saints celebrated in the first part of the daily office, in chapter after Prime.34 Vitae were interspersed throughout the formal liturgy, and often therefore written directly into the office (in homiliaries—​homiliarium); but they also

Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past. Elisabeth Mégier, “Jesus Christ, a Protagonist of Anglo-​Norman History? History and Theology in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia ecclesiastica,” in Orderic Vitalis:  Life, Works, and Interpretations, ed. Charles C. Rozier et al. (Woodbridge, 2016), 260–​83. 31 Leah Shopkow, History and Community:  Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC, 1997), 124 and 202. 32 Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre:  ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–​113. 33 Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate:  Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), 92–​111. 34 Jacques Dubois, Le martyrologe du Moyen Age latin (Turnhout, 1978); Jacques Dubois, Martyrologes d’Usuard au martyrologe romain (Abbeville, 1990).

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appeared outside the liturgy (in the refectory readings, for example), so surviving lectiones lists for a monastery’s extra-​liturgical practices can be helpful.35 The texts of the vitae read in each particular monastery are often contained in legendaries (legendarium) or passionals (passionarium, passionales);36 and the particular version of the vita contained therein can be identified with the help of the Bibliotheca hagiographica latina manuscripta, as each version is numbered with a specific BHL number.37 Identifying the version of a saint’s Life can be tremendously important in understanding why particular characteristics of the saint were venerated more than others in a monastery at a given historical moment. The first version of Robert of Arbrissel’s (d. 1116) vita, for example, was composed by Baudril of Dol (d. 1130), and showcases Robert’s charisma while recording the achievements of his career; the second, written by Andreas of Fontevraud (d. 1120–​2), highlights Robert’s role as a founder and guide of Fontevraud Abbey, and features Abbess Petronilla as a prominent secondary character.38 The selection of one or other vita in a monastery’s collection can show how a particular saint fit into the abbey’s changing self-​ conception, or, as in the case of Fontevraud, into its own specific history. These histories and vitae can be read alongside another monastic source that was newly robust in the twelfth century:  letters (epistolae) and letter collections. Because letters were often written as tractates meant for public reading and discussion, they were less private and more performative than letters today might be.39 Letter collections were often purposefully collected and constructed by monastic houses in the long twelfth century to preserve the words of a particular founder.40 Thanks in part to the newly strengthened monastic networks, new orders like the Cistercians, and easier communication and travel in twelfth-​century medieval society, letters could move between houses, and letter collections grew to include both copies of letters sent and letters received. On the whole, however, letter collections were less complimentary of important monastic figures than histories or hagiographies; as

Denis-​Bernard Grémont, “Lectiones ad prandium à l’abbaye de Fécamp au XIIIe siècle,” Cahiers Léopold Deslisle 20 (1971): 3–​41. Guy Philippart, Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques (Turnhout, 1977). 37 The Bollandists’ website includes a list of all versions of a saint’s Life: http://​bhlms.fltr. ucl.ac.be/​(date of last access: 30 August 2018). 38 Jacques Dalarun et  al., eds. and trans. (French and English), Les deux vies de Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud. Légendes, écrits et témoignages (Turnhout, 2006). See also the articles by Jasper and Howe and by Griffiths in this volume. 39 John Van Engen, “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried (Munich, 1997), 97–​132. 40 Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-​Collections (Turnhout, 1976), 42–​8; Samu Niskanen, The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury (Turnhout, 2011). 35

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sources often composed in the heat of the moment, some letters are even indictments or unflattering chastisements of venerated figures, such as those of Abelard (d. 1142) in the collection of letters between himself and the abbess Heloise (d. 1164).41 Since letter collections often included more mundane correspondence, they trace friendships between monks and nuns;42 preserve meditations on salvation and monastic life; record both major and minor frustrations and grievances; and demonstrate the agency of female voices in medieval society,43 all of which can both round out and offset the more flattering narratives of a monastery’s vitae, chronicles, or cartularies.

Sources for Learning and Devotion Teaching, learning, and praying were inseparable actions in monasteries. The twelfth century is an important moment of transition between traditional monastic learning guided by lectio divina and the emerging practice of scholasticism increasingly taught at schools and universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.44 The standard assumption, based in part on the diatribes of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and of William of Saint-​Thierry (d. 1148)  against Abelard, would be that monastic sources reflected none of the wider trends evident in proto-​scholastic sources of the period. Even Bernard’s own order, however, did not shy away from such learning,45 and he and many other important monks from the period (Peter Damian, Bruno the Carthusian, and Norbert of Xanten, to name a few) received educations at schools. The libraries of monasteries, therefore, reveal much about the training, exposure, and popularity of certain intellectual trends within particular communities. Not only are the titles owned by a house telling, but so are the surviving manuscripts from that house, complete with marginal notes, rubrics, and images, which offer essential evidence of a text’s interpretation in a particular community. The conventional understanding of how monks and nuns read and thought about texts was set to parchment in our period:  the Carthusian Guigo II’s

David Luscombe, ed., The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (New York, 2013). 42 Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community:  The Monastic Experience, 350–​1250 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 234. 43 Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-​Century Nuns’ Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 (2002): 34–​54. 44 See the article by Clark in this volume; Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York, 1982). 45 Brian Noell, “Scholarship and Activism at Cîteaux in the Age of Innocent III,” Viator 38 (2007): 21–​53. 41

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(d. 1193) Ladder of Monks details the ascendant process of medieval monastic reading from lectio to meditatio to oratio to contemplatio. Guigo’s method was evidently widespread in the twelfth century, as both monastic treatises on proper contemplation46 and reading aids found in contemporary monastic manuscripts corroborate.47 The revival of biblical exegesis in the cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries also found its way into the monastery, especially to houses such as Bec (home to Lanfranc and Anselm), Saint-​Laurent in Liège (home to Rupert of Deutz), and San Giovanni in Fiore (home to Joachim of Fiore).48 Above all, the premier twelfth-​century bastion of cutting-​edge biblical commentators was the Abbey of Saint-​Victor in Paris, where William of Champeaux and Hugh, Andrew, and Richard of Saint-​ Victor produced innovative exegesis, moral theology, liturgical poetry, and contemplative theory, thanks in part to exposure to Jewish sources and to Dionysian theology.49 Though monastic learning and prayer were indeed grounded in biblical reading, monks and nuns read a surprising variety of texts over the course of their formation:  classical texts,50 legal works,51 grammatical and rhetorical treatises,52 medical texts,53 anti-​Jewish and Muslim polemics,54 prayer





For instance, Aelred of Rievaulx, Treatises: The Pastoral Prayer, trans. Theodore Berkeley, Mary Paul Macpherson, and R. Penelope Lawson (Kalamazoo, MI, 1971). 47 Lauren Mancia, “Praying with an Eleventh-​Century Manuscript: A Case Study of the Engimatic Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593,” in Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, ed. T. Barton et al. (Turnhout, 2017), 161–​85. 48 See the article by Kienzle and Baker in this volume; Frans van Liere, “Biblical Exegesis through the Twelfth Century,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly (New York, 2011), 157–​78. 49 Montse Leyra Curia, In Hebreo:  The Victorine Commentaries on the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets in the Light of Its Northern-​French Jewish Sources (Turnhout, 2018); Frans van Liere, “Christ or Antichrist? The Jewish Messiah in Twelfth-​Century Christian Eschatology,” in From Knowledge to Beatitude:  St. Victor, Twelfth-​Century Scholars, and Beyond. Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr., ed. E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (Notre Dame, IN, 2013), 342–​57; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd. ed. (Notre Dame, IN, 1982), 83–​195. 50 Erik Kwakkel, ed., Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800–​1200 (Leiden, 2015); see also the article by Contreni in volume 1. 51 Anders Winroth, “The Legal Revolution of the Twelfth Century,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN, 2012), 338–​62; see also the article by Rolker in volume 1. 52 Vivien Law, “La grammaire latine durant le haut Moyen Âge,” in Histoire des idées linguistiques, ed. Sylvain Auroux, vol. 2 (Liège, 1992), 83–​95. 53 See the article by Brenner in this volume; Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–​1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford, 1993). 54 Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–​1150), trans. G. R. Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002). 46

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collections,55 florilegia,56 and treatises on monastic life57 accompanied the expected patristic volumes and liturgical books. The collecting patterns of a monastic library can reveal much about the intellectual training at certain monastic communities.58 Attention to the surviving library lists and manuscript collections from particular monasteries can therefore be essential information for scholars interested in a monk’s or nun’s particular intellectual formation or inheritance.59

Sources beyond Text: Art, Space, and Music Non-​textual monastic productions—​art, space, music—​were some of the most important vehicles for monastic learning and expression. It was not just through reading that nuns and monks encapsulated their identities and explored their belief systems. Over the course of their day, they spent hours reading from illuminated manuscripts, moving around church spaces, and singing God’s praises. By the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, most medieval Christian image uses had been established; age-​old productions—​such as reliquaries, wall-​ paintings, manuscript illuminations, and Romanesque buildings, persisted—​ and new forms, including extensive architectural sculpture and Gothic structures, were born.60 While some Christian images were meant to attract pilgrims or educate the laity on the most basic levels, the images for monks and nuns in this period were some of the most sumptuous, complicated, and theologically informed productions, since they were made for the most





Jean-​François Cottier, Anima mea. Prières privées et textes de dévotion du Moyen Âge latin. Autour des Prières ou Méditations attribuées à saint Anselme de Cantorbéry (XIe–​XIIe siècle) (Turnhout, 2001). 56 Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “The Florilegium Anglicum,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), 66–​114. 57 Carolyn Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-​Century Spirituality (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Constable, Three Treatises from Bec. 58 Giles E. M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (Burlington, VT, 2004); Teresa Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1075–​c.1125 (Oxford, 1992); Constant Mews, “Monastic Educational Culture Revisited:  The Witness of Zweifalten and the Hirsau Reform,” in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (London, 2000), 182–​97. 59 Albert Derolez, Les catalogues des bibliothèques (Turnhout, 1979); Monique-​ Cécile Garand, “Manuscrits monastiques et scriptoria au XIe et XIIe siècles,” in Codicologica 3. Essais Typologiques, ed. Albert Gruys and Johan Peter Gumbert (Leiden, 1980), 9–​33; André Vauchez and Cécile Caby, “Scriptoria and bibliothèques,” in Vauchez and Caby, L’histoire des moines, 291–​335. 60 Sara Lipton, “Images and Their Uses,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity in Western Europe 1100–​1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (New York, 2009), 258–​9. 55

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sophisticated and educated people in Christendom. The Cloisters Cross, perhaps from Bury St. Edmunds Abbey in England, and the Floreffe Bible, made for the Premonstratensian abbey of Floreffe in Belgium, are two mid-​twelfth-​ century examples with such complex programs of inscription and theological references that they would have been illegible to any other audience.61 Monastic polemic against the Church in need of reform62 and the violent secular world63 was also present in art of the period. The Cistercian order, whose most celebrated member, Bernard of Clairvaux, wrote a treatise against the opulence of Christian art, sought a new kind of architecture that reflected and communicated the Cistercians’ simpler, reformed livelihood.64 In the visual arena, the twelfth century was a moment ripe for monastic invention and integration. Space was also an essential expression of monastic values and experience.65 Monks and nuns saw the spaces of their monasteries as their principles incarnate: they fed souls in the refectory, bred compassion in the infirmary, cultivated devotion in the store room, and facilitated confession in the chapter house.66 By using both archeological and architectural studies of how the space of a monastery regulated access to different visitors (lay folk, conversi, monastic officers, those of the opposite gender, etc.), a scholar can better understand how the social hierarchy of the monastery might have been physically encoded in its walls and doors.67 Moreover, by reflecting on the features of a monastery’s grounds, one can also access the theological and ideological



Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross:  Its Art and Meaning (New York, 1994); Anne-Marie Bouché, “The Floreffe Bible Frontispiece, London BL add. Ms. 17738, fol. 3v–​4r, and Twelfth-​Century Contemplative Theory” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1997); Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Problems, Positions, Possibilities,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-​Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 11–​31. 62 Diane J. Reilly, The Art of Reform in Eleventh-​Century Flanders: Gerard of Cambrai, Richard of Saint-​Vanne, and the Saint-​Vaast Bible (Boston, MA, 2006). 63 Conrad Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 64 Peter Fergusson, Architecture of Solitude:  Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-​Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1984). 65 Michel Lauwers, ed., Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval (Turnhout, 2014), and the article by Lauwers in volume 1; Megan Cassidy-​Welch “Space and Place in Medieval Contexts,” Parergon 27 (2010):1–​12. 66 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary:  Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), 44. 67 Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, “Ne aliquis extraneus claustrum intret: Entry and Access at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-​Jean-​des-​Vignes, Soissons,” in Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude:  Essays on Cistercians, Art, and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. Terryl N. Kinder (Turnhout, 2004), 173–​86. 61

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underpinnings of such space. For instance, Peter Fergusson’s study of the Canterbury Cathedral Priory’s bath house and fish pond has shown that these features served not just as water sources but as “living waters” that created an ethereal community in the monastic precinct.68 More often than not, scholars neglect to examine the essential information that the liturgy provides about a monastery’s character. Though there are in every monastic liturgy elements that are common to other institutions in the same region or of the same order, the ceremonies practiced at a particular monastery are essential tools in uncovering the core of its identity.69 As Susan Boynton has said, “inscribed in the daily performance of the liturgy lies a perspective on monastic identity that is inaccessible to purely historical, political, and archeological narratives.”70 Even to the scholar with no musical training and no access to the melodies of a monastery’s liturgy, an examination of the texts of an abbey’s liturgical books is possible: the particular feasts important to a house are as revealing as its most prominent saints; and the selection and ordering of certain chants and readings, or the routes for certain liturgical processions, have much to teach about a monastery’s influences, networks, rivals, patrons, history, and distinction. Liturgy was a tool for broadcasting monastic identity both to a public (in the mass) and to its own community (in both the mass and the office).71 The most unique character of a monastery is often found in the divine office: in antiphons, responsories, readings for Matins, hymns, or lessons for particular feasts.72 In the mass, the communion offertory, chant introits, tropes, and sequences are often the most expressive of idiosyncratic (or, at least, regional) identity. As discussed earlier, much can also be made of special liturgies for particularly important saints or for the dedication of a church building.73 The music composed by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) for her nuns at Eibingen, for instance, tended to highlight the deeds of virgin female saints, most appropriate to an audience of women. By scouring the liturgical books of the mass (antiphonals, graduals, gospel books, evangeliaries, lectionaries, missals) or the office (psalters, antiphonals, hymnals, homiliaries, lectionaries, chapter

Peter Fergusson, “Canterbury Cathedral Priory’s Bath House and Fish Pond,” Anglo-​ Norman Studies 37 (2014): 115–​30. 69 See the article by Susan Boynton in this volume. 70 Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 3. 71 James Grier, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-​ Century Aquitaine (New York, 2006). 72 See the article by Jesse Billett in volume 1. 73 Louis Hamilton, A Sacred City: Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-​ Century Italy (Manchester, 2010). 68

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books, breviaries),74 one can piece together a whole new dimension of a monastery’s identity, and uncover the liturgical foundation from which most of the writings, visions, and actions of these monks and nuns stemmed.75 The long twelfth century was a turning point for liturgical sources, in part because of technical innovations:  in this period, heightened neumes (which showed the relative pitch between neumes) and alphabetical notation were often used, allowing for medieval melodies to be recovered (the majority of pre-​twelfth-​century melodies, like those of the Old Spanish rite, for instance, are illegible to modern scholars). Tonaries and theoretical treatises on music also help us to understand monastic musical practice from this period more clearly; Guido of Arezzo (d. c. 1050), Odorannus of Sens, Johannes Affligemensis, and Berno and Hermann of Reichenau are the most well known.76 Moreover, the transformations of the twelfth century (monastic reform, increasing importance of pilgrimage, the birth of new orders) brought changes in the liturgy.77 Earlier liturgical works were often discarded, replaced with a twelfth-​century repertory of newly styled offices, tropes, and sequences.78 Many twelfth-​century compositions, like the Marian antiphon Alma redemptoris Mater, eventually became so popular that they were integrated into the standard medieval liturgy (Alma was later featured at Compline).79 The sheer body of repertoire that survives from this period is remarkable, especially compared with that which survives from the earlier Middle Ages. From the polyphonic repertoire collected by Bernard Ithier of Saint-​Martial, to the Codex Calixtinus, to the Fleury playbook, historians



Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books: From the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, PA, 1998). Amy Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (New York, 2012), 59–​79. 76 Thomas McCarthy, Music, Scholasticism and Reform: Salian Germany 1024–​1125 (Manchester, 2009). 77 Paul Tirot, “Un Ordo Missae monastique:  Cluny, Cîteaux, La Chartreuse,” Biblioteca Ephemerides Liturgica Subsidia 21 (1981): 44–​120 and 220–​51; Jacques Hourlier and Benoît du Moustier, “Le calendrier cartusien,” Études grégoriennes 2 (1957):  151–​61; Raymond Etaix, “L’homiliaire cartusien,” Sacris erudiri 13 (1962):  67–​112; Susan Boynton, “The Customaries of Bernard and Ulrich as Liturgical Sources,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Cluniac Customs, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 109–​29; André Wilmart, “Cluny (Manuscrits liturgiques de),” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie 4.2 (Paris, 1914), 2074–​92; Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Early Cistercian Experience of Liturgy,” in Rule and Life: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed. M. Basil Pennington (Spencer, MA, 1971), 77–​116. 78 Margot Fassler, Music in the Medieval West: An Anthology (New York, 2014), 112–​13; Margot Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-​Century Paris (New York, 1993). 79 Fassler, Music in the Medieval West, 94. 74

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interested in the music, text, and performance practices of the monastic liturgy have extensive evidence at their fingertips.

A “Womanly Age” From 1081 to the end of the twelfth century, Europe experienced a striking increase in the number of female monasteries. While this increase coincided with the multiplicity of monastic orders born in the twelfth century, 60 percent of these houses were autonomous, with no official tie to a male monastery.80 Despite the fact that the majority of these women were self-​governing, however, most of their experiences are communicated to posterity in sources written by men. The source evidence for these nuns therefore needs to be combed with an exacting and critical eye, careful not to dismiss the agency that these women wielded in their own spiritual and temporal lives. After all, while Hildegard of Bingen, writing for a public (and therefore male) audience, called the twelfth century a “womanly age” apologetically, characterizing its depravity and inadequacy as feminine,81 Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. 1195), writing for a private audience of women (free from the male gaze), included no such apology in her sophisticated, intellectual, and hopeful view of the world in her Hortus deliciarum.82 Few source types are unique to women’s houses; like monks, religious women wrote letters, read vitae, sung the liturgy, produced books,83 and lived in cloistered spaces. The outstanding exception is advice literature that was written by men for monastic women. Even advice literature, however, needs to be interrogated, owing to its male authorship: to what extent was Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin (d. 1107), for instance, interested in advising exclusively female readers on how to live the life of an anchoress, and to what extent was he writing an extended spiritual metaphor for male readers?84 The Speculum virginum, another advice manual for nuns, was collected in more twelfth-​century male Cistercian libraries and those of the regular canons than in female houses, indicating that such handbooks were likely made for male readers just as much as

Bruce Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 14. 81 Hildegard of Bingen in a letter to Hillinus, archbishop of Trier; see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 239. 82 Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 2006). 83 Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004). 84 Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, trans. Monika Otter (Woodbridge, 2004), 14.

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they were for female ones.85 These are the kinds of questions required of male-​ authored sources on female monastics. For instance, in subjugating a male congregation to a female abbess at Fontevraud, was Robert of Arbrissel, as his vitae suggest, a champion of women? His letters and donation charters indicate instead that he was elevating aristocratic nuns so that they would continue to fund his foundation and protect him from accusations of heresy.86 Was the cura monialium a burden to religious men required to tend to helpless female religious? Or did men, as the letters of Abelard and Heloise suggest, actually see the care of daughters of Eve as essential to their own spiritual salvation?87 When dealing with sources for female monasticism, one must be careful to consider how nuns saw themselves (as women? as monastics? as aristocrats?) against how they were seen (and used) by male religious.

Conclusion From charters and cartularies to customaries, from histories to hagiographies, from manuscripts to monastic spaces, and from library lists to liturgical texts, twelfth-​ century monks and nuns expressed their concerns, constructed their identities, and codified their institutions for their contemporaries and for their descendants. The variety of sources that survive from this period allow scholars to expose the contradictions and corroborations, tropes and intertexts that reveal as much about the lived experience of monks and nuns as the source texts themselves. By reading these sources against each other, scholars can indeed sculpt several stories of “what happened” in the medieval monastery in the twelfth century; and they can also see that twelfth-​century monks and nuns did exactly the same thing, composing stories subject to debate, but useful in inventing monastic identities and institutions.

Bibliography Bedos-​Rezak, Brigitte. “Semiotic Anthropology:  The Twelfth Century Experiment.” In European Transformations 950–​1200, edited by Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen, 426–​67. Notre Dame, IN, 2011.

Barbara Newman, “Latin and the Vernaculars,” in Hollywood and Beckman, Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, 382. 86 Annalena Müller, “Women, Heresy, and Aristocracy: The Ties that Bound Robert of Arbrissel,” in Barton et al., Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World, 127–​44. 87 See the article by Griffiths in this volume; Fiona Griffiths, “‘Men’s duty to provide for women’s needs’: Abelard, Heloise, and Their Negotiation of the Cura monialium,” JMH 30 (2004): 1–​24. 85

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Sources for Monasticism in the Long Twelfth Century Beech, George. “Prosopography.” In Medieval Studies: An Introduction, edited by James M. Powell, 185–​226. Syracuse, NY, 1992. Bouchard, Constance B. “Monastic Cartularies:  Organizing Eternity.” In Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, edited by Karl Heidecker, 22–​32. Turnhout, 2000. Clanchy, Michael T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–​1307. Malden, MA, 1993. Cochelin, Isabelle. “Customaries as Inspirational Sources.” In Consuetudines et Regulae: Sources for the Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, edited by Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines, 27–​55. Turnhout, 2014. Constable, Giles. Letters and Letter-​Collections. Turnhout, 1976.   Medieval Monasticism: A Select Bibliography. Toronto, 1976. Dubois, Jacques. Le martyrologe du Moyen Age latin. Turnhout, 1978. Garand, Monique-​Cécile. “Manuscrits monastiques et scriptoria au XIe et XIIe siècles.” In Codicologica 3. Essais Typologiques, edited by Albert Gruys and Johan Peter Gumbert, 9–​33. Leiden, 1980. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2014. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. New York, 1982. Lemarignier, Jean-​ François. “L’exemption monastique et les origines de la réforme grégorienne.” In A Cluny. Congrès scientifique, Fêtes et cérémoines liturgiques en l’honneur des saintes abbés Odon et Odilon, 9–​11 juillet 1949, 288–​340. Dijon, 1950. Lifshitz, Felice. “Beyond Positivism and Genre:  ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative.” Viator 25 (1994): 95–​113. Mantello, F. A. C., and A. G. Rigg, eds. Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Washington, DC, 1996. Palazzo, Eric. A History of Liturgical Books:  From the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Madeleine Beaumont. Collegeville, PA, 1998. Pansters, Krijn. “Normation in Formation:  The Regulation of Religious Life and the Shape of Stability.” In Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, edited by Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer, 13–​47. Turnhout, 2016. Philippart, Guy. Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques. Turnhout, 1977. Remensnyder, Amy G. Remembering Kings Past:  Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France. Ithaca, NY, 1995. Vauchez, André, and Cécile Caby, eds. L’histoire des moines, chanoines, et religieux au Moyen Âge. Guide de recherche et documents. Turnhout, 2003. Venarde, Bruce. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997. Winroth, Anders. “The Legal Revolution of the Twelfth Century.” In European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F.  X. Noble and John Van Engen, 338–​62. Notre Dame, IN, 2012.

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Hermitism in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries Kathry n Ja spe r a n d Joh n   Howe

Medieval Western Christians could recognize hermits. A  reader admiring the image of the heavenly ladder in the encyclopedic Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (d. 1195)  could easily identify the bearded, barefoot, bare-​shinned, rough-​clad figure reaching for the “crown of life” ahead of the recluse, the monk, and the clerk, but who, alas, is losing his footing as he glances back at his garden.1 His high place is no accident. Peter Damian (d. 1072/​3) describes the eremitical life as the “golden road … the high road, preeminent among others leading to higher things.”2 Yet scholars today do not find hermit-​spotting similarly easy, and they debate what solitude is, how hermits relate to monastic rules, and where to classify temporary hermits and members of semi-​eremitical religious orders. In the present study, hermits are defined as people who, for the sake of prayer, live an isolated existence in “wilderness” outside the outer court of a monastery or the bounds of a churchyard. Because human beings are social animals, no hermit could live in complete solitude in an untouched wilderness—​at least no hermit whom historians could ever glimpse. Physical solitude is a relative ideal, one also cherished by recluses treated in the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in this volume. It is also debated whether the wave of hermitism that swept through Latin Europe at the start of the high Middle Ages should be considered an innovation or an ancient tradition. Holy hermits abounded in the post-​Roman West, but as cenobitic life became the monastic ideal hermits became rarer, at least in the surviving historical sources. In Italy, few are mentioned in the

Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Biscoff, and Michael Curschmann, eds., Herrad of Hohenbourg: Hortus deliciarum, 2 vols. (London, 1979), 1:201 and 2:352. 2 Peter Damian, Epist. 50, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 4  vols., MGH Briefe d.  dt. Kaiserzeit 4/​1–​4, 2:7–​131, esp. 80; English translation in Owen J. Blum, trans., The Letters of Peter Damian, 7 vols. (the last two with Irven M. Resnick) (Washington, DC, 1989–​ 2005), 2:289–​334, esp. 290–​1. 1

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centuries between the hermit-​f illed Dialogues of Pope Gregory I (r. 590–​604) and the similarly hermit-​f illed Dialogues of Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino (d. 1087).3 The hermits who had dotted the French landscape in the sixth and seventh centuries do not reappear in force until the eleventh; Jean Sainsaulieu, inventorying hermits in France, found disproportionately few references in the tenth century.4 Although Englishmen continued to honor the Irish and Saxon hermits of Bede’s (d. 735) day, they mention few contemporary ones until the late eleventh century.5 The eremitical revival of the high Middle Ages was connected to earlier hermits through the hagiographical memorials of Desert Fathers and late antique hermits. Another link was the acclamation in Benedict’s Rule (RB) of “anchorites … no longer fresh in the fervor of monastic life but long tested in a monastery who have learned, now schooled with the help of many, to fight against the Devil. … well trained … for single combat in the desert” (RB 1:3–​5). A series of articles by Jean Leclercq in the 1950s and 1960s documents the continuous existence of “Benedictine hermitism” throughout the early Middle Ages.6 Yet these hermit monks had an initial monastic formation, unlike many lay hermits of late antiquity and of the long twelfth century, and were often only temporarily “in the desert.” The “new hermitism” of the high Middle Ages was more visible, more focused on poverty, more interested in the care of souls and outreach to society; it was often implicitly or even explicitly critical of monastic life.7 It redefined the frontier between monasticism and hermitism. Many hermits lived in individual cells but were part of a community, sometimes with a rule. This “new hermitism” first emerges in late tenth-​century Italy, where Romuald (d. 1027)  is described as “the father of the reasonable hermits who lived





John Howe, Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-​Century Central Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons (Philadelphia, PA, 1997), 21–​3. Jean Sainsaulieu, “Ermites,” Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, vol. 15 (Paris, 1963): 771–​87, esp. 773–​4. 5 Mary Clayton, “Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New  York, 1996), 157; Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–​1050 (Oxford, 2011), 23–​7. 6 On traditional hermitism, see Giles Constable, “Eremitical Forms of Monastic Life,” in Istituti monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–​1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 28 agosto–​3 settembre 1977 (Milan, 1980), 239–​64; Jean-​ Marie Sansterre, “Recherches sur les ermites du Mont-​Cassin et l’érémitisme dans l’hagiographie cassinienne,” Hagiographica 2 (1995):  75–​92; John Howe, “St. Benedict as a Model for Italian Benedictine Life:  Some Hagiographical Witnesses,” American Benedictine Review 55 (2004): 42–​54. 7 “New hermitism” is a phrase from Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe (New York, 1984), 18–​42. 3

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according to a rule.”8 Romuald began his monastic career at Sant’Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, which failed to meet his spiritual expectations despite recent Cluniac-​inspired reforms. He fled to Venice, where he placed himself under the supervision of the uneducated hermit Marinus.9 They and companions traveled to Catalonia, and lived as hermits outside the monastery of Saint-​Michel de Cuxa.10 Romuald returned to Umbria and the Marches and spent his last three decades roaming the countryside, founding and reforming monasteries and hermitages. He created mixed eremitical and cenobitic communities such as the hermitage of the Holy Savior at Campus Malduli, which he founded near Arezzo in 1012 and affiliated two years later to the nearby monastery of Fonte Buono. Campus Malduli would give its name to the Camaldolese order.11 The ability of Romuald to move among hermitages, eremitical communities, and monasteries parallels the fluidity of monastic life in the neighboring Italo-​Greek world.12 Peter Damian, a hermit prior of Fonte Avellana who later became the dean of the College of Cardinals, helped advance Romuald’s eremitical ideals.13 When he was a thirty-​year-​old teacher contemplating what direction his life should take, he met two brothers from the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, founded in the shadow of Mount Catria not far from Gubbio, and was welcomed there in 1034. The hermits of Fonte Avellana lived in common but in separate cells, following a modified RB based upon prayer, manual labor, fasting, and occasional bodily mortification.14 Peter Damian identifies the earliest hermits who dwelt in the wilderness as the Old Testament figures of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses, followed by John the Baptist and then Paul and Antony. Within the quest for solitude, Peter attempts to distinguish between anchorites who wander through the desert subsisting on roots and bulbs,

Bruno of Querfurt, Life of the Five Brethren 2, ed. and trans. Christian Gaspar and Marina Miladinov, in Vitae sanctorum aetatis conversionis Europae centralis (saec. X–​XI), ed. Gábor Klanicsay (Budapest, 2013), 95–​181 and 185–​313, esp. 204–​5. 9 Peter Damian, Vita Romualdi esp.  4 and 10, ed. Giovanni Tabacco (Rome, 1957), esp. 20–​21 and 73. 10 On Spanish hermitism, see España eremitica. Actas de la VI Semana de estudios monásticos, Abadía de San Salvador de Leyre, 15–​20 de septiembre de 1963 (Pamplona, 1970). 11 Giovanni Tabacco, “Romualdo di Ravenna e gli inizi dell’L’Eremitismo Camaldolese,” in L’Eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 30 agosto–​6 settembre 1962 (Milan, 1963), 73–​121. 12 See the articles by Ramseyer and Howe in volume 1. 13 For the most recent biography of Peter Damian, see Ruggero Benericetti, L’eremo e la cattedra. Vita di S. Pier Damiani (Milan, 2007). 14 Mansueto Della Santa, Richerche sull’idea monastica di S.  Pier Damiani (Arezzo, 1961); Celestino Pierucci, “San Pietro Damiani e Fonte Avellana,” in Fonte Avellana nella società dei secoli XI e XII (Fonte Avellana, 1978), 157–​78, esp. 163; Christian Lohmer, Heremi Conversatio. Studien zu den Monastischenvorschriften des Petrus Damiani (Münster, 1991). 8

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and hermits who live in cells in an imagined wilderness.15 Solitude took on different meanings when lived within a community, as was the case in Peter Damian’s Fonte Avellana. In central Europe, however, wilderness hermitism thrived in the hinterlands.16 There was never a German order of hermits. Despite Romuald’s friendship with Otto III (r. 983–​1002), his movement did not take root in Germany, and even though Bruno (d. 1101), the founder of the Carthusians, began his ecclesiastical career in Cologne, his order never flourished in Germany. Perhaps some would-​be hermits were diverted into Cistercian foundations. The father of Frederick Barbarossa’s first wife, Adela of Vohburg, established a Cistercian house near the border between modern Germany and the Czech Republic, which was called Waldsassen, meaning “forest inhabitants.”17 Hermits remain poorly documented in Germany except for a few charismatic individuals. One for whom we have some information is St. Heimerad (d. 1019). He was originally from Swabia, where he served as confessor to a noblewoman. He traveled north to Hesse to preach but, according to his vita, his audience failed to perceive the Holy Spirit in his words. After this setback he embarked on pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem. Returning to Germany in 1014, he met the abbot of Hersfeld, who sent him to his monastery, where Heimerad rebuked so many aspects of life—​especially the wastefulness of the monks, particularly those of noble birth—​that he was brutally beaten and expelled. Hersfeld would not be the last place to remove him forcibly. His biographer presents him as a misunderstood man, forced to wander incessantly until he became a hermit on Mount Hasungen in Hesse, where, perhaps because he could not fit into a community, he became a traditional solitary. Through his piety, Heimerad gradually gained the admiration of the nearby populace, the support of a local count, and, in the end, even the favor of the formerly hostile bishop of Paderborn.18 The hermit Günther (d. 1045), who was descended from Thuringian nobility, never faced such opposition. In 1006, at the age fifty of he renounced

Peter Damian, Epist. 50, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, 2:83–​4, trans. in Blum, The Letters of Peter Damian, 2:292–​3; Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism, 5. 16 Herbert Grundmann, “Deutsche Eremiten, Einsiedler und Klausner im Hochmittelalter (10.–​12. Jahrhundert),” in Herbert Grundmann Ausgewählte Aufsätze, MGH Schriften 25/​1 (Stuttgart, 1976), 94–​6. 17 Thanks to John B.  Freed for the Waldsassen example:  see Fundatio Monasterii Waldsassensis, MGH SS 15/​2, 1088–​93. 18 Vita Sancti Haimeradi presbiteri auctore Ekkeberto, MGH SS 10, 599–​601; Hagen Keller, “‘Adelheiliger’ und pauper Christi in Ekkeberts Vita sancti Haimeradi,” in Adel und Kirche. Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Josef Fleckenstein and Karl Schmid (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1968), 307–​23. 15

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his inheritance and entered the Bavarian monastery of Niederalteich. But this proved unsatisfying, and in 1008 Günther became a hermit in the wilds of Bavaria, near the Bohemian border. A small community of hermits following the RB grew up around his cell in the valley of Rinchnach, where he lived for thirty-​seven years as a simple brother. Before and during this time he traveled extensively on pilgrimages and into the wild imperial borderlands. Although he received no formal instruction and possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of the Psalms, his vita claims that he preached eloquently. Word of his piety reached King Stephen of Hungary (r. 1000/​1–​1038), who invited Günther to his court. The old hermit died in Bohemia while visiting Duke Břetislav I.19 In Hungary and in the Slavic principalities hermits participated in national conversions.20 In eastern Europe they added to traditional eremitical humility and poverty an ideal of missionary brotherhood expressed through observances held in common.21 By the end of the eleventh century, the new hermitism was found throughout the whole Latin West, perhaps most dramatically in northwestern France.22 The houses of Bec, Fécamp, and Mont Saint-​ Michel attempted to accommodate hermits within the traditional structures of so-​ called Benedictine hermitism, but eremitical enthusiasm was hard to contain. Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116), born on the eastern fringe of Brittany, converted at the age of thirty to a more arduous life as a reforming archdeacon, and then in 1095 abandoned his clerical life altogether and entered into “the desert” of





Vita Guntheri heremitae, MGH SS 11, 276–​9. The Vita prior of Adalbert of Prague and Bruno of Querfurt’s Life of the Five Brethren, 95–​ 181 and 183–​313. Bruno of Querfurt’s version of Adalbert’s vita is in S. Adalberti, Pragensis episcopi et martyris, vita prior, ed. Jadwiga Karwasińska, Monumenta Poloniae Historica, n.s. 4.1 (Warsaw, 1962), 3–​47. See Jean Leclercq, “Saint Romuald et le monachisme missionnaire,” Revue bénédictine 72 (1962): 307–​23; Phyllis G. Jestice, Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century (New York, 1997), 75–​89; and Slawomir Gawlas, “Der hl. Adalbert als Landespatron und die frühe Nationenbildung bei den Polen,” in Polen und Deutschland vor 1000 Jahren, ed. Michael Borgolte (Berlin, 2002), 193–​233. 21 Jerzy Kloczowski, “L’érémitisme dans les territoires slaves occidentaux,” in L’Eremitismo in Occidente, 330–​54; Marina Miladinov, “Dalle laure ai Paolini: Le comunità eremitiche in Ungheria nel medioevo centrale,” in Ermites de France et d’Italie (XIe–​XVe siècle), ed. André Vauchez (Rome, 2003), 389–​411. On the role played by monks and nuns in the conversion of eastern Europe, see the article by Raaikmakers in volume 1 and the article by Jamroziak in this volume. 22 See Jean Becquet, “L’érémitisme clérical et laïc dans l’ouest de la France,” in L’Eremitismo in Occidente, 182–​211; Jean-​Hervé Foulon, “Solitude et pauvreté volontaire chez les ermites du Val de Loire,” in Liber largitorius. Études d’histoire médiévale offertes à Pierre Toubert par ses élèves, ed. Dominique Barthélemy and Jean-​Marie Martin (Geneva, 2003), 393–​416; Jean-​Hervé Foulon, “Les ermites dans l’ouest de la France: les sources, bilan et perspectives,” and Mathieu Arnoux, “Ermites et ermitages en Normandie (XIe–​XIIIe siècles),” in Vauchez, Ermites de France et d’Italie, 115–​35 (esp. 119) and 81–​113. 19

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the forests of Craon. His earliest vita, by Archbishop Baudri of Dol (d. 1130), describes him as truly wild, claiming that “he stayed in the forest, rejecting the society of men, now made the companion of beasts.” Because his piety attracted followers, he established first a community of regular canons at La Roë. Although he initially divided his time between directing his new community and preaching for Urban II (r. 1088–​99), he was preaching full time by 1098. Then Marbode of Rennes (d. 1123)  chastised him for drawing crowds of poorly supervised admirers who included reformed prostitutes. Robert admitted the need for more organization, and in 1101 founded a small oratory and several huts in a “deserted spot,” a “rough and neglected place, thick with thorn and bramble,” which would become the monastery of Fontevraud.23 Robert’s followers and associates included Bernard of Tiron (d. 1117)24 and Vitalis of Savigny (d. 1119/​22).25 In south-​central France, the canon Robert of Turlande (d. 1067), who had entered the desert with a few companions near Brioude in Auvergne in 1043, later adopted the RB and converted his hermitage into the monastery of La Chaise-​Dieu.26 Stephen of Obazine (d. 1154), who embarked on the eremitical life in the 1130s, affiliated his monastery of Obazine to Cîteaux in 1147.27 Yet









Baudri of Dol, Historia Magistri Roberti esp. 4, 11, and 15, and Andreas of Fontevraud, Supplementum Historiae, in Les deux vies de Robert d’Arbrissel fondateur de Fontevraud. Légendes, écrits et témoignages, ed. and trans. (in French and English) Jacques Dalarun et al. (Turnhout, 2006), 125–​87 and 189–​300, esp. 151, 153, and 159; Marbode of Rennes, Epist. ad Robertum, in ibid., 503–​57. Older English translations, also by Venarde, can be found in Bruce L. Venarde, Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Washington, DC, 2004), 88–​100; see also Jacques Dalarun, Robert of Arbrissel: Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Washington, DC, 2006). See also the article by Griffiths in this volume. 24 Geoffrey Grossus, Vita Bernardi Tironiensis, ed. Bernard Beck, in Saint Bernard de Tiron. L’ermite, le moine et le monde (Cormelles-​Royal, 1998), 312–​461; English translation in Ruth Harwood Cline, trans., Geoffrey Grossus: The Life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron (Washington, DC, 2009). See also Kathleen Thompson, “The First Hundred Years of the Abbey of Tiron: Institutionalizing the Reform of the Forest Hermits,” Anglo-​Norman Studies 31 (2008): 104–​17; and Kathleen Thompson, “The Other Saint Bernard: The ‘Troubled and Varied Career’ of Bernard of Abbeville, Abbot of Tiron,” JEH 60 (2009): 657–​72. 25 Stephen of Fougères, Vita B. Vitalis primi abbatis Savinacensis, ed. E.-​P. Sauvage, Analecta Bollandiana 1 (1882), 357–​90; translated in The Lives of Monastic Reformers II: Abbot Vitalis of Savigny, Abbot Godfrey of Savigny, Peter of Avranches, Blessed Hamo, ed. Hugh Feiss (Athens, OH, 2014), 41–​94; J. J. Van Moolenbrock, Vital l’ermite, prédicateur itinérant, fondateur de l’abbaye normande de Savigny, trans. Anne-​Marie Nambot (Assen, 1990). 26 Marbode of Rennes, Vita Beati Roberti, ed. Antonella Degl’Innocenti (Florence, 1995); The Lives of Monastic Reformers I: Robert of La-​Chaise-​Dieu and Stephen of Obazine, trans. Hugh Feiss, Maureen M. O’Brien, and Ronald Pepin (Collegeville, MI, 2010), 19–​59. Bernard of La Chaise-​Dieu, Liber Tripartitus de Miraculis Sancti Roberti, in Feiss et al., Lives of Monastic Reformers I, 71–​101, offers additional details. 27 Vie de saint Etienne d’Obazine, ed. Michel Aubrun (Clermont-​Ferrand, 1970); Feiss et al., Lives of Monastic Reformers I, 129–​240. See also the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1, and György Geréby and Piroska Nagy, “The Life of the Hermit Stephen 23

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traditional hermitism continued: Cluny, for example, had hermits living in its woods who were supervised by Peter the Venerable (r. 1122–​56).28 Flanders was filled with an array of itinerant apostolic preachers and hermits living in the wilderness.29 Not long after 1048 a man named Everelmus (d. 1060) retreated to an island in the River Reie near Bruges to live as a hermit, attracted followers, and ultimately inspired the creation of a house of regular canons in the early twelfth century.30 A monastery was also built over the former cell of the hermit Aibertus of Crespin (d. 1140). Aibertus longed for solitude and renunciation: he apprenticed as hermit in a cell outside the monastery of Crespin, and, after a monastic sojourn, retired to the countryside as a hermit in 1115, but so many people sought his spiritual advice that to regularize the situation the local bishop ordained him a priest.31 Lay hermits existed as well. St. Gerlach of Houthem (d. 1165/​6), a knight before he became a hermit, traveled to Rome and Jerusalem on pilgrimage in the mid-​twelfth century. He spurned what he considered monastic excess, preferring to live outdoors, and his favorite residence was an old oak tree near a well-​traveled road on his own land.32 Suspicious of Gerlach’s activities, the bishop of Liège ordered the tree cut down and demanded that he enter a monastery. Gerlach sought a papal privilege to guarantee his way of life, and soon the bishop, according to Gerlach’s vita written in 1227, realized his mistake and erected a cell for Gerlach made with wood from his oak tree. Gerlach is described as a man whose sanctity was rooted in asceticism and devotion rather than in miracles.33 He was a penitent figure, lamenting the sins of his





of Obazine,” in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 299–​310. 28 Vita S.  Petri Venerabilis ex Chronico Cluniacensi, in Bibliotheca Cluniacensis, ed. Martin Marrier and André Du Chesne (Mâcon, 1915), col. 600. 29 Charles Dereine, “Les prédicateurs ‘apostoliques’ dans les diocèses de Thérouanne, Tournai, et Cambrais-​Arras durant les années 1075–​1125.” Analecta Praemonstratensia 59 (1983): 171–​89. 30 AASS Oct. I (Antwerp, 1765), 318–​19; David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London, 1992; reprint 2013), 91. 31 Robert of Ostrevand, Vita Ayberti II xiv–​xv, AASS Apr. I (Antwerp, 1675), 677; Dereine, “Les prédicateurs ‘apostoliques’,” 183–​4. 32 Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker, De kluizenaar in de eik. Gerlach van Houthem en zijn vererring (Hilversum, 1995), with an edition of the Latin Vita beati Gerlaci Eremytae, by C.  H. Kneepkens, and the Middle Dutch Life, by H. van Dijk, 137–​245; Anneke B. Mulder-​ Bakker, “Saints without a Past:  Sacred Places and Intercessory Power in the Saints’ Lives from the Low Countries,” in The Invention of Saintliness, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-​ Bakker (London and New York, 2002), 45–​7; Herbert Grundmann, “Zur Vita S. Gerlaci Eremitae,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 18 (1962): 539–​54. 33 Mulder-​Bakker, “Saints without a Past,” 46.

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former life. His biography was written by a canon of the Premonstratensian house which was founded on Gerlach’s grave and dedicated to him. England abounded in new hermits.34 Even before the Norman Conquest, Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester from 1062 to 1095, a former monk who promoted monasticism, was sympathetic to eremitical spirituality.35 During his tenure, texts on the Desert Fathers were collected and copied at Worcester.36 In the wilds around Worcester, a hermit named Ealdwine of Malvern (d. 1085)  retreated into the woods and, despite initial hardships, Bishop Wulfstan reassured him that new companions would arrive; before long his hermitage had thirty residents.37 There had been no houses following the RB in England north of the River Trent before 1066, but then social upheaval spurred some men to conversion.38 Perhaps the thirty new residents of the Malvern Hills were part of that movement. In 1069, the monk Benedict (d. c. 1097) from Saint-​Germain at Auxerre fled his community to found a new monastery beside the River Ouse at Selby. He first lived in solitude in a small oratory, without a patron until the sheriff of Yorkshire introduced him to his unintentional benefactor, William the Conqueror (r. 1066–​87), who actually owned the land. The king allowed and endowed the monastery of St. Germanus at Selby.39 Not long after, around 1074, the prior of Winchcombe Abbey, Aldwyn (d. c. 1075), was so inspired by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that he decided to settle within the ruins of Jarrow and later Wearmouth. He and two monks of Eversham received permission from Bishop Walcher of Durham (d. 1080)  to settle at Jarrow, but new followers interrupted their solitude. Ealdwine and a new companion left for Melrose and went on to restore the monastery at Monkwearmouth in 1076 and the cathedral priory at Durham in 1083. Another brother left Jarrow in 1077 and moved to the long-​deserted seventh-​century abbey at Whitby.

Mary Rotha Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914); Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985); Licence, Hermits and Recluses, esp. 42–​66. 35 William of Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani I.xiv, in Saints’ Lives:  Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus, and Indract, ed. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson (Oxford, 2002), 7–​136, esp. 51. 36 Peter Jackson, “The Vitas Patrum in Eleventh-​Century Worcester,” in England in the Eleventh Century:  Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Carola Hicks (Stamford, 1992), 119–​34. 37 William of Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani II.iii, in Winterbottom and Thomson, Saints’ Lives, 66–​7; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2007), 1:434–​5. 38 Licence, Hermits and Recluses,  54–​5. 39 Historia Selebiensis Monasterii iv–​ix, ed. Janet Burton (Oxford, 2013), 14–​31. See also Janet Burton, The Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 1069–​1215 (Cambridge, 1999), 26–​9. 34

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Monastic houses multiplied rapidly in twelfth-​century Yorkshire, relying heavily on lay and ecclesiastical patronage.40 Kings, barons, and bishops all buoyed their authority by supporting hermits and new monasteries. Inspired by the Church of Bede, hermits went out into the wilderness and their cells ultimately became monasteries. This pattern was consistent with trends on the Continent, but hermits in England rarely founded new orders. Enthusiasm for the hermit life extended beyond Latin Europe. Pilgrims to the Holy Land encountered Eastern hermits. Hagiographies of western European hermit saints often specify that, prior to entering the desert, their heroes had visited the Holy Land. Some became hermits there, such as Conrad (d. 1154), son of Duke Henry the Black of Bavaria (d. 1126), who after a period of preparation at Clairvaux traveled to Jerusalem to live as a hermit. Gerard of Nazareth, bishop of Laodikeia from c. 1140 to c. 1160, noted many twelfth-​century Latin hermits in his region. Some roamed from place to place preaching Christianity to “pagans,” while others prayed within a community. The twelfth-​century hermit Alberic ministered to lepers living outside the walls of Jerusalem. Even when most of the new hermits of Europe were being absorbed by established orders, the hermit movement still flourished in the Holy Land. Perhaps some enthusiasts moved east.41 Scholarly literature on hermitism is usually organized regionally.42 This makes sense in that hermitages were often clustered; they could share networks of recruitment and patronage and tended to be associated with the same sacred landscapes and frontier zones. Yet regional perspectives are insufficient. For example, to explain twelfth-​century English hermitism as popular Saxon resistance to a Norman church fails to explain parallel phenomena in regions that lacked Saxons and Normans. Hermits were rooted locally but connected to a universal Church, to a “greater tradition” whose ideology they mediated and interpreted. The social functions of holy men have been much discussed since Peter Brown’s famous 1971 article on “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in



Burton, Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 32–​3, 36–​8, and 44; Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 57. Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Gerard of Nazareth:  A Neglected Twelfth-​Century Writer in the Latin East,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983): 55–​77; Historia Welforum xv, in Quellen zur Geschichte der Welfen und die Chronik Burchards von Ursberg, ed. Matthias Becher (Darmstadt, 2007), 54; Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis (Historia Hierosolymitana Abbreviata) l–​liii, ed. and trans. Jean Donnadieu (Turnhout, 2008), 218–​23. See also Gregorio Penco, “Eremitismo irregolare in Italia nei secoli XI–​XII,” Benedictina 32 (1985): 201–​21, esp. 211–​12; Andrew Jotischky, The Perfection of Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States (University Park, PA, 1995). 42 For example, see the studies in L’Eremitismo in Occidente; and in Vauchez, Ermites de France et d’Italie.

40

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Late Antiquity.”43 Henry Mayr-​Harting applied Brown’s perspective to the new hermitism, linking the success of Wulfric (d. 1154)  to changing social structures.44 Hermits became enmeshed in society despite their quest for solitude. They needed patrons because “wilderness” in the Latin West was always “owned.” Often they received offerings from friends and clients. When they participated in the broader economy, their relative independence gave them more economic freedom.45 The popularity of hermits rested ultimately on their spiritual dimensions. The hermit’s alienation proclaimed the existence of a world beyond everyday reality.46 His physical hermitage could be holy, perhaps featuring not only an oratory but also such numinous natural features as a spring, clearing, or cave. Hermits were associated with awesome nature and their hermitages were often sited with an eye toward natural beauty.47 Insofar as hermits experienced hardships, they witnessed Christ’s redemptive suffering. As penitents they offered hope of redemption.48 Some were controversial itinerant preachers.49 Their roles as spiritual advisors varied inasmuch as their ranks included illiterate lay men, former soldiers, monks, scribes, schoolmasters, and even members of the ordained clergy who could be authorized to undertake the care of souls. Lay people most often encountered hermits as guardians of hermitage chapels, and would have sought their prayers, perhaps in return for gifts. Sometimes they were able to affiliate with hermits in confraternities and prayer associations.50 Women rarely became hermits. Men’s eremitical advantages included greater physical strength, more freedom from social constraints, and the





Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–​101; John Howe, “Review Article: Revisiting the Holy Man,” Catholic Historical Review 86 (2000): 640–​4. 44 Henry Mayr-​Harting, “Functions of a Twelfth Century Recluse,” History 60 (1975): 337–​ 52; Susan J. Ridyard, “Functions of a Twelfth-​Century Recluse Revisited: The Case of Godfrey of Finchale,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-​Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford, 2001), 236–​50. 45 Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 97–​105. 46 John Howe, “The Awesome Hermit:  The Symbolic Significance of the Hermit as a Possible Research Perspective,” Numen 30 (1983): 106–​19. 47 Brian Golding, “The Hermit and the Hunter,” in The Cloister and the World:  Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford, 1996), 95–​117. On natural sacralities, see John Howe, “Creating Symbolic Landscapes:  Medieval Development of Sacred Space,” in Inventing Medieval Landscapes:  Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville, FL, 2002), 208–​23. 48 Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 11–​58 and 66–​72. 49 Gérard Gilles Meersseman, “Eremitismo e predicazione itinerante dei secoli XI e XII,” in L’Eremitismo in Occidente, 164–​79. 50 Licence, Hermits and Recluses,  162–​7. 43

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potential to be ordained. The Lives of the Desert Fathers and the flourishing twelfth-​century Vézelay cult honoring the penitent Mary Magdalene demonstrated that women could be hermits, while Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (d. 1002) wrote plays about female hermits.51 But few actual medieval ones are known. In the eleventh century, Franca, a former recluse, won permission from the bishop of Fermo to withdraw to a rural cell, where she died defending her chastity. Her contemporary Chelidonia (d. 1152)  probably received greater support as a hermit near Subiaco. Paulina (d. 1107), the aristocratic founder of Paulinzelle, retired to a chapel in the woods. But such exceptions were discouraged by an increasing tendency to enclose religious women more strictly.52 After several generations, eremitical enthusiasm apparently lessened. Many successful hermitages developed into large monastic foundations.53 At first, English communities were regularized as monasteries following the RB, and then in the later twelfth century as houses of Augustinian canons; Low Country hermits became canons; French communities tended to become Cistercian; in the twelfth century the popes reformed some Italian eremitical foundations into Cistercian houses, and in the thirteenth century they united many into a new order of Augustinian hermits.54 Semi-​eremitical orders such as the Vallombrosans, the Camaldolese, and the Carthusians, as well as the more austere Cistercian houses, may have attracted more educated potential hermits, leaving simple hermitages to less educated lay men. The stability of the hermitage could be a limitation. For lay hermits without monastic superiors, a hermitage was in theory conferred through a formal vow overseen by the local bishop or his representative, much like the immuring of recluses. An increasing desire for regular legal status is apparent in the clumsy way that hagiographers try to make the careers of earlier hermits conform to later expectations. According to his vita, Stephen



Larissa Bonfante, trans., The Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (Mundelein, IL, 2003), 78–​146. 52 Baudouin de Gaiffier, “Hagiographie du Picenum:  Vie de S.  Elpidius, Passion de Ste. Franca,” Analecta Bollandiana 75 (1957):  277–​ 98, esp. 288–​ 9 and 294–​ 8; Sofia Boesch Gajano, Chelidonia. Storia di un’eremita medievale (Rome, 2010); Sigiboto, Vita Paulinae 29, MGH SS 30/​2, 909–​38, esp. 923. For other examples, see Mario Sensi, “Il santesato: eremiti e comunità rurali, rapporti giuridici e umani,” and André Vauchez, “L’érémitisme dans les sources hagiographiques médiévales (France et Italie),” in Vauchez, Ermites de France et d’Italie, 343–​71 (esp. 348–​9) and 373–​88 (esp. 383–​6). 53 Cécile Caby, “Finis eremitarum? Les formes régulières et communautaires de l’érémitisme médiéval,” in Vauchez, Ermites de France et d’Italie,  47–​80. 54 Licence, Hermits and Recluses, 200–​ 2; Ludo Milis, “Hermits and Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century,” in Religion, Culture, and Mentalities in the Medieval Low Countries: Selected Essays, ed. Jeroen Deploige et al. (Turnhout, 2005), 181–​246. 51

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of Muret (d. 1124), who had entered the desert on his own, nevertheless wrote out a profession of eremitic stability, held it above his head in his solitude, and offered it to the Trinity;55 in her thirteenth-​century life, Chelidonia vows stability to a bishop, but with an anachronistic ceremony and some historical discrepancies.56 The move toward stricter legal and geographic boundaries may have been out of step with a world where, for many professed religious, the ideal of stability of profession was replacing the ideal of stability of place. Although half a dozen papal processes to canonize holy hermits had been initiated by 1330, subsequent medieval popes seem to have lost interest.57 Nevertheless, hermitism continued, better documented in late medieval Europe’s expanded archives,58 and enjoying some largely unheralded revivals in early modern Europe.59

Bibliography Clayton, Mary. “Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-​Saxon England.” In Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, edited by Paul E. Szarmach, 147–​75. New York, 1996. Constable, Giles. “Eremitical Forms of Monastic Life.” In Istituti monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–​1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 28 agosto–​3 settembre 1977, 239–​64. Milan, 1980.   “Spiritual Emptiness and Ascetic Exile in the Middle Ages.” In On the Shoulders of Giants: Essays in Honor of Glenn W. Olsen, edited by David F. Appleby and Teresa Olsen Pierre, 135–58. Toronto, 2015. Dereine, Charles. “Les prédicateurs ‘apostoliques’ dans les diocèses de Thérouanne, Tournai, et Cambrais-​Arras durant les années 1075–​1125.” Analecta Praemonstratensia 59 (1983): 171–​89. L’Eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII. Atti della seconda Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 30 agosto–​6 settembre 1962. Milan, 1963. España eremitica. Actas de la VI Semana de estudios monásticos, Abadía de San Salvador de Leyre, 15–​20 de septiembre de 1963. Pamplona, 1970. Golding, Brian. “The Hermit and the Hunter.” In The Cloister and the World:  Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, edited by John Blair and Brian Golding, 95–​117. Oxford, 1996.



Stephanus de Liciaco, Vita Stephani Muretensis 12, in Scriptores Ordinis Grandimontensis, ed. Jean Becquet, CCCM 8, 105–​37, esp. 112. 56 Boesch Gajano, Chelidonia,  95–​6. 57 Vauchez, “L’érémitisme dans les sources hagiographiques médiévales,” 373–​ 88, esp. 376–​8. 58 See Antonella Ghignoli, “Gli archivi degli eremiti di Siena,” and Catherine Santschi, “Les sources de l’histoire des ermites en Suisse orientale,” in Vauchez, Ermites de France et d’Italie, 25–​76 and 413–​37, esp. 420–​8 for examples of Italian and St. Gall hermitage documentation. 59 Jean Sainsaulieu, Les ermites français (Paris, 1974). 55

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Kathryn Jasper and John   Howe Grundmann, Herbert. “Deutsche Eremiten, Einsiedler und Klausner im Hochmittelalter (10.–​12. Jahrhundert).” In Herbert Grundmann Ausgewählte Aufsätze. MGH Schriften 25/​1, 94–​6. Stuttgart, 1976. Howe, John. “The Awesome Hermit:  The Symbolic Significance of the Hermit as a Possible Research Perspective.” Numen 30 (1983): 106–​19.   “St. Benedict as a Model for Italian Benedictine Life: Some Hagiographical Witnesses.” American Benedictine Review 55 (2004): 42–54. Jestice, Phyllis G. Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century. New York, 1997. Jotischky, Andrew. The Perfection of Solitude:  Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States. University Park, PA, 1995. Leyser, Henrietta. Hermits and the New Monasticism:  A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe. New York, 1984. Licence, Tom. Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–​1050. Oxford, 2011. Lohmer, Christian. Heremi Conversatio. Studien zu den Monastischenvorschriften des Petrus Damiani. Münster, 1991. Milis, Ludo. “Hermits and Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century.” In Religion, Culture, and Mentalities in the Medieval Low Countries: Selected Essays, edited by Jeroen Deploige et al., 181–​246. Turnhout, 2005. Penco, Gregorio. “Eremitismo irregolare in Italia nei secoli XI–​ XII.” Benedictina 32 (1985): 201–​21. Ridyard, Susan J. “Functions of a Twelfth-​Century Recluse Revisited: The Case of Godfrey of Finchale.” In Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-​ Harting, edited by Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser, 236–​50. Oxford, 2001. Thompson, Kathleen. “The First Hundred Years of the Abbey of Tiron: Institutionalizing the Reform of the Forest Hermits.” Anglo-​Norman Studies 31 (2008): 104–​17. Vauchez, André, ed. Ermites de France et d’Italie (XIe–​XVe siècle). Rome, 2003.

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Monastic Theologies, c. 1050–1200 Con sta n t J.   M e ws

The goal of monastic life is first of all to identify with Christ, through separating oneself from the world. In the Latin West, monks tended to avoid the abstract term theologia to describe their teaching. When Peter Abelard (d. 1142) first used Theologia as the title of a monograph explaining why God could be described as a Trinity of persons, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) was shocked by his use of the term, mockingly referring to it as his Stultilogia (“Stupidology”).1 He followed Augustine’s (d. 430) understanding of the term as pagan discourse about the gods or divinity. Only in the thirteenth century did theologia come to be more widely used (or, in the eyes of purists, misused) to embrace teaching about Christ, the Church, and ethics, as well as about God. Yet Bernard himself formulated a monastic perspective on Christian teaching that both rivalled and complemented what was being taught in non-​monastic schools. Monastic teaching tended to be hermeneutic rather than systematic in character. It drew on particular ways of understanding the Word of God, as formulated in Scripture and above all in the person of Jesus, the fullest manifestation of divine wisdom. Inevitably, monasticism produced many different ways of interpreting Christian thought. Although monastic communities in the Latin West had been required to follow the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) only since the time of Charlemagne (r. 768–​814), they shared no common institutional framework and ideology prior to the evolution of a system of general chapters within the Cistercian Order during the twelfth century.2 The RB did not lay out a specific monastic

Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae 190, ed. Jean Leclercq, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome, 1957–​77) 8:24. 2 See the articles by Diem and Rousseau and by Kramer in volume 1, and the article by Melville in this volume. On the Cistercian general chapters and the enforcement of uniformity, see Constance Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​Century Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2000); and Michael Casey, “Bernard and the Crisis at Morimond: Did the Order Exist in 1124?” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38 (2003): 119–​75. 1

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theology to which monks should adhere, other than insisting on the primacy of reflection on Scripture and committing monks to the pursuit of perfection, following the injunction of Christ. Yet, between 1050 and 1200, monastic intellectual and religious culture was transformed by increasingly pronounced competition, with alternative ways of thinking emerging within urban schools outside a monastic framework. In the process, various versions of Christian teaching developed within a monastic environment. Inevitably there was friction when individual monks, such as William of Saint-​Thierry (d. 1148) and Bernard of Clairvaux, feared that many monks were becoming so distracted by contemporary debates about Christian theology that they were losing sight of their original monastic vocation.

The Notion of Monastic Theology The phrase théologie monastique was first given wide currency in 1953 by Jean Leclercq, in a pioneering essay celebrating the eight hundredth anniversary of the death of Bernard of Clairvaux. The notion also underpinned his classic synthesis of the subject, originally given as lectures to Benedictine novices in Rome, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu, first published in 1957 and reprinted and translated many times subsequently.3 Leclercq argued that monastic religious culture was rooted in the meditative experience of reflection on Scripture, mediated through patristic tradition, in a way that was very different from the questioning technique of the schools. His analysis has been of enormous influence in shaping subsequent historiographical perspectives about monastic culture.4 Writing at a time when monks and clerics within Catholic educational structures were required to study the works of Thomas Aquinas (d.  1274), Leclercq argued that monasticism presented an alternative way of looking at Christian thought. In this he drew on the pioneering achievement of Henri de Lubac, who had identified the creative role of Origen (d. 253/​4) and the Greek fathers in promoting a mystical reading

Jean Leclercq, “S. Bernard et la théologie monastique du XIIe siècle,” in Bernard théologien. Actes du Congrès de Dijon, 15–​19 septembre 1953, published in Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9 (1953): 7–​23; Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York, 1961; first published in French 1957). 4 See Ferruccio Gastaldelli, “Teologia monastica, teologia scolastica e lectio divina,” Analecta Cisterciensia, 46 (1990), 25–​63; in contrast, see F. B.  A. Head, ‘“Monastic” and “Scholastic” Theology:  A Change of Paradigm?” in Paradigms in Medieval Thought Applications in Medieval Disciplines, ed. Nancy van Deusen and Alvin E. Ford (Lewiston, NY, 1990), 127–​41. 3

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of Scripture rather than rational disputation.5 Leclercq embarked on a critical edition of the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (initially in collaboration with Charles Talbot and Henri Rochais): eight volumes entitled Sancti Bernardi Opera, published in Rome between 1957 and 1977. This led him to consider Bernard as the pre-​eminent exponent of what he called contemplative monastic theology, as an alternative to what he considered to be disputatious scholasticism.6 Together with his friend and spiritual mentor, Thomas Merton (whose writings generated a great flowering of interest in monastic thought), Leclercq exposed the rich potential of medieval monastic intellectual and literary culture, alongside that of urban schools.7 While Leclercq rightly emphasized the debt of twelfth-​century monasticism to patristic tradition, monks varied greatly in their commitment to particular fathers of the Church. Within monasticism, there has always been a tension between emphasis on the pursuit of perfection, as formulated in the East by Evagrius and transmitted to the Latin West by Cassian (d. 435), and the mature teaching of Augustine about the fallen status of human nature, and the necessity for divine grace to overcome the enduring stain of original sin.8 Through the translations of Rufinus, once a friend and then a sparring partner of Jerome (d. 420), Latin monasticism became familiar with the thought of Origen, even though it had generated much controversy in the late fourth century. His teaching about the pursuit of perfection was questioned by Augustine, who was suspicious of ascetics like Pelagius. Gregory the Great (r. 590–​604), the first monk to become pope, combined Cassian’s moralism and commitment to spiritual growth with Augustine’s emphasis on our need for divine grace. Monks involved in positions of ecclesiastical responsibility might well draw on Augustine to emphasize the importance of sacraments as mediating divine grace. Others might prefer the way in which Ambrose (d. 397)  interpreted Scripture, drawing on Greek theological tradition, ultimately dependent on Origen. Those with a scholarly bent, like the Cistercian Nicholas Maniacoria in the mid-​ twelfth century, might follow Jerome’s emphasis on the Hebrew truth as vital for understanding Scripture.



Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959); Medieval Exegesis, trans. Mark Sebanc, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI, and Edinburgh, 1998–​2009). 6 See Jean Leclercq’s first study, Jean de Paris et l’ecclésiologie du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1942), and his first writing on Bernard, Saint Bernard mystique (Bruges, 1948). On Leclercq, see also the article by Van Engen in this volume. 7 On their friendship, see Patrick Hart, ed., Survival or Prophecy? The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq (New York, 2002). 8 See the article by Alciati in volume 1. 5

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Within a monastic milieu, Gregory the Great had particular authority because of his teaching that the highest meaning of Scripture was moral, above that of its literal and allegorical levels, a teaching that was subtly different from the earlier theory of four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (which Gregory calls moral), and the analogical or doctrinal.9 Unlike Augustine or Jerome, Gregory never directed treatises against specific individuals. Not all monks, however, agreed with the way in which Gregory distanced himself from the study of secular philosophy. They could find in Boethius (d. 524), a Roman Christian who devoted himself to the study of ancient philosophy, a different perspective from that of Augustine. Between the mid-​eleventh and late twelfth centuries, there would be many different ways in which monks drew on the writings of the past to formulate their own version of Christian teaching.

The Song of Songs and Monastic Spirituality Perhaps one of most distinguishing features of monastic spirituality was its commitment to the Song of Songs as a text that spoke about the longing of the bride, interpreted by Origen as both the Church and the soul, for her beloved, understood as the Word of God, just as Jews interpreted the bride as Israel longing for God.10 Very early in Christian tradition, the figure of Mary Magdalene, presented in all four Gospels as searching for the body of Jesus after the crucifixion, was taken as an emblem of the bride searching for her beloved. Origen, familiar with Platonic philosophical discussion of love, helped establish a way of reading not just the Song of Songs but also the whole of Scripture as about the soul’s love for the Word of God. In this perspective, mediated to the Latin West through the translations of Rufinus, ascetic spirituality was not so much about redemption from sin as about recovery of one’s true identity as being made in the image of God through union with the beloved, namely the Word of God manifest in Christ. In the Platonic philosophical framework within which it was framed, the Song of Songs articulated the longing of the soul rather than the lust of the flesh. By the late fourth century, Origen’s reading of the bride as anima vel ecclesia was giving way to a focus on the bride uniquely as Ecclesia in the

Scott DeGregorio, “Gregory’s Exegesis:  Old and New Ways of Approaching the Scriptural Text,” in A Companion to Gregory the Great, ed. Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo (Leiden, 2013), 269–​90. 10 On this theme, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, PA, 1990). 9

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writings of both Augustine and Jerome, neither of whom produced commentaries specifically on the Song of Songs. Even though Augustine had been introduced to Neoplatonic exegesis by Ambrose, his allusions to the Song of Songs are relatively much less frequent.11 While Augustine was fascinated by the phrase ordinate in me caritatem (“set in order charity in me,” Cant. 2:4 in the Vetus Latina), this was the City of God speaking, not the individual soul, whose capacity for love he considered disordered without the benefit of divine grace.12 In the first significant new commentary to be written on this text since Origen, Gregory the Great effectively laid the intellectual foundations of the bridal imagery that shaped monastic culture over subsequent centuries. While loyal to Augustine and Jerome in understanding the bride as the perfect Church, he acknowledged that it was also the soul filled with love for her beloved. In his homilies on the Gospels, Gregory invoked the figure of Mary Magdalene as preeminent as an exemplum of love for Jesus, not just in seeking out his crucified body, but as the sinful woman who sought to anoint his feet with her hair.13 He thus presented monastic life, not as a response to original sin, but as the framework in which monks and nuns longed for union with God through Christ. Mary Magdalene thus became a model of penitence for monks and nuns, while the Virgin Mary signified the perfect Ecclesia as bride of Christ. Gregory used the Song of Songs to articulate a relationship of mutual love between Ecclesia as the perfect soul and God. Gregory’s many monastic admirers were aware that his focus on the Song of Songs needed to be integrated with Augustine’s emphasis on the priority of divine grace. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Bede (d. 735) reasserted an ecclesial reading of the bride, explicitly condemning a commentary of Julian of Eclanum (d. c.  455), an educated admirer of Pelagius and target of Augustine’s invective. By the late eleventh century, the ecclesial focus of monastic spirituality was beginning to be challenged by a range of alternative perspectives. One, especially strong in Germany, was apocalyptic, while another—​of particular influence in the Anglo-​Norman world—​ was more intellectual in character. Even if neither of these approaches could be described as dominant, both illustrate the potential diversity of thinking developing in a monastic milieu in the twelfth century.

F. B. A. Asiedu, “The Song of Songs and the Ascent of the Soul: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Language of Mysticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 299–​317. Augustine, De civitate Dei 15.22. 13 Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 35–​46. 11

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Philosophical Approaches to Theology While Carolingian monasticism was committed to preserving the legacy of the Church fathers, new approaches to theology did not develop until the late eleventh century. Lanfranc introduced into Bec awareness that the study of dialectic could be combined with that of the fathers to defend Christian doctrine (in particular that of the Eucharist) against the arguments of Berengar of Tours (d. 1088), a secular cleric supported by the count of Anjou. Lanfranc’s theological technique was that of a lawyer, drawing on written authorities to buttress reason. He was concerned that Berengar’s application of Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as an outward sign of inward grace might potentially undermine reverence for the transformation that took place through the words of consecration of the Eucharist. In identifying patristic texts that could respond to Berengar, Lanfranc (d. 1089) laid the foundations for what would become a core element of sacramental theology in the twelfth century, as much in urban schools as in a monastic context. By contrast, his student Anselm (d. 1109) was inspired by his reading of both Augustine and Boethius (as also of Greek Fathers in translation) to develop arguments from reasoning alone (ratione sola).14 Aware that some monks were becoming interested in the analysis of the parts of speech, as formulated, for example, in the Glosule on Priscian’s Grammatical Institutes (perhaps first composed at Reims), Anselm developed a theological system based around the notion of “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum), without relying on arguments from scriptural or patristic authority. By framing his arguments in Augustine’s personal style of reflection in the Confessions, Anselm was able to persuade his reader to accept the voice of philosophical reason, a technique very different from that of Augustine in the City of God. While Anselm was not particularly interested in the bridal theology developed within commentaries on the Song of Songs, he did value the rhetoric of love and friendship, formulated within the prism of monastic life. For Anselm (who never used the word theologia), intellectual reflection was integral to the pursuit of happiness or beatitude, terminology he preferred to that of bridal union, as articulated in monastic exegetical tradition. Anselm’s philosophical approach was very different from the technique of Lanfranc, favored by most monastic writers, which was based on close analysis of the texts of patristic tradition. His writings were popular, however, not just in Normandy and England but also in Germany, where they found a

On Anselm’s affinities to Greek thought, see Giles Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (London, 2004).

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strong reception in monastic houses reformed by William of Hirsau (d. 1091). William was himself a monastic intellectual who employed the genre of the literary dialogue to discuss disciplines such as music theory and astronomy. These dialogues became the preferred literary form of Conrad of Hirsau—​a figure about whom little is known, other than that his writings, produced c. 1120–​1140 were preserved at Hirsau as the work of Peregrinus, the name he adopts as a conversation partner with Theodora in the Speculum virginum.15 Conrad was an influential monastic teacher, perhaps at Hirsau, who produced not only an influential Accessus to classical authors, but also dialogues such as On Contempt or Love for the World (De contemptu mundi vel amore) and Disputation of Synagogue and the Church (Altercatio Synagogae et Ecclesiae), which proceed through discussion between a master and disciple. This dialogue approach was also adopted by Honorius Augustodunensis (d. 1150s), a former disciple of Anselm who moved from England to Germany c. 1110 (at about the same time as Henry I’s young daughter, Matilda, was betrothed to the German emperor). Both his scientific writings and his biblical commentaries, such as that on the Song of Songs, which he interpreted as about Mary and Christ, circulated widely both in and beyond Germany, particularly in houses influenced by the Hirsau reform. Anselm’s fondness for open-​ended dialogue as a literary genre, picked up by authors like Conrad and Honorius, reflected an attitude of mind rather different from that of the Parisian schools in the twelfth century, where the emphasis was on disputation about texts and resolution of knotty questions with crisp doctrinal answers.

Apocalyptic Theology Unlike Anselm of Bec, German monastic writers were also interested in apocalyptic ways of thinking. The intensity of the investiture conflict in Germany in the last quarter of the eleventh century helped give a particular relevance to commentaries on the Book of Revelation, itself a text that combined criticism of the Roman Empire with warnings to Christians in various churches perceived as lacking in commitment to the call of Christ. Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129), originally a monk of Saint-​Laurent in Liège and later abbot of Deutz, outside Cologne, presented himself within his commentary on Matthew as someone who had been gifted with visionary experience that

On Conrad’s fondness for dialogue, see Constant J. Mews, ed. Listen, Daughter:  The Speculum virginum and the Formation of Religious Women (New York, 2000).

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compelled him to write.16 Conscious of the way in which masters such as Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) and William of Champeaux (d. 1121) were starting to be revered as authorities on Scripture, Rupert prepared a vast De trinitate in the form of a commentary on the entire Bible, identifying the sacred text as itself the record of the three persons of the Trinity working through history. His approach is so different from that of Anselm of Bec that he may have consciously sought to present a contrasting focus to that of rational argument, with emphasis on Scripture as the medium of divine revelation. Rupert’s great theme is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in history, anticipating the apocalyptic dimension in another twelfth-​century writer, Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), who would take such readings into a new dimension. In his commentary on Matthew, Rupert inveighs against the hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees in a way that implies that true monks distance themselves from false religious by the interiority of their devotion. Rupert’s apocalyptic theology was directed against those monks and ecclesiastics whom he viewed as serving the established imperial order, rather than a reformed vision of the Church. This apocalyptic reading would be developed much further by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), but taken in a new direction. Offered as a child by her parents to the newly established monastery of Disibodenberg, where she grew up in the shadow of another female recluse, Jutta (d. 1136), daughter of the count of Sponheim, Hildegard recalled that her spiritual understanding only started to develop in 1141, at the age of forty-​three. She reports that she was seized with understanding of the true meaning of Scripture, even though she was not versed in the technical skill of knowing the meaning of particular words and phrases.17 She was raised in an environment in which reformed monasticism was seen as spearheading spiritual renewal.18 Apocalyptic imagery provided her with authority for offering a subtly different vision of Scripture from that of Rupert of Deutz. Her preferred way of speaking about God was not in terms of individual persons of the Trinity, but of what she calls the shadow of the lux vivens, the living light. Whereas Jutta followed traditional ascetic values, according to the account of her Life written at Disibodenberg shortly after her death (undoubtedly provoked by her mortification of the flesh), Hildegard was fascinated by the relationship between body and soul. Her preferred metaphor for spiritual vitality

See John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, CA, 1983). Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York, 1990). 18 See the article by Griffiths in this volume. 16 17

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was greenness (viriditas), a term that Gregory the Great frequently invoked in his Moralia on Job. Hildegard inherited Rupert’s sense of moral outrage at abuses in the Church, but became increasingly interested in the health and well-​being of the human person. She saw music as providing a vital way in which body and soul could come together, to retrieve the original voice of Adam in Paradise. In her last great composition, the Book of Divine Works (Liber de divinorum operum) from the 1160s, Hildegard turns her attention from Ecclesia to creation as a whole, above all that of the human being. Her writing is rich in natural imagery, undoubtedly influenced by her fascination with the effect, whether beneficial or toxic, of certain plants, foods, and even stones on the human constitution. She interpreted monastic life in a fully naturalistic way, complaining against the contemporary habit of forcing children as oblates into religious life. Paradoxically, this was Hildegard’s own situation, as she had been offered to monastic life at a young age. While her visionary theology was hardly typical within twelfth-​century monasticism, it responded to the interests not just of monks and nuns, but of many others in the Church (like the widely read Gebeno of Eberbach) who admired her prophetic voice, well into the thirteenth century.

The Experiential Approach Perhaps the form of spiritual teaching that would have the widest influence in the twelfth century drew on the well-​established monastic tradition of reading the Song of Songs, in particular as influenced by Bernard of Clairvaux. The beginnings of a more personalized, experiential monastic theology can be seen in writers like John of Fécamp (d. 1078), who traveled as a young man from his native Volpiano to Burgundy, becoming a monk at Saint-​Bénigne, Dijon, and then abbot at Fécamp in Normandy (1028–​56).19 He sought inspiration in the writings of both Augustine (above all the Confessions) and Gregory the Great to create meditations of a distinctly personal character, such as De divina contemplatione Christique amore and Meditationes, texts that became widely read, although often under the name of Augustine. Their personal style of reflection would be developed in very different ways across Europe in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, in response to serious competition from alternative forms of Christian community—​not just from those clerics who preferred the Rule of Augustine to that of Benedict, as more

Lauren Mancia, “John of Fécamp and Affective Reform in Eleventh-​ Century Normandy,” Anglo-​Norman Studies 37 (2015): 161–​79.

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attuned to urban society, but also from lay communities condemned as heretical by ecclesiastical authority.20 This more personal approach to the Song of Songs developed in the early twelfth century in response to wider interest in the theme of sexual love, generated by enthusiasm for Ovid (d. 17/​18 c e ). It was also shaped by reaction against a more academic approach to Scripture developed in the cathedral schools by Anselm of Laon, who initiated the practice of systematically glossing all the main books of the Bible, including the Song of Songs. Anselm applied to Scripture the exegesis of a grammaticus analyzing any form of literary text. Each important word merited an explanation, perhaps as an interlinear gloss, while a scholarly reference to some particular quotation from a Church father about that word would be added to the margin. The goal of Anselm of Laon and his leading disciples was to produce a systematic account of the meaning of difficult terms in Scripture that might pose a problem for students. The Glossa ordinaria on most of Scripture that emerged by the mid-​twelfth century out of the teaching of secular masters, like Anselm and his disciples, and then Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154) and Peter Lombard (d. 1160), provided a pedagogically useful guide to teaching students how to approach Scripture. The multiplication of its manuscripts within both monastic and non-​monastic libraries shows how important such emerging scholastic techniques were within both kinds of environment. Anselm’s leading disciple, William of Champeaux, focused more on a philosophical approach to theological questions than on the glossing of Scripture. These systematic discussions of various issues of Christian doctrine, beginning with God and creation, and covering redemption, the Church and its sacraments, and the nature of Christian life, were similarly popular in monastic libraries in the twelfth century, signaling that monks were not automatically hostile to the systematic treatises emerging within the schools. These supplemented the experiential approach of meditative treatises, such as those written by John of Fécamp and Bernard of Clairvaux. The reformed monastic communities of the twelfth century, most famously that of Cîteaux, laid particular emphasis on attracting recruits not as oblates, as had been traditional in earlier centuries, but from those who had already been educated in the schools. While Bernard was not fundamentally opposed to the scholastic training that these novices had received, he sought to add a further dimension to their reading of Scripture. Some insight into this process is provided by the personal evolution of William of Champeaux, who

See the articles by Vones-​Liebenstein and by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume.

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had taught in the cathedral school of Notre-​Dame during the first decade of the twelfth century and then transferred his school to Saint-​Victor in 1111, establishing there a community of regular canons. After becoming bishop of Châlons in 1113, William seems to have moved away from the ideal of the regular canons. In 1115 he befriended and then ordained Bernard, then scarcely twenty-​f ive years old, as first abbot of Clairvaux. In his account of Bernard’s life, William of Saint-​Thierry describes the intimate friendship that developed between the leading scholastic of the day, now a bishop, and this young abbot, determined to transform spiritual life to the authenticity which his fellow Cistercians believed had largely been lost within conventional monasticism. William of Saint-​Thierry describes how he himself became a friend of Bernard at this time. Although a monk at Reims, he treasured the time he spent at Clairvaux, while recuperating from illness, for the intimacy with which they discussed the spiritual life: Therefore he talked to me about the Song of Songs in moral terms (moraliter), as far as the period of my illness allowed, putting aside the mysteries of Scripture, because this is what I wanted and asked for from him. Each day, whatever I  heard about this, I  put into writing, lest they escape from me, as far as God allowed and memory helped me. In this he expounded to me kindly and without envy, and expounded judgments from intelligence and meanings from experience, and strove to teach to someone inexperienced many things which are only learned through experience. Although I could not understand what he was communicating to me, he made me understand more than normal what I was lacking to understand these things.21

While the bride in the Song of Songs in the early medieval period had long been understood as Ecclesia or as the Virgin Mary (as by Honorius Augustodunensis), Bernard extended this by embracing Origen’s understanding of the bride as an emblem of both the Church and the soul. William of Saint-​Thierry’s comment about moral exegesis echoes the third and highest level of exegesis as expounded by Gregory the Great. While an allegorical reading focused on the bride as referring to the Church, a moral (or tropological, in the vocabulary of Jerome and Cassian) interpretation considered what the Song of Songs had to say about the experience of love. Bernard was certainly deeply versed in what Augustine had said in the Confessions about his experience of love. For Augustine, nothing could match the greatness of divine love, whose grace was fundamental for overcoming the weakness of the flesh. But, while he certainly knew the Song of Songs, Augustine preached only

Vita prima S. Bernardi I.12, PL 185, 259B; my translation.

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about its ecclesiological significance. Drawing on both Origen and Gregory the Great, Bernard recognized that there was a degree of potential parity in the love shared by the soul and the Word of God. In treatises like On Loving God, he sketched out a systematic vision of how the soul could be lifted away from its natural selfishness to loving others for their own sake, and loving God for his sake alone, and thus moving to a correct form of self-​love free from any form of ego. His theology combined Augustine’s teaching on grace with Gregory’s focus on penitence as promoting a return to God, through reflection on his Word. Bernard allowed monks to reflect on the meaning of Scripture not just through the prism of what had been said by the fathers of the Church, but through the prism of personal experience. In emphasizing experience, he set a precedent that both male and female spiritual writers (including Hildegard) could interpret each in their own way.

Conclusion While Bernard’s experiential focus was not the only theological approach adopted within twelfth-​century monasticism, it did become widely influential, not just within Cistercian circles. His writings were also revered within a more traditional monastic milieu, illustrated for example by the efforts of the monks of Anchin, under the direction of Goswin, to collect his writings. Yet it would be misleading to think that Bernard was the only voice shaping monastic thought in the period. The large number of scholastic writings preserved in monastic libraries across Europe in the twelfth century testifies to the importance that many monks attached to the pedagogical transformation promoted by the major urban schools of educational centers such as Laon and Paris.22 William of Saint-​Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux would be disturbed by the influence of more radical scholastic questioning of conventional categories, as promoted by Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers. The writings of these two great scholastics would continue to be preserved and read within a monastic environment, contributing to the plurality of theological perspectives that could be encountered within the cloister.

Bibliography Asiedu, F. B. A. “The Song of Songs and the Ascent of the Soul: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Language of Mysticism.” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 299–​317.

See the article by Clark in this volume.

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Monastic Theologies Berman, Constance. The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​ Century Europe. Philadelphia, PA, 2000. Casey, Michael. “Bernard and the Crisis at Morimond:  Did the Order Exist in 1124?” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38 (2003): 119–​75. DeGregorio, Scott, “Gregory’s Exegesis: Old and New Ways of Approaching the Scriptural Text.” In A Companion to Gregory the Great, edited by Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo, 269–​90. Leiden, 2013. de Lubac, Henri. Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 2 vols. Paris, 1959; Medieval Exegesis, trans. Mark Sebanc, 3 vols. Grand Rapids, MI, and Edinburgh, 1998–​2009. Gasper, Giles. Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance. London, 2004. Head, F. B. A. “‘Monastic’ and ‘Scholastic’ Theology: A Change of Paradigm?” In Paradigms in Medieval Thought Applications in Medieval Disciplines, edited by Nancy van Deusen and Alvin E. Ford, 127–​41. Lewiston, NY, 1990. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi. New York, 1961. Mancia, Lauren. “John of Fécamp and Affective Reform in Eleventh-​Century Normandy.” Anglo-​Norman Studies 37 (2015): 161–​79. Matter, E. Ann. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Philadelphia, PA, 1990. Mews, Constant J., ed. Listen, Daughter: The Speculum virginum and the Formation of Religious Women. New York, 2000. Van Engen, John. Rupert of Deutz. Berkeley, CA, 1983.

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Monastic Preaching and the Sermon in Medieval Latin Christendom to the Twelfth Century T i mothy M . B a ke r a n d B everly K ienz le

Introduction Christian preaching and the genre of the sermon developed both inside and outside the cloister, evolving as they circulated between secular and religious audiences. Whereas few monks (beyond the ones who became bishops) were ordained in the early centuries of Western monasticism, the difference between monks and secular clergy moved gradually to sharper definition in the eighth century, as more monks were ordained. Debates intensified in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries over the duty and authorization for preaching by monks, particularly outside the monastery. While Jerome (347–​420) had asserted that the duty of monks is “not to teach, but to weep,”1 Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075–​1129), addressing his extensive biblical commentaries to prelates and monk-​priests, argued forcefully that preaching stood first among their responsibilities. For Rupert, the impetus toward renewal and reform in the twelfth century rested upon correct and authorized preaching.2 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–​1153), alarmed over unauthorized preaching of monks and lay persons, stated that “it is not expedient for a monk to preach in public, nor is it seemly for a novice, nor proper for anyone unless he is expressly sent.” The temptation to preach publicly is thus a fox, evil disguised as good.3 Nonetheless, Gratian’s (d. 1144/​5) Decretum recognized that “monks chosen by the people, consecrated by the bishop with the consent of the abbot, have the right to the legitimate exercise of their



Jerome, Contra Vigilantium 15, PL 23, 367A. John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Los Angeles, 1983), 271–​3. 3 J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, eds., Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8  vols. (Rome, 1957–​77), 2:168. See also Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953): 276–​8; James Brundage, “St. Bernard and the Jurists,” in The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, ed. Michael Gervers (New York, 1992), 29. 1

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power.”4 Within traditional communities that followed the RB, and Cistercian and Carthusian monasteries, abbots and designated representatives preached to their monastic congregations. Female superiors, such as Hildegard of Bingen (1098–​1179), addressed their religious communities, presumably with permission of the abbot or superior. The statutes of the double monastery at Admont explain that a sister could preach to her community when the abbot or his representative could not be present.5 Abbots, some monks, and Hildegard herself preached outside their monasteries as well. Within the medieval monastic context, writers sometimes gave a broad interpretation for the act of preaching. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny (r. 1122–​56), describes a solitary monk as a silent preacher (taciturnus praedicator), since the work of monks in prayer was considered pastoral, as it aided the outside world. Guigo I of La Grande Chartreuse (1083–​1136) likewise compared copying manuscripts to preaching: In as much as we copy books, we make ourselves heralds of the truth, and we expect a reward from the Lord. For all those who through these books will have been corrected from error or will have progressed in the catholic truth, and for all those who will have repented from their sins and vices, or will have been enkindled with the desire for the heavenly fatherland.6

John L. Austin, pioneer of speech act theory, distinguished “locutionary” utterances as those that make a simple statement, “illocutionary” as those that seek to have an effect and invite a response, and “perlocutionary” or “performative” as those that achieve their effect.7 For contemporary scholars of medieval sermon studies, the terms “preaching” and “sermon” designate performative speech acts, from the informal to the formal, as well as a broad range of extant texts that were collected for various purposes.8 The verb “to preach” encompasses a number of Latin words. In the usage of patristic texts, the verbs praedicare and tractare conveyed the act of preaching, as did exponere, admonere, and exhortare. Nouns for “preaching” and “sermon” or “homily” are more numerous: sermo, homilia, expositio, narratio, admonitio, and exhortatio



Gratian, Decretum IIa pars, C.  xvi, q.  1, c.  19, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 1, ed. Emil Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879), cols. 765–​6; Dominique Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–​1150, trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 69–​70. 5 Alison Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004), 70–​3. 6 Guigo I, Coutumes de Chartreuse 28. 4, SC 313, 224. 7 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1955), 6–​13 and 116–​21. 8 Beverly M. Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record,” in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn A. Muessig (Leiden, 1998), 89–​124. 4

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figure among them. Collatio occurred in monastic usage and was later revived by the mendicants, who also employed concio. The terminology for sermons and preaching remained fluid in practice, even though the word sermo came to be used more frequently than its synonyms during the fourth century, and it strongly outnumbers the other terms by the twelfth century.9 Moreover, the terminology for preaching became the subject of theological parsing once the authority to preach was challenged, chiefly from the late twelfth century onward.10 Despite the fluidity of terminology found in medieval sources, scholars distinguish two predominant structural patterns in sermonic texts: the sermon and the homily. The structure of the sermon in this strict sense focuses on certain phrases, words, or images to develop its themes, while the structure of the homily moves through the exegesis of a passage sequentially, phrase by phrase. Distinctions may also be made based on the audience and the purpose (of the homily and the sermon) for some periods, but considerations of form allow for broader generalizations that reach across several centuries.11 Extant sermons and homilies appear within various types of collections and in varying phases of redaction. They were collected for liturgical manuscripts, including homiliaries, lectionaries, and sermonaries. Homiliaries generally provide patristic homilies in liturgical order, beginning with the season of Advent and ending with the Sundays after Pentecost. Such collections of homilies and sermons, frequently drawn from multiple authors, were often gathered for general monastic use, whether for preaching, reading aloud during meals, or as office readings during Matins. Office lectionaries include patristic homilies with the appropriate lessons and Gospel reading for the day; they were designed for reading aloud during the nocturns of Matins (RB 9.8).12





On this terminology, see Beverly M. Kienzle, “Introduction,” in The Sermon, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Turnhout, 2000), 161–​5. See also Christine Mohrmann, “Praedicare-​ tractare-​sermo,” in Études sur le latin des chrétiens, 4  vols. (Rome, 1961), 2:63–​72; Jean Longère, “Le vocabulaire de la prédication,” in La lexicographie du latin médiéval et ses rapports avec les recherches actuelles sur la civilisation du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1981), 303–​20; and Nicole Bériou, “Les sermons latins après 1200,” in Kienzle, Sermon,  382–​6. 10 Philippe Buc, “Vox clamantis in deserto? Pierre le Chantre et la prédication laïque,” Revue Mabillon n.s. 4 (1993): 5–​47; Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Preaching as a Touchstone of Orthodoxy and Dissent in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Sermon Studies 42 (1998): 18–​53. 11 Kienzle, “Introduction,” 161–​5; Thomas Hall, “The Early Medieval Sermon,” in Kienzle, The Sermon, 206–​12; and J. E. Cross, “Vernacular Sermons in Old English,” in Kienzle, The Sermon,  562–​5. 12 For readings used, see Réginald Grégoire, Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux. Analyse de manuscrits Grégoire (Spoleto, 19801980), 423–​486; Raymond Étaix, “Le lectionnaire de l’office à Cluny,” Recherches augustiniennes 11 (1976): 91–​159. 9

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“Sermonary” refers generally to a collection of sermons. The earliest such collections were compiled for use in Rome and in nearby cities, and these included sermons both for preaching to the laity and for use in a monastic setting. The principal authors within these collections included the bishops Augustine of Hippo, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Caesarius of Arles, and Maximus of Turin; Isidore, bishop of Seville, Bede, monk of Jarrow, and other ecclesiastical authors—​bishops, abbots, priors, and monks—​were added over time.13 Lisa Kaaren Baily, in her study of Eusebius Gallicanus’ sermon collections from fifth-​and sixth-​century Gaul, argues that collections of sermons, although some were intended for the laity and others for the monasteries, nevertheless “show us the development of a common vision of Christian community among people who did not see divisions as clearly as we do.”14 Finally, sermons could also be organized in exegetical groupings; especially well known are twelfth-​century Cistercian sermons on the Song of Songs. Such non-​liturgical sermon collections may have served for private reading, and they may or may not record the preacher’s actual delivery of the sermon.

Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Monastic preaching throughout the Middle Ages relied heavily on a foundation of late antique and early medieval patristic writings. Most of the authors of the latter had lived as monks for at least part of their lives. The many works of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) constituted a mainstay within monastic holdings, both for liturgical and private reading and for preaching. Augustine’s style, eloquent and rhythmic even when simple, greatly influenced later Christian writers, from his doctrinal treatises to the formidable On the City of God, from polemics against heresy to sermons and homiletic commentaries such the Tractates on 1 John and the Expositions on the Psalms, which established a pattern for later writers to engage in a fluid blend of the sermon and the commentary.15 Roughly contemporaneous with Augustine was John Cassian (d. 435), who founded two monasteries in Marseille, one for women and one for men (the Abbey of Saint-​Victor). His Conferences (Collationes), structured around questions and lengthy responses by several abbots, were often cited in subsequent monastic writing. Their oral character and exhortatory tone

Hall, “Early Medieval Sermon,” 205 and 218–​19. See Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity’s Quiet Success:  The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul (Notre Dame, IN, 2010), 106. 15 Mohrmann, “Praedicare-​tractare-​sermo,”  63–​72. 13

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made them readily adaptable for homiletic discourse. Cassiodorus (d. c. 583), who was influential on a lesser scale, elaborated a progressive program for sacred and secular reading in his Institutions, with an aim to instill the discipline and knowledge necessary for being a monk. His program was easily adapted for works that offer advice on preparation for preachers. In terms of form and function, Bishop Caesarius of Arles (d.  542) provided a wealth of sermons that were used as models for centuries to come and that appear frequently as a source for early medieval homiliaries and for Carolingian sermons. The great bishop, who focused on sermons so intently that his friends reported that he could be heard preaching in his sleep, advocated for regular preaching to the laity.16 Bishops, priests and deacons were to preach in everyday language, as he states, “No eloquence or great memory is sought … a simple admonition in ordinary language is necessary.” Any clergyman lacking the skill to compose his own sermons was advised to read aloud sermons from the fathers of the Church.17 Caesarius’ agenda for education and reform included the clergy as well as the laity, and his sermons were heard and received by a variety of audiences, lay, clerical, and monastic. Monks studied and copied these texts, and sent their copies to other monasteries, sometimes adapting the texts for monastic listeners.18 Caesarius concluded 206 of the 236 Sermones ad populos with a benediction and established this as practice for other preachers. Thomas Amos has argued that the bishop employed the closing of his sermon as a vehicle for teaching fundamental Christological doctrine in order to combat the heresy of Arianism, which had spread through southeastern Gaul.19 Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 540) established models for Western monastic practice, including the abbot’s duty to teach and preach (RB 2).20 His biography in Book II of Gregory the Great’s (r. 590–​604) Dialogues further illustrates an interconnection between bishops and monks that figures significantly in the authorship and audience of sermons from the sixth century into the early Middle Ages. Gregory resigned his post as Prefect of Rome around 575 in order to found monasteries on his estates both in Sicily and in Rome on the

Beverly Mayne Kienzle and David L. D’Avray, “Sermons,” in Medieval Latin:  An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Frank A.  C. Mantello and George Rigg (Washington, DC, 1996), 659–​69. 17 Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 1, in Caesarius of Arles: Sermons, trans. Mary M. Muller, vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 1956) 10, 14, 15, and 16. For the Latin original, see CCSL 103–​104. 18 See Hall, “Early Medieval Sermon,” 231–​2. 19 Thomas L. Amos, “Caesarius of Arles, the Medieval Sermon and Orthodoxy,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 35 (1982): 11–​20. 20 On the RB, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in volume 1. 16

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Caelian Hill, where, at the Monastery of St. Andrew, he himself adopted the monastic life. As papal nuncio to Pelagius II in Constantinople (579–​85), Gregory composed the Moralia in Iob for his monastic brothers. Once elected bishop of Rome in 590, he continued to support the spread of Christian monasticism, composing the Life of St. Benedict (Book II of the Dialogues) in 594 and sending missionary monks to England in 597. During his papacy, Gregory preached at churches in and around Rome before a diverse urban audience and established guidelines for preaching to varied demographics in his Regula pastoralis, a handbook on pastoral life and preaching. Gregory put his exegetical principles and his concern for a range of audiences into practice in his Forty Homilies on the Gospels, delivered between 590 and 593.21 Raymond Étaix brought to the fore three categories of homily implicit in this collection. The first group comprises those that Gregory composed (writing them out to some degree beforehand) and read aloud to a notary, who took them down. They were then read by a secretary to the people. Gregory reviewed and revised all of the homilies in this first collection. The second group includes homilies delivered by Gregory and taken down by stenographers. The third group consists of three homilies that were written based on the Moralia and the Regula pastoralis and then read by Gregory himself.22 An indication of how Gregory revised the homilies can be seen in Troyes MS 504 of the Regula pastoralis. Scholars, beginning with Jean Mabillon, recognized that the manuscript came from Gregory’s scriptorium. Mabillon argued that it was written under Gregory’s direct supervision and may represent an autograph. Richard W. Clement supports that position in his careful examination of frequent corrections on the manuscript that were probably indicated by Gregory personally.23 In the Forty Homilies, Gregory offers something for all of his hearers—​from numerology, etymology, and allegory to entertaining stories. Moreover, he consistently emphasizes the moral and practical message of the Gospels and, in that, his influence on medieval monastic preaching proved long-​lasting. In contrast to his more generalized homilies to a lay population, Gregory delivered the Homilies on Ezekiel between 593 and 594 to monks within his own community and perhaps also to monks at neighboring monasteries.24 Eight

Charles Morel, “Introduction,” in Gregory the Great, Homélies sur Ézéchiel, ed. and trans. Charles Morel, SC 327, 13. 22 Gregory the Great, Homiliae in euangelia, ed. R. Étaix, CCSL 141, ix–​x. 23 Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 504; Richard W. Clement, “Two Contemporary Gregorian Editions of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis in Troyes MS 504,” Scriptorium 39 (1985): 89–​97. 24 Morel, “Introduction,” 13. 21

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years later, at the request of his former brothers, he worked through the schedas (scraps of parchment used for note-​taking) written by his notary and edited two volumes of homilies, which were presented to Bishop Marinianus of Ravenna.25 Taken together, Gregory’s works established decisive patterns for liturgical preaching and exegetical commentary in sermon form. The use of the homiletic genre for biblical commentary was carried forward by Bede (d. 735), who was a great admirer of Gregory. Among Bede’s numerous works are two collections of homilies that are principally exegetical commentaries and clearly directed, if not preached, to a monastic audience.26 Bede’s choice of Gospel pericopes (passages) for commentary in the homilies reveals his intention to interpret passages that Gregory did not include in his Forty Homilies on the Gospels.27

The Carolingian Period Scholars who study the history of preaching from the Carolingian period to the twelfth century focus on collections (homiliaries, lectionaries, and sermonaries) as the principal vehicles for the transmission of sermons. Collections of sermons served for liturgical and refectory reading and also found their way into private reading. Benedict had stipulated that patristic texts were to be read along with Scripture during the night office (RB 9.8). That regulation spurred the growth of patristic homiliaries.28 Thus monasteries played a central role in composing homiletic texts that served not only their own internal purposes but also the needs of prelates who advocated and practiced preaching to the laity. The growth of collections designed for public preaching flourished following the Admonitio generalis (789), with its guidelines for providing sermons that both conveyed sound doctrine and addressed various groups in society.29 Although this legislation was aimed primarily at public preaching, monks such as Hrabanus Maurus (780–​856) provided model texts necessary for such an endeavor. Around the same period, Charlemagne (r. 768–​814) charged



Hall, “Early Medieval Sermon,” 234. On whether or not Bede ever preached his sermons, see Lawrence Martin, “Introduction,” in Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, Book One: Advent to Lent, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991), xiii–​xiv. See further in Andreas van der Walt, “The Homiliary of the Venerable Bede and Early Medieval Preaching” (PhD diss., University of London, 1980). 27 Martin, “Introduction,” xv–​xvii. 28 Hall, “Early Medieval Sermon,” 234. 29 Ibid., 221. See also the articles by Kramer and Contreni in volume 1. 25

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another monk, Paul the Deacon (d. c. 799), with compiling a homiliary for widespread use; regional variations of this collection and others sometimes yield evidence of additions and innovations from the local community. Thomas Amos’s study of Carolingian preaching estimates that 970 original sermons from the years 750–​950 remain extant.30 The works of Hrabanus Maurus demonstrate ongoing connections between monastic and public preaching. Hrabanus began his ecclesiastical career as a monk at the monastery of Fulda, but he moved to the monastery of Saint-​Martin of Tours during the abbacy of Alcuin. He later returned to Fulda as abbot, before he was named archbishop of Mainz in 847. During his tenure as archbishop (847–​55), Hrabanus composed 163 Homilies on the Gospels and Epistles, a collection compiled in 854–​5, not only for the personal edification of Emperor Lothar I (r. 817–​55) but also for public reading. While at Fulda, Hrabanus had written seventy Homilies for Major Feast Days, and Also on Virtues, a collection ad praedicandum populo (for preaching to the people) addressed to Archbishop Haistulf of Mainz (814–​26). Hrabanus’ comment that the homilies could serve “either for spiritual reading or for preaching” (ad legendum vel ad praedicandum) illustrates well the multiple uses of sermon literature, especially but not exclusively in the monastic world.31

Cluny and Monastic Preaching in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries The foundation of Cluny in 910 gave a major impetus to the growth of Western monasticism. The development of liturgical preaching at Cluny was emphasized by abbots Odo (d. 942), Odilo (d. 1049), and Peter the Venerable, who added sermons to the Cluniac lectionary in order to promote the cults of saints: for example, Odo added one for the feast of St. Benedict; Odilo added a sermon for the feast of Maiolus (his predecessor as abbot from 954 to 994);32 and Peter the Venerable added two sermons for the feasts of St. Marcellus (pope, martyred in 308) and another for the feast of the Transfiguration.33 This lectionary, while not required to be uniform in all Cluniac houses, was influential for spreading theological ideas and implicit models for preaching from Cluny through wider

Thomas L. Amos, “The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1983); Hall, “Early Medieval Sermon,” 234. 31 Hrabanus Maurus, Homiliae de festis praecipuis, PL 110, 10. 32 Jean Longère, La prédication médiévale (Paris, 1983), 54–​63. 33 Giles Constable, “ Petri Venerabilis, sermones tres,” Revue bénédictine 64 (1954): 224–​72. See also Catherine Bonnin-​Magne, “Le sanctoral clunisien (Xe–​XVe siècles)” (PhD diss., Université de Paris I, 2005).

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monastic circles. During the second half of the eleventh century, chiefly under Abbot Hugh of Semur (r. 1049–​1109), nearly two thousand monasteries either imitated the Cluniac way of life or joined the network of Cluniac priories.34 A set of fifty-​three collationes (conversations or talks), attributed to Abbot Odo of Cluny (924–​42),35 probably represents written versions of the informal sermons that took place twice a day in the cloister or in the chapter house, in the morning, before the manual work began, and again in the evening, when the work was over.36 These are outgrowths of oral commentary, written down when the community had the resources to do so. The collationes of Odo constitute a rich source of monastic theology and spirituality, weaving together numerous patristic sources with the everyday concerns of monastic life. The collatio, rooted in ancient monastic sayings and collected formally in John Cassian’s Collationes patrum, was later adopted as a regular practice of evening sermons by the mendicant orders.37 An additional five sermons were ascribed to Odo. The most famous, the first text for the office of Mary Magdalene, was unknown at Cluny and was probably compiled at Vézelay, where it was adapted into twelve readings for the office.38 Several sermons were attributed to Odilo: an Assumption sermon, once erroneously attributed to Idlephonsus of Toledo, has been restored to him.39 Peter the Venerable’s two sermons on Marcellus reflect the promotion of the cult of the saints and their relics, as well as discussions on the theology of the resurrectional body.40 Peter’s Transfiguration sermon, marking the introduction of the feast into the liturgical cycle at Cluny, explains the role of the Transfiguration in Cluniac theology and its reflection in architecture.41 His Sermon in Praise of the Lord’s Sepulcher lauds crusaders and views the Sepulcher as the center of the world, justifying the undertaking of the crusade to protect the holy sites.42 This sermon joins Peter’s treatise Contra Petrobrusianos

On the Ecclesia cluniacensis, see Dietrich W. Poeck, Cluniacensis ecclesia. Der cluniacensische Klosterverband (10.–​12. Jahrhundert) (Munich, 1998), 221–​34; and Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion, 31–​3 and 55–​68. 35 See Isabelle Rosé, Construire une société seigneuriale. Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–​milieu du Xe siècle) (Turnhout, 2008). 36 Odo of Cluny, Sermones quinque, PL 133, 709–​52. 37 M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study”: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto, 1998), 195. 38 Dominique Iogna-​ Prat, “La Madeleine du Sermo in veneratione Sanctae Mariae Magdalenae attribué à Odon de Cluny,” MEFRM 104 (1992): 37–​70. 39 Odilo of Cluny, Sermones 12, PL 142, 1023–​8. Eligius Dekkers, Clavis patrum latinorum 1257 (Turnhout, 1995), 420. 40 Iogna-​Prat, Order and Exclusion, 340. 41 Constable, “Petri Venerabilis, sermones tres,” 218. 42 Ibid., 224–​53. 34

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(c. 1139) in its defense of the cross against Peter of Bruys and his followers. Although Peter the Venerable’s extant sermons seem to be few, his letters and some of his other works, especially De miraculis, show a probable interest in providing materia praedicabilis. Extant sermons from monastic communities other than Cluny before the twelfth century are few. A collection of informal sermons from the turn of the century from Archbishop (and ex-​monk) Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) survives. These talks, commonly called dicta, were taken down by Alexander, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, at some time between 1100 and 1109.43 Alexander uses the term sententiola to refer to Anselm’s talks delivered in commune and recorded ad aedificationem. He alludes to others that were borrowed or stolen from Anselm’s work.44 Julien of Vézelay’s (1080/​ 90–​ 1165) two-​ volume collection of sermons includes chapter talks that he gave and that his abbot asked him to write down, and glimpses of sermon-​like teaching to oblates.45 Peter of Celle’s (c. 1115–​1182) rich collection of ninety-​six sermons covers the liturgical year.46 Other monastic sermons from this period will undoubtedly emerge as scholars work through the thousands of unidentified texts in manuscripts. Schneyer’s Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters lists more than seven hundred original extant sermons for the Carolingian period (750–​950) alone that remain to be edited.47

Monastic Preaching before 1200 Preaching was central to the practices of the monastic community. The sermon preached in chapter was, as Chrysogonus Waddell states, “a liturgical act, with the preacher breaking the bread received from Christ, ever present and acting through his word.”48 The RB or another text in its place was read in chapter, usually after Prime, and was followed by a commentary by the abbot or another monk designated by the abbot. The Cistercians held a parallel

Anselm of Canterbury, Memorials of St. Anselm, ed. Richard Southern and F. S. Schmitt (London, 1969), 107–​95. 44 Ibid., 107. 45 Julien of Vézelay, Sermons, ed. and trans. Damien Vorreux, vol. I, SC 192, 42. Sermo 13 in the same volume (263–​82) relates the five declensions to the five ways to avoid evil. 46 Peter of Celle, Sermones, PL 202, 637–​926; and Gerard de Martel, “Recherches sur les manuscrits des sermons de Pierre de Celle,” Scriptorium 33 (1979): 3–​16. 47 Johannes B. Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters, für die Zeit von 1150–​1350, 11 vols. (Münster, 1969–​90). 48 Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Liturgical Dimension of Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Preaching,” in Muessig, Medieval Monastic Preaching, 337. 43

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chapter for the lay brothers each week, where the abbot or his designate also spoke.49 Cistercians delivered formal sermons to the community on designated major liturgical feasts, namely the First Sunday of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul, and the Dedication, as well as the Marian feasts of Purification, Annunciation, Nativity, and Assumption. Most extant sermons by major Cistercian writers correspond to those feasts. On those occasions, and on others at the abbot’s discretion, the lay brothers joined the monks if the distance between grange and monastery permitted.50 The sermon genre also provided the Cistercians with texts to read both for private meditation and for public reading in the refectory and in the cloister before Compline.51 The readings for the nocturns of Matins included sermons, which were primarily patristic. Moreover, the sermon genre was employed for correspondence when churchmen exchanged letters that offered interpretations of Scripture. For example, a sermo epistolaris allows us to trace the shift toward Mariological exegesis across the English Channel. A homily addressed from Ralph d’Escures (bishop of Rochester 1108–​14, archbishop of Canterbury 1114–​22) to William (abbot of Fécamp, c.  1078–​1107) and Arnulf (abbot of Saint-​Martin of Troarn, c. 1088–​1112), probably written between 1088 and 1107, demonstrates and justifies the Mariological interpretation of Luke 10:38.52 The Cistercians distinguished themselves through composing numerous sets of exegetical sermons; in this, they continued the work of their renowned abbot Bernard of Clairvaux in his interpretation of the Song of Songs. Close to 400 sermons by the “mellifluous doctor” are extant, including the 86 on the Song of Songs, which illustrate the abbot’s mystical theology and include his denunciations of heresy; 128 liturgical sermons, many of which Bernard revised multiple times; 125 On Various Passages; 17 on He Who Dwells (Ps. 90); and 4 on The Annunciation. Additionally, Bernard composed seven parables (allegorical tales based on Scripture but illustrating a talent for story-​telling) and three series of Sententiae, or brief compositions similar to outlines, with



On lay brothers, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume. Usus conversorum 11.2 and 11.6, in Cistercian Lay Brothers:  Twelfth-​Century Usages with Related Texts, ed. Chrysogonus Waddell (Brecht, 2000), 69; Danièle Choisselet and Placide Vernet, eds., Les ‘Ecclesiastica officia’ cisterciens du XIIème siècle. Texte latin selon les manuscrits étudiés de Trente 1711, Ljubljana 31 et Dijon 114. Version française, annexe liturgique, notes, index et tables (Reiningue, 1989), 189–​90. 51 Waddell, “Liturgical Dimension of Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Preaching,” 342. 52 Beverly M. Kienzle, “Exegesis on Luke 10:38 at the Turn of the Twelfth Century: Worcester MS F94, fol. 1r–​2r. A Tribute to James E. Cross,” Medieval Sermon Studies 40 (1997): 22–​8.

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a simple, numerical structure.53 Other Cistercians followed suit. Gilbert of Hoyland (d. 1172) and John of Ford (d. 1214) continued commenting on the Song where Bernard left off. Geoffrey of Auxerre (d. after 1188) wrote sermons on the Book of Revelation, and Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) composed liturgical sermons as well as homilies on the burdens enumerated in Isaiah. Isaac of Stella (c. 1100–​1169) and Guerric of Igny (d. 1157) composed other collections of liturgical sermons (now edited), while Adam of Perseigne (d. 1221) and Amadeus of Lausanne (d. 1159) wrote Marian sermons.54 Although twelfth-​century non-​Cistercian sermons have not been studied or translated as much as those of the Cistercians,55 they offer a view of women’s preaching not available from female Cistercian communities. A  remarkable collection of fifty-​eight Homilies on the Gospels by Hildegard of Bingen expounds twenty-​seven Gospel pericopes—​selections used for the liturgy on Sundays and feast days—​with dramatic narratives in parallel to the Scripture. Hildegard’s homilies emphasize the moral sense of Scripture, as well as the dramatic recounting of collective salvation history and the individual struggle of the soul. She lends voices to Adam, to other biblical characters, to the angels, to Jesus, and even to God. The homilies are preserved in the so-​called Riesenkodex (Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek 2), which includes all of Hildegard’s writings considered as “inspired,” and in two later manuscripts.56 Sermon collections from Admont hold promise for the study of women’s contributions to preaching at double monasteries, as well as for the history of monastic preaching and exegesis.57 The sermons, first edited in 1725 by Bernhard Pez, are now considered the work of Irimbert, abbot from 1172 to 1177 and younger brother of Gottfried the abbot. The nuns of Admont could preach in their chapter meeting on feast days when the abbot or his deputy was unable to be present, and they probably had a role in the composition of some of Irimbert’s sermons, as they assisted him with recording the texts.58



Beverly M. Kienzle, “The Monastic Sermon,” in Kienzle, Sermon,  302–​5. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Preaching,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Bruun (Cambridge, 2013), 254–​7. 55 See Jean Leclercq, “Prédicateurs bénédictins aux XIème et XIIème siècles,” Revue Mabillon 33 (1943): 48–​73, with excerpts from the sermons of Thomas of Morigny (1099–​ 1144), William of Flay, and William of Merlehaut. 56 Hildegard of Bingen, Expositiones euangeliorum, ed. Beverly M.  Kienzle and Carolyn A. Muessig, in Hildegardis Bingensis Opera minora, ed. Peter Dronke et al., CCCM 226, 185–​333. See also, on the manuscripts, Hildegard of Bingen, Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Beverly M. Kienzle (Trappist, KY, 2011), 144–​69; and, for the first full study of Hildegard’s Expositiones, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Hildegard of Bingen and Her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries (Turnhout, 2009). 57 On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 58 Beach, Women as Scribes,  68–​74. 53

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Alison Beach points out the evidence for interaction between Irimbert and the nuns in the four extant manuscripts of the abbot’s commentaries on Ruth. Beach argues that the sisters of Admont should be accorded a significant role in authorship, and she notes that sermon manuscripts were kept within the nuns’ community.59 The Sermones of the Vallombrosan abbess Umiltà of Faenza (1226–​1310) were recorded by her sisters and memorialized in the marvelous altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti (d. 1348). First a nun at the monastery of St. Perpetua, Umiltà became a recluse at St. Apollinaris in Faenza, but she reportedly preached to visitors from her cell. She departed to become abbess at Santa Maria Novella della Malta in 1266; finally, in 1282, she founded a monastery in Florence dedicated to St. John the Evangelist. Several of Umiltà’s sermones resemble prayers or meditations; others deal with doctrine.60 Within the sermones, she also composed laude, or poems of praise to the Virgin Mary. In a lauda included in Sermo IX, she states that she intended her prayers (preghiere/​preces) for an audience of listeners or readers, when she asks the Virgin Mary to have mercy “upon those who read her book in honor of the Virgin, those who listen to it read, and those who are devoted to her.”61 Umiltà de Faenza’s sermons were translated from Latin into the vernacular and vice versa. This fluidity in language shows the increasing use of the vernacular, challenging the assumption that a twelfth-​century monastic sermon was delivered to a monastic audience in Latin but that monks preaching to the lay brothers or outside the monastery employed the vernacular.62 In fact, some of the Latin sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux appear with the notation “delivered completely in French,” and one of Hélinand of Froidmont’s (d. after 1229)  sermons is rubricated “This entire sermon was delivered in French.”63 Therefore, the audience does not seem to have been the sole determinant of the language used for the written transmission of preaching.



Alison I. Beach, “Listening for the Voices of Admont’s Twelfth-​Century Nuns,” in Voices in Dialogue:  Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-​Fulton (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), 188–​9; Alison I. Beach, “The Multiform Grace of the Holy Spirit: Salvation History and the Book of Ruth at Twelfth-​Century Admont,” in Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-​Century Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach (Turnhout, 2007), 125–​37. 60 Umiltà of Faenza, Sermones, ed. Adele Simonetti (Florence, 2005), 356–​9. 61 Ibid., 186. 62 See A.  Hoste, “Introduction,” in Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 1, ed. Anselm Hoste, trans. Gaston Salet, SC 130, 34. 63 J. Leclercq, “Recherches sur les sermons sur les Cantiques de S.  Bernard,” Revue bénédictine 65 (1955): 82; and Hélinand of Froidmont, Sermones, PL 212, 543. 59

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Monastic preaching destined for a monastic audience was primarily inward-​ looking and experiential. Often it relates the observance of the RB to spiritual progress. The sermon calls the audience to the contemplation that leads to the purification of heart and life necessary for meriting a reward in heaven. Meditation on the heavenly Jerusalem is the path to final ascent there. Neglect of the rule jeopardizes that journey. Hence, obedience, humility, charity, and perseverance stand out as key themes of monastic preaching, just as they occupy a central role in the RB. At times preachers complain about the observance of the RB. The rigorous monastic routine left some monks nodding over the books they read in the cloister, snoring during the reading in the oratory, and sleeping during chapter talks.64 Hildegard of Bingen often preached to her nuns about obedience but does not reproach any particular behavior. Jean Leclercq’s study of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Circumcision shows that Bernard weeded out references to community life as he made revisions.65 The great abbot aimed to leave a legacy of well-​composed texts, suitable for meditation and for the wide audience that increasingly requested his writings, and not only destined for cenobitic monks. Monastic sermons incorporate liturgical references—​ readings, hymns, and, occasionally, comments upon ritual practices. The Admont sermons contain some precise references to the liturgy, the reading of the day, or the mass. Homily 59 refers to the daily excellence of the mass (hodierna missae excellentia), praises singing, and concludes with a direct exhortation to the brothers and a doxology, a short hymn of praise (e.g. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit …”).66 Hélinand of Froidmont’s second Palm Sunday sermon gives a tour of the monastery buildings as the procession moved around the grounds.67 Although written monastic sermons rarely record any details on the preacher’s life or on happenings in the outside world, extant examples are not totally devoid of such comments. Bernard of Clairvaux explains that “speaking” to the monks is his labor because he cannot do manual work with them.68 Isaac of Stella speaks of the famous teachers to whom he and others flocked; he likely left England to study in France, perhaps under Abelard



Isaac of Stella, Sermons 14, vol. 1, 274. J. Leclercq, Recueil d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits (Rome, 1962), 55–​62. Godfrey of Admont, Hom. Dominic. LIX, PL 174, 399B and 401B. 67 Hélinand of Froidmont, Sermones, 559–​60. 68 Leclercq et al., Sancti Bernardi Opera, 4:447. 64

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(d. 1142), and then resided in Chartres, where he himself later taught.69 Isaac also mentions his forced exile on the island of Ré following Henry II’s (r. 1154–​89) reprisals against Cistercians who supported Thomas of Canterbury (Becket; d. 1170).70 In addition, Isaac refers to Bernard of Clairvaux as having died and been canonized, which allows the sermon to be assigned an approximate date.71 Finally, Isaac criticizes the new militia—​possibly the Knights of Calatrava, founded in 1157—​calling it a “new monstrosity” (monstrum novum) for trying to convert by force, and proclaims that Christians who die in the slaughter are martyrs.72 John of Ford’s Sermon Forty-​One on the Song of Songs laments the Interdict imposed on England on 23 March 1208 (following the refusal of King John (r. 1199–​1216) to recognize the pope’s candidate, Stephen Langton, as archbishop of Canterbury). John’s remark that the people have been without the sacraments for almost two years allows for dating the sermon to early 1210.73 Moreover, in Sermon Seventy-​Six, John describes the deprivations that his monastery experienced when it was forced to sell everything of value in order to pay the fines imposed by King John in 1208.74 Hélinand of Froidmont recounts his conversion, and in another sermon he mentions being in Paris as a young man.75 Monastic preachers, when called upon by an ecclesiastical superior, addressed some audiences beyond the monastery.76 Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade at Vézelay in March 1146; he also laid the theological foundations for crusading and the military orders in De laude novae militiae, written in the late 1120s, and some of his letters reveal his crusading message.77 It is intriguing, therefore, that none of his extant sermons concern the crusades. Disappointed in the behavior of the crusaders, Bernard himself

Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 3, ed. Anselm Hoste and Gaetano Raciti, trans. Gaston Salet, SC 339, 146. See also Hoste, “Introduction,” 10–​13. 70 Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 3, 294–​302; and Anselm Hoste, “Notes complémentaires,” in ibid., 316–​19. 71 See Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 3, 235; Hoste, “Notes complémentaires,” 313. 72 Isaac of Stella, Sermons, ed. Anselm Hoste and trans. Gaston Sachet, vol. 2, SC 207, 299; Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 3, 158–​60, and Hoste, “Notes complémentaires,” 310–​11. 73 John of Ford, Super Extremam Partem –​Cantici Canticorum –​Sermones CXX, 2 vols., ed. Edmund Mikkers and Hilary Costello, CCCM 17–​18, 1:298–​304. 74 Ibid., 2:526–​34. 75 Hélinand of Froidmont, Sermones, 592–​4. A. T. Thayer, “Judith and Mary: Hélinand’s Sermon for the Assumption,” in Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse et al. (Louvain-​la-​Neuve, 1998),  63–​76. 76 Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land 1096–​1270 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), esp. 40–​59, 65–​71, and 71–​8; Beverly M. Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade, 1145–​1229: Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard (Woodbridge, 2001). 77 Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953): 245–​7.

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might not have wanted to preserve them. While Bernard refused to lead the Third Crusade, Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury and former abbot of Ford, took the cross and died at Acre in 1190. Baldwin preached in England and Wales and often carried a cross on his tour (1188–​90). His extant sermon on the Cross resembles a theological treatise rather than the sort of recruitment sermon he probably preached on tour.78 Several Cistercians preached the Fourth Crusade and Abbot Guy of Vaux-​ de-​Cernay (d. 1225) and a few others accompanied the crusaders. Innocent III (r. 1198–​1216) also called on the Cistercians to support missionary activity in Prussia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics, and to combat heresy. The Cistercians were deeply involved in southern France at the time of the Church’s fight against Cathars, as preachers and legates, bishops and negotiators. Hélinand of Froidmont delivered sermons at the 1229 synod following the conclusion of the Albigensian Crusade.79 His sermons reflect the movement from the contemplative spirituality of the Cistercians to the active life of the friars. Most sermons delivered as part of preaching missions, however, do not survive. One may wonder why.80 While recording such sermons in the field might have been difficult, once the Cistercians withdrew from crusade recruitment, some preachers may not have wanted their sermons remembered. Scholars must rely on other texts such as chronicles and letters, where available, to surmise what had been the content of the sermons. Cistercians’ involvement in matters extra muros, both in their preaching missions and in their involvement with the rising university system, does not represent either an immediate or a holistic shift from a “monastic” to a “scholastic” spirituality.81 Hélinand of Froidmont delivered sermons at the University of Toulouse’s opening ceremonies in 1229. He warns in those sermons, however, of the potential danger of scholasticism: the pursuit of knowledge uncoupled from the pursuit of virtue.82 Likewise, the little-​studied Foigny sermon collection contains forty-​nine sermons and fifty-​six collationes preached by about twenty monks of this Cistercian abbey between c.  1210 and c. 1270. These sermons maintain a characteristically monastic spirituality while utilizing some scholastic techniques within their distinctive monastic

D. N. Bell and J. P. Freeland, “The Sermons on Obedience and the Cross by Baldwin of Forde,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 29 (1994): 241–​90. 79 See Beverly M. Kienzle, “Hélinand de Froidmont et la prédication cistercienne dans le Midi,” in La prédication en Pays d’oc (XIIème–​début XVème siècle) (Toulouse, 1997), 37–​67. 80 See Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade, 10–​11, 73–​4, 103–​6, 137–​8, and 213–​14. 81 For a fuller discussion of monastic spirituality and theology, see the article by Mews in this volume. On monks and universities, see the article by Clark in this volume. 82 See Kienzle, “Hélinand de Froidmont,” 37–​67. 78

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enterprise.83 Thus, even as monastic sermons, such as those of Hélinand, reflect the movement from the contemplative spirituality of the Cistercians to the active life of the friars at the beginning of the thirteenth century, they portray in this shift a certain degree of ambivalence among the cloistered orders. Ambivalence toward scholasticism notwithstanding, Hélinand’s sermons provide evidence of the growing use of tools made popular by the universities for organizing material such as divisions and distinctiones, alphabetical orderings of the allegorical meanings of scriptural words. Cistercians and others developed aids to study and a reference system for designating portions of the text. These study aids were clearly composed to facilitate the writing and preaching of sermons, and the sermon from around 1200 onward demonstrates in form and content the growing influence of the university over life inside and outside the cloister.84 The study of monastic sermons contributes significantly to understanding the history of medieval Western Christendom and to recognizing the role that monastic communities played within that broader context. Investigating the techniques and products of preaching provides a window through which one may view the pressing theological and social issues of the day. Additionally, by applying hermeneutic strategies developed within the disciplines of literary theory and rhetoric, contemporary scholars have gained valuable insights into medieval methods for interpreting Scripture and for communicating doctrine to a variety of audiences. Furthermore, since advances in scholarship are due largely to sustained efforts to edit a vast quantity of unedited texts sealed away in manuscripts worldwide, the field of sermon studies has helped to expand the corpus of primary source material available to medievalists. Nevertheless, as Schneyer’s Repertorium indicates, thousands of sermons lie untouched and unexamined. Further, a real and growing need persists for deeper investigation into the relationship between biblical exegesis and medieval perceptions of history (an inquiry that lies within the purview of intellectual history). Studies focused on the connection between community and

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Jean-​Baptiste de Lancy, Historia fusniacensis coenobii, ordinis cisterciencis, necnon collationes quorumdam monachorum ejusdem loci (Bona-​Fonte, 1671), 1. Richard H. Rouse, “Cistercian Aids to Study in the Thirteenth Century,” in Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 2, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt (Kalamazoo, MI, 1976), 123–​ 34; Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “Statim invenire:  Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,” in Authentic Witnesses:  Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse (Notre Dame, IN, 1991), 191–​220. See also the article by Roest in this volume.

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“text” continue to appear, and scholars worldwide continue to examine and to present unstudied primary source material. As the other chapters of these two volumes demonstrate, discussions about the role of monastic women and about monastic influences outside the cloister provide new insights into ancient institutions. Here we have underscored the preacher’s role as a bridge connecting secular and regular worlds and uniting both to the narrative of Christian salvation history.

Bibliography Beach, Alison. Women as Scribes:  Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria. Cambridge, 2004. Étaix, Raymond. “Le lectionnaire de l’office à Cluny.” Recherches augustiniennes 11 (1976): 91–​159. Grégoire, Réginald. Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux. Analyse de manuscrits. Spoleto, 1980. Hall, Thomas. “The Early Medieval Sermon.” In Kienzle, The Sermon, 203–​69. Hamesse, Jacqueline et  al., eds. Medieval Sermons and Society:  Cloister, City, University. Louvain-​la-​Neuve,  1998. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. “La Madeleine du Sermo in veneratione Sanctae Mariae Magdalenae attribué à Odon de Cluny.” MEFRM 104 (1992): 37–​70.   Order and Exclusion:  Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150, trans. Graham Robert Edwards. Ithaca, NY, 2002. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne. Hildegard of Bingen and Her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries. Turnhout, 2009.   “Medieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record.” In Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn A. Muessig, 89–124. Leiden, 2002.   “Preaching.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, edited by Mette Bruun, 245–57. Cambridge, 2013.   “Preaching as a Touchstone of Orthodoxy and Dissent in the Middle Ages.” Medieval Sermon Studies 42 (1998): 18–53.  ed. The Sermon. Turnhout, 2000. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, and David L. D’Avray. “Sermons.” In Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, edited by Frank A. C. Mantello and George Rigg, 659–​69. Washington, DC, 1996. Longère, Jean. La prédication médiévale. Paris, 1983. Mohrmann, Christine. “Praedicare-​tractare-​sermo.” In Études sur le latin des chrétiens, 4 vols., 2:63–​72. Rome, 1961–​77. Muessig, Carolyn A., ed. Medieval Monastic Preaching. Leiden, 1998. Rosé, Isabelle. Construire une société seigneuriale. Itinéraire et ecclésiologie de l’abbé Odon de Cluny (fin du IXe–​milieu du Xe siècle). Turnhout, 2008. Rouse, Mary A., and Richard H. Rouse. “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page.” In Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, edited by Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, 191–​220. Notre Dame, IN, 1991.

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The Mass in Monastic Practice: Nuns and Ordained Monks, c. 400–​1200 Fiona J. G riffiths The earliest monasteries were founded in fourth-​century Egypt, Syria, and Palestine as communities of lay men and women, who withdrew to the desert to pursue lives of asceticism and devotion to God.1 Inspired by the command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), early monks and nuns devoted themselves to prayer and the chanting of the Psalms, whether in their cells (in eremitic communities) or in groups (in cenobitic communities). Early monastic liturgy almost certainly drew on the traditions of urban Christian churches, which had begun to develop public prayer rituals following the conversion of Constantine in 312 and the ensuing legalization of Christianity. Evidence for at least six of the eight hours of the medieval divine office can be found in Eastern sources as early as the fourth century.2 Prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, and the recitation of the Psalms formed the core of early monastic practice. Celebration of the mass—​an essential part of monastic life during the high Middle Ages—​does not feature prominently in these early sources. When various forms of monasticism were carried west in the early fifth century, the cycle of daily prayers went too. Early Latin rules—​like the Rule of the Master (RM, c. 500/​525) and the rules of Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) and Aurelianus of Arles (d. 551)—​devote attention in various measure to questions relating to the evolving office, specifying the number and order of the psalms, the frequency of prayer within the community, and the location of prayer within the monastic space.3 While these rules differ in the detail they provide concerning the office, they are consistent in their relative inattention to



See the articles by Giorda and by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in volume 1. See the article by Jeffrey in volume 1. 3 See the article by Diem and Rousseau in volume 1; see also Joseph Dyer, “Observations on the Divine Office in the Rule of the Master,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, ed. Rebecca A. Baltzer and Margot E. Fassler (Oxford, 2000), 74–​98 (Table 4.1). 1

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the mass.4 Caesarius of Arles wrote to the nuns of Saint-​Jean in Arles simply that the mass should be celebrated in monasteries “sometimes” (RCaeV 36). According to Aurelianus of Arles, the mass was to be celebrated when the abbess (or abbot) wished.5 The RM is more specific, noting that mass should be celebrated in the monastic oratory for the feast day of the monastery’s patron, at the blessing of a new abbot, and on Sundays.6 Communion extra missam (outside the liturgy of the mass) could be received more regularly through the distribution of a presanctified host by the abbot (a practice, discussed by Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), that was common among early desert monks).7 The seeming indifference to the mass in early monastic rules stems from the fact that they were composed for monasteries that were fundamentally lay communities. Late antique and early medieval monks were rarely ordained to the priesthood. Indeed, early monastic rules reflect considerable reluctance to admit ordained members. The RM refused to accept priests, unless they wished to live as regular members of the community, without special privilege or position (RM 83). Benedict of Nursia (d. c. 540) advised caution when accepting priests, recommending that, “if someone of priestly rank asks to be received in the monastery, consent should not be granted hastily” (RB 60). Benedict himself was not ordained and, although he allowed that some monks within the community might seek ordination (and therefore have “altar duties”), he offered no explicit guidance concerning the celebration of the mass (RB 62). Monastic ambivalence regarding ordination underscores the contrast between monks and clerics.8 Equally important, if not more so, were the implications of lay identity for the “unisex” possibilities of early monasticism.9 As long as monks remained lay men (by which I  mean not priests), they were—​sacramentally at least—​not so very different from nuns. The spiritual practices of nuns and monks were similar during these early centuries.10

See the article by Billett in volume 1; see also Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. (New York, 1951). 5 Aurelian of Arles, Regula ad virgines, PL 68, 406; Aurelian of Arles, Regula ad monachos, PL 68, 396. 6 RM 45.17 (feast day of saint); 93.8 (new abbot); 45.14–​15 and 75.5 (masses on Sunday); Regula magistri, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 105–​107. 7 Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 93, in Letters, Volume 1 (1–​185), trans. Agnes C. Way (Washington, DC, 1951), 208. 8 On this distinction, see the article by Diem and Rousseau in volume 1. 9 Albrecht Diem, “The Gender of the Religious:  Wo/​ Men and the Invention of Monasticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras (Oxford, 2013), 432–​46. 10 See the article by Réal in volume 1. 4

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Both were regulated by the hours of the divine office and by the recitation of prayers and psalms: sixth-​century monastics, both male and female, chanted the entire Psalter each week and therefore daily spent some three or four hours singing the office.11 Given the centrality to monastic life (both male and female) of prayer and psalmody, for which priests were not required, Gisela Muschiol cautions against overstating the spiritual reliance of early nuns on priests. Prescriptive texts generally treated monks and nuns in ways that were more similar than different. Monastic rules that had initially been addressed to nuns were excerpted and inserted into rules for monks, and nuns—​like monks—​followed the RB, which Benedict never tailored for a specifically female monastic audience.12

Daily Mass and the Ordination of  Monks By the seventh century, changes in spiritual life and monastic economy were making inroads into monastic practice as it related to the mass. Daily mass had been common in urban churches for some time, reflecting growing devotion to the host and belief in its spiritual power, particularly as it related to intercession for the dead. In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great (r. 590–​604) answered the question “Is there anything at all that can possibly benefit souls after death?” by identifying the mass (“the holy Sacrifice of Christ”) as a crucial spiritual aid. “For this reason,” he observed, “the souls of the dead sometimes beg to have Masses offered for them.”13 As the mass came to be understood not simply as an act performed in memory of Christ’s death, but as a renewed sacrifice with salvific implications in the present, monasteries began to celebrate the mass more frequently.14 In many communities, daily conventual mass became the norm, celebrated in monastic oratories and at monastic altars, often—​at least in the case of male houses—​by ordained monks.



Gisela Muschiol, “Time and Space:  Liturgy and Rite in Female Monasteries of the Middle Ages,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York, 2008), 191–​206; Gisela Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–​900,” ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 198–​216. 12 Diem, “Gender of the Religious.” 13 Gregory the Great, Dialogues 4.57.1–​2, SC 265, 184; English translation in Odo John Zimmerman, trans., Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great (Washington, DC, 1959; reprint. 1983), 266. 14 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 11

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The increased frequency and spiritual prominence of the mass precipitated a series of changes in monastic life that had significant gendered implications. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Benedict’s presumptively lay monastic community shifted its center of gravity toward ordained members, who could serve the monastery as resident priests.15 The daily conventual mass was supplemented during the Carolingian period by private masses, celebrated by individual monk-​priests. By the mid-​ninth century, according to Hildemar of Corbie (fl.  c. 845), the conventual mass was celebrated twice each day, in addition to private masses.16 At the Abbey of Saint-​Riquier at the turn of the ninth century, the twice-​daily conventual mass was accompanied by a further thirty private masses said by ordained monks at thirty altars.17 The foundation of Cluny during the early tenth century—​with its multiplication of monastic chapels and altars, and dramatic expansion of the liturgy—​ accelerated the trend toward monastic ordination. By the end of the twelfth century, it was common for monks to be ordained.18 Changes in the monastic celebration of the mass accentuated differences between monks (who could be ordained to the priesthood) and nuns (who could not).19 For many scholars, the increased frequency of the mass in monastic communities and the simultaneous ordination of many monks to the priesthood portended the end of monasticism as a potentially “unisex” form of religious life, even as the Carolingian reforms universalized adherence to a single monastic rule (the RB) among nuns as well as monks. Late antique and early medieval parallels between the monastic life for monks and nuns began to be eclipsed by new and gendered differences. Asymmetries were most obvious in women’s comparatively limited access to the mass. Male monastic communities included ordained members who served as weekly celebrants, facilitating the daily mass. Women’s communities—​ at least theoretically—​could not. Although the abbess continued to be the spiritual leader of her community and might hear confession, administer



Angelus Albert Häussling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier. Eine Studie über die Messe in der abendländischen Klosterliturgie des frühen Mittelalters und zur Geschichte der Meßhäufigkeit (Münster, 1973), 150–​9; Otto Nussbaum, Kloster, Priestermönch und Privatmesse. Ihr Verhältnis im Westen von den Anfängen bis zum hohen Mittelalter (Bonn, 1961), 70–​83. See the article by Blennemann in volume 1. 16 Hildemar of Corbie, Expositio regulae 38 and 60. See also the article by Billett in volume 1. 17 Hariulf, Chronicon Centulense, in Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint Riquier, ed. Ferdinand Lot (Paris, 1894), 70–​1. 18 Giles Constable, “Religious Communities, 1024–​1215,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, IV: c. 1024–​c. 1198, ed. David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-​Smith (Cambridge, 2004), Part I, 352. 19 Muschiol, “Time and Space.” 15

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penance, and sometimes read the Gospels,20 she could not act as celebrant for the mass; she could not “make present the risen Christ” as an ordained monk was thought to do.21 Since nuns were forbidden to celebrate the mass themselves, they relied on ordained men, whether canons or monk-​priests, to confect the sacrament at their altars. Despite repeated prohibitions, however, there is evidence that women sometimes served at the altar.22 Traditional accounts of female monastic life have identified serious economic implications for nuns in these changes. The need to secure priests to celebrate the mass presented nuns with a financial burden that was unknown in male monasteries:  in return for their spiritual service, priests required recompense, usually in the form of land, revenues, and material goods.23 Meanwhile, donations to female monasteries may have suffered as the mass gained prominence: a number of scholars have suggested that donors were less inclined to support women’s monasteries, preferring to endow masses in men’s communities than to fund the prayers of nuns.24 In his early fifth-​ century De cura pro mortuis gerenda (On the Care of the Dead) (421/​2), Augustine had declared that masses and prayers were equally acceptable as suffrages for the dead.25 Yet the idea that masses were superior nevertheless took hold, as Gregory the Great’s account of the dead begging for masses suggests. Conversion tables from the central Middle Ages reflect the comparative value of the mass, noting how many psalters or masses could substitute for penance.26 Evidence from Cluny suggests that a single mass could be considered the equivalent of fifty psalms—​a calculation that has led scholars to view masses as more spiritually efficient than praying the Psalter (and presumably more attractive to donors).27 Moreover, priests could say multiple masses in a day: the early ninth-​century Merseberg penitential, for example,



Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2008), 49–​88; Katie Ann-​Marie Bugyis, The Care of Nuns:  The Ministries of Benedictine Women in England during the Central Middle Ages (Oxford, 2019). 21 Macy, Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, 32. 22 Ibid., 62. 23 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 225–​6. 24 See the article by Muschiol in volume 1; see also Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, “Sexism and the Celestial Gynaeceum: From 500 to 1200,” JMH 4 (1978): 125; C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989), 219. 25 Augustine of Hippo, De cura pro mortuis gerenda 18.22, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 41, 658. 26 Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf Busch, Thomas Lentes, and Hubertus Lutterbach, “Gezählte Frömmigkeit,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995): 1–​71. 27 Giles Constable, “Commemoration and Confraternity at Cluny during the Abbacy of Peter the Venerable,” in The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleven-​ Hundredth Anniversary of Its Foundation (Münster, 2010), 332–​3. 20

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allows for up to seven masses on a weekday and up to twenty on a feast day.28 The consequences of these changes were dramatic for monastic women, as Gisela Muschiol observed: “Formerly held in high esteem, prayer by religious women succumbed to the Mass, always celebrated by men.”29

Nuns and the Mass: Problems and Possibilities The growing spiritual prominence of the mass within monastic life had considerable implications for women religious. On the one hand, the mass presented new spiritual opportunities for women, serving as a focal point for affective devotion to the suffering Christ. Late medieval nuns and pious lay women were drawn by the power of the consecrated host to make Christ physically present and also by the feminizing implications of Christ’s bodily, nurturing, and maternal sacrifice.30 Through the Eucharist, women identified themselves with the humanity of Christ. Yet despite these new possibilities, the mass has typically been seen as a point of contention between the sexes and a confirmation of women’s secondary status within the Church. It represented a spiritual experience that was potent and desired, but that was accessible to professed women only through ordained men. The mass marked nuns as distinct from monks, confirming them as lay and female, and thus as spiritual dependents. The most immediate effect of male monastic ordination was to devalue female monastic authority and spiritual dignity. Early monastic women had been seen as “ordained into their own orders,” according to Gary Macy, who noted that abbots and abbesses held equivalent positions and authority.31 Yet by the end of the twelfth century, the rite of ordination had been restricted to the priesthood and narrowly defined to center on the power to confect the mass, eroding the spiritual authority of abbesses as ordained ministers of the Church.32 All women, even nuns, were theoretically excluded from the altar and from any active role in the mass.33 They were forbidden to touch liturgical

Arnold Angenendt, “‘Donationes pro anima’:  Gift and Counter-​Gift in the Early Medieval Liturgy,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe:  New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Aldershot, 2008), 140. 29 Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice,” 210. 30 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987). 31 Macy, Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, 35. 32 Ibid., 89–​110. 33 Michel Lauwers, “Les femmes et l’eucharistie dans l’Occident médiéval:  interdits, transgressions, devotions,” in Pratiques de l’eucharistie dans les Églises d’Orient et d’Occident (antiquité et Moyen Age), I. L’institution, ed. Nicole Bériou, Beátrice Caseau, and Dominique Rigaux (Paris, 2009), 445–​76. 28

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textiles except when laundering them, a point that Church councils repeated and that Peter Abelard (d. 1142) incorporated into his twelfth-​century Rule for the nuns of the Paraclete: “neither the sacristan nor any of the sisters shall ever be allowed to touch the relics or the altar-​vessels, nor even the altar-​ cloths except when these are given them to be washed.”34 In part as a result of these developments, nuns came to be viewed in gendered terms as “women” rather than “female monks” (as certain early monastic texts had seemed to characterize them). New conceptions of ordination, which privileged the (male) priest and the mass, excluded women from ordination, but also figured them as impure and spiritually dangerous to priests. Church reformers during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries therefore encouraged the separation of ordained men from women, requiring that priests reject marriage and that they limit contact with women—​even nuns, who relied on them for the mass.35 Coincident with many of these changes was a tremendous upsurge in monastic life; new monastic congregations proliferated in conjunction with reform, reflecting a desire for simplicity and authenticity in the religious life that would inspire the founding of the mendicant orders a century later. Yet, until recently, these new orders were understood reflexively as male. Separation from women has, accordingly, been viewed as a hallmark of male spirituality during this vibrant and decisive period. Men celebrated as saints were often those who dramatically and even flamboyantly rejected women, like the twelfth-​century hermit Godric of Finchale (d. 1170), who was celebrated for having thrown “his naked body among the prickly spurs of thorns and brambles” to extinguish carnal desire; his biographer commented that the “old enemy” made images of women appear to him (which he rejected “manfully”).36 As Bernard of





Abelard, Institutio 52, in The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, ed. David Luscombe, trans. Betty Radice, and rev. David Luscombe (Oxford, 2013), 414–​15. For earlier regulations concerning women’s access to the altar, see Concilium Parisiense (829), c. 45, MGH Concilia II.2, 639; and Haito of Basel, Capitula 16, MGH Capit. Episc. I, 215. 35 On clerical celibacy, see Helen L. Parish, Clerical Celibacy in the West, c.1100–​1700 (Burlington, VT, 2010); Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest:  Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–​1300 (Philadelphia, PA, 2015); and the essays in Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (New York, 1998). For a discussion of the historiography of “reform” as it relates to women, see Fiona J. Griffiths, “Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages,” in Bennett and Karras, Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender, 447–​63. 36 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de vita et miraculis S.  Godrici 27, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London, 1847), 76. 34

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Clairvaux (d. 1153) famously warned the monks of his order, reflecting a similar sexualized anxiety, “To be always in a woman’s company without having carnal knowledge of her … [is] … a greater miracle than raising the dead.”37 Yet, despite rhetoric emphasizing the separation of priests and monks from women, rejection by men did not define women’s monastic experience during the high Middle Ages (nor did rhetorical rejection necessarily shape practice). Many male monasteries and congregations welcomed devout women and included them in their spiritual circles.38 According to the Domesday Book, some twenty-​eight nonnae lived at the male monastery of Bury St. Edmunds in the late eleventh century, praying “daily for the King and for all Christian people.”39 At the Norman monastery of Bec during the same period, resident women were viewed as “mothers of the monks.”40 At Cluny, too, women were received, together with their male relatives, long before the foundation of the women’s house at Marcigny in 1056.41 Other women lived at men’s monasteries: Jutta (d. 1136) and Hildegard (d. 1179) at Disibodenberg,42 Diemut (d. c. 1130–​1150) the famous scribe and recluse at Wessobrunn,43 and Herluca of Epfach (d. 1127/​8), who spent the last years of her life at the male Augustinian community of Bernried.44 The presence at men’s monasteries of these women demonstrates the willingness of some men’s communities to accept pious women and to provide spiritual care for them—​including, of course, the mass.







Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo 65.4, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 8  vols. (Rome, 1957–​77), 2:175; English translation in On the Song of Songs, trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene M. Edmonds, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1971–​80),  3:184. 38 See the articles by Magnani and by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 39 Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2000), 2:49–​50. 40 Sally N. Vaughn, St. Anselm and the Handmaidens of God: A Study of Anselm’s Correspon­ dence with Women (Turnhout, 2002), 67–​115. 41 Joachim Wollasch, “Parenté noble et monachisme réformateur:  observations sur les ‘conversions’ à la vie monastique aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Revue historique 264 (1980): 7. 42 Vita Juttae, ed. in Franz Staab, “Reform und Reformgruppen im Erzbistum Mainz: vom ‘Libellus de Willigisi consuetudinibus’ zur ‘Vita domnae Juttae inclusae’,” in Reformidee und Reformpolitik im Spätsalisch-​Frühstaufischen Reich. Vorträge der Tagung der Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte vom 11. bis 13. September 1991 in Trier, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Mainz, 1992), 172–​87; English translation in Anna Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources (Turnhout, 1998), 65–​84. See also the article by Mews in this volume. 43 Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004), 32–​64. 44 Paul of Bernried, Vita b. Herlucae, AASS Apr. II (Antwerp, 1675), 552–​7. 37

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Nuns and Priests: Men in Women’s Monasteries Changes in the monastic celebration of the mass may have been limiting for women in some ways, but they also created new and often fruitful opportunities for nuns to interact with ordained men within the religious life. Indeed, even before the daily celebration of the mass made the regular presence of a priest necessary for nuns, men were active in women’s monasteries. Pachomius (d. 348)  is credited with having established the first male cenobitic community in Egypt, but he also supported his sister in her spiritual quest, establishing a community for women on the riverbank opposite his men’s house and sending men to construct the monastic buildings. Moreover, Pachomius selected an old man, Apa Peter, to care for the women—​to serve as their “father” and to “preach frequently to them on the Scriptures for their soul’s salvation.”45 According to the Bohairic Life, Apa Peter took up residence on the women’s side of the river, becoming the earliest known resident male spiritual guide for nuns. Direct evidence for the experiences of men, like Apa Peter, who lived near (or with) nuns and served them spiritually, is rare. Monastic polemic more often warned against the involvement of monks with nuns, particularly after the eleventh century as purity concerns mounted. Charters and other monastic documents typically record practical or logistical details: the number of monks or canons who served a female house, for instance, or the financial agreement governing their arrangement. Even so, it is clear that the intensification of Eucharistic piety and the increased frequency of the mass after the ninth century meant that more ordained men were needed in women’s monasteries than ever before. Concern with how nuns should manage relations with their priests is particularly evident in sources from this period, although such concern was not entirely novel. Early rules for nuns (like those of Caesarius, Aurelianus, and Donatus, as well as the early ninth-​ century Institutio sanctimonialium, for canonesses) had acknowledged the periodic presence of men in women’s monasteries. Caesarius of Arles allowed for the entrance of the bishop, provisor, priest, deacon, and subdeacon, as well as lectors “whose age and life commends them, and who are needed to offer mass sometimes” (RCaeV 36). He stipulated, however, that these men should never enter the community without a chaperone, nor without permission from the abbess—​precautions that were designed, he assured the women, “to guard your reputation.”

The Bohairic Life of Pachomius 27, in Pachomian Koinonia, vol. 1, trans. Armand Veilleux (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), 50.

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Attention to the logistics of men’s access to female monasteries was specific to rules for women, yet some rules for men raised an analogous topic:  the obligation for monks to care for nuns. The late seventh-​ century Regula cuiusdam patris declared that religious women (“sisters”) should be provided for materially since “they are members of Christ, and mothers of the Lord, and through a virgin Christ redeemed us.”46 Efforts to achieve uniformity of monastic life during the ninth century meant that sentiments like these were often obscured as the RB came increasingly to define monasticism. As we saw above, the RB, which was written in the first instance for a male and lay monastic community, gave no guidance concerning the celebration of the mass, nor did it recognize women’s need for care (whether material or spiritual), or offer any argument for men’s obligation to provide it. More problematic from the standpoint of female monasticism is the fact that the RB assumed a single-​sex monastic life for monks, implying that monks had no need of nuns, even as nuns increasingly needed priests.

Nuns’ Priests and Male Spirituality Despite the silences of the RB on the topic of the mass and the gendered implications of its celebration and reception, nuns received the mass more or less regularly throughout the medieval period, often from the hands of local ordained monks. The dramatic expansion of female monastic life in the period between 1050 and 1250 meant that more ordained men were serving in female monasteries at this time than ever before.47 For the most part, these men provided spiritual care for nuns without incident, although there were cases in which the failure of priestly care emerged as a source of conflict. We hear, for instance, of Hildegard of Bingen’s struggle in the mid-​twelfth century to obtain pastoral care at Rupertsberg from the monks at Disibodenberg, the nuns’ mother house. The conflict was heated and lengthy, and resulted in the women’s supplications to the archbishop of Mainz, the emperor, and even the pope. Although Hildegard secured various charters detailing Disibodenberg’s obligation to Rupertsberg, she experienced repeated difficulties in obtaining the women’s choice of priests. As she wrote to Pope Alexander III (r. 1159–​81), the

Regula cuiusdam patris ad monachos 18, in Fernando Villegas, “La ‘Regula cuiusdam Patris ad monachos’: ses sources littéraires et ses rapports avec la ‘Regula monachorum’ de Colomban,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 49 (1973): 25. 47 Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life (Philadelphia, PA, 2018), 9–​10.

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conflict had serious spiritual implications: without priests, Hildegard lamented that “spiritual religion will be totally destroyed among us.”48 Hildegard’s difficulties in securing care from the monks of Disibodenberg are illustrative of a certain set of problems that medieval nuns could, and clearly did, sometimes face: men’s resistance, obfuscation, and direct denial of care. But they also point to another set of possibilities: openness to religious women on the part of ordained monks and secular clergy, support, and a willingness to engage spiritually with women. When the monks of Disibodenberg refused to provide priests for the nuns at Rupertsberg, other ordained men stepped in to help the women. Both the archbishop of Mainz and the pope responded to Hildegard’s requests for support and, indeed, support was temporarily provided by various men, including Volmar (d. 1173) and Gottfried (d. 1176), both monks from Disibodenberg; Hildegard’s nephew Wezelin (d. 1185)  (to whom Alexander referred her appeal); her brother Hugo (d. c.  1177), who served at the monastery briefly until his untimely death, a canon from Mainz; and Guibert of Gembloux (d.  1213), a Flemish monk who came to Rupertsberg in order to serve as Hildegard’s secretary but who soon found himself acting as priest for the women as well. These men were sympathetic to Hildegard’s requests for help, which they saw as wholly legitimate. Guibert’s example suggests that some ordained monks were sincere and enthusiastic about serving women. It was Guibert himself who initiated contact with Hildegard, seeking her out and coming to Rupertsberg as her secretary willingly, even eagerly. Most strikingly, Guibert reported real satisfaction with his circumstances at the women’s monastery, where he lived for several years as the women’s priest (even after Hildegard’s death) in what he described as “the beauty of peace and of all delight and pleasantness.”49 Ordained monks like Guibert could be deeply committed to the spiritual care of women, which they saw not as a burden or a distraction from the male religious life—​as some medieval churchmen implied and modern historiography has too often assumed—​but as an intrinsic part of the apostolic life that so deeply inspired religious revival during the period.50 As far as Guibert was concerned, serving as a priest for nuns was a worthy calling for ordained

Fiona J. Griffiths, “Monks and Nuns at Rupertsberg:  Guibert of Gembloux and Hildegard of Bingen,” in Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500, ed. Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin (Turnhout, 2014), 145–​69. 49 Guibert of Gembloux, Ep. 38, ll. 33, ed. Albert Derolez in Guiberti Gemblacensis epistolae. Quae in codice B.R. BRUX. 5527–​5534 inveniuntur, CCCM 66A, 367; English translation in Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard, 100. 50 Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales. 48

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men—​one in keeping with the examples of Christ and of the Apostles, who had also engaged with women, dignified them spiritually, included them in their religious circles, and cared spiritually for them. Guibert defended his service among women in several long letters in which he expressed his sense of the spiritual dignity of his priestly ministry among women (refuting the insinuations of his critics that he spent his time at Rupertsberg “lusting with girls in the recesses of the cloister”).51 In so doing, Guibert focused on the example of Christ, who had honored women, defended female sinners, and included women among his close friends. As Guibert wrote, praising religious women and highlighting their gendered intimacy with the Trinity, “holy virgins are the temple of God the father, the spouses of his son Jesus Christ, [and] the sanctuary of the holy Spirit.”52 The example of Christ’s friendship and concern for women (which was discussed extensively, too, by the controversial twelfth-​century monk-​priest Peter Abelard) suggested that priestly contact with women was neither so dangerous nor so spiritually detrimental to men as some medieval churchmen were prepared to argue. In addition to the example of Christ, the Bible offered two further accounts of men’s care for women, which suggested that men had a concrete obligation to attend to women’s needs—​just as the Regula cuiusdam patris had claimed. According to the New Testament, the provision of care for widows had been a pressing concern for early Christians. At the prompting of the Apostles, the early Church community chose seven men to meet the women’s material needs (Acts 6:3–​5). Widows had filled a spiritual role within the early Church, praying “night and day” (1 Tim. 5:5), and so were often seen as the forebears of medieval nuns—​women who were also expected to renounce marriage and devote themselves to prayer. During the twelfth century, the abbess Heloise of the Paraclete (d.  1164) made the connection clear, arguing that nuns, like early consecrated widows, deserved the material support of the Church. As she wrote, “It is right and proper that [nuns] should be supported from the funds of the Church as if from the personal resources of their husbands.”53 Acts 6 is unambiguous in its message of the necessity of male support—​ in this case, material support—​for women who had vowed themselves to lives of chastity and prayer. A second biblical account offered a model that

Guibert of Gembloux, Ep. 26, ll. 470–​4, ed. Derolez in Guiberti Gemblacensis epistolae, 283; English translation in John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006), 60. 52 Guibert of Gembloux, Ep. 26, ll. 553–​4, ed. Derolez in Guiberti Gemblacensis epistolae, 285. 53 Heloise, Ep. 6.28, in Luscombe, Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise,  254–​5. 51

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required some interpretation, but that was even more powerfully influential in prompting priestly care for medieval religious women. According to the Gospels, women had been among Christ’s closest followers and supporters. They had accompanied him on his travels and provided for his material care from their own resources. They were also, crucially, steadfast at the cross, remaining with him as he died, in stark contrast to the male disciples who were absent from the crucifixion scene in three of the four Gospels. Only in John’s Gospel is any male disciple described as having been present at the crucifixion. Yet the focus of the Gospel account is squarely on Jesus’ attention to a woman: his mother. As John reports, when Jesus saw Mary standing at the foot of the cross with the disciple “whom he loved” (understood as John himself ), he entrusted her to John’s care, presenting John as her adoptive son and Mary as John’s adoptive mother. “Behold your son,” Jesus said to Mary, indicating John as her adoptive child, and to John he said, “Behold your mother” ( John 19:26–​27). The commendation of Mary to John had an enormous impact on a certain set of medieval men, who saw in John’s care for Mary a model of the care owed by religious men to professed women.54 According to the Gospel, John even took Mary to live with him in his own home after the crucifixion ( John 19:27), a fact that was regularly cited as evidence that relations between the sexes in the religious life could be fully chaste—​contradicting the dire warnings of alarmist observers. The commendation, however, was useful not just as a defense of men’s chaste involvement with women, but also as an indication that the obligation to care for religious women was Christ’s direct and dying command to men—​from the cross, no less. This was admittedly a controversial interpretation, which was contested from the moment it appeared. Yet by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, John was regularly invoked as a model of pure and spiritually inspired male spiritual care for women. Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, Azecho of Worms, the biographers of Anselm of Lucca and Matilda of Tuscany, the Life of Christina of Markyate, Peter Abelard, Guibert of Gembloux, Thomas of Cantimpré, and the early thirteenth-​century Book of St. Gilbert—​to name a few—​all invoked the commendation to John in this way. The most telling evidence for the medieval understanding of the commendation as a model for men’s care of women comes from Fontevraud, the

Fiona J. Griffiths, “The Cross and the Cura monialium: Robert of Arbrissel, John the Evangelist, and the Pastoral Care of Women in the Age of Reform,” Speculum 83 (2008): 303–​30.

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Loire Valley monastery founded in 1101 by Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116), and which housed both women and men. According to Robert’s biographer, as the order of Fontevraud grew, Robert modeled each new house on the special relationship between John and Mary. The rationale for Robert’s orientation toward John and Mary was made explicit in his vita: Robert’s biographer Andreas (d. c. 1119–​22) commented that because St. John the Evangelist, at Christ’s command, unfailingly served … [the] Virgin Mother as a devoted minister …, wise Robert decreed that the brothers’ oratories should be dedicated in John’s honor…. This must have been done with divine inspiration so that the brothers would rejoice to have as patron of their church the one they regarded as an example of service owed to the brides of Christ.55

At Fontevraud, men’s care and attentive service to the spiritual needs of religious women was explicitly and intentionally modeled on John’s tender, chaste, and divinely ordained care for Mary. A final observation related to the commendation scene is suggested in the account from Fontevraud. Robert’s biographer noted that John offered an “example of service owed to the brides of Christ,” implying two things at once: first, that men’s service was not voluntary, but was actually understood as being “owed” to women; and second, that it was owed to them precisely because of their spiritual status as “brides of Christ.” By conceiving of nuns as brides of Christ, religious men who served nuns at Fontevraud, and elsewhere, were able to imagine their ministry as an act, not just of obedience to Christ, but of devotion to him. Caring for nuns was, for these men, part of a three-way relationship that involved ordained men, Christ, and nuns—​ considered as his brides. The Apostle John was Mary’s adoptive son, but also Jesus’ closest and most cherished disciple and his spiritual brother (as Abelard argued, based on the new kinship relationship forged at the cross). For medieval monks and priests to imagine themselves as emulating John in their care for women was therefore, in some sense, to imagine themselves approximating John’s closeness to Christ as well. The idea that serving nuns spiritually could be an act of friendship toward Christ, and therefore a central part of male spirituality, is most clear in the ways that some medieval men described the spiritual care of women as the

Andrew, Supplementum historiae vitae Roberti 11, in Les deux vies de Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud. Légendes, écrits et témoignages, ed. and trans. (in French and English) Jacques Dalarun et al. (Turnhout, 2006), 210–​11. On the earlier eremitic life of Robert, see the article by Jasper and Howe in this volume.

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work of the paranymphus, or “bridesman,” who was equally the friend of the bridegroom. Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin (d. 1107) (who may have served as chaplain at Wilton) adopted this motif several times in his writings, depicting, for instance, the archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury (d. 988) as the “friend of the bridegroom,” who brought Edith of Wilton (d. 984–​7) to Jesus, and was then joined to her as John had been to Mary.56 Other men, too, invoked John in this way: for William de Montibus (d. 1213), the priest Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189) had acted in his care for women as “a prudent and provident attendant of the bridegroom.”57 As these examples imply, caring for religious women (including, of course, ministering the mass to them) could be understood by medieval monk-​priests as a vital part of their relationship with Christ, as well as a spiritual service that served (as the men of Fontevraud acknowledged) the salvation of men’s souls.

Conclusion: Women at the Altar This chapter has focused on the gendered implications of changes in the celebration of the mass in monastic life from the origins of monasticism until the turn of the thirteenth century, when the founding of the mendicant friars ushered in a further set of changes in women’s relations with both ordained men and the mass. Although shifts in monastic practice relating to the mass have typically been seen as deleterious for professed women—​increasing gendered distinctions and eroding women’s earlier spiritual status, while also forcing the sacramental reliance of nuns on priests, who are presumed to have resisted contact with them—​I have argued that these shifts held certain spiritual possibilities for women and men. Some men found cause to celebrate the spiritual benefits of serving nuns, even staking their salvation on their care for professed women. Monk-​priests begged the prayers of nuns as one reward for their labors, praising women’s capacity as intercessors based on their special status as “brides of Christ.” Some even sought burial in female monasteries, perhaps sharing in Abelard’s expressed confidence that no place is “more fitting for Christian burial among the faithful than one amongst women dedicated to Christ.”58 Despite the scholarly hypothesis that masses must have displaced the prayers of nuns, the medieval evidence suggests that

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Goscelin of St. Bertin, Vita s. Edithae 21, ed. A. Wilmart, “La légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin. I.” Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938): 88. The text of the sermon is reproduced in Joseph W. Goering, William de Montibus (c. 1140–​1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto, 1992), 225–​6. 58 Abelard, Ep. 3.12, in Luscombe, Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise,  154–​5.

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women’s prayers continued to be held in high esteem and to attract the support of donors.59 Although I  have taken the mass as my focus, women’s liturgical and paraliturgical engagement extended beyond the mass, sometimes bypassing priests. The practice of receiving communion in the absence of a priest (through distribution of pre-​consecrated hosts, sometimes by an abbess), attested in some early monastic rules, continued in female monasteries even after the mass had gained a central place in monastic devotions.60 At the Bavarian monastery of Monheim during the late ninth century, the abbess distributed bread that had been blessed, as the miracle book of St. Waldburga attests.61 The tenth-​century Life of Odile, abbess of Hohenbourg (d. c.  720), offers further evidence of this practice: as Odile lay dying, she took communion with her own hands.62 Later abbesses maintained these practices, as Jean Leclercq has shown, identifying two manuscripts that include an ordo for communion without a priest and show evidence of female use. The first, an ordinal copied in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, was produced at the female monastery of Santa Sofia in Benevento.63 The provenance of the second, a manuscript dating to the tenth or eleventh century, is unknown; however, it bears the grammatical marks of a female reader, including feminine endings.64 A final set of examples suggests that male, clerical control of the mass and the altar was not always the case in women’s monasteries. While women were excluded from the altar and from physical access to liturgical objects and textiles, it was often the case that nuns had sewn or embroidered the vestments worn by their priests, as well as the hangings that adorned their altars. The liturgical textiles produced by nuns indicate that they frequently pictured themselves at the altar, or in a special relationship with Christ (or Mary), seemingly disregarding their liturgical marginalization.65 A  set of

Erin L. Jordan, “Gender Concerns:  Monks, Nuns, and Patronage of the Cistercian Order in Thirteenth-​Century Flanders and Hainaut,” Speculum 87 (2012): 62–​94. 60 Jean Leclercq, “Eucharistic Celebrations without Priests in the Middle Ages.” Worship 55 (1981):  160–​8; and Jean Leclercq, “Prières médiévales pour recevoir l’Eucharistie, pour saluer et pour bénir la croix,” Ephemerides liturgicae 79 (1965): 327–​40. 61 Wolf hard, Miracula S. Waldburgis Monheimensia 3.8, in Ein bayerisches Mirakelbuch aus der Karolingerzeit. Die Monheimer Walpurgis-​Wunder des Priesters Wolf hard, ed. Andreas Bauch (Regensburg, 1979), 282. 62 Vita Odiliae Abbatissae Hohenburgensis 22, MGH SS RM 6, 50. 63 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 4928. The ordinal is discussed in Leclercq, “Eucharistic Celebrations without Priests,” 224–​5. 64 Auxerre, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 25. Texts from the manuscript are edited in Leclercq, “Prières médiévales pour recevoir l’Eucharistie.” 65 Fiona J. Griffiths, “‘Like the Sister of Aaron’: Medieval Religious Women as Makers and Donors of Liturgical Textiles,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the 59

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vestments produced at Göss, a monastery following the RB, featured the Virgin Mary, but also the abbess Chunegunde II (before 1239–​post 1269), who had commissioned the vestments, and Adela of Bavaria (d. c. 1020), a patron of the monastery.66 The central focus of the antependium (a cover for the altar that women were normally forbidden to touch) is composed exclusively of these three female figures. A second early thirteenth-​century antependium confirms the iconographic centrality of contemporary women.67 Produced at Rupertsberg some fifty years after Hildegard’s death, it depicts a series of ten nuns (likely the makers of the antependium), each identified by name and shown in adoration of Christ. By depicting themselves on the cloth, these women suggested not just their participation in the mass but also their special access to Christ—​unmitigated by a priest. The mass was a central part of monastic life from the ninth century on, marking a distinction between those who could be ordained, and those who could not. Yet it is a mistake to assume that male monastic ordination was always prejudicial to nuns, or that ordained monks refused contact with professed women. Changes in the liturgy had real implications, of course, and nuns did sometimes face challenges in securing priests to serve at their altars. However, a significant corps of ordained monks served as priests for nuns, ensuring the mass at women’s altars. The ideal of segregation by sex within the religious life—​promoted by both medieval and modern sources—​tends to obscure a reality in which priests were regularly present in women’s monasteries, and in which some religious men welcomed and sought spiritual engagement with women as a central part of the apostolic life, and in obedience to Christ’s dying command. Nuns, meanwhile, developed forms of devotion and liturgical engagement that highlighted their sense of intimacy with Christ and gendered devotion to him. Like the holy women at the cross and the tomb, medieval nuns imagined themselves as having a role in the narrative of the Passion, and its ritual celebrations.

Bibliography Baltzer, Rebecca A., and Margot E. Fassler, eds. The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography. Oxford, 2000.



High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments, and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Münster, 2011), 343–​74. 66 Vienna, MAK-​Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/​Contemporary Art, T 6902–​6906. 67 Brussels, Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, Inv.-​Nr. Tx.1784.

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Fiona J.  Griffit hs Berger, Teresa. Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History:  Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past. Burlington, VT, 2011. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast:  The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, CA, 1987. Griffiths, Fiona J. Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. Philadelphia, PA, 2018. Häussling, Angelus Albert. Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier. Eine Studie über die Messe in der abendländischen Klosterliturgie des frühen Mittelalters und zur Geschichte der Meßhäufigkeit. Münster, 1973. Jungmann, Joseph A. The Mass of the Roman Rite:  Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. New York, 1951. Lauwers, Michel. “Les femmes et l’eucharistie dans l’Occident médiéval:  interdits, transgressions, devotions.” In Pratiques de l’eucharistie dans les Églises d’Orient et d’Occident (antiquité et Moyen Age), I. L’institution, edited by Nicole Bériou, Beátrice Caseau, and Dominique Rigaux, 445–​76. Paris, 2009. Leclercq, Jean. “Eucharistic Celebrations without Priests in the Middle Ages.” Worship 55 (1981): 160–​8. Levy, Ian Christopher, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall, eds. A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages. Leiden, 2012. Macy, Gary. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Oxford, 2008. Muschiol, Gisela. “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West.” In Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–​900,” edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith, 198–​216. Cambridge, 2004.   “Time and Space:  Liturgy and Rite in Female Monasteries of the Middle Ages.” In Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, 191–206. New York, 2008. Nussbaum, Otto. Kloster, Priestermönch und Privatmesse. Ihr Verhältnis im Westen von den Anfängen bis zum hohen Mittelalter. Bonn, 1961. Peters, Greg, and C. Colt Anderson, eds. A Companion to Priesthood and Holy Orders in the Middle Ages. Leiden, 2015. Venarde, Bruce L. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997. Vogel, Cyrille. “Deux conséquences de l’eschatologie grégorienne: la multiplication des messes privées et des moines-​prêtres.” In Grégoire le grand, edited by Jacques Fontaine, Robert Gillet, and Stan Pellistrandi, 267–​76. Paris, 1986. Vogüé, Adalbert de. “Problems of the Monastic Conventual Mass.” Downside Review 87 (1969): 327–​38.

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Reclusion in the Middle Ages P aul ette L ’ He rm ite -​L e clercq ( t r an slate d b y L o chin B rouillard) Reclusion was a very common type of religious life in the medieval West, especially in the high Middle Ages. A man or a woman was voluntarily confined within a narrow space and lived there alone, consecrating the rest of their life to prayer. If Rome outshone any of its rivals with its 230 recluses at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it seems that most cities or towns were home to at least one recluse. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, reclusion had become rarer in some regions—​for instance, in Italy from the thirteenth century, in Spain from the fifteenth century—​while a significant number of recluses were still established in Germany and England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. After the Reformation, reclusion was prohibited in Europe even as it was already waning everywhere. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians, including Mabillon, could refer to the recluse as an extinct species. The challenges that scholars face in studying medieval recluses are twofold:  coming to terms with the vocabulary used to speak about these individuals, and understanding the nature of their lived experiences. In the fourth and fifth centuries, three types of religious men and women who wished to leave the world for the sake of God made their appearance in the Christian landscape: monks, hermits, and recluses. Another term used was anchorites. Their primary shared characteristic was the search for solitude as a pathway to contemplation and penitence. Their orientation, however, was different, and the meaning and the evolution of the terminology used to designate each of these forms of religious life is telling. The monk wished to be alone (monos), but the cenobitic way of life soon eclipsed this ideal; ironically, the monk is the least solitary of men. The Greek word for anchoritism (anachōrēsis) could be used to describe soldiers retreating from the battlefield, but also floodwaters receding. This desire for secession, for departure from community, was grounded in the Stoic school and Epictetus, and above all

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in the ecclesiastical literature of Greek Fathers like Gregory of Nazianzus (d. c. 390). The concept was not greatly elaborated. Yes, the anchorite leaves the world, but will he be a perpetual wanderer or will he settle down? Will he remain defiantly alone? Hermit, another Greek word (erēmitēs), brings us to our final destination, the desert (erēmos). This terminology equates the hermit with the desert, emphasizing geography and climate, not the process that led an individual to embrace reclusion. The word recluse (reclusa) itself, however, is derived from the verb claudo (kleiō in Greek), which means “to close,” “to incarcerate.” The Greek recluse is described as being egkleistos (“confined”). The recluse exerts his or her free will in a contradictory manner, as this affirms itself in order to be alienated. The recluse compels himself or herself according to his or her own volition to live in a closed environment where he or she will be deprived of freedom of movement. It is no coincidence that the words réclusion, reclusión, and reclusione all refer in the contemporary judicial terminology of three European languages to an “afflictive and dishonoring sentence,” leading to the loss of freedom and frequently an obligation to work.1 In a long-​term perspective, however, do these terms echo the same realities, and are these realities unchanging? It is interesting that most of the common English terms used to refer to the recluse (ancren, anchoress) go back to anchoritism, whereas the terms generally employed on the Continent evoke enclosure:  inclusi, reclusi, klausner, empierré, emparedada (within four walls), murata, etc. But when these forms of religious life appeared in the fourth and fifth centuries, was the vocabulary associated with them so precise? A first step in classification was made in the sixth century. The Rule of St. Benedict (RB) draws a distinction and establishes hierarchy among three types of religious life: monasticism, reclusion, and eremitism, with the latter two seen as the most praiseworthy in the eyes of God. These three types of religious vocation spread across the West. Again, however, questions remain. Were these types perfectly defined, and once an individual had willingly embraced one particular form, could it be abandoned? Since reclusion was first and foremost a religious phenomenon, “the daughter of the cross and the desert,”2 one must study the viewpoint of the Church while not losing sight of the attested realities: did the Church conceptualize and regulate reclusion over the centuries? What role did individual

“Réclusion,” in Grand dictionnaire Robert de la langue française; Raúl Estangüi Gómez and Diane Pasquier-​Chambolle, “De l’enfermement et des lieux de réclusion,” Hypothèses 11 (2008): 141. 2 Louis-​Antoine-​Augustin Pavy, Les recluseries (Lyon, 1875), 15. 1

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improvisation play? What factors can explain the success and eclipse of this form of religious life? Can a study through the lens of gender shed a different light on these questions? An institutional history of reclusion remains a difficult enterprise. As the questions above indicate, an institutional history relies on the notion that, from the first millennium, the Church codified an established phenomenon, distinct from monasticism and eremitism, and so sacred that only episcopal authority could legitimize it. To picture the recluse across time as ritually imprisoned in a space that he or she will never again leave is to assume an unchanging norm and practice that did not exist until the last centuries of the Middle Ages, and even then with many exceptions. And, again, was the distinction between the different forms of religious life really so clear-​cut? Let us return to the significant problem of blurry terminology. After Abraham of Quiduna (close to Edessa) fled his marriage and became a recluse, he established his seven-​year-​old niece Mary in a cell next to his. Both uncle and niece had access to the outside world only through a small window.3 The Life of Abraham, translated into Latin for the first time in the sixth century, was very well known. Yet the titles of the manuscripts designate him sometimes as a recluse, sometimes as a hermit. The fluidity of the vocabulary is especially revealing in the praise-​f illed introduction to the Life of St. Amand, who lived in the seventh century as a monk, a recluse, and a missionary-​bishop in turn. St. Amand’s biographer refers to him as “a recluse, even more, almost a hermit” (reclusus insuper quasi eremita).4 Was enclosure always very rigid, at least during a period of reclusion? Acepsimas, a priest and recluse in the fifth-​ century East, left his cell just once a week, and then only at night in order to fetch water.5 Did this make him less of a recluse? From an institutional point of view, we should not be led astray by thinking that the liturgical rites preserved for the late medieval period in a handful of dioceses reflect the origins of reclusion. The pontificals that have come down to us, including one from a fifteenth-​century bishop of Exeter, distinguish between the blessing of hermits, the enclosure of recluses, and the profession of monks—​all understood as lifelong callings.6 But was this always the case? What is striking, in fact, is the flexibility and reversibility of these forms of life

De Vitis Patrum, PL 73, 283–​93 and 651–​61; see also André Wilmart, “Les rédactions latines de la vie d’Abraham ermite,” Revue bénédictine 50 (1938): 222–​45. 4 MGH SS 5, 475–​6. 5 AASS Apr. III (Antwerp, 1675), 20–​9. 6 R. Barnes, ed., Liber pontificalis of Edmund of Lacy, Bishop of Exeter (1440–​55) (Exeter, 1847), 125–​37. 3

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through the centuries. In other words, individual freedom (at least regarding hermits and recluses) persisted in the face of the ecclesiastical establishment. There is, for example, evidence of anchorites who abandoned their anchorholds in order to resume their wandering as hermits, gather disciples, join a community, enter a monastery, or change their vocation entirely by performing pastoral care as priests or even bishops, before returning to their life in the desert. In the fourth century, St. Martin of Tours (d. 397) punctuated his career as archbishop with retreats, living at times as a hermit, and at other times enclosed in a small cell. In the twelfth century, the priest Aibertus (d. 1140) went from hermit, to monk, and finally to recluse in the monastery of Crespin-​en-​Hainaut.7 His Life relates that he had longed to become a recluse in the desert (habere reclusionem in deserto). St. Arnould was an eleventh-​century monk at Saint-​Médard of Soissons, then a recluse, then the abbot of the same monastery, then a recluse again, and finally a bishop.8 For centuries, reclusion could be just one line on a complex religious résumé. Some councils of the early Middle Ages did try, though in vain, to reserve reclusion to experienced monks. I will mention here only the most exacting legislation, that of the Council “in Trullo” of 692, which imposed a probation period of three years, followed by an evaluation by a bishop. After an extra year of trial, the recluse would be enclosed and blessed by the bishop, after which he or she could not leave the anchorhold except in a case of emergency.9 Despite the fact that the Council of Agde (506) ruled that bishops were to control these vocations,10 there is little evidence that such regulation was observed. In the following century, for example, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) alludes to the presence of many lay recluses without ever specifying their previous social status or describing the process of their conversion. It should be stressed that most of these lay recluses were men, among them Anatole, a poor boy who embraced enclosure in a crypt at the age of twelve and went insane over the years.11 Monegund, one of the few female recluses mentioned by Gregory, married according to her parents’ wishes and endured the misfortune of losing her two children. After this, with her husband’s agreement, she became an anchoress, first in her own home and then in a cell at the basilica



Robert of Ostrevand, Vita Ayberti II, AASS Apr. I (Antwerp, 1675), 677. PL 174, 1374–​1440. See also the new edition in Lisiardus, Hariulfus. Vitae, Miracula, Translatio et alia Hagiographica sancti Arnulphi episcopi Suessionensis, ed. R. I. A. Nip, CCCM 285. 9 Mansi 11:963 (canon 41). 10 Mansi 8:331 (canon 38). 11 Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 34, PL 71, 474; English translation in The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, 1974). 7

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of Saint-​Martin of Tours.12 In the tenth century, John of Gorze (d. 974) lived as a recluse at Metz before going on to become a great reformer of monasticism in Lorraine.13 We must wait until c. 900 for the first surviving rule for recluses, written by Grimlaicus, a priest who was possibly from around Metz and likely himself an anchorite (as he speaks of nostra vocatio).14 From the turn of the millennium, reclusion attracted more and more lay people, and particularly women. Demand once again preceded legislation. In the twelfth century and after, new rules were written, although they lacked universal appeal. No Church theologian has ever systematized the principles or applications of reclusion. In fact, the authoritative Dictionnaire de droit canonique includes no entry on reclusion. In order to map the development of reclusion, one must investigate over the longue durée and at every level of the available documentation, both normative and practical. This examination should lead from the top to the bottom of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: conciliar texts, prescriptions from dioceses, monasteries, canonical chapters, and parishes, down to individual initiatives on the part of churchmen such as the Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) or the anonymous author of the early thirteenth-​century Ancren Riwle. Scholars must look at normative texts produced in each century and each country—​ from Grimlaicus’ Regula to Johannes Busch’s (d. 1489/​90) treatise.15 Above all, it is necessary to use, alongside rules and hagiographies, documents of practice that yield information on the foundation, the patronage, and the management of communities of recluses by the local authorities, on bequests and donations to the recluses, and on conflicts of governance. Recluses appear in every possible kind of document: religious (mortuary rolls, necrologies, exempla collections, sermons) and secular (public archives to private archives recorded by notaries), from cartularies to treasuries, from literary sources, especially chronicles, to iconographical or archaeological ones. Reclusion, although it aspired to exist at the margins of the world, clearly interacted with the history of architecture, of urban life as much as ecclesiastical organization and the social and cultural expression of religious belief. This makes

Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 24, PL 71, 848, and Vitae Patrum 19, PL 71, 1087–​ 1192; English translations in Glory of the Martyrs, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool, 2004) and Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James (Liverpool, 1991). 13 John of Saint-​Arnulf, Vita Iohannis abbatis Gorziensis, MGH SS 4, 343 ff.; see also John of Saint-​Arnulf, La Vie de Jean, abbé de Gorze, ed. and trans. Michel Parisse (Paris, 1999). 14 Grimlaicus, Rule for Solitaries, trans. A. Thornton (Trappist, KY, 2011). 15 Johannes Busch, Liber de reformatione monasteriorum II.42, ed. K. Grube (Halle, 1886),  656–​8.

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the lack of codification of the qualifications required to become a recluse and of control of recluses’ communities even more extraordinary. Two explanations may be advanced for this lack of codification. On the one hand, it would have been hard to make a unified body out of an aggregate of individuals; each recluse and each community of recluses remains a particular case. On the other hand, it is clear that, from the early days, reclusion was a contested and divisive phenomenon, torn between its perception as a Christian ideal and its portrayal as a dangerous trap. One biblical verse could trump another:  “Go, my people, enter into thy chambers, shut thy doors upon thee, hide thyself a little for a moment, until the indignation pass away” (Is. 26:20) versus “If one fall he shall be supported by the other: woe to him that is alone, for when he falleth, he hath none to lift him up” (Eccles. 4:10). Radical solitude had just as much power to attract as to outrage. For certain Christians, reclusion was the most sublime form of religious life. For example, the recluse and the hermit had climbed the highest on the ladder of perfection as represented by the nun Herrad of Landsberg (d. 1195) in an illustration in her twelfth-​century encyclopedia, the Hortus deliciarum. These two figures, however, are depicted falling from the ladder, just like all the others. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, we find accusations of and warnings against the recluse’s pride, ambition, hypocrisy, avarice, lust, heresy, and desire to become famous or even to try to pass as a saint. The first council to stipulate that ambitio or impulsus vanitatis could motivate reclusion was that of Orleans in 511.16 The same sentiment was reiterated at the Council “in Trullo”:  “the recluse should not be seeking vainglory.”17 In these texts, the false recluse starts to pray harder as soon as he hears footsteps moving in his direction; he yearns for acknowledgement and admiration from the crowd on account of his sacrifice, his supposed macerations of the flesh, all with the purpose of collecting more donations.18 In reality, invisible behind his curtains, nothing can prevent the false recluse from daydreaming in bed, gorging on food, or chatting with bystanders at the window. Unlike the monk, the anchorite does not renounce her will. She obeys only herself, and therein lies her flaw: she cannot be controlled. The Church grew more concerned about its powerlessness with respect to the recluse by the twelfth century, once it had acquired the mechanisms to probe more deeply into the consciences of the faithful thanks to the increasing importance of confession.

Mansi 8:347 (canon 22). Mansi 11:963. 18 See Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, “La mauvaise prière du reclus hypocrite,” in Prier au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou, Jacques Berlioz, and Jean Longère (Turnhout, 1991), 108. 16 17

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From Pachomius (d. 348) to Gerson (d. 1429), misgivings regarding solitude were even visible in the context of cenobitic monasticism itself. A monk or a nun sought to be separated from society, but up to what point? Pachomius feared that the individual cell would give ground to impure thoughts. In the sixth century, the rule of Caesarius of Arles (RCaeV), written for women, forbade solitude and imposed the shared dormitory, just like the RB. For centuries, the monk had been subject to the gaze of others: at the divine office, at work, in the refectory, in the dormitory. The reinterpretation of the RB in the Carolingian period, however, showed more trust and lenience. Not long after, Grimlaicus’ rule established a space for reclusion but within very strict boundaries. A recluse had to be a veteran monk or nun molded by discipline, had and to enter into reclusion with at least one companion settled in a contiguous cell; they remained attached to their community and within the monastic enclosure. A male recluse could also still hold to his pastoral duties. For theorists of reclusion like Grimlaicus, Aelred, or the author of the Ancren Riwle, reclusion was not a temporary experience, reversible at any moment like a lease or a job contract. Logically, the qualifications required to become a recluse should have been more rigorous than those demanded of a monk. It is hard to imagine that a personal decision would have been enough, or that an urban government, or even an abbot, prior, abbess, or prioress, would have been able to choose a recluse and lock him or her in a cell. Yet there are few traces of the oversight that might have been exerted by ecclesiastical authorities. Was the authorization of the bishop really compulsory? It is not mentioned at all in Aelred of Rievaulx’s Rule for a Recluse of 1162.19 The famous English recluse Wulfric (d. 1154) enclosed himself autonomously.20 The best-​documented cases come from the thirteenth century, and these show that some bishops tried to impose this confirmation in their own diocese, although reclusions obviously occurred without their support. One could have expected the bishop to control the process at every stage, including the identity of the candidate (his or her age and sex), status (priestly, monastic, or lay), social situation (virgin, consecrated to celibacy, widow, with or without children). A bishop might also examine his or her motives, specify the religious training required (stipulating a period of novitiate, or

PL 32, 1451–​74; Aelred de Rievaulx, La vie de recluse, ed. and trans. C. Dumont, SC 76; English translation in Aelred of Rievaulx, Treatises; The Pastoral Prayer, trans. Mary Paul Macpherson, introduction by David Knowles (Spencer, MA, 1971), 43–​102. 20 John of Forde, The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Pauline Matarasso (Trappist, KY, 2011). 19

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at a minimum an exam), and take into consideration the practical situation (was there an available anchorhold? Did the candidate have sufficient means, for example for a servant to look after his or her needs?). A  bishop would also have been able to dictate the liturgical frame (which form of formal commitment, which rite would make the recluse’s status in the Church official?), the recluse’s daily schedule (prayers, readings, labor, meals, and so on), and whether he or she would follow a rule. If so, which one? And who would provide for his or her spiritual needs? Was an inspection to be carried out at regular intervals? The sources do not answer all of these questions, but rather hint at the great diversity of customs observed on the ground. The lack of precision concerning the liturgy surrounding the entrance into reclusion is significant. The sources speak of profession, promise, resolution (propositum), or taking the veil or vows for women. When their content is specified, these vows seem to mirror the monastic language of profession by referring to conversion of mores and stability. One thing, however, is clear:  the vow of poverty could only have been valid if the recluse was a monk or a nun. This commitment was inconceivable for most lay recluses. Legally, they remained private owners, relied on some temporal means, could draft wills, and lived on the basis of donations—​to such an extent, in fact, that they were sometimes accused of hoarding. One would expect the recluse, who had chosen (at least according to some) the most ascetic and admirable way of life, to have benefited from being legally tried only within the Church. Such was not the case, however, as recluses did not exist as a formal body (universitas) within the Church. As the Church never laid down any theory or legislated clearly and universally regarding reclusion, custom was improvised locally. Reclusion indeed demanded only three concrete criteria: a candidate approved by an official, ecclesiastical or lay; an available structure to support him or her; and a religious authority to provide an official existence to the would-​be anchorite, thereby acknowledging the Christian and social value of the process. As soon as a candidate was selected, the practical issue of accommodation arose. The cell of the recluse (mansiuncula, domuncula, tegurium, tuguriunculum, cella, reclusorium, inclusorium, clusa, reclusa, carcer, etc.) is described as a rudimentary lodging, constricted and generally locked. It was often built on the side or under the porch of the church with which it communicated through a narrow opening, or located in the cemetery. Many other locations are also found in the sources: a crypt, on a bridge, in public places or on busy streets, or next to the wall of the city gates. The most striking feature of these dwellings is not so much the austerity of the furnishings, but the fact that they 754

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bring together—​even more than a prisoner’s cell in any time period—​every function from the highest to the lowest. A single dwelling might serve as an oratory (made sacred by a blessing at the time that the recluse moved in), a chapel (when it included an altar or even relics and a Eucharistic reserve), a preemptively dugout tomb, a cellar, a dressing-​room, a dining room, a workshop, a bathroom, a bedroom, and, in the most sublime instance, a nuptial chamber for the embrace of the Bridegroom. However modest it might have been, the cell had to satisfy all of the legal and practical conditions that dictated the ownership or renting of real estate, its caretaking, and its transfer after the recluse’s death, as wills, rulings, and legal records attest. Here again we encounter every possible scenario. The would-​be recluse would have his or her cell built out of her own pocket and ensure revenue and a servant, making him or her at least materially autonomous. In some cases, cells might be founded for recluses by lay individuals, whether prince, lord, or townsperson. Many were attached to an institution, which might be religious (for example, monasteries and chapters of canons affiliated with old or new orders), in which case the abbot or abbess was to preside over the enclosure.21 Others were attached to lay institutions. In southern France, reclusion was a municipal business. The town, holding tight to its prerogatives, was in charge of the accommodation and caretaking of its tenant. In each case, we must consider whether the landlord imposed certain prerequisites: was he looking for a man or a woman, a monk or a nun picked from the ranks of a neighboring establishment, a priest who could perform the mass? Once these two primary conditions—​ identifying a candidate and a supported lodging—​had been fulfilled, only the matter of ecclesiastical confirmation remained. When the recluse fell under the jurisdiction of an urban government, as was the case in Limoges, the government itself would review the candidates, select one of them and invest this person with the garb appropriate to the function.22 Only then would the priest come to perform the mass and the rite of enclosure. When nothing is specified in the document, we may speculate that the parish priest took care of the recluse’s spiritual needs. As to the delicate matter of appointing a confessor, several solutions were



Such was the case in Lyon:  see Marie-​Claude Guigue, Recherches sur les recluseries de Lyon (Lyon, 1887), 210; and Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, “Reclus et recluses dans la mouvance des ordres religieux,” in Les mouvances laïques des ordres religieux, ed. Nicole Bouter (Saint-​Étienne, 1996), 201–​18. 22 Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, “Les reclus dans la ville au bas Moyen-​Âge,” Journal des savants (1988): 243–​4. 21

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proposed. When the patron of the recluse was a monastery or a mendicant community, the confessor was normally chosen from within it. The bishop could also appoint a confessor or grant the privilege of free choice, a choice that Aelred of Rievaulx placed in the hands of the recluse, and which was present in certain pontifical indults (dispensations).23 Finally, was reclusion irrevocable? Could a bishop excommunicate a recluse who had abandoned his or her cell? Sometimes he would threaten to do so, but did he actually? An anchoress from Limoges was allowed by the urban administration to leave her cell because she was paralyzed by visions, and she was permitted to return to her former lodging a few years later. More telling still, in 1359, Archbishop William of Lyon (d. 1365)  reinstated the pension (eliminated by his predecessor) that St. Eucherius (d. 449) had granted to all recluses of the city.24 Why reestablish this practice? William explained that such a pension would prevent recluses from leaving their cells to go begging for food. Still other sources from Lyon reveal interesting examples of the economic dimensions of the lives of recluses. One recluse agreed to pay a specific annual rent for his cell, expecting even greater revenues from the donations. Some revenues from recluses’ cells were tied to canonical prebends or ecclesiastic benefices. In one case, a bishop threatened a recluse with expulsion from his cell if his behavior became unacceptable. The statutes of the community of recluses of St. Gall in Strasbourg in 1388 imposed no vows on the anchorites; while punishments were established for fornication, provisions were made for those who wished to leave their cell to marry!25 Entrance into reclusion was also a source of debate from a liturgical point of view, and, like other aspects of reclusion, its liturgical aspects were never fully codified. It was sometimes specified that, upon the ceremony of enclosure, the mass of the Holy Spirit or the daily mass would be celebrated. Another liturgical office that assimilated the entrance into anchoritic life to a funeral was also common. England offers the best-​documented cases in this context, thanks to the present state of the edition of liturgical manuscripts. Several pontificals from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stipulate the performance of a requiem mass and the recitation of prayers characteristic of a funerary liturgy.26 The anchorite is described as if dead (quasi mortuus), just

Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 77. Guigue, Recherches sur les recluseries, 212–​13. 25 Charles Schmidt, Histoire du chapitre de Saint-​ Thomas de Strasbourg (Strasbourg, 1860), 398. 26 See the census of English pontificals in John Brückman, “Bibliographical Survey of Latin Manuscript Pontificals and Benedictionals in England and Wales,” Traditio 29 (1973): 391–​458. 23

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as though in the grave (velut in sepulcro). He or she would receive extreme unction and be pronounced dead. This fiction extended into the anchorhold, where a tomb had already been prepared. The recluse would lie down in the grave and the bishop would throw a symbolic handful of dirt on him or her, entrust his or her soul to the angels, leave the cell, and lock the door. The selection by some bishops of such a ritual, not found in the Roman pontifical, has not drawn the attention it deserves. Did certain bishops resist this custom? This seems likely, as some bishops forbade the funerary rites sometimes used in this same period for the exclusion of lepers, although the grounds for such episcopal opposition was unfortunately not recorded. How, then, might we understand this resistance? Certain churchmen might have felt that the celebration of a metaphorical death endangered the essence of sacraments. The discussions of theologians and canon lawyers in the late Middle Ages about the sacrament of extreme unction, which reflect their reluctance to grant it except in circumstances of imminent death, are well known. In many ways, however, this ideal of death to the world was fundamental to Christian doctrine, expressed, for example, in the oft-​repeated saying of St. Paul that those who took up the cross in order to follow Christ died with him, waiting for eternal life (Rom. 6:8–​9). The monk’s death to the world was similarly at the very heart of monastic conversion. The rite that the monk underwent, however, did not borrow from the liturgy of the dead, but rather conferred upon him the grace of a second baptism. His death was merely a civil one. The monk could thus be considered to be less dead than the recluse, were one to imagine such a scale. How, indeed, could one bestow upon a healthy living person the sacrament of extreme unction? How could one officially mark the end of his or her earthly journey? And if reclusion was revocable, we can imagine the irregularity resulting from the experience of death and funeral should the recluse later return to the world and to sin. Would such a scenario not challenge the very notion of what is definite and unalterable? These questions point to the power of the words and gestures of those who performed sacerdotal functions, and to the very efficacy of the Church’s sacraments. Long before John L.  Austin’s How to Do Things with Words,27 the medieval Church had conceived of the performative power of the priest. The sacred words uttered by the priest do the thing. The Council of Toledo in 694 had prohibited a priest from celebrating a mass for the dead for an enemy in order to precipitate his demise.28 But if a bishop celebrated a

John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962). Mansi 12:259 (canon 5).

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requiem mass for a recluse, and if “saying is doing,” would God not immediately send his angels to take the recluse away? Let us now turn to the motives of the candidates for reclusion and their reception within the surrounding community, for, without at least tacit support, reclusion would have been impossible. Many English historians have explained the success of reclusion on political grounds. A  number of Anglo-​Saxons may have expressed their hostility toward the Conquest of 1066 by becoming recluses.29 Should the historical context of the last centuries of the Middle Ages (wars, epidemics, Church crises, millennial movements, growing anxiety about the afterlife, desire to imitate the suffering Christ) be invoked to explain this extreme form of piety throughout the West? Such an explanation is, in my view, too global. It was, after all, individual men and women who entered an anchorhold. If we refuse to consider the diversity of individual cases, how is it possible to interpret the variations that sometimes led recluses to heresy, or the great differences in opinion regarding reclusion and the recluses themselves? In this regard, the example of Margaret the Lame (contracta) (d. 1250), an anchoress in Magdeburg, is especially clear. Deemed a saint by some, she was reviled by others.30 This diversity is attested by evidence of practice:  the documentation reflects every imaginable situation. Among the recluses we find young and old, male and female, virgins, widows, and widowers, penitent prostitutes, monks and nuns, abbots and abbesses, canons and canonesses, priests, bishops, members of the third order, beguines, aristocrats and servants, the poor and the wealthy. It is not possible to explain all of these experiences as a reaction to the political climate or as the result of sociological conditioning. The difficulty of investigating the issue of intent lies in the need to take into account the multiple parameters that should ideally be determined in each case, including age (as the reclusion of an elderly priest does not carry the same meaning as that of a twelve-​year-​old girl), prior status (as a monk has a different outlook on reclusion from a lay man), and socioeconomic status (as the founder of a monastery who becomes an anchorite does not do so for the same reasons as a peasant). The historical context must also be taken into account in all cases, since certain features of reclusion remain constant while others change. Before the emergence of the mendicant orders and the

See Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–​1250 (Oxford, 2011), who criticizes this traditional stand. 30 See Anneke Mulder-​Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses:  The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2005), 148–​73.

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beguines, for instance, the outlets offered to converts for departure from the world had been limited. Different sources offer different perspectives on the possible impulses for entering into a life of reclusion. Hagiographical and apologetic works from the time of the Desert Fathers tend to insist on eschatology as the simplest and most valued motive. Rules offer us another perspective. While Aelred of Rievaulx’s rule was addressed to his sister, it was also meant for a wider audience.31 As was the case in Grimlaicus’ Regula, Aelred states that it is love for God that dictates this vocation, but his ideal recluse is totally unlike the model of his predecessor. Dismissing any preliminary training in a monastery, Aelred forbids the recluse from fulfilling any social role. This restriction is partly due to the fact that his addressee was a woman and could not perform pastoral care like the priest for whom Grimlaicus wrote. But Aelred’s preoccupations lie elsewhere. He prohibits the recluse from paying any attention to the starving orphans who would come to beg at her window. In his pessimistic view, the recluse’s tiny window, her only opening to the street and to the world, is a place of danger. The sole goal of the recluse should be jealous self-​abandonment in pursuit of the love of Christ the Bridegroom. The choice of reclusion could also be explained as a default option for those who found religious institutions too few or too elitist. Or traditional monasteries might have been perceived as too lax by more demanding souls. Other motives might also have been negative, predicated upon purposes that went against Christian values, and expressing them would therefore have been sacrilegious. Historians then find themselves in the murky waters of what remains unsaid. A young man or woman among the laity, for example, might have wished to escape from overbearing paternal authority, from an imposed marriage, from parenthood, or from a predetermined social status. A  man might also flee an unwanted marriage, as illustrated by the Life of Abraham de Quiduna, mentioned above, which was transformed into a play by Hrotswitha of Gandersheim (d. 1002) in the tenth century, or the even more famous story of Alexis, who ran away from his young bride on the wedding night and came back at the end of his life to live as a recluse in the family house, unrecognized by his parents. A  widow might have desired to avoid remarrying. In such cases, withdrawing from the world would not have been guided primarily by religious concerns but rather by an impulse to reject a preordained fate. For orphans and repudiated wives without resources, reclusion could

Paulette L’Hermite-​Leclercq, “Aelred of Rievaulx: The Recluse and Death According to the Vita inclusarum,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 34 (1999): 183–​201.

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offer a pious safe haven. Moreover, we should not dismiss certain psychological dispositions; there are certainly asocial individuals in any given period, and such people might have found life unbearable in a monastic community.32 The canon and his two English brothers who obtained a pontifical indult in order to enter an anchorhold without the authorization of their superior in 1399 and 1424 could perhaps be counted among these.33 Still more negative incentives could be envisioned, including the appeal of a life without worldly care, which were denounced by the Church. Worse still was the secret aspiration to draw attention to oneself by projecting the image of a champion of self-​mortification, an athlete at prayer. What can be said about the expectations of the community that accepted a recluse within its walls? The significant practical arrangements that reclusion demanded must be taken into account. If in earlier centuries the recluse was exiled to the wilds, from the twelfth century onwards he became domesticated, as it were, and the anchorhold transformed into a part of the urban landscape, contributing to a town’s identity. Still, the recluse depended for her survival on the good will of the townspeople. She would be welcome as long as she projected the positive image of the living dead, a willing victim (hostia viva), a holocaust in the spirit of St. Paul (Rom. 12:1),34 and as long as her cell was perceived as a tomb, a sacred repository, a prayer windmill, and a window on a sacrifice meant to benefit the community both on earth and in heaven. It seems that, in most cases, recluses were indeed well regarded. The communities relied upon them for protection against plagues like war, thunder, epidemics, and famines. Certain recluses were elevated to the rank of spiritual fathers and mothers, attributed with charismatic and mystical powers that granted them the gift of prophecy. On the more modest scale of everyday life, they could simply be appreciated on a personal level. We find countless testimonies of recluses who acted as confidants, comforters, counselors, and, if they were ordained, confessors to various individuals. They might even continue to engage in intense social activity. In fifth-​century Autun, for example, the recluse St. Leonien oversaw a community of 100 monks, while in the late



See, for example, Alison I. Beach, Shannon Li, and Samuel Sutherland, Monastic Experience in Twelfth-​ Century Germany:  The Petershausen Chronicle in Translation (Manchester, forthcoming). 33 Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 66. 34 For the image of the holocaust, see for example Admonitio ad Nonsuindam reclusam, PL 134, 925. 32

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twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Yvette of Huy (d. 1228) oversaw the personnel of the leper house she had established.35 Finally, great saints such as Francis (d. 1226) and Dominic (d. 1221) were honored by meeting recluses in Rome, just as St. Anselm (d. 1109) had been honored by visiting recluses in Lyon. This situation, however, would shift toward the end of the Middle Ages. Again, we may ask whether the catastrophes that befell western Europe between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries might explain these changing fortunes, although the same catastrophes are sometimes used to justify the very success of reclusion. Disaster certainly cannot be neglected as an explanation, as many anchorholds were destroyed by wars, or when churches, walls, or bridges were rebuilt. In some cases, the religious institutions that had served as patrons of anchorholds also fell into a state of decline and destitution, and were thus no longer able to continue to maintain them. But these causes alone are insufficient to explain this transformation. We must also consider the possibility that there were fewer and fewer vocations, and also fewer benefactors, and that the Church’s attitude grew increasingly hostile. Indeed, as soon as the occasion arose, countless former anchorholds were converted into beguinages or monasteries, which were much easier for ecclesiastical authorities to control. A change in mentality—​in religious sentiment—​should also be considered. A new conception of civic duty, which was added to the duties of the Christian and the citizen, might have led, from the fourteenth century on, to increasing criticism of begging and those deemed useless to society at large. We can observe a similar will on the part of the recluses themselves to serve the community more efficiently, for instance by opening a school. Further, toward the end of the Middle Ages, the devotional practices of the laity had developed significantly. It is no coincidence that certain famous rules such as the Ancren Riwle were later used by lay people outside the context of the anchorhold. In the sixteenth century, new female orders like the Visitandines and the Ursulines were created and dedicated to active charity or teaching. The multiplication of masses for the souls stuck in purgatory, and the expansion of the practice of indulgences and pilgrimage, might ultimately have rendered the intercessory role of recluses less necessary. The spread of the Humanist movement, which promoted the idea of a “sound mind in a sound



See Isabelle Cochelin, “Sainteté laïque:  l’exemple de Juette de Huy (1118–​1228),” Le Moyen-​Âge 95 (1989): 397–​417.

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body,” might also have led to the eclipse of reclusion, which Burchard of Worms had called “the Order of the dead.”36 Finally, we come to the question of gender and the place of reclusion in herstory. Once surviving primary sources multiply, in the high and late Middle Ages, statistically speaking, reclusion was practiced more often by women and eremitism more often by men. Why? Was this because, in a system of representation constructed by men, an equation was made between total and definitive enclosure and the concept that a woman’s place was in the private sphere? Was it because reclusion was theoretically meant both to protect her against her own sinful desires, and to protect men against temptation? If we return to the discourse of the Desert Fathers we observe in the contemporary sources that the divide between different types of religious life was not based upon the separation of the sexes. At the origins of the three modes of life (monasticism, eremitism, reclusion), during the mythical period of the ammas and abbas, a gendered distinction did not exist. The hermit Mary the Egyptian (fl. fifth or sixth century) did penance in the desert. Nor was the distinction between hermits and recluses conceived in terms of gender in the RB, which ignores women. This is significant: all three modes of religious life were conceived by and for men, but we cannot attribute the distinction between reclusion and eremitism to gender. In fact, this initial conception of reclusion on a male model did not prevent its success among women. Most recluses in the early Middle Ages were men, but this proportion seems to have reversed in the later period, as noted above. The degree to which this is true is hard to define. The rites for reclusion preserved in pontificals tend to be addressed to both sexes, but in sources such as wills the gender of the recluse is generally not specified. These formulaic documents would stipulate that a certain amount of money was to be given to “all the recluses” (omnibus reclusis) of the town or the diocese, preventing us from knowing whether these were men or women. An important question then remains:  why did more women than men embrace anchoritism in the high and late Middle Ages? This imbalance appears to me to have been governed by practical considerations. It is true that eremitism could be more dangerous for women. It would have been more difficult for women to defend themselves against assault by men or by beasts, or to produce whatever was necessary for their survival.37 Another

Vita sancti Burchardi 13, MGH SS 4, 838; English translation available at https://​ sourcebooks.fordham.edu/​source/​1025burchard-​vita.asp (date of last access:  31 August 2018). 37 See the article by Jasper and Howe in this volume.

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factor may have been demography, since towns were populated by more women than men. Yet, in my view, the main reason for this difference was ecclesiological. Women suffered from a perpetual lack of religious structures that they could join. Men, who filled all positions for every rank of the secular clergy, found in the mendicant orders yet another sphere of action beyond that offered by traditional monasticism. Such a sphere was inaccessible to the female component of these orders, who ended up being as cloistered as ever.38 Women could certainly embrace certain new structures that combined active life and devotion, such as the beguinages or charitable institutions and hospitals.39 But there was still too little supply to meet the demand, and, moreover, these new movements were suspect in the eyes of the Church, as the measures adopted against the beguines in 1311/​12 demonstrate. Might we then relate the factor of gender to the mystical flowering of the thirteenth century? The association of women with this particular expression of religious devotion has been much underscored, and we indeed find mystics among the recluses. This is a field of research too rich to be explored here fully. I will thus limit myself to the case of Julian of Norwich (d. after 1416). What does the work of Julian of Norwich owe to her status as a recluse? Were there not great mystics outside the anchorholds, and male mystics who were not recluses? This “mystical invasion” is also, therefore, not enough to explain the phenomenon. We must go back to the first question: was there an essential relation—​ in the etymological sense—​between reclusion and the ideal of the feminine constructed by men? I do not believe so. Even if more women than men chose reclusion, this cannot be interpreted as the result of an ecclesiastical policy. Although this type of religious life did produce a few saints, this was not sufficient to appease the doubts of the Church about the danger represented by these male and female recluses. The 1341 statutes of the beguines of Paris warn them thus: “no young woman should remain alone in a room” (Que nulle jueune fame ne demeure seule en chambre”).40 It is no coincidence that the seventeenth century invented the panopticon, which allowed the warden to watch his prisoner at all times, just as reclusion disappeared. Throughout the centuries, if we notice little enthusiasm on the part of the bishops to push women toward reclusion—​whether the nun Caritas in

See the article by Andenna in this volume. See the articles by More and Mulder-​Bakker and by Brenner in this volume. 40 Statutes published by L. Le Grand, Mémoires de la Société de Paris et de l’Ile-​de-​France 20 (1893): 344. 38

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the days of Burchard of Worms (around the end of the tenth century) or Jeanne de Cambry in the seventeenth century41—​we may wonder if reclusion did not, for a number of women, paradoxically allow the attainment, as unexpected as it was contested, of a freedom that they could not find in the secular world. Once in the anchorhold, a woman was no longer the “daughter of ” or the “wife of ” anyone, and was thus free to earn the reverence of  all.

Bibliography Cochelin, Isabelle. “Sainteté laïque: l’exemple de Juette de Huy (1118–​1228).” Le Moyen-​Âge 95 (1989): 397–​417. Guigue, Marie-​Claude. Recherches sur les recluseries de Lyon. Lyon, 1887. Gunn, Cate, and Liz Herbert McAvoy, eds. Medieval Anchorites in Their Communities. Woodbridge, 2017. Hostetler, Margaret M. “Designing Religious Women: Privacy and Exposure in the Life of Christina of Markyate and Ancrene Wisse.” Mediaevalia 22 (1999): 201–​31. Jones, Eddie A. “A Mirror For Recluses: A New Manuscript, New Information and Some New Hypotheses.” The Library:  The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 15 (2014): 424–​31. Laumonier, Lucie. “Les recluses de Montpellier du XIIIe au XVe siècle:  une institution urbaine.” Revue Mabillon 26 (2015): 179–​204. L’Hermite-​Leclercq, Paulette. “Aelred of Rievaulx: The Recluse and Death According to the Vita inclusarum.” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 34 (1999): 183–​201.   “Les reclus dans la ville au bas Moyen-Âge.” Journal des savants (1988): 219–62.   “Reclus et recluses dans la mouvance des ordres religieux.” In Les mouvances laïques des ordres religieux, edited by Nicole Bouter, 201–18. Saint-Étienne, 1996. Licence, Tom. Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–​1250. Oxford, 2011. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, ed. Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe. Woodbridge, 2010. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life. Rochester, NY, 2011. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, and Mari Hughes-​ Edwards, eds. Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages. Chicago, IL, 2005. Mulder-​Bakker, Anneke. Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia, PA, 2005. Pavy, Louis-​Antoine-​Augustin. Les recluseries. Lyon, 1875. Rava, Eleonora. “Eremite in città: il fenomeno della reclusione urbana femminile nell’età comunale: il caso di Pisa.” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 21 (2010): 139–​62. Riehle, Wolfgang. The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England, trans. Charity Scott-​Stokes. Ithaca, NY, 2014.



Vita sancti Burchardi, 838; Pierre de Cambry, Abrégé de la vie de dame Jeanne de Cambry … recluse lez Lille (Tournai, 1663).

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Reclusion in the Middle Ages Sensi, Mario. “Anchoresses and Penitents in Thirteenth-​and Fourteenth-​Century Umbria.” In Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, edited by Daniel Borstein and Roberto Rusconi, 56–​83. Chicago, IL, 1996. Warren. Ann K. Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England. Berkeley, CA, 1985.

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Similarities and Differences between Monks and Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century Ursula V on e s-​L ie benstein At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), regular canon and future bishop of Acre in Palestine, wrote a History of the Western World (Historia occidentalis). Here he states that “the renewal of the Western Church” could only happen “through the order of regulars or monasticism.”1 He then defines the regulars, simultaneously grouping them together while also distinguishing between regular canons and monks:  “From the early times onwards there existed in the Western World two different kinds of regulars, namely the black monks following the Rule of St. Benedict and the white canons living according to the Rule of St. Augustine.”2 He mentions that they represented different institutions and different ways of life “but that they all had one and the same foundation, like a kind of cornerstone: they had to renounce the world, to have nothing of their own, to be obedient to their superior and to remain chaste.”3 Some chapters later, he deals with the question of secular canons, subdivided in his eyes into two groups: canons who live in community according to a rule other than the Augustinian one, probably the Rule of Aachen (the Institutio canonicorum Aquisgranensis),4 and “false canons,”5 who “cannot be called monks,”6 because they live in private houses and neglect their duties. Jacques’s definition of regulars is one articulated from the perspective of an internal observer, as he was himself a regular canon. At the same time, the Fourth Lateran Council defined religious—​ whether monk or regular canon—​as a “regular”—​that is, committed to

Jacques de Vitry, The historia occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry: A Critical edition, ed. John Frederick Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972), 22. All translations from Latin to English are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Ibid. 13, 111. 3 Ibid. 13, 110. 4 Ibid. 30, 151. For the Rule of Aachen, see below. 5 Jacques de Vitry, Historia occidentalis 30, 152. 6 Ibid. 31, 156. 1

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a rule.7 And this in a period in which the relationship between monks and canons had undergone many changes since the times of Augustine (d. 430).

Monasterium clericorum: Eusebius, Augustine, and the Aftermath Eusebius of Vercelli (d. 371) was the first in the Western Church to associate “the functions of clerics and the institutions of the monks.”8 Half a century later, Augustine gathered the clerics of his cathedral around him to found a community, a so-​called monasterium clericorum, or monastery for the clergy.9 He produced a rule for this community, the Praeceptum or regula secunda, which was to serve as a guide for the regular canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.10 This same Praeceptum was adapted, however, for consecrated virgins by Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) (RCaeV) as early as the sixth century.11 So there was, from the beginning, a close relationship between the rules for the clergy and the ones for monastic communities. Little is known about the common life of canonici or clerici at the bishop’s or the archpriest’s see in the following centuries. These canons were devoted primarily to the celebration of the Eucharist, to the liturgy of the Hours, and to the pastoral care of the people. In exchange, they received their means

Michele Maccarrone, “Le costituzioni del IV concilio lateranense sui religiosi,” in Nuovi studi su Innocenzo III, ed. Roberto Lambertini and Michele Maccarrone (Rome, 1995), 1–​45, esp. 25 (at 3). See also the article by Sharp in this volume. 8 Ambrose of Milan, Ep. 63, in Epistolarum classis prima, PL 16, 1207. For this institution, see Guiseppe Ferraris, “La vita comune delle canoniche di S. Eusebio e di S. Maria di Vercelli nel sec. XII,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 17 (1963): 365–​94; and Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam et monachorum: le influenze monastiche sulle strutture istituzionali delle canoniche e delle congregazioni canonicali,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit, ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske (Munich, 1997), 240–​1. 9 Luc Verheijen, La règle de Saint-​Augustin, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967), 2:200. See also Augustine, Sermon 355, PL 39, 1570. Klaus Schreiner, “‘Ein Herz und eine Seele’: eine urchristliche Lebensform und ihre Institutionalisierung im augustinisch geprägten Mönchtum des hohen und späten Mittelalters,” in Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Paring, 2002),  3–​14. 10 See Verheijen, La règle de Saint-​Augustin, 1:417–​37, for the edition of this text. For an English translation of the rule, see Tarsicius J. van Bavel, ed., The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions, trans. Raymond Canning (Kalamazoo, MI, 1996). For the manuscripts, see www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org/​texts/​Augustine-​ Regulae.html (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 11 For the influence of the rule of St Augustine on the RCaeV, see Lazare de Seilhac, L’utilisation par S.  Césaire d’Arles de la règle de S.  Augustin (Rome, 1974); and Maria Caritas McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles: A Translation with a Critical Introduction (Washington, DC, 1960). 7

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of subsistence from the bishop.12 Toward the end of the seventh century, monks of communities that originally led an ascetic life started to receive holy orders. Terms such as regularis or claustralis began to be employed to designate both monks and canons without distinction, their dwellings being known as a monasterium, coenobium, or abbatia.13 Around 755, Chrodegang, bishop of Metz (d. 766), composed a rule for the clerics of his cathedral.14 He took many passages from the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), but not without making significant changes; like the monks, the canons had to share a dormitory, but they could also sleep in lodgings of their own within the enclosure.15 The canons had a common refectory, but they were not obliged to take all their meals there. They had to come to chapter, where—​unlike in monasteries—​a passage of the Rule was to be read only on some days of the week. There were other essential differences: the canons were not obliged to renounce private property and could leave their enclosure to administer sacraments, to preach or to fulfill pastoral duties. Half a century later, Louis the Pious (r. 814–​40) decided to attempt a unification of religious life. Monastic communities were obliged to follow the RB as established by Benedict of Aniane (d. 821) and “a huge variety of monastic sources, including the Rule of St Augustine.”16 The canons were to live according to the Rule of Aachen,17 which was based on the writings of the Church fathers—​Isidore of Seville, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Prosper of Aquitaine—​and conciliar texts, probably as they were known in the collection called the Dionysio-​Hadriana.18

Guy P. Marchal, “Was war das weltliche Kanonikerinstitut im Mittelalter? Dom-​ und Kollegiatstifte:  eine Einführung und eine neue Perspektive,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 94 (1999): 778–​9. 13 Ibid., 780–​1. See Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996),  8–​12. 14 Jerome Bertram, The Chrodegang Rules:  The Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Critical Texts with Translations and Commentary (Burlington, VT, 2005), 1; Martin A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church:  Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula Canonicorum in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2004). 15 Bertram, Chrodegang Rules, 3–​24 and 52–​83. See Fonseca, “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam et monachorum,” 248. 16 Bertram, Chrodegang Rules, 9. See also Josef Semmler, “Die Beschlüsse des Aachener Konzils im Jahre 816,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 74 (1963): 15–​82. For recent research about the text of RB, in the version adopted by the Council of Aachen, see the articles by Diem and Rousseau and by Kramer in volume 1. 17 MGH Concilia 2/​1, 307–​421. Marchal, “Was war das weltliche Kanonikerinstitut,” 783–​7, with references to the literature. 18 Bertram, Chrodegang Rules, 87. 12

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Nine chapters of the Rule of Aachen referred to the RB.19 In Chapter 115, a clear distinction between monks and canons was drawn: It is permissible for canons to wear linen, to eat meat, to give and receive private property and to possess church property in humility and righteousness, since we do not find that the sacred canons prohibit these things; on the other hand these are strictly forbidden to monks, who lead a stricter life according to the provisions of their rule.20

As a result of the decisions of the Council of Aachen, some communities such as Sithius in Flanders were split into two, one of monks and one of canons, now forced to life different lives, although before they had followed a mixed rule. However, the “boundaries between the monks’ and the canons’ practice” living under the same abbot faded away, until “Gerard of Brogne restored the Benedictine rule” for the monks of Sithius in the mid-​tenth century.21

Were the Regular Canons of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries “Monks”? Owing to the search for a new way of life in accordance with the vita apostolica, thinking and practices changed around the middle of the eleventh century—​ a phenomenon aptly termed “monachization” by Giles Constable.22 Some canons attached to cathedrals or other sanctuaries decided in favor of a stricter and more ascetic life in common, following the example of the Christian community in the early Church as depicted in the Acts of the Apostles, sometimes even inserting chapters of the RB in their manuscripts.23 They committed themselves to more rigorous dietary rules and now took vows before entering the community.24 Was this the “monachization” of the Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “Gli ‘Excerpta Benedicti’ nelle sillogi normative canonicali medioevali,” in Studi in onore di Dinu Adamesteanu (Galatina, 1983), 222–​4. 20 MGH Concilia 2/​1, 397; translation in Bertram, Chrodegang Rules, 145. 21 Karine Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (Woodbridge, 2005), 59–​60. 22 Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 6; and Giles Constable, “The Study of Monastic History Today,” in Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieval History, ed. Vaclav Mudroch and G. S. Couse (Montreal, 1974), 33. See still Charles Dereine, “Vie commune, règle de saint Augustin, et chanoines réguliers au XIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 41 (1946): 365–​406; and Dereine, “La ‘vita apostolica’ dans l’ordre canonial du IXe au XIe siècles,” Revue Mabillon 51 (1961): 47–​53; also Schreiner, “ ‘Ein Herz und eine Seele’,” 14–​20. 23 See Fonseca, “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam et monachorum,”  244–​6. 24 Mirko Breitenstein, Das Noviziat im hohen Mittelalter. Zur Organisation des Eintrittes bei den Cluniazensern, Cisterziensern und Franziskanern (Münster, 2008). 19

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canons, a progressive blending of the active life of the canons—​represented by its cura animarum and pastoral duties—​with the contemplative life of the monks? The main elements of this new form of life were the creation (or revival) of common lodgings (dormitories and refectories), the renunciation of private property, and the adherence to certain rules concerning clothing, eating habits, the lectio divina, and the holy office. At the end of the eleventh century, the rules followed by the now so-​called regular canons were still inspired by the Rule of Aachen, but in a somewhat amended version. Pope Urban II (r. 1088–​99) was the first to declare that the life of the “regular” canons—​as opposed to that of the “secular” canons, who continued to live as before in individual lodgings, enjoying their personal revenues and disposing of them in their wills—​had to be put on the same level as monastic life. In his famous charter Pie voluntatis affectus, delivered in July 1092 in favor of the regular canons of Saint-​Ruf in Avignon and later repeated for the benefit of other regular canons,25 he emphasized a life in search of eternal merit and renunciation of all worldly goods.26 He insisted that this kind of life was just as commendable and meritorious as the life of monks. He mentioned that monks, “thanks to the mercy of God, had enlightened the whole century,” whereas the canons had at this time “nearly completely declined, because of the diminishing zeal of the faithful.” He recalled that Pope Urban I (r. 222–​30) had instituted the canons’ form of religious life,27 that Augustine had organized it in his rules, and that Jerome (d. 420) had discussed it in his letters. He insisted, therefore, that regular canons should not be allowed to leave the community to seek either a more comfortable, or even a stricter, form of  life. Philipp Jaffé, Samuel Loewenfeld, Friedrich Kaltenbrunner, and Paul Ewald, eds., Regesta pontificum romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum MCXCVIII, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1888), JL 5763; Codex diplomaticus ordinis Sancti Rufi Valentiae, ed. Ulysse Chevalier (Valence, 1891), 8–​9. See also Johannes Laudage, “‘Ad exemplar primitivae ecclesiae’: Kurie, Reich und Klerusreform von Urban II. bis Calixt II.,” in Reformidee und Reformpolitik im spätsalisch-​frühstaufischen Reich, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Mainz, 1992), 71–​3; Horst Fuhrmann, Papst Urban II. und der Stand der Regularkanoniker (Munich, 1984); Charles Dereine, “L’élaboration du statut canonique des chanoines réguliers spécialement sous Urbain II,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 46 (1951):  545–​ 51; Yannick Veyrenche, “ ‘Quia vos estis qui sanctorum patrum vitam probabilem renovatis’: naissance des chanoines réguliers jusqu’à Urbain II,” in Les chanoines réguliers. Émergence et expansion (XIe–​XIIIe siècles). Actes du 6e colloque international du C.E.R.C.O.R., Le Puy-​en-​Velay, 29 juin–​1er juillet 2006, ed. Michel Parisse (Saint-​Étienne, 2009), 29–​70; and Alfons Becker, Papst Urban II. (1088–​1099), vol. III. Ideen, Institutionen und Praxis eines päpstlichen regimen universale (Hanover, 2012), 396–​413 and 463–​80. 26 Codex diplomaticus, ed. Chevalier, 8. 27 Regarding Urban II’s decision to mention this pope, see Josef Siegwart, Die Chorherren-​ und Chorfrauengemeinschaften in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz vom 6. Jahrhundert bis 1160 (Fribourg, 1962), 233–​4. 25

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This prohibition of such transitus28 from one order to another stirred emotions throughout the century.29 Urban II insisted upon it in a sermon delivered in the chapter of Saint-​Ruf when he stayed at Avignon, a sermon that was later integrated in Gratian’s (d. 1144/​5) Decretum.30 One of the reasons for this attitude was later expressed by commentators on the Decretum: “Because in nearly all cases the life of the religious canons (vita religiosorum canonicorum) is equal to the religious life of the monks, no regular canon is allowed to join a monastery without the permission of his prior.”31 During the course of the twelfth century, however, this prohibition was dropped,32 and even regular canons accepted the passage of the members of their order ad strictiorem vitam (“to a stricter form of life”).33 In papal privileges from the beginning of the twelfth century, references to various writings of the Church fathers as inspiration for the life of the regular canons came to be replaced by exclusive reference to the Rule of St. Augustine (RA).34 At the same time, some communities of regular canons started to compose their own customaries, partly influenced by monastic customaries like those of Cluny or Hirsau.35 In the time of Pope Gelasius II (r. 1118–​19) a dispute arose regarding the different rules of St. Augustine; which should be adopted, the Praeceptum (or third rule) or the more severe Ordo monasterii

Gert Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung zwischen Vita canonica und Vita monastica:  das Übertrittsproblem in kanonistischer Behandlung von Gratian bis Hostiensis,” in Secundum regulam vivere. Festschrift für P. Norbert Backmund, ed. Gert Melville (Windberg, 1978), 205–​43. 29 Dereine, “L’elaboration du statut canonique,” 552–​5. 30 Titus Lenherr, “Die Überlieferung des Kapitels ‘Duae sunt, inquit, leges’ (Decretum Gratiani C.  19 q.  2 c.  2),” Archiv für Katholisches Kirchenrecht 168 (1999):  359–​84; Peter Landau, “Die ‘duae leges’ im kanonischen Recht des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Officium et Libertas chistiana (Munich, 1991), 55–​96; Becker, Papst Urban II, 480–​5. See also Lars-​ Arne Dannenberg, Das Recht der Religiosen in der Kanonistik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 2008), 228–​328, esp. 318–​26; and Giorgio Picasso, “San Bernardo e il ‘transitus’ dei monaci,” in Monachorum tempora seu gesta exquirere: studi di storia monastica (secoli VI–​XIII), ed. Giorgio Picasso and Giancarlo Andenna (Münster, 2006), 133–​54. 31 Rufinus, Summa Decretorum c. XIX, q. III, ed. Heinrich Singer (Paderborn, 1902; reprint Aalen, 1963), 379; Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung,” 218. 32 Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung,” 222–​7. 33 See Mathieu Arnoux, Des clercs au service de la réforme. Études et documents sur les chanoines réguliers de la province de Rouen (Turnhout, 2000), 76–​82; Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung,” 217. 34 For the different rules attributed to St. Augustine and known at this time, see Verheijen, La règle de Saint-​Augustin. 35 On monastic customaries, see the articles by Bruce and Cochelin in volume 1. See Josef Siegwart, Die Consuetudines des Augustiner-​Chorherrenstiftes Marbach im Elsaß (Fribourg, 1965); Stefan Weinfurter, Consuetudines canonicorum regularium Springirsbacenses-​ Rodenses, CCCM 48 (1978). Charles Dereine, “Saint-​Ruf et ses coutumes au XIe et XIIe siècle,” Revue bénédictine 59 (1949): 161–​82. 28

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(or second rule)?36 After the condemnation of the liturgical prescriptions of the Ordo monasterii by Gelasius II, the regular canons were split into two movements: the more moderate ordo antiquus (older order), with Saint-​Ruf of Avignon, Saint-​Victor of Paris, and Marbach, and the stricter ordo novus (new order) of Springiersbach, Arrouaise, and Prémontré.37

The Expansion of the Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century Like all monastic houses before the appearance of new monastic orders later in the twelfth century, every house of regular canons was in principle independent or dependent only on the bishop or the cathedral chapter.38 In France, Saint-​Ruf of Avignon, the first community of clerics known to have sought to lead a more “religious” form of life (from 1039 onward), was also the first one to disseminate and influence other houses. Through its links with the eleventh-​century papal reform movement, its customs were propagated in houses in Burgundy, southern France, Italy, Savoy, Lorraine, Catalonia, Leon-​ Castile, and the German Empire, as well as later in England, Portugal, and Scandinavia.39 In northern France, Saint-​Victor of Paris was founded in the first decade of the twelfth century and favored by the Capetian kings.40 Its school was famous and brought forth philosophers such as Hugh (d. 1141) and Richard of Saint-​Victor (d. 1173).41 Victorine houses could be found from Normandy See the letters of Bishop Walter of Maguelonne and Abbot Pontius of Saint-​Ruf, in Dereine, “Saint-​Ruf et ses coutumes,” 167–​74. On the beginning of the introduction of the ordo novus in Germany, see Werner Bomm, “Wesenszüge der regulierten vita canonica im Spiegel ihrer ‘geistigen Verarbeitung’ im Hohen Mittelalter,” in Studien zum Bildungswesen der bayerischen Augustiner Chorherren in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Gert Melville and Alois Schmid (Paring, 2008), 36–​9. On Prémontré, see Clemens Dölken, ed., Norbert von Xanten und der Orden der Prämonstratenser (Magdeburg, 2010); and Irene Crusius and Helmut Flachenecker, eds., Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden (Göttingen, 2003). 37 The terms are contemporary, but have been used in modern research since the publication of Charles Dereine, “Chanoines (des origines au XIIIe siècle),” in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 12 (1953) 353–​405 (see 386–​90). See also Siegwart, Chorherren-​und Chorfrauengemeinschaften, 256. 38 For the monastic orders, see John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 274; and the article by Melville in this volume. 39 See Ursula Vones-​ Liebenstein, “Der Verband der Regularkanoniker von Saint-​ Ruf: Entstehung, Struktur und normative Grundlagen,” in Melville and Müller, Regula Sancti Augustini, 49–​104. 40 Ursula Vones-​Liebenstein, Saint-​ Victor in Paris. Vom Königskloster zur Kongregation (Paring, 2007); and the articles by Mews and Clark in this volume. 41 Dominique Poirel, ed., L’école de Saint-​Victor de Paris. Influence et rayonnement du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne (Turnhout, 2010). 36

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to England, from Denmark to southern Italy. On the frontier of Flanders, the Order of Arrouaise was created from eremitical origins and later spread to England (Bourne, Lilleshall, Missenden), Ireland (Bangor, Kells, Durrow), and Scotland ( Jedburgh).42 In Germany,43 the canonical movement was supported by reform-​oriented bishops like Conrad of Salzburg (d. 1147),44 Altmann of Passau (d. 1091) (Rottenbuch, St. Nicola in Passau), and Reinhard of Halberstadt (d. 1123); all three often integrated the regular canons into the administration of their dioceses.45 In Italy, Santa Mary in Reno, Holy Cross in Mortara, San Giovanni in Laterano, Porto in Ravenna, and San Frediano in Lucca were famous centers of canonical reform.46 In the Holy Land, the Congregation of the Holy Sepulcher was founded;47 in Portugal, Santa Cruz in Coimbra;48 and in Spain, the order of Roncesvalles, which cared especially for pilgrims en route to Santiago de Compostela.49 In England, there were the Gilbertines, named after their founder, Gilbert of Sempringham, which by 1189, the year of his

Ludo Milis, L’ordre des chanoines réguliers d’Arrouaise. Son histoire et son organisation, de la fondation de l’abbaye-​mère (vers 1090)  à la fin des chapitres annuels (1471) (Bruges, 1969). On the regular canons in Ireland, see the article by Ó Clabaigh in this volume. 43 For the spread of canonical houses, see the map “Die regulierten Chorherren bis 1250,” by Odilo Engels and Josef Siegwart, in Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte, ed. Hubert Jedin (Fribourg, Basel, and Vienna, 1970), 50. See also Helmut Flachenecker, “L’expansion des chanoines réguliers dans le Saint Empire Romain,” in Parisse, Les chanoines réguliers, 361–​83. 44 Stefan Weinfurter, Salzburger Bischofsreform und Bischofspolitik im 12. Jahrhundert. Der  Erzbischof Konrad I.  von Salzburg 1106–​ 1147 und die Regularkanoniker (Cologne, 1975). 45 Stefan Weinfurter, “Neuere Forschung zu den Regularkanonikern im Deutschen Reich des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 224 (1977): 394. 46 Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, Medioevo canonicale (Milan, 1970); Cristina Andenna, Mortariensis Ecclesia. Una congregazione di canonici regolari in Italia settentrionale tra XI e XII secolo (Münster, 2007); Cristina Andenna, “L’expansion des chanoines réguliers en Italie,” in Parisse, Les chanoines réguliers, 385–​425. 47 Nikolas Jaspert, Stift und Stadt. Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regularkanonikerstift Santa Eulàlia del Camp im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145–​1423) (Berlin, 1996); Nikolas Jaspert, “Die Ritterorden und der Orden vom Heiligen Grab auf der Iberischen Halbinsel,” in Militia Sancti Sepulchri. Idea e istituzioni, ed. Kaspar Elm and Cosimo Damiano Fonseca (Vatican City, 1998), 381–​410. La Orden del Santo Sepulcro. I Jornadas de Estudio, Calatayud-​Zaragoza (Madrid, 1991). 48 E. A. O ’Malley, Tello and Theotonio, the Twelfth-​Century Founders of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra (Washington, DC, 1954); Armando Alberto Martins, O mosteiro de Santa Cruz de Coimbra na Idade Média (Lisbon, 2003). 49 See E. Ramírez Vaquero, “La communidad regular de Santa María de Roncesvalles, siglos XII–​XIX,” Principe de Viana 54 (1993):  357–​402; and in general Ursula Vones-​ Liebenstein, “L’expansion des chanoines réguliers dans la péninsule ibérique au XIIe siècles,” in Parisse, Les chanoines réguliers, 429–​54. 42

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death, had eighteen canonries and fourteen double monasteries, whose nuns followed the rule of the Cistercians.50 The Premonstratensians, founded by Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134)  and thus also known as the Norbertines, were by far the most influential order of regular canons. They followed stricter practices such as manual labor, abstinence from meat, and continual silence. Organized like the Cistercians (with different provinces, an annual general chapter, and lay brothers), the Premonstratensians were soon present all over Europe.51 Given these different forms of common life, it is difficult to speak of the regular canons during the twelfth century as an entity. This is also reflected in the research, which tends to focus on a particular order of regular canons (such as the ones listed above) or to address the problem of similarities and differences between monks and regular canons.

The Current State of Research: Differences between Monks and Regular Canons During the 1950s, there was increased interest in studies about regular canons, and the question of their relationship with the monks was one of the major issues. John Compton Dickinson in England, Charles Dereine in Belgium, and Jakob Mois in Germany emphasized the difficulties of studying the topic given the desire of both groups to differentiate themselves from each other.52 The monks were especially keen that the two groups should remain clearly distinct, protesting against the taking of vows and the reception of

Brian J. Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995); Glyn Coppack, “ ‘And then he added canons’:  Gilbert of Sempringham and the Developing Framework of Gilbertine Life,” in The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Turnhout, 2011), 291–​311; Janet Burton, “L’expansion des chanoines réguliers en Grande-​Bretagne,” in Parisse, Les chanoines réguliers, 477–​98 (including maps). On the issue of double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 51 Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten und die Entstehung des Prämonstraten­ se­rordens,” in Barbarossa und die Prämonstratenser (Göppingen, 1989), 67–​ 100, reprinted in Stefan Weinfurter, Gelebte Ordnung—​Gedachte Ordnung. Ausgewählte Beiträge zu König, Kirche und Reich, ed. Helmuth Kluger et  al. (Ostfildern, 2005), 65–​92; see also Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert of Xanten in the Judgement of His Contemporaries,” Communicator 20 (2002): 25–​50. 52 John Compton Dickinson, The Origins of the Austin Canons and Their Introduction into England (London, 1950), 197–​214. Dereine, “L’élaboration du statut canonique,” 442. Jakob Mois, Das Stift Rottenbuch in der Kirchenreform des 11.-12. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Freising, 1953), 65–​93 and 239–​46.

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the habit by canons,53 as well as against the fact that the superiors of houses of canons were now to be called abbots.54 But historians generally agree that the differences emphasized in polemical treatises and statements “in many ways disappeared in practice.”55 In 1955, Herbert Grundmann underlined the fact that the borders and differences between some monks, regular canons, preachers, and hermits were fading in the twelfth century, mainly because all of them sought to live according to the life of the early Church, the vita apostolica.56 It has long been recognized, therefore, that regular canons and monks shared many ideals in common,57 while, as Cosimo Damiano Fonseca argued, they were each searching for their own distinct identity.58 Fonseca further maintained that, while the influence of the monks (following the RB) on the canonical communities in the eleventh century was very important, it grew progressively weaker in the course of the twelfth century, although it never disappeared entirely.59 Clifford Hugh Lawrence wrote in the third edition of his introduction to Medieval Monasticism that “in essentials the canonical observance was monastic. In fact, for practical purposes, the difference between a house of canons regular and a Benedictine monastery would sometimes be hard to define.”60 This was an opinion also expressed by Giles Constable and Pierre-​Roger Gaussin, when they examined the different forms of religious life, particularly in the aftermath of the so-​called Gregorian Reform.61 Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 202–​3. On Hugh of Amiens’ critique of the regular canons, see Ryan P. Freeburn, Hugh of Amiens and the Twelfth-​Century Renaissance (Aldershot, 2011). 54 See Rupert of Deutz, Commentarium in regula sancti Benedicti, PL 170, 526; Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 202. 55 Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 201. 56 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages:  The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN, 1995). See also Franz Felten, “Wozu treiben wir vergleichende Ordensgeschichte,” in Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin, 2007), 17. 57 Dereine, “La ‘vita apostolica,” 47–​53; Christopher N.  L. Brooke, “Monks and Canons,” in Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. William J. Sheils (Oxford, 1985), 109–​2 9. 58 Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “Monaci e canonici alla ricerca di una identità,” in Istituzioni monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–​1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 28 agosto–​3 settembre 1977 (Milan, 1980), 22–​58. 59 Fonseca, “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam et monachorum,” 245. 60 Clifford Hugh Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Harlow, 2001), 166. 61 Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 109; Pierre-​Roger Gaussin, L’Europe des ordres et des congrégations. Des Bénédictins aux Mendiants (VIe–​XVIe siècle) (Saint-​Etienne, 1984),  7–​20. 53

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In 1979, however, Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the fact that, “despite many similarities between regular canons and the new monastic orders, the monastic and canonical senses of vocation were at some fundamental level different,” and that “monks and regular canons had different conceptions of Christian responsibility.”62 She concluded that there were more similarities than differences, but that “the monk qua monk is responsible for his own salvation, not the salvation of others,” whereas the regular canons “incorporated a sense of responsibility for others into their feeling about themselves.”63 Ten years later, Jean Châtillon came to the conclusion that the spirituality of the regular canons was “fundamentally different from monastic spirituality,” despite the fact “that they very often borrow some of their usages, customs or ascetic and liturgical practices from monks.”64 Christina Andenna reconsidered this issue in 2004, and concluded that Bynum and Fonseca were right in asserting that the specificity of the regular canons lies in them “feeling responsible for others,” in “pointing out for the faithful and their fellow men the way to God.”65 Was it the exercise of the cura animarum, the cure of souls,66 that distinguished regular canons from monks, as Jean Leclercq argued in 1962, or the practice of hospitality to which Charles Dereine referred?67 Was it the spirituality of the regular canons, their functions in the Church, or their customs and habits that distinguished them?68 Only comparative studies, including those currently being conducted in Dresden under Gert Melville69—​examining Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-​Century Spirituality (Missoula, MT, 1979), 195 and 4. 63 Ibid., 193 and 196. 64 Jean Châtillon, “La spiritualité de l’ordre canonial (VIIIe–​XIIIe siècles),” in Le mouvement canonial au Moyen Age. Réforme de l’Église, spiritualité et culture, ed. Patrice Sicard (Paris and Turnhout, 1992), 132 (my translation). 65 Cristina Andenna, “Kanoniker sind Gott für das ganze Volk verantwortlich.” Die Regularkanoniker Italiens und die Kirche im 12. Jahrhundert (Paring, 2004), 14. 66 Jean Leclercq, “La spiritualité des chanoines réguliers,” in La vita comune del clero nei secoli XI e XII, 2 vols. (Milan, 1962), 1:134. 67 “Discussione,” in La vita comune del clero nei secoli XI e XII, 1:136–​7. 68 Fonseca, “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam monachorum,” 243; Fonseca, “Gli ‘Excerpta Benedicti’ ”; Jean Baptiste Van Damme, “La ‘Summa Carta caritatis’ source de constitutions canoniales,” Citeaux. Commentarii cistercienses 23 (1972):  5–​ 54; Dirk Van de Perre, “Die ältesten Klostergesetzgebungen von Prémontré, Oigny, Citeaux, Klosterrath und Arrouaise und ihre Beziehungen zueinander,” Analecta Praemonstratensia 76 (2000): 29–​69. 69 For further information see the homepage of the FOVOG (Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte), https://​tu-​dresden.de/​dcpc/​fovog (date of last access:  1 May 2019); and Gert Melville, “FOVOG:  Comparing the Medieval History of Religious Orders. On the Aims and the Structure of an International Collaborative Research Centre in Germany,” Revue Mabillon 20 (2009): 252–​8. 62

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all aspects of religious life:  the law, the customs, the administration, the structures of the different congregations, the daily life in the cloister, the profession, and the vows70—​can provide adequate answers.

Self-​Conception of Monks and Canons: A Life of Equal Value? The concept of two ways of religious life of equal value was discussed throughout the twelfth century in polemical writings on both sides.71 Among others, Rupert of Deutz (d.  1129), Peter Abelard (d.  1142), Hugh of Rouen (d.  1164), and the unnamed author(s) of the Dialogue between a Cluniac and a Cistercian and Of the True Apostolic Life, wrote on behalf of the dignity and precedence of monasticism.72 The author of the Dialogue argued that “whether they like it or not, all who have professed that rule [of St. Augustine] are monks. For they are either monks or of no order.”73 He added that “the Norbertines and all those who lead a life in common are monks,” but that “some of the Norbertines from vainglory deny that they are monks, because they wish to be called preachers and rulers of churches.”74 In the treatise De vita vera apostolica, the eating and clothing habits of the canons were criticized, and the conclusion drawn “that the rule of the canons is of lesser value and less venerable than the rule of the monks.”75 On the other side, regular canons such as Lietbert of Saint-​Ruf (d. 1110), Yves of Chartres (d. 1115), Arno of Reichersberg (d. 1175), Philip of Harvengt (d. 1183), and Anselm of Havelberg (d. 1158) defended the superiority of their (canonical) order.76 In the succession of Christ and the Apostles, the regular See the list of the different volumes of “Vita regularis—​Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter” and their content, https://​tu-​dresden.de/​dcpc/​ fovog/​vita-​regularis?set_​language=en (date of last access: 1 May 2019). 71 See Dereine, “L’élaboration du statut canonique,” 558–​61. 72 Rupert of Deutz, Altercatio monachi et clerici, PL 170, 537–​42; Christl Meier-​Staubach, “Ruperts von Deutz literarische Sendung,” in Aspekte des 12. Jahrhunderts. Freisinger Kolloquium 1998, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs et al. (Berlin, 2000) 45–​8; Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 209; Felten, “Wozu treiben wir vergleichende Ordengeschichte,” 41. Peter Abelard, Letter Contra quemdam canonicum regularem qui monasticum ordinem deprimebat, PL 178, 345–​52. Hugh of Rouen, Dialogorum Libri VII, lib. 6, PL 192, 1215–​19. 73 Idung of Prüfening, Dialogus duorum monachorum II.41, in Robert B. C. Huygens, “Le moine Idung et ses deux ouvrages:  ‘Argumentum super quatuor questionibus’ et ‘Dialogus duorum monachorum’,” Studi Medievali 13 (1972):  291–​470; for an English translation, see Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 198. See also Idung of Prüfening, Cistercians and Cluniacs: The Case for Cîteaux. A Dialogue between Two Monks, An Argument on Four Questions, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, Joseph Leahey, and Grace Perrigo (Kalamazoo, MI, 1977). 74 Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 199. 75 De vita vera apostolica, PL 170, 650. 76 Ursula Vones-​Liebenstein, “The Liber ecclesiastici et canonici ordinis of Lietbert of Saint-​ Ruf,” in Shaping Stability:  The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle

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canons—​as Lietbert of Saint-​Ruf expressed it—​thought of themselves as an order of priests who, like Jesus, “carry the sins of the people … being appointed mediators between God and the people … the light of the world … the salt of the earth” (Mt 5:13–​14).77 At the same time, some authors preferred to highlight the similarities. Between 1150 and 1180, a regular canon of the province of Salzburg wrote a prologue to the RA in which he placed monks and regular canons on the same level, calling them monachi who differ only in habitus and the exercise of the cure of souls.78

Similarities and Differences From a strictly legal point of view, according to canon law, regular canons and monks had distinct identities and functions within the Church.79 Their differences and similarities should, however, be further investigated with respect to nearly every aspect of religious life, from spirituality to the different forms of their propositum (stability, obedience,80 renunciation of property, chastity); on legal, economic, and liturgical questions, as well as on the internal structures of the different houses and orders (distribution of offices, election of the abbot or prior, institution of a general chapter, the Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 175–​204. Yves of Chartres, “Letter to Bishop Peter of Poitiers,” Ep. 36, PL 162, 48–​9; Jean Leclercq, ed., Yves de Chartres. Correspondence (Paris, 1949), 146. See also Dereine, “L’élaboration du statut canonique,” 544–​5. Arno of Reichersberg, Scutum canonicorum, PL 194, 1515. Philipp of Harvengt, De continentia clericorum, PL 203, 769–​837. See Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo, 50–​5. Anselm of Havelberg, Epistola apologetica pro ordine canonicorum, PL 188, 1120; Dickinson, Origins of the Austin Canons, 199; and Werner Bomm, “Anselm von Havelberg, Epistola apologetica—​Über den Platz der ‘Prämonstratenser’ in der Kirche des 12. Jahrhunderts:  vom Selbstverständnis eines frühen Anhängers Norbert von Xanten,” in Crusius and Flachenecker, Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, 107–​83. 77 Lietbert of Saint-​Ruf, “Letter to Provost Otger of Ferrania in Liguria,” Ep. 1, in Lietberti Abbatis S. Rufi Epistolae, PL 157, 717. 78 Stefan Weinfurter, “Vita canonica und Eschatologie:  eine neue Quelle zum Selbstverständnis der Reformkanoniker des 12. Jahrhunderts aus dem Salzburger 4, 60 (lines Reformkreis (mit Textedition),” in Weinfurter, Gelebte Ordnung, 51–​ 145–​ 66), and 61–​ 2 (line 191–​ 215). Stefan Weinfurter, “Funktionnalisierung und Gemeinschaftsmodell:  die Kanoniker in der Kirchenreform des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Stiftskirche in Südwestdeutschland. Aufgaben und Perspektiven der Forschung (Leinfelden-​Echterdingen, 2003), 107–​21. See also Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo, 49. 79 Giorgio Picasso, “Monachesimo e canoniche nelle sillogi canonistiche e nei concili particolari,” in Istituzioni monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–​1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio Mendola, 28 agosto–​3 settembre 1977 (Milan, 1980), 133–​58. 80 Sébastien Barret and Gert Melville, eds., Oboedientia. Formen und Grenzen von Macht und Unterordnung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum (Münster, 2005).

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status of the lay brothers); on their actions in the world outside the cloister (cura animarum, preaching, caring for the poor, the sick, and the pilgrims, studies at universities); and inside the cloister (studies, liturgy, reading in the refectory,81 divine office,82 canonical hours, habits of eating83 and clothing, the chapter of faults); and the behavior of monks or regular canons towards their fellow brothers or sisters. To give one example, it is noteworthy that the biblical figures who served as models for both sides differed. The monks looked to Benjamin and Rachel, Mary and John, for their contemplative way of life, and the regular canons to Aaron and Leah, to Martha and Peter for their active way of life.84 Likewise, the white linen habit of the canons referred to the resurrection of Christ, the black woolen frock of the monks to his passion,85 and the white woolen frock of the Cistercians to their castitas corporalis.86 One essential difference between regular canons and monks remained: their conception of the priesthood. When monks received the sacred orders—​and this was more and more the case from the late eleventh century onwards—​ it was for the benefit of the community. Canons, on the other hand, were priests by definition, in the succession of Aaron and the priests of the Old See Klaus Schreiner, “Lautes Lesen, fiktive Mündlichkeit, verschriftlichte Norm: einleitende Vorbemerkungen über Fragen, Themen und Ergebnisse einer Tagung,” in Viva vox und ratio scripta. Mündliche und schriftliche Kommunikationsformen im Mönchtum des Mittelalters, ed. Clemens M. Kasper and Klaus Schreiner (Münster, 1997), 2; Hermann Hauke, “Der Stellenwert des nichtliturgischen Lesens im Mönchsleben des Mittelalters,” in ibid., 126–​9. For the regular canons, see Ursula Vones-​Liebenstein, “Die Rolle der Bibel im Leben von Regularkanonikerabteien:  Saint-​Ruf und Saint-​Victor in Paris—​ein Vergleich,” in Bibel und Exegese in der Abtei Saint-​Victor zu Paris. Form und Funktion eines Grundtextes im europäischen Rahmen, ed. Rainer Berndt (Münster, 2009), 167–​92. 82 See Roger E. Reynolds, “Divine Office,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 4 (1984), 230. 83 Giles Constable and B. Smith, eds. and trans., Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus (Oxford 1972), 39. 84 See Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung,” 212; Helmut Flachenecker, “Lea oder Rachel? Stift oder Kloster am Bischofssitz?” in Frühformen von Stiftskirchen in Europa. Funktion und Wandel religiöser Gemeinschaften vom 6. bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhundert, ed. Sönke Lorenz and Thomas Zotz (Leinfelden-​Echterdingen, 2005, 377–​92; and in particular Arno of Reichersberg, Scutum canonicorum, PL 194, 1522. 85 Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung,” 212–​13. For the symbolic value of the white color, see Gert Melville, “Construction and Deconstruction of Religious Symbols in the Middle Ages,” in Self-​Representation of Medieval Religious Communities: The British Isles in Context, ed. Anne Müller and Karen Stöber (Munster, 2009), 13; Franz Fuchs, “Wolle oder Leinen: zum Streit um den rechten Habit in der Regularkanonikerbewegung des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Melville and Müller, Regula Sancti Augustini, 219–​38. 86 See Giles Constable, “The Ceremonies and Symbolism of Entering Religious Life and Taking the Monastic Habit, from the Fourth to the Twelfth Century,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale (Spoleto, 1986), 828; Melville, “Construction and Deconstruction,” 10. 81

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Testament. They were priests ordained to celebrate the sacred office for the glory of God—​in other words, not priests for the care of the people, but for the service of God. Later, when in the course of the twelfth century other groups of regular canons emerged more closely involved in pastoral activities at the level of a diocese like Salzburg or Halberstadt, this was a different matter. So it was not the exercise of the cure of souls or the caring for one’s neighbor that made the difference between monks and canons, but rather their self-​conceptions; monks led a life of asceticism and self-​denial, of prayer, and of renunciation to sanctify themselves and to pray for the salvation of those who had placed their trust in them, while regular canons embraced ascetic practices in order to be more worthy for the service of God, and especially for the celebration of the Eucharist.87 The life of the monks was based on a monastic theology of contemplation, while the theology of the regular canons was based on the sacrament of the altar, the Eucharist, as Peter Classen has shown, using the work of Gerhoch of Reichersberg (d. 1169) as an example.88 I will conclude by turning to a twelfth-​century source: the Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in Aecclesia,89 which was probably written by a regular canon of the ordo antiquus in the first half of the twelfth century and addressed to a monk.90 The author distinguishes between monks or canons living far from lay men and monks or canons living close to them. In referring to a letter of Augustine warning about the risks of “a change of custom,”91 he states that: in retaining one’s own customs too rigorously, and in following foreign ones, schisms and disturbances can be generated. … I would wish that the monks of the same province, and the canons similarly, should follow each other mutually, so that those who live in one province should fast in the same way and follow the same rule of silence. … Perhaps then both rules would be better maintained and more willingly.92

See François Petit’s comments in La vita comune del clero, 1:137–​9. See Peter Classen’s comment in ibid., 1:140. 89 See Andenna, “Kanoniker sind Gott”,  6–​12. 90 Giles Constable and B.  Smith, “Introduction,” in Constable and Smith, Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus, xv–​xviii; see also Jörg Oberste, “Zwischen uniformitas und diversitas. Zentralität als Kernproblem des frühen Prämonstratenserordens (12./​ 13. Jahrhundert),” in Crusius and Flachenecker, Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, 226. 91 Augustine, Ep. 54, CSEL 34, 166 (paragraph V, 6). 92 Constable and Smith, Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus, 37. 87

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I do not think that all monks, or even all regular canons, really longed for this kind of unity, even though it resonated with Augustine’s vision of the early Church, rooted in Acts 4:32: “They were of one heart and one soul.”

Bibliography Andenna, Cristina. “Kanoniker sind Gott für das ganze Volk verantwortlich.” Die Regularkanoniker Italiens und die Kirche im 12. Jahrhundert. Paring, 2004. Brooke, Christopher N. L. “Monks and Canons.” In Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, edited by William J. Sheils, 109–​29. Oxford, 1985. Burton, Janet, and Karen Stöber, eds. The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles. Turnhout, 2011. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-​Century Spirituality. Missoula, MT, 1979. Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1996. Dereine, Charles. “L’élaboration du statut canonique des chanoines réguliers spécialement sous Urbain II.” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 46 (1951): 534–​65. Dickinson, John Compton. The Origins of the Austin Canons and Their Introduction into England. London, 1950. Felten, Franz. “Wozu treiben wir vergleichende Ordensgeschichte.” In Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven, edited by Gert Melville and Anne Müller, 1–​51. Berlin, 2007. Flachenecker, Helmut. “Lea oder Rachel? Stift oder Kloster am Bischofssitz?” In Frühformen von Stiftskirchen in Europa. Funktion und Wandel religiöser Gemeinschaften vom 6.  bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts, edited by Sönke Lorenz and Thomas Zotz, 377–​92. Leinfelden-​Echterdingen,  2005. Fonseca, Cosimo Damiano. “Constat … monasterium esse tam canonicorum quam et monachorum:  le influenze monastiche sulle strutture istituzionali delle canoniche e delle congregazioni canonicali.” In Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit, edited by Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske, 239–​51. Munich, 1997. “Monaci e canonici alla ricerca di una identità.” In Istituzioni monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 28 agosto–3 settembre 1977, 22–58. Milan, 1980. Lenherr, Titus. “Die Überlieferung des Kapitels ‘Duae sunt, inquit, leges’ (Decretum Gratiani C. 19 q. 2 c. 2).” Archiv für Katholisches Kirchenrecht 168 (1999): 359–​84. Melville, Gert. “Zur Abgrenzung zwischen Vita canonica und Vita monastica:  das Übertrittsproblem in kanonistischer Behandlung von Gratian bis Hostiensis.” In Secundum regulam vivere. Festschrift für P. Norbert Backmund, edited by Gert Melville, 205–​43. Windberg, 1978. Naissance et fonctionnement des réseaux monastiques et canoniaux. Actes du premier colloque international du CERCOM. Saint-​Étienne, 1985. Parisse, Michel, ed. Les chanoines réguliers. Émergence et expansion (XIe–​XIIIe siècles). Actes du 6e colloque international du C.E.R.C.O.R., Le Puy-​en-​Velay, 29 juin–​1er juillet 2006. Saint-​Étienne,  2009.

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Ursula Vones-Liebe nste in Picasso, Giorgio. “Monachesimo e canoniche nelle sillogi canonistiche e nei concili particolari.” In Istituzioni monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–​1215). Atti della settima Settimana internazionale di studio Mendola, 28 agosto–​3 settembre 1977, 133–​58. Milan, 1980. Schreiner, Klaus. “‘Ein Herz und eine Seele’:  eine urchristliche Lebensform und ihre Institutionalisierung im augustinisch geprägten Mönchtum des hohen und späten Mittelalters.” In Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, edited by Gert Melville and Anne Müller, 1–​47. Paring, 2002. Van Damme, Jean Baptiste. “La ‘Summa Carta caritatis’ source de constitution canoniales.” Citeaux. Commentarii cistercienses 23 (1972): 5–​54. Van Engen, John. “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150.” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–​304. Vones-​Liebenstein, Ursula. “The Liber ecclesiastici et canonici ordinis of Lietbert of Saint-​Ruf.” In Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, edited by Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer, 175–​204. Turnhout, 2016. Weinfurter, Stefan. “Neuere Forschung zu den Regularkanonikern im Deutschen Reich des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 224 (1977): 379–​97.

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The Institutionalization of Religious Orders (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries) G e rt M e lv il l e ( tr a n slate d b y Ja m e s Mixon)

Not least because of the shocks of the Investiture struggle and of the great reforms of the Church, from the second half of the twelfth century in Western Christendom there had emerged a general desire for an internalization of belief—​one that from that time onward came increasingly to inspire an individual search for God, and that required both a stronger sense of self-​ responsibility and a more precise knowledge of self. These developments also led to a “crisis” of traditional monasticism, since the old communities had come more and more to be seen as rigid and lifeless. They lived, so it was said, like the Pharisees (more Pharasaico). They upheld the claustrales observantiae—​that is, the common rituals, the liturgical rites, and traditional practices of prayer—​only outwardly, while neglecting those true precepts of the Lord (praecepta Domini) that concerned the soul—​humility, contrition, asceticism, contemplation.1 As a consequence, a remarkable flood of refugees fled from the cloister into the eremitical isolation of the forests and mountains. For the most part they gathered around a charismatic personality and built for themselves new communities whose independent identities and core spiritual ideals required a life lived, with special intensity, according to conviction.2

John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–​1150,” Speculum 62 (1985): 269–​305; Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1998). 2 Gert Melville, Frommer Eifer und methodischer Betrieb. Beiträge zum mittelalterlichen Mönchtum, ed. Cristina Andenna and Mirko Breitenstein (Cologne, 2014), 33–​48; Gert Melville, Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 94–​ 124; see also Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN, 1995). 1

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Despite this spirit of new departures, no one could ignore the fact that charismatic leadership was ephemeral. It could endure only if it were established within an institutional framework. The result was a peculiar turn of events: new communities found themselves having to establish precisely that which they had sought to overcome—​the institutionalization of monastic life. Yet, if their new form of interiorized life was to stand out, they had to set their religious ideals of asceticism and poverty clearly apart from traditional monastic life. To achieve that aim, they required an organizational framework that could—​with the utmost rationality—​unquestionably show the way to perfection, both for communities and for individuals. The most innovative and indeed revolutionary framework of this kind was the religious order, whose institutional form began to take shape precisely at this time. It was destined to change the world of monasticism in fundamental ways. At the origins of these changes stood a group of Benedictine monks who came from eremitical roots, and who around 1098 broke away from their community of Molesme, along with their abbot Robert (d. 1111), because they could not fulfill the demands of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) there. They then settled in a “new monastery” south of Dijon, in a glade called Cîteaux.3 The citation that follows is of the utmost importance for capturing the innovative power of the beginnings of this young community, which would soon found a series of daughter houses: In this decree, then, the aforesaid brethren [i.e. Stephan Harding, the second abbot of Cîteaux, and his brothers], taking precaution against future shipwreck of their mutual peace, elucidated and decreed and left for their posterity by what covenant, or in what manner, indeed, with what charity their monks throughout abbeys in various parts of the world, though separated in body, could be indissolubly knit together in mind. They considered that this decree should be called the Charter of Charity, because, averting the burdensome levying of all exactions, its statute pursues only charity and the advantage of souls in things human and divine.4

With these striking words, the introductory lines of their so-​called Carta caritatis prior, drawn up before 1119, the Cistercians set down the normative framework that would guide them in the future—​a framework that would have a formal validity independent of any single person.



Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe:  1090–​1500 (London, 2013); Melville, Medieval Monasticism, 136–​57. 4 Translation following Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux (Cîteaux, 1999), 442. 3

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The Formation of an Order The Carta caritatis pointed to a future that was to be regulated; that would see the formation of an organization of the common life that was lived methodically, across great distances; and that would be upheld by the mutual responsibility of all its adherents.5 But it also embodied the core ideals of community that anchored identity, and in that respect it was possessed of a symbolic power with enormous integrating potential. The Carta caritatis was perhaps the first constitutional text of the post-​Roman era in Europe, and as such it first captured what would become an essential principle of all modern constitutions: governance shared horizontally, among those who enjoy equal rights. The relationship to daughter houses, noted above, represented in its universality an entirely new way to organize monastic congregations, and one that pointed the way to the future. At its core it called for a rejection of the old way, of congregations held together by property rights and under the leadership of a single head (Cluny is a primary example), in favor of an alliance that was cooperatively responsible and grounded in the ideal of equal rights for all member houses. In sum, it was a rejection of vertical lines of governance in favor of horizontal, a turn away from lording it over one another and toward cultivating a relationship characterized by mutual support. To turn such an organizational principle into practice, a uniform validity of foundational norms was necessary. The Cistercians accordingly saw not only in the Carta caritatis, but especially in the RB, a foundation that would represent—​if followed faithfully and purely—​a guideline for life in every monastery. To make good on this claim, the Carta caritatis established explicitly that everywhere “we may live by one charity, one Rule, and like usages.”6 At the same time, it also dictated that no abbot could be chosen who was not from a Cistercian community. The inner cohesion of the community was to be upheld alongside a strict separation from the outside world, so as to truly establish and guarantee a unique identity. Community-​based establishment of legislation was never the result of a single act. Rather, it had to be perpetually repeated, in order to adapt relevant law to changing circumstances. The RB, as well as the Carta caritatis, could only provide the foundation for this, even as the latter, in the early history of



Gert Melville, “Zur Funktion der Schriftlichkeit im institutionellen Gefüge mittelalterlicher Orden,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 391–​417. 6 Translation in Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts, 444. 5

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the order, twice underwent a process of revision (in the form of the Summa cartae caritatis, c. 1123/​4, and the Carta caritatis posterior, approved in 1152).7 A further element had to be added.8 The general chapter was soon established as an independent gathering for the representation of all member abbeys, as well as the highest instance in matters of supervision, legislation, administration, and justice. The establishment of a general chapter also created an institutional space for negotiating the changing and further development of legislation. The Carta caritatis thus declared accordingly: Let  all the abbots of these churches come to the New Monastery [i.e. Cîteaux] once a year on the day they decide among themselves, and there let them treat of the salvation of their own souls; if something is to be emended or added to in the observance of the Holy Rule or of the Order, let them so ordain it, and let them re-​establish among themselves the good of peace and charity.9

To “emend” (emendare), to “add” (augere), and to “ordain” (ordinare)—these were the key concepts. Collectively they produced a systematic procedure, unique up to that point in time, for the ongoing redaction of legislation—​a process grounded in the foundational insight that essentials could be preserved only through constant adaptation. A marvelous witness to that principle is the general chapter’s continual written production of its decisions, which were themselves the product both of a continual feed of information and of precisely regulated procedural guidelines. Before 1152 there had already been made, based on a selection of the most important proceedings to date, a first cross-​section of definitions of general chapters.10 From 1202, such selective compilations then appeared over and over again, usually within a generation. These were entitled libri definitionum, and they were systematically organized according to subject matter.11 With the constitution of the Carta caritatis, the Cistercians thus created the religious order in the modern, legal sense. It was an organization that in principle embodied a horizontal governance, that knew how to regenerate itself according to its evolving circumstance, and that made use of three

Ibid., 261–​74, 371–​81. On the organization of the Cistercians, see the foundational work of Jean-​Berthold Mahn, L’Ordre cistercien et son gouvernement des origines au milieu du 13e siècle 1098–​1265 (Paris, 1951). 9 Translation following Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts, 446. 10 See Philippe Guignard, ed., Les monuments primitifs de la règle cistercienne (Dijon, 1878), 245–​76. 11 Bernard Lucet, “L’ère des grandes codifications cisterciennes (1202–​1350),” in Études d’histoire du droit canonique dédiées à Gabriel Le Bras, 2 vols. (Paris 1965), 1:249–​62. 7

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fundamental institutions for that purpose:  the general chapter,12 continual issue of statutes as independent law,13 and enforcement of oversight within the order by means of visitation.14 By virtue of their interwoven functions, these three institutions formed a strict system for the insurance of order. They were the central instances through which the norms of the common life were embodied, for both the individual and the whole, and with their help the norms of the organization could be tested, improved, and adapted to circumstance, and the uniformity of their observance continually monitored. They possessed a focusing power that pervaded the entire order, a power that could claim legitimacy based only on the fact that it was legally created by the order itself, in the interest of the order’s prosperity.

Adaptations The Cistercians were thus the protagonists of a new kind of institutionalization of monastic life, one that was quickly adapted not only by communities of similarly recent foundation, but also by those steeped in tradition. That adaption, too, was carried out with a high degree of organizational rationality, and it seized on the opportunities made available by the three institutions noted above, even as it played out in quite differentiated ways.15 The Cistercian model was flexible enough to accommodate a broad spectrum of specific needs. To illustrate this circumstance, the following discussion briefly presents a series of exemplary representatives of the most important monastic forms of life:  the Premonstratensians for those who lived according to the Rule of St. Augustine (RA); the Carthusians for those who lived as hermits; the Cluniacs for the traditional Benedictine communities; and the Dominicans for the mendicants. The Premonstratensians underwent a transformation from a charismatically led community to a legally constituted “order” in order to negotiate organizationally the departure of their founder, Norbert of

Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser (Münster, 2002). 13 Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville, eds., Regulae –​Consuetudines –​Statuta. Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del Medioevo (Münster, 2005). 14 Jörg Oberste, Visitation und Ordensorganisation. Formen sozialer Normierung, Kontrolle und Kommunikation bei Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern und Cluniazensern (12.–​frühes 14. Jahrhundert) (Münster, 1996). 15 Klaus Schreiner, Gemeinsam leben. Spiritualität, Lebens-​und Verfassungsformen klösterlicher Gemeinschaften in Kirche und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Gert Melville (Berlin, 2013), 509–​50.

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Xanten (d.  1134), to become the archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126.16 The driving force was Hugh of Fosses (d. 1164), Norbert’s one-​time fellow traveler, whom Norbert had established as abbot of Prémontré. Following the model of the Cistercians, with whom they entered into a prayer confraternity, they quickly established a general chapter as the highest instance, and by 1130 had already bound all of their communities to a common way of life under a first (and quite disordered) set of statutes. In 1131 they were placed under papal protection, and introduced a process of visitation along lines of filiation that in a second (and by now systematically organized) collection of statutes was in turn given supplemental support in the form of oversight by province (called “circaries”). Further statutes followed, superseding those that had come before. But, in contrast to the Cistercians, libelli definitionum were not created from previous definitions, but were rather established anew. Not least on the basis of this apparatus the Premonstratensians were far more successful than those regular canons who did not transform themselves into an order. Founded in 1084—​even before the Cistercians—​the Carthusians, like the Premonstratensians, underwent a transformation from a charismatically led community to an institution, an “order.”17 Their founder, Bruno of Cologne (d. 1101), had left his followers in the “Grande Chartreuse” in 1090, and had gone first to Rome and the pope, then to southern Italy in order to found a new eremitical community there. In contrast to the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians, however, the Carthusians had no rule. Nor did they have recourse to any special written corpus of normative material—​analogously to Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116) for the community of Fontevraud, for example—​ that Bruno could have recorded down and on which they could later depend. At most they took their inspiration variously from the RB, from the writings of the Desert Fathers, and from a single letter of Bruno to his abandoned disciples. In particular, it was thanks to the support of the bishop of Grenoble that the community not only survived but even grew to include more houses. But



Irene Crusius and Helmut Flachenecker, eds., Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden (Göttingen, 2003); Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten und die Entstehung des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Gelebte Ordnung, gedachte Ordnung. Ausgewählte Beiträge zu König, Kirche und Reich, ed. Helmuth Kluger, Hubertus Seibert, and Werner Bomm (Ostfildern, 2005), 65–​94. 17 Florent Cygler, “Vom ‘Wort’ Brunos zum gesatzten Recht der Statuten über die ‘Consuetudines Guigonis’:  Propositum und Institutionalisierung im Spiegel der kartäusischen Ordensschriftlichkeit (11.–​ 14. Jahrhundert),” in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter. Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff (Munich, 1999), 95–​110.

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it was only by the period between 1121 and 1127 that Guigo I (d. 1136), the fourth leader of the “Grande Chartreuse,” had the local customs finally written out and approved by the papacy as a set of statutory rules. The Carthusians would never come to adopt an actual rule, but they now at least had a text to serve as a normative basis that could guide affairs in all of their communities. It was only at a general chapter in 1140/​1 that the longstanding lack of organizational coherence was remedied. From 1155, that body began to occupy an unusually sovereign position within the order, since it was granted absolute authority over all matters of legislation, visitation, correction, appointments to office, and the regulation of affairs of property and economy in all houses. In the general chapter, the “Grande Chartreuse” appointed four of eight diffinitors, as well as its own prior, and thus always held the majority. Moreover, in a way that was quite distinct from the other orders, the general chapter was led by the fundamental principle that any needed reform could only be achieved through continual extension and refinement of legal material. Taking only the twelfth century into consideration, supplements (Supplementa) to the Consuetudines of Guigo were provided as early as c. 1140, with further statutory extensions between 1141 and 1151, as well as c. 1170. Further supplements followed yet again at the end of the century. The previously issued texts nevertheless retained their validity. Even the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (r. 1122–​56), as monarchical head of a monastic alliance more than two hundred years old and spread across all of Europe, had with the cooperation of the superiors of his houses issued statutes governing discipline and daily life.18 The statutes ultimately proved unsustainable, and the Cluniacs soon thereafter found themselves in a severe crisis that threatened their solidarity. But by 1200 a serious realignment was finally underway.19 With support from the papacy, which had energetically encouraged reform in 1196, a first general chapter, which was presided over by Abbot Hugh V of Cluny (d. 1109) and which required the attendance of all abbots and priors of the Cluniac alliance, issued statutes and provided the Cluniacs with a new constitution. The congregation strikingly transformed itself into an order in the new, Cistercian sense, even if the communitarian principle would never fully establish itself.



Giles Constable, “The Statutes of Peter the Venerable,” in The Abbey of Cluny:  A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleven-​Hundredth Anniversary of Its Foundation (Münster, 2010), 307–​12; Gert Melville, “Action, Text, and Validity:  On Re-​examining Cluny’s Consuetudines and Statutes,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 67–​83. 19 On this issue, see Melville, Frommer Eifer und methodischer Betrieb, 232–​94. 18

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The history of the coming decades was shaped by an oscillation between, on the one hand, the effort continually to uphold the absolute monarchy of the abbot of Cluny, and, on the other hand, the desire to establish at least a constitutional monarchy. In the end a kind of division of powers came to be established, in which the abbot of Cluny exercised executive power, and the general chapter judicial power. The abbot never lost his right as sole visitor, however, even if that right had de facto come to be exercised first by the superiors of newly established provinces, and then (from 1233) by visitors appointed by the general chapter. Legislative duties were divided between the general chapter and the abbot of Cluny according to their particular positions of strength in any given moment. The first collection of statutes from 1205/​ 6 bore the imprint of the general chapter, although it was drawn up under the same abbatial regime as those of 1200. The next corpus of statutes, from 1276, 1301, and 1314, unmistakably had the abbot of Cluny as their author, even though during this time the general chapter had determined to break free of limiting itself to supreme jurisdiction and increasingly to issue, as supplements to the statutes, general regulations (definitiones generalia). Altogether, this transformation of an old congregation makes quite clear that the adoption of rational methods and mechanisms was not particularly difficult, even if the stripping away of age-​old, tradition-​bound structures of governance proved to be a long and tangled process. The Dominicans, in contrast, as they began to professionalize their core ideal of preaching (by 1217 at the latest), stood as heirs to what had become a century’s worth of experience in the shaping of a religious order—​and they knew how to deploy that legacy masterfully.20 Their founder, Dominic of Guzmán (d. 1221), was extraordinarily successful at winning papal privileges that quickly opened for his growing community the possibility of working across all diocesan boundaries, such that soon enough—​at a second general chapter in 1221, the year of Dominic’s death—​a network of (at first eight) provinces could be established, likely according to the example of the Premonstratensians, though perhaps of the Cluniacs. Yet even this was no consolation for the defeat that Dominic had suffered at the Fourth Lateran Council, where he had sought in vain for permission to have a rule of his own, and thus saw himself compelled to remain with the RA, even though his intention to lead souls to salvation by way of theological learning and

On the Dominican constitution, see Georgina Rosalie Galbraith, ed., The Constitution of the Dominican Order 1216 to 1360 (Manchester, 1925); for an overview of subsequent developments, see Melville, Medieval Monasticism, 232–​48.

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preaching would have required a specific set of regulations. So it was that a general set of statutes began to be prepared at the first general chapter of 1220, which was in turn presented for approval at a subsequent special general chapter—​a capitulum generalissimum, attended not only by the heads of the order, but also by delegates from all of its convents. This corpus, soon called simply the Constitutiones, would in the future provide a normative basis for the Dominicans that functioned much like a rule—​one that, after a revision by Raymond of Peñaforte (d. 1275) (which provided a new scaffolding for its material and its system), could no longer be altered, and that served the order as an identity-​establishing symbol of its unity. The Constitutiones possessed a sophisticated rationality that pointed the way to the modern constitutions. They differentiated between legal principles that were to remain immutable, those that could be changed only by a capitulum generalissimum, and those that might be modified, eliminated, or extended at will by a regular general chapter. In order to relieve the order’s members of a troubled conscience with respect to human law, it was further established that to violate the Constitutions was not to commit a sin but only to incur a temporal penalty. Finally, all ranks within the order—​both the leaders of the order (prelati) and the rank-​and-​file brothers (subditi)—were to take part in the legislative process. On this basis there emerged two kinds of gatherings for the general chapter, which met in an alternating sequence: one general chapter for the prelati, then two for the subditi. The cooperation of the two factions was ensured insofar as each change in the Constitutiones required three sequential readings before the general chapters. The differences in these orders’ organizational conceptualizations should be clear enough. Nevertheless, the entire spectrum of concrete forms can be traced back to a few foundational structures that became more or less common to all orders. These categories of the institutional, the result of a sophisticated rationality, underlay every aspect of the development of the orders, and will be discussed in detail here: vision and design; validity; formality and distinction; flexibility; the building of systems; and (symbolic) identity.

Vision and Design The Cistercians could not have anticipated that their secessionist move, through the development of model customs implemented over the long term in daily life, would ultimately be sanctioned by hindsight. Far more important for them was to ensure, in a strictly forward-​looking manner, that 791

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their exceptional achievements were immediately recognizable. This circumstance opened up a quite new structure of monastic life. Here was the true “monastic turn.” Of course monastic life had long adopted a forward-​looking stance in the form of its rules, which enjoyed a golden age between the fourth and seventh centuries,21 though only two—​the rules of Benedict and Augustine—​would survive into the twelfth century and beyond. Rules had been written down for the future. Yet in their conceptualization they remained anchored in the era in which they were written. Only through adaption to new needs could they remain up to date—​and this happened above all by means of slowly emerging customs (consuetudines), on whose validity future generations could rely, as the inheritance of a tradition that offered orientation and secure guidance in all affairs.22 Among the Cistercians and the other new orders, in contrast, something entirely different unfolded. They were newly founded institutions, and could therefore only begin from scratch—​with a view that looked forward, and not back. That kind of perspective had to be rooted in the conviction that the community’s future world could be formed more or less out of nothing. The study of the time span before the establishment of constitutional texts makes this quite clear: the Cistercians themselves needed only around twenty years from the founding of Cîteaux to the completion of the Carta caritatis. The Premonstratensians required barely five years from Norbert’s departure to the recording of their first foundational statutes, the Dominicans from the decisive bull of approval in 1217 to the promulgation of their constitutions only eleven. Even the Carthusians, who adopted no inherited rule at all, were able within a good thirty years after Bruno’s departure to codify what had become the customs of the Grande Chartreuse, making them binding on future generations with a force analogous to statutes. And the Cluniacs, with their decades-​long traditions, were able within around four years to transform a papal license to reform (1196) into the first statutes of an order’s constitution (1200). These were astonishingly narrow windows of time (in comparison to the development of consuetudines) for the gathering of experiences and the testing of new directions—​to say nothing of creating, and sustaining, a corporate institution from a single, quick series of legislative acts.



Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, eds., Western Monasticism ante litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011). 22 Andenna and Melville, Regulae –​ Consuetudines –​ Statuta; Boynton and Cochelin, From Dead of Night to End of  Day. 21

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A process such as this demanded the realization of a very special core ideal (propositum),23 and that the new community should draw from that realization the justification for its existence that led to papal approval of its founding. Such a core ideal might locate itself, for example, in the field of contemplation, of pastoral care, of preaching, or of care for the sick. It was only decisive that the ideal should permeate the community that upheld it, including each individual member, and that it mark that community as something distinct. A strong will, driven by passion and zeal, was of course necessary to create such a foundational structure, and now in the world of monasticism just these kinds of individuals were in fact redefining themselves. The interiorization of faith, noted above, led from the second half of the eleventh century to a deeper self-​knowledge, not least through a newly rediscovered exploration of conscience.24 As such it set free an enormous potential for self-​reliance—​and thereby the potential to create the environment necessary for organizing a new form of life.

Validity Forward-​looking measures aimed at regulating social relationships, however, required first, and fundamentally, a foundational establishment of norms. The establishment of orders rested “on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands,” as Max Weber said.25 The legitimacy of norms accordingly no longer lay—​as it had before—​in tradition or in the charisma of an office or a particular head (caput), but in the constitutive will of the community or its representatives (membra) as a whole, which granted validity, in one legislative act, to generally binding norms. One of the most significant articulations of this paradigm shift can be found in the words of the abbot of Cluny, when he wrote of the statutes he promulgated at the general chapter of the year 1200: “We also subject ourselves to the law”





Markus Schürer, “Das ‘propositum’ in religiös-​ asketischen Diskursen:  historisch-​ semantische Erkundungen zu einem zentralen Begriff der mittelalterlichen ‘vita religiosa’,” in Oboedientia. Zu Formen und Grenzen von Macht und Unterordnung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Sébastien Barret and Gert Melville (Münster, 2006), 99–​128. 24 Mirko Breitenstein, “La disponibilità della trascendenza: la coscienza dei monaci come garanzia di salvezza,” in Responsabilità e creatività. Alla ricerca di un uomo nuovo (secoli XI–​XIII), ed. Giancarlo Andenna and Elisabetta Filippini (Milan, 2015), 65–​85. 25 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA, 1978), 215. 23

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(etiam nos legi subjicimus).26 Yet it was not only the source of the law that had—​ at least as a theoretical claim—​been set free from ties to the person of a lawgiver. Among those whom the law governed, too, an analogous principle had taken root, and again it was the Cluniacs who gave it expression when they articulated the core principle of the equality of all who stood before the law and faced punishment: there “the transgressions of the delinquent were to made right according to God, the Rule of holy Benedict, and the constitutions of the Cluniac order, without respect of persons.”27 The Dominicans, as has already been noted, even set aside the legitimating derivation of human law from divine law, when at the beginning of the thirteenth century they established that a transgression of their foundational constitutions was not a sin, but only a breaking of the law—​thereby in a certain way allowing for a separation of the moral from the legal.28 The law of the orders was thus conceived as the greatest possible outpouring of an autonomous legal community, and was correspondingly defended, insofar as possible, against hierarchically higher instances such as the papacy.29 In a complementary way, and again in the context of their exclusive sovereignty and authority, the orders could change or even abrogate the validity of norms, with respect both to content and to scope. The Premonstratensians captured this point succinctly (and also established a high degree of legal security) with a terse remark in their statutes from the middle of the twelfth century: no one other than the properly approved instance (the general chapter) could arbitrarily change, add, or delete anything in the written normative material of the order.30 If the legislative statutes—​the order’s “own law” (ius proprium)—were valid without restriction throughout the entire order, nevertheless there was no doubt that it was only one particular law (ius particulare) in the larger context of the common law of the Church (ius commune), and





Gaston Charvin, ed., Statuts, chapitres généraux et visites de l’Ordre de Cluny, vol. 1 (Paris, 1965), 42; Gert Melville, “The Abbot of Cluny at the Turning Point from the Charismatic-​Traditional to Legal Authority:  An Analysis Referring to Max Weber’s Model,” in Abbots and Abbesses as a Human Resource, ed. Steven Vanderputten (Münster, 2018), 151–​64. 27 Ibid., 51. 28 Florent Cygler, “Une nouvelle conception de la culpabilité chez les réguliers: Humbert de Romans, les Dominicains et le ‘principe de la loi purement pénale’ au XIIIe siècle,” in La culpabilité. Actes des XXe Journées d’histoire du droit, ed. Jacqueline Hoareau-​Dodinau (Limoges, 2001), 387–​401. 29 Gert Melville, “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht: eine Skizze zum 12./​13. Jahrhundert,” in Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Peter Landau and Jörg Müller (Vatican City, 1997), 691–​712. 30 Placide Lefèvre and Wilfried Marcel Grauwen, Les statuts de Prémontré au milieu du XIIe siècle (Averbode, 1978), 1. 26

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still more, in the universe of divine law. Yet the legislative statutes occupied such a superior place in the practical affairs of daily life in the orders that exasperated canonists had to point out that one could learn more about the circumstance of an order through its statutes than through the laws of the Church.31

Formality and Distinction Everything that is to have validity in the future must make possible a purposeful and uniform handling of decisions arising from a given situation. This means that the established norms cannot in fact arise from exemplary cases in the sense of “case law,” but must rather take the form of so-​ called “hypothetic-​general” legal statutes, and thereby attain a higher level of abstract formality—​one that allows any relevant events, everywhere and at all times, to be sequentially subsumed under or oriented toward already established criteria. The complexity of future affairs is thereby reduced considerably, and at the same time sorted out in a catalogue of differentiated circumstances, in order even to be able to isolate what might be legally relevant. A model articulation of this process of surveying a given circumstance can be found in the Dominican constitutions: The visitors must report to the general or provincial chapter regarding the brothers they have investigated, whether they are at peace, whether they are diligent in their studies, whether they are zealous in their preaching, the status of their reputation, what returns they have realized, and whether in their food, clothing and other things they live in keeping with the letter of the normative texts.32

A catalogue of this kind, which focused a wide variety of possible affairs on a few matters, made possible the routine of a perpetually repeatable regulatory process. This was extended, as the next step, to encompass precise articulations of the sanctions to be imposed. A  formal model such as this made available to the courts of the order a penal procedure that could be routinely applied—​in the most straightforward instances, as the immediate application of an explicitly cited legal norm, as was the case for example in this measure of the Cluniac general chapter: “Because it has been established in a general chapter that no prior—​even a conventual prior—​should possess

Melville, “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht,” 705–​6. Raymond Creytens, “Les Constitutions des Frères Prêcheurs dans la redaction de s. Raymond de Peñafort (1241),” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 62–​3.

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his own seal, we decree that the prior of Rozier-​Côtes d’Aurec, who is no conventual prior, should return the seal he possesses, and that he should make no further use of any seal.”33 The main requirement for the assessment of a given circumstance, as well as for the rendering of a legal judgment, was in any case an exact legal definition of a valid statement of facts—​formulated in a model way, for example, in this sentence from the Premonstratensian statutes from the middle of the twelfth century: “Whosoever should become apostate, in the event that he does not return within forty days, shall be excommunicated.”34 The circumstance that triggers a punishment, the general legal concept of apostasy, is here precisely defined through a clause that designates a forty-​day period, and that definition is then put to use for the specific needs of the Premonstratensian order. These kinds of determinations, along with the information gathered by visitors, judicial decisions, and all administrative acts required the medium of writing.35 Only in this way were conceptual precision, authentic preservation, and uniform, trans-​local proclamation of valid norms made possible. Accordingly, the following was stipulated regarding the definitions of the general chapter of the Dominicans (and analogously among other orders): “We order that in every convent there should be a booklet (quaternus) in which the decrees of the general and provincial chapters are to be recorded year by year, and that these should be read aloud four times each year. Nor should they be deleted, even if they have been revoked.”36

Flexibility As has already been noted, the institutionalization of a religious community, and even more that of a congregation of monasteries, did not come to a close with the first acts of foundation. Thus one of the greatest achievements of a future-​oriented stance was the development of an awareness that validity was sustainable only if tempered with a certain flexibility. Above all, this meant that a form of organization that at the beginning may have seemed suited to a particular goal had to be constituted in a way that made change possible. Only in this way could it be possible to react both to internal decay and to changing outward circumstances, to correct mistakes and to adapt

Charvin, Statuts, 261. Lefèvre and Grauwen, Les statuts de Prémontré, 42. Melville, “Zur Funktion der Schritflichkeit.” 36 Benedikt Maria Reichert, ed., Acta capitulorum generalium Ordinis Praedicatorum, vol. 1 (Rome, 1898), 32. 33

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anew—​in a word, to regenerate itself. The Cistercians, as has been shown, understood this principle and precociously institutionalized perpetual reform as the duty of their general chapter. The other orders then followed suit. The Premonstratensians, for example spoke of a “repairing of the order” that was to happen every year at this gathering. Of highest importance in this regard was the need to distinguish precisely between that which was to be upheld as unchanging and that which could be changed. Peter the Venerable, as leader of the Cluniac congregation, brought the point home compellingly for monastic affairs in the first half of the twelfth century. As he explained in the prologue of his statutes, what was immutably prescribed by God as an eternal law was not to be changed by man. That which had merely been commended to humanity as useful, however, could very well be changed. Thus all that concerned (monastic) virtue was to remain unchanged, whereas the means of assistance that led to virtue could certainly be modified—​thus not the principles of faith, hope, and love, but rather the regulations governing fasting, vigils, manual labor, and so on.37 All orders adopted this same concept. The Dominicans, especially, reveal like no others how the distinction between fixed and fluid, so to speak, could be used in a refined way to the optimal benefit of an order.38 In this regard, many orders later followed them. The Dominicans, as has been shown, not only distinguished between three kinds of legal material—​unchangeable, changeable only through an exceptional resolution, and freely changeable within the context of the general chapter. More importantly they also introduced, alongside their constitutions (for which any change required the tedious procedure of three readings, and whose thematic grid could not be changed), the concept of flexible, pragmatic decrees (called admoniciones or precepta).39 These could come into force immediately, but they could also be revoked, and above all they were thematically completely open. Moreover, they transformed the traditional use of dispensation, insofar as they no longer took the usual reference to concrete individual cases as their point of departure, but rather—​ in a way analogous to the shift from case law to “hypothetic-​general” legal



Charvin, Statuts, 21. Gert Melville, “The Fixed and the Fluid:  Observations on the Rational Bases of Dominican Constitution and Organization in the Middle Ages,” in Making and Breaking the Rules:  Discussion, Implementation, and Consequences of Dominican Legislation, ed. Cornelia Linde (Oxford, 2018), 19–​35. 39 Gert Melville, “Die Rechtsordnung der Dominikaner in der Spanne von constituciones und admoniciones: ein Beitrag zum Vergleich mittelalterlicher Ordensverfassungen,” in Grundlagen des Rechts. Festschrift für Peter Landau zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Richard H. Helmholz, Paul Mikat, Jörg Müller, and Michael Stolleis (Paderborn, 2000), 579–​604. 37

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statutes—​designated quite broadly defined areas of monastic life as governed by dispensation. So above all, for example, the training of preachers required dispensation from obligations to the common rhythms of the day, from prohibitions against reading heretical books, and so on.

The Building of Systems The structure of an order, however highly differentiated and precisely defined in all of its details, could only function if all elements were coordinated both with one another and with a common goal, thus forming a closed system of mutual complementarity across jurisdictions and representations, hierarchical levels and instances, patterns of procedure and communication. In this regard the Cistercians laid the foundation and provided a model for all other institutionalizations in the vita religiosa. On the one hand, they created the general chapter as the representative body of the order, in which they gave the abbot of Cîteaux only an honorary precedence, and established the Definitorium, whose competency granted legislative and judicial power to the plenary session of all abbots of the order, which lasted only for a few days. On the other hand, they allowed for procedures of supervision to pass along lines of filiation, through which all who visited those “below” were also visited by those “from above.” Both general chapter and visitation were exceptionally strong forces for ensuring cohesion, and they also mutually reinforced one another, since in principle the most serious cases were referred to the general chapter. Concrete decisions (“definitions”) arising from the general chapter also inspired the systematic codification of laws that were handed back both to individual abbots and to members of the general chapter, with binding validity. The Dominicans—​to take another structural model into consideration as an example—​created two hierarchical groups: the prelates (prelati) and the subjects (subditi).40 But both were granted the full range of powers associated with decision-​making and regulation—​the first by virtue of their office, the second by election and delegation. Both met at their respective general chapters (with the exception of the so-​called captilulum generalissimum) and these, as noted, were closely tied to one another in the legislative process. Similarly, while the prelates regulated the affairs of the subjects through visitation, the subjects elected the prelates and evaluated both their performance in and their suitability for office. The result was

William A. Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order, vol. 1 (New York, 1965), 170.

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thus a system of two mutually complementary forces—​one ascending, so to speak, and one descending. It was also the Dominicans who functionalized every action toward reaching the goal of their order, and who for that reason reached a higher level of consistency than the other orders. Yet the other orders, too, knew the same kind of rationality in the pursuit of a goal, which they captured in the concept of the propositum.41 The aim of the Dominican order was to aid in the salvation of every human soul.42 To that end, the Dominicans above all deployed the instrument of preaching. In order to be best prepared for that task, they devoted themselves intensely to study. And in order to support both, they created the highly rational organization that has been discussed here. The overall result was a system whose various layers served to order every affair, and the conditions surrounding every affair, toward a goal that was itself supported by subordinate goals. For hierarchically organized powers, above all the papacy, it was not easy to break into such an enclosed system.43

Identity A system seeks always to give itself coherence, and to differentiate itself both from the environment and especially from other competing systems. Both of these aims mutually reinforce one another. In contrast to earlier congregations, the new orders stressed the importance of being uniform in all of their affairs, and also prescribed uniformity in their statutes as an indispensable norm. Even the prologue of the Premonstratensian statutes from the middle of the twelfth century speak of both unity (unitas), which was to be preserved inwardly, and uniformity (uniformitas), which was to be maintained outwardly.44 The Dominicans adopted this precept word for word in their Constitutiones, and the corresponding commentary on that passage by their Master General, Humbert of Romans (d. 1277), shows how important it was not only for the internal cohesion of the order but also for its outward presentation. Without a uniform habit, for example, brothers who encountered one another out in the world would not recognize themselves as members of the same order. Nor would outsiders recognize them as belonging to the order.45 Clothing as an outwardly visible sign served to

Schürer, “Das ‘propositum’ in religiös-​asketischen Diskursen.” On the following, see Melville, Medieval Monasticism, 239–​48. 43 Melville, “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht.” 44 Lefèvre and Grauwen, Les statuts de Prémontré, 1. 45 Humbert of Romans, “Expositio in constitutiones,” in B. Humberti de Romanis … opera de vita regulari, ed. Joachim J. Berthiers, vol. 2 (Rome, 1889), 5–​8. 41

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identify and to prove membership. Moreover, the material and color of the habit were laden with symbolic value, insofar as they stood for various identifying core ideals such as contemplation, poverty, angelic purity, and so on.46 Only the liturgy47 and a common historiographical tradition had comparable power both to unify internally and to distinguish externally. Contrived historiographical self-​representations, especially, alleged a unique beginning.48 They clothed the structures of each order in a myth of origins, and thereby marked each order’s distinct place on the spectrum of religious life. Among the best examples are the Augustinian hermits, who traced their roots back to Augustine (d. 430); the Paulines, who looked to Paul of Thebes (d. c. 342); and the Carmelites, who looked to the prophet Elijah. In each case, a mythical past provided the core of an unassailable identity. The institutionalization of orders gave rise to distinct legal entities that survived across generations,49 and that sharply distinguished themselves from one another in terms of organization. Institutionalization also now divided a monastic life that had hitherto been characterized by a certain internal permeability into independent and self-​reliant entities.50 Early on the Cistercians, as noted, established that only their own members were eligible to hold office in the order. The same era saw the emergence of rules that were valid only for a particular order. The Rule of the Templars and that of the Grandmontines51 were the earliest, those of the Franciscans and the Carmelites somewhat later, because in each case the core ideal (propositum) was so specific (as a text that was ascribed to Bonaventure claimed, for example, in the case of Francis52) that none of the existing rules could accommodate it.







Peter von Moos, “Le vêtement identificateur: l’habit fait-​il ou ne fait-​il pas le moine?” in Le corps et sa parure/​The Body and Its Adornment, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Micrologus 15 (2007): 41–​60. 47 See, for example, the Carta caritatis prior 3, in Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts, 443 and 445, n. 47. 48 Gert Melville, “Knowledge of the Origins:  Constructing Identity and Ordering Monastic Life in the Middle Ages,” in Knowledge, Discipline and Power in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of David Luscombe, ed. Joseph Canning, Edmund King, and Martial Staub (Leiden, 2011), 41–​62. 49 Foundational for the analysis of such structures is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (reprint Princeton, NJ, 2016). 50 Joachim Wollasch, Mönchtum des Mittelalters zwischen Kirche und Welt (Munich, 1973),  177–​8. 51 Gert Melville, “Von der Regula regularum zur Stephansregel: der normative Sonderweg der Grandmontenser bei der Auffächerung der vita religiosa im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit, ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske (Munich, 1997), 342–​63. 52 Bonaventure, “Determinationes,” 338. 46

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In contrast to consuetudines in the traditional mold, statutes, as independently formulated law, were naturally valid only for those who created them. Examples include measures that stood in place of a rule as a normative textual basis, such as the statutes of Robert of Arbrissel for the congregation of Fontevraud,53 or those of Guigo du Chastel for the Carthusians.54 In this new environment it was no longer possible to blend inherited normative frameworks, since to do so would have meant crossing the boundaries of quite specific laws, and therefore a violation of institutional integrity. At best there was only (and this occurred often) a kind of normative imitation. The Fourth Lateran Council sought to curb the growing number of new orders insofar as it sought to compel new foundations to adopt the norms of already established institutions. The impact of the measure, however, was not particularly effective.55

Conclusion The foundational structures surveyed here were the most consequential features of the newly institutionalized worlds of monasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They cut across all concrete forms of religious orders, and as categories of planning and action they would make possible the mastery of the future in the face of every kind of adversity. To be able to develop these structures, and to manage them, was the true marker of innovative achievement in this era of new religious orders.

Bibliography Andenna, Cristina, and Gert Melville, eds. Regulae –​Consuetudines –​Statuta. Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del Medioevo. Münster, 2005. Barret, Sébastien, and Gert Melville, eds. Oboedientia. Zu Formen und Grenzen von Macht und Unterordnung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum. Münster, 2006. Breitenstein, Mirko. Das Noviziat im hohen Mittelalter. Zur Organisation des Eintrittes bei den Cluniazensern, Cisterziensern und Franziskanern. Berlin, 2008.

Jacques Dalarun, Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse dans l’ouest de la France (Turnhout, 2004). 54 Guigo I, Guigo’s “Consuetudines” van de eerste Kartuizers, ed. Albert de Mayer and Jozef Maria de Smet (Brussels, 1951). 55 Michele Maccarrone, “Le costituzioni del IV concilio Lateranense sui religiosi,” in Nuovi studi su Innocenzo III, ed. Roberto Lambertini (Rome, 1995), 1–​46; Gert Melville, “ ‘… regulam et institutionem accipiat de religionibus approbatis’: kritische Bemerkungen zur Begrifflichkeit im Kanon 13 des 4.  Laterankonzils,” in The Fourth Lateran Council:  Institutional Reform and Spiritual Renewal, ed. Gert Melville and Johannes Helmrath (Affalterbach, 2017), 275–​88. 53

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Gert Melville Breitenstein, Mirko, Julia Burkhardt, Stefan Burkhardt, and Jens Röhrkasten, eds. Rules and Observance. Devising Forms of Communal Life. Berlin, 2014. Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1998. Cygler, Florent. Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser. Münster, 2002. Dubois, Jacques. “Les ordres religieux au XIIe siècle selon la curie romaine.” Revue bénédictine 78 (1968): 283–​309. Jamroziak, Emilia. The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe: 1090–​1500. London, 2013. Linde, Cornelia, ed. Making and Breaking the Rules:  Discussion, Implementation, and Consequences of Dominican Legislation. Oxford, 2018. Malone, Carolyn Marino, and Clark Maines, eds. “Consuetudines et Regulae”:  Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Turnhout, 2014. Melville, Gert. “Action, Text, and Validity: On Re-​examining Cluny’s Consuetudines and Statutes.” In From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, edited by Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, 67–​83. Turnhout, 2005.   Frommer Eifer und methodischer Betrieb. Beiträge zum mittelalterlichen Mönchtum, edited by Cristina Andenna and Mirko Breitenstein. Cologne, 2014.   Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life. Collegeville, MN, 2016.   “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht: eine Skizze zum 12./13. Jahrhundert.” In Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Peter Landau and Jörg Müller, 691–712. Monumenta Iuris Canonici C/10. Vatican City, 1997. Oberste, Jörg. Visitation und Ordensorganisation. Formen sozialer Normierung, Kontrolle und Kommunikation bei Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern und Cluniazensern (12.–​frühes 14. Jahrhundert). Münster, 1996. Robson, Michael, and Jens Röhrkasten, eds. Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context:  Formal and Informal Structures of the Friars’ Lives and Ministry in the Middle Ages. Berlin, 2010. Schreiner, Klaus. Gemeinsam leben. Spiritualität, Lebens-​und Verfassungsformen klösterlicher Gemeinschaften in Kirche und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, edited by Gert Melville. Berlin, 2013. Sonntag, Jörg. Klosterleben im Spiegel des Zeichenhaften. Symbolisches Denken und Handeln hochmittelalterlicher Mönche zwischen Dauer und Wandel, Regel und Gewohnheit. Berlin, 2008. Vanderputten, Steven. Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100. Ithaca, NY, 2013.

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Gender and Monastic Liturgy in the Latin West (High and Late Middle Ages) G ise la M uschio l ( t r a n slate d b y A l ison I. Beac h )

Even at first glance, liturgy is a gender-​relevant topic, as much within the context of monasticism as within the broader Church. For there was and is a visible difference between the participation of men and women in liturgical celebrations. Despite the prominence of gender in this context, however, research on gender and liturgy in the central and late Middle Ages is still in its infancy.1 In this article, I will first identify some of the basic gender-​related structures that underlie liturgical celebrations, and then turn to the gender-​ specific contexts of the monastic liturgy. I will focus on the period from the long twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages, taking the perspective of the Roman Church and its associated territories. It should be kept in mind, however, that, throughout the Middle Ages, individual dioceses and regional churches maintained characteristic forms of liturgy, distinct from those of Rome, even after the Carolingian reforms. Only the Council of Trent would lead the Western Church toward greater standardization. Liturgy as the interplay of roles, as cooperative ritual performance, must be differentiated in all of its many forms:  mass, divine office, processions and pilgrimages, sermon-​ oriented worship services, thematic devotions, sacramental performances, and many more. While none of these forms of liturgical celebration is exclusively monastic—​since similar (though not identical) performances take place within both monasteries and non-​monastic

On gender and liturgy in the early Middle Ages, see Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–​751 (Leiden, 1995); Gisela Muschiol, “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–​900 CE, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia Smith (Cambridge, 2004), 198–​216; and Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994). See also Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Burlington, VT, 2011); and Teresa Berger, Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (Collegeville, MN, 1999).

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ecclesiastical communities—​there are specifically monastic forms of liturgy, as well as a characteristic intensity to monastic liturgical celebrations. Even in a monastic context, however, liturgy is and remains a performance in which the world extends into the monastery and the monastery acts toward the world.2 The celebration of mass may at first seem to be a straightforwardly male-​ dominated ritual but, from the perspective of the laity who take part, both sexes clearly participate with comparable postures and gestures. A differentiation of roles based on status within the Church precedes differentiation by sex. It is not first men and women who are distinguished from one another, but rather clergy from laity, though admittedly only men were admitted to the ranks of the clergy.3 The liturgy of the hours, a form of liturgy that was probably more important than the mass for monks and nuns, was first a lay celebration in its late antique origins. No cleric, and thus no man, was absolutely required for its performance.4 Only certain developments in the early and central Middle Ages led to the requirement for a male cleric not only for mass but also for the liturgy of the hours. But during the high Middle Ages, there are also many examples of women filling the role of liturgical presider within female monastic communities.5

Sources for the Study of Liturgy and Gender Liturgical books written for use in various forms of worship are the most important sources for research on liturgy, both in general and for the study of its gendered aspects. These books and their contents certainly did not remain immutable over the centuries, but rather were subject both to conscious reforms and to less deliberate changes. The decoration of prayer books could



Arnold Angenendt, “Liturgie im Mittelalter,” in Liturgie, Ritual, Frömmigkeit und die Dynamik symbolischer Ordnungen, ed. Helwig Schmidt-​Glintzer (Wiesbaden, 2006), 35–​78; Susan Boynton, “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Monastic Psalters,” Speculum 82 (2007): 896–​931. See also the article by Boynton in this volume. 3 On the mass in women’s monastic communities, see the article by Griffiths in this volume. 4 Anton Baumstark, Nocturna laus. Typen frühchristlicher Vigilienfeiern und ihr Fortleben vor allem im römischen und monastischen Ritus (Münster, 1957); Paul Frederick Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church (London, 1983); Egeria (Aetheria), Itinerarium. Reisebericht, trans. Georg Röwekamp (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2000); for an English trans., see Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, trans. Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw (Collegeville, MN, 2018). 5 Muschiol, Famula Dei,  101–​6. 2

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also transmit gender-​specific liturgical references and concepts of piety.6 Liturgical books as a source for the study of gender difference are treated in detail below in the section on liturgy and literacy. Narrative texts are also an important source for the history of liturgy. Chronicles or reports of reforms often offer glimpses of the celebration of the liturgy within particular communities. Such non-​ liturgical sources can reflect liturgical practices:  for example, at the double monastery of Admont in the high Middle Ages.7 For the late Middle Ages, we have the report of the Dominican Johannes Meyer (d. 1485) in his Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens (Book on the Reform of the Order of Preachers), which clearly reflects the connection between monastic reform and liturgy for both men’s and women’s convents; indeed, for both sexes, a special rite in the church marked the beginning of the Dominican Observant reform.8 Saints’ Lives can also offer considerable information about the celebration of the liturgy, particularly for the early Middle Ages. Hidden within such biographies, rather unintentionally, is evidence for liturgical celebrations that offers a thoroughly new window on everyday liturgical life.9 Finally, a broad range of legal texts—​contracts, notarial records, and other similar legal agreements—​sometimes mention liturgical feasts related to Christ and the saints, and could even be integrated into such celebrations. For example, Emperor Otto I (r. 962–​73) had charters dated on 2 February, the feast of Candlemas in the liturgical year of the Middle Ages, which he and his descendants often celebrated at the monastery of Quedlinburg.10 Some legal texts explicitly identify patron saints (male or female) as guarantors of compliance with an agreement. When a legal text was laid out upon a grave in the context of a ritual, the saint of the monastery increased the binding force of the agreement or, in some cases, sanctioned its breach. The saints might thus be called forth as witnesses in the liturgical celebrations of the community.11

Stefanie Seeberg, Die Illustrationen im Admonter Nonnenbrevier von 1180. Marienkrönung und Nonnenfrömmigkeit. Die Rolle der Brevierillustration in der Entwicklung von Bildthemen im 12. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2002). 7 See the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 8 Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ed. Benedikt Maria Reichert (Leipzig, 1908–​9). 9 Muschiol, Famula Dei,  20–​31. 10 Helmut Beumann, Die Ottonen (Stuttgart, 1991), 111; Gerd Althoff, Otto III. (Darmstadt 1996), 43–​6, 52. 11 Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Women’s Monasteries and Sacred Space: The Promotion of Saints’ Cults and Miracles,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe:  New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 68–​87; Hedwig Röckelein, “Founders, Donors, and Saints: Patrons of Nuns Convents,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York, 2008), 207–​24. 6

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Liturgy and Space Liturgy is dependent upon the spaces in which it is celebrated: large or small, sumptuous or simple, publicly accessible or enclosed.12 The primary space of monastic liturgy was, in general, the conventual church. This was not, however, the only space for liturgical celebrations. From the early Middle Ages on, there is evidence for multiple churches and oratories belonging to a single monastery.13 Near the main church, for example, there might be one or more oratories in which at least part of the divine office was sung, often depending upon the season. Evidence for such oratories survives from both men’s and women’s communities. All of these liturgical spaces could be accessible to the public in various ways. The main church itself was generally an openly accessible space during the major hours, while an oratory that lay within the monastic precinct was more likely to be off limits to the laity and designated for the minor hours.14 Further, some areas in the main monastery church were not open to both sexes equally. While male communities generally sang the office in the choir of their respective churches, often (although certainly not always) divided from the laity by a choir-​or rood-​screen, various means developed for separating women from other visitors to the church, both clerical and lay, and also from the space around the altar.15 In the early Middle Ages, monastic rules already called for the installation of curtains to separate women from the rest of the parish. Even altar cloths that needed to be washed by them were to be passed through the bar that delimited the chancel, and under no circumstances were the nuns themselves to remove them from the altar.16 The choir of the church was definitely not the space of liturgy in women’s communities.17





Gordon Blennemann, “Raumkonzept und liturgische Nutzung:  eine Spurensuche zur Frühgeschichte der Metzer Frauenklöster Sainte-​ Glossinde und Saint-​ Pierre-​ aux-​Nonnains,” in Frauen  –​Kloster  –​Kunst. Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Carola Jäggi, Susan Marti, and Hedwig Röckelein (Turnhout, 2007), 319–​26. 13 See the article by Bully and Destefanis in volume 1. 14 Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture: From the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Farnham, 2009),  123–​9. 15 Monika Schmelzer, Der mittelalterliche Lettner im deutschsprachigen Raum. Typologie und Funktion (Petersberg, 2004). 16 Gisela Muschiol, “Reinheit und Gefährdung? Frauen und Liturgie im Mittelalter,” Heiliger Dienst 51 (1997): 48. See also the article by Griffiths in this volume. 17 Margret Aston, “Segregation in Church,” in Women in Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1990), 237–​94; Gisela Muschiol, “Liturgie und Klausur: zu den liturgischen Voraussetzungen von Nonnenchören,” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius (Göttingen, 2001), 129–​48. 12

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Like the screen that separated the clergy from the laity and the monastic community from the rest of the parish (sometimes also from the lay brothers of the monastery), a gallery also developed in some places as a place of prayer for religious women. From this gallery, the women could neither be seen nor themselves see the people below. With the gallery, the West took over from Byzantium an ideal way to satisfy the requirements of ecclesiastical legislation, prompted primarily by notions of cultic purity and impurity regarding the exclusion of women from the area around the altar while simultaneously permitting various forms of visual and auditory participation in the divine office/​liturgy of the hours.18 At the same time, the nuns, situated in the gallery, had to find ways to experience mass, at least visually or aurally. But even this limited participation through hearing or seeing from afar was further restricted in the course of the high Middle Ages. For Cistercian nuns and nuns associated with the Hirsau movement, as well as women in the female communities of the mendicant orders, the practice of separation extended to the complete exclusion of the sisters from the chancel. The most extreme form of separation was a small barred and curtained window through which mass could only be heard.19 The consecrated host would then be handed through this window, or through a Kommunionrad, an opening in the wall fitted with a turning wooden wheel. It is important to note, however, that this separation held only for mass, the part of the liturgy for which the nuns had to rely on clerics. As noted above, the nuns were able to celebrate the divine office without male support, and it was the abbess who generally took on the role of liturgical leader and who recited the collects (the prayers at the end of each office). The role played in this development by the altars that are first attested on nuns’ galleries in the high Middle Ages has not yet been thoroughly examined.20





Gisela Muschiol, “Liturgy and Rite in Female Monasteries of the Middle Ages,” in Hamburger and Marti, Crown and Veil, 191–​206, esp. 199. 19 Bernadette Barrière, “The Cistercian Convent of Coyroux in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Gesta 31 (1992):  76–​ 82; Caroline A. Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213–​1340,” Gesta 31 (1992): 83–​91; see also Carola Jäggi and Uwe Lobbedey, “Church and Cloister: The Architecture of Female Monasticism in the Middle Ages,” in Hamburger and Marti, Crown and Veil, 109–​31. 20 Petra Zimmer, “Die Funktion und Ausstattung des Altares auf der Nonnenempore: Beispiele zum Bildgebrauch in Frauenklöstern aus dem 13. bis 16. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1990); for the late Middle Ages, see Gerhard Weilandt, “Alltag einer Küsterin:  die Ausstattung und liturgische Nutzung von Chor und Nonnenempore der Nürnberger Dominikanerinnenkirche nach dem ‘Notel der Küsterin’ (1436),” in Kunst und Liturgie. Choranlagen des Spätmittelalters. Ihre Architektur, Ausstattung und Nutzung, ed. Anna Moraht-​Fromm (Ostfildern, 2003), 159–​87. 18

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Concepts of ritual purity or impurity provide the context for the separation of the nuns from all of the other devout, including not only clerics and monks, but also female and male lay people. Requirements for enclosure, which were always enacted with greater severity and binding force for women’s communities than for men’s, were related to these concepts. The idea that sexuality or sexual activity reduced the value of prayer and liturgy was not original to Christianity, but rather was adapted very early by Christianity and stands in the background of diverse enclosure regulations of the high Middle Ages.21 The perceived value of pure, virginal prayers grew in connection with the memorial services increasingly expected of monasteries.22 And in the case of nuns, the stricter the enclosure, the more powerful those prayers were thought to be. A clear gender differentiation is also evident in the abundant processions that were characteristic of the liturgical world of the Middle Ages. Processions within women’s communities occasioned special interaction between nuns and the boundaries of their spaces. Women’s procession routes were generally restricted to the internal space of the monastery, and very few processions led women beyond their cloister walls and into the surrounding villages.23 The same restriction applied to communities of monks, but to a much lesser extent. Monks and nuns were also permitted differential access to pilgrimages, particularly to destinations far away. The prayer books that include texts and images that help the reader to undertake a kind of virtual pilgrimage to Jerusalem thus come mainly from women’s communities. The liturgical performance of certain processions within the cloister, together with quasi-​performative acts of prayer, was intended to lead a woman to believe that she had arrived at a desired pilgrimage destination, whether Jerusalem, Rome, or elsewhere. This was virtual travel, not only in mind, but also in body, and could include walking with statues or kissing the pictures in prayer books.24 After returning from his own pilgrimage, the Dominican Felix Fabri (d. 1502) wrote his Sionpilger, a short book for women intended to enable them to embark on a spiritual journey to Jerusalem.25 The rapid acceptance

On questions of purity in connection with the liturgy, see Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2000), 404–​11; Muschiol, “Reinheit und Gefährdung?” 42–​54. 22 See the article by Blennemann in volume 1. 23 Jürgen Bärsch, Die Feier des Osterfestkreises im Stift Essen nach dem Zeugnis des Liber Ordinarius (zweite Hälfte 14. Jahrhundert). Ein Beitrag zur Liturgiegeschichte der deutschen Ortskirchen (Münster, 1997). 24 Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011). 25 Kathryne Beebe, Pilgrim and Preacher: The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/​38–​1502) (Oxford, 2014), 129. 21

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in the late Middle Ages of the emerging genre of the Stations of the Cross in women’s monasteries should also be interpreted in this context.26

Liturgy and Identity No other activity occupied monks and nuns longer or more intensely in the course of their daily life than the liturgy. The modalities of the liturgy thus determined the identity of a community in a number of important ways. First, communal identity developed through liturgy through the enactment of liturgical forms particular to the house or order, and this might differ both from the liturgy of the rest of the Church and also from the liturgy of other religious communities.27 The community of Cîteaux, for example, defined itself over against Cluny through a distinctive liturgy that expressed the claim of a return to an imagined origin.28 Second, this identity flowed from the liturgy outward; it might attract high regard and win acceptance in the area surrounding the monastery, and serve to make the performance of memorial duties more attractive for potential donors. At the same time, the phenomenon of the keeping of memoria is eminently gendered. As long as psalmody functioned as memorial performance by monasteries for their associated laity, women’s communities were able to compete with men’s communities. But when mass became more highly valued within the system of spiritual bookkeeping at the end of the early Middle Ages, the women and their monasteries lost ground in comparison to the monks. The power of their prayers for penitents, or their prayers for the dead of their connected families, lost attractiveness for benefactors, as mass was attributed with a greater potential effect. Although the prayers of an entire group of ascetic virgins continued to command a high value, as the commutation and redemption lists in the penitentials show, more masses (reckoned as the equivalent of 100 psalms) could be celebrated than psalms sung in the same period of time, and quantity was clearly a factor in the context of liturgy and memoria.29 Memorial duties were useful in generating income, and



Susanne Wegmann, “Der Kreuzweg von Adam Kraft in Nürnberg: ein Abbild Jerusalems in der Heimat,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 84 (1997): 93–​117; Olaf Siart, “Die Darstellung der Passion im Kreuzgang des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Wienhausen,” in Passion und Ostern in den Lüneburger Klöstern, ed. Linda M. Koldau (Ebstorf, 2010), 187–​204. 27 Susan Boynton, Shaping Monastic Identity:  Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–​1125 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 64–​105 and 206–​15. 28 Jörg Oberste, Die Zisterzienser (Stuttgart, 2014). 29 Arnold Angenendt et  al., “Gezählte Frömmigkeit,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995): 1–​71. 26

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women’s communities could thus suffer heavy economic losses. At the same time, the Libri vitae (memorial books that listed the names of entire monastic communities, including both living and dead members) reflect no distinction between monks and nuns. Male and female religious are named without distinction on the basis of sex in the commemorative lists of other women’s and men’s communities, offering evidence of the continued value of reciprocal prayer, by women as well as by men.30 Identity and liturgy mattered in the context of pivotal life moments. For monastic communities, the liturgical actions associated with birth and baptism were less important than those for entrance, profession (often called a second baptism), and death. It is significant that these events were carefully bounded and marked by liturgy, surrounded with prayers and time-​honored rites.31 Many liturgical formulas for profession or death make no distinction based on gender; the formulas for profession and the prayers that accompanied the liturgy of the Last Rites were often similar for nuns and monks. One remarkable exception, however, emerges in the context of female Cistercian communities; nuns made their profession seated on the altar.32 This appears to have been the only permissible appearance of a nun at the altar, as many consuetudines excluded women from this area at all other times. Another aspect of identity that emerges through the medium of liturgy is found in the thematic devotions that developed in the high and late Middle Ages, particularly within women’s communities. Inspired by the increasing importance of mysticism, devotions that focused on Christ’s Passion, on Mary as the Mother of Jesus, and on the Eucharist, and a characteristic form of reverence for the Cross, emerged and gained particular importance within female houses.33 Women’s communities were not dependent upon clerics





Dieter Geuenich and Uwe Ludwig, eds., Der Memorial-​und Liturgiecodex von San Salvatore/​ Santa Giulia in Brescia (Hanover, 2000); see also Johanne Autenrieth, Dieter Geuenich, and Karl Schmid, eds., Das Verbrüderungsbuch der Abtei Reichenau (Hanover, 1979). 31 On the liturgy of female profession, see Eva Schlotheuber, “Klostereintritt und Übergangsriten:  die Bedeutung der Jungfräulichkeit für das Selbstverständnis der Nonnen der alten Orden,” in Hamburger et  al., Frauen  –​ Kloster  –​ Kunst, 43–​55; Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des “Konventstagebuchs” einer Zisterzienserin von Heilig-​Kreuz bei Braunschweig (1484–​1507) (Tübingen, 2004). For the liturgy of the Last Rites, see Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter, 659–​716; and Frederick Paxton, with the collaboration of Isabelle Cochelin, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages/​Le rituel de la mort à Cluny au Moyen Âge central (Turnhout, 2014). 32 Schlotheuber, “Klostereintritt und Übergangsriten,” 52. 33 On the veneration of the Cross in monastic communities, see Volker Honemann, “Kreuzesmeditation in der klösterlichen Literatur am Beispiel des Liedes O du edele sedderenboom,” in Koldau, Passion und Ostern in den Lüneburger Klöstern, 223–​44.

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for any of these devotions, which they carried out completely on their own. These devotions have been little studied, particularly from the perspective of gender, and the phenomenon warrants further scholarly attention.34

Liturgy as Interaction of  Roles The liturgy of the medieval Church was a performance with different roles, although these roles must not be compared with those associated with the liturgy of the present day. Priests, deacons, and subdeacons played fixed roles during the celebration of mass, including within monasteries, whether male or female. Rules and consuetudines for female houses reflect the presence of several clerics whose presence was strictly regulated in order to avoid contact with the sisters.35 Interaction between the sexes was reduced to an absolute minimum; contact between the priest and the nuns was permitted only during the distribution of the sacrament of communion. The sacrament of confession is not considered here, as there was no communal liturgical form for this in the high Middle Ages.36 This is different from the so-​called chapter of faults within a monastic community.37 For the divine office, however, the division of roles was organized, not on the basis of sex, but on office. In a women’s community, the abbess could fill the role of the presider of the liturgy. The sisters themselves were divided into two choirs, and a cantrix (chantress) and a weekly reader were also designated. There was also a female sacristan—​an individual charged with the oversight and organization of all of these activities.38 Processions also reflect gendered roles in the celebration of the liturgy. As noted above, processions in men’s communities were, in general, able to move beyond the confines of the monastery, while those in women’s communities were normally limited to the enclosed precinct. The Liber ordinarius from the house of canonesses at Essen (1350) attests to processions inside the precinct in which religious women and clerics acted together, a practice also



One exception is June Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Constance Berman, and Lisa Bitel (Turnhout, 2014), esp. Chapters 2 and 7. 35 Muschiol, Famula Dei, 192–​4. See also the article by Griffiths in this volume. 36 Claudia Mohn, “Beichte und Kommunion in mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern: liturgische und bauliche Besonderheiten am Beispiel fränkischer Frauenzisterzen,” in Hamburger et al., Frauen–​ Kloster –​ Kunst, 327–​35. 37 On the chapter of faults, see the article by Cochelin in volume 1. 38 Weilandt, “Alltag eine Küsterin,” 159–​87. 34

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reflected in the customary (1498) of the monastery of St. Cecilia in Cologne.39 Essen’s Liber ordinarius also reflects an additional phenomenon, particularly prevalent in the late Middle Ages, but with roots in the tenth century: the Easter liturgy integrated in dramatized representations of the Resurrection in which women and men took on gender-​specific roles, with the sisters playing the role of women at the tomb and a cleric playing the role of the angel.40

Liturgy and Writing Can a liturgical book, one might ask, have a gender? The answer is clear: not the book itself, of course, but certainly its copyist. Gender should thus be taken into account when considering literacy in the context of liturgy. Reading and writing were the basic skills of the learned women and men in a monastery. A note written by a female pupil at tenth-​century Essen is a particularly lovely example of this striving to learn. Here, one of the younger sisters asks her magistra for permission to spend the night declining nouns, reading, and singing with one of her fellow sisters. The magistra’s positive reply is also found on the slip of parchment: Valete in domino.41 Throughout the Middle Ages, male and female religious took responsibility for producing their own liturgical texts, copying them and decorating them with miniatures, and customizing them to suit their particular needs.42 At women’s monasteries in the high and late Middle Ages, there was a direct connection between book production, the ability to read and write, and reform, a connection that also pertains to liturgical books. More investigation of this relationship in the high Middle Ages is needed, as the liturgical books of that period from both male and female monasteries have been too little studied.43 The nuns of Admont, for example, had books made for their





Gisela Muschiol, “Das ‘gebrechlichere Geschlecht’ und der Gottesdienst:  zum religiösen Alltag in Frauengemeinschaften des Mittelalters,” in Herrschaft, Bildung und Gebet. Gründung und Anfänge des Frauenstiftes Essen, ed. Thomas Schilp and Michael Schlagheck (Essen, 2002), 19–​28; Tobias Kanngiesser, Haec sunt festa quae apud nos celebrantur. Der Liber ordinarius von St. Caecilien: Köln (1498) (Siegburg, 2017). 40 Gisela Muschiol, “Osterliturgie in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters,” in Koldau, Passion und Ostern in den Lüneburger Klöstern, 45–​66; Carol Symes, “Liturgical Texts and Performance Practices,” in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (Farnham, 2016), 239–​67. 41 Katrinette Bodarwé, Sanctimoniales litteratae. Schriftlichkeit und Bildung in den ottonischen Frauenkommunitäten Gandersheim, Essen und Quedlinburg (Münster, 2004), 75–​6. 42 See the article by Cohen in volume 1. 43 Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2004), 40, 80, and 92–​102; Alison I. Beach, ed., Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Turnhout, 2007). 39

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own use—​among others, Admont MS 17, their so-​called liber matutinalis—​and also themselves produced copies of sermons for internal use.44 Finally, we know something of the exchange of books between monasteries from loan records and letters that transmit urgent requests that borrowed books be returned immediately. Liturgical books were part of this traffic between houses, as evidence of exchange within fifteenth-​century female Dominican reform networks clearly attests. Liturgical books from the Dominican convent of St. Katharina in Nuremberg were sent to several other communities in order to produce a common liturgy and shared reformed identity.45 Scholars have yet to investigate whether such an exchange of liturgical books also took place between men’s and women’s monasteries.

Liturgy and Materiality The decoration of liturgical spaces and manuscripts was another aspect that was gendered: painted altarpieces, textiles designed specifically for liturgical spaces and for the individuals who wore them—​in short, the materiality of the liturgy.46 While wall painting, books, and other objects are not gendered in their materiality, their donation and use can clearly take on gendered dimensions. Historical research on liturgical textiles has recently offered evidence for an interesting type of role substitution. Since it was not possible for women to approach the altar themselves, in some female religious communities nuns designed and created textiles for use in the mass decorated with images and symbols of the sisters. Abbess Chunegunde II of Göss (d. 1269), for example, donated an antependium (a textile hanging for the altar) and had various clerical vestments made both to ensure her memoria and to establish the virtual presence of women right at the altar. The antependium bore a portrait of the founding abbess, and the vestments for the priests and deacons had inscriptions mentioning the abbess and her community, thus allowing the women to join the clerics, albeit indirectly, at the altar.47



See the article by Baker and Kienzle in this volume. See also Beach, Women as Scribes, 80–​1; Christina Lutter, Geschlecht und Wissen, Norm und Praxis, Lesen und Schreiben. Monastische Reformgemeinschaften im 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna and Munich, 2005). 45 Marie-​Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Die Bildung der Dominikanerinnen in Süddeutschland vom 13. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2004); Antje Willing, Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg. Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse, 2  vols. (Berlin, 2012). 46 See the article by Gajewski and Seeberg in this volume. 47 Barbara Eggert, “Textile Strategien der Grenzüberschreitung:  der Gösser Ornat der Äbtissin Kunigunde II. (amt. 1239–​1269),” in Hamburger et al., Frauen –​ Kloster –​ Kunst, 281–​8. 44

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The textiles that numbered among the possessions of Altenberg, a Premonstratensian women’s community, demonstrate the connections between the monastery and several particular families; they also shed light on the visibility and invisibility of liturgical spaces, as well as on the “media effect” of various textiles and other material objects (such as panel paintings) within the framework of liturgical performance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Abbess Gertrud (d. 1297), the daughter of St. Elisabeth of Thuringia (d. 1231), donated a hanging with scenes from the Life of her sainted mother. Her successors, who were related to comital families from the area around Altenberg, and in the broader sense to the landgraves of Thuringia, highlighted these connections through the donation of altar cloths on which they had themselves “inscribed” with images and words.48 The decoration of prayer books and walls could similarly transmit gender-​ specific liturgical references and concepts of piety. The murals that decorated the nuns’ choir at the abbey of Wienhausen followed an explicit program in which the nuns were represented in both image and word.49 Chalices and patens, altars and altar retables, books and mural images, textiles, and carved figures—​all of these objects preserve programs of theological and spiritual images through which the nuns tried to place themselves within their liturgy.50 Gender difference in the context of liturgy is not merely a modern academic interest; the postures, gestures, texts, and material culture associated with the liturgy within medieval monastic communities reflect a deep contemporary concern with gender. The study of gendered aspects of medieval liturgical performances within women’s, men’s, and dual-​sex monastic communities, however, is still in the early stages. Continued research will make possible a comparison of men’s and women’s houses in diverse liturgical contexts.

Bibliography Angenendt, Arnold. Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter. Darmstadt, 2000. Aston, Margret. “Segregation in Church.” In Women in Church, edited by W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, 237–​94. Oxford, 1990.

Stefanie Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum. Leinenstickereien im Kontext mittelalterlicher Raumausstattungen aus dem Prämonstratenserinnenkloster Altenberg/​Lahn (Petersberg, 2014). 49 Susanne Wittekind, “Passion und Ostern im Bildprogramm des Wienhäuser Nonnenchores,” in Koldau, Passion und Ostern in den Lüneburger Klöstern, 157–​86. 50 See the overview of art production and liturgical use by Jeffrey F.  Hamburger, “Between This World and the Next: The Art of Religious Women in the Middle Ages,” in Hamburger and Marti, Crown and Veil, 76–​108. 48

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Gender and Monastic Liturgy Berger, Teresa. Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History:  Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past. Burlington, VT, 2011.   Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History. Collegeville, MN, 1999. Beuckers, Klaus Gereon, ed. Liturgie in mittelalterlichen Frauenstiften. Forschungen zum Liber ordinarius. Essen, 2012. Boynton, Susan. “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Monastic Psalters.” Speculum 82 (2007): 896–​931.   Shaping Monastic Identity:  Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125. Ithaca, NY, 2006. Braunfels, Wolfgang. Abendländische Klosterbaukunst. Cologne, 1985. Doig, Allan. Liturgy and Architecture: From the Early Church to the Middle Ages. Farnham, 2009. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London, 1966. Hamburger Jeffrey F., and Susan Marti, eds. Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries. New York, 2008. Hamburger Jeffrey F., Carola Jäggi, Susan Marti, and Hedwig Röckelein, eds. Frauen  –​ Kloster –​Kunst. Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. Turnhout, 2007. Hascher-​Burger, Ulrike, and Henrike Lähnemann. Liturgie und Reform im Kloster Medingen. Edition und Untersuchung des Propst-​Handbuchs Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Lat. liturg. e. 18. Tübingen, 2013. Hen, Yitzhak. Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–​751. Leiden, 1995. Koldau, Linda Maria. Frauen –​Musik –​Kultur. Ein Handbuch zum deutschen Sprachgebiet der Frühen Neuzeit. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005. Mecham, June. Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions:  Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, edited by Alison I. Beach, Constance Berman, and Lisa Bitel. Turnhout, 2014. Muschiol, Gisela. Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern. Münster, 1994.   “Men, Women and Liturgical Practice in the Early Medieval West.” In Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 CE, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia Smith, 198–216. Cambridge, 2004.   “Reinheit und Gefährdung? Frauen und Liturgie im Mittelalter.” Heiliger Dienst 51 (1997): 42–54.Reinle, Adolf. Die Ausstattung deutscher Kirchen im Mittelalter. Darmstadt, 1988. Rudy, Kathryn M. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Schlotheuber, Eva. Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des “Konventstagebuchs” einer Zisterzienserin von Heilig-​ Kreuz bei Braunschweig (1484–​1507). Tübingen, 2004.

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Monastic Landscapes He dwig Rö cke lein

Klosterlandschaften (Monastic Landscapes): The Concept What kind of physical landscapes did particular monastic orders prefer for the locations of their communities? How did some religious communities create places of isolation in which to settle? How did monasteries create infrastructure, such as diverted waterways, to make it possible to inhabit a chosen space?1 How did monks and nuns imagine their relationship to the natural environment around them? What can we infer about the policy of rulers, or the relationship of monasteries to centers of power, from the lands donated to a given community or order?2 These are some of the many varied questions that animate the study of medieval monastic landscapes, a field of inquiry that emerged in 1955 with the publication of William George Hoskins’s groundbreaking monograph, The Making of the English Landscape,3 and that has since developed its own methodology within the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, history, and archaeology.4 This chapter offers an introduction to the analytical instruments and methods of research on monastic landscapes of the high Middle Ages. A monastic landscape might comprise material and physical, geographic and spatial, spiritual and religious, mental and virtual, institutional and



James Bond, Monastic Landscapes (Stroud, 2004); Derek Hall, Scottish Monastic Landscapes (Stroud, 2006). 2 József Laszlovszky and Hedwig Röckelein. “Medieval Monastic Regions in Central Europe: The Spiritual and Physical Landscape Setting of Monastic Orders and Religious Houses,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 17 (2011): 296–​308. 3 William George Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955). 4 Wendy Ashmore and A. Bernand Knapp, eds., Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford, 1999); Kurt Anschuetz et  al. “An Archaeology of Landscape: Perspective and Directions,” Journal of Archaeological Research 9.2 (2001):  157–​211; Marc Antrop, “A Brief History of Landscape Research,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, and Emma Waterton (London, 2013),  12–​22. 1

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social, and symbolic and semantic dimensions.5 Monastic landscapes also have their own aesthetic, literary, metaphorical, and emotional implications. Some researchers define a monastic landscape as the physical environment of a single monastery, of several monasteries in a geographically or politically defined area, or of a particular religious order. It can also include the dependent settlements, the road system and infrastructure, parish churches, social networks, and the institutions of power at play within this monastic landscape.6 Depending on the particular research interest of the scholar, hermeneutical, sociological, statistical, and scientific methods may be chosen and combined.7 In her case study on the monastery of Stavelot-​Malmedy, for example, Ellen F.  Arnold investigated both the ecosystem and medieval mentalities related to the environment in hagiographical sources, focusing on “the cultural and spiritual implications of the medieval relationship with nature.”8 Gert Melville and Franz J.  Felten have focused on administrative, organizational, social, and spiritual parameters of Klosterlandschaften.9 Still other historians are attempting to reconstruct monastic landscapes on behalf of governmental bodies that aim to have monasteries—​individually or in groups—​designated as cultural heritage by UNESCO.10

Written Sources and Material Evidence Written records and material remains, including those uncovered in field excavations, provide the overwhelming majority of source material for monastic landscape studies. Together, these sources can open a window onto the everyday life of the monastery. Environmental history and archaeology





For landscapes in general, see Jeff Malpas, ed., The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge, MA, 2011); for medieval monastic landscapes in particular, see Gert Melville, “Klosterlandschaft,” in Landschaft(en). Begriffe  –​Formen  –​Implikationen, ed. Franz J. Felten, Harald Müller, and Heidrun Ochs (Stuttgart, 2012), 195–​222. 6 For different research methods and understandings of “monastic landscapes,” see Bond, Monastic Landscapes; Melville, “Klosterlandschaft.” 7 For different methodologies in recent studies in Germany, see Jens Schneider, “Les monastères et leurs paysages: à propos des ‘Klosterlandschaften’ dans la recherche allemande,” Francia 45 (2018): 211–​18. 8 Ellen F. Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape:  Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes(Philadelphia, PA, 2013). 9 Franz J.  Felten, “Klosterlandschaften,” in Felten et  al., Landschaft(en), 157–​91; and Melville, “Klosterlandschaft,” 195–​222. 10 See Roman Czaja, Heinz-​Dieter Heimann, and Matthias Wemhoff, eds., Klosterland­ schaften. Methodisch-​exemplarische Annäherungen (Paderborn and Munich, 2008). 5

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allow us to reconstruct, not only the physical landscape, but also its social, infrastructural, and economic dimensions. For too long, historians have accepted uncritically the claims in hagiographical and historical sources that monasteries were founded in deserted areas.11 The study of geography and the economy of the region, however, offers an important corrective that historians can no longer ignore. For instance, although Clairvaux was located in a side valley, it was a valley quite close to the fairs of Champagne. The balance between the written sources and archaeological remains that are available to scholars varies, depending on external factors such as the date of Christianization, the destruction of monastic culture during periods of reformation, and secularization in the early modern and modern states. The relatively plentiful written sources extant for England and Germany allow for the reconstruction of the history of monastic landed properties—​their income and cultivation as well as the transformation of the landscape through agriculture, water regulation, and other activities of the monks and nuns. In France, however, medieval monastic architecture was often destroyed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the course of building new and “modern” monasteries, as was the case, for example, in Cluny, Bec, and Clairvaux. The same is true for German-​speaking areas in the baroque area, when revenues and monastic power increased again and led to the extensive destruction of medieval buildings. Although the preservation of written evidence produced in German monasteries in the Middle Ages is considerable, there are some areas, such as Thuringia and the southwest, in which monastic archives and libraries, and consequently most of the written sources kept there, were destroyed during the early sixteenth-​century peasant rebellions. In Hungary, on the other hand, where the first royal chancellery was not established before the last decades of the twelfth century and where many written records were destroyed during the Reformation, research on monasteries and monastic landscape focuses more on material remains and archaeological investigations.12 Collaborations between historians and archaeologists in holistic studies of the historical environment that take into account both surviving written sources and material remains can yield excellent results. The archaeological side of such cooperative efforts includes not only the analysis of the material remains of a site (including all types of material evidence, from potsherds, bones, glass, and other small finds, to walls and remnants of buildings),

See the article by Berman in this volume. See the article by Jamroziak in this volume.

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but also observable physical features of the landscape (such as dams, fish ponds, channels, or any other types of earthwork). Together, historians and archaeologists can help us to understand why a monastery was located in a particular site, sometimes revealing underlying patterns. This holistic approach to landscape is evident in the work of the archaeologists James Bond, Roberta Gilchrist, and Derek Hall, whose research on England, Wales, and Scotland focuses on the interactions of monks and nuns with their natural environment, as well as on the impact of monasteries and orders—​for example, the Cistercians and Premonstratensians—​on their physical environment.13 Jemma Bezant has studied the transformation of the environment and the landscape by the Cistercians in the context of their unique system of granges for agricultural production.14

Methodologies Various research aims call for different approaches to the study of monastic landscapes and different narratives may be chosen to portray them. One can privilege, for instance, a synchronous or a diachronic comparison. The synchronous comparison observes and contrasts various monastic communities (within a local, regional, national, or international perspective) for a given period.15 Their political, social, and economic situations could be similar, identical, or entirely different.16 The diachronic comparison, meanwhile, observes and contrasts the processes of change over certain monastic communities of a given area. If the focus is on the natural, social, and political environment of an individual monastery, the methods of choice are microhistory and “thick description,” an approach used in Landesgeschichte in German historiography. This type of close study requires the inclusion of all available data for the



Bond, Monastic Landscapes; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture:  The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York, 1997); Hall, Scottish Monastic Landscapes. 14 Jemma Bezant, “Revising the Monastic Grange: Problems at the Edge of the Cistercian World,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 3 (2014): 51–​70. 15 Emilia Jamroziak, “Cistercian Monasteries on Northern Frontiers and Their Social Context: Comparative Study of Scotland and Pomerania (an Overview of the Project),” in Czaja et  al., Klosterlandschaften, 127–​40; Emilia Jamroziak, Survival and Success on Medieval Borders: Cistercian Houses in Medieval Scotland and Pomerania from the Twelfth to Late Fourteenth Century (Turnhout, 2011). 16 Patrick Geary, “Vergleichende Geschichte und sozialwissenschaftliche Theorie,” in Das europäische Mittelalter im Spannungsbogen des Vergleichs. Zwanzig internationale Beiträge zu Praxis, Problemen und Perspektiven der historischen Komparatistik, ed. Michael Borgolte (Berlin, 2001), 29–​38. 13

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monastery and its surroundings, in other words a dense and highly heterogeneous body of sources. An individual monastery that is considered paradigmatic for an entire group of similar communities can be the subject of a case study that also offers insight into other regional monasteries that lack a similar corpus of primary sources. For example, the study of the polyptychs from Fulda, Corvey, and Saint-​Denis (with the other sources from these monasteries) can help us to understand how other contemporary monasteries might have inscribed themselves within their own landscapes.17 Efforts to reconstruct medieval monastic landscapes have also benefited from significant new methods that have developed within the fields of history, sociology, and archaeology. In the social sciences, network analysis considers human societies as “pattern[s]‌… of relationships obtaining between actors in their capacity of playing roles relative to one another.”18 Its aim is to analyze these relationship patterns and the relative positions of individual actors—​or nodes—​within them. Network analysis can help with the identification, visualization, analysis, and understanding of the structure of monastic landscapes. Two basic features can offer important insights into the structure of a network and its actors. The first is provided by the ties that link different actors/​ nodes in a network. This type of enquiry usually focuses on similarities (of location, environmental circumstances, institutional affiliations, etc.), (biological, economic, affective) relations, interactions (communication, cooperation, etc.), and flows (of information, persons, resources, etc.).19 The second feature is the position of individual actors/​nodes within the network. This type of enquiry focuses, for example, on central versus peripheral situations, proximity versus remoteness from important actors/​nodes, or the number of nodes with which a specific node is in direct contact. Network analysis can help to answer a wide range of questions about monastic landscapes.20 How were networks of communities of monasteries or monastic orders structured—​open or closed, centralized or dispersed—​and can differences be observed with regard to religious orders, geographic location, and so on? Which communities acted as central nodal points in monastic networks, and what were the factors leading to centrality? Can common features of institutions or individuals within particular monastic networks be observed? How were external, non-​monastic institutions and individuals

See the article by Devroey in volume 1. Siegfried Frederick Nadel, The Theory of Social Structure (Glencoe, IL, 1957), 12. Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca, “Network Analysis in the Social Sciences,” Science 323 (2009): 892–​5. 20 See the article by Ó Clabaigh in this volume. 17

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(secular clergy, family relations, friends, courts, dioceses, etc.) integrated into monastic networks? Do any gender-​based patterns emerge?

Evolution of Monastic Networks, Especially the Cistercians Both the number and the character of nodal points in monastic networks changed significantly during the Middle Ages. Early medieval networks were comparatively unstable and reflected only the first signs of institutionalization; they were chiefly based on social and political relations, on family ties,21 on friendship (amicitia), on feudal dependency, and on confraternities. Despite these obstacles, significant female monastic landscapes can be observed in Saxony and the valley of the River Main from the eighth to the tenth centuries. At their root lie the Saxon-​Frankish aristocracy in the north and Anglo-​Saxon missionaries in the south—​both aided by the Carolingian dynasty.22 These structures, however, vanished during the tenth century, and the monastic landscapes underwent a period of re-​formation. It was only in the high and late Middle Ages that stable networks developed within the framework of religious orders. Binding regulations (contained in rules, statutes, constitutions, and customaries), hierarchical structures of religious organizations, and their unified provincial administration all contributed to this trend. Parker Snyder used a quantitative network analysis to demonstrate how this process of structuralizing, institutionalizing, and condensing progressed in different spatial and temporal stages within the Cistercian order throughout Europe.23 In his investigation of the relationships of Cîteaux, Clairvaux, Morimond, Pontigny, and La Ferté and the roughly 350 filiations that were established between 1098 and 1398, he treated each foundation as a node and each filial house as a link to the network as a whole. In doing so, he discovered different patterns of communication, regional priorities, and models of internal hierarchy within the filial lines. Snyder argued that Cistercian foundations can be read like a flowchart, presenting a general picture of the monks’ strategy. There was first a period before the



See the article by Rosé in volume 1 and the article by Lyon in this volume. Hedwig Röckelein, “Bairische, sächsische und mainfränkische Klostergründungen im Vergleich (8. Jahrhundert bis 1100),” in Nonnen, Kanonissen und Mystikerinnen. Religiöse Frauengemeinschaften in Süddeutschland. Beiträge zur interdisziplinären Tagung vom 21. bis 23. September 2005 in Frauenchiemsee, ed. Eva Schlotheuber, Helmut Flachenecker, and Ingrid Gardill (Göttingen, 2008), 23–​55. 23 Parker Snyder, “Cistercian Network Analysis:  A Road Map through the Mental Imagination of the First Generations of Monks” (MA diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2008). 21

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administrative structures had been formalized. One can then notice, as early as the 1130s, a functional and integrated network. After that point the network became a medium for the transfer of religious and cultural ideas, as well as economic and technological practices. A diachronic comparison is the method of choice for studies of developments and changes within a heterogeneous monastic landscape. Snyder, for example, compared the distribution patterns of the Cistercians with those of two other orders also founded in the twelfth century—​the Premonstratensians and Carthusians. He concluded that: “On a whole [sic], the landscape distribution of [Cistercian] monasteries is rather disparate compared to the Carthusians and Premonstratensians, whose foundations show a higher propensity to cluster around core areas. This finding suggests the Cistercians were rather more widespread and their influence was sustained long enough for colonisation to fill in the blank spaces on the map.”24 Having observed similarities and differences between the objects of comparison on a phenomenological level, the second step is to determine the internal and external causes for these similarities and differences. These may be of very different types: institutional, organizational, religious, economic, administrative, social, or political.

Gender and Monastic Networks One crucial but often overlooked cause of differences in the development and structure of monastic landscapes is gender. Based on our current knowledge, however, we can see that male and female monastic landscapes were radically different in the Middle Ages.25 For networks that contained both male and female monastic communities and individuals, a number of questions emerge. What was the position of female actors/​nodes in relation to male ones in terms of centrality and interconnectedness? How did the integration and position of female monastic communities and/​or their members in monastic networks influence their success with regard to material wealth, power, landholding, and intellectual/​spiritual influence? How were ideas (reform movements, spirituality, artistic concepts, theological debates, etc.) and material resources (money, goods, land property, etc.) transmitted within male and female monastic networks, and are there differences between male

Ibid., 91. Petra Weigel, “Klosterlandschaft—​Frauenklosterlandschaft:  das Beispiel Thüringen,” in Felten et al., Landschaft(en), 351–​64.

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and female monastic networks in terms of their participation in these processes of transmission and exchange? When studying female religious houses in this context, it is necessary to question the very methods for the collection of data used by researchers on monasticism. Snyder’s data, for example, is derived from protocols of the chapter of Cîteaux and from visitation reports. But these include female communities to an almost negligible degree, since female Cistercians were not represented at the general chapter by their abbesses but by their father-​abbot. Moreover, communities that had not been incorporated into the order were not represented at the order’s general chapter at all. This was the case for the majority of nuns who lived their life in accordance with the Carta caritatis and referred to their community as “monasterium ordinis Cisterciensis.”26 Their visitators were usually not Cistercians but bishops, clerics, black monks, or regular canons. Indeed, in some areas—​for example in Westphalia, East Saxony,27 Swabia, Franconia,28 and Thuringia—​the number of female houses that defined themselves as Cistercian was significantly higher than for male communities. The incorporation or non-​incorporation of a female house into the order had a considerable impact on the formation of networks. Only incorporated monasteries were able to profit from the communication network of the order and from the privileges that were granted by the pope. Networks of non-​incorporated Cistercian houses for women worked in different ways; they were based on the family ties of the abbesses and nuns, or on contacts with bishops, secular clerics, and other orders in their region. The aspect of gender is of great relevance beyond the context of the new orders founded in the twelfth century. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a variety of double houses were established.29 The male and female communities in such double houses comprised small “monastic landscapes.” Studying their networks offers the opportunity to highlight some interesting facts. The female communities were often led by the associated abbot. Within the congregation of Cluny, for instance, female houses were directly subordinate to the center, the abbot of Cluny. Except for Marcigny in Burgundy, most

See the articles by Andenna and Berman in this volume. Hedwig Röckelein, Schriftlandschaften, Bildungslandschaften und religiöse Landschaften des Mittelalters in Norddeutschland (Wiesbaden, 2015), esp. 53 (map 10, on male Cistercians) and 54 (map 11, on female Cistercians). 28 Stefan Petersen, “Die geistlichen Gemeinschaften im mittelalterlichen Bistum Würzburg: ein Überblick,” in Franken und Südtirol. Zwei Kulturlandschaften im Vergleich, ed. Helmut Flachenecker and Hans Heiss (Bolzano, 2013), 157–​267. 29 On the double monastery as a historiographical problem, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 26 27

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appeared only once the movement had passed its zenith. Moreover, they were usually situated in Provence, northern Italy, and Spain.30 The reforming circles associated with the monastery of Hirsau in the Black Forest had numerous double houses in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially the monasteries that communicated intensively with St. Georgen and Petershausen.31 Furthermore, a symbiosis between monasteries following the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) and anchoresses (inclusae), and, occasionally, a connection with semi-​religious women can be observed. Female religious houses sometimes developed from small communities of inclusae attached to male monasteries (Nonnenwerth near Cologne; Disibodenberg–​Bingen). In other cases, inclusae attached themselves to existing women’s communities (Lippoldsberg). If one considers the political, social, and monastic networks of all the reform groups of the high Middle Ages that included women, Fontevraud emerges, without any doubt, as the most “emancipated” (in that it was the one least dominated by men).32 The convent’s abbess also led the neighboring male monastery and the attached hospital, as well as the entire monastic group. Fontevraud was closely tied to the high aristocracy of France and England; prominent aristocrats including Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), and Henry II (r. 1154–​89) and Richard I  (the Lionheart) (r. 1189–​99) of England used the monastery as their place of burial. Owing to these connections and the rich endowment of the community by the Plantagenets, the abbey was able to form one of the most politically, religiously, and culturally influential networks of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on both shores of the English Channel, with excellent relations with the English court. On the other hand, the monastic group of Prémy and the Paraclete of Heloise with its filiations, also headed by an abbess, remained comparatively minor organizations.33



Hedwig Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis der benediktinischen Reformen des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts: Gorze, Cluny, Hirsau, St. Blasien und Siegburg,” in Female ‘vita religiosa’ between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages:  Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin, 2011), 286–​91; Giancarlo Andenna, Sanctimoniales Cluniacenses. Studi sui monasteri femminili di Cluny e sulla loro legislazione in Lombardia (XI–​XV secolo) (Münster, 2004). 31 Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis,” 292–​6; Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Cambridge, 2017), 73–​90 (on double monasteries) and 93–​115 (on Petershausen as agent of reform). 32 Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 60–​4. 33 Franz J. Felten, “Verbandsbildung von Frauenklöstern:  Le Paraclet, Prémy, Fontevraud mit einem Ausblick auf Cluny, Sempringham und Tart,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit, ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske (Munich, 1997), 277–​341.

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The networks of women in Saxony who followed the RB were very different from those of their sisters in France and England. On the recommendation of the bishops of Hildesheim and Halberstadt, they preferred regular canons as priors instead of black monks. The nuns of Lamspringe and Lippoldsberg benefited from the scholarly networks of the reform clerics in the Harz region, the archdioceses of Salzburg and Trier, and the cathedral schools in northern France.34 This is reflected by the female houses’ libraries.35 A comparably close tie between regular canons and females living under the RB was created by Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189) in England.36

Source-​Based  Data The systematic investigation of source-​based data constitutes a useful starting point for the (re-​)construction of monastic landscapes. To this end, it is important that source-​based data are organized in such a way that they can facilitate the conceptualization of monastic landscapes. Owing to the manifold forms of medieval monasticism, however, the data extracted from the sources cannot be easily standardized. With regard to the early period of monasticism in particular, individual and singular cases dominate. Data on the centralized orders of the high Middle Ages, on the other hand, is much more accessible, since these institutions themselves contributed to the standardization of the sources. The standardization of data necessitates compromises with regard to empirical enquiry and statistical evaluation. Franz J. Felten developed a list of parameters for source-​based data that is useful for the reconstruction of monastic landscapes.37 This catalogue is quite extensive, and the necessary sources and fundamental research to meet its requirements completely only exist for a few houses. It does, however, provide some useful guidelines. Data on the identification of an institution (name, place, date of foundation, historical and modern administrative dependencies) and on its basic historical development (including periods of reform and





Hedwig Röckelein, “Die Auswirkung der Kanonikerreform des 12. Jahrhunderts auf Kanonissen, Augustinerchorfrauen und Benediktinerinnen,” in Institution und Charisma. Festschrift für Gert Melville zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Franz J. Felten et al. (Cologne, 2009),  55–​72. 35 Alison I. Beach, ed., Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-​ Century Germany (Turnhout, 2007); Helmar Härtel, Geschrieben und gemalt. Gelehrte Bücher aus Frauenhand. Eine Klosterbibliothek sächsischer Benediktinerinnen des 12. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbüttel, 2006). 36 Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995). 37 Felten, “Klosterlandschaften,” 190–​1. 34

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dates of dissolution) is essential. The data should ideally also include information on extant documents and manuscripts, prosopographical data, information on the institution’s obedience, its internal organizational structure (for instance, who had responsibility over the nuns), liturgical practices, and manorial possessions. By using the database, archaeologists and art historians should be able to gain insight into architectural features, objects within the buildings, religious art, mural and stained glass images, and textiles, as well as landscape features such as fish ponds, ground plans, and hydrology. The state of research on these features of monasticism in different countries is fairly diverse in its extent and depth. The monastic handbooks on different regions of Germany and Italy that have been produced during the past decades may serve as positive examples.38 Monographic series such as the Germania Benedictina, the Helvetia Sacra, and Germania Sacra have emerged from the initiatives of orders and states in German-​speaking areas. A corpus of data covering all of Europe would be an extremely welcome initiative; it would certainly reflect the great variety of monastic landscapes that existed during the medieval period: southern Iberia, with its lack of monasteries during the Muslim period; southern Italy, with its Greek forms of monasticism; Scandinavia, with its scarcity of surviving sources (because of the late Christianization and the destruction associated with the Reformation). The data corpus would shed light on the varying contributions of lay social groups (kings, queens, aristocrats, or knightly families) and religious communities and orders during different periods of Christianization:  black monks and then regular canons and Cistercians in central and western Europe; Cistercians, mendicants, and military orders in Prussia; and mendicants in the Cuman area of Hungary.39 Databases have multiplied in recent years, and these offer significant new resources to scholars investigating various monastic landscapes. In contrast to printed handbooks, databases can be kept up to date to reflect the current state of research. There are now regionally based online databases of male and female communities for Denmark, Wales, Baden-​Württemberg, Thuringia, Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland, and Catalonia.40 Monasteria Hungarica and



For Germany, there are regional monastic handbooks for Lower Saxony (4 vols., 2012), the northern Rhine Valley (2  vols. to date, 2009–​), Brandenburg (2007), Westfalia (3 vols., 1992–​2003), and Württemberg (2003); for Italy, see Monasticon Italiae (4 vols. to date, 1981–​). 39 On monks and missionary activity, see the articles by Rajmaakers and Jones in volume 1, and the articles by Ó Clabaigh and Jamroziak in this volume. 40 Denmark: www.jggj.dk/​KlosterGISkatalog.htm; Wales:  www.monasticwales​.org; Baden-​Württemberg: www.kloester-​bw.de;Thuringia:www2.uni-​erfurt.de/​monasticon/​ eingang.htm; Bavaria: www.datenmatrix.de/​p rojekte/​h dbg/​k loster/​i ndex.php; 38

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Monastic Routes are both only available on CD-​ROM in Hungarian, although an English version of each is being prepared; Paradisum Plantavit contains a corpus of monasteries in Hungary that followed the RB. Some of these databases are intended for public use and for tourism, and others for scholarly research. Both Monastic Matrix and FemMoData include databases of female houses across Europe.41 The project COL&MON, a collaborative effort by a number of highly ranked scientific institutions in France, is a research tool for the spatial analysis of religious institutions.42 The online portal offers access to two databases: “Collégiales,” which presents data for chapters of (exclusively male) regular and secular canons in France between 816 and 1563, and “Monastères,” which includes male and female monasteries. These databases are rather heterogeneously organized with regard to the choice of the core data, as well as to the manner in which that data is collected and structured. Some projects are limited to one period of time, others to specific orders. Others, financed by tourism schemes, incorporate a small corpus of easily accessible data. Research, however, requires a corpus of in-​depth indexed data. Assigning a unique number to each monastery would make it possible to identify communities across databases and to allow permalinks to be assigned to them. This would enable an individual record in one database to be quoted and linked to other databases and applications. Furthermore, the use of ‘Virtual International Authority Files’ (VIAF) for personal and place names would facilitate standardization within and between external databases. Core data could also be linked to editions of primary sources, photos and sketches showing architectural features, objects, and archaeological remains. Dossiers on individual monasteries could thus be generated across multiple platforms.

Maps, Charts, and Diagrams Cartography is still the most important medium for the visualization of monastic landscapes, since maps, charts, and diagrams often illustrate





Austria: kulturgueter.kath-​o rden.at/​k losterportal; Switzerland: http://​w ww​ .helvetiasacra.ch/​; Catalonia:  www.monestirs.cat (date of last access for all URLS:  2 May 2019). 41 Monastic Matrix: http://​monasticmatrix.org/​dematrice; FemMoData: http://​femmodata .uni-​goettingen.de (date of last access: 2 May 2019). On the specifications of databases, see Hedwig Röckelein, “FemMoData: A Database on Medieval Female Monasteries in Europe,” in Women in the Medieval Monastic World, ed. Janet Burton, and Karen Stöber (Turnhout, 2015), 355–​364. 42 See https://​colemon.huma-​num.fr/​projet/​analyse-​spatiale-​phenomene-​religieux (date of last access: 2 May 2019).

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monastic landscapes better and more clearly than mere historical narratives. Maps provide insight into the dense or dispersed spatial distribution of monastic presences within ecclesiastical or secular administrative regions,43 and can be used to visualize nodes of networks and the different disposition of religious houses within the provinces of religious orders. Whether maps are generated with or without GIS applications, the quality of data and the criteria for its selection are vital.44 James Bond and Mick Aston have shown the path and velocity of the expansion of Premonstratensians and Carthusians using maps created in a traditional way.45 Parker Snyder, on the other hand, demonstrated the same phenomena for male Cistercians using GIS applications.46 He took into consideration four attributes for each community: date of foundation, location, category of institution, and filiation. GIS applications make it easy to create digital maps.47 Most online monastic databases include geographic information for the monastic houses they cover. Producing a whole set of maps, or using the features offered by interactive maps, facilitates the synchronous observation of monastic houses of different orders in the same region, of their relations with ecclesiastical and secular superstructures, dioceses, provinces of orders, and territories. The diachronic development of filiations of religious orders can also be visualized in this way. One problem of such digitally created maps of historical monastic landscapes is the basic topographic layer. Information about the natural environment in the Middle Ages—​bodies of water, for example—​is not readily available. The most commonly used software for creating digital maps is Arc-​GIS. Most of the digital databases on monasteries accessible via the internet integrate digital maps based on geodata available through Google Maps or Open Street Map. These maps, however, are based on contemporary waterbodies, borders, etc. They have to be modified to display medieval diocesan borders, territories, deserted settlements, historical shorelines,



For the medieval diocese of Würzburg, see Petersen, “Die geistlichen Gemeinschaften im mittelalterlichen Bistum Würzburg,” esp. 258–​67 for maps on different orders. 44 Kathleen M. S. Allen, S. W. Green, and E. B. W. Zubrow, eds., Interpreting Space: GIS and Archaeology (London and New York, 1990). 45 James Bond, “The Premonstratensian Order: A Preliminary Survey of the Growth and Distribution in Medieval Europe,” in In Search of Cult:  Archaeological Investigations in Honour of Philip Rahtz, ed. Martin Carver (Woodbridge, NY, 1993), 153–​82; Mick Aston, “The Development of the Carthusian Order in Europe and Britain:  A Preliminary Survey,” in ibid., 139–​50. 46 Snyder, “Cistercian Network Analysis.” 47 Anne Kelly Knowles, Placing History:  How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA, 2008). 43

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and water courses. One good example is the georeferenced digital database of Scandinavian monasteries (www.jggj.dk/​KlosterGISkatalog.htm) developed by the historian and geographer Johnny G. Jakobsen at the University of Copenhagen.

Conclusion Monasticism had an enormous influence on the transformation of rural and urban landscapes in Europe during the Middle Ages. Monastic landscape studies investigate and describe this process at different levels (physical, social, and spiritual) and from different disciplinary perspectives (history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, natural sciences, and social network analysis). The focus might be on a single monastery that transformed the rural countryside or on a group of monasteries, on the bonds between and among monasteries (within or without a particular order), or on the ties between monasteries and families, secular power, or ecclesiastical patrons. The aim of monastic landscape studies is to reveal and to understand why and how different patterns of monastic structures developed in a given region or territory.

Bibliography Arnold, Ellen F. Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. Philadelphia, PA, 2013. Bond, James. Monastic Landscapes. Stroud, 2004. Czaja, Roman, Heinz-​Dieter Heimann, and Matthias Wemhoff, eds. Klosterlandschaften. Methodisch-​exemplarische Annäherungen. Paderborn and Munich, 2008. Felten, Franz J., Harald Müller, and Heidrun Ochs, eds. Landschaft(en). Begriffe –​ Formen –​ Implikationen. Stuttgart, 2012. Gardiner, Mark, and Stephen Rippon, eds. Medieval Landscapes. Oxford, 2007. Gilchrist, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London and New York, 1997. Golding, Brian. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300. Oxford, 1995. Hall, Derek. Scottish Monastic Landscapes. Stroud, 2006. Hoskins, William George. The Making of the English Landscape. London, 1955. Knowles, Anne Kelly. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA, 2008. Laszlovszky, József, and Hedwig Röckelein. “Medieval Monastic Regions in Central Europe:  The Spiritual and Physical Landscape Setting of Monastic Orders and Religious Houses.” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 17 (2011): 296–​308. Malpas, Jeff, ed. The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies. Cambridge, MA, 2011. Melville, Gert. “Klosterlandschaft.” In Felten et al., 195–​222.

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Hedwig Rö ckelein Röckelein, Hedwig. “Bairische, sächsische und mainfränkische Klostergründungen im Vergleich (8. Jahrhundert bis 1100).” In Nonnen, Kanonissen und Mystikerinnen. Religiöse Frauengemeinschaften in Süddeutschland. Beiträge zur interdisziplinären Tagung vom 21. bis 23. September 2005 in Frauenchiemsee, edited by Eva Schlotheuber, Helmut Flachenecker, and Ingrid Gardill, 23–​55. Göttingen, 2008.   “FemMoData:  A Database on Medieval Female Monasteries in Europe.” In Women in the Medieval Monastic World, edited by Janet Burton, and Karen Stöber, 355–364. Turnhout, 2015.   “Frauen im Umkreis der benediktinischen Reformen des 10. bis 12. Jahrhunderts: Gorze, Cluny, Hirsau, St. Blasien und Siegburg.” In Female ‘vita religiosa’ between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, edited by Gert Melville and Anne Müller, 275–327. Berlin, 2011.   Schriftlandschaften, Bildungslandschaften und religiöse Landschaften des Mittelalters in Norddeutschland. Wolfenbütteler Hefte 33. Wiesbaden, 2015.

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Later Monastic Economies Con sta n ce A .   B e rm an

This chapter examines the resources used by communities of monks and nuns in the medieval West to support their lives of prayer, contemplation and charity in the years between 1100 and 1400 c e. In an earlier chapter Jean-​Pierre Devroey laid out the fundamentals of Carolingian monastic economies by drawing on monastic rules, customaries, and treatises, as well as on capitularies and polyptychs; much of this organization of monastic economies remained in the later Middle Ages.1 In both eras few monastic communities were entirely self-​sufficient; most had recourse to markets.2 The evidence for later monastic economies in the West differs from that from the Byzantine realm in that there is little available hagiography that touches on economic matters. There were, however, a number of Western acquisition patterns, by purchase and exchange as well as gifts, that were similar to those described by Kaplan for Mount Athos.3 While acknowledging the continued importance of great pilgrimage churches like Cluny or those of nuns like Saintes and Le Ronceray that provided a full panoply of services (such as schools, burials, prayers for souls, care for travelers and the sick, ransoming prisoners), the emphasis in this article is on new foundations of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries that derived from contemporary notions of reform.4 Many were relatively small

See the article by Devroey in volume 1. For a contrary argument, on the autarky of late medieval English monastic estates, see Philip Slavin, Bread and Ale for the Brethren (Hatfield, 2012). 3 See the article by Kaplan in volume 1. 4 On Cluny, see the articles by Bruce, Rosé, and Cochelin in volume 1, and Barbara H. Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property: 909–​ 1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). On eleventh-​century female monasticism, see Mary Skinner, “Benedictine Life for Women in Central France:  A Feminist Revival,” in Distant Echoes: Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1, ed. John A Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984), 87–​113; see also Thomas Grasilier, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye royal de Notre-​Dame de Saintes de l’ordre de Saint-​Benoît (Niort, 1871), and Paul Marchegay, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye du Ronceray d’Angers (1028–​1184) (Paris, 1900). On the concept of monastic reform, see the article by Vanderputten in volume 1. 1

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in their beginnings. Unlike earlier monastic communities that had often been granted entire villas at their foundation, they tended to acquire new properties by the purchase and consolidation of landholdings. Even if the sites sought for the new foundations were often in some isolation from towns, these institutions produced abundant documents of practice, such as charters of real-​estate conveyance, that reveal links to markets and towns in which the produce of monastic fields, flocks, and vineyards could be sold. Those documents also reveal a much higher proportion of female communities than had been the case for the early medieval centuries.5 This reflects a demographic situation in which not all women were sought after as child-​ bearers. Instead, many were led to enter religious life at some point in their lives. Contrary to the misogynous clichés about such nuns and sisters, the documents show that many abbesses and prioresses of this era were excellent administrators of property, as well as leaders of their communities. They were not hampered in this by the increasing insistence on nuns’ enclosure.6 Most often abbesses of the later Middle Ages had to amass granges and other holdings by a slow process of land accumulation and consolidation. The acquisitions in limited purchases for the foundation of the abbey of nuns at Rifreddo in the Italian Piedmont were exceptional.7 So were the handful of conveyances for the foundation of the abbey of Cistercian nuns at Herce in the Spanish Riojas, which began with “an inherited estate or héritage” given in 1246 by the founders, Alfons López de Haro (d. 1264) and Maria Álvarez de Cameros (d. 1251). They gave another three such villas or villages between 1247 and 1250, with a fourth villa conveyed by Alfons’s second wife in 1261. The donors also provided the first abbess of Herce with sufficient cash to pay 1,190 maravedis to remove the three powerful groups of owners from the abbey site, including a community of Cistercian monks.8



Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 6 On enclosure, see Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545 (Washington, DC, 1997). On abbesses, see Bruce L. Venarde, “Praesidentes Negotiis: Abbesses as Managers in Twelfth-​Century France,” in Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy, ed. Samuel K. Cohn Jr. and Steven A. Epstein (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996); Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-​Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New  York, 2000), 1–​17; and Constance Hoffman Berman, The White Nuns:  Cistercian Abbeys for Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 2018). 7 Catherine E. Boyd, A Cistercian Nunnery in Medieval Italy: The Story of Rifreddo in Saluzzo, 1220–​1300 (Cambridge, MA, 1943). 8 Ghislain Baury, Les religieuses de Castille. Patronage aristocratique et ordre cistercien XIIe–​ XIIIe siècles (Rennes, 2012), 142, 157, and 159. 5

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The more typical pattern was the slow process of property acquisition of already cultivated lands for new foundations of monks or nuns. The French queen mother Blanche of Castile (d. 1252) was still resolving claims amounting to more than 60 livres over the rest of the 1240s for her new foundation for Cistercian nuns at Maubuisson made in 1242. Thus: John of Maubuisson received sixteen livres for an arpent of meadow located just behind the abbey wall; he may also have received two livres for a house located next to the abbey’s well; Dreux of Maubuisson and Aiceline his wife received twenty livres for their claims to a nearby quarry. The knight Lord Thibaut and his wife Martaria were paid for a bridge located next to the abbey; two women from Aulnay were paid two and a half livres for land next to the abbey’s garden and a right of way; Richard Borin was paid nearly thirteen livres for his holdings there. Roger Redbeard and his wife received three and a half livres for land located next to the abbey wall, which they held from the church of Saint-​Lazare, while Gerald of Saint-​Ouen received eight livres for a single arpent of land, but located actually inside the nuns’ enclosure, which he held from the prior of Saint-​Peter of Pontoise.9

These are the accounts presented by the Templar manager of construction to Queen Blanche for her review three times a year. Such a careful acquisition process was necessary even when the founder was the queen of France. Perhaps the most successful of the new monastic economies were those of the Cistercian monks and nuns. Recent study suggests that Cistercian rural accomplishments were not because monks and lay brothers were frontiersmen or pioneers making new foundations in untouched forests in the company of wild beasts, as early myths about the order claim; those stories are part and parcel of the hagiographical models for many monastic foundations.10 To some extent the Cistercian management was successful because the order’s expansion coincided with considerable economic growth in western Europe. Surviving documents also show that the managerial miracle of Cistercian settlement and land acquisition began with a careful acquisition policy, with the purchase and reassembling of long-​cultivated, often fragmented land.

Pontoise, Archives Départementales du Val d’Oise, 72H12, “Achatz d’héritages de Maubuisson,” (henceforth “Maubuisson”), fols. 38v–​39r (1241–​6). 10 Constance Hoffman Berman, Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-​Three Monasteries (Philadelphia, PA, 1986), 22 and 74; Ellen Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia, PA, 2013); Robert Fossier, “L’économie cistercienne dans les plaines du nord-​ouest de l’Europe,” in L’économie cistercienne. Géographie. Mutations (Auch, 1983), 53–​74. 9

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The model was an effective one from the outset. Cistercians gathered together long-​cultivated lands and long-​fragmented rights attached to these lands, and began to introduce the practice of direct management using monks and nuns, lay brothers and lay sisters (rather than leasing lands to dependent peasants). Indeed, the Cistercians (and other new monastic founders) differed from traditional monasticism regarding recruitment, by accepting newcomers across a wider range of noble, barely noble, and bourgeois classes, but also incorporating peasant lay brothers and sisters.11 Their efficiency was enhanced by an austere lifestyle, new liturgical practices that allowed time for labor in the fields, the lower “labor-​dependency” costs of using lay brothers in the fields, and exemptions from tithes, tolls, and market dues. An example of the last is revealed by the charters of exemption from passage tolls allowing the Cistercian monks of Grandselve to transport goods down the Garonne from the vicinity of Toulouse to Bordeaux.12 Improved yields in cereal and other production derived from consolidation as well as investment in such amenities as iron tools, better draft animals, and so forth, as well as major infrastructure including mills, barns, and fortifications in some cases. The introduction of lay brothers and sisters was often by their recruitment along with land acquisition in the same villages in which those peasant laborers had been born. This process might have significantly eased the rapid insertion of a new monastic community into a given region thanks to the lay brothers and sisters’ local contacts and knowledge. But because lay brothers and lay sisters did not reproduce, once land acquisition ceased, by the mid-​thirteenth century, Cistercians began to be plagued with problems in recruiting lay brothers, not only because they were no longer acquiring land, but for other reasons discussed in the article by Cassidy-​Welsh in this volume.13 For a long time, scholars associated Cistercian foundations with sites “far from cities, castles, and human habitation.” Such solitudes derived from the tendency for new monastic groups to acquire land on the margins of settlements, as seen in Clairvaux’s grange of Beaumont, located on the



On the latter, see below at notes 12 and 15. See Paris, BnF, Latin 11010. See also Daniel Le Blévec and Alain Venturin, eds., Cartulaire du Prieuré de Saint-​Gilles de l’Hôpital de Saint-​Jean de Jérusalem (1129–​1210) (Paris, 1997), nos. 260 (1114–​50) and 186 (1182); and Paul-​A. Amargier, ed., Cartulaire de Trinquetaille (Aix-​ en-​Provence, 1972), no. 206 (1150), for exemption from tolls in the Rhone valley from Raymond, count of Barcelona. 13 Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 74; and Constance Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Peasant, Lay Brother and Sister and the Converted Knight in Medieval Southern France,” in Religious and Laity in Northern Europe, ed. Janet Burton and Emilia Jamroziak (Turnhout, 2006), 263–​83. 11

12

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Champagne and Burgundy frontier.14 Such sites on the fringes of parishes had often only recently been brought into cultivation by earlier peasants. They became available to new monastic groups like the Cistercians as a consequence of a process of village centralization, which moved peasants from isolated farmsteads and hamlets into nucleated villages that offered the protection of churches and fortifications, and amenities such as communal ovens, watermills, fish ponds and wine presses.15 Monks and nuns often acquired such properties by purchases from peasants who found the lands that were most distant from village centers the most expensive to cultivate. In this process of consolidating long-​fragmented holdings into larger holdings, monks and nuns employed considerable cash, probably spurring on a lively land market that may have been to the benefit of lords and peasants as well. In order to cultivate the lands that they were purchasing, the Cistercians often used the so-​called grange system, attempting to consolidate holdings that had been under previous ownership into large uninterrupted expanses. These were often satellite farms at some distance from the abbey that would eventually be cultivated wholly by lay brothers. But in several respects the introduction of such granges to be worked by lay brothers and monks was neither as universal nor unique to the Cistercians as once thought. In some cases, among Cistercian abbeys in Wales for instance, such reorganization did not occur, and considerable vestiges of earlier cultivation schemes survived.16 Moreover, the direct management of grange agriculture associated with the Cistercians was being adopted by many other monastic groups,





Christophe Wissenberg, Entre Champagne et Bourgogne. Beaumont, ancienne grange de l’abbaye cistercienne de Clairvaux (Paris, 2007). See also Constance Hoffman Berman, The Cistercian Evolution:  The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​Century Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2010), 56–​68. 15 On this process of nucleation, of “incastellamento,” for Italy, see Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval. Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle, 2  vols. (Rome and Paris, 1973); For France, see Monique Bourin, Villages médiévaux en Bas-​Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1987); Laure Verdon, La terre et les hommes en Roussillon aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Structures seigneuriales, rente et société d’après les sources templières (Aix-​en-​Provence, 2001), and Robert Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIIIeme siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1968). See the recent review article by Michel Lauwers, “De l’incastellamento à l’inecclesiamento: monachisme et logiques spatiales du féodalisme,” in Cluny, les moines et la société au premier âge féodal, ed. Dominique Iogna-​Prat et al. (Rennes, 2013), 315–​38. For southern France, see the article by Charles Higounet, “Cisterciens et Bastides,” in Paysages et villages neufs du Moyen Âge. Recueil d’articles (Bordeaux, 1975), 265–​74; but see also Constance H. Berman, “From Cistercian Granges to Cistercian Bastides:  Using the Order’s Records to Date Landscape Transformations,” in Espace Cistercien, ed. Léon Pressouyre (Paris, 1994), 204–​15. 16 See Jemma Bezant, “Revising the Monastic Grange:  Problems on the Edge of the Cistercian World,” Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 3 (2014): 51–​70. For Ireland, see the article by Ó Clabaigh in this volume. 14

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including traditional monasteries that also started to admit lay brothers relatively quickly, but in some cases used hired labor too. In almost no monastic economy, however, whether Cistercian or non-​Cistercian, community of monks or of nuns, was direct management ever wholly achieved. All ecclesiastical institutions made efforts to regain control of assets that had fallen into the hands of the laity, and often to impose additional accountability on their agents.17 Resistance to such reform came from families of hereditary managers, as is seen when the thirteenth-​century Benedictine abbot of Saint-​Père-​de-​Chartres found himself forestalled in his attempts to convey properties for a foundation of Cistercian nuns at Eau-​les-​Chartres by his provosts’ claims to have inherited those land rights.18 In the diocese of Lüneburg, Cistercian nuns at Medingen and Wienhausen dismissed their provosts and sometimes instituted joint holdings of personal property because they feared their continued depredations of would lead to the nuns’ starvation.19 Eleventh-​century reformers had vociferously attempted to regain tithes that had fallen into lay hands, and there was considerable preaching about returning tithes to the Church. But, although in theory tithes should have been returned to bishops, most were granted or sold to monastic communities, old and new.20 Such conveyances of tithes to new monastic groups that had initially eschewed their ownership, however, must be carefully parsed. The Cistercian monks and nuns, for example, who refused to live from the revenues of tithes, often had to acquire existing tithes from earlier owners in order to put into practice their exemption from tithes, as discussed below.

Acquisition of  Assets Whether in the early or later Middle Ages the first priority for abbots and abbesses, priors and prioresses, was providing food, shelter, and clothing for their communities. Some, maybe even more among the nuns than the monks, may also have stinted on their comforts in order to fulfill a fourth

Robert Berkhofer, Day of Reckoning:  Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 2004). 18 M. Guérard, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-​Père de Chartres (Paris, 1840), no. 104 (1229); see also Charles Métais, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Notre-​Dame-​de-​l’Eau (Chartres, 1908), no. 16 (1229). 19 See June L. Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions: Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa Bitel (Turnhout, 2014), 100 and passim. 20 Giles Constable, Monastic Tithes from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1964). 17

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obligation: care for the poor.21 The greatest source of calories in medieval diet was bread. Thus, day in and day out, whatever the feast or fast day, whatever the liturgical season, bread had to appear on the monastic tables, and provision of bread in sufficient quantities would be a major focus of monastic founders, patrons, and administrators. Monastic economies varied from place to place because of soil and climate that affected which cereals were produced for bread (rye as opposed to wheat, for example in certain soils; barley in very wet areas), and how much time monks or nuns themselves devoted to working those granges.22 Not all granges, however, produced grain: some of the ones created by the nuns of Coldstream in Scotland, for instance, were almost entirely devoted to pastoralism, and were probably worked entirely by hired or lay brother shepherds.23 While most granges had some land reserved for cereal cultivation, deliveries of cereals were also granted to monastic communities from patrons’ granges and mills and from the ownership of tithes, tolls, market taxes, and even hearth taxes. Around 1240 Blanche of Castile purchased the tithes at Archemont, Magnitot, and Hérouville for her Cistercian nuns at Maubuisson, eventually paying nearly 1,000 livres in cash to earlier lay owners, so that in the end about 22.5 muids (roughly a cartload each) of grain would be delivered to Maubuisson annually.24 Tithe exemptions were an important factor regarding cereal production. To the extent that twelfth-​century monastic communities organized their own cultivation of cereal, there were generous exemptions by popes and bishops from tithes over lands brought under their own management. Even when monastic communities were exempted from payment of tithes on their own cultivation, the necessity of the repurchase of such tithes from earlier owners arose.25 Cistercians at Obazine acquired tithes by gifts in 1162 in the parish of





On nuns adhering to different standards, see Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich 1350–​1450 (Woodbridge, 1998); and Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London, 1994), esp. 23–​5. 22 For a discussion of these site changes, see R. A. Donkin, The Cistercians: Studies in the Geography of Medieval England and Wales (Toronto, 1978). 23 See Charles Roger, ed., Chartulary of the Cistercian Priory of Coldstream with Relative Documents (London, 1879). 24 Adolph Dutilleux and J. Dépoin, eds., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Maubuisson (Notre-​Dame-​ la-​Royale) (Pontoise, 1882) (also published as L’abbaye de Maubuisson, histoire et cartulaire, publiés d’après les documents), nos. 465–​70 (1239), and 487–​90 (1247); “Maubuisson,” fol. 39v (1246), and fol. 41v. Armelle Bonis, Abbaye cistercienne de Maubuisson. La formation du temporel (1236 à 1356) (Saint-​Ouen-​l’Aumône,  1990.) 25 Constance H. Berman, “Cistercian Development and the Order’s Acquisition of Churches and Tithes in Southern France,” Revue bénédictine 91 (1981): 193–​203. On post-​ 1215 exemption, see James S. Donnelly, The Decline of the Medieval Cistercian Brotherhood (New York, 1949); the last third of this volume considers the tithe privilege. 21

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La Graulière, when Peter the Judge, a noble from Corrèze (fl. c. 1162), granted rights to various properties, including tithes “over whatever was worked by Obazine in that parish, that is, over all the production of its laborers.”26 In the early thirteenth century, Bishop Manasses II of Orleans (d. 1221) preached the return of tithes to the Church, but encouraged the transfer of those tithes to his “dear daughters” the Cistercian nuns of Voisins. Whereas those nuns may have at first used those tithes (most often paid in kind) to provide their own food and drink, they appear to have soon acquired the identical lands from which those tithes were collected, transforming those acquisitions into tithe-​ free granges.27 The desire of Cistercian nuns, including others such as those at Pont-​aux-​Dames and Port Royal, and like the monks of the order, to assure tithe-​free cultivation by repurchases of tithes is mirrored for non-​Cistercians (like those of the Paraclete or Fontevraud).28 Annual rents of a certain number of muids of grain from mills could also be an important source of grain for monastic bread. Thus, the nuns of Port Royal had deliveries of nearly 15 muids of wheat or other grain paid at the feast of Saint-​Rémy or All Saints’ Day each year from a number of places near the abbey, including the mills of Corcelles and Mareuil, the tithes of Joiac and Coupières, and various granges belonging to local donors.29 Mills were important monastic assets, although early references to monastic grinding mills cited by authors such as Gimpel were not always water-​powered; many were probably animal-​or human-​operated and cannot be considered clearly to be water-​powered except in cases in which they are mentioned in the context of water rights.30 The water-​powered mills became widespread only after about 1100 and many of them came into monastic hands after they had been in use for some time; indeed, repairs and litigation about water rights may have been too expensive for non-​monastic owners. When Cistercians arrived in southern France around 1135, they rarely established water mills at wholly



Bernadette Barrière, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye cistercienne d’Obazine (XIIe–​XIIIe siècle) (Clermont-​Ferrand, 1989), nos. 170 (1162), 267 (1162), 269 (1162?), 196 (1164), and 337 (1170). 27 Jules Doinel, ed., Cartulaire de Notre-​Dame de Voisins de l’Ordre de Cîteaux (1207–​1343) (Orleans, 1887). 28 See the many such conveyances in Charles Lalore, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye du Paraclet, in Collection des principaux cartulaires du diocèse de Troyes, vol. 2 (Paris, 1875–​90); Jean-​ Marc Bienvenu, Robert Favreau, and Georges Pon, eds., Grand Cartulaire de Fontevraud, 2  vols. (Poitiers, 2000–​5); Adolphe de Dion, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Porrois, au diocèse de Paris, plus connue sous son nom mystique Port-​Royal (Paris, 1903); A. Berthaut, L’abbaye du Pont-​aux-​Dames, assise en la paroisse de Couilly (1226–​1790) (Meaux, 1887), nos. 42–​4 (1231) and 48–​50 (1232), etc.; see also Berman, Medieval Agriculture. 29 De Dion, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Porrois, censier, 15–​24. 30 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine:  The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York, 1976). 26

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new sites, but acquired existing water mills, often improving and expanding their capacity beyond solely grinding flour.31 Windmills were introduced only after all the possible water-​power sources had been exhausted.32 In southern France, where considerable water power was available, for instance, the earliest windmill documented for the Carcassonne Pass was one granted to the Dominican nuns of Prouille c. 1210 by an Albigensian crusader.33 Elsewhere there were tidal-​powered mills, perhaps earliest in Ireland, which could be operated twice a day, backing up water into a millpond at high tide and then opening up the mill pond when the tide was low, allowing the wheels to operate the grinding stones.34 Water-​powered mills are often documented in detail because the expansion of their capacity (by raising the level of mill dams and causing either flooding of lands upstream or downstream mills to be deprived of power) led to disputes, such as the case of the widow Matrona Machelina, who complained about land flooded by a mill constructed by the monks of La Sauve Majeure.35 Elsewhere meadows were created thanks to mills: at Silvanès, an irrigated meadow was associated with a complex with two mills under one roof, one designated for grinding and the other for fulling (or pounding) cloth.36 At Les Ruisseaux near Nogent, west of Paris, the Cistercian nuns of Les Clairets had mills adjoining meadows belonging to neighboring Tironesian monks. These meadows were periodically flooded by an agreement allowing those monks to open culverts under the banks of the mill race once a week.37 Such meadows that could be flooded to provide additional crops of hay, whether associated with a mill race that could be diverted or simply because they were close to rivers that flooded in the spring, were also often associated with fisheries. Such coincidence is seen among the acquisitions by the nuns of Saint-​Antoine just outside Paris, who made cash purchases of a fishing weir on the River Marne and almost 10 arpents of meadowland there, adjoining

Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 82; Berman, Cistercian Evolution, 189–​220. John Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–​1540 (Oxford, 2004). J. Guiraud, ed., Cartulaire de Notre-​Dame de Prouille (Paris, 1907). 34 T. McErlean and N. Crothers, “The Early Medieval Tide Mills at Nendrum: An Interim Statement,” in Strangford Lough:  An Archaeological Survey of the Maritime Cultural Landscape, ed. T. McErlean et al. (Belfast, 2002). 35 Charles Higounet and Arlette Higounet-​Nadal, with Nicole de Peña, eds., Grand Cartulaire de la Sauve Majeure (Bordeaux, 1996), nos. 296 (1126–​47), 368, 688, and 298 (n.d.). 36 P.-​A. Verlaguet, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Silvanès (Rodez, 1910), nos. 210 (1159) and 145 (1164). 37 Vicomte de Souancé, ed., Abbaye Royale de Notre-​Dame des Clairets. Histoire et cartulaire (Nogent-​le-​Rotrou, 1894), no. 52 (1248). 31

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those of the king.38 Such association between mills, meadows, and fishing rights or fish ponds behind mills was common, as was also seen in areas of constantly shifting river beds in delta areas, like that of the Camargue south of Arles, for instance, where in 1202 a meadow at Bagnolet was granted to the Hospitallers of St. Thomas of la Trinquetaille, along with fisheries “in the territory called Torremier from the Rhône River up to the Garrigues, whether in land, water, meadows, woods, fisheries, hunting rights.”39 Mills were also used by the monastic communities for their own benefit. Grinding flour using hand mills was arduous work and took hours for women, children, and the elderly, who could otherwise have undertaken more productive activities—​ whether assisting in the harvest before bad weather or spinning wool or flax into yarn. Those who operated hand mills still had to be fed, and even using animal mills meant feeding those animals. In contrast, water-​and wind-​powered mills limited the burden for monastic servants of grinding flour for bread production. It probably also provided monastic economies with small amounts of income, in cash or kind, from non-​monastic  users. The issue of these payments has been a vexed one. Once many adhered to the contentions of the French historian Marc Bloch, who argued in 1935 that the medieval water-​powered mill was a tool used to impose a repressive seigneurialism.40 Increasingly, however, historians have seen the payment made for the use of a mill, called multura, as a small price to pay for the relief of a considerable burden. In fact, water-​powered mills may have been an amenity used to attract tenants to new villages.41 Evidence for the estates purchased by Louis IX (r.  1226–​70) for his foundation of Royaumont (for Cistercian monks), north of Paris, does not suggest that constraint was needed for tenants to use water-​powered mills.42 For Spain, Ghislain Baury shows that, by 1232, the nuns of Cañas possessed fifteen water-​powered mills, used not solely for their internal use, but as revenue



Paris, Archives nationales, S*4386, “Cartulaire de Saint-​Antoine,” fols. 18v–​21v. Amargier, Cartulaire de Trinquetaille, nos. 183 (1202) and 145 (1193); Damien Carraz, L’Ordre du Temple dans la basse Vallée du Rhône (1124–​1312). Ordres militaires, croisades et société méridionales (Lyon, 2005), 108–​21. 40 Marc Bloch, “The Advent and Triumph of the Water-​Mill,” in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York, 1969), originally published in French as “Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau,” Annales 7 (1935): 531–​5. 41 Constance H. Berman, “Women’s Work in Family, Village and Town after ad 1000: Contributions to Economic Growth?” Journal of Women’s History 19 (2007): 10–​32. 42 Paris, BnF, Latin 9166–​9, “Cartulaire de Royaumont,” fols. 7–​10 (August 1228) and fols. 1137–​42 (September 1229). 38

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sources; the nuns collected multura from tenants, but there was no indication that constraint was necessary.43

Pastoralism Despite the fact that monks and nuns did not typically consume meat, increased demand for meat, dairy products, and wool in growing urban markets caused an enormous expansion of monastic pastoralism and animal husbandry in the high and late Middle Ages. For Cistercians, animal production reaped enormous benefits, both because of expanding secular demand in nearby cities and because of the generosity of donors in granting unimpeded access to pasture rights in woodlands and wastelands to as many animals as the new monks and nuns owned. Such grants are seen, for instance, in the documents for the nuns of Coldstream in Scotland.44 Sometimes, too, pastoralism may have been the only viable option for the particularly rough terrains conveyed to Cistercian monks, such as the grange at Canvern in the Cevennes given to the Cistercians of Valmagne.45 Many earlier, unaffiliated reformers supporting themselves by pastoralism (because it was less labor-​intensive than cereal cultivation) may have sought a Cistercian affiliation because the order’s monks had been early to write down regulations concerning their shepherds and lay brothers moving from place to place.46 While in some regions monastic pastoralism came to be associated primarily with meat, milk, and cheese production, in Britain it was wool that was paramount. The great Cistercian abbeys of Fountains and Rievaulx came to have their wool production tied to forward contracts for fleeces with Italian merchants. At the other end of the scale, if scabies or murrain erupted among the monastic flocks, abbeys could soon fall into bankruptcy.47 Expansion in pastoralism in the high Middle Ages was characterized by two things: the creation of additional pasture in coastal marshlands and an improved short-​distance transhumance (the seasonal movement of grazing animals to maximize access to pasturelands). The former process had not been started by monastic communities: rather, they undertook the secondary

Baury, Les religieuses de Castille. Rogers, Chartulary of the Cistercian Priory of Coldstream. 45 See Berman, Cistercian Evolution, 211–​15; Thérèse Sclafert, Cultures en Haute Provence (Paris, 1959). 46 Regarding the earliest fragment of a Cistercian lay brother treatise on pastoralists, see Berman, Cistercian Evolution. 47 Donkin, Cistercians; but see also Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks, and Paul Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, 1230–​1327 (Cambridge, 2007). 43

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task of building dikes after pastureland created by anonymous peasants had drained land which gradually sank below sea level. Thus drainage of peat marshes along the North Sea, once seen as the activity of pioneering monks, is now understood to have been the work of independent farmers and the occasional hermit establishing farmsteads by surrounding their holdings with drainage ditches. Such waterlogged land, once drained, gradually became compacted and subsided below the level of storms at sea, requiring protection through expensive diking systems. It was only in these secondary efforts that monastic economies were involved. Flanders’ thirteenth-​century countesses were among the rulers who granted Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns extensive rights along the coast so that these monastic communities could undertake the expensive construction of dikes in those areas, which then allowed them to introduce monastic animal husbandry along the coast.48 The same could be said for monastic communities in the English Fens.49 Monks of Saint-​ Victor of Marseille, Saint-​ Gilles, Psalmody, and Montmajour, and nuns of Saint-​Césaire of Arles may have been among the earliest medieval beneficiaries of the ongoing reclamation of land along the various channels of the Rhone in the Camargue and nearby areas in that river’s delta. Most of the actual labor, however, had been undertaken by nearly anonymous peasants.50 This marshland environment is one of rough pine woods, marshes, great salt ponds (such as the Étang de Vaccarès and the Étang de Berre), drainage ditches, levees, saltworks, reclaimed and newly planted fields, vineyards, and meadows; there were also fishing rights in the fresh or salt ponds and the various river branches.51 The amelioration of such lands whether by natural forces or human effort is implied in many charters.52 Nonetheless, it is a region in which major monastic landholdings would come to be acquired. For example, the abbey of Montmajour was founded on an island near Arles that was surrounded by marshes that its tenants only later drained. The region became important for winter pasturing of sheep, cows, and possibly horses. From these gradually drained marshes at sea level, earlier abbeys, then Cistercian ones, and finally Hospitallers and Templars moved



See William H. TeBrake, Medieval Frontier:  Culture and Ecology in Rijnland (College Station, TX, 1985); for Flanders, see Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York, 2006), 65–​7, and 73–​81. 49 Thanks to Brian Golding for this information, private discussion, summer 2013. 50 Le Blévec and Venturain, Cartulaire de Saint-​Gilles, nos. 1–​40. 51 Ibid., no. 18, with a mention of a savena, or sagena, described by the editors as a “fish engine” and also described by Richard Hoffmann, “Medieval Fishing,” in Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource Use, ed. Paolo Squatriti (Leiden, 2000), 359–​63. 52 See, for instance, Le Blévec and Venturain, Cartulaire de Saint-​Gilles, no. 39 (1179). 48

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their animals in late May or early June up into summer pasture in the Alps, Pyrenees, and Massif Central, at locations such as La Couvertoirade or Le Caylar on the Causse de Larzac.53 Transhumance is often documented by agreements about access to pasture rights among monastic communities who were anxious to establish clear rights to move animals up into the high Pyrenean or Alpine summer pastures, and who needed set numbers of days coming and going to those mountain pastures during which the animals could rest and be fed and watered.54 Whereas in the twelfth-​century small groups of monastic communities that eventually came to be Cistercian could practice such transhumance with limited laborers, by the thirteenth century it was cash-​rich commanderies of the military religious orders that were moving sheep, goats, and cattle up into the highlands.55 Indeed, in the Rhone delta, the monastic economies of those Templar and Hospitaller commanderies of Saint-​Gilles captured considerable amounts of the cash flowing down the Rhone valley, along with crusaders of all types, for those military-​religious were becoming the major “outfitters” providing supplies, transport, and housing for northerners awaiting fair winds for embarking on crusades. Much of this provisioning, including everything from horses to salted eels, was associated with the massive landholdings of those new groups.56 In the Camargue, the production of salt for preserving food was associated with the provision of crusader supplies. Great salt-​works there were exploited by the monks of Psalmody near what would become the new city of Aigues-​Mortes in the mid-​thirteenth century, and by Hospitaller and Templar foundations too. The charters describe how boundaries of salt and fresh water, fisheries and salt marsh were shifting: one evokes the island that was “created” (nata est) in the area in front of Mas Thibert; another promises that, if floods from sea or river engulf a particular spit of land, donors will provide “other land” elsewhere to replace it.57 Salt was also produced on the





Berman, Medieval Agriculture, 94–​117, on pastoralism. See also Verdon, La terre et les hommes; Sylvie Caucanas, Moulins et irrigation en Roussillon du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1995); and Aline Durand, Les paysages médiévaux du Languedoc (XIe–​XIIe siècles) (Toulouse, 1998). 54 Berman, Medieval Agriculture. 55 Durand, Les paysages médiévaux. 56 C. Couderc and J.-​L. Rigal, eds., Cartulaire et documents de l’abbaye de Nonenque (Rodez, 1955), nos. 8 and 9 (1167/​8), 17 (1170), and 18 (1171); Giselle Bourgeois, “Les granges et l’économie de l’abbaye de Nonenque au Moyen Age,” Cîteaux 24 (1973): 139–​60; and Berman, Cistercian Evolution, 119. Le Blévec and Venturain, Cartulaire de Saint-​Gilles, no.  318 (1187) and no.  344 (1190). See Judith Bronstein, The Hospitallers and the Holy Land: Financing the Latin East, 1187–​1274 (Woodbridge, 2005). 57 Amargier, Cartulaire de Trinquetaille, nos. 259 (1146) and 161 (1194). 53

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Île d’Oléron on the Atlantic coast by the Cistercians of Obazine; and shares in inland salt-​works were acquired by the Lüneburg Heath female communities of Benedictines and Cistercians near the Baltic coast in northern Germany.58

Forest Rights In contrast to their much larger endeavors in putting into place transhumant production of cattle and sheep, Cistercians and other monks and nuns did little, except in the coastal instances mentioned above, to add to the overall amounts of land under cultivation in the later Middle Ages.59 Thirteenth-​ century Cistercian nuns at Lieu-​Notre-​Dame-​de-​Romorantin, south of Blois, appear to have directed the creation of new lands from which they received “terrages” (rents paid on land being brought under cultivation by peasants), but that is unusual.60 More often, when monks and nuns obtained rights in forested areas, it was for usage of the timber and for woodland management, often with specific provisions about not reducing forested land to arable. The Cistercian monks and lay brothers seen in the striking early Cistercian manuscript paintings cutting branches and splitting logs were not engaged in clearance and reclamation of new lands; instead, they were occupied with coppicing and pollarding, activities linked to regular forest management.61 Monastic rights over forested land were often limited and very specific. They included rights for monastic communities to gather firewood—​like those given to the Fontevrist nuns at the priory of Longpré or to the Cistercian nuns of Le Parc, both foundations by the great heiress Eleanor of Vermandois (d. 1213).62 Just before his departure on crusade in 1248, Louis IX gave the nuns of Le Lys 200 arpents in the forest of Bièvre. Half were described as including rights to collect wood for heating, for construction and repairs at the abbey, its mills, or its dependent farms, and for feeding up to three hundred pigs at the proper season.63 These rights often specifically precluded any uprooting



Ibid., nos. 18 (1143), 77 (1199–​1200), etc. See also Carraz, L’Ordre du Temple; Barrière, Cartulaire d’Obazine, 25; Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions,  89–​94. Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape. 60 See Ernest Prat, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye royale du Lieu-​Notre-​Dame-​lèz-​Romorantin (Romorantin, 1892). 61 Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Use in England, new ed. (Dalbeattie, 2003); on these manuscripts, see discussion in Conrad Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 62 On Eleanor of Vermandois, Longpré, and le Parc, see Constance H. Berman, “Two Medieval Women’s Control of Property and Religious Benefactions:  Eleanor of Vermandois and Blanche of Castile,” Viator 41 (2010):  151–​82; and Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society. 63 Paris, BnF, Latin 13892, “Cartulaire du Lys,” no. 10 (1252). 58 59

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or clearance of large trees, while they might allow coppicing on a regularly established schedule. Lord Hugh of Châtillon (d. 1248), for instance, forbade the regular canons of Premonstratensian Hermières from clearing land in the “Bois du Jariel” east of Paris, and reserved to himself the fruits, pears, apples, acorns, nuts, and medlars from that area; later, Saint-​Antoine acquired rights there for 200 livres.64

Viticulture The need for wine for the mass inspired gifts of vineyards to monastic communities. While wine production was labor-​ intensive, many Cistercian monks and nuns instituted wine production by the planting of new vines and supplying an expanding wine market. This was done through contracts in medium vestum (in which lords, including monastic ones, would have a half-​share in the ownership of vineyards planted by tenants after a period of years).65 This may well be what was behind the give and take between the great abbey of Cluny and its tenants at Bézornay, or in the acquisitions of newly planted vineyards for the Cistercian nuns at Le Lys, whose first abbess, Alix of Mâcon (r. 1248–​59), paid nearly 1,400 livres tournois for rights to cellars in Sens and for vineyards located at nearby Mâlay-​le-​Roi, beginning in 1252.66 Many new houses of Cistercian nuns like Le Lys acquired extensive vineyards in areas of Champagne and Burgundy, and closer to Paris,67 and the fact that these viticultural properties became valued assets after the Hundred Years’ War may be one reason why a number of such houses of nuns were suppressed by neighboring monks.68

Urban Properties Finally, monastic communities of both monks and nuns often held extensive urban properties; it may indeed be that there was a tendency for donors to

See Paris, A.N., S*4386, “Cartulaire de Saint-​ Antoine,” fols. 11r–​ 16r (1243–​ 1278). Regarding coppicing, see inserts in “Maubuisson,” fols. 20r–​21r. 65 See David N. Bell, “Vins et vignobles cisterciens de l’Yonne,” in Les Cisterciens dans l’Yonne, ed. Terryl N. Kinder (Pontigny, 1999), 73–​82. 66 See Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter, 88–​102. 67 See J. L’Huillier, “Inventaire des titres concernant la seigneurie que les religieuses de l’abbaye royale de Notre-​Dame du Lys possédaient à Mâlay-​le-​Roi,” Bulletin de la Société historique de Sens 10 (1882). 68 See Constance H. Berman, “The Labors of Hercules, the Cartulary, Church and Abbey for Nuns of La Cour-​Notre-​Dame-​de-​Michery,” JMH 26 (2000):  33–​70; and Berman, White Nuns. 64

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make gendered decisions and to prefer to endow houses of nuns with such income-​paying holdings, although it is difficult to know for sure.69 Certainly many communities of nuns had extensive urban properties. Some, like the nuns of Santa Maria in Via Lata or those of Santa Maria Rotunda in Rome, commissioned urban tenants to build houses and plant vineyards within the ancient ruins in Rome—​on the Capitoline hill or inside the Coliseum—​and to maintain claims to such tourist attractions within the city as the Column of Trajan.70 Whereas the earliest Cistercian monks may have eschewed such properties, they soon acquired at least some urban properties, allowing them to market their surpluses. Urban properties were prominent among properties for some abbeys of Cistercian nuns. In Paris, for instance, the Cistercian nuns of Saint-​Antoine had acquired rights over more than 300 houses in the city of Paris by 1340 and were constantly updating their portfolio of urban rents by granting loans for property or business expansion in return for augmentations of those rents.71 In contrast, evidence from Bologna suggests that properties held there by mendicant nuns were intended to provide income to the Franciscan friars, who were not supposed to own any properties.72 By the end of the Middle Ages nearly every monastic community in the West had its urban hospice or college in a nearby city: a place of study and a place of prayer for donors, but also a place from which to conduct business within the urban marketplace.73 Overall, monastic economies were an important aspect of high and late medieval urban and especially rural economic development. Although the new monks and nuns were rarely those who had brought new land under cultivation, their acquisition and reorganization of extensive and often previously fragmented landholdings brought new productivity to fields and other assets. Their purchases stimulated a land market that allowed peasants, too, to reorganize lands and that encouraged general productivity. In cities, also, monks and nuns added to the redevelopment of assets, including some that

See Prat, Cartulaire de l’abbaye royale du Lieu, no. 1 (1247) and, in that volume, the lists of terrages. 70 Constance H. Berman, “Land, Family, and Women in Medieval Rome: Reassessing a Mentor’s Classic Article,” Medieval Feminist Forum 41 (2006): 64–​74. 71 Paris, Archives nationales, LL 1595, “Cartulaire de Saint-​Antoine-​des-​Champs,” fols. 87r–​90r. 72 Sherri Franks Johnson, Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna (Cambridge, 2014). 73 See Constance H. Berman, “Monastic Hospices in Southern France:  The Cistercian Urban Presence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 101 (2007): 747–​74.

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had been abandoned in late antiquity, such as the many buildings restored by nuns in Rome.74

Bibliography Arnold, Ellen. Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. Philadelphia, PA, 2013. Baury, Ghislain. Les religieuses de Castille. Patronage aristocratique et ordre cistercien XIIe–​XIIIe siècles, with preface by Adeline Rucquoi. Rennes, 2012. Berkhofer, Robert. Day of Reckoning:  Power and Accountability in Medieval France. Philadelphia, PA, 2004. Berman, Constance Hoffman. The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​Century Europe. Philadelphia, PA, 2010.   Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-Three Monasteries. Philadelphia, PA, 1986.   The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women in Medieval France. Philadelphia, PA, 2018. Carraz, Damien. L’Ordre du Temple dans la basse Vallée du Rhône (1124–​1312). Ordres militaires, croisades et société méridionales. Lyon, 2005. Constable, Giles. Monastic Tithes from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1964. Donkin, R. A. The Cistercians:  Studies in the Geography of Medieval England and Wales. Toronto, 1978. Gilchrist, Roberta. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London, 1994. Langdon, John. Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–​1540. Oxford, 2004. Makowski, Elizabeth. Canon Law and Cloistered Women:  Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545. Washington, DC, 1997. Mecham, June L. Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions:  Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, edited by Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa Bitel. Turnhout, 2014. Oliva, Marilyn. The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich 1350–​1450. Woodbridge, 1998. Rosenwein, Barbara H. To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter:  The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property: 909–​1049. Ithaca, NY, 1989. Venarde, Bruce L. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997.



Berman, “Land, Family, and Women in Medieval Rome.”

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Nobility and Monastic Patronage: The View from Outside the Monastery Jonatha n R.   L yon Secular noblemen and noblewomen’s relationships with monastic communities during the high Middle Ages follow many of the patterns already established in the preceding centuries. Across Latin Christendom, nobles continued to make donations to religious houses for the sake of their own souls and those of their ancestors and other relatives.1 Similarly, those who had sufficient resources to found new monasteries continued to do so, establishing and endowing religious communities dedicated in perpetuity to their spiritual well-​being and the preservation of their memories. As in earlier centuries, nobles’ motives for patronizing monastic houses were not confined solely to the religious sphere. Anthropological models of “gift-​g iving” (as discussed by Isabelle Rosé in her article in volume 1) can be applied to the property agreements between nobles and monasteries of the high Middle Ages as well. Conflicts over lands and rights also continued to unsettle local societies, because the shifting nature of patronage and kinship networks over time repeatedly opened new questions about which nobles had claims to a piece of property even after it had been donated to a religious community. As in previous periods, nobles of the high Middle Ages founded and endowed monasteries to project their status as leading members of society. Indeed, viewed through a wide lens, noble support of religious communities in these centuries can be seen fitting into a much broader tradition—​traceable back to the pre-​ Christian Roman Empire and forward into the early modern period (and beyond)—that stressed largesse as one of the chief virtues of aristocracy. Noblemen and noblewomen who hoarded their land and wealth rather than distributing it freely to their own followers and to local civic and

See the article by Blennemann in volume 1.

1

I would like to thank Prof. Christina Lutter (Vienna) for reading early drafts of this article.

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religious institutions were unworthy of their status as members of the sociopolitical elite.2 Underneath this overarching canopy of continuity, there is nevertheless ample evidence for change during the high Middle Ages. The reform movements of the period and the arrival on the scene of new religious orders altered nobles’ patronage strategies and their relationships with monastic communities in numerous ways. By focusing on secular nobles’ links to monasteries—​rather than monks’ attitudes toward nobles—​it is also possible to explore how changes within European aristocracies, and in aristocratic forms of lordship, affected the shifting dynamics of noble–​monk relations.3 The richness of the source material for noble society during the high Middle Ages, at least in comparison to the evidence from earlier centuries, means that these changes can be analyzed in detail for many parts of Europe. Three topics merit special attention:  the expansion and intensification of noble lordship and their impact on the spread of monasticism; noble motivations and strategies in founding new monasteries; and noble influence and control over local monasteries.

The Expansion and Intensification of Noble Lordship The momentous military and political events of the year 1066 offer an appropriate entry point into a period when the European nobility underwent great change—​and in the process helped to change the monastic landscape of Latin Christendom. While most of the lords who fought with William the Conqueror (r. 1066–​87) at Hastings had close ties to Continental monasteries before 1066, many of these same lords shifted at least some of their patronage to England after the Conquest. In a few cases, they supported older Anglo-​ Saxon communities, with at least one member of the aristocratic elite from the Continent even choosing to be buried in one of these houses.4 But many of the nobles who followed William soon set about founding new houses on the island, and subsequent generations of the Anglo-​Norman aristocracy

David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility:  Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900–​1300 (Harlow, 2005), 68–​71; and various articles in Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner, eds., Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–​900 (Cambridge, 2007). 3 For monks’ attitudes toward the secular sphere, see Gert Melville, “Inside and Outside: Some Considerations about Cloistral Boundaries in the Central Middle Ages,” in Ecclesia in Medio Nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, ed. Steven Vanderputten and Brigitte Meijns (Leuven, 2011), 167–​82. 4 David Bates, “The Abbey and the Norman Conquest:  An Unusual Case?” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Woodbridge, 2014), 12–​13. 2

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established additional monasteries there as well. These nobles typically invited monks from their favorite houses on the Continent to establish daughter houses in England. Thus, Devon, which possessed two traditional houses following the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) prior to 1087, saw the foundation of seven other communities of black monks by 1144, six of them dependencies of French monasteries.5 However, not all of the new, post-​Conquest foundations were traditional houses; many belonged to the new orders coming into fashion in this period.6 In 1132, for example, Walter Espec (d. c. 1153), a noble lord from a Norman family that settled in Bedfordshire, played a leading role in founding Rievaulx Abbey, one of the first Cistercian houses in England.7 While England provides one of the clearest examples for how conquest and expansion could create new monastic patronage opportunities for the nobility, similar evidence emerges from across Latin Christendom in the decades after 1050. A comparable process was also at work in southern Italy and Sicily after the arrival of the Normans there.8 On the Iberian peninsula, the late eleventh and twelfth centuries were a period of southward expansion for the Christian kingdoms and of rapidly increasing wealth for the aristocracy, trends which generated a new wave of monastic foundations undertaken by the leading noble families.9 Analogous patterns are evident along the eastern frontier of Latin Christendom as well.10 German lords acquired the predominantly pagan march of Brandenburg (the region around Berlin) in the mid-​twelfth century, and the subsequent decades saw the region transformed by dozens of new foundations. Traditional monastic houses as well as Cistercian, Premonstratensian, and Augustinian ones all appeared in the first century following the conquest, thanks largely to the support of the margraves of Brandenburg and other leading noble families.11 As a result, what Robert Bartlett has called the “aristocratic diaspora” from the old Carolingian heartlands outward into other parts of Europe during the high Middle Ages

Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings (Oxford, 2000), 418–​21. Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997), 391–​428. Emilia Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey and Its Social Context, 1132–​1300: Memory, Locality, and Networks (Turnhout, 2005), 28–​32. 8 See the article by Ramseyer in volume 1. 9 Simon Barton, The Aristocracy in Twelfth-​Century León and Castile (Cambridge, 1997), 185–​220. 10 See the article by Jamroziak in this volume. 11 Heinz-​Dieter Heimann, Klaus Neitmann, and Winfried Schich, eds., Brandenburgisches Klosterbuch. Handbuch der Klöster, Stifte und Kommenden bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts, 2  vols. (Berlin, 2007). For neighboring Saxony, see Bianca Else, Wettinische Klöster im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert. Die Gründungen Dietrichs des Bedrängten (†1221) und Heinrichs des Erlauchten (†1288) (Frankfurt am Main, 2016). 5

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had the side effect of creating a surge in noble support for new monastic foundations in these regions.12 While the peripheries of Latin Christendom are some of the places where this new wave of noble patronage is most visible, there is ample evidence for a significant increase in the number of noble foundations in western Europe. From the perspective of the secular nobility, two developments contributed to this increase: new noble families and new noble lordships. In many cases, it was not old noble families with roots dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries leading this surge in patronage after 1050, but rather newer families that had risen to prominence after the end of the Carolingian period. In the German-​speaking lands, for example, the Investiture Controversy and the civil wars that accompanied it helped to reshape the aristocracy. Many older families died out in the male line or lost their eminent titles, while new lineages took advantage of the unsettled political situation to gain new rights and properties.13 These newcomers were anxious to call attention to their increased status and wealth—​and to enhance the legitimacy of their claims to be leading lords—​by founding new monastic houses. Thus, the years between 1050 and 1150 have been described as the most intensive period of monastic foundation in the southern German duchy of Bavaria, and a comparable statement could be applied to other regions as well.14 Historians have long recognized the connection between newly emerging noble families in the duchy of Swabia and the vibrant monastic reform movements of the region. The reformed communities of Hirsau, St. Blasien, Schaff hausen, Zwiefalten, and Muri all owed their foundations to the support of local noble families whose genealogies cannot be accurately reconstructed for the period before the year 1000 or so. Muri, for example, was one of the earliest beneficiaries of the patronage of members of the Habsburg dynasty, which first rose to prominence over the course of the eleventh century.15 Thus, a new aristocracy was taking shape that was closely bound to the latest trends in monastic life, and, as various scholars have



Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–​ 1350 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 24. 13 Jonathan R. Lyon, Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100–​ 1250 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 16–​32. 14 Stefan Weinfurter, “Die kirchliche Ordnung in der Kirchenprovinz Salzburg und im Bistum Augsburg 1046–​1215,” in Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1, ed. Walter Brandmüller (St. Ottilien, 1998), 304; and Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 126. 15 See the classic article on this subject: Karl Schmid, “Adel und Reform in Schwaben,” in Gebetsgedenken und adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Beiträge, ed. Karl Schmid (Sigmaringen, 1983), 337–​59 (first published in 1973).

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noted, the reform movements of the period after 1050 would not have been as successful without the strong support of local noble lords and their families.16 Also helping to create this new wave of foundations was the growing number of noble lordships appearing in the high Middle Ages. The reasons for this trend are numerous: the outward expansion of Latin Christendom; weak royal authority at the local level in many regions, which opened the door to lesser lords seizing power; and the intensification of efforts to clear and colonize marginal lands. Across Europe, the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries witnessed a castle-​building boom as noble lords—​with or without the permission of kings and magnates—​sought to strengthen their hold over their territories. Monastic houses had a role to play in this intensification of lordship. Along the eastern frontier of the German kingdom, the nobleman Wiprecht of Groitzsch (d. 1124) used monks from his own foundation of black monks at Pegau to reform another monastery, which he had acquired through his wife, and was thus able to establish a group of close supporters in newly gained territories.17 The Cistercians, even if the stories of them establishing houses in deserts and wastelands were frequently more rhetorical than real, are the best known example of a monastic order that specialized in transforming lightly settled regions into valuable pieces of larger lordships.18 For example, in Silesia in modern-​day Poland, Duke Henry I the Bearded (d. 1238) supported the foundation and endowment of the Cistercian monastery of Henryków during the 1220s in order to subject a frontier zone of his territories to more intensive lordship.19 Other congregations, especially those of regular canons, were similarly popular with noble founders, because they could help improve new lordships by organizing parish churches, collecting tithes, building







John Howe, “The Nobility’s Reform of the Medieval Church,” American Historical Review 93 (1988):  317–​39; Constance B. Bouchard, Sword, Miter, and Cloister:  Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–​1198 (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 124; Gert Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, trans. James D. Mixson (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 85–​8; and Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1993), 298–​301. 17 Georg H. Pertz, ed., Annales Pegavienses, MGH SS 16, 249–​ 50; English translation: Jonathan R. Lyon and Lisa Wolverton, trans., “The Deeds of Margrave Wiprecht of Groitzsch (d. 1124),” in Jonathan R. Lyon, Noble Society: Five Lives from Twelfth-​Century Germany (Manchester, 2017), 76. 18 See the article by Berman in this volume. 19 Piotr Górecki, A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents (Toronto, 2007), 81–​6; and Piotr Górecki, The Text and the World: The Henryków Book, Its Authors, and Their Region, 1160–​1310 (Oxford, 2015). 16

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regional networks with other houses, and providing educated chancery scribes and advisers for new lords’ households.20 Thus, the high Middle Ages witnessed a remarkably vibrant phase in the interrelationship between secular nobles and monastic communities across Latin Christendom. The combination of new aristocracies and noble families, new lordships, and new religious orders generated a flurry of new foundations and new patronage networks across a much wider swath of Europe than just the old Carolingian heartlands.

Noble Motivations and Strategies in Founding New Monasteries When nobles founded new communities during the high Middle Ages, a multifaceted set of motivations lay behind their actions. Their own strategies of lordship were often some of the most important factors, but not to be overlooked is the spirit of religious renewal in this period. Across Latin Christendom, many members of the lay elite were inspired to found and endow new religious communities for the sake of their souls, because they recognized the inherent sinfulness of the noble lifestyle. A  few went even further, withdrawing altogether from the violent world of the nobility to a monastic house. In the case of the Premonstratensians, the vita of one noble founder provides an especially vivid account of how new monastic forms could elicit dramatic acts of lay patronage and devotion. Count Godfrey of Cappenberg (d. 1127), who had personally met the order’s founder, Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134), was so inspired to seek remission for his sins that he not only founded a Premonstratensian community in his castle but laid down his arms and joined it while still a young man.21 Similar stories could be told for other places and other orders as well. Most nobles who founded new houses, however, did not abandon the world so readily. Many only took monastic vows on their deathbeds, after a lifetime spent in the violent pursuit of power





Green, Aristocracy of Norman England, 403; and Barton, Aristocracy in Twelfth-​Century León and Castile, 195–​6. See also the articles by Vones-​Liebenstein (on the differences between monks and regular canons) and Ó Clabaigh (on the role of regular canons in the colonization of Ireland) in this volume. 21 Gerlinde Niemeyer and Ingrid Ehlers-​Kisseler, eds., Die Viten Gottfrieds von Cappenberg, MGH SRG 74; English translation: “The Life of Godfrey of Cappenberg,” in Norbert and Early Norbertine Spirituality, ed. and trans. Theodore J. Antry and Carol Neel (New York and Mahwah, NJ, 2007), 85–​ 119. See also Herbert Grundmann, Der Cappenberger Barbarossakopf und die Anfänge des Stiftes Cappenberg (Cologne, 1959).

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and lordship.22 The majority, meanwhile, were patrons of the monastic life throughout their lives—​but never participants. Whether driven by sacred or profane motivations (or, more commonly, a combination of both), the noblemen and noblewomen who comprised the new aristocracies of the high Middle Ages strove to found and endow monastic communities to serve as burial sites, prayer centers for the sake of their souls, and places where their memory and that of their relatives could be preserved. For example, the monastery at Sorø in Denmark, originally a traditional monastic foundation but transformed into a Cistercian house in 1161, became one of the wealthiest foundations in the Scandinavian kingdom thanks to the patronage of the so-​called Hvide family.23 This does not mean, however, that each noble lineage developed close connections to just one monastic community. Recently, scholars have cautioned against overusing the term Hauskloster (dynastic monastery) and applying it arbitrarily to religious communities that may never have been intended to be the sole foundation tied to a multi-​generational lineage.24 Most nobles gave gifts of lands and rights to multiple religious houses in order to create and maintain far-​ reaching spiritual, social, and political networks. Moreover, in some noble lineages, members of each generation chose to found new monastic communities of their own and to be buried in them, rather than continuing to patronize ancestors’ monasteries or to seek burial alongside parents and grandparents. In these cases, young lords in each generation frequently wanted to display their status and authority by establishing their own religious houses, especially if older monasteries with ties to their lineage belonged to orders that were no longer fashionable with the aristocracy.



Jonathan R. Lyon, “The Withdrawal of Aged Noblemen into Monastic Communities: Interpreting the Sources from Twelfth-​Century Germany,” in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York, 2007), 143–​69. 23 Kim Esmark, “Religious Patronage and Family Consciousness:  Sorø Abbey and the ‘Hvide Family’, c. 1150–​1250,” in Religious and Laity in Western Europe 1000–​1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton (Turnhout, 2006), 93–​110. 24 Jürgen Dendorfer, “Gescheiterte Memoria? Anmerkungen zu den ‘Hausklöstern’ des hochmittelalterlichen Adels,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 73 (2014):  17–​38. See also Karl Schmid, “Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht, Haus und Dynastie beim mittelalterlichen Adel,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 105 (1957):  43–​4; Bernd Schneidmüller, “Landesherrschaft, welfische Identität und sächsische Geschichte,” in Regionale Identität und soziale Gruppen im deutschen Mittelalter, ed. Peter Moraw (Berlin, 1992), 65–​101; and Wilhelm Störmer, “Die Hausklöster der Wittelsbacher,” in Die Zeit der frühen Herzöge. Von Otto I. zu Ludwig dem Bayern, ed. Hubert Glaser (Munich, 1980), 139. 22

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Two German noble lineages that rose to prominence in the late eleventh century offer a useful comparison. In Swabia, four dukes of Zähringen from three different generations of the lineage used a single monastery, St. Peter in the Black Forest, as a burial site and center for memory preservation throughout the twelfth century. In contrast, the Wettin family of Saxony saw multiple members of each generation found new communities to serve as new memorial sites: the old family monastery at St. Peter on the Lauterberg, an early twelfth-​century foundation, lost much of its significance for the Wettins by the close of the century, replaced by a series of newer Cistercian and Augustinian houses.25 Thus, it is impossible to point to a single patronage strategy within the leading noble families of Latin Christendom; all of them endowed and supported monastic houses, but how they chose to do so could vary significantly from lineage to lineage, and from generation to generation. Further complicating the idea of the dynastic monastery, not every religious community founded by nobles was designed to serve as a burial site or principal center for preserving a family’s memory. Like the aforementioned Godfrey of Cappenberg, the childless Count Ludwig of Arnstein (d. 1185) founded and then joined a Premonstratensian house for spiritual reasons, ending his noble lineage.26 Around the same time, Ediva (d. before 1167), the widow of a knight, founded Godstow Abbey in England and became the community’s first abbess, her two daughters being the first two prioresses. Despite this close tie to a family of modest aristocratic rank, Godstow attracted the bulk of its patronage from numerous bishops and secular magnates because of Ediva’s reputation for living a holy life.27 Other aristocratic women, especially widows, also founded and endowed their own religious houses that were not necessarily seen as their families’ principal foundations.28 Moreover, both noblemen and noblewomen, even if





Compare Stefan Pätzold, Die frühen Wettiner. Adelsfamilie und Hausüberlieferung bis 1221 (Cologne, 1997), and Ulrich Parlow, Die Zähringer. Kommentierte Quellendokumentation zu einem südwestdeutschen Herzogsgeschlecht des hohen Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1999). 26 Ludwig Widmann, ed., “Die Lebensbeschreibung des Grafen Ludwig von Arnstein,” Annalen des Vereins für Nassauische Alterthumskunde und Geschichtsforschung 18 (1883–​ 4): 244–​66; English translation: “The Deeds of Count Ludwig of Arnstein (d. 1185),” in Lyon, Noble Society, 220–​48. 27 Emilie Amt, “The Foundation Legend of Godstow Abbey: A Holy Woman’s Life in Anglo-​Norman Verse,” in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York, 2012), 13–​31; and Sharon K. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-​Century England (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1988), 62–​5. 28 Hedwig Röckelein, “Bairische, sächsische und mainfränkische Klostergründungen im Vergleich (8. Jahrhundert bis 1100),” in Nonnen, Kanonissen und Mystikerinnen. Religiöse Frauengemeinschaften in Süddeutschland, ed. Eva Schlotheuber, Helmut Flachenecker, and Ingrid Gardill (Göttingen, 2008), 50–​5; and Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society,  94–​9. 25

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they were not the sole founders of monastic communities, frequently worked closely with others, such as bishops, to establish religious houses. Indeed, many of the archbishops and bishops who founded new communities were themselves from noble families. There are numerous examples of such high-​ ranking ecclesiastics working together with their secular noble relatives to found religious communities that could enhance and expand their family’s power and influence, even if they were not the main sites of the family’s patronage strategies.29 Regardless of motivations, the majority of noble foundations must be seen in one way or another through the lens of noble lordship. To understand better what this means, it is necessary to shift away from issues of religion or family prestige to concrete problems on the ground at the local level. For example, the question of where a noble or noble family chose to found a new house raises a complex set of issues. The transformation of castle architecture in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries is one element. Some lords converted old castles into religious houses after they had finished building newer, more modern fortifications; a monastic foundation was thus an easy way to recycle an old castle and to ensure that it could be maintained as a secondary strategic site if necessary.30 Count Milo of Bar-​sur-​Seine (d. c. 1126) founded a house of nuns in his old castle of Jully in Burgundy around 1115.31 Around the same time, hundreds of miles away, the counts of Andechs in Bavaria established a house of regular canons and canonesses on the site of their old castle of Diessen, just across Lake Ammer from their new castle at Andechs.32 Nobles also established new religious communities in places where different members of an extended kinship group had overlapping property rights that could easily generate disputes. In this way, potential conflicts could be mitigated in a way beneficial to everyone, with all the family members jointly endowing a new monastic foundation. Everyone in the kinship group could then become members of its prayer community and could be entered in the house’s necrology.33



For an example of the close collaboration between a bishop and his brother from the high nobility, see Alois Schütz, “Das Geschlecht der Andechs-​ Meranier im europäischen Hochmittelalter,” in Herzöge und Heilige. Das Geschlecht der Andechs-​ Meranier im europäischen Hochmittelalter, ed. Josef Kirmeier and Evamaria Brockhoff (Munich, 1993), 66–​7. 30 Benjamin Arnold, Power and Property in Medieval Germany: Economic and Social Change c. 900–​1300 (Oxford, 2004). 31 Bouchard, Sword, Miter, and Cloister, 122. 32 Schütz, “Das Geschlecht der Andechs-​Meranier,” 49. On dual-​sex communities, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in volume 1. 33 Michael Borgolte, “Stiftergedenken in Kloster Dießen: ein Beitrag zur Kritik bayerischer Traditionsbücher,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 24 (1990): 235–​89; and John B. Freed, The

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As this focus on the more strategic aspects of monastic foundation and patronage suggests, the suitability of a particular site for the religious life was not always the first issue when nobles looked to found a new monastery. More significant issues included the questions of where it would be useful in securing or expanding lordship and where the noble had the property rights to establish the community. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of these religious houses, especially in their earliest years, struggled. Papal bulls confirming privileges for these monastic houses frequently reference their difficulties, noting for example that the communities had moved multiple times before finally settling in a location that proved suitable for their survival.34 Cases of bishops intervening in order to rescue struggling communities further suggest that some of these dynastic foundations were never adequately supported by their noble founders.35 Indeed, it is easy to miss in the sources many of the foundations started by nobles. Some of these communities are mentioned in only a few extant charters and seem to have initially been so small, and so inadequately endowed with lands and rights, that their origins and earliest years are impossible to reconstruct. For every noble foundation that became a prominent institution—​such as the early twelfth-​century monasteries of Klosterneuburg and Heiligenkreuz near Vienna founded by the Babenberger margraves of Austria, both of which survive to this day as wealthy religious houses—​there are many others that remained small and obscure throughout their (at times short) histories.

Noble Influence and Control over Local Monasteries All monasteries, whether new ones founded after 1050 or older houses with roots stretching back into the early Middle Ages, had to coexist with the noble families who controlled neighboring lordships. Monastic communities with strong traditions of royal patronage (such as Saint-​Denis and Westminster Abbey) and extraordinarily wealthy ones (such as Cluny) are the exceptions, not the norm, when analyzing the social and political influence that religious



Counts of Falkenstein: Noble Self-​Consciousness in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Philadelphia, PA, 1984). 34 See, for example, Waldemar Schlögl, ed., Die Traditionen und Urkunden des Stiftes Diessen 1114–​1362 (Munich, 1967), 102–​5, no. 2; and Michael Stephan, ed., Die Urkunden und die ältesten Urbare des Klosters Scheyern (Munich, 1988), 13–​16, no. 4. 35 “The Life of Bishop Otto of Bamberg (d. 1139), by a Monk of Prüfening,” in Lyon, Noble Society, 108–​10; and Felix Rosenfeld, ed., Das Urkundenbuch des Hochstifts Naumburg, vol. 1 (Magdeburg, 1925), 127–​9, no. 148.

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houses could exert over the neighboring noble society.36 Most monasteries were much more intricately bound up in complex power relationships, as the intensive study of charters, cartularies, and other sources recording alternating periods of cooperation and conflict between nobles and monasteries has clearly shown.37 Thus, while a few religious houses had the political influence and the right connections to keep local nobles at bay in most circumstances, others were not always able to challenge aristocratic interference. As a result, nobles frequently exerted significant influence and control over neighboring monasteries. Many noble foundations were intentionally established in places firmly in the grasp of a single family, meaning that these religious communities operated within quite narrow patronage networks centered on the founders, their lineage, and their household and dependents.38 In other words, these foundations were more than just burial sites or places for memorial preservation; they were also locations where a lord and his followers could bind themselves more closely to local social and spiritual networks. This situation was typically more advantageous for the noble family and its household than the monks or nuns. Monasteries founded by nobles in locations where the community had no other neighbors beside the founding family and its followers had limited opportunities to attract patronage and support from a wide network of other nobles.39 Indeed, the narrow networks connecting many of these small noble foundations to the outside world are an indication that such monasteries were intended to remain under the family’s control. Especially in cases where leading nobles—​dukes, margraves, counts—​founded religious communities close to their own castles for reasons linked to their own strategies of lordship, the power relationship between a noble lineage and its monastic foundation was clearly tilted in the founding family’s favor.







Compare William Chester Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries:  Westminster and Saint-​ Denis in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2009), and Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–​1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 37 See, for example, Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process:  Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–​1100 (Ithaca, NY, 2013); Stephen D. White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints:  The Laudatio parentum in Western France, 1050–​1150 (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1988); and Constance Hoffman Berman, The Cistercian Revolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​Century Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), 161–​220. 38 Ludwig Holzfurtner, “Schenker und Schenkergruppen:  sozialgeschichtliche Studien an Hand hochmittelalterlicher bayerischer Traditionsbücher,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 54 (1991): 304–​6. See, for example, Schlögl, Die Traditionen und Urkunden des Stiftes Diessen. 39 Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey and Its Social Context, 63. 36

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The control exerted by nobles over local monasteries could take many forms. Within the German kingdom, for example, the events of the Investiture Controversy helped shape noble influence over many of the reformed monastic communities. During the eleventh century, the popes in Rome gradually emerged as a rival source of authority and patronage to the Salian kings and emperors in the eyes of many nobles.40 The famous conflict between Pope Gregory VII (r.  1073–​85) and the German ruler Henry IV (r.  1056–​1105) thus provided an opportunity for some lords to distance themselves from their own rulers north of the Alps and to draw closer to the papacy. As a result, it became increasingly popular in the later eleventh century for a noble, when founding a new religious community, to place the community under papal protection rather than royal protection, as had traditionally been done in the past. Nobles inspired by the reform ideas emanating from the monastery of Hirsau in the Black Forest were especially attracted to this idea of giving the pope, not the king, authority over their foundations.41 Putting a community directly under papal protection gave it a link to a higher power—​but a higher power located hundreds of miles away from the German kingdom. This meant that the noble founder and his heirs were the ones who, at the local level, had the task of protecting and defending the community, thus ensuring that they maintained substantial control over their foundations. In the German kingdom and in some regions further west, these lords exercised a form of advocacy over their monasteries and appear with the title advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) in the sources. Monastic advocates first appear in the Carolingian period, when—​at least according to the capitularies and the conciliar sources—​their primary function was to represent abbots and monastic communities at secular courts.42 This remained one of the functions of some monastic advocates into the high Middle Ages, but, in different parts of Europe, advocates also acquired different sorts of roles and responsibilities. In France, for example, monastic advocates were first



Thomas Zotz, “Die Situation des Adels im 11. und frühen 12. Jahrhundert,” in Vom Umbruch zur Erneuerung? Das 11. und beginnende 12. Jahrhundert—​Positionen der Forschung, ed. Jörg Jarnut and Matthias Wemhoff (Munich, 2006), 348–​9. 41 Klaus Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform:  Spiritualität, Lebensform und Sozialprofil einer benediktinischen Erneuerungsbewegung im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert,” in Gemeinsam Leben. Spiritualität, Lebens-​und Verfassungsformen klösterlicher Gemeinschaften in Kirche und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Gert Melville (Berlin, 2013), 153–​204; and Johannes Laudage, “Welf IV. und die Kirchenreform des 11. Jahrhunderts,” in Welf IV. Schlüsselfigur einer Wendezeit. Regionale und europäische Perspektiven, ed. Dieter R. Bauer and Matthias Becher (Munich, 2004), 199–​225. 42 Charles West, “The Significance of the Carolingian Advocate,” Early Medieval Europe 17 (2009): 186–​206.

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and foremost defenders of their monasteries’ legal and economic interests, but the significance of monastic advocacy seems to have faded by the early twelfth century.43 In the German kingdom, in contrast, the twelfth century saw monastic advocates’ roles expand significantly: they were tasked with exercising justice over high crimes on monastic estates and for carrying out death sentences, which obviously could not be carried out by the abbot or other members of the church community. Many German nobles used their role as advocate to gain access to Church estates and to exploit monastic resources for their own benefit—​regardless of whether these houses were their own foundations or not.44 In 1156 or 1157, Emperor Frederick I  Barbarossa (r.  1152–​90) wrote to Count Henry of Wolfratshausen (d. 1157), cautioning him against committing further violence (violentia) against the imperial monastery of Tegernsee in his role as advocate for the community.45 Similar complaints about violent advocates are commonplace in other sources. As a result, the question of whether or not any given monastic advocacy was a heritable benefice under the control of a single lineage, or an office that the monastic community could bestow and revoke as it saw fit, was a crucial one in shaping the interactions between monasteries and local lords. The early thirteenth-​century chronicler Lambert of Ardres (d. after 1206), in his History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, has much to say about the complex relationship between the monastery of Saint-​Bertin in Flanders, one of the great Carolingian houses, and one of its advocates from the local noble family of Ardres, Arnold I of Ardres (d. 1094). The author makes it clear that the title of advocate gave Arnold a great deal of prestige, since he was otherwise lacking a prominent noble title. He also became a monk at Saint-​ Bertin on his deathbed, and “His body was buried honorably by the monks in their cloister and was carefully housed in a memorable tomb forever.”46 At least as reported by this chronicler, the relationship between monastery and



Bouchard, Sword, Miter, and Cloister, 125–​8; and, for the geography of advocacy, Charles West, “Monks, Aristocrats, and Justice:  Twelfth-​Century Monastic Advocacy in a European Perspective,” Speculum 92 (2017): 372–​404. 44 See, for example, Martin Clauss, Die Untervogtei. Studien zur Stellvertretung in der Kirchenvogtei im Rahmen der deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts (Siegburg, 2002); and Jonathan R. Lyon, “Noble Lineages, Hausklöster, and Monastic Advocacy in the Twelfth Century: The Garsten Vogtweistum in Its Dynastic Context,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (2015): 1–​29. 45 Helmut Plechl, ed., Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung, MGH Die Briefe d. dt. Kaiserzeit 8, 230, no. 198. 46 Lambert of Ardres, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. Leah Shopkow (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 151–​2; see also 143 for Arnold as advocate. 43

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advocate was a good one in this case—​and a useful reminder that connections to some of the venerable old monasteries remained important aspects of noble status during the high Middle Ages. The power dynamic clearly favored Saint-​Bertin, a prominent monastery, which had the local influence to manage this advocate from a relatively minor, up-​and-​coming family. Less prestigious communities, in contrast, frequently had no way to challenge their advocates. As a result, Church advocacy could shift some power dynamics in favor of local nobles, giving them tight control over a neighboring religious house, access to its properties, and the opportunity to siphon off its revenues into their own pockets. Finally, when considering noble influence and control over local monastic foundations, the role of family relationships must also be emphasized. More than half a century ago, Karl Schmid argued that the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw a shift in the structure of southern German noble families from large, horizontally structured kinship groups to narrower, vertically structured lineages.47 Over the years, this became a model for positing a social transformation of the European nobility as a whole in the high Middle Ages.48 This helped to feed into an older argument that noble families used their monastic foundations as a place to dump—​and forget—​daughters whom they could not afford to marry off, or “excess” younger sons without inheritance rights in primogeniture-​based patrilineages.49 In these older models, daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers vanished from lay society once they crossed the threshold of a monastic house. This vision of a sharp divide between the secular and monastic spheres has given way, more recently, to an image of religious communities as participating in a much more regular give-​and-​take with local and regional aristocratic elites. Some monasteries undoubtedly did house noble relatives who were too weak or infirm to play a prominent role in secular society.50 But in





Schmid, “Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht,” 1–​62. For overviews of this scholarship, see Crouch, Birth of Nobility; Werner Hechberger, Adel im fränkisch-​deutschen Mittelalter. Zur Anatomie eines Forschungsproblems (Ostfildern, 2005); and Constance B. Bouchard, Those of My Blood:  Constructing Noble Families in Medieval Francia (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). 49 Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest:  The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1983); Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge, 2004), 50; and, for an especially blunt statement of this position, Edmund von Oefele, Geschichte der Grafen von Andechs (Innsbruck, 1877), Preface. 50 Timothy Reuter, “Nobles and Others: The Social and Cultural Expression of Power Relations in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), 111–​26; and Lyon, “Withdrawal of Aged Noblemen,” 143–​69. See also the article by Cochelin in volume 1. 47

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many cases, the noblemen and noblewomen who entered religious houses remained active participants in family life, and kin connections easily crossed back and forth across the divide. As recent scholars of gender have noted, the martial language that many monks used to describe their spiritual conflicts reflected their own upbringing in noble families and their continuing ties to the chivalric culture outside the monastery.51 In addition, property grants to monastic houses were sometimes directed toward supporting specific relatives inside those communities.52 And family networks frequently influenced who obtained leadership positions inside monastic houses. For example, when Countess Estefanía Armengol (d. after 1143) founded the Cistercian abbey of Valbuena de Duero in 1143, she made it clear that, after her death, one of her kin should be chosen as the new abbot.53 In the German-​speaking lands, evidence for close contacts and interactions between family members inside and outside monasteries appears in many of the remarkable letter collections that survive from the high Middle Ages. Princess Sophia of Hungary, who became a nun at Admont around 1150 after her betrothal to King Conrad III of Germany’s heir fell apart, wrote letters to both her mother and brother about her joy at joining the convent.54 And around the same time, Landgrave Ludwig I  of Thuringia (d. 1140)  wrote a letter to the abbot of Reinhardsbrunn to complain that the abbot was supporting the decision by the landgrave’s younger brother to leave the monastery.55 In short, while there were unquestionably physical walls separating monastic houses from the outside world—​indeed, some of these walls can still be seen today—​it is necessary to view them as much more porous barriers than historians once thought them to be.56





Katherine Allen Smith, “Spiritual Warriors in Citadels of Faith:  Martial Rhetoric and Monastic Masculinity in the Long Twelfth Century,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities, ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (New York, 2010), 86–​110; and Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life:  Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004), 24–​42. 52 Lyon, Princely Brothers and Sisters, 57. 53 Barton, Aristocracy in Twelfth-​Century León and Castile, 201. 54 Jonathan R. Lyon, “The Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary, a Nun at Admont,” in Goldy and Livingstone, Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, 51–​68. For the rich Admont letter collections, see also Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-​Century Nuns’ Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 (2002): 34–​54. 55 Friedel Peeck, ed., Die Reinhardsbrunner Briefsammlung, MGH Ep. Sel. 5, 21–​2, no. 22. 56 See, for example, Christina Lutter, Geschlecht und Wissen, Norm und Praxis, Lesen und Schreiben. Monastische Reformgemeinschaften im 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna and Munich, 2005), 80–​7; Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 120; and John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform: Lotharingia c. 850–​ 1000 (Oxford, 2001), 263. 51

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Conclusion There is little evidence that the eleventh-​century reform movements and the new monastic orders of the high Middle Ages put a sudden end to older notions of proprietary lordship over monastic houses.57 Throughout this period, monasteries continued to be closely connected to aristocratic society. When nobles founded communities or endowed them with gifts of property and rights, they were creating long-​term relationships rather than participating in one-​time acts. These relationships could fluctuate over time between periods of conflict and cooperation, but they always helped to embed monastic houses in local landscapes of noble lordship. Because abbots, abbesses, and other leaders of religious houses were frequently nobles themselves—​as were many of the other members of their communities—​many of these religious maintained ties of various sorts to their relatives outside the community, creating social networks that easily crossed the divide between the ecclesiastical and secular spheres. The more willing scholars are to view monasteries as being fully integrated into their surrounding communities, rather than separated from them, the easier it is to understand how deeply enmeshed these religious houses truly were in aristocratic society and culture.

Bibliography Arnold, Benjamin. Power and Property in Medieval Germany:  Economic and Social Change c. 900–​1300. Oxford, 2004. Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–​1350. Princeton, NJ, 1993. Barton, Simon. The Aristocracy in Twelfth-​Century León and Castile. Cambridge, 1997. Bouchard, Constance B. Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–​ 1198. Ithaca, NY, 1987. Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1996. Crouch, David. The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900–​1300. Harlow, 2005. Dendorfer, Jürgen. “Gescheiterte Memoria? Anmerkungen zu den ‘Hausklöstern’ des hochmittelalterlichen Adels.” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 73 (2014): 17–​38. Green, Judith A. The Aristocracy of Norman England. Cambridge, 1997. Howe, John. “The Nobility’s Reform of the Medieval Church.” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 317–​39. Lyon, Jonathan R. Noble Society: Five Lives from Twelfth-​Century Germany. Manchester, 2017.   Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100–1250. Ithaca, NY, 2013.

Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2006).

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Jonathan R.  Lyon Schmid, Karl. “Adel und Reform in Schwaben.” In Gebetsgedenken und adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Beiträge, edited by Karl Schmid, 337–​59. Sigmaringen, 1983 (first published in 1973). Venarde, Bruce L. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215. Ithaca, NY, 1997. White, Stephen D. Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio parentum in Western France, 1050–​1150. Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1988. Wood, Susan. The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West. Oxford, 2006.

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The Medical Role of Monasteries in the Latin West, c. 1050–​1300 E l m a B re n n e r Monasteries were among the most important sites for the care of the sick and the dissemination of medical knowledge throughout the early and central Middle Ages, at least up to the thirteenth century. While the medical preoccupations of monastic communities reflect the fundamental Christian duty of visiting the sick, they also resulted from the self-​contained character of these communities and their role as centers of learning. From the formulation of the Benedictine Rule (RB) in the sixth century, monasteries offered specially tailored facilities to sick monks and nuns, and such provision was sometimes extended to resident lay people, as well as to guests from outside the community. Key medical tenets about how to maintain and restore health were assimilated into the monastic way of life, shown particularly in the practice of bloodletting and the regulation of the diet, both of which were understood to prevent ill health by ensuring the proper humoral balance within a person’s body. Physical health, therefore, was an important consideration in monastic communities, indicating that, contrary to much historical thinking about medieval religious, monks and nuns did not repudiate their bodies. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, numerous hospitals for the sick poor and leprosy hospitals (leprosaria) were established on the model of the monastery; their permanent residents, including the sick members of leprosy hospital communities, often lived according to a monastic rule. Overall, provision for the sick was a key aspect of community life, and brought monasteries into greater contact with the world outside. Much as monastic houses varied greatly in their size and organization, they fulfilled many different medical roles, both within and beyond their walls.

The Care of the Sick in Medieval Western Monasticism Much medieval thinking about health and illness was derived from the works of Galen, a Greek physician in the Roman Empire in the second century, who 865

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argued that health depended on a balance of the four humors, understood to be fluids inside the body (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If one of the humors predominated or became corrupt, it was necessary to remove this harmful matter from the body. Galenic medicine also taught that health depended on variable environmental, physical, and psychological factors known as non-​naturals (air, food and drink, wakefulness and sleep, exercise and rest, excretion and retention, and emotional well-​being). These ancient ideas evidently influenced arrangements in medieval monastic communities, in terms of both efforts to promote health and the medical treatment of those who became sick. Visiting the sick is one of the six biblical works of mercy (Matt. 25:31–​46), works that all Christians must fulfill in order to be saved at the Last Judgment. The RB contains clear instructions about how the sick should be cared for within the monastery, and also suggests that notions of disease, healing, and care shaped monastic life more broadly. In dealing with a delinquent monk, for example, an abbot was to exhibit the same kind of care that a physician shows toward a sick person; nonetheless, if the monk did not rectify his behavior, he was to be expelled, “lest one diseased sheep contaminate the whole flock.” The RB states that the sick should be treated as if they were Christ, and should occupy a separate space in the monastery with an attendant. They should also have special entitlements to aid their recovery, consisting of more frequent access to (medicinal) baths than the healthy, and, for the very sick, permission to eat meat.1 Both spiritual and physical health were important within the monastery; indeed, in medieval thinking the health of the body was understood to depend upon that of the soul. In 1215, Canon 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council instructed physicians to ensure that, before they treated a patient, the individual had first received the care of a priest. This was because “sickness of the body may sometimes be the result of sin … when the cause ceases so does the effect.”2 One would thus expect the sick to have had ready access to a chapel, as is demonstrated in an early medieval idealized plan of a monastery following the RB. The Plan of St. Gall, drawn c.  820–​833, contains detailed information about provision for sick monks, in theory at least.3 In

“22. Medical Injunctions in the Rule of St Benedict,” in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis (Toronto, 2010), 82–​4. 2 Norman P. Tanner, ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London and Washington, DC, 1990), 1:245. 3 On the Plan of St. Gall, see the articles by Lauwers (with a figure of the Plan) and Cohen in volume 1. 1

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the Plan, a whole area of the monastic precinct is dedicated to medical care, with a cloister and chapel specifically for the use of the sick adjoining those of the novices. The area incorporates a dormitory for the sick, a separate room for the seriously ill, facilities for bloodletting and bathing, a medicinal herb garden, and a house for physicians that includes their accommodation, a storage area for drugs, and another room for critically ill patients (perhaps lay men).4 The nature of the facilities depicted in the Plan suggests that bleeding and bathing, both of which were understood to expel corrupt humoral matter from the body (in the latter case through the opening of skin pores), were integral to medical treatment in the monastery. The administration of herbal remedies was also important; the drug storage room could have functioned as a pharmacy.5 It is also clear that medical practitioners resided within the monastery, in the physicians’ house. Since these men lived separately from the monks, they may have been lay men.6 It is evident, too, that those in a critical condition were deemed to require special treatment. The Augustinian rule (RA), which rapidly became popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, placed special emphasis on provision for any sick individual (RA 15 and 21). The regular canons who observed the RA reached outwards into lay society, assisting parishes, dispensing alms, and founding hospitals and leprosaria.7 Many of the leprosaria and hospitals for the sick poor that were a major focus of lay benefaction in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were organized as Augustinian communities of canons, lay brethren, and, in the case of leprosaria, sick residents. Indeed, the Augustinians’ connection with the laity brought lay people into the cloister, as they entered Augustinian houses to pursue a religious life, living alongside canons and canonesses and playing a vital role in the practical care of the sick.8 Other religious communities following newer rules, especially the mendicant orders of St. Francis (d. 1226)  and St. Dominic (d. 1221)  and



“24. The Plan of St Gall:  Medical Facilities Within an Ideal Monastery,” in Wallis, Medieval Medicine, 94–​7; Maria A. D’Aronco, “The Benedictine Rule and the Care of the Sick: The Plan of St Gall and Anglo-​Saxon England,” in The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Aldershot, 2007), 243–​5. 5 D’Aronco, “Benedictine Rule,” 244; “Plan of St Gall,” 96. 6 See “Plan of St Gall,” 94. 7 On regular canons, see the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. 8 François-​Olivier Touati, “‘Aime et fais ce que tu veux’:  les chanoines réguliers et la révolution de la charité au Moyen Âge,” in Les chanoines réguliers. Émergence et expansion (XIe–​XIIIe siècle). Actes du sixième colloque international du CERCOR, Le Puy en Velay, 29 juin–1er juillet 2006, ed. Michel Parisse (Saint-​Étienne, 2009), 159–​210. 4

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the Cistercian order, also paid special attention to matters of health and illness, and to tending the sick and needy within and outside the community. The Dominican Constitution drawn up in 1220 was based on the RA, and contained tenets regarding bloodletting, caring for the sick, and other health-​related issues. In both Franciscan and Dominican communities, it was recognized that the order’s effectiveness and success depended on the health of community members. Although the space available to mendicant convents was often limited because they were established in urban settings, the construction of an infirmary, with its own chapel and sometimes other appendages such as a separate infirmary kitchen and cloister, was considered essential. The mendicant communities were also concerned about the salubriousness of the convent’s environment, and were willing to relocate if their surroundings proved to be unhealthy. Their gardens played an important role, as the source of medicinal plants and as places where the sick could convalesce.9 Like the Augustinians, the Cistercians undertook to assist the sick and needy in lay society, a preoccupation that provided an impetus for the expansion of their order in the thirteenth century. As Anne E.  Lester has shown for the region of Champagne in northern France, groups of Cistercian nuns in particular took over the administration of existing leprosy houses and hospitals for the sick poor, establishing their own communities within or alongside these charitable institutions.10 Some Cistercian communities also accepted sick or disabled individuals as members. At the female monastery of Bondeville in Upper Normandy in the mid-​thirteenth century, two of the seven resident lay sisters were mentally impaired.11 The Cistercians appear to have been particularly flexible and inclusive, providing supportive and protective environments for the sick, disabled, and vulnerable.12



Angela Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, 2004), 13–​14, 45–​50, and 55–​7. Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns:  The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY, 2011), Chapter  4, esp. 118–​19 and  132–​3. 11 Théodose Bonnin, ed., Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis. Journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen (1248–​1269) (Rouen, 1852), 348; English translation in Sydney M. Brown, trans., The Register of Eudes of Rouen, ed. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (New York, 1964), 395. On lay sisters, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume. 12 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 180 (on the flexibility of the female monastery of Bondeville, Normandy). 9

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Health and Illness Inside the Monastery Within medieval monasteries, considerable provision was made both for the care of religious who were sick, impaired, or disabled, and for maintaining the health of the other members of the community. The infirmary, a distinctive space within the monastic complex, offered the necessary facilities for the sick, including a specially tailored diet, access to religious worship, and the attention of medical practitioners, who were often religious but were sometimes members of the laity. The sick within the infirmary were permitted to eat meat, and, as shown in the Plan of St. Gall, often worshipped in a separate chapel that adjoined this space.13 Infirmaries were frequently situated on the edge of the precinct and in close proximity to the monastery’s water supply, enabling the washing and bathing of the sick. The infirmary established the separation of the sick from the healthy, permitting the main community to continue to fulfill its observances and duties without interruption by the needs of the sick.14 Nonetheless, there were also opportunities for contact, when sick religious who were sufficiently strong attended religious services with the main community, or when the healthy acted contrary to monastic discipline and chose to eat with the sick in the infirmary, where meat was available.15 The infirmarer, who was a monk or nun, had overall responsibility for the infirmary, and could call upon the services of lay servants, physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries from outside the community. Monastic infirmaries accommodated not only those who were acutely or chronically sick, but also elderly or disabled religious, who often stayed in the infirmary on a permanent basis. While the aged and disabled were not necessarily unwell, they were likely to be less physically active than their fellow religious and unable to participate fully in the life of the community. One of the customaries describing the abbey of Cluny, the Liber tramitis, refers to these residents of the infirmary as “limping and elderly monks who dishonour the community,” suggesting that their reclusion was considered necessary and was perhaps enforced, since they tarnished the order and appearance of the





Riccardo Cristiani, “Integration and Marginalization: Dealing with the Sick in Eleventh-​ Century Cluny,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 288–​90; Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–​1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford, 1993), 88, 92. 14 Mary K. K. Yearl, “Medieval Monastic Customaries on Minuti and Infirmi,” in Bowers, Medieval Hospital, 180. 15 Leonie V. Hicks, Religious Life in Normandy, 1050–​1300: Space, Gender and Social Pressure (Woodbridge, 2007), 111–​12; Cristiani, “Integration and Marginalization,” 289. 13

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community.16 At the same time, however, living in the infirmary could be an attractive option, particularly for elderly religious, as was certainly the case at Westminster Abbey in England.17 Not all orders were suitable for elderly members, though:  life in mendicant houses, for example, was particularly active and rigorous. In some instances elderly friars, monks, and nuns moved from one order to another as they became less active, or they retired to a smaller dependent house of their order.18 Bloodletting, aimed at restoring the balance of the humors, was among the treatments administered to the sick within monastic infirmaries. As well as the humors, the non-​naturals were taken into account, in terms of dietary regulation, exercise, and exposure to good, clean air. At Westminster Abbey, a garden and orchard were situated south of the infirmary, where patients could spend time and walk about. Convalescent monks were also sometimes sent to the abbey’s rural manors, where they could breathe clear air.19 Phlebotomy and the regulation of the non-​naturals featured in the lives of healthy members of monastic communities too, indicating that considerable attention was paid to the preservation of health and well-​being, and thus the prevention of sickness. In 1260 the minister general of the Franciscan order, Bonaventure, argued for the importance of gardens “for recreation in the open air to aid the recovery of the sick and to preserve health and improve those fatigued by their spiritual studies.” In Franciscan convents and other monasteries it was recognized that, to ensure health, the rigors of prayer and study needed to be mitigated by exercise and leisure time.20 Detailed arrangements for bleeding, which was primarily performed for preventive reasons within monasteries, were set out in numerous monastic customaries. Phlebotomy took place at set moments in the liturgical calendar, or according to a rota by which groups of community members were bled in succession. Different orders followed different arrangements, and individual communities could also adopt their own customary practice with regard to bleeding. The early twelfth-​century customs of the Carthusian order, for example, stated that monks should be bled five times per year, while lay brothers should undergo bleeding only four times annually.21 Although

Cristiani, “Integration and Marginalization,” 292–​ 5. On monastic customaries, including Cluniac ones, see the articles by Bruce and Cochelin in volume 1. 17 Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 87. 18 Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (New York, 2013), 144–​6. 19 Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 90, 99. 20 Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars, 56–​8 (57 for quotation). 21 On lay brothers, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume. 16

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bloodletting originated in ancient medical theory, it took on a distinctive significance in a monastic context. Here, it was associated with the prevention of not only physical but also spiritual ill health, and the liturgical calendar determined the timing of bleeding, as opposed to the astrological calendar that increasingly governed medical practice in lay society in this period. After having been bled, religious enjoyed around three days of rest and exemption from the usual monastic routine, during which time they had an enriched diet.22 Bloodletting thus offered an opportunity for respite from the discipline that governed community life.

Hospitals, Leprosaria, and Lay Society From the second half of the eleventh century, monastic or quasi-​monastic institutions that were specifically dedicated to the care of the sick within lay society began to be established, proliferating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Broadly speaking, these were hospitals, providing for the sick poor, and leprosaria, for people with leprosy. The latter type of institution was sometimes painted in a negative light by nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century writers, as a type of isolation hospital that reflected medieval beliefs about leprosy and contagion, as well as about the sinfulness of leprosy sufferers.23 Such ideas fitted into a broader negative picture of medieval leprosy that became prevalent in the nineteenth century, as writers took an interest in the medieval past as a result of their encounters with leprosy sufferers in the colonial world.24 Nonetheless, in the colonial period the complexity of medieval responses to leprosy was still often acknowledged, along with the fact that in the Middle Ages sufferers were perceived as having a special relationship with God, enhanced by their pursuit of a religious vocation within leprosaria.25 While hospitals for the sick poor usually had a more general remit than leprosaria, occasionally these institutions took on more specialized functions, such as those that accommodated the blind, pregnant women, and orphaned or abandoned children. The hospital of St. Thomas at Southwark, outside London, for example, catered for women in childbirth, most of whom were



Yearl, “Medieval Monastic Customaries,” 175–​8 and 183–​5. See, for example, Charles A. Mercier, Leper Houses and Mediaeval Hospitals (London, 1915), 7 and 8–​9. 24 See Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006), Chapter 1. 25 See Mercier, Leper Houses, 7–​8; Léon Le Grand, ed., Statuts d’Hôtels-​Dieu et de léproseries. Recueil de textes du XIIe au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1901), xxvi–​xxviii. 22 23

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unmarried and unable to give birth at home.26 The Quinze-​Vingts hospital in Paris was one of the first hospitals for the blind, founded in the mid-​1250s by King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–​70) for a large community (300 persons) of blind individuals and the sighted people who supported them.27 Such hospital communities often followed a rule, most typically the RA, reflecting the manner in which the Augustinian order engaged with the laity. In the twelfth century, many leprosaria and hospitals in England and northern France, such as the leprosy house at Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, and the hospital for the sick poor at Rouen, Normandy, were organized as Augustinian priories.28 In other instances, however, the exact rule followed by hospital communities is not known, revealing how monasticism took on new, more fluid characteristics in these institutions that catered primarily for the laity. Hospitals and leprosaria offered opportunities to their staff and benefactors to benefit their souls by engaging in the practice of charity and fulfilling a number of the biblical acts of mercy, by caring for the sick and providing hospitality, clothing, food, and drink. Indeed, the model of the hospital originated in the shelters for pilgrims and travelers, often situated along major roads, sometimes as part of a monastic complex, of the earlier Middle Ages. These earlier hospitals did not offer medical care, but provided accommodation and sustenance to people who were undertaking a journey. Within cities, many of the earliest hospitals were established in close proximity to cathedrals, and were administered by bishops and the secular clergy, who undertook to provide this essential support to travelers and the poor. In the region of Catalonia, for example, there were a number of almshouses attached to cathedrals from the eleventh century onwards, offering food to the poor.29 From the twelfth century onwards, leprosaria and hospitals were frequently staffed by lay brethren as well as professed religious, and by a smaller number



Martha Carlin, “Medieval English Hospitals,” in The Hospital in History, ed. Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter (London, 1989), 33. 27 Mark P. O’Tool, “The Povres Avugles of the Hôpital des Quinze-​Vingts: Disability and Community in Medieval Paris,” in Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France, ed. Meredith Cohen and Justine Firnhaber-​Baker (Farnham, 2010), 158. 28 On Maiden Bradley, see Brian Kemp, “Maiden Bradley Priory, Wiltshire, and Kidderminster Church, Worcestershire,” in East Anglian and Other Studies Presented to Barbara Dodwell, ed. Malcolm Barber, Patricia McNulty, and Peter Noble (Reading, 1985), 87–​120; on the Hôtel-​Dieu at Rouen, see Elma Brenner, “The Care of the Sick and Needy in Twelfth-​and Thirteenth-​Century Rouen,” in Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–​1300, ed. Leonie V. Hicks and Elma Brenner (Turnhout, 2013), 342, 344, 346–​7, 348. 29 James William Brodman, Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), 8–​9. 26

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of clerics.30 The lay staff often took religious vows upon entering the community, and sometimes donated themselves and all their possessions to the hospital. This form of donation echoed the process of monastic profession that took place from the early eleventh century, and created a strong relationship of dependency between the lay entrant and the hospital community.31 At leprosaria and hospitals that catered for other chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick or disabled entrants also sometimes donated themselves in this way. An admission charter of 1290 marking the entry of Raoul l’Assaieur and his wife, Agnès, to the Quinze-​Vingts hospital for the blind in Paris, for example, states that the couple made over themselves and their possessions to the hospital. While it is not confirmed whether either Raoul or Agnès was blind, many blind residents of the Quinze-​Vingts entered the community with their able-​ bodied spouse.32 Lay brethren were permanent residents of hospitals and leprosaria, and enjoyed the practical and spiritual benefits of community membership, being assured of accommodation and sustenance while they lived, and a place of burial and commemorative prayers on their behalf after death. Lay residents, particularly lay sisters, often undertook nursing duties and other practical tasks. The number of lay brothers and sisters in these institutions had evidently burgeoned by the first part of the thirteenth century, since tenets were laid down at the ecclesiastical Council of Paris in 1212 to regulate their presence and behavior.33 These provisions were reconfirmed at the Council of Rouen two years later.34 At the Council of Paris, the religious status of “those who stay in leprosaria and hospitals, to serve the sick and pilgrims” was confirmed:  these individuals were to live according to the monastic rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and to wear a religious habit. The council decreed that the number of healthy residents should not exceed the number of the sick or pilgrims, “since it is more effective to have a few healthy individuals serving a large number of the sick,” and “the goods of the hospital bestowed through the devotion of the faithful are not intended for the use of the healthy, but rather for that of the sick.” Furthermore, married couples who entered hospitals and leprosaria to avoid lay jurisdiction, and thus



On lay staff in hospitals and leprosaria, see Charles de Miramon, Les “donnés” au Moyen Âge. Une forme de vie religieuse laïque v. 1180–​v. 1500 (Paris, 1999), Chapter 10. 31 Ibid.,  30–​1. 32 O’Tool, “The Povres Avugles,” 161 and 162–3. 33 Mansi 22:835–​6. 34 Ibid., 22:913.

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be judged only in ecclesiastical courts, were not to continue to engage in carnal acts.35 These provisions suggest that there was concern among the ecclesiastical authorities that lay brethren were exploiting the resources of leprosaria and hospitals, and not necessarily living chastely. They benefited from becoming members of these religious communities, but did not always fully adopt the religious life. Indeed, in a number of respects lay brothers and sisters were characterized by their “semi-​religiosity,” sitting on the boundary of monastic life in institutions that did not themselves always have all the features one would expect of a monastery.36 One of the categories of the resident laity at hospitals and leprosaria was the elderly, since these institutions offered an attractive environment in which aged people could spend their final years, without necessarily participating in the care of the sick. Entrance donations by such individuals could be very lucrative to hospital communities. The 1264 statutes of the leprosy hospital of Le Grand-​Beaulieu at Chartres refer explicitly to this sector of the resident population, mentioning the distribution of wine for lay sisters who were advanced in age.37 There is much evidence to suggest that the tenets of the Councils of Rouen and Paris had little effect, and that lay brethren continued to live in substantial numbers at hospitals and leprosaria. Indeed, at Cologne’s largest leprosy hospital, after 1300 a maximum of only one in four of the residents were leprous. This situation could also reflect the fact that the incidence of leprosy, which only ever affected a very small proportion of the population, was already starting to decline by the fourteenth century.38 In terms of the sick, hospitals and leprosaria usually catered for both men and women, but the sexes were strictly segregated with regard to their accommodation and daily activities. At the leprosy hospital at Sherburn, County Durham, for example, statutes confirmed in the early fourteenth century specified that the leprous brothers and sisters should attend daily mass separately, and were to live in separate lodgings.39 This segregation, also applied to lay staff, underlines the fact that these were religious communities, where



Ibid., 22:835–​6. De Miramon, Les “donnés”, 29 (using the term “semi-​religiosité”), and 363–​4. Kay Peter Jankrift, “Vieillir parmi les morts ‘vivants’:  la léproserie, hospice pour habitants non lépreux?” in Lépreux et sociabilité du Moyen Âge aux Temps modernes, ed. Bruno Tabuteau (Rouen, 2000), 31–​7, esp. 36–​7; Le Grand, Statuts d’Hôtels-​Dieu et de léproseries, 219. 38 Jankrift, “Vieillir parmi les morts ‘vivants’,” 37. 39 Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and His Northern Heirs (Cambridge, 1977, reprint Woodbridge, 2000), 125. 35

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chastity was considered essential. An important difference between leprosaria and the majority of hospitals concerns the composition of the permanent, resident community. While some hospitals, such as the Quinze-​Vingts in Paris, did accommodate the chronically sick or disabled on a long-​term basis, most hospitals catered for the acutely sick, whose stay was only temporary. At leprosaria, in contrast, the leprous, who were not expected to recover and could live with their illness for many years, became permanent residents. Reflecting this distinction, the statutes of hospitals tend to address only the staff, while ordinances for leprosaria envisage the community as a body of leprous and non-​leprous residents.40 Nonetheless, the sick and the healthy were still usually segregated within leprosy hospitals, as was the case at Le Grand-​Beaulieu at Chartres, where the two groups ate meals separately and their clothing was washed separately. Furthermore, at Chartres the leprous were not to enter the workrooms of the healthy, nor to touch “the common food.”41 These provisions are suggestive of concern about contamination and contagion, although they do not necessarily reflect fully fledged ideas about the transmission of disease from one person to another.42 The leprous were fully integrated into the religious community of the leprosarium, meaning that their devotional activities formed an important part of the spiritual life of these houses. Indeed, within leprosaria and hospitals much emphasis was placed on the care of souls as well as bodies. For leprosy sufferers, whose affliction was known to be ultimately fatal, spiritual care, to prepare the soul for the world to come, was of primary importance.43 As the small number of extant memorial books produced by leprosaria and hospitals reveal, religious worship in the institution’s church benefited the souls of the sick residents, staff, and benefactors. Memorial books recorded the names of individuals whom a monastic community undertook to commemorate after



Le Grand, Statuts d’Hôtels-​Dieu et de léproseries, xxv–​xxvi. Ibid., 217; Jankrift, “Vieillir parmi les morts ‘vivants’,” 36. 42 On the development of ideas about leprosy and contagion, see François-​Olivier Touati, “Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies,” in Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-​Modern Societies, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (Aldershot, 2000), 179–​201; François-​Olivier Touati, “Historiciser la notion de contagion: l’exemple de la lèpre dans les sociétés médiévales,” in Air, miasmes et contagion. Les épidémies dans l’antiquité et au Moyen Âge, ed. Sylvie Bazin-​Tacchella, Danielle Quéruel, and Évelyne Samama (Langres, 2001), 157–​87. 43 On the religious status of the leprous and the spiritual care they received within leprosaria, see François-​Olivier Touati, “Les léproseries aux XIIème et XIIIème siècles: lieux de conversion?” in Voluntate dei leprosus. Les lépreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIème et XIIIème siècles, ed. Nicole Bériou and François-​Olivier Touati (Spoleto, 1991), 1–​32; François-​Olivier Touati, Maladie et société au Moyen Âge. La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (Brussels, 1998).

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death. In England from the later thirteenth century, this arrangement was increasingly understood in terms of a confraternity, in which both the living and the dead formed a spiritual community centered upon the monastic house. For a hospital or leprosarium, this meant that the religious observances performed by the sick, particularly the commemorative prayers that they offered, assumed heightened importance. The prayers of the leprous were considered to be particularly efficacious, since their affliction was understood to mark the fact that God had chosen them specially to be saved, by completing their penance on earth. While these spiritual services attracted much-​ needed donations to hospitals and leprosaria, they also reinforced the identity of these houses as religious communities.44 Hospitals and leprosy houses differed markedly from the monastic infirmary in their focus on caring for sick members of lay society. Nonetheless, particularly in the early Middle Ages, monastic hospices that sheltered travelers sometimes offered medical provision to lay persons; in southern Italy, the infirmaries of male religious houses, unlike those of female houses, were termed “hospitals,” which may imply that they welcomed the laity.45 While leprosaria, hospitals, and monastic infirmaries each had different primary functions, in many instances they proved to have a flexible role, meaning that they could cater for needy individuals for whom there was little specialized institutional provision available, such as those with mental disorders and those with physical disabilities.46 Where it existed, this openness provided options other than family or community care for those who were in need.

Medical Knowledge and Learning The care of the sick within monastic communities, hospitals, and leprosaria depended to a large extent on the medical expertise of monks, nuns, and lay brethren. While lay medical practitioners, such as surgeons, phlebotomists, and apothecaries, sometimes visited these institutions, the major part of bodily care was provided by skilled members of the resident community. In the later Middle Ages and perhaps earlier, the leprous residents of certain leprosy hospitals, such as that at Cologne, were themselves involved in medical

Carole Rawcliffe, “Communities of the Living and of the Dead: Hospital Confraternities in the Later Middle Ages,” in Hospitals and Communities, 1100–​1960, ed. Christopher Bonfield, Jonathan Reinarz, and Teresa Huguet-​Termes (Oxford, 2013), 125–​9 and 134–​5. 45 Patricia Skinner, Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy (Leiden, 1997), 102. 46 See Wendy J. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout, 2013), 222. 44

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matters, since they were called upon to diagnose suspected cases of leprosy.47 Although medical expertise in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly developed through practical experience, in undertaking activities such as dressing ulcers and bloodletting, as well as developing knowledge in areas such as pharmacy, it also resulted from scholarly learning. As centers of book production, monasteries played a key role in the transmission and circulation of collections of medical recipes and learned medical texts. The latter included the works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, which became available in the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through Latin translations from Arabic and Greek. Monastic houses in southern Italy, where the town of Salerno was a leading center of medical learning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were at the forefront of these developments. The textual production of the abbey of Montecassino was especially important. Many of the most important translations from Arabic into Latin were completed by Constantine the African, who died as a monk of Montecassino between 1085 and 1098.48 Although many monastic houses did not own medical or scientific books, such works were held by monasteries, from the large, wealthy foundations to the smaller, more modest communities. There was a strong tradition of medical learning at the great abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, dating back to the abbacy of Baldwin, who acted as a physician to English kings both before and after the Norman Conquest.49 An eleventh-​century Latin compendium of medical recipes is closely associated with Baldwin, and has a Bury pressmark.50 A later manuscript, containing medical material from the twelfth to fourteenth century, was also once in the library at Bury St. Edmunds. It includes a version of the Articella, the medieval university textbook for medicine, written down in southern Italy in the twelfth century.51 At the other end of the spectrum of monastic houses, a small priory at Mersea, Essex, dependent on the Abbey of Saint-​Ouen, Rouen, possessed a medical compendium probably produced in the thirteenth century. This small, portable volume contains learned texts on urines and pulses, as well as medical notes and recipes, suggesting that it served as a useful reference work for medical practice.52



Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine (Baltimore, MD, 2007), 42–​3. Skinner, Health and Medicine, 127–​9, and 134. 49 Debby Banham, “Medicine at Bury in the Time of Abbot Baldwin,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Woodbridge, 2014), 226. 50 London, British Library, MS Sloane 1621; Banham, “Medicine at Bury,” 228–​38. 51 London, Wellcome Collection, MS 801a. 52 Cambridge, St John’s College, MS E.29; Neil R. Ker, ed., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd ed. (London, 1964), 130. 47

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Knowledge about medicine was perceived by some monastic communities as not only an important practical tool, but also an intrinsic aspect of the learning required to pursue the religious life. This approach to medical knowledge is demonstrated by the production of manuscript miscellanies in which medical material sits alongside theological and liturgical texts. The volume from Bury St. Edmunds that includes the Articella, for example, also contains sermons, theological excerpts, and prayers.53 Similarly, the monastic community of Muchelney in England possessed a breviary that included a Regimen sanitatis describing how to lead a healthy life, and works on diet and pestilence.54 Such miscellanies exemplify the extent to which care of the body and of the soul were closely intertwined, and suggest that medical learning was not necessarily a distinct category of knowledge in monastic communities. In contrast to male houses, only a tiny handful of medical books survive from female monastic communities, despite the evident interest of female religious in knowledge and learning about the care of the body.55 While religious women played an important role in the practical care of the sick in hospitals and leprosaria, only two female medical writers, Trota of Salerno (fl. first half of the twelfth century) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–​1179), are known from the central Middle Ages. Nonetheless, these were two very significant authors. Trota practiced medicine in the flourishing medical center at Salerno and wrote a work known as the Practica, as well as making an important contribution to the Trotula, a widely transmitted collection of texts on women’s medicine. The Trotula’s title indeed reflects Trota’s name.56 Hildegard of Bingen, who established a new female monastery at Rupertsberg in 1150, is well known for her medical learning, alongside her other intellectual activities. Probably between 1151 and 1158, she composed a practical work, the Physica, which describes the medicinal properties of different elements of the natural world (birds, fish, plants, trees, stones, and so on).57 During the same period, she wrote a more theoretical text,

Wellcome Collection, MS 801a. Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 279. 55 Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-​ Modern Gynaecology (Oxford, 2008), 130. 56 Ibid., viii–​ix and 58–​62. 57 Melitta Weiss Adamson, “A Reevaluation of Saint Hildegard’s Physica in Light of the Latest Manuscript Finds,” in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. Margaret R. Schleissner (New York, 1995), 58–​9 and 74–​5, no. 25; Florence Eliza Glaze, “Medical Writer: ‘Behold the Human Creature’,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 132. 53

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the Causes and Cures, which outlines the causes of diseases and the necessary remedies, as well as discussing sexuality, physiology, and prognosis.58 Hildegard’s medical works reveal that she both had access to Latin medical texts, and composed her own texts in an original manner.59 While her example reveals that it was possible for a religious woman to make an important contribution to medical knowledge in the twelfth century, it is also evident that she was exceptional. In numerous instances, male and female religious were recognized within and outside the monastery as expert medical practitioners, revealing that they did not simply read medical texts, but also put their learning into practice.60 Prior to the advent of medical education in the universities in the thirteenth century, the descriptor medicus (or medica) broadly denoted book learning and experience in medical matters, rather than necessarily signifying that a person had pursued a formal course of study in the field. Conciliar legislation in the 1130s sought to prevent religious from generating income from their medical activities, suggesting that their medical role was recognized, and was a key aspect of their engagement with lay society.61 In monasteries with major healing shrines, it was no doubt advantageous for religious to possess medical knowledge. The account of the miracles of Thomas Becket compiled by the monk William of Canterbury in the 1170s reveals that William had extensive knowledge of medicine, which he may have acquired before he joined the community at Christ Church, Canterbury.62 Yet religious with medical expertise were also present in smaller, more run-​of-​the-​mill communities, corresponding with the ownership of medical books by such communities, discussed above. At the Augustinian chapter of Saint-​Mellon at Pontoise in northern France, for example, an archiepiscopal visitation in May 1268 found that a medicus, Master Robert of Attrabate, was one of only two canons in residence.63





Glaze, “Medical Writer,” 131; Kenneth F. Kitchell and Irven M. Resnick, “Hildegard as a Medieval ‘Zoologist’: The Animals of the Physica,” in Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. Maud Burnett McInerney (New York, 1998), 27. 59 Glaze, “Medical Writer,” 125 and 133–​4. 60 Skinner, Health and Medicine, 129. 61 Darrel W. Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Baltimore, MD, 1996), 227–​ 8; Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 173; Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate:  Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), 183. 62 Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate,  181–​4. 63 Bonnin, Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis, 603; Brown and O’Sullivan Register of Eudes,  694–​5. 58

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Conclusion Monastic communities in medieval western Europe fulfilled many different medical roles. At the most fundamental level, community life promoted the health and well-​being of monks and nuns, and provided support for those who became sick or disabled. The monastic way of life therefore valued and supported the bodies of religious, as well as their souls. The infirmary was a space in which the ill and infirm could receive special attention, and where they would not disrupt the regular life of the main community. Monasteries were also key sites for the transmission of ancient medical learning and the development of practical medical expertise. From the later eleventh century, monastic or semi-​monastic institutions that were specifically dedicated to the care of the sick and disabled, providing primarily for the sick poor or the leprous, were also founded. These hospitals and leprosaria catered for the laity, and were sometimes managed by the newer religious orders, especially the Augustinians and the Cistercians, or by semi-​religious lay brothers and sisters. Religious women played a major role in caring for the sick at such institutions, and often possessed considerable medical knowledge. In all these different institutional contexts, a major emphasis was placed on the care of the souls of the sick, and on the manner in which the pious activities of those who were suffering physically could benefit the souls of others. Furthermore, certain medical interventions, above all bloodletting, were believed to promote the health of the body and the soul simultaneously. It is inappropriate to consider medicine in isolation from the other activities of monastic communities, above all their religious mission. Indeed, both the religious and the laity at this time situated their understanding of sickness, disability, and medicine within the much broader framework of their relationship with God, in this world and in the world to come.

Bibliography Banham, Debby. “Medicine at Bury in the Time of Abbot Baldwin.” In Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, edited by Tom Licence, 226–​46. Woodbridge, 2014. Bériou, Nicole, and François-​Olivier Touati, eds. Voluntate dei leprosus. Les lépreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIème et XIIIème siècles. Spoleto, 1991. Biller, Peter, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge, 2001. Bowers, Barbara S., ed. The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice. Aldershot, 2007. Brenner, Elma. “Medical Knowledge and Practice at Le Bec, c. 1050–​c. 1300.” In A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–​13th Centuries), edited by Benjamin Pohl and Laura L. Gathagan, 310–​20. Leiden, 2018.

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Medical Role of Monasteries Brodman, James William. Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe. Washington, DC, 2009.   Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. Philadelphia, PA, 1998. Carlin, Martha. “Medieval English Hospitals.” In The Hospital in History, edited by Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter, 21–​39. London, 1989. Cristiani, Riccardo. “Integration and Marginalization: Dealing with the Sick in Eleventh-​ Century Cluny.” In From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, edited by Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, 287–​95. Turnhout, 2005. Gasper, Giles E. M. “‘A Doctor in the House’? The Context for Anselm of Canterbury’s Interest in Medicine with Reference to a Probable Case of Malaria.” JMH 30 (2004): 245–​61. Gilchrist, Roberta. Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism. London, 1995. Glaze, Florence Eliza. “Medical Writer:  ‘Behold the Human Creature’.” In Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, edited by Barbara Newman, 125–​48. Berkeley, CA, 1998. Green, Monica H. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-​ Modern Gynaecology. Oxford, 2008. Harvey, Barbara. Living and Dying in England, 1100–​1540: The Monastic Experience. Oxford, 1993. Montford, Angela. Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Aldershot, 2004. O’Tool, Mark P. “The Povres Avugles of the Hôpital des Quinze-​Vingts:  Disability and Community in Medieval Paris,” in Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France, edited by Meredith Cohen and Justine Firnhaber-​Baker, 157–​74. Farnham, 2010. Rawcliffe, Carole. “Communities of the Living and of the Dead: Hospital Confraternities in the Later Middle Ages.” In Hospitals and Communities, 1100–​1960, edited by Christopher Bonfield, Jonathan Reinarz, and Teresa Huguet-​Termes, 125–​54. Oxford, 2013.   Medicine for the Soul: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital. St Giles’s, Norwich, c. 1249–1550. Stroud, 1999. Touati, François-​Olivier. “‘Aime et fais ce que tu veux’:  les chanoines réguliers et la révolution de la charité au Moyen Âge.” In Les chanoines réguliers. Émergence et expansion (XIe–​XIIIe siècle). Actes du sixième colloque international du CERCOR, Le Puy en Velay, 29 juin–1er juillet 2006, edited by Michel Parisse, 159–​210. Saint-​Étienne, 2009.   Yves de Chartes (1040–​1115). Aux origines de la révolution hospitalière médiévale. Paris, 2017.

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East-​Central European Monasticism: Between East and West? E m il ia Ja m ro ziak The history of monasticism in the core areas of east-​central Europe, cannot be properly considered without adopting a broader historiographical approach to this part of the continent. The medieval kingdoms and duchies that are the precursors of the modern political entities of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary do not reflect their medieval territories. Medieval Hungary also included Slovakia, Transylvania, Vojvodina, eastern Slavonia, and, from the early twelfth century, the kingdom of Croatia under the personal union of Arpad kings. Early medieval Polish territory included Greater and Lesser Poland, Mazovia, Lower Silesia, and, from the mid-​twelfth century, some overlordship over parts of Pomerania. The territory of early medieval Bohemia also included Moravia. In the most basic terms, the European monastic landscape has traditionally been described in terms of core and periphery. According to this interpretative approach, the later formation of ecclesiastical structures in the peripheral part of Europe meant that monasticism in these areas was always merely a copy of the models developed in the core of western Europe. Jerzy Kłoczowski championed a more sophisticated version of this concept, evoking a “Younger Europe,” which includes the “new Christian” territories of east-​central Europe and Scandinavia. Many western European phenomena arrived there after a long delay, and, although modelled on the structures and ideas developed in the West, often appeared in a simpler or otherwise altered version. Kłoczowski sees the thirteenth century as the turning point in the “Occidentalizing” of the regions of “new Christendom,” and religious communities played a significant role in this process.1 Jenő Szőcs offers another interpretative model, evoking “Three Europes.” Here, east-​central areas comprise what he called a “third Europe,” which,

Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa. Europa Środkowo-​ Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza (Warsaw, 2003), 72–​82.

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while distinct, shared some features of the “first” (the West), and the “second Europe” (the Byzantine world). Szőcs’s terminology was not intended to evoke value judgments, but rather to provide a more holistic explanation of medieval Europe’s economic and political development, in order to avoid simplistic dichotomy and to show how this medieval phase shaped the later history of the entire continent. This interpretation also provides an alternative to sharply binary images of “the East” and “the West”—​creating a very distinct region “in between” both—​important in the political context of the formulation of Szőcs’s theory. This model can be also used to elucidate aspects of Church organization and of religious culture in east-​central Europe and in the West that are both similar and different, and as such is still valuable.2 Unfortunately, despite the existence of these models, in practice, much of the east-​central European scholarship has suffered from an exceptionalism complex: the notion that the history of this part of Europe is unique and can neither be compared with the West nor be explained by the historiographical models developed elsewhere. With few notable exceptions, there is still relatively little research on the monastic and medieval religious history of this part of the continent in the Anglophone world.3 All of this has tended to prevent wider dialogue. If comparisons are made, the outdated interpretive models are too frequently relegated to the area less known to the author and are thus rather unhelpfully given a new lease on life. Additionally, much of the debate in the region, especially surrounding the early stages of monasticism in east-​central Europe, has focused on the factual issues—​the dating of specific documents, locations of events, and so on—​based on evidence that is so fragmentary that definitive conclusions can never be reached.

The Emergence of Monasticism in East-​Central Europe The arrival of monasticism in east-​central Europe was an integral part of Christianization according to the Latin rite in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Bohemian and Hungarian rulers established monasteries at the time of their own conversion, and the first religious houses appeared in Poland somewhat later, following a pattern very similar to that in east Francia and Denmark.4 In all three cases, however, Christians, including missionary

Jenő Szűcs, Les trois Europes, trans. V. Charaire, G. Klaniczay, and P. Thureau-​Dangin (Paris, 1985; first published in Hungarian 1982). Notable exceptions include Gábor Klaniczay, József Laszlovszky, Nora Berend, Piotr Górecki, and Paul Milliman. 4 See the article by Raajimakers in volume 1. 2 3

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monks, were present long before the first monasteries were founded.5 Further south, other Slavs—​Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, and Dalmatians—​were subject to either Byzantine influences or the Latin tradition or both, the Croats and Dalmatians since the eighth and ninth centuries. Although missionaries associated with the monks Cyril (d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) had already implemented Slavonic observance in Bohemia and Moravia in the ninth century, with probable use of Slavonic liturgy, later Latin missions from the Carolingian Empire and Rome subjugated this cultural influence from the Byzantine world.6 This does not mean, however, that Slavonic influence should be ignored, even though the source evidence is perilously thin. Moreover, any discussions of the Byzantine or Latin historical roots of east-​central Europe have been deeply politicized since the nineteenth century. Any claims for the particular importance of either Orthodox or Latin influence have also been statements about contemporary political and cultural alliances. Since the second half of the twentieth century, scholars have generally emphasized the Latin identity of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, so that the connections to the Byzantine world are seen now as marginal. Much of the earlier evidence for the importance of Eastern influences in Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland, introduced by nineteenth-​century archaeologists, is now mostly discredited, while more recent scholarship on the Slavonic texts from the region tends to focus on the historical linguistics without making any wider claims. Nevertheless, there is evidence for non-​Latin monastic institutions in Bohemia and Hungary, as will be discussed below. Even before the establishment of the first monasteries in east-​central Europe, the monks there played an important role. Some of the first bishops and martyrs of the region were missionary monks. The missionary Bishop Unger of Poznań (consecrated in 982/​3) was a monk who had served as abbot of Memleben, a foundation of Otto II (r. 973–83) and his wife, Theophanu (d. 990), in Thuringia. The first communities of monks were probably associated in the earliest period with these missionary bishops, assisting them and training priests from within the local community.7 This is exemplified by Maurice (d. c. 1070), the first bishop in Hungary to be recruited locally, who was consecrated in 1036 after studying in a monastic school, possibly at Pannonhalma Abbey.

Nora Berend, Przemysław Urbańczyk, and Przemysław Wiszewski. Central Europe in the High Middle Ages: Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, c. 900–​c.1300 (Cambridge, 2013), 349. 6 Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa, 36. 7 See also the article by Raajimakers in volume 1. 5

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The first regular monastic communities were a result of the arrival of foreign missionaries, and, increasingly, the participation of local newcomers. Even very radical ideas such as eremitism were successfully planted and soon began to flourish locally.8 Two monks from Pereum near Ravenna, Benedict and John, arrived in Poland in 1001 and were joined there by three Polish recruits, Isaac, Matthew, and the cook Christianus. The invitation came from the Polish duke, but the choice of Ravenna as the origin of the first monks is often attributed to the influence of Emperor Otto III (r. 996–​1002), who had visited Gniezno the year before. They settled in a hermitage that Duke Bolesław Chrobry (d. 1025) granted to them in a location sometimes identified as Międzyrzecz (an identification that is much disputed). They were all killed by robbers in November 1003 and subsequently venerated as martyrs.9 The hagiography of these Five Brothers was written by another monk-​missionary, Bruno-​Boniface (d. 1009), whose fieldwork included Magyar tribes around the Black Sea, non-​Christians in Sweden, and finally Poland, where he also wrote the Life of St Vojtěch/​Wojciech discussed below. He himself was eventually martyred during his mission to the northeast of Poland.10 By the mid-​eleventh century, the earliest monasteries in Poland emerged from individual monks or semi-​formal groups. Typically, the first monasteries in the region followed the Benedictine Rule (RB) and were royal and ducal foundations, routinely established in close proximity to the founders’ stronghold. The archaeological evidence, however, is tenuous, best documented in Kraków, where such men might have served in the oldest church, of St. Gereon. Tyniec Abbey (f. c.  1044)  was founded by Duke Kazimierz the Restorer (1016–​58) and his son King Bolesław the Generous (c. 1042–​1081/​2) near the ducal residence in Kraków. The first abbot, Aaron (d. 1059), went on to become bishop of Kraków. Mogilno (f. c. 1060) and Lubiń (f. c. 1076), also founded by Bolesław the Generous, were similarly positioned.11 In Bohemia, all early foundations following the RB were established within the Přemyslid dynasty’s domain, on lands directly controlled by the ruling family and supported by incomes from the monarchs’ revenue.12 Many early

Marina Miladinov, Margins of Solitude: Eremitism in Central Europe between East and West (Zagreb, 2008), 18. Józef Dobosz, Monarchia i możni wobec Kościoła w Polsce do początku XIII wieku (Poznań, 2002), 79–​84; Miladinov, Margins of Solitude, 94–​114. 10 Jerzy Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity (Cambridge, 2000), 14. 11 Berend, Urbańczyk, and Wiszewski, Central Europe in the High Middle Ages, 123. 12 Petr Sommer, “Early Medieval Monasteries in Bohemia,” in 25 Years of Archaeological Research in Bohemia, Památky Archeologické:  Supplémentum I, ed. Jan Fridrich (Prague, 1994), 206–​11. 8 9

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monasteries were located on older strongholds: Ostrov (f. 1000), Hradiště outside Olomouc (f. 1070s), Rajhrad (f. mid-​eleventh century) and Postoloprty (f. 1110s).13 King Stephen I of Hungary (r. 1000/​1–​1038) founded monasteries following the RB in Pécsvárad, Zalavár (on the site of an older stronghold), Bakonybél, Somlóvárhely, and Zobor.14 The involvement of royal and ducal families in the region was not restricted to the roles of founder and benefactor. Members of the newly Christianized dynasties themselves entered these communities. The Bohemian princess Mlada-​Maria (d. after 983), daughter of Bolesław I the Cruel (r. after 935–​967/​ 72), founded the women’s monastery of St. George in Prague and became its first abbess. Her sister, Dobrava, was the wife of the first Christian ruler of Poland, and their brother, Strahkvas-​Christian, was a monk at St. Emmeram in Regensburg, an abbey that produced a number of monk-​missionaries sent to Slavic lands. The female community of St. George in Prague became very much a family foundation and in the later centuries continued to be ruled by abbesses from the Přemyslid dynasty.15 Such a close connection is inseparable from the key commemorative functions played by these foundations.16 Their relationships with the founders and their descendants are documented by surviving libri vitae, such as that from Lubiń Abbey in western Poland, the burial site of several Piast dukes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.17 The royal and ducal foundations in east-​central Europe thus followed the Ottonian model of a proprietary church in which monasteries served as necropolises for kin, and the monks were intercessors for the fate of the benefactors’ souls in the afterlife. The monasteries themselves were closely dependent on and controlled by the kin-​ group from which the founder came.





Lisa Wolverton, Hastening Towards Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 32, 116, and 123. 14 Nora Berend, József Laszlovszky, and Béla Zsolt Szakács, “The Kingdom of Hungary,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy:  Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c.  900–​1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge, 2007), 352; Berend, Urbańczyk, and Wiszewski, Central Europe in the High Middle Ages, 107. 15 Kłoczowski, History of Polish Christianity, 10; Petr Sommer, Dušan Třeštík, and Josef Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” in Berend, Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy, 238. 16 See also the article by Blennemann in volume 1 and the article by Lyon in this volume. 17 Zdzisław Perzanowski, ed. (Księga Bracka i Nekrolog opactwa Panny Marii w Lubiniu (Liber fraternitatis et Liber mortuorum abbatiae Sanctae Mariae Lubinensis), Warsaw, 1976); Zofia Kurnatowska, “Opactwo Benedyktynów w Lubiniu i jego rola w życiu kulturalnym i społecznym we wczesnym średniowieczu,” Zeszyty Lubińskie. Numer Specjalny 6 (1997), www.benedyktyni.net/​node/​31 (date of last access: 3 May 2019). 13

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The Growing Network of Patrons This close proprietary relationship between monasteries and their patrons was not only present in the early stages of their history but continued for centuries. This was made manifest in the treating of monasteries as economic assets and their use as regular stopover points on the itineraries of the monarchs. The latter phenomenon is particularly striking in the relationship of Czech Přemyslid rulers to various monasteries in the thirteenth century. The monasteries of Plasy (Cistercian men), Klaudruby (black monks), Tepla (Premonstratensian men), and Chotešov (Premonstratensian women) were frequently on the itinerary of King Václav I  of Bohemia (r. 1226–​53). Moreover, some Cistercian monasteries in Bohemia were located very close to royal hunting reserves; such was the case for Plasy (already mentioned) and Aula Regis, founded by King Přemysl Otakar II in 1268 on the site of a fortified hunting lodge.18 By the first decades of the twelfth century, the Piast, Přemyslid, and Arpad monarchs were not the only founders and benefactors of monastic institutions. Increasingly, lay magnates, both male and female, also became involved in this process.19 By the late eleventh or early twelfth century, Sieciech (d. after 1100), who was the count palatine of the Polish Duke Władysław Herman (d. 1102), together with his kin, founded a large male monastery on his estates in Sieciechowo.20 Piotr Włostowic (d. 1153), count of Silesia, was a prolific founder of churches and monasteries, including an abbey of black monks in Ołbin on the edge of Wrocław, in the 1120s (later to become a Premonstratensian house at the behest of its patrons).21 He was probably supported in his endeavors by his wife, as illustrated by a reference on the tympanum of another church of the regular canons in Wrocław-​ Piasek founded by the family. A stone inscription explains that Maria made the donation together with her son Świętosław.22 Jaksa (d. 1176), who married Piotr and Maria’s daughter Agafia, founded the Holy Sepulcher monastery

Marcin R. Pauk, “Klasztor jako zaplecze ekonomiczne władzy królewskiej w państwie ostatnich Przemyślidów,” in Klasztor w państwie średniowiecznym i nowożytnym, ed. Marek Derwich and Anna Pobóg-​Lenartowicz (Wrocław, 2005), 227–​31. 19 Dobosz, Monarchia i możni, 250–​1; Sommer, Třeštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” 247. 20 Dobosz, Monarchia i możni, 260. 21 Marek Derwich, Monasticism benedyktyński w średniowiecznej Europie i Polsce. Wybrane problemy (Wrocław, 1998), 194. 22 Kazimierz Ciechanowski, Epigrafika romańska i wczesnognogotycka w Polsce (Wrocław, 1965), 22; Emanuel S. Klinkenberg, Compressed Meanings: The Donor’s Model in Medieval Art to around 1300 (Turnhout, 2009), 191. 18

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in Miechowo for the regular canons of the Holy Sepulcher. The choice of order was not accidental as it was made following Jaksa’s pilgrimage in 1162 to the Holy Land, which was recorded in several contemporary chronicles.23 There is further evidence that, in the generation of the grandchildren of Piotr Włostowic and Maria, the tradition of generous benefaction to the family’s foundations continued. Similarly, the first male Premonstratensian and Cistercian houses in Bohemia were founded by magnates:  Hroznata the Bold (d. 1217)  was the founder of Teplá (1197) and, upon his return from crusade, Chotěšov (1220–​ 10); Miroslav (fl. c. 1142), “one of the leading men of Bohemia,”24 with the support of Bishop Jindřich Zdík of Olomouc (d. 1150), founded the Cistercian Sedlec Abbey (1142–​3); Osek Abbey (1197–​9) was founded by Slavek of the Hrabišice family (d. 1226). In Moravia, Vladislav Jindřich (d. 1222) established the Cistercian abbey in Veligrad in the 1140s.25 It is not an accident that the oldest surviving charter issued by a non-​royal lay person in Polish territory recorded a donation to the canons of Czerwińsk (1130–​55).26 Premonstratensian canonesses also benefited from this interest in new monasticism and were supported by powerful patrons and benefactors whose female relatives inhabited these communities: in Bohemia, in Louňovice pod Blaníem (f. 1149) and Dolní Kounice (f. 1181); in Moravia, in Nová Řiše (f. 1211); and in Poland, in Kraków-​Salwator (f. post 1165, but the chronology is much disputed), Strzelno (f. 1193), Żukowo (f. 1212), and Imbramowice (f. 1223). As with the princely foundations, some of the relationships between monasteries and the kin-​g roup of the patrons were very long-​lasting. This can be illustrated by the example of the monastery of Zselicszentjakab, founded in 1061 by Otto (d. after 1066), count palatine of King Salomon of Hungary (r. 1063–​74). Zselicszentjakab remained under the patronage of his descendants, the Győr kindred, until the fifteenth century. The scale of material support offered by the powerful magnate founders is clearly visible in the size and grandeur of the Romanesque monastic churches in Lébény or Ják. Some



Dobosz, Monarchia i możni,  371–​2. Gustav Friedrich, ed., Codex diplomaticus et epistolaris regni Bohemiae (Prague, 1907), vol. 1, no 155; Wolverton, Hastening Towards Prague, 51. 25 Sommer, Třeštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” 247; Wolverton, Hastening Towards Prague, 47 and 117. 26 Anna Adamska, “ ‘From Memory to Written Record’ in the Periphery of Medieval Latinitas: The Case of Poland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout, 2000), 88; Repertorium polskich dokumentów doby piastowskiej (Kraków, 1937), no. 56. 23

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founders were also commemorated on the tympana, as the Silesian case exemplifies.27 The foundations of these magnates were part of a distinct second wave of monastic foundations that came with the emergence of Cistercian houses in east-​central Europe, beginning in the 1140s. The spread of these new monasteries manifests the further densification of the monastic network, as well as the existence of strong connections to the Church in other parts of Europe. The appearance of Cistercian houses with ties of filiation beyond the region also provided an important new channel of transmission of ideas, knowledge, and manuscripts.28 The connection of the Přemyslids and the Piasts to the Babenberg family was one of the routes through which inspiration for Cistercian foundations might have traveled. The Babenberg Margrave Leopold III and his wife, Sophia, founded the Cistercian abbey of Stična (Sittich) in the territory of modern-​day Slovenia. The margrave was also behind the foundation of Heiligenkreuz Abbey (1135/​6) in Austria, one of the key Cistercian centers in central Europe. Two of the daughters of Leopold III married Přemyslid and Piast rulers: Agnes (d. 1163) was the wife of Władysław II the Exiled, duke of Poland (d. 1159); Gertrud (d. 1150) married Vladislav II, duke and king of Bohemia (d. 1174). They thus brought with them connections to the growing Cistercian network. In Polish territories, the oldest houses were Jędrzejów (f. 1149) in Little Poland and Łekno (f. 1153) in Greater Poland, which became mother houses at the center of large regional networks. Sedlec (f. 1142/​5) in Bohemia and Cikádor (f. 1142) in the kingdom of Hungary became regionally important institutions. Cikádor was a royal foundation of King Géza II (r. 1141–​62) and a daughter house of Heiligenkreuz, but it never established any further daughter houses. The second wave of Cistercian foundations in Hungary was also linked to the influence of the royal court and the new direction of cultural influences at the court linked to the marriage of Béla III (r. 1172–​96) to French princesses: Agnes of Antioch (d. c. 1184) and then Margaret (d. 1197), the sister of King Philip Augustus of France (r. 1180–​1223).29 Cistercian monasteries were attractive to founders, not because of allegedly better economic practices or the technological superiority of their agriculture as traditionally argued in the literature, but because of the cultural

Pál Engel, The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–​1526, ed. Andrew Ayton and trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi (London, 2001), 87 and 92. See the article by Röckelein in this volume. 29 Beatrix Romhányi, “The Role of the Cistercians in Medieval Hungary: Political Activity or Internal Colonization?” Annual of Medieval Studies at the CEU 1 (1995): 180–​204. 27

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capital that the monks brought with them.30 The nationalist historiography of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth advanced the idea that Cistercians, as proponents of economic and technological changes in the “backward East,” were also emissaries of a superior German culture. The new wave of economic history in the 1960s and ’70s readily attributed an economic rationale to the white monks and presented them as proto-​ capitalist entrepreneurs.31 The cultural capital attractive to both the local church and the lay elites—​the knowledge that new communities brought with them, manuscripts, skills, new liturgical practices, the designs of their precinct and churches, and ideas about the role of monks within the Church and society—​were crucial for the place that these communities secured in the new host areas. The economic role of Cistercian houses in different localities was undoubtedly significant, but one should be wary of oversimplifications and of projecting the Western Cistercian economic model on these regions. The Cistercians’ successful economic endeavors, their estates and granges, often followed much more mixed patterns than white monks’ monasteries in western Europe. For example, Cistercian houses in Bohemia operated a grange system with manorial elements; while lay brothers had a largely managerial role (often with specialization in livestock or in a particular aspect of agriculture such as viniculture), they also supervised various types of laborers, including serfs. Many granges produced both for the market and for internal monastic consumption, and storage facilities within the granges held not only the produce of the farms but taxes paid in kind by the serfs.32 In Pomerania, Cistercian houses were often very large and powerful landowners economically dominating their neighbors.33 In sparsely populated areas, including, for example, the frontier between Silesia and the duchy of Greater Poland, colonization was carried out according to the ius Tutonicum—​“German law,” used in the areas of migration in east-​central Europe—​which encouraged settlement. But the white monks were far from the only landowners involved in attracting settlers. Only

See the article by Berman in this volume. Emilia Jamroziak, Survival and Success on Medieval Borders: Cistercian Houses in Medieval Scotland and Pomerania from the Twelfth to Late Fourteenth Century (Turnhout, 2011); and Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe 1090–​1500 (London, 2013). 32 Kateřina Charvátowa, “Manorial Farms of Cistercian Abbeys of Mediaeval Bohemia,” in Historia i kultura cystersów w dawnej Polsce i ich europejskie związki, ed. Jerzy Strzelczyk (Poznań, 1987), 127–​35. 33 Krzysztof Guzikowski, Procesy kolonizacyjne w posiadłościach cystersów z Kołbacza w XII–​ XIV wieku. Przestrzeń i ludzie (Szczecin, 2014).

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11  percent of all colonized land was in the hands of Cistercian communities.34 Among the Cistercian abbeys in Bohemia, only Zlatá Koruna Abbey was involved in the large-​scale colonization of its estates.35 Without denying the importance of Cistercians houses in the regional economy, neither their arrival in east-​central Europe nor the support they received from the local elites was linked to their technological and economical skills. It was rather their religious role as intercessors that appealed to their new founders and benefactors. The Cistercians offered the promise of effective intercession and the opportunity to engage in the highly prestigious act of becoming a founder—​by this stage a well-​established phenomenon in east-​central Europe. It was easier to found a reformed community as it required fewer resources than a monastery following the RB; such large traditional houses had been part of the landscape for over a century. The Cistercian monasteries emphasized strictness of observance and exclusivity in admitting lay people into monastic spaces, thus making their foundations appear to wield special intercessory powers. The founders were also attracted to their trans-​European connections, support by the local episcopate, and royal and ducal backing. Of course, the white monks offered what the new founders and benefactors wanted from any monastic institutions and developed fruitful relationships with them. Many Cistercian houses in the region became dynastic necropolises, places of commemoration, and important locations on the monarchs’ itineraries. These functions, akin to that of the “Hauskloster” (a proprietary monastery), and especially the role of family mausoleum, have been associated partly with the tradition passed down from the Babenbergs and the desire not just for effective intercession for the afterlife, but also for prayers for effective political and military endeavors.36 The Cistercian communities in east-​central Europe are the best examples of the adaptability of the Cistercian





Józef Dobosz and Andrzej M. Wyrwa, “Działalność gospodarcza cystersów na ziemiach polskich: zarys problemu,” in Monasticon Cisterciense Poloniae, ed. Andrzej Marek Wyrwa, Jerzy Strzelczyk, and Krzysztof Kaczmarek, vol. 1 (Poznań, 1999), 206. 35 Katerina Charvátová, “Mindful of Reality, Faithful to Traditions:  Development of Bohemian Possessions of the Cistercian Order from the Twelfth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” in L’espace cistercien, ed. Léon Pressouyre (Paris, 1994), 181. 36 Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Cystersi w Europe Środkowowschodniej wieków średnich,” in Cystersi w społeczeństwie Europy Środkowej, ed. Andrzej M. Wyrwa and Józef Dobosz (Poznań, 2000), 32–​3; Brygida Kürbis, “Cystersi w kulturze polskiego średiowiecza. Trzy świadectwa z XII wieku,” in Historia i kultura cystersów w dawnej Polsce i ich europejskie związki, ed. Jerzy Strzelczyk (Poznań, 1987), 338.

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model to different local environments while retaining the core of their identity: their observance.37 Importantly, some Cistercians were also missionaries on the very frontiers of east-​central Europe. They were present along the Baltic from Mecklenburg to Riga, and possibly took part in the missions to Ruthenia to convert the Orthodox population in the 1140s.38 It seems, however, that the prospective mission of the white monks never moved beyond the planning stages, in which Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Bishop Matthew of Kraków (d. 1166)  were involved.39 Christian (d. 1245), a Cistercian monk from Kołbacz Abbey and later abbot of Oliva Abbey, became a missionary bishop in Prussia. After clashing with the Teutonic Knights over the issue of authority, he ended up imprisoned by pagan Sambians for five years.40 The presence of the military orders was indeed a distinct feature of the northeastern edge of the region, in Prussia and the Baltic, and it influenced the growth of monasticism in these regions. The Teutonic Knights, the Brothers of the Sword in Livonia, and the Order of Dobrzyń were either invited (as was the case at first with the Teutonic Knights) or established by local religious authorities. Bishop Albert of Riga (d. 1229) introduced the Brothers of the Sword in 1202 and Bishop Christian of Oliva, the missionary bishop of Prussia, the Order of Dobrzyń in the 1220s. The military orders were envisaged as defenders of neighboring Christian territories against pagans and they participated in crusading efforts through the conquest of Prussia and Livonia. By the thirteenth century, they had become an established feature of the regions’ political, economic, and religious structures, frequently competing with other religious institutions for property and privileges. This competition was detrimental to the attempts of the Cistercian order to establish monasteries in the territory of the Teutonic Knights, while Franciscan and Dominican houses, which did not compete with the Teutonic Knights for the control of the rural economic resources, became a significant feature of Prussian towns and cities along the Baltic coast and further inland.



On relationships between monastic houses and the laity, see the article by Lyon in this volume. 38 For a discussion of monks as missionaries more broadly, see the article by Raaijmakers in volume 1 and the article by Ó Clabaigh in this volume. 39 Teresa Dunin-​Wąsowicz, “Kilka uwag o sprawie działalności misyjnej cystersów na Rusi w XII–​XIII wieku,” in Społeczeństwo Polski Średniowiecznej, vol. 5, ed. Stefan Kuczyński (Warsaw, 1992), 161–​73; Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Die Zisterzienser in Klein-​Polen und das Problem ihrer Tätigkeit als Missionier und Seelsorger,” in Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, ed. Kaspar Elm et al. (Bonn, 1980), 71–​8. 40 Krystyna Zielińska-​Melkowska, “Święty Chrystian-​ Cysters-​ Misyjny Biskup Prus,” Nasza Przeszłość 83 (1994): 35–​44. 37

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Female Communities and Their Patrons While female founders and patrons played a significant role in establishing both male and female houses, this phenomenon remains an under-​studied area of monastic history. Wives of kings, dukes, and major aristocrats were often the decisive force behind monastic foundations and were also founders in their own right. This is particularly visible in Silesia, where political fragmentation and intermarriage with dynasties from the Germanic Empire, Bohemia, and the kingdom of Hungary provided a strong network of powerful patronesses and abbesses supporting monasteries both for men and for women across the region. The emergence of female mendicant houses in east-​central Europe is also credited to female patrons and their family connections. These foundations are particularly important for understanding the history of female mendicant identities and the development of this type of community, which lived according to the tenets of absolute poverty, in the context of dynastic foundation and their intercessory and commemorative role for the kin-​g roup. Prague was at the center of this new web of female mendicant foundations. Agnes (d. 1282), daughter of Ottokar I Přemyslid of Bohemia (d. 1230), was a correspondent of Clare of Assisi (d. 1253), a cousin of St. Elisabeth of Hungary (d. 1231), and a close relative of Hedwig of Silesia (d. 1243), who was a notable founder of the Cistercian monastery of Trzebnica. The foundation of a female community in Prague following the customs of St. Damian, with Agnes as abbess, was an important step in the introduction of female mendicancy to the region;41 this was followed by further foundations by the Piast princesses across the Polish duchies, by the Přemyslids in Bohemia, and by the Árpáds in the kingdom of Hungary. Agnes also established a hospital in Prague, and, in the 1240s, the tertiaries based there evolved into a new order: the Knights of the Cross with the Red Star. Through the same family connections, the order spread from Bohemia to Silesia, and the knights were invited into the area between 1241 and 1246 by Agnes’s sister, Duchess Anna (d. 1265), the widow of Duke Henry the Pious (d. 1241). The Knights of the Cross with the Red Star benefited from the patronage of other Piast rulers, and houses were also established further north in Mazovia and Greater Poland.42 Anna also funded a Clarissan community in Wrocław.

See the article by Andenna in this volume. Maria Sarnawska, “Nekrolog Krzyżowców z Czerwoną Gwiazdą: źródło do poznania środowska zakonu i jego kontaktów,” in Derwich and Pobóg-​Lenartowicz, Klasztor w państwie średniowiecznym i nowożytnym, 211–​12.

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Other relatives of Agnes and Anna established further houses for nuns. Kunegunda (d. 1292), the wife of Bolesław the Chaste (d. 1279), founded a monastery of Poor Clares in Stary Sącz; Bolesław’s sister Salomea (d. 1286)  established a Clarissan house in Zawichost (later moved to Skała); and Kunegunda’s sister Jolenta (d. 1298)  founded a women’s monastery in Gniezno.43 The foundation of fifty women’s communities within Piast territory between 1200 and 1300 was also part of a Europe-​wide upsurge in female monasticism, but the support that these Clarissan houses received from a group of high-​powered women across the region is truly remarkable.44 As noted above, mendicant female communities, and especially Clarissan houses, were important in Silesia, the Polish kingdom, Bohemia, and the kingdom of Hungary, and not just because of their close connection to royal women. The influence of Franciscan spirituality extended much farther, by influencing aristocratic piety. The mendicants were also behind the hagiographical commemoration of many holy women from the Piast, Přemyslid and Arpad dynasties who were founders, patrons, and abbesses of female mendicant houses, and they supported the cults of Salomea and Kunegunda (respectively sister and wife of Bolesław the Chaste), Hedwig of Silesia, Anna and her sister of Agnes of Prague, and Elisabeth of Hungary, sister of Béla IV, as well as his daughters, Margaret, Kunegunda, and Jolenta. In these cults, the tradition of dynastic sainthood was combined with the ideals of apostolic poverty and renunciation, showing that these concepts were not seen as contradictory to contemporary audiences. The vitae of these women also demonstrate how strong the regional monastic tradition had become. Moreover, the east-​central European milieu had produced figures whose cults spread across the continent.45



Kłoczowski, History of Polish Christianity, 43. Ibid., 40. 45 Dariusz Karczewski, Franciszkanie w monarchii Piastów i Jagiellonów w średniowieczu. Powstanie  –​rozwój  –​organizacja wewnętrzna (Kraków, 2012), 22–​ 3 and 26; Hanna Krzyżostaniak, Trzynastowieczne święte kobiety kręgu franciszkańskiego Polski i Czech (Poznań, 2014), 250–​80; Gabor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses:  Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Kirsty Day, “Constructing Dynastic Franciscan Identities in Bohemia and the Polish Duchies” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2016); Wojciech Kętrzyński, ed., Vita sanctae Salomeae reginae Halicensis auctore Stanislao Franciscano and Vita et miracula sanctae Kyngae ducisse Cracoviensis, in Monumenta Poloniae Historica 4 (Lwów, 1884), 770–​96 and 662–​744; A. Semkowicz, ed., Vita Sanctae Hedvigis and Vita Annae ducisse Silesiae, in Monumenta Poloniae Historica 4 (Lwów, 1884), 501–​655 and 656–​61. 43

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The Cultural Role of Monasticism One of the oldest and most important forms of cultural capital that monasticism brought into the region was the cults of saints, first introduced by the missionary monks and visible in the oldest layer of church dedications. The emergence of the first local saints, including the bishop of Prague and martyr St. Vojtěch (Wojciech in Polish, also known by the Latinized name Adalbert; d. 997), was an important step in the process of the formation of regional religious identities. Vojtěch/​Wojciech was patron of the developing Polish kingdom under the Piasts. By the early twelfth century, he was also venerated as the patron of the diocese of Prague, and in Hungary as a mythical missionary who baptized King Stephen I.46 These cults were often supported and developed through hagiography, dedications, and the commissioning of images by monastic communities. The first Cistercian monastery within the Polish territory, in Jędzejów (f. c. 1149), was dedicated both to St. Vojtěch/​Wojciech and to the Virgin Mary.47 The shrines of many regional saints and imported “universal” saints were under the care of monks and nuns. From the thirteenth century on, many monastic churches secured indulgences, just like their western counterparts, further boosting their attractiveness as pilgrimage destinations. The Cistercian nuns of Trzebnica, the guardians of the shrine of their founder, St. Hedwig, secured sixteen individual letters of indulgence in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Premonstratensian Abbey of St. Vincent in Wrocław, which possessed a large collection of relics, secured as many as twenty-​nine such documents.48 The formation of subsequent layers of local saints’ cults was an important part of the process of adaptation of the monastic communities to the regional context. The production of local heroes provided a means of bonding for the religious communities and their environment, and helped to create important places of devotional focus.





Gerard Labuda, Świety Wojciech. Biskup-​ męczennik, patron Polski, Czech i Węgier (Wrocław, 2000); Marie Bláhová, “Bohemian Historical Writing,” in The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000–​1300), ed. Lars Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen, 2006), 85–​7; Sommer, Třeštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” 235. 47 Andrzej Wyrwa, Jerzy Strzelczyk, and Krzysztof Kaczmarek, eds., Monasticon Cisterciense Poloniae. Katalog męskich klasztorów cysterskich na ziemiach polskich i dawnej Rzeczpospolitej, vol. 2 (Poznań, 1999), 90. 48 Roman Stelmach, “Śląskie dokumenty odpustowe do końca XV wieku,” in Derwich and Pobóg-​Lenartowicz, Klasztor w państwie średniowiecznym i nowożytnym, 182 and 187. 46

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In addition to missionary and intercessory work, the new monastic communities played other culturally significant roles that built cultural capital. Monks were frequently employed in the chanceries of Polish, Hungarian, and Bohemian rulers.49 Some of the oldest historical records, such as the annals produced at Břevnov Abbey near Prague in the late tenth century (discussed further below), are products of the monastic milieu. Similarly, the oldest surviving royal charters from the region were issued for ecclesiastical institutions, especially monasteries, as in the case of the privilege of the Hungarian King Stephen I for Pannonhalma Abbey (1001, but surviving in a later interpolation) or Andrew I’s (r. 1046–​66) charter for Tilhany monastery (1055).50 Throughout the region, monasteries continued to function as important centers of textual production of all kinds, including religious, literary, and legal documents. In the kingdom of Hungary, many monasteries also served as loca credibilia (places of authentication), offering a type of notarial service that was often combined with the secure storage of charters, an activity that gave these monasteries particular prominence. Several houses of black monks (Cluj-​Mănăştur, Hronský Beňadik, Pannonhalma, Pécsvárad, Somogyvár, Szekszárd, Zalavár, Zobor), Premonstratensians (Csorna, Jasov, Kláštor pod Znievom, Leles, Šahy), and Knight Hospitallers (Székesfehérvár) were designated as loca credibilia within the kingdom, including in Transylvania and Slavonia.51 Byzantine influence and the presence of the Slavonic rite in the monastic context is a complex issue. Although the Church in east-​central Europe was dominated by Latin culture from the tenth century onward, the monastery of Sázava near Prague continued for a few decades to produce texts in Old Church Slavonic—​a testament not only to the older Christian influences from Byzantium, but also to enduring contacts with Kievan Rus. The abbey was funded by the priest Procopius (d. 1053), later a saint (canonized in 1204 by Innocent III), who was a proponent of the Slavonic liturgy as tool of Christianization. In 1055, with the intervention of Duke Spytihněv II (d. 1061) the monks were expelled and replaced by a group of German black monks who established the Latin liturgy. Upon his succession, King Vratislav II (r. 1085–​92) reinstated the expelled monks and applied, unsuccessfully, to Pope



György Györfy, “Die Anfänge der ungarischen Kanzlei im 11. Jahrhundert,” Archiv 96; Marek Derwich, “Klasztor w państwie:  zarys für Diplomatik 30 (1984):  88–​ problematyki badawczej,” in Derwich and Pobóg-​Lenartowicz, Klasztor w państwie średniowiecznym i nowożytnym, 22. 50 Engel, Realm of St Stephen, 39. 51 Zsolt Hunyadi, “Administering the Law: Hungary’s Loca Credibilia,” in Custom and Law in Central Europe, ed. Martyn Rady (Cambridge, 2003), 30–​1.

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Gregory VII (r. 1073–​85) for permission to perform the Slavonic liturgy in the abbey as a tool of internal mission. Under the pressure of reformers against non-​standard observance, however, the monks were once again expelled in 1096 after Vratislav II’s death and their place taken by another group from Břevnov Abbey who observed the Latin rites.52 The role of intersecting eastern and western influences in religious and monastic culture in Bohemia is preserved not only textually but also in some fragments of early medieval material culture. Pectoral crosses, for example, some of which are directly associated with monastic sites, often show both Byzantine and western stylistic influences.53 In Hungary, a number of Greek monasteries, including a women’s community at Veszprémvölgy founded during the reign of Stephen I, were linked to royal patronage. In the eleventh century, King Andrew I, whose wife was Anastasia, daughter of the grand prince of Kiev, founded additional monasteries following the Greek rite. These monasteries continued to follow the Orthodox rite until the thirteenth century.54 Although the Latin rite triumphed in the region, the influence of the Slavonic tradition did not disappear without a trace. The Slavonic vita of St. Procopius was translated into Latin, probably in the late eleventh century, and his cult was recognized by both Latin and Orthodox Churches. The vital function of historical writing by religious communities must be considered in the wider context of literacy in east-​central Europe. It is not only the events of “national history” that were recorded in many of these texts, but a wide range of information that remains crucial for understanding the place of monastic communities in the local context, with their often complex ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. The beginnings of Bohemian annalistic writing are connected with Břevnov Abbey and the cathedral in Prague.55 In the 1170s, an anonymous monk of Sázava (by then occupied by black monks) produced a chronicle that combined a foundation narrative, gesta of the abbots, extracts from Cosmas of Prague’s Chronicle (the oldest narrative of Czech history, c. 1119–​1125), and a history of the abbey until





Wolverton, Hastening Towards Prague, 134–​5; Friedrich, Codex diplomaticus, no. 81. Kateřina Horníčkova, “Between East and West: Bohemian Reliquary Pectoral Crosses as Testimony to Religious and Cultural Exchange,” in Rome, Constantinople and Newly-​ Converted Europe: Archaeological and Historical Evidence, ed. M. Salamon et al. (Kraków, 2012),  1–​15. 54 Bláhová, “Bohemian Historical Writing,” 87–​ 8 and 106; Sommer, Třeštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” 250; Berend, Laszlovszky, and Szakács, “Kingdom of Hungary,” 353–​4; Berend, Urbańczyk, and Wiszewski, Central Europe in the High Middle Ages, 317–​18 and 357. 55 Bláhová, “Bohemian Historical Writing,” 89. 52 53

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the time of the author. This author had a clear interest in the wider history of Bohemia and its relationship with the empire.56 The oldest narratives of foundations also frequently contain elements of other texts, such as charters that are no longer extant in their original form, and as such have traditionally been valued for the evidence they preserve, especially if they “reveal broader historiographical reference.”57 In addition, they are excellent sources for understanding the changing self-​image of these monastic communities through time. The foundation narrative of Sázava Abbey, for example, created after the community was Latinized, not only incorporated the process of eradication of the non-​standard observances within the narrative of the institutional history, but also preserved traces of older traditions associated with the founder, Procopius, and stressed the importance of the patronage of Bohemian rulers.58 The foundation narrative of Pannonhalma, the oldest house of black monks in Hungary, written in the late 1220s, preserves the text of the foundation charter from 1001/​2 and emphasizes the connection between the community and the Hungarian kings, the founder, Géza, and his son, Stephen I. In fact, the success of King Stephen in crushing a rebellion prior to his coronation was followed by a lavish grant to the abbey as a thanksgiving for its support.59 This is important evidence both of a bond that continued for generations between the early medieval monasteries in east-​central Europe and their ruler-​patrons, and of the role of these communities as repositories of memory and tradition, preserved in written form while also incorporating significant material from oral tradition. Finally, there are types of monastic historical writing that are testimony to the role of male and female communities in their localities and the ways in which it was recorded. The Liber fundationis Claustri Sanctae Martiae Virginis in Henryków (Silesia, f. 1222–​8), created in sections after 1268 and then concluded c.  1310, gives a very detailed description of the landholdings of the abbey, stories of difficulties with neighbors, genealogies of local families, and the monastery’s legal rights to various properties, all of which are intertwined with its commemorative functions. The white monks recorded the linguistic and cultural complexities of the region—​Slavonic and Germanic, and economic and social changes that affected the monastery and its neighbors—​and

Ibid., 107. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 106. 59 László Veszprémy, “Legends and Liturgy,” in The Making of Christian Myths (Copenhagen, 2006), 221. 56

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this text is a vital evidence for the way in which monastic houses functioned as an integral part of local landscape.60

Conclusion Although the history of monasticism and female mendicancy in east-​central Europe is often relegated to the margins of the European historical narrative, these institutions had a significant influence on the region religiously, culturally, socially, and economically. Although they were based on models that arrived from the West, often via the German Empire, these forms of monastic life were not simply poor copies of original forms. Traditional monastic communities, followed by the new orders (Cistercian and Premonstratensian communities), and then by mendicants, both men and women, adapted to the economic structures and particular needs of the local context and played a role in internal and external missions. For lay patrons and benefactors, these institutions provided a key site of commemoration and memorialization of kinship. Religious houses were important for reinforcing group identity, promoting the value of written documents, and producing and preserving texts. Founding a monastery was one of the ways in which the first generation of Christian rulers displayed their new identity, and later generations of magnates shared a model of piety typical of their western counterparts. In this part of the world, we see both the enthusiastic adoption of the proprietary church model and Cistercian monks functioning as missionaries. The monasticism of east-​central Europe clearly belonged to the Latin world, yet was well adapted to this particular regional context.

Bibliography Berend, Nora, ed. Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–​1200. Cambridge, 2007. Berend, Nora, Przemysław Urbańczyk, and Przemysław Wiszewski. Central Europe in the High Middle Ages: Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, c. 900–​c.1300. Cambridge, 2013. Bláhová, Marie. “Bohemian Historical Writing.” In The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000–​1300), edited by Lars Boje Mortensen, 83–​119. Copenhagen, 2006. Derwich, Marek. Monasticism benedyktyński w średniowiecznej Europie i Polsce. Wybrane problemy. Wrocław, 1998.

Piotr Górecki, A Local Society in Transition: The Henryków Book and Related Documents (Toronto, 2007); Piotr Górecki, The Text and the World: The Henryków Book, Its Authors, and Their Region, 1160–​1310 (Oxford, 2015).

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Emilia Jamroziak Derwich, Marek, and Anna Pobóg-​Lenartowicz, eds. Klasztor w państwie średniowiecznym i nowożytnym. Wrocław, 2005. Engel, Pál. The Realm of St Stephen:  A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–​1526, edited by Andrew Ayton and translated by Tamás Pálosfalvi. London, 2001. Górecki, Piotr. A Local Society in Transition:  The Henryków Book and Related Documents. Toronto, 2007.   The Text and the World:  The Henryków Book, Its Authors, and Their Region, 1160–1310. Oxford, 2015. Jamroziak, Emilia. Survival and Success on Medieval Borders:  Cistercian Houses in Medieval Scotland and Pomerania from the Twelfth to Late Fourteenth Century. Turnhout, 2011. Karczewski, Dariusz. Franciszkanie w monarchii Piastów i Jagiellonów w średniowieczu. Powstanie –​rozwój –​organizacja wewnętrzna. Kraków, 2012. Klaniczay, Gabor. Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe. Cambridge, 2002. Kłoczowski, Jerzy. A History of Polish Christianity. Cambridge, 2000.   Młodsza Europa. Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza. Warsaw, 2003. Labuda, Gerard. Świety Wojciech. Biskup-​męczennik, patron Polski, Czech i Węgier. Wrocław, 2000. Miladinov, Marina. Margins of Solitude: Eremitism in Central Europe between East and West. Zagreb, 2008. Romhányi, Beatrix. “The Role of the Cistercians in Medieval Hungary: Political Activity or Internal Colonization?” Annual of Medieval Studies at the CEU 1 (1995): 180–​204. Sommer, Petr. “Early Medieval Monasteries in Bohemia.” In 25 Years of Archaeological Research in Bohemia, Památky Archeologické:  Supplémentum I, edited by Jan Fridrich, 206–​11. Prague, 1994. Wyrwa, Andrzej M., and Józef Dobosz, eds. Cystersi w społeczeństwie Europy Środkowej. Poznań, 2000.

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Monasticism, Colonization, and Ethnic Tension in Late Medieval Ireland Col m á n Ó Cla ba ig h   OSB The period between the mid-​ eleventh and early fourteenth centuries witnessed seismic changes within Irish Church and society.1 From the middle of the eleventh century, reforming prelates, papal legates, and ecclesiastical synods sought to transform Irish Church structures, reinvigorating them along the lines of the Continental movement broadly known as the Gregorian reform. The Irish monastic presence on the Continent, already established from the sixth century onward, experienced a revival, and Irish monasteries in Germany and Italy acted as important conduits for the circulation of ideas, texts, and personnel. The Anglo-​Norman incursion of 1169 initiated a period of rapid conquest, colonization, and consolidation that continued for just over a century. All of these developments had major consequences for Irish monastic and religious life. As Lisa Bitel has noted, the Irish monastic tradition stretched back to the dawn of Irish Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. The earliest Christian text to survive from Ireland, the Confession of St. Patrick, records the presence of virgins and celibates among the first Irish Christians, although little is known of the details of their lifestyle. From the sixth century onward, monasteries played a major role in the artistic, cultural, intellectual, and political life of medieval Ireland, and the surviving monastic rules, whether preserved in Latin or Irish versions, present a picture of a very austere and ascetic lifestyle, an impression confirmed by Irish hagiographical texts. The practice of peregrinatio—​self-​imposed exile for the love of Christ—​meant that the Irish presence was influential in monastic centers right across Britain and continental Europe. Although the early monastic communities in Ireland were relatively uninfluenced by the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), the Irish foundations on



Colmán Ó Clabaigh, “The Church, 1050–​1460,” in The Cambridge History of Ireland, Volume I: 600–​1550, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge, 2018), 355–​84.

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the Continent founded by Columbanus (d. 615) played a seminal role in its transmission.2 The Viking presence in Ireland, first recorded in 795, initially had a disruptive effect on monastic life, but the gradual Christianization of the Hiberno-​Norse settlements in the tenth and eleventh centuries led to increased contact with ecclesiastical reformers in England and elsewhere in Europe. For example, the erection of a cathedral dedicated to the Holy Trinity in Dublin during the reign of King Sitric Silkbeard (deposed 1036), owed much to the involvement of members of the Irish monastic communities in Cologne; until their expulsion by Bishop Samuel in 1096, monks observing the RB formed the cathedral chapter.3 Other important links were forged with sees and monasteries in England, and many of the first bishops of the Hiberno-​Norse sees of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick had either been members of, or were closely associated with, the monasteries at Winchester, Worcester, and St Albans. These links resulted in at least five of these early Hiberno-​Norse bishops taking oaths of obedience to Archbishops Lanfranc (d. 1089) and Anselm (d. 1109) of Canterbury, who regarded them as suffragans, an ecclesiastical toehold that would later contribute to justifying the Anglo-​Norman invasion of Ireland.4

Monasticism and the Twelfth-​Century Transformation of the Irish Church By the eleventh century, the control of many monasteries and ecclesiastical centers had long passed into the hands of hereditary dynasties, and monastic commitment to celibacy and liturgical observance was compromised. The transformation of the Irish Church that occurred in the twelfth century was a local response to the wider reform movement associated with Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–​85). The reform impetus in Ireland found expression in the convocation of ecclesiastical synods. Between 1101 and 1179 the Irish annals record that eleven such meetings were held. Of these, the Synods of Cashel (1101), Ráith Bressail (1111), and Kells/​Mellifont (1152) were particularly significant as they moved the Irish Church into line with Continental norms. These reforms included the reestablishment of territorial dioceses, the reform and

Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, “A Tale of Two Rules:  Benedict and Columbanus,” in The Irish Benedictines: A History, ed. Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh (Dublin, 2005), 11–​24. See also the article by Diem and Rousseau in volume 1. 3 Colmán Ó Clabaigh, “The Benedictines in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland,” in Browne and Ó Clabaigh, Irish Benedictines,  84–​6. 4 Marie Therese Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-​Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford, 1989),  7–​55. 2

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renewal of sacramental discipline, and the introduction of Continental religious orders to reinvigorate monastic life.5 Contacts with Continental ecclesiastical centers played a seminal role in the reform movement. From the late tenth century onwards the Irish annals record several pilgrimages to Rome and other shrines by high-​ ranking Irish pilgrims. This in turn led to a revival of the Irish monastic tradition on the Continent as some of these pilgrims, both male and female, entered Continental monasteries or established their own foundations. They were closely involved in the reform measures promoted by Emperor Otto the Great (r. 962–​73), and garnered a reputation for asceticism, sanctity, and scholarship. By the late eleventh century an Irish monastery, Holy Trinity of the Scots, had been established in Rome. During the same period in Lotharingia, a number of Irish monks were recorded as abbots and monks in monasteries such as Waulsfort in the Ardennes and at the Benedictine abbeys of St. Felix and St. Symphorien at Metz. In Cologne, Irish monks controlled both the monastery of St. Martin from c. 975 until the latter part of the eleventh century, and that of St. Pantaleon from 1019 to 1042. However, of all the Irish Continental foundations, the most influential were the houses of the Congregation of St. James, whose mother house was at Regensburg in Bavaria and who followed the RB. This grouping eventually numbered ten houses by the early thirteenth century. These foundations, known as the Schottenklöster, were mostly concentrated in southern Germany but with an important foundation in Vienna and a short-​lived outlier in Kiev. The congregation recruited most of its novices in Ireland and received financial support from aristocratic Gaelic benefactors, mostly based in the southern province of Munster. Many of these were commemorated in the community’s necrology, along with a small number of Irish-​born nuns who had entered communities in Germany. The foundations, and particularly the house at Regensburg, provided important nodal points for disseminating Irish hagiographical, historical, and theological texts to Continental audiences.6

St. Malachy and Monastic Reform in Ireland In Ireland itself, the Cistercian monks and the Augustinian canons and canonesses were behind the most numerous and successful attempts to

Marie Therese Flanagan, The Transformation of the Irish Church in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2010), 1–​33. 6 Dagmar Ó Riain Raedel, “Irish Benedictine Monasteries on the Continent,” in Browne and Ó Clabaigh, Irish Benedictines,  25–​63. 5

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reform monastic life and observance.7 Their expansion owed much to the role of St. Malachy (Máel Máedoc Ua Morgair, d. 1148) as reformer and papal legate in Ireland. Although a member of hereditary clerical family himself, he became a monk at Armagh, where he came under the influence of the ascetic Imar Ua hÁedecáin (d. 1134) and was ordained a priest. Further studies at the reformed monastery at Lismore with the monk-​bishop Máel Ísu Ua hAinmire (d. 1135)  consolidated his position as a reformer. His attempts to revive monastic life at the monastery at Bangor encountered stiff local opposition and, despite being appointed bishop of Connor in 1124, he was forced into exile to Lismore in 1127. Although designated by Archbishop Cellach of Armagh (d. 1129) as his successor, the opposition of the Uí Síniach dynasty who had controlled the church of Armagh for two centuries meant that Malachy did not gain possession of the see until 1134. In 1137 he resigned this position in favor of Abbot Gelasius of Derry (d. 1174) and assumed the bishopric of Down. In 1139 he went to Rome to petition the approval of Pope Innocent II (r. 1130–​43) for the Irish reformers to be symbolized by the granting of the pallium—​the symbol of metropolitan jurisdiction—​to the archbishops of Armagh and Cashel. En route he visited reformed monastic houses including the abbeys of Saint-​Nicholas at Arrouaise, and Clairvaux. At the last he developed a friendship with its charismatic abbot, St. Bernard (d. 1153). Malachy’s activities are unusually well documented because of the partial survival of his correspondence with Bernard and from the details that the latter recorded in the vita that he composed after Malachy’s death in Clairvaux in 1148. This contact led to the foundation of the first Irish Cistercian monastery at Mellifont, Co. Louth, in 1142. Although this new foundation had an inauspicious start when the French members of the foundation party returned to Clairvaux citing difficulties with their Irish confrères, Mellifont and its daughter houses experienced a rapid flowering and had established fourteen foundations by 1169. By 1184 the Mellifont filiation consisted of twenty-​two monasteries resulting from either direct foundations or from the assimilation of pre-​existing communities, a practice now seen as increasingly characteristic of the early spread of the order.8

On regular canons, see the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. See the article by Vanderputten in volume 1, and Roger Stalley, The Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland (London and New Haven, CT, 1987), 11–​20.

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Whereas the mid-​twelfth century Regensburg text The Vision of Tnudgal credited Malachy with founding fifty-​four congregations of monks, canons, and nuns, little sign remains of his promotion of female monasticism.9 No evidence survives for the establishment of Cistercian nunneries during the order’s initial period of expansion. This may reflect the general ambivalence of contemporary Cistercian monks toward their female colleagues across Europe.10 Despite this, communities of women, including some in Ireland, did adopt the Cistercian lifestyle. The 1228 visitation report of Abbot Stephen of Lexington (d. 1258), discussed below, contains disapproving references to nuns residing at the male monasteries at Inishloughnacht, Jerpoint, and Mellifont. There are also late medieval references to Cistercian nunneries at Derry, Co. Derry, and at Ballymore, Co. Westmeath, but these are uncertain, and other sources describe both foundations as being houses of Augustinian canonesses.11 The new Cistercian foundations depended on the benevolence of Irish kings and chieftains for their endowment and were subject to the political considerations of contemporary Irish politics. Many of the monasteries were situated on territorial boundaries and were intended to consolidate the patrons’ interests in disputed areas.12 Mellifont itself was established by King Donnchad Ua Cerbaill (d. 1168)  on the boundary of his kingdom of Airgialla as part of a campaign of territorial expansion that included judicious patronage of new religious foundations.13 The ones established by the Ua Briain kings of Munster were particularly noteworthy in this regard, with the houses at Kilcooley, Co. Tipperary, Corcomroe, Co. Clare, Monasternenagh, Co. Limerick, and Fermoy, Co. Cork being established at strategic points on the boundaries of their kingdom just as Anglo-​Norman expansion was encroaching on the same areas.14 This creation of an ecclesiastical buffer zone as a means of extending and consolidating secular authority was a feature of monastic foundations across Europe.15

Flanagan, Transformation of the Irish Church, 150. See the article by Andenna in this volume. Aubrey Gwynn and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses:  Ireland (London, 1970), 309, 313, and 316. 12 Geraldine Carville, The Occupation of Celtic Sites in Medieval Ireland by the Canons Regular of St. Augustine and the Cistercians (Kalamazoo, MI, 1982). 13 Flanagan, Transformation of the Irish Church, 151. 14 Stalley, Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland, 14. 15 Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber, eds., Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe:  Conflict and Cultural Interaction (Turnhout, 2013). See also the articles by Raaijmakers and Rosé in volume 1, and the article by Jamroziak in this volume. 9

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Regular Canons and Nuns Augustinian foundations in the pre-​Norman period were, for their part, often established adjacent to pre-​existing monastic foundations and perhaps demonstrate a desire to reinvigorate these sites. Recent archaeological analysis of the sites at Ferns, Co. Wexford, and Kilmacduagh, Co. Galway, indicates that the Augustinian monasteries there were founded as part of a major restructuring of the earlier monastic settlements. A similar pattern may be observed in north Wales, where the canons arrived in the early twelfth century. Many of their foundations were established at pre-​existing sites, mostly former clas churches, in what may have been an attempt to legitimate their presence by appropriating the ancient, native monastic tradition.16 In Ireland, as in Wales, new foundations were often relatively small, and the principal attraction of the canonical life for the Irish reformers was the framework that it provided for disciplined clerical life and the possibilities it afforded of involvement in pastoral activities. Malachy’s contact with the Augustinian community at Guisborough in North Yorkshire had alerted him to the pastoral possibilities that the canonical lifestyle offered, while the austere observances of the canons of Saint-​Nicholas at Arrouaise in Flanders impressed both Malachy and Archbishop Laurence O’Toole (Lorcán Ua Tuathail, d. 1180) of Dublin as an appropriate form of reformed clerical life.17 The Premonstratensian canons also established ten houses in Ireland between 1182 and 1260.18 The canonical life, in both its male and female expressions, experienced rapid expansion in Ireland, although the movement is not as well documented as the Cistercians, and many of the foundation dates of monasteries are conjectural. By 1260, however, the number of male foundations of regular canons, whether Gaelic or Anglo-​Norman in origin, numbered approximately 135. Of the sixty-​five nunneries that flourished in the later medieval period (1140–​1540), forty-​eight are classified as houses of either Augustinian or Arroasian canonesses.19 Very little survives to illustrate the liturgical, devotional, or economic aspects of these communities, particularly in their

Karen Stöber and David Austin, “Culdees to Canons:  The Augustinian Houses of North Wales,” in Monastic Wales: New Approaches, ed. Janet Burton (Cardiff, 2013), 40. 17 Flanagan, Transformation of the Irish Church, 136–​54. 18 Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, 201–​7; Miriam Clyne, “Archaeological Excavations at Holy Trinity Abbey, Lough Key, Co. Roscommon,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 105c (2005): 24. 19 Tracy Collins, “Timolin: A Case Study of a Nunnery Estate in Late Medieval Ireland,” Anuario de estudios medievales 44.1 (2014): 54–​5. 16

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early phases. Likewise, tracing their internal and external constitutional arrangements often proves challenging, owing to the paucity of sources. Initially, as at Clonard, Co. Meath, Clonfert, Co. Galway, and Termonfeckin, Co. Louth, the foundations consisted of co-​located or joint communities, where regular canons and canonesses occupied residences within the same enclosure. Concerns about possible sexual impropriety meant that these joint communities were of short-​lived duration, although female communities always required the services of male chaplains.20 By 1195, the abbess at Clonard, Co. Meath, was described as having thirteen monasteries under her jurisdiction, which suggests a considerable degree of institutional organization. The influence of the Clonard community declined in the fourteenth century and by 1383 the abbacy had been transferred to Odra, Co. Meath. The Ua Conchobair (O’Connor) foundation at Kilcreevanty, Co. Galway, was recognized as the head of the canonesses in Connacht by 1224. The Ua Briain (O’Brien) family established a nunnery at Killone, Co. Clare, c. 1189 and thereafter the abbess was normally a member of the family. Other important foundations included the houses of St. Mary de Hogges (f. c. 1146) and Grace Dieu (f. c. 1190), both near Dublin; Kilculiheen, Co. Waterford (f. 1151); Lismullin, Co. Meath (f. c. 1240); and St. Catherine de O’Conyl, near Shanagolden, Co. Limerick (f. before 1261). In 1297, Agnes of Hereford, a recluse in Cork, petitioned the Justiciar of Ireland for permission to establish a community of nuns to run a school for girls, and it is possible that some of the other foundations were also involved in education.21

The Anglo-​Norman Invasion Canterbury’s formal involvement in Irish Church affairs ended at the Synod of Kells/​Mellifont in 1152, at which Dublin, which had enjoyed a filial relationship with the English primatial see, was established as a metropolitan archbishopric in its own right. It has been plausibly argued that Canterbury’s irritation at this slight was a contributing factor to the 1155 grant by Pope Adrian IV (r. 1154–​9) of the bull Laudabiliter to Henry II (r. 1154–​89) permitting him to enter Ireland for the purpose of promoting Church reform. While the



Flanagan, Transformation of the Irish Church, 153. More generally on male chaplains in female monasteries, see the article by Griffiths in this volume. 21 On recluses, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in this volume.

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textual integrity of this bull is contested, it remained the foundational text of the Anglo-​Norman colony in Ireland until 1541.22 The Anglo-​Norman incursions into Ireland between 1169 and 1171 tipped the balance of power in Irish society as the Hiberno-​Norse cities of Waterford, Dublin, Cork, and Limerick fell to the invaders. They also conquered large swathes of territory along the eastern and southeastern seaboard, and secured control of the great waterways of Munster and of Waterford harbor. This territorial expansion continued throughout the late twelfth century, as Anglo-​ Norman magnates extended their grip into Ulster, Meath, and, by the early thirteenth century, the western province of Connacht. The availability of this newly conquered territory initiated a process of inward migration to Ireland that lasted for almost a century and that saw the emergence of a distinctive colonial society and culture. Within this, the manor emerged as the basic unit of agricultural activity, a process that also accelerated the development of parishes in Ireland. More than 170 town and boroughs were established by the Anglo-​Normans in an attempt to encourage settlement and trade. These were mostly concentrated in the east and southeast of the country, areas that remained the most Anglicized until the Tudor and Elizabethan plantations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Monasticism and Colonialism English and Norman religious houses and the military orders were among the earliest beneficiaries of the land redistribution that followed in the wake of the invasion, and they too played an important role in the process of colonization and consolidation. Nor were the religious mere passive recipients of baronial patronage: the surviving sources record the presence of English monks in Ireland actively canvassing benefactions for their communities. English monastic communities were among the earliest beneficiaries of the conquest. Canterbury Cathedral priory received large grants of land in Co. Wexford. The monasteries of Little Malvern (Worcestershire), St. Nicholas of Exeter, and Glastonbury received lands and ecclesiastical incomes in Counties Dublin, Tipperary, Limerick, and Cork, while the community at Bath gained possession of the priory hospitals dedicated to St. John the Evangelist at Cork, Youghal, and Waterford.23 The Abbey of Saint-​Taurin at Evreux in Normandy

Anne Duggan, “The Making of a Myth:  Giraldus Cambrensis, Laudabiliter, and Henry II’s Lordship of Ireland,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, series 3, 4 (2007): 115–​16. 23 Ó Clabaigh, “Benedictines in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland,” 99–​106.

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established a foundation at Fore, Co. Westmeath, on land granted by Hugh de Lacy II (d. 1186) before 1185. A similar pattern of conquest, patronage, and colonization had also characterized monastic foundations in twelfth-​century Wales, where the monasteries were endowed with lands, tithes, and properties by the Norman conquerors and where the pioneering communities were drawn from houses in England, France, and Normandy.24 The greatest Anglo-​Norman benefactor in Ireland was John de Courcy (d. c. 1219), who established several religious houses in northeast Ulster staffed by monks and canons from his family strongholds in Somerset and Cumbria after his conquest of the Dál Fiatach kingdom of Ulaid in 1177. These included monasteries following the RB at Ards, Nendrum, and Downpatrick (where the monks constituted the cathedral chapter). His patronage also extended to the Cistercians. He granted the monastery at Inch, Co. Down, to the monks of Furness (Cumbria) in 1180 or 1188, while in 1193 his wife, Affreca, established the male Cistercian Grey Abbey, Co. Down, a daughter house of Holmcultram Abbey, also in Cumbria. Downpatrick’s priory of St. Thomas the Martyr was established before 1183 and staffed by Augustinian canons from Carlisle. De Courcy also established a community of Crutched Friars in Downpatrick who administered the priory hospital of St. John the Baptist.25 This foundation was one of seventeen established for the Crutched Friars or Fratres Cruciferi, a Hospitaller order of regular canons following the Rule of St. Augustine (RA). Although similar groups are found in Italy, Flanders, and England, the origins of the Irish houses are almost entirely obscure. The Crutched Friars maintained hospitals for the poor and sick, and the presence of nursing sisters is recorded at their foundations at Ardee, Dublin, and Dundalk. It is likely that sisters were also involved in the running of their hospitals elsewhere in Ireland.26 As with monastic foundations elsewhere in contemporary Europe, various considerations motivated this patronage.27 In an age of faith the post-​mortem welfare of one’s soul and those of one’s relatives, patrons, and ancestors were influential considerations, as surviving charters demonstrate.28 In old age the “family foundation” offered a place of honorable retirement and the security

Janet Burton, “Transition and Transformation:  the Benedictine Houses,” in Burton, Monastic Wales,  21–​38. 25 Ó Clabaigh, “Benedictines in Mdeival and Early Modern Ireland,” 100–​4 and 107–​13. 26 Gwynn and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, 208–​16. 27 See the article by Lyon in this volume. 28 See the article by Blennemann in volume 1. 24

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of death in the religious habit, and provided a worthy dynastic mausoleum for the founder and his or her descendants. It also provided a suitable venue for family members with an inclination to the monastic life. In many cases, relatives or descendants of the founder frequently held the office of religious superior, as at the Augustinian foundation at Athassel, Co. Tipperary, where members of the Anglo-​Norman De Burgo family dominated the position of prior for the rest of the Middle Ages. More pragmatically, the endowment of monasteries consolidated a baron’s grip on his newly conquered territories, helped secure their boundaries, rendered them more attractive to colonists, and bolstered the local economy through more efficient land use and improved agricultural practices. The English Benedictine foundations were generally content either to let their Irish lands to others or to administer them through proctors. The Cistercians and the regular canons were more successful at establishing fully fledged communities, and their willingness to exploit the land themselves, or, in the case of the canons, to establish parishes and supervise pastoral activity, rendered them a more attractive option for many patrons. The Cistercians in particular were at the forefront of agricultural innovation in Ireland in the century and a half after their arrival in 1142. As members of pan-​European order, their system of general chapters, filiation, and regular visitation provided routes along which practical information concerning agriculture and animal husbandry could circulate. Their system of granges consolidated farming units often situated at a distance from the monastery, and produced agricultural surpluses for the benefit of the community.29 Granges were associated with all the Cistercian monasteries in Ireland, whether of Gaelic or of Anglo-​Norman origin, along with many houses of Augustinian regular canons and canonesses. This system was dependent on careful supervision and a large workforce of lay brothers (or conversi). These were individuals who had taken monastic vows but who were not bound by the liturgical commitments of the choir monks.30 They provided the labor that initially sustained the Cistercian economy and were often recruited from the peasantry in the vicinity of their respective monasteries. Based on her excavations at Bective Abbey, Co. Meath, and on comparisons with other Cistercian sites in Ireland, Geraldine Stout argues that the Cistercians may have been responsible for the introduction of the three-​f ield arable farming system in Ireland. She also notes the presence of a distinctive

See the article by Berman in this volume. See the articles by Cassidy-​Welch and Berman in this volume.

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breed of sheep among the faunal remains excavated at Bective and at a Cistercian grange at Staleen, Co. Meath, that indicates proficiency at selective animal breeding. Archaeological fieldwork at other Cistercian sites in Ireland has produced a disproportionate number of plough pebbles, hard quartz stones that were attached to the soles of wooden ploughs to reduce attrition. This innovation is indicative of intense agrarian activity and show that the Cistercians were at the forefront of agricultural innovation in thirteenth-​ century Ireland.31 The military orders arrived in Ireland in the wake of the Anglo-​Normans and remained enmeshed with the colony and its affairs throughout the Middle Ages. Significantly, they recruited their members almost exclusively from the ranks of the colonists. The earliest Irish reference occurs c. 1177, when Matthew the Templar and Ralph the Hospitaller witnessed a deed along with Laurence O’Toole, the archbishop of Dublin.32 Not surprisingly, given the pattern of Anglo-​Norman settlement, most of their properties were concentrated in the east and southeast of the country, and Edward Coleman has noted that the Templars’ initial endowments, as confirmed by Henry II sometime between 1172 and 1177, gave them control over the headwaters of the Rivers Barrow, Nore, and Suir as well as over the access to Waterford harbor. They were thus charged with the custody of the main arteries of transport in southeast Ireland, along with one of the country’s major ports. Delegating such strategically important locations to the Templars is indicative of the confidence that the crown placed in them.33 Both the Templars and the Hospitallers were entrusted with sensitive administrative and military commissions by the crown. The earliest record of this occurs in 1220, when King Henry III of England (r. 1216–​72) instructed the justiciar of Ireland to deposit money with the Templars and Hospitallers, who would be responsible for conveying it to England. In 1234, two Templars acted as intermediaries between crown officials in Ireland and the rebellious Richard Marshal (d. 1234), and in the same year the Master of the Temple in Ireland was one of three officials charged with overseeing the Irish exchequer accounts. From 1270, the Hospitallers joined them in this

Geraldine Stout, “The Cistercian Grange: A Medieval Farming System,” in Agriculture and Settlement in Ireland, ed. Margaret Murphy and Matthew Stout (Dublin, 2015), 65–​8. 32 Helen J. Nicholson, “A Long Way from Jerusalem: The Templars and Hospitallers in Ireland, c. 1172–​1348,” in Soldiers of Christ: The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller in Medieval Ireland, ed. Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh (Dublin, 2015), 7. 33 Edward Coleman, “ ‘Powerful Adversaries’:  The Knights Templar, Landholding and Litigation in the Lordship of Ireland,” in Browne and Ó Clabaigh, Soldiers of Christ, 187. 31

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supervisory role. In 1274, Brother Stephen de Fulbourn, a Hospitaller, was appointed treasurer of Ireland and became justiciar in 1281. Following his death in 1288, two other Hospitallers, William FitzRoger (fl. c.  1274–​1294) and William de Ros, held the position of deputy justiciar in Ireland. Along with other crown officials, these roles often involved the orders in military campaigns against the Gaelic population, as well as in interventions in disputes between the Anglo-​Irish.34 From the late thirteenth century, as the strength of the Anglo-​Norman colony waned in the face of climatic change, economic recession, and Gaelic resurgence, the monasteries were occasionally penalized, like other absentees, for drawing revenues from Ireland without residing there and contributing to the defense of the colony. The foundations in Ireland from Normandy were particularly susceptible to the ebb and flow of Anglo-​French relations in the fourteenth century. Like their counterparts in England, the revenues of these houses were frequently confiscated to help with the war effort in France. In time these foundations either became independent, as at Fore, Co. Westmeath, or passed to local interests, as at St. Andrews in Ards, Co. Down. Eventually most of the English Benedictine houses relinquished the administration of their Irish lands to representatives in Ireland in return for an annual rent, as happened, for example, with the properties granted to Canterbury Cathedral priory. Others they sold altogether, as in 1486, when the monks of Little Malvern sold their property at Castleknock near Dublin to the city’s Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary.35 Among the Cistercians, the establishment of new monasteries by the Anglo-​Normans after 1169 created rival filiations to Mellifont and introduced an element of ethnic tension among the Irish houses. In all, the invaders established ten new Cistercian foundations between 1180 and 1222, mostly located in the fertile areas of the southeast of Ireland, where Anglo-​Norman settlement was most densely concentrated. The founding members of these communities were drawn from houses in England, and subsequent novices were primarily recruited from the ranks of the colonists. The deployment of English masons to build many of these new foundations meant that these differences found architectural expression, and many of the new Anglo-​Norman foundations were constructed in the Early English Gothic style.36

Nicholson, “A Long Way from Jerusalem,” 16–​17. Ó Clabaigh, “Benedictines in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland,” 99–​100. 36 Stalley, Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland, 16. 34 35

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Ethnic Tension The Anglo-​Norman foundations were generally better endowed and better disciplined than the older Gaelic communities. The reluctance of Irish abbots to undertake the arduous journey to the order’s annual chapter at Cîteaux, already evident in 1190, meant that the Gaelic houses became increasingly isolated from the order’s disciplinary structures. The close alliance between the French-​speaking Anglo-​Norman foundations and their patrons introduced an ethnic dimension into matters of monastic observance that would have far-​reaching consequences for Mellifont and her daughter houses. Statutes concerning the Irish houses passed by the general chapter in 1216 indicate that a general breakdown of discipline had occurred, and successive attempts at reform met with stiff resistance from Mellifont and her filiation: in 1216, the visitators were refused entry to Mellifont and greeted by a riot at Jerpoint, and further attempts in 1221 and 1224 were also rebuffed. In 1227, the Anglo-​ Norman abbot imposed on the abbey of Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, was driven away by the community, who knocked him off his horse and seized the monastic seal. It took an armed band to reinstall him later. This revolt against the order, known in a contemporary phrase as the “conspiracy of Mellifont,” was to some measure resolved by Stephen of Lexington, abbot of Stanley in Wiltshire, who conducted a visitation of the Irish houses in 1228.37 The fortuitous discovery of his letter book in a Turin library and its publication in 1946 opened up a vista of almost complete institutional collapse among the Gaelic houses. In a letter to Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–​41), the abbot of Cîteaux, drawing on Abbot Stephen’s account, described how “in the monasteries of Ireland our restraint and rule are scarcely observed in anything apart from the habit, for there is no due service in choir, or silence in the cloister, discipline in the chapter, community meals in the refectory or monastic quiet in the dormitory according to the rules of the order.”38 The maladministration of the finances of some Irish houses also occupied much of Abbot Stephen’s energy. Writing to the abbot of Cîteaux, he described how we have with us the seal of a certain abbot which was pawned in a tavern for eighteen pence, and we saw the seal of another abbot in the same manner in the possession of a secular; consequently, on account of this the monasteries are reduced almost to nothing; that which had twenty ploughlands

Barry O’Dwyer, The Conspiracy of Mellifont, 1216–​1231:  An Episode in the History of the Cistercian Order in Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1970). 38 Stephen of Lexington, Letters from Ireland 1228–​1229, trans. Barry O’Dwyer (Kalamazoo, MI, 1982), 183. 37

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at foundation now, to speak the truth, does not have three; that which had eighty does not have fifteen.39

One of the most striking features of Abbot Stephen’s correspondence is the constant threat of physical violence with which he was confronted. Writing to his brother in England, he stated “how often we have been exposed to the robbers, to the persecution of chieftains and to the malignant manoeuvrings of false brethren.”40 On attempting to enter the monastery at Inisloughnacht near Clonmel, he was confronted by the prior of the community, bearing a spear in one hand and a sword in the other, with its scabbard hanging around his neck. The unfortunate lay brother he had sent ahead to announce his arrival had been stripped, subjected to an attempt at castration, and assaulted almost to the point of  death. Following his visitation of the monasteries of Jerpoint and Duiske, Abbot Stephen issued a detailed list of regulations that were henceforth to be followed by the two communities. These included the instructions that monks were to keep the rule of silence, and to observe moderation in the consumption of food and drink, and that the lay brothers were to avoid drunkenness. Relatives of the monks were to be removed from the precincts of the monasteries and no guests were permitted to enter the enclosure, with the exception of William Marshal (d. 1219), the Anglo-​Norman earl of Leinster.41 The communitarian, familiar aspect of Gaelic society that Lisa Bitel has highlighted in this volume in the context of early Irish monasticism did not sit easily with the structured approach of the RB and of the Cistercian observances. When Abbot Stephen approached Mellifont “prepared to face death,” he found that more than half of the community’s 110 monks had absconded, taking with them the monastery’s valuables, books, and charters. He allowed 28 to return and banished the rest from the order. Then, having “harangued these bestial people for seven days,” he presided over the election of Jocelyn of Beaubec as abbot. He also dismantled the Mellifont filiation and assigned the supervision of its daughter houses to monasteries in Wales, England, and France, an arrangement that continued until 1274, when the Mellifont filiation was restored. Stephen’s ordinance for the reformation of Mellifont and the other houses included instructions that no candidates were to be admitted unless they made confession in Latin or French, which were to be the languages in which the rule and constitution were expounded. This was

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 81. 41 Ibid., 157–​71.

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an attempt to curb use of the Irish language within the community. The numbers at Mellifont were fixed at fifty monks and sixty lay brothers. Abbots from English or Continental monasteries were appointed to govern some of the Irish houses in the hope that their example would improve matters. Recalcitrant monks were exiled to monasteries in England or the Continent and forbidden to return until they had made amends. While Abbot Stephen’s visitation did address some of the issues besetting the Irish houses, ethnic tensions remained high. In 1230 the Anglo-​Norman abbot imposed on Fermoy was murdered, reputedly by his own monks.42

The Anglo-​Normans and the Regular Canons The Anglo-​Normans also proved particularly generous benefactors of the Augustinian canons in Ireland, although this is less well documented than their support for the Cistercians. In some cases, as with Hugh de Lacy’s grant of lands and ecclesiastical incomes in Meath and Louth to the Augustinian community of Llanthony in Wales, patronage took the form of bestowing lands and incomes on foreign foundations. It was more common, however, for benefactors to establish new houses on their recently conquered territories, and the regular canons received more Anglo-​Norman patronage than any other religious, with their foundations accounting for more than one-​third of all those established after the conquest. Although the Augustinians received patronage from some of the leading tenants-​in-​chief of the conquest, such as William de Burgh (d. 1205/​6) and William Marshal, their chief supporters were generally from lower down in the social hierarchy. For patrons of limited means, the regular canons provided a cost-​effective way of endowing a religious community and securing its attendant spiritual and economic benefits, particularly because they did not require large endowments of land to support substantial communities, unlike the Cistercians. The arrival of the regular canons corresponded with the expansion of the parochial system in Ireland and, as clerics living a communal religious life, they were more willing to undertake pastoral work and ecclesiastical administration than the monastic orders. Patrons assigned the tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues of their newly conquered territories for the support of the Augustinian foundations that they established. The canons in turn undertook to organize the parochial structures within their patrons’ territories. Adrian Empey notes that, of the 111 churches listed in the c. 1320 papal taxation of the

Stalley, Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland, 20.

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diocese of Ossory, over half were impropriate to Augustinian communities. By contrast, the two Cistercian communities in the diocese between them enjoyed the revenues of just six churches at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1541.43 This symbiotic relationship was frequently established at an early date in the colonization process; at sites such as Tristernagh (Co. Westmeath), Kells (Co. Kilkenny), and Athassel (Co. Tipperary), the claustral complex is found in conjunction with the mottes or early earthen castles of the communities’ secular founders and patrons.

The Friars in Ireland The arrival of the mendicant friars in the early thirteenth century brought the Irish Church and society into contact with the most vital expression of religious life in contemporary Europe.44 The Friars Preachers founded their first communities at Dublin and Drogheda in 1224, and in 1230 the Franciscan general chapter established an independent Franciscan province in Ireland. The earliest references to the Carmelites and Augustinians occur in 1271 and 1282 respectively. Despite the claims of later Franciscan and Dominican chroniclers, all the mendicant orders in Ireland owed their origins to the agency of their colleagues in England. Initially, the friars gravitated to the towns and boroughs of the Anglo-​Norman colony in the east and southeast of Ireland, where their linguistic and cultural affinity with the colonists assured them of receptive congregations for their pastoral activities and the material support necessary for their mendicant lifestyle. By the early fourteenth century, when the first wave of mendicant expansion had ceased, the various orders had established a combined total of ninety-​six foundations. Of these only eight were situated in the Gaelic territories of the west and north of the country. Despite this imbalance it seems that the friars’ appeal initially enabled them to straddle linguistic and cultural divisions in the border areas where they operated. The register of the Dominican house at Athenry, Co. Galway, established in 1241 by the Anglo-​Norman baron Myler de Bermingham (d. before 1275), shows that the community there received generous support from both Anglo-​Norman and Gaelic aristocrats, as well as from the burghers of the newly established borough.



C. Adrian Empey, “The Sacred and the Secular:  The Augustinian Priory of Kells in Ossory, 1193–​1541,” Irish Historical Studies 24:94 (1984): 137–​8. 44 Colmán Ó Clabaigh, The Friars in Ireland, 1224–​1540 (Dublin, 2012), 29, 93–​7, 101, and 109–​10. 43

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The friars’ arrival corresponded with a period of economic prosperity and territorial expansion for the colony. The Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites all recruited novices from the Gaelic and Anglo-​Norman populations, while the Augustinians seem to have confined recruitment to Anglo-​Norman candidates. With the exception of the Franciscans, all the mendicants formed subordinate units of their English provinces. This lack of autonomy and subjection to English rule gradually chafed with both the  Gaelic and the Anglo-​Norman members of each order. Despite this, all the orders enjoyed harmonious internal relations until the final decades of the thirteenth century, when they, too, were beset by the heightened ethnic division occasioned by the wider colony’s experience of recession, depopulation, and contraction in the face of economic and environmental changes and Gaelic resurgence. The earliest expression of disquiet occurs in a letter addressed to King Edward I (r. 1272–​1307) by the Franciscan bishop of Kildare, Nicholas Cusack (d. 1299), sometime between 1283 and 1299, in which he excoriated the “secret counsels and poisonous colloquies which certain religious of the Irish tongue … hold with the Irish and their rulers.”45 The division cut both ways and the exchequer records for the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries contain several references to payments made by the crown to friars involved in embassies and intelligence gathering on its behalf. The most notorious example of ethnic tension within the orders occurred at the Franciscan provincial chapter in Cork in 1291, during which a dispute erupted between the Anglo-​Norman and Gaelic delegates and sixteen friars were reputedly slain.46 The most significant event in polarizing the Irish friars along ethnic lines was the invasion of Ireland in May 1315 by Edward Bruce (d. 1318), brother of Robert I, king of Scotland (r.  1306–​29). Tensions between the pro-​and anti-​Scottish factions were particularly intense among the Franciscans and Dominicans, and led King Edward II (r. 1307–​27) to address letters to the justiciar of Ireland and to the minister general of the whole Franciscan order in 1315 and 1316, respectively castigating those friars who had actively supported the Scots. The grievances of the Gaelic population found expression in the Remonstrance that Domhnall Ua Néill (Donal O’Neill, d.  1325), king of Tir Eoghain, addressed to Pope John XXII (r. 1316–​34) on behalf of the Irish

Ibid., 31. See the challenge to the accuracy of this account in Francis J. Cotter, The Friars Minor in Ireland from Their Arrival to 1400 (St Bonaventure, NY, 1994), 33–​8.

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princes. In it he denounced the partisan attitudes of Anglo-​Norman religious like the Cistercian monks of Granard, Co. Offaly, who joined in manhunts of the Gaelic population. He also reported the outburst of Friar Simon le Mercer, a Franciscan from Drogheda, who, in 1317, asserted that it was no more a sin to kill an Irishman than a dog and that he would not hesitate to celebrate mass after so doing. In 1324, further accusations against the Gaelic Franciscans by Edward II led to the appointment of a papal commission to investigate the Irish province. Led by William de Rodierd (d. 1316), the dean of Dublin’s St. Patrick Cathedral, it found that the loyalty of eight communities were suspect and recommended that their members be reassigned. It also forbade any Gaelic friar to hold the offices of minister provincial or vicar provincial, a prohibition that remained in place until the middle of the fifteenth century. Reported incidents of ethnic tension within the mendicant orders declined after this, and with the onset of the Black Death in August 1348 other issues preoccupied the friars. The Anglo-​Norman friaries, concentrated in the towns and boroughs of the colony, were harder hit by the pandemic than their Gaelic confreres. After the plague, the balance of power within all the mendicant orders shifted to their Gaelic members and resulted in a remarkable second flowering of the mendicant movement that saw more than a hundred new foundations being established, mostly in Gaelic territories, between 1390 and 1530.47 As with many of their colleagues in the border areas of medieval Christendom, the monks, nuns, and friars of medieval Ireland had to negotiate their way in political and social situations riven by ethnic tension. Despite the high ideals of their calling, they too were products of their culture and prone to the same prejudices and antipathies as their lay contemporaries. Not surprisingly, the ambient tension in society infiltrated the cloister, sometimes resulting in violence, bloodshed, and death. For all their longing for the “kingdom of heaven,” they all too often found themselves enmeshed in conflict, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

Bibliography Browne, Martin, and Colmán Ó Clabaigh, eds. Households of God: The Regular Canons and Canonesses of St Augustine and of Prémontré in Medieval Ireland. Dublin, 2019. Carville, Geraldine. The Occupation of Celtic Sites in Medieval Ireland by the Canons Regular of St. Augustine and the Cistercians. Kalamazoo, MI, 1982.

Ó Clabaigh, Friars in Ireland, 33–​42 and 53–​65.

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Monasticism in Late Medieval Ireland Empey, C. Adrian. “The Sacred and the Secular: The Augustinian Priory of Kells in Ossory, 1193–​1541.” Irish Historical Studies 24:94 (1984): 131–​51. Flanagan, Marie Therese. The Transformation of the Irish Church in the Twelfth Century. Woodbridge, 2010. Gwynn, Aubrey, and R. Neville Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland. London, 1970. Nicholson, Helen J. “A Long Way from Jerusalem:  The Templars and Hospitallers in Ireland, c. 1172–​1348.” In Soldiers of Christ:  The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller in Medieval Ireland, edited by Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh, 1–​22. Dublin, 2015. Ó Clabaigh, Colmán. “The Benedictines in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland.” In The Irish Benedictines: A History, edited by Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh, 79–​121. Dublin, 2005.   “The Church, 1050–1460.” In The Cambridge History of Ireland, Volume I: 600–1550, edited by Brendan Smith, 355–84. Cambridge, 2018.   The Friars in Ireland, 1224–1540. Dublin, 2012. Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí. “A Tale of Two Rules:  Benedict and Columbanus.” In The Irish Benedictines:  A History, edited by Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh, 11–​24. Dublin, 2005. O’Dwyer, Barry. The Conspiracy of Mellifont, 1216–​1231:  An Episode in the History of the Cistercian Order in Medieval Ireland. Dublin, 1970. Ó Riain Raedel, Dagmar. “Irish Benedictine Monasteries on the Continent.” In The Irish Benedictines:  A History, edited by Martin Browne and Colmán Ó Clabaigh, 25–​63. Dublin, 2005. Stalley, Roger. The Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland. London and New Haven, CT, 1987. Stout, Geraldine. “The Cistercian Grange:  A Medieval Farming System.” In Agriculture and Settlement in Ireland, edited by Margaret Murphy and Matthew Stout, 28–​68. Dublin, 2015.

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Late Medieval Monasticism: Historiography and Prospects E l i sa b eth L usset a n d B e rt   Roest While general surveys of medieval monasticism and monographs on individual religious orders often continue to work within the well-​worn paradigm of the decline of organized religious life in the late Middle Ages, a foray into the quickly growing body of scholarship on late medieval monasticism tells a different story. Medievalists and Renaissance scholars with varied backgrounds and with widely diverging research interests have opened up the field, as is evident from the contributions to this fourth and final section of these volumes.1 It is not our intention to “double” the insights presented in the contributions offered here, but rather to use some of their central topics to highlight a number of trends present in today’s research and to clarify the direction in which the study of later medieval monasticism is heading2. This has become a very exciting and rich field of research indeed, and one that is particularly innovative with respect to female monasticism and intellectual life.

Comparative Perspective Since the early 1990s, the historiography has been much more sensitive to the context and mechanisms that led to the emergence and development of congregations and monastic orders from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on.3 The comparative perspective adopted by historians in this process has

For current research platforms and series, see the Vita regularis series coordinated by Gert Melville, the Disciplina Monastica series coordinated by Isabelle Cochelin and Susan Boynton, the Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Studia Monastica, and Hereditas Monasteriorum. 2 For older historiographic evaluations, see in particular Giancarlo Andenna, ed., Dove va la storiografia monastica in Europa? Temi e metodi di ricerca per lo studio della vita monastica e regolare in età medievale alle soglie del terzo millennio (Milan, 2001); Joan Greatrex, “After Knowles:  Recent Perspectives in Monastic History,” in The Religious Orders in pre-​ Reformation England, ed. James Clark (Woodbridge, 2002), 35–​47. 3 See the article by Melville in this volume. 1

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helped to liberate institutional studies from their traditionally more national and single-​order focus. And much more attention has been devoted to larger themes such as writing processes, intra-​order communication, the relationship between monastic norms and Church law in general, the situation of orders in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and their relations with the papacy, and so on.4 Likewise, the attention toward congregation and order formation has led to studies of order administration and government at different levels (orders, monastic networks, and monasteries).5 In nearly every area, this historiographic renewal is contributing to a new image of traditional monastic life in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages.6 These studies on congregation and order formation have made it clear that, even if the expansion of traditional male contemplative monasticism (Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian) was tapering off somewhat after 1200, the period after this date saw an efflorescence of new forms of monasticism and non-​cloistered religious life.7 This can be seen in the extraordinary expansion of the mendicant orders and the continuing proliferation of all types of regular canons, both of which, because of their “active” way of life, were long seen (and are still seen, especially in the case of the mendicants) as not “monastic,” although they were indebted in many ways to monastic usages for their liturgical life, spirituality, and hagiographical self-​fashioning.8 This







Cristina Andenna, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville, eds., Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, 2  vols.; Vol. 1:  Netzwerke. Klöster und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts; Vol. 2: Zentralität. Papsttum und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2012–​13). See also the literature mentioned in the articles by Caby and Sharp in this volume. 5 Joseph A. Gribbin, The Premonstratensian Order in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2001); Joan Greatrex, The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, 1270–​1420 (Oxford, 2011); Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, eds., The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles (Turnhout, 2011); Jean-​François Cottier, Daniel-​Odon Hurel, and Benoît-​ Michel Tock, eds., Les personnes d’autorité en milieu régulier. Des origines de la vie régulière au XVIIIe siècle (Saint-​Étienne, 2012). 6 Jean-​Marie Le Gall, Moines au temps des réformes. France, 1480–​1560 (Seyssel, 2001); Martin Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, c.  1300–​1535 (Manchester, 2009); Martin Heale, The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford, 2016). For an evaluation of the so-​called crisis paradigm of late medieval monasticism, see also the articles by Roest and Knudsen in this volume. 7 Gert Melville and Anne Müller, eds., Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven (Münster, 2007). 8 Regarding the regular canons, see the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. For the mendicants, see Donald Prudlo, “The Living Rule:  Monastic Exemplarity in Mendicant Hagiography,” in Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 229–​44; Bert Roest, “Franciscan Educational Perspectives:  Reworking Monastic Traditions,” in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George P. Ferzoco and Carolyn A. Muessig (London, 2000), 168–​81. 4

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vitality was also manifested in the emergence of new monastic orders, such as the Celestines, the Brigittines, and the Hieronymites, and in the dramatic expansion of a wide variety of female religious houses within mendicant order families that were truly monastic and contemplative (the Poor Clares and the Minoresses, the Dominican nuns, several types of Augustinian nuns, etc.).9 Moreover, and most importantly, as elaborated upon in the essay by More and Mulder-​Bakker, modern scholarship has shown that the period after 1200 saw a profusion of male and especially female “semi-​religious” initiatives, as can be seen in the importance of the anchorite, beguine, and tertiary movements that popped up all over Europe and frequently surpassed all other forms of organized religious life in terms of numbers and social inclusiveness.10 Each of these new developments has been approached from different angles in modern scholarship. Specialists have looked at the problematic relationship between many forms of female semi-​religious life and various forms of “active” monasticism and the canonical requirements regarding rule observance and enclosure. As Elizabeth Makowski and others have pointed out, many of these new religious movements seem to have unfolded in defiance of the categories that the canonists developed between the Lateran Councils and the issuing of the bull Periculoso by Boniface VIII (r. 1294–​1303) in 1298. Scholars have come to realize that the problems of and complaints about organized religious life that emerge from the surviving clerical sources are directly related to the discrepancy between established legal categories and the changing realities on the ground from the twelfth century onwards.11 This discrepancy was felt especially by clerics at the diocesan level, who at times were much more willing to accommodate “unregulated” forms of religious life than one might expect, but also by clerics within the papal Curia and by the leaders of mendicant orders, who clearly vacillated between supporting new initiatives by charismatic initiators such as Catherine of Siena and Angelina of Montegiove, and curbing them or forcing them into more accepted channels



Bert Roest, Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform (Leiden, 2013); Sylvie Duval, “Comme des anges sur terre.” Les moniales dominicaines et les débuts de la réforme observante, 1385–​1461 (Rome, 2015). See the article by Andenna in this volume. 10 A classic starting point is Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies:  Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565 (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). See further the literature mentioned in the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume. On the recluses, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in this volume. 11 Elizabeth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-​Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC, 2005). See on this also Alison More, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200–​1600 (Oxford, 2017). 9

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of enclosed monasticism.12 The study of these dynamics continues to open up lines of interpretation that elucidate the expansion and the transformation of new forms of semi-​monastic and monastic life and the social groups involved with it. More than ever before, later and late medieval cloistered ways of life increasingly became an urban phenomenon. This was true for the Humiliati, for many congregations of regular canons, for the mendicant orders, and for a large array of other orders, congregations, and semi-​religious initiatives. Within the context of the urbanization of western Europe, new urban monastic landscapes evolved that can be analyzed in order to deepen our understanding of the spiritual life of lay and religious people alike. This type of research has become an increasingly integral part of urban history and regional Landesgeschichte studies. As shown in the essay by Hirbodian in this volume, it is fruitful to approach the Sitz im Leben of monasteries, semi-​monastic religious houses, beguinages, and urban anchorite or recluse initiatives from a localized histoire totale perspective, to answer all kinds of questions about kinship, enrollment, patronage networks, political clout, socioeconomic power, and urban or territorial religious policy formation.13 Order history used to emphasize the elements that bound monasteries within the same order: the rule, constitutions, and (from the twelfth century onwards), general chapters, visitations, and organization into provinces. This allowed, and still allows, for the production of handbooks and syntheses that follow the history of a specific order or order branch over long periods of time. This is valid as a historiographical sleight of hand, and is acknowledged





Alessandra Bartolomei Romagnoli, Luciano Cinelli, and Pierantonio Piatti, eds., Virgo digna coelo. Caterina e la sua eredità. Raccolta di studi in occasione del 550 anniversario della canonizzazione di Santa Caterina da Siena (1461–​2011) (Vatican City, 2013); María del Mar Graña Cid, “Angelina de Montegiove y el movimiento de las Terciarias franciscanas: valoración de la originalidad de su obra (siglos XIV–​VII),” Analecta TOR 34 (2003): 199–​245; Enrico Menestò, ed., Le Terziarie francescane della Beata Angelina. Origine e spiritualità. Atti del Convegno di studi, Foligno, 13–​15 luglio 1995 (Spoleto, 1996). 13 For an interesting case study outside the German lands, see Jens Röhrkasten, “Monasteries and Urban Space in Medieval Welsh Towns,” in Monastic Wales:  New Approaches, ed. Janet E. Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff, 2013), 55–​72. See also Moines et religieux dans la ville (XIIe–​XVe siècle) (Toulouse, 2009); Espaces monastiques, espaces urbains de l’Antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rome, 2012); Claudia Kimminus-​Schneider and Manfred Schneider, eds., Klöster und monastische Kultur in Hansestädten. Beiträge des 4. wissenschaftlichen Kolloquiums Stralsund 12. bis 15. Dezember 2001 (Stralsund, 2003); Gerhard Dohrn-​van Rossum, “Kloster und Stadt in der europäischen Geschichte,” in Zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte der Stadt Chemnitz. Kolloquium des Stadtarchivs Chemnitz, 24. April 2002, Volksbank Chemnitz, ed. Gabriele Viertel, Stephan Weingart, and Stephan Pfalzer (Stollberg, 2002), 56–​63.

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as such in recent syntheses on the Poor Clares and the Cistercians,14 yet there were many other links between monastic houses that were not determined by matters of order allegiance. The more localized and regional historical approaches mentioned above indicate that most houses were embedded in other networks of socioeconomic and spiritual support and communication. And it is the fruit of recent scholarship that the complexity of these networks has been brought to light. Hence houses belonging to a specific order frequently had close contacts with a wide variety of neighboring houses in the same town or in the same diocese, or opted for a special relationship with other houses, whether or not they were a part of the same order, subscribed to comparable programs of religious reform,15 or shared a common support network of commemorative prayer.16

Interactions between Monastic and Extra-​Monastic Worlds The monastic landscapes of the later medieval period were shaped by many agents, several of which are now the focus of serious scholarly research. One central agent was, of course, the bishop, whose relationship with the monastic houses in his diocese had long since been defined by episcopal visitation rights and enduring rivalries between secular and regular clergy.17 Yet, with the emergence of new houses that were (partially) exempt from episcopal control (such as the Poor Clares, the Minoresses, and Dominican nuns), together with the explosion of non-​exempt semi-​monastic communities (including beguine, tertiary, and anchorite initiatives in the towns, as well





See Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe: 1090–​1500 (London, 2013); Roest, Order and Disorder,  4–​5. 15 See also the article by Roest in this volume regarding the context of late medieval Observant initiatives. For some interesting case studies, see Heins Krieg, ed., Das Markgräflerland. 2. Kloster und Stadt am südlichen Oberrhein im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Schopf heim, 2011); Carola Jäggi, “Spätmittelalterliche Frauenklöster im südwestlichen Bodenseeraum:  kulturelle Netzwerke avant la date,” in Visuelle Kultur und politischer Wandel. Der südliche Bodenseeraum im Spätmittelalter zwischen Habsburg, Reich und Eidgenossenschaft, ed. Elke Jezler-​Hübner (Constance, 2015), 52–​71. 16 See Stacy L. Boldrick, “An Encounter Between Death and an Abbess: The Mortuary Roll of Elisabeth ’s Conincs, Abbess of Forest (Manchester, John Rylands Library, Latin MS 114),” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 82 (2000): 29–​48; Lynda Rollason, “Medieval Mortuary Rolls:  Prayers for the Dead and Travel in Medieval England,” Northern History 48 (2011): 187–​223. 17 See the article by Sharp in this volume. For the classical older studies in this regard, see Robert Norman Swanson, “Episcopal Visitation of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lichfield in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Studia Monastica 29 (1987):  93–​108; Christopher Robert Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century (Manchester, 1983). 14

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as an array of lay confraternities with strong connections to specific local monastic or mendicant houses), the position and the role of local bishops in supervising and cultivating forms of “regular” religious life could become even more complex and demanding. In-​depth scholarship on this phenomenon needs to build on local sources, which have survived in highly unequal measure. As Knudsen elucidates in his essay, this source problem complicates our scholarly efforts to evaluate the significance of local complaints in visitation records. Scholars should thus be wary of jumping to conclusions about the state of religious observance when they detect an increase in visitation complaints during the late medieval period. This calls again for collaborative forms of comparative research with recourse to many different sources to support more representative and encompassing chronological and spatial analyses of religious life in monastic houses. In many ways, evaluating the “quality” of religious life within religious communities and its change over time will always be highly problematic, owing to the nature of surviving source materials, as well as to the changing expectations of religious people and their observers.18 One could argue that a lay public that was increasingly sophisticated, religiously speaking, and a religious respublica literarum imbued with a discourse of reform might have been more demanding with regard to monastic houses and the religious inhabiting them. Moreover, resistance from communities that were to be reformed was not due solely to a lack of religious stamina needed to embrace the new measures; it could often be a question of fear of loss of self-​governance. One could also argue that enduring stereotypes found in literary and other popular narrative representations of male and female religious were as important for their perception by contemporaries as actual practices and abuses within the monastic compound. In any case, reform was by no means solely a top-​ down process, implemented by general chapters or by outside parties such as bishops or papal legates in order to improve communities of little faith; it often had many political ramifications and was frequently an initiative both originating from and contested at the community level. In most cases, however, it is hard to cut through the discourse surrounding reform to get to the underlying realities.19

Wolfgang Brandis and Hans-​Walter Stork, eds., Weltbild und Lebenswirklichkeit in den Lüneburger Klöstern. IX. Ebstorfer Kolloquium vom 23. bis 26. März 2011 (Berlin, 2015). 19 See the articles by Vanderputten and Steckel in this volume, as well as Milena Svec Goetschi, Klosterflucht und Bittgang. Apostasie und monastische Mobilität im 15. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2015); Elisabeth Lusset, Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (XIIe–​XVe siècle) (Turnhout, 2017). 18

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Alongside the bishop and other ecclesiastical authorities with specific visitation rights, urban authorities and territorial overlords were likewise important agents in the religious landscape. Older scholarship focused on the ways in which overlords in many European regions succeeded in gaining control over previously independent large monastic houses, causing the breakdown or at least the “nationalization” of supra-​national Cluniac and Cistercian networks and control over important abbatial appointments, and began to exploit monastic wealth for economic and dynastic purposes. More recent scholarship has focused on the ways in which both urban authorities and territorial overlords allowed for, and even stimulated, the development of certain types of Observant or reformed monasticism.20 In fact, as scholars are now pointing out, urban and territorial authorities had much to say about monastic oversight as part and parcel of deliberate and far-​reaching socio-​religious policies born of pragmatic reasons but also of the conviction that socioeconomic health and urban and territorial peace were very much bound up with the presence of healthy and well-​regulated religious houses. Many of these houses were, in fact, very active as parochial and extra-​parochial caregivers, much more so than the “normal” division between regular and secular clergy according to normative sources might suggest. These communities engaged in pastoral work, either through direct involvement in parish work, or through their role in schooling, the direction of lay confraternities, or practices of religious commemoration and connected prayer services. It was by no means only the mendicants and regular canons who shouldered this burden. Monastic churches could double as parish churches, and many communities controlled external parish churches and exercised appointment rights concerning parish priests.21 Likewise, as is discussed in the essay by Clark and Bush, late urban monastic foundations were actively involved in preaching, over and above the in-​depth homiletic edification of their own communities, and it would seem that female abbesses and prioresses in some regions could also play a significant role in this work. Like their better researched mendicant colleagues, monks

See the literature mentioned in the article by Roest in this volume; see also Robert L. J. Shaw, “The Celestine Monks of France, 1350–​1450: Monastic Reform in an Age of Schism, Councils and War” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2014). 21 See, for instance, the article by Knudsen in this volume, and Hilda Agneessens, “Het klooster der Rijke Klaren of Klarissen-​Urbanisten te Petegem, Beaulieu bij Oudenaarde, vanaf zijn ontstaan tot 1412” (PhD diss., Universiteit Gent, 1967). For the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, see David Knowles, “Essays in Monastic History, 1066–​1216, 6:  Monastic Parish Organization,” Downside Review 51 (1933):  501–​22; Brian R. Kemp, “Monastic Possession of Parish Churches in England in the Twelfth Century,” JEH 31 (1980): 133–​60.

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provided regular Sunday sermons that were open to the laity, and in a number of urban centers they were a source of well-​educated Advent and Lenten preachers, in close collaboration with local religious and secular authorities. Much still remains to be done, not only on preaching within male and female houses by men and women and on preaching to the laity by monks from different orders for different occasions, but also on the transmission of monastic homiletic texts.22 The importance of late medieval monastic houses for mass commemoration and prayer services for the dead, in particular, has been researched intensively over the last two decades, but further comparative engagement is still needed to evaluate its overall significance and its transformation over time.23 Specific patronage relationships also come to play in this context. There was a surprising shift in patronage, away from traditional rural monasticism and toward smaller urban religious houses across the European continent from the twelfth century down to the sixteenth century and beyond. Some very interesting research on this topic has been done with regard to Benedictine nuns, Poor Clares and other fully enclosed female mendicant orders (Dominicans, Augustinian canonesses, etc.) in Catalonia, Italy, France, the southern Low Countries, and England.24 Comparable developments in Reconquista-​era southern Spain and in central and eastern Europe have been charted for both urban and rural “dynastic” monastic settlements and interpreted as deliberate attempts to display dynastic prestige and legitimacy. These (often magnificent female) monasteries should also, however, be studied as religious, political, cultural, and economic actors, instead of approaching them always as tools in the hands of their founders and donors.25





See Carolyn Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching (Leiden, 1998). See, for instance, the Medieval Memoria Online database for the Low Countries, http://​memo.hum.uu.nl/​ (date of last access:  31 August 2018), as well as Karl G. Schmid and J. Wollasch, eds., Memoria. Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter (Munich, 1984); and Gabriela Signori, “Hochmittelalterliche Memorialpraktiken in spätmittelalterlichen Reformklöstern,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 60 (2004): 518–​47. 24 See, for instance, Michelle Marie Herder, “Women as Benefactors at Catalan Benedictine Nunneries,” Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008):  493–​ 512; Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New  York, 2006); Madeline H. Caviness, “Anchoress, Abbess and Queen:  Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. J. H. McCash (Athens, GA, 1996), 105–​54; Julian M. Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540:  A Patronage History (Woodbridge, 2006); Ghislain Baury, Les religieuses de Castille. Patronage aristocratique et ordre cistercien, XIIe–​XIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2012). 25 See for instance Heinz-​Dieter Heimann, “Mord–​Memoria–​Repräsentation: dynastische Gedächtniskultur und franziskanische Religiösität am Beispiel der habsburgischen Grablege Königsfelden im späten Mittelalter,” in Imperios sacros, monarquías divinas /​ 22

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Several of the sources that are being exploited to study patronage relationships have shed light on issues of social recruitment. Modern scholarship is developing keen new insights into the social stratification of organized medieval religious life. Recent research has shown that different religious houses/​orders catered to different social groups, particularly in the late Middle Ages. Both the late medieval (urban) monastic landscape and that of the wider organized religious mirrors the socioeconomic stratification of the surrounding society. The presence or absence of certain types of houses or forms of religious life can tell us something about the socioeconomic make-​up of towns, including, for example, the respective weight of feudal–​aristocratic or commercial–​bourgeois forces. This again can only be revealed through localized histoire totale or Landesgeschichte approaches, in combination with forms of overarching comparative research. Much work still needs to be done in this regard in order to arrive at more balanced generalizing evaluations.26 Studies of this nature also touch on issues of economics, the exploitation of monastic patrimony, and the balance between lay friars and sisters and servants, on one side, and the monks and choir nuns within religious houses, on the other. As a rule, scholars have signaled a decline in the economic prosperity of rural monastic houses, with large estates under direct exploitation in the decades following the Black Death, and they have shown how some houses were more successful than others in reinventing their socioeconomic profile.27 But scholarship seems less advanced in evaluating the material health of the many urban religious houses, which functioned in the different and frequently more volatile and heavily monetized socioeconomic settings of the late medieval towns. This context cannot be dissociated from the economics of salvation connected with the commemoration and prayer services mentioned above.





Heilige Herrscher, göttliche Monarchien, ed. Carles Rabassa and Ruth Stepper (Castelló de la Plana, 2002), 269–​90; Simon Teuscher and Claudia Moddelmog, eds., Königsfelden. Königsmord, Kloster, Klinik (Baden, 2012). 26 See the article by Röckelein in this volume; see also, for instance, Catharina Andersson, “Male Monastic Recruitment among the Cistercians in Medieval Sweden, c. 1143–​1450,” in Monastic Culture: The Long Thirteenth Century. Essays in Honour of Brian Patrick McGuire, ed. Lars Bisgaard, Sigga Engsbro, Kurt Villads Jensen, and Tore Nyberg (Odense, 2014), 148–​175; Janet E. Burton, “Yorkshire Nunneries in the Middle Ages: Recruitment and Resources,” in Government, Religion and Society in Northern England, 1000–​1700, ed. John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (Stroud, 1997), 104–​116; James G. Clark, “Why Men Became Monks in Late Medieval England,” in Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge, 2013), 160–​83. 27 See the article by Knudsen in this volume, and the literature mentioned there.

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The personal make-​up of monastic communities—​including the number of inhabitants and the ratio of religious to servants—​was certainly determined in part by the socioeconomic management of religious houses. Many other factors were also in play, including the degree of enclosure adopted (or enforced) and choices made at the point of foundation that were reflected in the rule and the constitutions. Although some work has been done recently on the issues of conversi/​conversae/​lay brothers and lay sisters in specific orders such as Cluny and the Cistercians, as discussed in the article by Cassidy-​Welch, the role of lay friars and sisters, lay servants, and other groups that could constitute the monastic familia in the more recent religious foundations—​male and female mendicant houses and other monastic and semi-​monastic newcomers to the field—​still demands scholarly attention. While the suggestion that the new opportunities for lay religious involvement in semi-​religious urban movements compensated to some extent for the numerical decline of lay brothers and sisters in Benedictine and Cistercian houses from the later thirteenth century onwards might have validity, in-​ depth studies of the lay element (whether lay friars or sisters or other types of lay servants) within religious precincts of many late medieval monastic foundations is still a desideratum.28 One further point of consideration is the variety within orders. For instance, the female Benedictines and Poor Clares had both very poor and small houses and very rich and prestigious royal foundations. To what extent did such completely different houses, although they were part of the same order, share common concerns in matters of recruitment, material existence, and liturgical display, and in the ratio of lay members (including personal servants and sometimes even slaves) present to safeguard the way of life of the nuns?29

Monastic Art and Material Culture Fueled in part by questions surrounding the late medieval economics of salvation, as well as by the emergence of a much more inclusive historical approach, a real revolution has been taking place with regard to the study of monastic art and material culture. This is especially true for the later medieval period, for which our source base is, on average, much better than that for earlier centuries. The article by Gajewski and Seeberg devoted to art and

Elisabeth Lopez, “Frères et sœurs extérieurs dans les couvents des ordres mendiants,” in Les mouvances laïques des ordres religieux. Actes du 3e colloque international du CERCOR (Saint-​Étienne, 1996), 117–​33. 29 Roest, Order and Disorder, 227–​82. 28

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material culture deals with many aspects central to this development. One fruitful line of research touches again on patronage and lay–​religious interaction, and points especially to issues of prestige. For example, the churches of large monasteries were often important for dynastic commemoration and the display of dynastic prowess. This also connects to the question of the extent to which art commissioned to be seen for a wider public differed from art geared toward the religious and devotional needs of those within the monastic enclosure, especially in the case of fully enclosed nuns.30 Another line of inquiry is artistic agency:  to what extent was monastic art and material culture a matter of artistic consumption, subject to rules of fashion and artistic development akin to what we see in patrician and noble circles of the same period, and to what extent was monastic art driven by “intramural” concerns and artistic production? This has become a particularly hot topic with regard to art and material culture produced by late medieval nuns. While the work of female painters has long been dismissed as lacking in artistic quality, more recent scholarship has changed this point of view and approached monastic art from a much less judgmental evolutionary perspective.31 Questions concerning control over artistic expression and decision-​making with regard to specific artistic programs will by no means always lead to the same answers. And, again, both in-​depth studies of individual houses with their patronage and cultural networks and more comparative approaches on the local, regional, and even European levels are needed to point out dominant tendencies. Such studies will stimulate a further integration of visual arts, as well as material culture and music, into the mainstream of monastic history. The field of monastic music, in particular, is flourishing and offering a wealth of new discoveries. The music of the late medieval liturgy was central to monastic life, an importance that sometimes even directly contradicted the rules and statutes of the monasteries in question.32 The study of monastic





Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective (Cambridge, 2003); Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, eds., Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 2008). 31 Jeryldene M. Wood, “Breaking the Silence:  The Poor Clares and the Visual Arts in Fifteenth-​Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 262–​86; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists:  The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Anne Winston-​Allen, “Outside the Mainstream: Women as Readers, Scribes, and Illustrators of Books in Convents of the German-​Speaking Regions,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica M. O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout, 2015), 191–​208. 32 See the article by Boynton in this volume.

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music has much to offer to other forms of historical research, precisely because liturgical music seems to have been very much bound up with monastic identity formation, including within the context of struggles over Observant reforms and monastic renewal.33 The study of monastic architecture is now well integrated into the field of monastic studies in general, and there is a fruitful exchange under way between scholars of religious architecture and historians devoted to issues of monastic spirituality, liturgy, daily life, and so on.34 Two important themes in more recent studies of late medieval monastic architecture are the similarities in layout and structure of monastic compounds in orders and congregations that shared a specific monastic way of life, and the importance of regional building styles. In both cases, architectural characteristics transgressed order allegiance as such to some extent. Hence, while iconographic programs in the monastic churches and the claustral area frequently expressed strong elements of order-​related religious identity formation, the architectural setting of the monastic compound often reflected underlying aspects that transcended order. For instance, whatever their overt differences, houses of pastorally oriented male canons and mendicant orders frequently had much in common with regard to the layout of church and cloister. The same was true, for different reasons, for houses and churches of enclosed female Benedictines, female Cistercians, regular canonesses, Poor Clares, and Dominican nuns, with their heavy emphasis on enclosure.35 Matters become rather more complicated in the case of “double monasteries,” characteristic



Ladislav Kacic, ed., Plaude turba paupercula. Franziskanischer Geist in Musik, Literatur und Kunst. Konferenzbericht Brat (Bratislava, 2005); Anne Bagnall Yardley, “The Musical Education of Young Girls in Medieval English Nunneries,” in Young Choristers, 650–​ 1700, ed. Susan Boynton and Eric Rice (Woodbridge, 2008), 49–​67; Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens:  Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996); Albrecht Classen, “Mein Seel fang an zu singen.” Religiöse Frauenlieder des 15.–​16. Jahrhunderts. Kritische Studien und Textedition (Leuven, 2002). 34 Michel Lauwers, ed., Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval (Turnhout, 2014). 35 Leonie Silberer, “Medieval Monastic Architecture of the Franciscan Order:  Friaries as Evidence of Written and Unwritten Rules and Ideal Perceptions,” in Rules and Observance:  Devising Forms of Communal Life, ed. Mirko Breitenstein, Stefan Burkhardt, Julia Burkhardt, and Jens Röhrkasten (Berlin, 2014), 281–​94; Virginia M. Jansen, “Architecture and Community in Medieval Monastic Dormitories,” Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture 5 (1998):  59–​94; Carola Jäggi, “Ordensarchitektur als Kommunikation von Ordnung:  Zisterziensische Baukunst zwischen Vielfalt und Einheit,” in Andenna, Herbers, and Melville, Die Ordnung der Kommunikation, 1:203–​22; Gisela Muschiol, “Architektur, Funktion und Geschlecht: Westfälische Klosterkirchen des Mittelalters,” in Westfälisches Klosterbuch, ed. Karl Hengst, 3 vols. (Münster, 1994–​ 2003), 3:791–​811; Carola Jäggi, Frauenklöster im Spätmittelalter. Die Kirchen der Klarissen und Dominikanerinnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Petersberg, 2006). 33

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of Fontevraud, the Brigittines, some individual large royal Benedictine and Clarissan foundations, and the female Gilbertines; under one and the same (mis)nomer can be found quite divergent monastic spatial and sacral solutions, a phenomenon that will certainly profit from more in-​depth comparative scholarly analysis.36

Scholastic Learning and Humanism Comparable inroads have been made with regard to age-​old paradigms concerning “monastic learning” and arguably its most pivotal material counterpart, the monastic library. The idea that medieval monastic learning was becoming more and more obsolete by the twelfth century, owing to the rise of the universities and the breakthrough of scholasticism, is being successfully challenged. A wealth of scholarship has shed new light on the contribution of monks to scholastic culture, the striking degree to which later medieval mendicant scholarship incorporated monastic legacies, and the role that late medieval reformed monasticism played in the dissemination of humanism and vernacular theology in the long fifteenth century. It is true that the universities became the dominant centers of learning from the twelfth century onwards. But male monastics participated in this new context right from the start, and, as the essays of Clark and Roest in this volume indicate, made much larger institutional and intellectual contributions to late medieval academic culture than previous generations of scholars were inclined to acknowledge. Many of the university foundings from the second half of the fourteenth century onwards were, in fact, made possible by the active involvement of monastic communities. This phenomenon has been ignored so far because the focus of scholarship on scholastic thought since the later nineteenth century, especially those studies devoted to the influx of Arab-​Aristotelian thought, has been on the Parisian scholastic authors of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. But especially from the second half of the

On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. See also Pamela Yvonne Stanton, “Definition and Reality of Double Monasticism in Medieval Europe. A  Case Study:  The Anglo-​Norman Monastery of St Albans” (PhD diss., University of Calgary, 1993); Kaspar Elm and Michel Parisse, eds., Doppelklöster und andere Formen der Symbiose männlicher und weiblicher Religiosen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1992), 25–​55; Carola Jäggi, “Raum und Liturgie in franziskanischen Doppelklöstern: Königsfelden und S. Chiara in Neapel im Vergleich,” in Art, cérémonial et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicolas Bock, Peter Kurmann, Serena Romano, and Jean-​Michel Spieser (Rome, 2002), 223–​46.

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fourteenth century onwards, monastics comprised a considerable percentage of the student and teacher populations at studia incorporated in universities, and a significant number of monastic authors with solid scholastic training were involved with several of the most important late medieval intellectual controversies.37 Moreover, a substantial number of monastic authors, educated both within congregational colleges attached to universities and in the orders’ own schools elsewhere, were at the forefront of the humanist movement. This was signaled in the 1970s and early 1980s by Stinger and Brann,38 and has since been fleshed out by several other scholars working on reformed Benedictines, Camaldolese monks, and Augustinian hermits in England, the German Empire, Spain, and the Italian peninsula.39 At lower levels, monasteries old and new remained involved in the schooling of children and adolescents. Here again, new historical approaches have moved away from privileging normative sources such as statutes, which frequently limited or even forbade such active teaching activities. These new studies show that many urban monastic houses offered significant educational services to lay children and adolescent boys and girls, a phenomenon that would take on a new dynamic in the early modern period.40 The study of medieval monastic libraries, in particular, has undergone a transformation, and it is now clear that a number of assumptions about the relative marginalization of monastic book culture in the late Middle Ages needs revision. Much of the literature that fueled late medieval lay religious formation was monastic in origin. Moreover, the impact of Benedictine





See the article by Clark in this volume; Thomas Sullivan, Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris A.D. 1229–​1500: A Biographical Register (Leiden, 1995); Jacques Verger, “Moines, chanoines et collèges réguliers dans les universités du Midi au Moyen Âge,” in Naissance et fonctionnement des réseaux monastiques et canoniaux (Saint-​Etienne, 1991), 511–​ 49. See also Constance Hoffman Berman, “Monastic Hospices in Southern France and Colleges in Montpellier, Toulouse, Paris, and Oxford: The Cistercian Urban Presence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 102:3–​4 (2007): 747–​80. 38 Charles Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–​1439) and the Revival of Patristic Theology in the Early Italian Renaissance (Albany, NY, 1977); Noel Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–​1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden, 1981). 39 Kaspar Elm, “Mendicants and Humanists in Florence in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: The Problem of Justifying Humanistic Studies in the Mendicant Orders,” in Religious Life between Jerusalem, the Desert, and the World:  Selected Essays by Kaspar Elm, trans. James Mixson (Leiden, 2015), 111–​37; Stephen Bowd, Reform before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2002); Franz Posset, Renaissance Monks:  Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches (Leiden, 2005); Cécile Caby, Autoportrait d’un moine en humaniste. Girolamo Aliotti (1412–​1480) (Rome, 2018). 40 See the literature provided in the article by Knudsen in this volume. 37

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and especially Cistercian, Carthusian, and Victorine spirituality is obvious on many of the most influential texts of religious instruction written in the later Middle Ages, including the widely diffused mendicant Meditationes vitae Christi conglomerate. This influence is particularly clear for the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the religious writings of many mendicants and monastics, including Carthusians and cloistered members of the Modern Devotion movement (e.g. the Windesheim Congregation), were aimed directly at both female religious and the laity, as part of a wider program of shaping devout Christian subjects. The impact that this had on the thirst for vernacular devotional literature well into the sixteenth century is still being studied.41 It has also become apparent that many established ideas about monastic library formation do not withstand scrutiny. As McQuillen and Schlotheuber neatly point out in their article, monastic library formation was a more complicated process than the mere inspection of surviving medieval and early modern library catalogues might suggest. Questions concerning monastic book acquisition must again intersect with questions of patronage and the formation of religious identity, as well as with issues of religious reform.42 Rather than seeing monastic libraries as nearly impenetrable bastions of “imprisoned texts,” as Stephen Greenblatt erroneously restated in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (possibly an unfortunate misreading of the playful deconstruction of the monastic library in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose), serious scholarship has come to discuss monastic libraries and monastic houses broadly speaking as players in the late medieval book market and as exercising a formative influence on the type of literature available to a growing number of literate lay people. This is another topic that presents rich opportunities for further research.43



Petronella Bange, Spiegels der christenen. Zelfreflectie en ideaalbeeld in laat-​middeleeuwse moralistisch-​didactische traktaten (Nijmegen, 1986); Sabrina Corbellini, Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages:  Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion (Turnhout, 2013); M. C. Woods, “Shared Books:  Primers, Psalters, and the Adult Acquisition of Literacy among Devout Laywomen and Women in Orders in Late Medieval England,” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Lieges and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-​ Browne (Turnhout, 1999), 177–​93. 42 See Werner Williams-​Krapp, “Observanzbewegungen, monastische Spiritualität und geistliche Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Geistliche Literatur des späten Mittelalters. Kleine Schriften, ed. Kristina Freienhagen-​Baumgardt (Tübingen, 2012), 173–​88. 43 See also David Neil Bell, “Monastic Libraries: 1400–​1557,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. III:  1400–​1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), 229–​54; Claire Cross, “Monastic Learning and Libraries in Sixteenth-​Century Yorkshire,” in Humanism and Reform: The Church in Europe, England, and Scotland, 1400–​ 1643. Essays in Honour of James K. Cameron, ed. James Kirk (Oxford, 1991), 255–​69. 41

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It was in urban monastic and mendicant libraries that many urban preachers found the praedicabilia that facilitated the shaping of their Advent and Lenten cycles. And it was in those same libraries that lay members of urban confraternities found material to shape their own worldview. The fifteenth-​ century painter Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), to offer just one example, was a member of the confraternity of Our Lady in Den Bosch, and his visions of heaven and hell were probably shaped in part by the religious works that he was able to consult in the libraries of religious houses in his home town, catering to a surprisingly wide clientele of readers.44 The importance of monastic libraries and monastic book culture might have been even more fundamental, as it has been suggested that the introduction of the printing press with movable type originated first and foremost in order to cater specifically to “monastic” needs—​that is, in response to the need of religious houses for certain types of texts in larger quantities.45 The popular notion that the printing press was an “agent of civilization” holds true, although in a different way than many older studies on the emergence of modernity tend to suggest.46 Together with research on late medieval monastic humanism and patristics, the ongoing study of the role of monastic library formation and concomitant cultural production in shaping the late medieval and Renaissance intellectual world is bound to deliver interesting results. The study of late medieval monasticism is thriving, and the research that is emerging is reshaping—​even revolutionizing—​the way in which we understand and evaluate forms of religious life in the late Middle Ages. This contribution has highlighted a number of issues that are directly or indirectly connected to the major themes of the various articles in this section, all of which are indicative of a changing evaluation of monastic history during the late medieval period. We have singled out, among other things, the importance of both localized and order-​transgressing studies; the recognition of the complex interaction between monastic and extra-​monastic worlds (especially within urban contexts); attention to the efflorescence of new monastic and semi-​ monastic initiatives; recognition of the monastic contribution

See Ester Vink, Jeroen Bosch in Den Bosch. De schilder tegen de achtergrond van zijn stad (Nijmegen, 2001). See the article by McQuillen and Schlotheuber in this volume. 46 Anne-​Wiebke Kuhnen, “Die Erfindung des Drucks mit beweglichen Lettern und die Gutenberg-​Bibel,” in Geschichte der Buchkunst. Vom Pergament zum E-​Book. Eine Einführung, ed. Christina Strunck (Petersberg, 2013), 40–​4; Sophie Cassagnes-​Brouquet, “Du manuscrit à l’imprimé: une entrée bouleversante dans la galaxie Gutenberg,” in Monde(s) en mouvement. Mutations et innovations en Europe à la fin du Moyen Âge et au début de la Renaissance, ed. Muriel Cunin and Martine Yvernault (Limoges, 2012), 243–​56. 44

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to scholastic learning and humanism; and, first and foremost, the imperative need to abandon the simplistic image of an old-​fashioned late medieval monasticism in decline.47 Much more could be said, of course, not only about each of these issues, the advances that have been made, and the directions that could be taken, but also about topics that we have not touched upon: aspects of gendered monastic spirituality, devotional practices, the monastic use of sacred space, and so on.48 The study of late medieval monasticism is emerging as a vibrant field of research for medievalists and Renaissance scholars alike, who are exploring a wide variety of research questions that are central to our comprehension of the religious life and self-​understanding during the period leading up to the religious conflicts of the early sixteenth century.

Bibliography Andenna, Cristina, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville, eds. Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Netzwerke. Klöster und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts; Vol. 2: Zentralität. Papsttum und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 2012–​13. Andenna, Giancarlo, ed. Dove va la storiografia monastica in Europa? Temi e metodi di ricerca per lo studio della vita monastica e regolare in età medievale alle soglie del terzo millennio. Milan, 2001. Baury, Ghislain. Les religieuses de Castille. Patronage aristocratique et ordre cistercien, XIIe–​XIIIe siècle. Rennes, 2012. Classen, Albrecht. “Mein Seel fang an zu singen.” Religiöse Frauenlieder des 15.–​16. Jahrhunderts. Kritische Studien und Textedition. Leuven, 2002. Duval, Sylvie. “Comme des anges sur terre.” Les moniales dominicaines et les débuts de la réforme observante, 1385–​1461. Rome, 2015. Espaces monastiques, espaces urbains de l’antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge. Rome, 2012. Goetschi, Milena Svec. Klosterflucht und Bittgang. Apostasie und monastische Mobilität im 15. Jahrhundert. Cologne, 2015. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. Nuns as Artists:  The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent. Berkeley, CA, 1997. Hamburger, Jeffrey F., and Susan Marti, eds. Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries. New York, 2008. Heale, Martin. The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England. Oxford, 2016.   Monasticism in Late Medieval England, c. 1300–1535. Manchester, 2009. Jäggi, Carola. Frauenklöster im Spätmittelalter. Die Kirchen der Klarissen und Dominikanerinnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert. Petersberg, 2006. Jordan, Erin L. Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages. New York, 2006.

For a more extensive discussion on the latter, see the article by Roest in this volume. See Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011).

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Elisabeth Lusset and Be rt   Roe st Kendrick, Robert L. Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan. Oxford, 1996. Kimminus-​Schneider, Claudia, and Manfred Schneider, eds. Klöster und monastische Kultur in Hansestädten. Beiträge des 4. wissenschaftlichen Kolloquiums Stralsund 12. bis 15. Dezember 2001. Stralsund, 2003. Lauwers, Michel, ed. Monastères et espace social. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2014. Le Gall, Jean-​Marie. Moines au temps des réformes. France, 1480–​1560. Seyssel, 2001. Lusset, Elisabeth. Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (XIIe–​XVe siècle). Turnhout, 2017. Luxford, Julian M. The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540: A Patronage History. Woodbridge, 2006. Makowski, Elizabeth. “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”:  Quasi-​Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages. Washington, DC, 2005. Melville, Gert, and Anne Müller, eds. Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische Ansätze und Perspektiven. Münster, 2007. Posset, Franz. Renaissance Monks:  Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches. Leiden, 2005. Roest, Bert. Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform. Leiden, 2013. Rudy, Kathryn M. Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout, 2011. Shaw, Robert L. J. “The Celestine Monks of France, 1350–​1450: Monastic Reform in an Age of Schism, Councils and War.” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2014. Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565. Philadelphia, PA, 2001. Stinger, Charles. Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–​1439) and the Revival of Patristic Theology in the Early Italian Renaissance. Albany, NY, 1977. Thomas, Anabel. Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective. Cambridge, 2003.

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Sources of Late Medieval Monasticism Cé cil e   Ca b y ( t r a n slate d b y Trista n Sh arp)

One of the main innovations in monastic life—​one that marks a real caesura between the two halves of the Middle Ages—​is the explosion of diversitas religionum, that is, the multiplication of the forms of communal regular life. At the start of the eleventh century, monasticism was not uniform, but these differences were not considered to be a defining feature. This was the form of monasticism that the fourteenth-​century papacy would later designate the ordo sancti Benedicti. From the eleventh century on, there was growing diversity among religious communities, which later led to the construction of many religious orders with well-​defined institutional and legal structures.1 The most famous example (but also the most innovative) was that of the Cistercian order, which during the first two decades of the twelfth century laid the foundation for a complex organization that was at once decentralized through the system of filiation and firmly unified by the general chapter. This new diversity justifies starting with the sources that accompanied this institutional transformation, before returning in the final two sections of this essay, first to the sources of monastic history that are less specific to the late Middle Ages (such as the privileges and letters of the popes and other supervisory authorities), and then to a consideration of recent methodological developments.



On this evolution, see the articles by Melville and Andenna in this volume, and the publications by Melville and his students, especially Gert Melville, “Unitas e diversitas: l’Europa medievale dei chiostri e degli ordini,” in Europa in costruzione. La forza delle identità, la ricerca di unità (secoli IX–​XIII), ed. Giorgio Cracco et al. (Bologna, 2007), 357–​84; Florent Cygler, “ ‘Unité des cœurs’ et ‘uniformité des mœurs’ au défi de l’espace et du temps: les statuts des ordres religieux au Moyen Âge,” in Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieu clos (IVe–​XIXe siècle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-​Donat et al. (Paris, 2015), 171–​88.

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Literacy and the Construction of Religious Orders The strong demand for unity, or even for uniformity, inherent in the organization of religious orders during the twelfth century expressed itself through two essential and organically related means. First, there was the creation of a corpus of written law particular to a given order (ius particulare or ius proprium), which radically transformed the nature of monastic norms. Second, an administrative machinery was created that ensured the governance and control of the orders, above all the general chapter and the system of visitation.2 These innovations led to the appearance of new types of documents:  accounts of the meetings of the general chapter;3 the various compilations of statutes through which the discussions of the chapter were promulgated;4 catalogues of abbeys—​such as the tabulae surveying the different male Cistercian abbeys according to their seniority5—​and lists of provinces or other geographical groupings;6 cartae and formae visitationis and the records of visitations;7 letters concerning legations, the reports of inquests, and inventories;8 and so on.









Gert Melville, “Zur Funktion der Schriftlichkeit im institutionellen Gefüge mittelalterlicher Orden,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991):  391–​ 417; Maria Pia Alberzoni, “I sistemi di controllo,” in Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, Vol. 1: Netzwerke. Klöster und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Cristina Andenna, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville (Stuttgart, 2012), 93–​117. 3 On the general chapter, see Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel in hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser (Münster, 2002). 4 See Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville, eds., Regulae –​Consuetudines –​Statuta. Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del medioevo (Münster, 2005). 5 Matthias Tischler, “Tabula abbatiarum Cisterciensium Bambergensis: eine neue Quelle zur Geschichte des Zisterzienserordens im 12. und frühen 13. Jahrhundert (mit Edition),” in Institution und Charisma. Festschrift für Gert Melville, ed. Franz J. Felten, Annette Kehnel, and Stefan Weinfurter (Cologne, 2009), 73–​98; Alexis Grélois, “Au-​delà des catalogues: pour une étude à frais nouveau de l’expansion cistercienne dans la France de l’Ouest,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 120 (2013): 154–​69. 6 Simon Tugwell, “The Evolution of Dominican Structures of Government: Terminology, Nomenclature and ordo of Dominican Provinces,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 75 (2005):  29–​94; Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Figure cartographique et auto-​conscience de l’ordre: une carte des provinces franciscaines (fin XIIIe/​début XIVe siècle),” in Pensare per figure. Diagrammi e simboli in Gioacchino da Fiore, ed. Alessandro Ghisalberti (Rome, 2010), 349–​58; Alexis Grélois, “Une adoption contrariée: les provinces chez les cisterciens, fin du XIIe–​milieu du XVe siècle),” Annales de l’Est 63 (2013): 49–​74. 7 Jörg Oberste, Visitation und Ordensorganisation. Formen sozialer Normierung, Kontrolle und Kommunikation bei Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern und Cluniazensern (12.–​frühes 14. Jahrhundert) (Münster, 1996); J. Oberste, ed., Die Dokumente des klösterlichen Visitationen (Turnhout, 1999). 8 Florent Cygler, “Caractères et contenus de la communication au sein des ordres religieux au Moyen Âge: les transferts internes d’informations,” in Andenna, Herbers, and Melville, Netzwerke,  85–​6. 2

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These sources have been the focus of at least three new directions in research:  the complex elaboration of norms in the monastic milieu;9 the function of pragmatic writing in relation to the growth of literacy;10 and the development of a means of communication and governance.11 Our understanding of the elaboration and transmission of norms has benefited greatly from a return to the original sources, even when seemingly authoritative editions are available. This phenomenon has had spectacular results for Cistercian general chapters.12 In a parallel development, recent scholarship has underlined the importance of the institutional borrowing and circulation of texts. This has shattered approaches divided by order, for example, complicating the notion of an opposition between monastic orders in the strict sense and the mendicant orders. The recent edition of the first corpus of the statues of the Camaldolese order, the Libri tres de moribus promulgated by Prior General Martin III in 1253, has demonstrated that the Camaldolese legislators borrowed, sometimes word for word, from both Cistercian and Dominican compilations.13 Comparisons with the structures for governance of other institutions have shown the importance of reciprocal influences in the use of writing. This is the case, for example, for governance by letter, which has been well studied for the great chancelleries of sovereigns (emperors, kings, popes), but which still awaits systemic study for religious orders. We have only started to demonstrate the pioneering role of the Cistercians—​especially in the monastery





For example, Emmanuele Coccia, “La legge della salvezza:  Bernardo Clairvaux e il diritto monastico,” Viator 41 (2010): 127–​46. 10 Gert Melville, Florent Cygler, and Jörg Oberste, “Aspekte zur Verbindung von Organization und Schriftlichkeit, im Ordenswesen:  ein Vergleich zwischen den Cisterziensern und Cluniazensern im 12./​13. Jahrhundert,” in “Viva vox” et “ratio scripta.” Mündliche und schriftliche Kommunikationsformen im Mönchtum des Mittelalters, ed. Clemens M. Kasper and Klaus Schreiner (Münster, 1997), 205–​80. 11 Cygler, “Caractères et contenus de la communication,” 77–​90; Michael Robson and Jens Röhrkasten, eds., Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context:  Formal and Informal Structures of the Friars’ Lives and Ministry in the Middle Ages (Münster, 2010). 12 See Alexis Grélois, “Tradition and Transmission:  What is the Significance of the Cistercian General Chapters’ Statutes? (Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries),” in Shaping Stability:  The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 205–​16. 13 Concerning the Camaldoli’s borrowings from the Cistercians and Dominicans in 1253, see Martino III priore di Camaldoli, Libri tres de moribus, ed. and trans. Pierluigi Licciardello (Florence, 2013). On the role of the curia in some of these interactions between orders, see Pietro Maria Silanos, “Examinari fecimus diligenter:  la contribution des consiliatores pape dans les procédures d’approbation de nouvelles formes de vie régulière à l’aube du IVe concile de Latran,” in Interactions, emprunts, confrontations chez les religieux (antiquité tardive–​f in du XIXe siècle), ed. Sylvain Excoffon, Daniel-​Odon Hurel, and Annick Peters-​Custot (Saint-​Etienne, 2015), 205–​36. 9

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of Clairvaux—​in using new techniques for letter-​writing (ars dictaminis). At the end of 1145, Bernard (d. 1153), pressed by the urgent needs of the moment, took a true professional letter-​writer into his service, the former black monk Nicholas of Montiéramey.14 In the following decades, formularies were created that merit study in their own right.15 The diffusion of houses through Christendom required links that guaranteed unity across geographical distance. To take one example, by the end of the Middle Ages the Carthusian order had developed a well-​articulated system for registering and transmitting the decisions of its general chapter.16 Ultimately the creation of religious orders led to the development of more-​or-​less centralized and permanent chanceries, or at least to an office of secretary, although their records are preserved unevenly.17 It is rarer to find research on administrative writing by (or for) female monastic communities, except some that highlight the way in which nuns were excluded from certain governmental practices. In 1228, for example, the Cistercian general chapter forbade abbesses to lead, or even to attend, the visitation of their daughter houses. The power of Cistercian abbesses was frequently attacked by the general chapters of the first half of the thirteenth century.18 Not all female religious belonged to an order (far from it), but those who did often lacked autonomous written norms (with a few exceptions, such as Fontevraud and the Clarissans).19 Instead they constituted branches whose norms were inserted into compilations conceived principally for men,









Anne-​Marie Turcan-​Verkerk, “L’introduction de l’ars dictaminis en France. Nicolas de Montiéramey, un professionnel du dictamen entre 1140 et 1158,” and Claudio Felisi and Anne-​Marie Turcan-​Verkerk, “Les Artes dictandi latins de la fin du XIe à la fin du XIVe siècle: un état des sources,” in Le dictamen dans tous ses états. Perspectives de recherche sur la théorie et la pratique de l’ars dictaminis (XIe–​XVe s.), ed. Benoît Grévin and Anne-​Marie Turcan-​Verkerk (Turnhout, 2015), 63–​98 and 417–​541, respectively. 15 See Sixta Görtz, “Formularbücher des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts als Zeugen organisationsbezogener Schriftlichkeit im Zisterzienserorden,” in De ordine vitae. Zu Normenvorstellungen, Organisationsformen und Schriftgebrauch im mittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, ed. Gert Melville (Münster, 1996), 284–​314. 16 See, most recently, Sylvain Excoffon, “Les chartreux et les élites en Europe d’après les obits des actes des chapitres généraux de Chartreuse (1422–​1474): première approche,” in Les chartreux et les élites, XIIe–​XVIIIe siècles (Saint-​Étienne, 2013), 199–​232. 17 For some emblematic examples in England, see William A. Pantin, “English Monastic Letter-​Books,” in Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait, ed. J. G. Edwards, V. H. Galbraith, and E. F. Jacob (Manchester, 1933), 201–​22; on letter registers among the Camaldoli, see Cécile Caby, De l’érémitisme rural au monachisme urbain. Les Camaldules en Italie à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rome, 1999). 18 Alexis Grélois, “L’abbesse cistercienne entre l’ordre et l’ordinaire (XIIe–​début XIVe siècle),” in Les personnes d’autorité en milieu régulier. Des origines de la vie régulière au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-​François Cottier, Daniel-​Odon Hurel, and Benoît-​Michel Tock (Saint-​ Étienne, 2012), 117–​30. 19 See the article by Andenna in this volume. 14

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and eventually into specific sub-​sections. For instance, the Cistercian statutes of 1237 grouped the prescriptions for women into a unique chapter (the fifteenth and last), a chapter that expanded considerably in the following compilation of 1257.20 The case of the Cistercians—​by far the best studied, excluding the mendicants—​underlines the need to investigate the specific, and often unwritten, norms of female religious life, including the role of bishops (even in supposedly exempt orders).21 There is a similar need for research on the relationship within orders between the exclusively male hierarchy and female communities, and on the potentially unique character of documentary production in certain female communities, despite their vulnerability and the dependence on intermediaries that claustration imposed on them.22 This tableau of an apparent triumph of the written word, and especially of legal and administrative texts, should not disguise two parallel, and only seemingly contradictory, realities. First, one must not neglect the continuing importance of gestures and orality in monastic communication, whether within institutional settings, such as during debates at chapters and other assemblies,23 or even with respect to the transmission of the decisions of these proceedings to the various houses.24 One should also include other situations that are more difficult to grasp, such as in the context of the interactions between a community and the local society, especially regarding the resolution of conflicts. In reality, the revolution of the written word did not put a stop to clamores, protestations, the humiliation of relics, and other performative acts of vengeance in encounters with “wicked” lay people.25 Moreover,





See Ghislain Baury, “Émules puis sujettes de l’ordre cistercien:  les cisterciennes de Castille et d’ailleurs face au Chapitre Général aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Cîteaux. Commentarii cistercienses (hereafter Cîteaux) 52 (2001): 40 and annex IV; Élisabeth Lusset, “Réflexions sur la correction des moniales criminelles en Occident, XIIIe–​XVe s.,” in Figures de femmes criminelles. De l’antiquité à nos jours, ed. Loïc Cadiet et al. (Paris, 2010), 255–​65. 21 See Brigitte Degler-​Spengler, “Zisterzienserorden und Frauenklöster:  Anmerkungen zur Forschungsproblematik,” in Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und 22; Guido Wirklichkeit, ed. Kaspar Elm and Peter Joerissen (Cologne, 1982), 213–​ Cariboni, “Cistercian Nuns in Northern Italy: Variety of Foundations and Construction of an Identity,” in Women in the Medieval Monastic World, ed. Jane Burton and Karen Stoeber (Turnhout, 2015), 61–​3. 22 See Ghislain Baury, “Patronage et gestion des domaines chez les cisterciennes castillanes:  les fausses quittances de Cañas (1298–​1302),” Cîteaux 59 (2008):  237–​52; Grélois, “L’abbesse cistercienne.” 23 Cygler, Das Generalkapitel in hohen Mittelalter, 49. 24 Grélois, “Tradition and Transmission,” 213–​14. 25 Steven Vanderputten, “Monachos hujus ecclesie ad se venire fecit: attitudes laïques comme reflets des stratégies monastiques orales et rituelles dans les transferts patrimoniaux,” in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth–​ Thirteenth Centuries), ed. Steven Vanderputten (Turnhout, 2011), 49–​64.

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in the case of excommunication, as well as of all sorts of injunctions by superiors (convocation, transfer, etc.), reading the sanction or injunction aloud was essential for it to take effect.26 These strictly legal and administrative instruments are not sufficient to account for all of the practices that assured the unity, stability, and durability of a religious order. In a general way, the pioneering reflections of Brian Stock on the Cistercian order as a “textual community” have highlighted the function of non-​administrative writing in the construction of both the community and the order. This all-​encompassing approach to monastic literacy breaks through the artificial partition between administrative documents and intellectual production.27 In the small Camaldolese order in central Italy, a 1216 legal proceeding pitted the hermitage of Camaldoli, jealous of its libertas, against it diocesan ordinary, the bishop of Arezzo. The conflict was the occasion for the caput ordinis to develop a defensive strategy that brought together legal documents, an invented origin story that excluded the bishop (which circulated as an interpolation in the Life of Romuald of Ravenna by Peter Damian (c. 1042)), and a forged foundation charter that conveniently substituted a mythic lay founder, Maldolo, for the bishop.28 This example illustrates the existence of veritable “workshops of the written word” within orders that deployed multiple strategies.29 In this regard, one of the genres that has received the most attention is that of foundation narratives, here defined as texts that create and preserve the community through the sharing of a common narrative.30 This scholarship has taken account of the variety of discursive supports for origin stories,



Alain Rauwel, “Liturgie monastique et société médiévale,” BUCEMA, hors-​série 5 (2013), http://​cem.revues.org/​12534 (date of last access: 30 August 2018). 27 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation Baron, in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983); Marlène Hélias-​ “Écrits et écritures dans le monde cistercien: pratiques et gestion de l’écrit monastique (X IIe–​X IIIe siècles),” BUCEMA 15 (2011), https://​journals.openedition.org/​cem/​12025 (date of last access: 30 August 2018); Dominique Stutzmann, “Clairvaux et l’écrit,” in Clairvaux. L’aventure cistercienne, ed. Arnaud Baudin, Nicolas Dohrmann, and Laurent Veyssière (Paris, 2015), 199–​205. 28 Amy Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past:  Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 29 The documents related to the trial will be published in the near future; until then, see Cécile Caby, “Camaldoli (1012–​2012):  chronique des célébrations du millénaire de la fondation de Camaldoli,” Revue Mabillon 23 (2012): 271–​4. 30 La mémoire des origines dans les institutions médiévales communautés et pouvoirs en Italie et dans le Maghreb aux époques médiévales et modernes (Rome, 2003); Écrire son histoire. Les communautés régulières face à leur passé (Saint-​Étienne, 2005); Philippe Josserand and Mathieu Olivier, eds., La mémoire des origines dans les ordres religieux-​militaires au Moyen Âge (Berlin, 2012). 26

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which include not only texts, but also visual representations (images, maps, etc.),31 a point which is underlined by recent studies, for example, of monastic seals.32

Ius proprium and ius commune There have been profound innovations even in a field as well worn as the relationships between religious communities or orders and the papacy. Concerning the place of the vita religiosa in pontifical letters and privileges,33 legal compilations, and treatises,34 new attention has been paid to the negotiations between the ius commune of the papacy and the ius proprium of the orders, and, more broadly, to the complicated interaction between local practices and the requirements for the Church at large.35 The late Middle Ages were characterized by growing pressure from the papacy on the monastics, which was felt particularly by independent houses; after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), one of Rome’s main goals regarding the latter was to organize them into orders (with the necessary administrative







Gautier Dalché, “Figure cartographique”; Uta Kleine, “La terre vue par les moines. Construction et perception de l’espace dans les représentations figurées de la propriété monastique: Marmoutier (Alsace) et Zwettl (XIIe–​XIVe siècle),” in Monastères et espace social dans l’Occident médiéval. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident medieval, ed. Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2015), 147–​84; Alessia Trivellone, “Culte des saints et construction identitaire à Cîteaux: les images de Jérôme dans les manuscrits réalisés sous l’abbatiat d’Étienne Harding,” in Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin (VIe–​XVIe siècle). Actes du colloque international de Lyon, 4–​6 octobre 2010, ed. Marie-​ Céline Isaia and Thomas Granier (Turnhout, 2014), 215–​34. 32 On seals more generally, see Michel Pastoureau, “Les sceaux et la fonction sociale des images,” in L’image. Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1996), 275–​308; for the seals of abbesses, see Giovanni Maria Del Basso, “Il sigillo delle monache:  autorità e modello,” in Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 1996), 347–​64; for Clairvaux, see Arnaud Baudin, “Sceller à Clairvaux et dans sa filiation champenoise du XIIe au XVe siècle,” in Baudin, Dohrmann, and Veyssière, Clairvaux, 172–​83. 33 For an excellent introduction regarding monasticism, see Olivier Guyotjeannin, “Les rapports avec les instances supérieures,” in Moines, chanoines et religieux au Moyen Âge. Guide de recherche et documents, ed. André Vauchez and Cécile Caby (Turnhout, 2003), 173–​228. 34 See the articles by Melville and Sharp in this volume. 35 Gert Melville, “Zum Recht der Religiosen im ‘Liber extra’,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 87 (2001):  165–​90; and, for a different perspective, Coccia, “La legge della salvezza”; Michel Lauwers, ed., La dîme, l’Église et la société féodale (Turnhout, 2012); Guido Cariboni, “Appello e divieto di appello alla Chiesa romana presso gli ordini religiosi nel XII secolo,” in Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, Vol. 2: Zentralität. Papsttum und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Cristina Andenna, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville (Stuttgart, 2013), 261–​75. 31

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organization). Communities of black monks were especially targeted; for instance, the 1268 statutes of the legate Ottobuono Fieschi (d. 1276) deprived English communities of black monks of their autonomy by reinforcing episcopal visitation and establishing general chapters for exempt houses, organized into two provinces, Canterbury and York, which would later be unified. The activity of these English chapters is well documented, in contrast to other regions of Christendom.36 In the following century, the great inquests led by Benedict XII (r.  1334–​42) as part of his reforms of various orders and monasteries produced a rich documentation that awaits renewed study in light of recent advances in the interpretation of administrative texts.37 Monasteries that did not have the benefit of exemption remained under the control of diocesan authorities; many of these were female monasteries. They all became the object of increased supervision in a context of growing administrative machinery, resulting in the creation of texts specific to the control of monastics, such as visitation records.38 These developments reflect the advance of a kind of rationalized administration characteristic of the later Middle Ages. Interest in curial and episcopal documents has been revived by new questions and new techniques of systematic and statistical analysis, which have developed largely thanks to digital editions and formats, particularly suited to analyzing the growing number of letters produced by the papal collation of benefices from the beginning of the fourteenth century.39 There are, moreover, other types of records produced by the Curia and aimed at the regular world that have only recently received attention from historians of monasticism. This is the case, for example, for documents produced by the Apostolic Penitentiary, which cast new light on the process of denouncing







See Sharp in this volume. See also William A. Pantin, ed., Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215–​1540, 3  vols. (London, 1931–​7); and, for a good state of the question, Harmony Dewez, “Obedientiales et claustrales: clôture, argent et contrôle chez les bénédictins anglais au XIIIe siècle,” in Heullant-​Donat et al., Enfermements II, 309–​22. 37 See, for example, the editions by Leopold Delisle, “Enquête sur la fortune des établissements de l’Ordre de Saint-​Benoît en 1338,” Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale 39 (1916): 359–​408; and Jean Laporte, “L’état des biens de l’abbaye de Jumièges en 1338,” Annales de Normandie 9 (1959): 67–​89. 38 Guyotjeannin, “Les rapports avec les instances supérieures,” 180–​4; and the articles by Sharp and Knudsen in this volume. 39 See especially the database Ut per litteras apostolicas, www.brepols.net/​Pages/​ BrowseBySeries.aspx?TreeSeries=LITPA (date of last access 31 August 2018), which will contain more than 250,000 pontifical documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Honorius III (r. 1216–​27) to Gregory XI (r. 1370–​8). 36

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monastic crimes in the context of the institutionalization and the modes of functioning of religious orders.40

Texts for Managing the Monastic Community The late Middle Ages were also characterized by the development of administrative records for managing monastic property and seigneurial revenues. These genres (cartularies, pancartes, landbooks, rent books and accounts, and simple charters) have long been staples of monastic history, but their interpretation has nonetheless been thoroughly revisited.41 It has been demonstrated, for example, how Cistercian capitularies, constantly updated, could be used not only to note statutes and liturgical precepts or to remember benefactors, which was their original function, but also as compilations of legal acts and even as registers of payment.42 With few exceptions, such research has concentrated thus far on periods before the thirteenth century;43 the later periods, which often saw traditional modes of record-​keeping pushed aside by the influence of other techniques, above all those of notaries, remain to be studied.44 Recent research on the flowering of late medieval numeracy has shed light on the penetration into the monastic world of capacities for systematic book-​ keeping and classification. These studies attempt to elucidate the dynamic between the organization of monastic life and economic choices, investigating further, for example, the distinction between claustral monks dedicated to prayer and monks or brothers dedicated to









On the Penintenciary, see Arnaud Fossier, Le droit bien tempéré. Casuistique et pratiques administratives de la Pénitencerie Apostolique (début XIIIe–​début XVe siècle) (Rome, 2018); on monastic petitions sent to it, see Élisabeth Lusset, Crime, châtiment et grâce dans les monastères au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2017). 41 See also the article by Bruce in this volume. 42 Guido Cariboni, “I Libri capituli delle abbazie cistercensi italiane:  Osservazioni preliminari tra memoria e amministrazione,” in Les pratiques de l’écrit dans les abbayes cisterciennes (XIIe–​milieu du XVIe s.). Produire, échanger, contrôler, conserver, ed. Arnaud Baudin and Laurent Morelle (Paris, 2017), 257–​70. 43 For Cluny, see Didier Méhu, Paix et communautés autour de l’abbaye de Cluny (Xe–​XVe siècle) (Lyon, 2001); and Sébastien Barret La mémoire et l’écrit. L’abbaye de Cluny et ses archives, Xe–​XVIIIe siècle (Münster, 2004). For the Cistercian order, see Hélias-​Baron, “Écrits et écritures dans le monde cistercien”; Coraline Rey, “Cartularisation et inventorisation: les registres de copies d’actes à Cîteaux (XIIe–​XVe siècle),” in L’enquête en questions. De la réalité à la “vérité” dans les modes de gouvernement (Moyen-​Âge/​Temps modernes), ed. A. Mailloux and L. Verdon (Paris, 2014), 141–​6, and her numerous other publications; Baudin and Morelle, Les pratiques de l’écrit dans les abbayes cisterciennes. 44 On late medieval cartularies, see Cristina Carbonetti, Arianna Cervi, Marta De Bianchi, and Jean-​Marie Martin, “Les cartulaires ecclésiastiques de l’Italie médiévale,” MEFRM 127.2 (2015), http://​mefrm.revues.org/​2655 (date of last access: 31 August 2018).

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administration.45 But they equally reconsider certain practices that have long been considered signs of decadence, such as indebtedness, and show other transfers of know-​how or pragmatic knowledge, for example between monastic and public or seigneurial administrations.46 There are numerous instances from medieval Italy of monks, friars, and lay brothers holding offices in communal governments, especially positions related to financial management.47 Moreover, monastic communities themselves were not immune to the influence of local practices, as demonstrated by variations in their record-​ keeping that reflect local usage much more than any policy of their order.48 Research on this topic has been particularly active for two groups:  paradoxically, the mendicants—​who considered collective poverty to be their distinguishing mark—​ and also women. The administrative documents of mendicant communities are the focus of current investigation, but this could be productively extended to monks in the strict sense of the term.49 This interest has developed in the context of a general revision of our understanding of the medieval economy, resting in part on a closer study of the theoretical writings of monks and mendicants.50 As for women, this focus on







Dewez, “Obedientiales et claustrales,” 309–​22. On lay brothers, see the article by Cassidy-​ Welch in this volume. Paul Harvey, Manorial Records (London, 1984); Isabelle Theillier, “Comptabilité et réalité financière:  quelques observations autour d’un registre comptable de l’abbaye Saint-​ Amand de Rouen (1387/​8–​1397),” Les sources comptables (2005), 51–​73; Harmony Dewez, “Une simplicité trompeuse: le compte manorial monastique (Angleterre, XIIIe–​XIVe siècle),” in Classer, dire, compter. Discipline du chiffre et fabrique d’une norme comptable à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Olivier Mattéoni and Patrice Beck (Paris, 2015), 153–​70; Xavier Hermand, Jean-​François Nieus, and Etienne Renard, eds., Décrire, inventorier, enregistrer entre Seine et Rhin au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2013). 47 Frances Andrews and Agata Pincelli, Churchmen and Urban Government in Late Medieval Italy, c.1200–​c.1450: Cases and Contexts (Cambridge, 2013). 48 For female communities, see Baury, “Patronage et gestion des domaines”; Ghislain Baury, “Une économie du patronage aristocratique:  le temporel des moniales cisterciennes en Castille (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles),” in Mundos medievales. Espacios, sociedades y poder. Homenaje al profesor José Ángel García de Cortázar, ed. Carmen Diez Herrera et al., 2 vols. (Santander, 2013), 2:1067–​79; Gary M. Radke, “Les nonnes et leurs protecteurs: le couvent du Corpus Domini à Venise au XVe siècle,” in Économie et religion. L’expérience des ordres mendiants (XIIIe–​XVe siècle), ed. Nicole Bériou and Jacques Chiffoleau (Lyon, 2009), 637–​60. 49 Giuseppe Avaracci, Rosa Marisa Borracini Verducci, and Giammario Borri, eds., Libro, scrittura, documento della civiltà monastica e conventuale nel basso medioevo (secoli XIII–​XV) (Spoleto, 1999); Baudin, Dohrmann, and Veyssière, Clairvaux; L’economia dei conventi dei frati minori e predicatori fino alla metà del Trecento (Spoleto, 2004); Clément Lenoble, L’exercice de la pauvreté. Économie et religion chez les franciscains d’Avignon (XIIIe–​XVe siècle) (Rennes, 2013). 50 Valentina Toneatto, Les Banquiers du Seigneur. Évêques et moines face à la richesse (IVe–​début IXe siècle) (Rennes, 2012); Giacomo Todeschini, Il prezzo della salvezza. Lessici medievali del pensiero economico (Rome, 1994). 45

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their record-​keeping reflects interest in female literacy and the administrative autonomy of female communities. Regional studies that have paid more attention to marginal annotations, as well as to the keeping of account books, have shed light on female pragmatic literacy.51 In the case of the Dominican nuns of Tuscany, there is even evidence of a real capacity for innovation in record-​keeping, including the use of impressive accounts books that sometimes follow a double-​entry system.52

Toward a Broader Corpus of Sources For several decades, historians have sought to open up the history of monasticism—​which for too long has been studied in isolation—​and thus to reframe their analyses and questions concerning regulars in the context of a broader social history.53 All the fields of social activity and a great variety of sources can now be studied to enrich the corpus of monastic history, while more exclusively monastic sources can benefit from methodologies developed in other contexts. The inclusion of sources produced outside the strictly monastic, or even ecclesiastical, world seems to be particularly promising. Such sources can indeed shed light from the outside on certain monastic practices, especially for areas long neglected by traditional monastic historiography. This is the case, for instance, for monastic life set within the urban world, traditionally criticized in monastic literature; such studies can encompass documents produced by urban institutions themselves: deliberations of town and city councils, agreements, records of the alms of the urban community to various regular communities, and so on. This approach has been especially useful for German-​speaking areas and for the communes of medieval Italy, where government by the written word was an essential part of politics.54 This



Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England:  Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–​1540 (Rochester, NY, 1993). 52 Sylvie Duval, “Usages du livre et de l’écrit chez les moniales dominicaines observantes (Italie, 1400–​1450 ca.),” in Entre stabilité et itinérance. Livres et culture des mendiants, XIIIe–​XVe siècle, ed. Nicole Bériou, Martin Morard, and Donatella Nebbiai (Turnhout, 2014), 215–​27; and Sylvie Duval, “Scrivere, contare, gestire: i libri di amministrazione dei monasteri femminili fiorentini (1320–​1460),” in Scritture, carismi, istituzioni. Percorsi di vita religiosa in età moderna. Studi per Gabriella Zarri, ed. Concetta Bianca and Anna Scattigno (Rome, 2018), 85–​104. 53 See Vauchez and Caby, Moines, chanoines et religieux. 54 For the long tradition of this approach to the sources in Germany, see the article by Hirbodian in this volume. For Italy, on the use of a notary, for example, see Attilio Bartoli Langeli, “Un notaio bolognese per l’abbazia di Sassovivo: Topazio (1200–​1212),” Bollettino Storico della città di Foligno 27–​8 (2003–​4): 11–​66; for the use of judicial consilia, see Mario Ascheri, “I primi consilia giuridici per l’abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore,” 51

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allows historians to explore the relationships between urban institutions and officials (especially notaries and legal experts) and monastic establishments in the city or its territory. This work has revised our understanding of monasticism in towns, and even of monasticism more broadly.55 Our knowledge of monastic education, already well advanced for medieval England,56 can make progress in other areas thanks to the availability of sources for urban studia,57 such as registers of graduates or records of academic acts, or the rotuli of supplications addressed by the universities to the popes in order to obtain benefices for their masters or students.58 With such research, it is important to be ready to question the validity of the traditional partitioned approach: is it valid in the late Middle Ages to speak of monastic hagiography, monastic theology, monastic preaching, or monastic literature in general?59 And, if it is valid, on what bases? Is the fact that an author belonged to a religious community or to an order enough to characterize his or her work as monastic, or should it be considered just one element—​and not always the most important one—​among others? This is a difficult question, and even more so if it is posed in terms of orders and not only of individual communities—​the latter being rarely taken into account by scholars working in the period after the late twelfth century. The Cistercian literature of the first two generations, for example, can certainly be seen as the fruit of a true “textual community” connected by characteristic common practices, such as the writing of commentaries on the Song







in Da Siena al “desertum” di Acona, ed. Valerio Cattana and Mauro Tagliabue (Cesena, 2016), 73–​95; regarding a female community in Umbria, see Francesca Santoni, “Il costo della giustizia: badesse, avvocati e notai in un processo umbro di metà Trecento,” in In uno volumine. Studi in onore di Cesare Scalon, ed. Laura Pani (Udine, 2009), 529–​50. 55 See the conclusion in Cécile Caby, “Les implantations urbaines des ordres religieux dans l’Italie médiévale: Bilan et propositions de recherche,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 35 (1999): 151–​79; Moines et religieux dans la ville (XIIe–​XVe siècles) (Toulouse, 2009); Espaces monastiques, espaces urbains de l’antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rome, 2012); Andrews and Pincelli, Churchmen and Urban Government. 56 See the article by Clark in this volume. 57 For Italy, see Celestino Piana, Ricerche su le università di Bologna e di Parma nel secolo XV (Grottaferrata, 1963); Celestino Piana, Nuove ricerche su le università di Bologna e di Parma (Grottaferrata, 1966) and Celestino Piana, La facoltà teologica dell’università di Firenze nel quattro e cinquecento (Grottaferrata, 1977). 58 For instance, Jean-​Michel Matz, “Les moines et le droit: enquête sur la culture juridique dans les abbayes du diocèse d’Angers à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 112.1 (2005): 90. 59 For a general overview, see Dominique Poirel, “Auteurs et genres littéraires,” in Vauchez and Caby, Moines, chanoines et religieux, 229–​89; on theology, see the article by Mews in this volume; on preaching, see the articles by Baker and Kienzle, and Clark and Bush in this volume.

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of Songs.60 But it is more difficult to define what is specifically “Cistercian” about the writings of monks who attended the students’ house (domus studentium) at Paris from the middle of the thirteenth century. The scholastic model of the universities, largely conditioned by mendicant practices, made its way into traditional monastic education structures, including the academic institutions that were gradually put in place by the orders with the support of the papacy.61 This happened at the same time as authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of Saint-​Victor (d. 1141) remained among those most cited in treatises on religious formation.62 Nevertheless, the unifying effect on writing practices of the organization into orders and networks can be readily observed. The new institutional structures appear to have favored shared patterns of intellectual activity and book production within horizontal communities of knowledge.63 Some genres, such as hagiography, are especially telling and have been explored more closely. Here again, the Cistercians are an exceptional case, since their order regulated all intellectual production by requiring the prior approval of the general chapter for the publication of any text. Moreover, the hagiographical exempla played an essential role in the construction of their identity;64 an abundant corpus of vitae that has still not been studied extensively (with the exception of the vitae of Bernard65 and from the Flemish houses66) also exists. The Carthusians, on the other hand, seem to have been an order









Martha G. Newman, The Boundaries of Charity:  Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098–​1180 (Stanford, CA, 1996). 61 Jean-​Philippe Genest, “L’enseignement des arts libéraux au collège Saint-​Bernard,” in Du copiste au collectionneur. Mélanges d’histoire des textes et des bibliothèques en l’honneur Dalla Guarda and Jean-​ Philippe Genest d’André Vernet, ed. Donatella Nebbiai-​ (Turnhout, 1998), 191–​218; Cécile Caby, “Non obstante quod sunt monachi: être moine et étudiant au Moyen Âge,” Quaderni di storia religiosa 16 (2009): 45–​81. 62 Giles Constable, “The Popularity of Twelfth-​Century Spiritual Writers in the Late Middle Ages,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence and Dekalb, IL, 1971), 5–​28; Cédric Giraud, Spiritualité et histoire des textes entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne. Genèse et fortune d’un corpus pseudépigraphe de méditations (Paris, 2016). 63 Newman, Boundaries of Charity; Thomas Falmagne, Un texte en contexte. Les Flores Paradisi et le milieu culturel de Villers-​en-​Brabant dans la première moitié du 13e siècle (Turnhout, 2001); Donatella Frioli, “Le biblioteche monastiche:  note per un’analisi diacronica,” in Scriptoria e biblioteche nel basso medioevo (Spoleto, 2015), 335–​42; see also the article by Röckelein in this volume. 64 Stefano Mula, “Herbert de Torrès et l’autoreprésentation de l’ordre cistercien dans les recueils d’exempla,” in Le Tonnerre des exemples. Exempla et médiation culturelle dans l’Occident, ed. Marie-​Anne Polo De Beaulieu, Pascal Collomb, and Jacques Berlioz (Rennes, 2010), 187–​99. 65 Adriaan Hendrik Bredero, Bernard de Clairvaux. Culte et histoire (Turnhout, 1998). 66 Éric Delaissé and Fabienne Arboit, “La Vie de Pierre, convers de Villers-​en-​Brabant au XIIIe siècle: édition critique et traduction,” Analecta Bollandiana 131 (2013): 299–​374.

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without hagiography:  even Bruno, the founder of La Chartreuse, lacked a Life until the modern era.67 If late medieval monks and nuns did not lose interest in saints and in writing vitae, they rarely strove to promote new saints from their order. This largely explains the small number of canonizations from the monastic milieux during the late Middle Ages. It would be worthwhile to investigate certain forms of late medieval monastic hagiography, notably the redaction of new versions of the Lives of holy monks or local saints whose cults were tied to the community. This phenomenon has already been well studied for the early and central Middle Ages, but not for later periods. Monks at Lérins, for example, wrote several successive versions of the Life of their founder, Honoratus (d. 429), in both Latin and Provençal, in order to promote pilgrimage to their island.68 It would be equally worthwhile to study ancient and patristic forms of encomium, which came back into fashion as a result of humanism, and which certain religious adopted, whether they practiced them themselves or commissioned works from experts. For example, the Dominicans of San Marco in Florence had a close relationship with the humanist cleric and historian Francesco da Castiglione (d. 1484).69 It is also in this context that catalogues of famous men enjoyed great success as a genre among the historians of both the mendicants70 and of traditional monasticism. The vast enterprise of Johannes Trithemius (1462–​1516), abbot of Sponheim,71 is perhaps the best known of these, but there were also more modest and less well-​known enterprises, especially in Italy.72 For this genre, however, as for preaching,73 or





Annick Peters-​Custot, Bruno en Calabre. Histoire d’une fondation monastique dans l’Italie normande. S. Maria de Turri et S. Stefano del Bosco (Rome, 2014). Cécile Caby, “Honoratus of Lérins between Manuscript and Print,” in The Saint between Manuscript and Print:  Italy, 1400–​1600, ed. Alison K. Frazier (Toronto, 2015), 255–​97; Michel Lauwers and Anne Jolly, eds. Entre ciel, mer et terres. L’île monastique de Lérins (Ve–​XXe siècle) (Nice, 2017). 69 Francesco Bausi, “La Vita Dominici di Francesco da Castiglione:  contributo alla storia dell’agiografia umanistica,” Interpres 25 (2006): 53–​113. On humanist hagiography, see Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2005). 70 Anne Huijbers, “De viris illustribus ordinis praedicatorum: a ‘classical’ genre in Dominican hands,” Franciscan Studies 71 (2013): 297–​324. 71 See Noel L. Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–​1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden, 1981); Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius (1462–​1516) (Würzburg, 1991). 72 Cécile Caby, “Autorité du passé, identités du présent dans l’ordre olivétain aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” in L’Autorité du passé dans les sociétés médiévales, ed. Jean-​Marie Sansterre (Rome, 2004), 203–​19; Cécile Caby, “Bernardino Gadolo ou les débuts de l’historiographie camaldule,” MEFRM 109 (1997):  225–​68; Elisabetta Guerrieri, Clavis degli autori camaldolesi (secoli XI–​XVI) (Florence, 2012), 62–​7; Antonella Degl’Innocenti, “L’opera agiografica di Girolamo da Raggiolo,” in Vallombrosa. Memorie agiografiche e culto delle reliquie, ed. Antonella Degl’Innocenti (Rome, 2012), 219–​43. 73 See the article by Clark and Bush in this volume. 67

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for epistolography, we are cruelly lacking tools to access the many texts composed in late medieval monasteries.74 Questions about the more strictly intellectual work of late medieval monks cannot be addressed without reference to the means by which they acquired knowledge, and the places of the production, conservation, and diffusion of monastic knowledge. In this context, an understanding of monastic book collections and libraries is essential. If the traditional sources for this understanding—​inventories, catalogues, and the books themselves—​ remained broadly the same at the end of the Middle Ages as at the beginning, their numbers grew, and the forms and modes of functioning of inventories and catalogues became more sophisticated.75 We lack, however, a synthetic study of the use of the book by monks such as the one that has been undertaken for the mendicants.76 The books of nuns, on the other hand, have received considerable attention, including the work of female scribes77 and their capacity to create literature in Latin and the vernacular.78 Returning to the question of the delimitation of the corpus of sources for the history of monasticism, it is necessary to bear in mind the evolution of source analyses and methodologies over the past twenty years; scholars no longer restrict themselves to a few specific sources and one particular analytical frame. The collaboration, for instance, between archaeology and history has fundamentally changed. There is not only an appreciation now for the specificity of the different approaches (against the illusion of a possible blending), but also a move beyond an approach that focuses principally on the ecclesiastical building (perhaps extending to the cloister), in order to investigate the arrangement and function of the different buildings within the



Cécile Caby, “Pratiche umanistiche e riforma monastica:  gli epistolari camaldolesi latini nel quattrocento,” in Camaldoli e l’ordine camaldolese dalle origini alla fine del XV secolo, ed. Cécile Caby and Pierluigi Licciardello (Cesena, 2014), 523–​52; Cécile Caby, “Pratiques humanistes et ordres religieux dans l’Italie du quattrocento:  quelques jalons,” in L’humanisme à l’épreuve de l’Europe (XVe–​XVIe siècle), ed. Elisabeth Crouzet-​ Pavan and Denis Crouzet (Paris, 2019). 75 On monastic libraries, see the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in this volume, and the website Libraria. Pour l’histoire des bibliothèques anciennes, www.libraria.fr/​fr/​ accueil (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 76 For the mendicants, see Bériou, Morard, and Nebbiai, Entre stabilité et itinérance. 77 See the website of the project, Donne e cultura scritta nel medioevo, http://​edu.let.unicas. it/​womediev/​ (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 78 See the articles by Boynton and Muschiol in this volume. See also Anne Bondéelle-​ Soucher, “Les moniales cisterciennes et leurs livres manuscrits dans la France d’Ancien régime,” Cîteaux 45.3–​4 (1994):  193–​337; David N. Bell, What Nuns Read:  Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995); Ghislain Baury, “Une bibliothèque médiévale de moniales en Castille:  Canas et les membra disjecta de son Missel,” Cîteaux 61 (2010): 181–​3. 74

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whole monastic space.79 The recent examples of progress in understanding the buildings of conversi serve to underline perfectly the benefits of this broader approach.80 With regard to images, ever-​richer methodological reflections and the availability of searchable digital collections have encouraged their incorporation into the corpus of monastic history. For example, the work of Dominique Donnadieu-Rigaut on the way in which late medieval religious orders conceived of themselves through images has reinvigorated approaches to the images produced by these orders, in that it moves beyond an approach organized by order or by iconographic type.81 As Marc Bloch said, “the good historian is like the ogre of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”82 It is clear that this ogre has invaded even the lands of the monks and nuns, profoundly transforming the very notion of “sources of the history of monasticism.” From now on, in the domain of monastic history, too, “everything is a document.”83

Bibliography Andenna, Cristina, and Gert Melville, eds. Regulae –​Consuetudines –​Statuta. Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del medioevo. Münster, 2005. Andenna, Cristina, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville, eds. Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, Vol. 1: Netzwerke. Klöster und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 2012.  eds. Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, Vol. 2: Zentralität. Papsttum und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 2013.







See, for instance, Sébastien Bully and Christian Sapin, eds., Au seuil du cloître. La présence des laïcs (hôtelleries, bâtiments d’accueil, activités artisanales et de services) entre le Ve et le XIIe siècle, BUCEMA, hors-​série 8 (2015), https://​journals.openedition. org/​cem/​13023 (date of last access:  31 August 2018), and their numerous other publications; Pascale Brudy, “Le réfectoire: un bâtiment méconnu,” in L’âge roman. Arts et culture en Poitou et dans les pays charentais, Xe–​XIIe siècles, ed. Pascale Brudy and Anne Bénéteau Péan (Montreuil, 2011), 123–​34. 80 Franck Tournadre, “De l’aile conventuelle à destination des convers au bâtiment agricole à fonction multiple: le cas des abbayes cisterciennes de Chaloché (Maine-​et-​ Loire), Preuilly (Seine-​et-​Marne) et Valence (Vienne),” In Situ 5 (2004), doi:  10.4000/​ insitu.2393 (date of last access:  31 August 2018); Cédric Roms, “L’archéologie à Clairvaux,” in Baudin, Dohrmann, and Veyssière, Clairvaux, 259–​61. 81 Dominique Donnadieu-​Rigaut, Penser en images les ordres religieux (XIIe–​XVe siècles) (Paris, 2005). See also the article by Gajewski and Seeberg in this volume. 82 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester, 1992), 22 (translation modified slightly). See also Jacques Revel and Jean-​Claude Schmitt, eds., L’ogre historien. Autour de Jacques Le Goff (Paris, 1998). 83 Pierre Toubert, “Tout est document,” in Revel and Schmitt, L’ogre historien, 85–​105. 79

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Sources of Late Medieval Monasticism Andrews, Frances, and Agata Pincelli. Churchmen and Urban Government in Late Medieval Italy, c.1200–​c.1450: Cases and Contexts. Cambridge, 2013. Baudin, Arnaud, and Laurent Morelle, eds. Les pratiques de l’écrit dans les abbayes cisterciennes (XIIe–​milieu du XVIe s.). Produire, échanger, contrôler, conserver. Paris, 2017. Baudin, Arnaud, Nicolas Dohrmann, and Laurent Veyssière, eds. Clairvaux. L’aventure cistercienne. Paris, 2015. Bériou, Nicole, and Jacques Chiffoleau, eds. Économie et religion. L’expérience des ordres mendiants (XIIIe–​XVe siècle). Lyon, 2009. Bériou, Nicole, Martin Morard, and Donatella Nebbiai, eds. Entre stabilité et itinérance. Livres et culture des Mendiants, XIIIe–​XVe siècle. Turnhout, 2014. Burton, Jane, and Karen Stoeber, eds. Women in the Medieval Monastic World. Turnhout, 2015. Cygler, Florent. Das Generalkapitel in hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser. Münster, 2002.   Espaces monastiques, espaces urbains de l’Antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge. MEFRM, 124.1 (2012). https://​journals.openedition.org/​mefrm/​93. Grévin, Benoît, and Anne-​Marie Turcan-​Verkerk, eds. Le dictamen dans tous ses états. Perspectives de recherche sur la théorie et la pratique de l’ars dictaminis (XIe–​XVe s.). Turnhout, 2015. Heullant-​Donat, Isabelle, et al., eds. Enfermements II. Règles et dérèglements en milieu clos (IVe–​ XIXe siècle). Paris, 2015. Isaïa, Marie-​Céline, and Thomas Granier, eds. Normes et hagiographie dans l’Occident latin (VIe–​XVIe siècle). Actes du colloque international de Lyon, 4–​6 octobre 2010. Turnhout, 2014. Lauwers, Michel, ed. La dîme, l’Église et la société féodale. Turnhout, 2012.   Monastères et espace social dans l’Occident médiéval. Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval. Turnhout, 2015. Lauwers, Michel, and Anne Jolly, eds. Entre ciel, mer et terres. L’île monastique de Lérins (Ve–​ XXe siècle). Nice, 2017. Melville, Gert, ed. De ordine vitae. Zu Normenvorstellungen, Organisationsformen und Schriftgebrauch im mittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Münster, 1996.   La mémoire des origines dans les institutions médiévales. Actes de la table ronde de Rome, 6–​8 juin 2002. MEFRM 115 (2003), 133–​479. Smirnova, Victoria, et  al. The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles and Its Reception. Leiden, 2015.   Les sources comptables, méthodologie, critique et édition. Tabularia. Sources écrites de la Normandie médiévale 5 (2005). http://​www.unicaen.fr/​mrsh/​craham/​revue/​ tabularia/​view.php?dir=dossier5. Vauchez, André, and Cécile Caby, eds. Moines, chanoines et religieux au Moyen Âge. Guide de recherche et documents. Turnhout, 2003.

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Monastic Liturgy, 1100–​1500: Continuity and Performance Susa n B oy n ton Monastic liturgy in the high and late Middle Ages was defined by a broad continuity of practice across time and place. From the later eleventh century, when the “Benedictinization” of monastic liturgy was complete (as described by Billett in volume 1) to the sixteenth century and even beyond, the basic structures of monastic liturgical observance remained largely the same. Monks and nuns spent much of the day singing the divine office in services that corresponded essentially to the hours prescribed by the Rule of St. Benedict (RB). In addition to the psalmody of the office, the mass (often two daily masses) was part of the monastic day. The cycle of the year structured around the liturgy included various forms of ritual commemoration that shaped the experience of time and history in a monastic community. While individual elements varied among orders and houses, the long-​term stability of the shared features created a continuous liturgical tradition over the centuries. The organization of daily life around the mass and office was common to all regular religious, male and female. In this chapter, I emphasize the liturgical practices of female communities not only because they are the subject of much recent research, but also because the liturgy is an aspect of monasticism that brings out the shared characteristics of male and female communities rather than their differences.1 Although female perspectives on the mass were marked by the fact that women could not be celebrants,2 liturgical commentary and visionary accounts written by both men and women often cite the sung texts they performed.3



On variety (and commonalities) in female monastic orders during the high and late Middle Ages, see the article by Andenna in this volume. On male celebrants in female religious houses, see the article by Griffiths in this volume. 3 On the liturgy and gender, see the article by Muschiol in this volume. 1

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Whether a community was male or female, Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, Carmelite, Augustinian, Dominican, or Franciscan, chanting the Psalms from memory was the central activity that formed the basis of literacy. Reading the Bible in the mass and office, and hearing it cited in exegesis (itself often the source of liturgical readings) as well as in preaching, shaped the understanding of scriptural texts among the regular religious.4 The Psalms and their performance in the office were the basis of prayers, contemplative exercises, and spiritual meditations throughout the period under consideration here. The liturgy had so profoundly permeated the imaginary of monastic writers that mystical and devotional writings are often based on liturgical structures, and the celebration of the mass and office frequently appear in visionary literature.

Degrees of Uniformity in Theory and Practice The continuity of the liturgy in monastic life can easily be overlooked when the history of medieval monasticism is constructed as a narrative of reform.5 Despite the differences between worship practices that were emphasized by reformers (sometimes in a polemical tone and often for rhetorical purposes), changes were more often refinements of or adjustments to a normative practice than radical departures from it. In other words, most revisions did not fundamentally transform the longstanding structures underlying liturgical tradition. The Cistercian reform of the liturgy, for example, was a revision intended to yield a more authentic version of the chant repertory (drawing from the tradition of Metz) in the context of Cistercian aspirations to observe the RB authentically.6 Likewise, the revised Cistercian hymnary was supposed to recover ancient versions of the Ambrosian office hymns (which were sought in Milan).7 The aim of these revisions was a strict observance of the RB and an improved version of the chant (altered by editorial processes that Cistercians understood as purification). Even though the reformers produced new versions of chants and modified liturgical customs, these changes were

Susan Boynton, “The Bible and the Liturgy,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Western Middle Ages, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly (New York, 2011), 10–​33. 5 For a critique of such a narrative, see the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 6 On the Cistercian liturgical reform, see the introduction to Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., The Primitive Cistercian Breviary (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Lat. Oct. 402), with Variants from the “Bernardine” Cistercian Breviary (Fribourg, 2007); Alicia Scarcez, L’antiphonaire 12 A–​B de Westmalle dans l’histoire du chant cistercien au XIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2011), 35–​55. 7 Chrysogonus Waddell, The Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Hymnal, 2 vols. (Trappist, KY, 1984), 1:19–​22. 4

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intended to regain an earlier spirit of worship.8 Cistercian liturgical practice was both uniform and durable: prescriptions established in the twelfth century remained in force until the seventeenth century, when the order adopted the Roman rite.9 Not all monastic orders strove for the same degree of uniformity as Cistercians. The selections of chants and readings for the divine office, as well as the calendar of saints, varied widely even among communities observing the RB. The Hirsau reform, inspired in part by Cluniac customs, promoted a degree of liturgical cohesion in its congregation.10 The congregation of Cluny established liturgical connections among the widely scattered daughter houses, but not marked homogeneity. Cluniac abbots introduced innovations that spread throughout Europe, both inside and outside the network of its dependencies, such as the Feast of All Souls (2 November, established by Abbot Odilo around 1030–​1) and other ritual commemorations of the dead.11 It was only a century later that Peter the Venerable’s statutes explicitly required the daughter houses to observe the changes in liturgical practice that he prescribed for Cluny.12 In the fifteenth century, the Observant reforms of Melk and Bursfeld led to modifications of liturgical practice in the name of correct observance, and the congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua (founded in 1480) introduced its own rite, but the general shape of the monastic liturgy remained essentially unchanged into the early modern period, even taking into account the impact of the reforms introduced after the Council of Trent. Nevertheless, specialists of medieval liturgy tend to pay the most attention to the differences in ritual structure and liturgical repertory between different houses of a single order

Bernard of Clairvaux, The Letter of St. Bernard and the Tract on the Cistercian Revision of the Antiphoner: The Text Newly Edited, Principally from the Mount Melleray Manuscript, ed. and trans. David Wulstan (Lions Bay, 2015). 9 Nicolas Bell, “Liturgy,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge, 2013), 264–​5. 10 Felix Heinzer, “Der Hirsauer ‘Liber Ordinarius,’ ” Revue bénédictine 102 (1992): 309–​47, reprinted in Klosterreform und mittelalterliche Buchkultur im deutschen Südwesten (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2008), 185–​223. 11 Dominique Iogna-​Prat, “The Dead in the Celestial Bookkeeping of the Cluniac Monks around the Year 1000,” in Debating the Middle Ages, ed. Lester Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Malden, MA, 1998), 340–​62. 12 Giles Constable, “The Monastic Policy of Peter the Venerable,” in Pierre Abélard–​Pierre le Vénérable. Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du XIIe siècle. Abbaye de Cluny, 2–​9 juillet 1972 (Paris, 1975), 119–​38, reprinted in The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleven-​Hundredth Anniversary of Its Foundation (Münster, 2010), 285–​306. On Cluniac liturgy, see now Susan Boynton, “Shaping Cluniac Devotion,” in A Companion to the Medieval Abbey of Cluny, ed. Scott Bruce and Steven Vanderputten (Leiden, 2020). 8

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as well as between religious orders. Some of these divergences are due to tradition and others are the result of innovation and creativity.

Creating New Chants Throughout the Middle Ages, male and female religious composed new chants to complement and enrich the existing repertory of music for the mass and office. Thus the performance of the monastic liturgy brought together many voices both literally and figuratively, by combining layers of music that resulted from multiple types of compositional agency. New compositions could replace existing ones or introduce proper chant (thus music would be specifically designated for a service that had previously employed chants applicable to numerous occasions). Often, new chants enhanced the commemoration of a feast, whether one of universal importance or one of special significance to a particular institution. In some cases, such as that of the Aquitanian monk-​composer Adémar de Chabannes (c. 989–​1034), the historical context and manuscript tradition offer insight into the reasons for the expansion of the chant repertoire and the circumstances of its transmission. Adémar, seeking to promote the cult of St. Martial as an apostle, composed new services with the intention of affirming the saint’s apostolic rank for the benefit of the Abbey of Saint-​Martial of Limoges.13 Whereas the Gregorian chant repertory consolidated before the turn of the millennium was set to texts drawn largely from the Bible, the texts of newer chants were stylistically diverse.14 The genres of the new compositions encompass proper chants for mass and office, liturgical poetry (including office hymns and entire rhymed offices for the divine office, sequences for mass, and tropes for the chants of both services), processional hymns of various kinds, and the hybrid works commonly known as liturgical drama for important feasts, particularly Christmas and Easter.15 The most characteristically monastic of genres was the office hymn; the RB prescribed the performance of a hymn at every hour of the office, and from the ninth century to



James Grier, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-​ Century Aquitaine (Cambridge, 2006). 14 James Grier, “A New Voice in the Monastery: Tropes and Versus from Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Aquitaine,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1023–​69; Catherine Jeffreys, “ ‘Listen, Daughters of Light’:  The Epithalamium and Musical Innovation in Twelfth-​Century Germany,” in Listen, Daughter:  The Speculum virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant J. Mews (New York, 2001), 137–​57. 15 Susan Boynton and Margot E. Fassler, “The Language, Form, and Performance of Monophonic Liturgical Chants,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Ralph Hexter and David Townsend (New York, 2011), 376–​400. 13

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the late eleventh century hymns were sung only in the monastic office.16 In the period between 1100 and 1500, secular churches and monasteries had generally comparable repertories, with the exception of polyphony, which was frowned upon by some monastic orders. While the identity of some composers is well known, in many other cases anonymous compositions that are closely bound to the history of a monastery or found only in its repertory are reasonably supposed to have been produced within that community. In this way, we can surmise the existence of numerous female as well as male monastic composers whose names are not associated with their works.17 Some of the earliest accounts of identifiable individuals enriching the liturgy come from the Abbey of St. Gall. The monks Notker Balbulus (The Stammerer, d. 912) and Tuotilo (d. 915), who lived from the middle of the ninth century to the early tenth, composed texts for tropes and sequences of the mass.18 Tropes are newly composed interpolations (of text, music, or both together) into an existing chant; individual verses were joined together into trope complexes that varied from place to place and even between manuscripts from the same place. On major feasts of the Church year, certain chants (such as the introit of the mass, which accompanied the entering procession of the clergy) were customarily performed with tropes that solemnized the occasion. This festive performance practice was not universal even at its apogee in the central Middle Ages (the abbey of Cluny and the Cistercian order eschewed tropes), but tropes continued to be copied in more conservative manuscripts into the sixteenth century.19 Even orders that excluded tropes and sequences from their liturgy, such as the Cistercians and Carmelites, still imposed on all their houses their own musical choices through revision and new composition of chant for the mass and the office. A trope in the Easter liturgy, the “Quem queritis” dialogue between the angel and the three women at the tomb of Christ, appears to be the origin



Susan Boynton, “The Theological Role of Office Hymns in a Ninth-​Century Trinitarian Controversy,” in In principio erat verbum. Mélanges P. Tombeur, ed. Benoît-​Michel Tock (Turnhout, 2005), 31–​2. 17 Anne Bagnall Yardley, “ ‘Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne’:  The Cloistered Musician in the Middle Ages,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–​ 1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana, IL, 1987), 15–​38. 18 Susan Rankin, “Notker und Tuotilo:  Schöpferische Gestalter in einer neuen Zeit,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 11 (1991): 17–​42. New edition (with translation) of Notker’s sequences in Notker Balbulus, The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus, Volume I: Text and Music; Volume II: Translation, ed. and trans. Calvin Bower (Woodbridge, 2016). 19 For studies of tropes in Germanic areas, see Alison Noel Altstatt, “The Music and Liturgy of Kloster Preetz: Anna von Buchwald’s Buch im Chor in Its Fifteenth-​Century Context” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2011), 307–​22; Andreas Haug, Troparia tardiva. Repertorium später Tropenquellen aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (Kassel, 1995). 16

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of liturgical drama, a term used loosely to describe a variety of “representational rituals” associated with feasts of the Church year.20 An early reference to the performance of this dialogue appears in the Regularis concordia, a customary redacted at the end of the tenth century for the reform of monasteries in England.21 Musical reenactments of the Visit to the Sepulcher, which exist in several distinct textual traditions, formed part of monastic Easter liturgies throughout medieval Europe.22 Both male and female communities performed ritual ceremonies associated with Easter and Christmas; the extent to which these performances involved impersonation varied as widely as the styles. The Easter play from Origny expresses the Magdalene’s lament in music reminiscent of secular song.23 In secular churches and in male monastic communities, all the singers were, of course, male. As June Mecham observed, texts of the Visit to the Sepulcher associated with female houses specify that women perform the parts of the three Marys, and for female religious this ceremony “was a means of expressing as well as constructing their spiritual self-​identity.”24 Easter drama flourished in convents through the late Middle Ages and beyond.25 Sequences, which are poetic compositions structured in paired versicles, are sung by the entire choir during mass after the Alleluia on feasts of a moderate and high rank outside penitential seasons. The sequences attributed to Notker of St. Gall formed the nucleus of the collection known as the Liber hymnorum and provided the basis for sequence repertories (both secular and monastic) in Germanic regions for centuries. Notker’s preface to the Liber hymnorum states that he set the texts to the long melismas of Alleluia chants, establishing a link between the Alleluia and the sequence that manifests itself



Nils Holger Petersen, “Biblical Reception, Representational Ritual, and the Question of ‘Liturgical Drama,’ ” in Sapientia et Eloquentia:  Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, ed. Gunilla Iversen and Nicolas Bell (Turnhout, 2009), 163–​202. 21 Nils Holger Petersen, “The Representational Liturgy of the Regularis concordia,” in The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium, ed. Nigel Hiscock (Turnhout, 2003), 107–​17. 22 Texts from across Europe are printed in Walther Lipphardt, ed., Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, 9 vols. (Berlin and New York, 1975–​90). 23 Susan Boynton, “Emblems of Lament in Latin and Vernacular Song,” in The Church and Vernacular Literature in Medieval France, ed. Dorothea Kullmann (Toronto, 2009), 234–​5. 24 June Mecham, Sacred Communities, Shared Devotions:  Gender, Material Culture, and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa M. Bitel (Turnhout, 2014), 26. 25 See, for instance, Tanja Mattern, “Liturgy and Performance in Northern Germany: Two Easter Plays from Wienhausen,” in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Anderson, Henrike Lähnemann, and Anne Simon (Leiden, 2014), 285–​315.

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both in sequence texts and in commentary on the liturgy.26 As the thirteenth-​ century liturgical commentator Guillaume Durand (d. 1296) wrote, summarizing a centuries-​old tradition of commentary on the liturgy, the Alleluia is “an angelic praise,” but “the praises of eternity cannot be fully echoed in human words.”27 The sequence was thought to fit words to the song of the angels; consequently, some sequence texts refer to the joining of human and angelic choirs. One instance of this connection appears in the illustration of the introit for Christmas Day from the Codex Gisle, a gradual (containing the proper chants of the mass) copied by Gisela von Kerssenbrock in 1300 for the Cistercian abbey of Marienbrunn.28 The letter “P” for the introit, “Puer natus est,” shows an angelic choir above and the nuns’ choir below, singing the sequence for the Easter Vigil, which enjoins the choir to “sing with the angels.” The composition illustrates what Judith Oliver calls the “fusion of Earth and Heaven.”29 As Lori Kruckenberg has pointed out, this image may illustrate the practice of singing the sequence melody alone (as a textless vocalization) in alternation with the texted sequence.30 In this way a choir could convey musically the idea of contrasting angelic and earthly song.

Liturgy as an Expression of Religious Identity and Theology The twelfth-​ century sequence, rich in biblical allegory and theological language, was an integral part of the religious identity of regular canons, as seen in the repertories of the Victorines in Paris and the regular canons in Austria.31 In the Dominican order, sequences functioned as a form of sung theology as well.32 The learned character of the order, as manifested for



Andreas Haug, “Re-​Reading Notker’s Preface,” in Quomodo Cantabimus Canticum? Studies in Honor of Edward H. Roesner, ed. David Butler Cannata et al. (Middleton, WI, 2008),  65–​80. 27 Guillaume Durand, Rationale IV:  On the Mass and Each Action Pertaining to It, trans. Timothy M. Thibodeau (Turnhout, 2014), 76 and 90. 28 Judith Oliver, Singing with Angels:  Liturgy, Music, and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock (Turnhout, 2007). 29 Ibid., 209–​11. 30 Lori Kruckenberg, “Neumatizing the Sequence: Special Performances of Sequences in the Central Middle Ages,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59 (2006): 243–​317. 31 Margot E. Fassler, Gothic Song:  Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-​ Century Paris (Cambridge, 1993; 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN, 2011); Franz Karl Prassl, “Studien zu Repertoire und Verwendung von Sequenzen in der Liturgie österreichischer Augustinerchorherren vom 12. bis zum 16. Jh.” (PhD diss., University of Graz, 1987). 32 Margot E. Fassler, “Music and the Miraculous: Mary in the Mid-​Thirteenth-​Century Dominican Sequence Repertory,” in Aux origines de la liturgie dominicaine. Le manuscrit Santa Sabina XIV L 1 (Rome, 2004), 229–​78. 26

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instance in the women’s community of Paradies bei Soest, is signaled by the array of theological texts inscribed within the intricate illuminations found in chant manuscripts, including those of a sequence for John the Evangelist.33 Sequences were among the several genres composed by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), the first western European composer to whom a significant repertory of surviving music is securely attributed. Hildegard composed eight sequences, including some that may have been intended for the liturgy of her own community (those for the Virgin Mary, Saint Ursula, and Rupert); these compositions project the identity of her community, enrich the contemplative life of its members, and give voice to Hildegard’s Eucharistic theology.34 The majority of the chants that Hildegard composed were antiphons, responsories, and hymns for the divine office.35 It is no exaggeration to state that her music was a performative statement of her theology, because most of her songs were embedded at some point in her major theological treatise, the Scivias.36 Hildegard created sets of office and mass chants for some saints of particular importance, such as Disibod (d. 700), the patron of her first monastery, and Rupert (d. 732), the patron of the community she founded on the Rupertsberg. The set is particularly extensive for St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins, a cult of increased importance in the Rhineland in the twelfth century. For Hildegard, Ursula was a model of the Church, and her companions presented a model for the female monastic community in the broader context of Hildegard’s ecclesiology.37 Hildegard’s allegorical music drama, the Ordo Virtutum, is an even more explicit reflection on female monasticism. Based loosely on the model of Prudentius’ Psychomachia, the Ordo Virtutum depicts the vicissitudes of a soul, Anima, falling prey to temptation by the Devil, plunging into despair, and





Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Inscribing the Word—​Illuminating the Sequence:  Epithets in Honor of John the Evangelist in the Graduals from Paradies bei Soest,” in Leaves from Paradise: The Cult of John the Evangelist at the Dominican Convent of Paradies bei Soest, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 161–​213. 34 Tova Leigh-​ Choate, William Flynn, and Margot Fassler, “Hearing the Heavenly Symphony:  An Overview of Hildegard’s Musical Œuvre with Case Studies,” in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and George Ferzoco (Leiden, 2014), 163–​92. 35 Margot E. Fassler, “Composer and Dramatist: ‘Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse’,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA, 1998), 149–​75. 36 Margot E. Fassler, “Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 317–​78. 37 Tova Leigh-​ Choate, William Flynn, and Margot Fassler, “Hildegard as Musical Hagiographer:  Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek Ms. 103 and Her Songs for Saints Disibod and Ursula,” in Kienzle, Stoudt, and Ferzoco, Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 208–​214. 33

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being rescued by the Virtues. Various interpretations have been suggested for the drama’s original purpose, including the dedication of a church, the ceremony of a nun’s entry into the convent, and a sonic Tree of Jesse that forms an integral part of the Scivias.38 Like Hildegard’s chant compositions, the Ordo Virtutum in performance realizes the composer’s distinctive theology of music. Of all the characters in the play, only the Devil has a speaking part with no music to sing; this choice reflects Hildegard’s conviction, stated and explicated at length in her letter to the prelates of Mainz, that music is humankind’s link to Paradise lost; when Adam was banished from Eden, he lost his voice, and the communal practice of liturgical singing holds the promise of salvation.39 Belief in the salvific potential of monastic singing was widespread both inside and outside the cloister. In psalters of the eleventh century and beyond, prayers to be recited along with psalmody request the salvation of the singer based on the number of psalms performed.40 The Helfta nuns Gertrude (d. 1301/​2) and Mechthild both recount moments when God visibly manifested his satisfaction with the nuns’ singing.41 Monastic commemorations such as obits, prayers, and votive masses were perceived as an efficacious means of obtaining intercession.42 Although the much-​studied abbey of Cluny in particular has shaped modern accounts of the medieval ritual economy, lay patronage of other monasteries, too, assumed that liturgical rituals gave donors a privileged place in the larger community outside the monastery.43 In a variety of ways, the liturgy was closely bound to the identity and historical self-​awareness of a medieval monastic community. In an ancient abbey such as Saint-​Denis, the liturgy conveyed facets of a long institutional history and the particular aesthetics of its members such as Suger (d. 1152).44 At the



Leigh-​Choate, Flynn, and Fassler, “Hearing the Heavenly Symphony,” 184–​91. For the most recent study of Hildegard’s Letter to the Prelates of Mainz, see Miranda (Sister Parousia) Clemens, “That They Might Sing the Song of the Lamb: The Spiritual Value of Singing the Liturgy for Hildegard of Bingen” (MA diss., Trent University, 2014). 40 Susan Boynton, “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Monastic Psalters,” Speculum 82 (2007): 896–​931. 41 Anna Harrison, “ ‘I Am Wholly Your Own’: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta,” Church History 78 (2009): 561; Anna Harrison, “‘Oh! What Treasure is in This Book?’ Reading, Writing, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta,” Viator 39 (2008): 90. 42 See the article by Blennemann in this volume. 43 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter:  The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 44 Tova Ann Leigh-Choate, “The Liturgical Faces of Saint Denis:  Music, Power, and Identity in Medieval France” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009). 38

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other end of the chronological spectrum, the chant books of the Carmelite liturgy attest to the distinctive identity of the order and the special character of its rite, which continued from the fourteenth century into the nineteenth, reflecting both internal and external reforms that occurred over the course of these centuries.45 Even those who did not belong to a community could have a considerable impact on its liturgy. For instance, the Easter liturgy that Peter Abelard (d. 1142) created for the community of the Paraclete (which he had founded) while Heloise (d. 1164) was abbess turns his “specific interpretations of an ideal women’s monasticism into ritual practice” and his sequence for Easter “contributes to the construction of the Paraclete’s institutional identity.”46 Abelard’s compilation of a hymn repertory for the Paraclete combines many of his own newly composed texts with traditional ones.47 Composing new music for the liturgy was an effective means of communicating a monastery’s identity. Chants for the office of St. Swithun (d. 8630 in the eleventh-​century Winchester Troper (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 473) formed part of the special commemoration of the saint by the monastic community of the cathedral priory.48 For the imperial abbey of Farfa in the eleventh century, the composition of new office hymns may have reinforced the community’s claims on saints’ cults.49 Similarly, the unique hymns for St. Ethelburga (d. after 686) in a fifteenth-​century manuscript from Barking Abbey could be the work of Barking nuns (such as Clemence and Vulfruna) who wrote saints’ Lives in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.50 Whatever the date of these hymns, they attest to the role of new chant compositions in the veneration of saints who were special to a particular community.51 Many women’s communities had distinctive chant repertories that signaled their affiliation. Twelfth-​century examples include the music of Hildegard



James John Boyce, Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity:  The Choir Books of Kraków (Turnhout, 2008). 46 William Flynn, “Letters, Liturgy, and Identity:  The Use of Epithalamica at the Paraclete,” in Iversen and Bell, Sapientia et Eloquentia, 302. 47 Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Hymn Collections from the Paraclete, 2  vols. (Trappist, KY, 1987–​9). 48 Susan Rankin, “St Swithun in Medieval Liturgical Music,” in The Cult of St Swithun, ed. Michael Lapidge (Oxford, 2003), 191–​213. 49 Susan Boynton, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 185–​206. 50 On Clemence, see most recently Diane Auslander, “Clemence and Catherine:  The Life of St Catherine in Its Norman and Anglo-​Norman Context,” in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (Woodbridge, 2012), 164–​82. 51 Anne Bagnall Yardley, Performing Piety:  Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York, 2006), 192–​8. 45

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of Bingen, the liturgy of the Paraclete, and the chant corpus of the regular canonesses of Klosterneuburg (transmitted in manuscripts copied from the twelfth century to the sixteenth).52 Manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries preserve distinctive musical repertories from the Cistercian royal abbey of Las Huelgas and the Dominicans of Paradies bei Soest.53 Processionals that combined chant, prayer, and other devotions were copied for the Dominican nuns of the royal convent at Poissy from the thirteenth century well into the early modern period.54 A late medieval manuscript from the community of Poor Clares at Aldgate similarly combines liturgical chant with a book of hours.55 A processional dated 1351, copied for the Observant Clares of Brussels, transmits unique texts for the office of St. Clare.56 While these manuscripts come from elite women’s houses, numerous processionals survive from all kinds of female communities, providing insight into nuns’ singing and liturgical actions on major feasts of the Church year such as the Purification (2 February), Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Corpus Christi, and rogation days.57 As Anne Yardley has pointed out, the particular choices of antiphons for Maundy Thursday in some manuscripts emphasize the role of Mary Magdalene, implicitly identifying her with the women religious performing the ritual foot-​washing known as the Maundy, while usually this ceremony aligns those performing it with Christ.58 Although the basic





Constant J. Mews, “Liturgy and Identity at the Paraclete:  Heloise, Abelard and the Evolution of Cistercian Reform,” in The Poetic and Musical Legacy of Heloise and Abelard, ed. Marc Stewart and David Wulstan (Ottawa, 2003), 19–​33; Michael L. Norton and Amelia J. Carr. “Liturgical Manuscripts, Liturgical Practice, and the Women of Klosterneuburg,” Traditio 66 (2011): 67–​169. 53 Nicolas Bell, The Las Huelgas Music Codex: A Companion Study to the Facsimile (Madrid, 2003); Margot E. Fassler and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Desert in Paradise: A Newly-​ Discovered Office for John the Baptist from Paradies bei Soest and Its Place in the Dominican Liturgy,” in Resounding Images:  Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Turnhout, 2015), 251–​80. 54 Michel Huglo, “Les processionaux de Poissy,” in Rituels. Mélanges offerts à Pierre-​Marie Gy, ed. Paul De Clerck and Eric Palazzo (Paris, 1990), 339–​446. 55 Anne Bagnall Yardley, “Clares in Procession:  The Processional and Hours of the Franciscan Minoresses at Aldgate,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 13 (2009): 1–​23. 56 “Franciscan and Clarissan Chants in Plimpton MS 034,” http://​chantmanuscripts. omeka.net/​exhibits/​show/​franciscan-​and-​clarissan-​chant (date of last access:  31 August 2018). 57 Alison N. Altstatt, “The Rogationtide Processions of Wilton Abbey,” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 2.2 (2016), https://​elischolar.library.yale.edu/​yjmr/​vol2/​iss2/​3/​ (date of last access: 31 August 2018); Yardley, Performing Piety, 115–​58. 58 Anne Bagnall Yardley, “The Sonic Presence of Mary Magdalene at the Last Supper: The Maundy of the Poor at Barking Abbey,” in Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler, ed Dorsey Armstrong, Ann W. Astell, and Howell Chickering (Kalamazoo, MI, 2013), 169–​82. On the various ceremonies of the mandatum, see the article by Cochelin in this volume. 52

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structure of processionals is nearly universal, specific elements tend to link processionals to the communities of women who used them. Processions and other festal observances are among the traditions in women’s houses that were scrutinized by the Observant reform in the late Middle Ages. The customs of the regular canonesses of Klosterneuburg were repeatedly censured in visitation reports and reform statutes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, apparently because processions on particular days of the Church year were one way in which the men’s and women’s communities interacted directly, even singing together and performing the Visitatio Sepulchri.59 Similarly, the Bursfeld reform put pressure on north German houses to reduce the accretions to the liturgy in the late fifteenth century.60 The most distinctive liturgical practices associated with women’s communities are those of the late medieval Brigittine order. A significant corpus of liturgical manuscripts survives from the abbey of Vadstena in Sweden (f. 1384) and from the abbey of Syon in England (f. 1415). The Brigittine chant repertory, known as the Cantus sororum, is based on a weekly cycle in which each day focuses on a theme related to the Virgin Mary.61 In addition to the daily office, Brigittines sang the Lady mass, which specifically commemorated Mary.62 Liturgical texts also comprised the majority of their daily reading.63 The readings at table that the Brigittine nuns heard each day were closely related to the liturgical cycle (including texts such as the Gospel reading from mass and the Lives of saints).64

The Liturgy and Literacy For religious communities, singing and listening to the liturgy was the basis of literacy. Reading and memorizing the Psalms was the foundation for all subsequent Latin language acquisition, and liturgical reading was the principal mode of transmission for the Bible and other texts.65 In its early days,

Norton and Carr, “Liturgical Manuscripts,” 126–​31. Altstatt, “Music and Liturgy of Kloster Preetz,” 89–​101. 61 For an overview of the Brigittine liturgy, see Corine Schleif and Volker Schier, Katerina’s Windows: Donation and Devotion, Art and Music, as Heard and Seen Through the Writings of a Birgittine Nun (University Park, PA, 2009), 99–​103. 62 On the Brigittine liturgy at Syon Abbey, see Yardley, Performing Piety, 203–​27. 63 Ingela Hedström, “Vadstena Abbey and Female Literacy in Late Medieval Sweden,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout, 2013), 253–​61. 64 Jonas Carlquist, “The Birgittine Sisters at Vadstena Abbey: Their Learning and Literacy, with Particular Reference to Table Reading,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe, 239–​72. 65 Susan Boynton, “Training for the Liturgy as a Form of Monastic Education,” in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. Carolyn Muessig and George Ferzoco (Leicester, 2000), 7–​20. 59

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the community of Cîteaux learned Scripture primarily through reading in the choir and refectory.66 Another significant body of texts for the monastic religious experience was provided by the hymns of the divine office, which were used in teaching Latin, as well as being sung during the liturgy of the hours. Latin glosses on the office hymns in eleventh-​century monastic liturgical books illustrate pedagogical uses of hymn texts that are supported by other evidence, such as monastic customaries that prescribe ways of teaching singing and reading.67 Hymn commentaries continued to be used in the teaching of Latin (as witnessed by late medieval grammatical miscellanies), and in the fifteenth century emerged as a mode of spiritual instruction forming part of a broader monastic education. In the later Middle Ages the absorption of the liturgy—​and thus literacy training—​employed both Latin texts and vernacular translations.68 In the context of the Observant reform, as Claire Taylor Jones has demonstrated, Dominican nuns in southern Germany studied the hymns both in Latin and in translation, acquiring literacy skills while assimilating the spiritual precepts communicated in the liturgical texts.69 Late medieval song books and prayer books from female monasteries in northern Germany include vernacular religious songs.70 Recent scholarship on late medieval manuscripts from northern Germany illustrates the distinctive ways in which nuns received liturgical texts. Many liturgical books include depictions of nuns within the sacred scenes commemorated by the services. The sumptuous Codex Gisle and the Douce Homiliary place special emphasis on female role models and the cult of the Virgin Mary.71 The richly illuminated chant books from the Dominican





Diane J. Reilly, “Education, Liturgy and Practice in Early Cîteaux,” in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe Tenth–​Thirteenth Centuries), ed. Steven Vanderputten (Turnhout, 2011), 85–​114; and Diane J. Reilly, The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth-​Century France (Amsterdam, 2018). 67 Susan Boynton, “The Didactic Function and Context of Eleventh-​Century Glossed Hymnaries,” in Der lateinische Hymnus im Mittelalter. Überlieferung  –​Ästhetik  –​ Ausstrahlung, ed. Andreas Haug (Kassel, 2004), 301–​29. 68 Cynthia Cyrus, “Vernacular and Latinate Literacy in Viennese Women’s Convents,” in Blanton, O’Mara, and Stoop, Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe, 119–​32; Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia, PA, 2017). 69 Claire Taylor Jones, “Rekindling the Light of Faith: Hymn Translation and Spiritual Renewal in the Fifteenth-​Century Observant Reform,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42 (2012): 567–​96. 70 Ulrike Hascher-​ Berger, “Religious Song and Devotional Culture in Northern Germany,” in Anderston et al., Companion to Mysticism and Devotion, 261–​83. 71 Judith H. Oliver, “Christmas Lessons in Word and Image in the Douce Homiliary,” Studies in Iconography 37 (2016): 109–​45; Oliver, Singing with Angels, 209. 66

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convent of Paradies bei Soest contain numerous inscriptions that attest to the nuns’ learning and access to a variety of theological writings.72

The Liturgy and Devotion The liturgy was the primary source for prayers and contemplative exercises. The connection is so close, and the texts of prayer so deeply rooted in the Psalms and the hours of the divine office, that it can be difficult to distinguish with any consistency between the categories of liturgy and devotion. Many prayers commonly identified as “private” were used to accompany the chanting of psalms or form part of ceremonies that were performed in the choir, such as the Adoration of the Cross.73 A twelfth-​century manuscript of Anselm of Canterbury’s (d. 1109) prayers that belonged to the nuns of Admont contains illustrations in which chant texts, complete with their neumes, evoke the concomitant liturgical occasions by means of sound, image, and text.74 The illuminator of this manuscript (Admont 289) had absorbed the liturgy so deeply as to be able to assemble novel utterances from precisely notated snippets of chant, sometimes combining several different chants in the same image. Some prayers, such as those of Anselm, are not liturgical in function; they may have served as models for improvising one’s own prayers.75 Liturgical prayers, too, could be employed in extended ritual functions; as Katie Bugyis has shown, some women religious in medieval England “wrote their own prayers for use in private and communal confession, sometimes creatively adapting Mass texts traditionally used by priests.”76 The experience of the liturgy underlies a vast body of mystical and contemplative writing, including compound works such as Gertrude of Helfta’s Spiritual Exercises, a large corpus of devotions written collectively by the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century. Daily and annual liturgical cycles constitute the structural framework for the exercises, which comment on the ­service that the prayers accompany or describe experiences that nuns had

Jeffrey Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti, and Margot Fassler, eds. Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–​1425, 2 vols. (Münster, 2016). 73 Boynton, “Prayer as Liturgical Performance.” 74 Michael Curschmann, “Integrating Anselm:  Pictures and the Liturgy in a Twelfth-​ Century Manuscript of the ‘Orationes sive Meditationes,’ ” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 295–​312. 75 Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–​33. 76 Katie Ann Bugyis, “The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England,” Speculum 92 (2017): 82. 72

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during the divine office.77 As in the psalmody prayers transmitted in psalters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, so also in the Spiritual Exercises, “the devotions are oriented primarily toward the development of an affective and personal identification with the psalm text and, by extension, with the Psalmist and with Christ himself.”78 While deepening the nuns’ individual experience, the liturgy was simultaneously the communal endeavor in which they were engaged together, the “place and moment where experience occurs.”79 Numerous anecdotes in the visionary literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including Peter the Venerable’s On Miracles, as well as Cistercian exempla, describe supernatural occurrences (involving God, the Virgin Mary, saints, angels, or demons) during the performance of the mass and office.80 As Anna Harrison observes, “the words they chanted and to which they listened seeped into their imagination. They give rise to and became the stuff of visions, suffusing communal song, reception, or a gospel reading with tangled layers of meaning.”81 The profound assimilation of the liturgy witnessed in monastic literature was acquired over a lifetime of performance. The liturgy functioned as a form of monastic education that trained young members of the community through study, memorization, and performance of chants and readings.82 Liturgical learning was always part of life in a monastery, and could begin at various ages depending on the community or order.83 In the central Middle Ages, child oblates sang a wide variety of chants for which they needed extensive preparation.84 The presence of numerous young people in a monastic community entailed an educational structure with skilled teachers supplementing the work of the choirmaster or choirmistress.85 Among the Benedictines, the important roles of children



Claire Taylor Jones, “Hostia Jubilationis: Psalm Citation, Eucharistic Prayer, and Mystical Union in Gertrude of Helfta’s Exercitia Spiritualia,” Speculum 89 (2014): 1012–​26. 78 Ibid., 1007. 79 Harrison, “ ‘I Am Wholly Your Own’,” 554. 80 Susan Boynton, “The Devil Made Me Do It: Demonic Intervention in the Monastic Liturgy,” in European Religious Cultures, ed. Miri Rubin (London, 2008), 89–​106. 81 Harrison, “ ‘I Am Wholly Your Own’,” 562. 82 Boynton, “Training for the Liturgy”; Rebecca King Cerling, “Taking Their Place: Benedictine Child Oblates at Eleventh-​Century Canterbury Cathedral Priory” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2014). 83 Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin. “The Sociomusical Role of Child Oblates at the Abbey of Cluny in the Eleventh Century,” in Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, ed. Susan Boynton and Roe-​Min Kok (Middletown, CT, 2006), 3–​24. 84 Susan Boynton, “The Liturgical Role of Children in Monastic Customaries from the Central Middle Ages,” Studia Liturgica 28 (1998): 194–​209; Anne Bagnall Yardley, “The Musical Education of Young Girls in Medieval English Nunneries,” in Young Choristers, ed. Susan Boynton and Eric Rice (Woodbridge, 2008), 49–​67. 85 Margot E. Fassler, “The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries: A Preliminary Investigation,” Early Music History 5 (1985): 29–​52. 77

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in the liturgy continued through the late Middle Ages with the ongoing practice of child oblation, which remained widespread in female monasticism but declined in male communities after the twelfth century.86 Female monastic communities had several types of younger members. At Barking Abbey, for instance, there were infantes (the youngest), juvencule (school-​aged girls), and scolares (novices), all of whom had specific liturgical duties.87 Some of the children in monastic communities could be boarding pupils, as with the boys and girls attested in the fifteenth century at the Saxon convent of Preetz. Girls in German convents performed a wide range of liturgical chant in the late Middle Ages, although their participation became more limited as a result of visitations carried out under the Bursfeld reform.88 Despite changes mandated by the Observant reforms of the fifteenth century and the enforcement of enclosure in the sixteenth, the performance of the monastic liturgy continued to offer girls an opportunity to acquire extensive musical skill in addition to basic literacy.89 Monastic and mendicant communities played a central role in the education of youth into the early modern period and beyond, ensuring a degree of continuity into the next millennium.

Liturgy as a Way of  Life The daily experience of worship, over decades, was fundamental to nearly every aspect of monastic life. The liturgy structured time, formed the basis of education and devotion, and was central to the identity, prestige, and even the material existence of religious communities. Liturgical practice defined the role of monastics in relation to the laity; it determined their representation of their institutional histories. Thus, the central importance of the liturgy for male and female religious and for their congregations must be taken into account when writing the history of monasticism.

Bibliography Bell, Nicolas. “Liturgy.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, edited by Mette Birkedal Bruun, 258–​67. Cambridge, 2013.

See the article by Cochelin in this volume. Yardley, Performing Piety,  181–​5. 88 Altstatt, “Music and Liturgy of Kloster Preetz,” 104–​80. 89 Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996); Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Colleen Reardon, “Cantando tutte insieme: Training Girl Singers in Early Modern Siena,” in Boynton and Rice, Young Choristers, 195–​215. 86 87

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Susan Boynton Boynton, Susan. “The Liturgical Role of Children in Monastic Customaries from the Central Middle Ages.” Studia Liturgica 28 (1998): 194–​209.   “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters.” Speculum 82 (2007): 896–931.   Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa. Ithaca, NY, 2006.   “Training for the Liturgy as a Form of Monastic Education.” In Medieval Monastic Education, edited by Carolyn Muessig and George Ferzoco, 7–20. Leicester, 2000. Boynton, Susan, and Isabelle Cochelin. “The Sociomusical Role of Child Oblates at the Abbey of Cluny in the Eleventh Century.” In Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth, edited by Susan Boynton and Roe-​Min Kok, 3–​24. Middletown, CT, 2006. Bugyis, Katie Ann. “The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England.” Speculum 92 (2017): 36–​84. Fassler, Margot E. “Music and the Miraculous:  Mary in the Mid-​Thirteenth-​Century Dominican Sequence Repertory.” In Aux origines de la liturgie dominicaine. Le manuscrit Santa Sabina XIV L 1, 229–​78. Rome, 2004.   “The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries:  A Preliminary Investigation.” Early Music History 5 (1985): 29–52. Fulton, Rachel. “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice.” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–​33. Grier, James, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-​Century Aquitaine. Cambridge, 2006.   “A New Voice in the Monastery: Tropes and Versus from Eleventh-​and Twelfth-​Century Aquitaine.” Speculum 69 (1994): 1023–​69. Hamburger, Jeffrey, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti, and Margot Fassler, eds. Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–​1425. 2 vols. Münster, 2016. Harrison, Anna. “ ‘I Am Wholly Your Own’: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta.” Church History 78 (2009): 549–​83. Iogna-​Prat, Dominique. “The Dead in the Celestial Bookkeeping of the Cluniac Monks around the Year 1000.” In Debating the Middle Ages, edited by Lester Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, 340–​62. Malden, MA, 1998. Jones, Claire Taylor. Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany. Philadelphia, PA, 2017. Leigh-​ Choate, Tova, William Flynn, and Margot Fassler. “Hearing the Heavenly Symphony:  An Overview of Hildegard’s Musical Œuvre with Case Studies.” In A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and George Ferzoco, 163–​92. Leiden, 2014. Norton, Michael L., and Amelia J. Carr. “Liturgical Manuscripts, Liturgical Practice, and the Women of Klosterneuburg.” Traditio 66 (2011): 67–​169. Oliver, Judith. Singing with Angels:  Liturgy, Music, and Art in the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock. Turnhout, 2007. Yardley, Anne Bagnall. Performing Piety:  Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries. New York, 2006.

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Books and Libraries within Monasteries E va S c h lothe ub e r a n d Jo hn T. Mc Quillen ( s e ction s b y E va Schlotheuber tr a n slate d b y E l iza Ja eger) “One praises medieval libraries more than one knows them.” (Paul Lehmann)

Books within the Monastery: A Tour To Jerome of Mondsee (d. 1475), master of the University of Vienna and proponent of the Melk reform, the omnipresence of books within monasteries was self-​evident. He expressed this sentiment in the title of his short work “Remarks that religious should have table readings, not only in the refectory, but also in other places (within the monastery).”1 Reading aloud was thought to make the contents of a text more accessible, individual reading to promote introspection, and above all, to encourage compliance with the rule of silence, since reading aloud to one’s self was not the same as talking. Humbert of Romans (1200–​77), Dominican master general, wrote in his instructions for the various offices of the order that the librarian was to open the library regularly, but also to ensure that the books that most of the brothers did not personally possess were located in “appropriate places of silence,” usually chained to desks.2 Although the most extensive book collections were usually kept within the confines of the library, books could be found in many other places throughout the community. The early eighth-​ century Codex Amiatinus provides one of our earliest visualizations of a medieval book collection from a monastic setting. This manuscript was produced at the monastery of Wearmouth–​Jarrow in Northumbria, but was based upon a sixth-​century manuscript from Italy, the

Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz (hereafter MBK), 4  vols. (Munich, 1918–​2009), 4/​2:796. 2 Humbert of Romans, Instructiones de officiis ordinis, in Opera de vita regulari 2, ed. Joachim J. Berthier (Rome, 1889), 263–​6 (chapter XIII: De officio librarii). 1

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Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus (d. c. 583) (now lost). The portrait of Ezra on folio 5r of the Codex Amiatinus, likely based on a depiction of Cassiodorus in the exemplar, includes a five-​tiered book cabinet with nine volumes laid on the shelves. If we assume that this cabinet is emblematic of medieval armaria, we have at least one basic unit of collection organization: small groups of books shelved horizontally in individual cabinets. The books themselves frequently reveal such shelving practices with the title or shelfmark written along the edge or cover of the book (not the spine). Armaria, book chests or cabinets, organized and protected monastic book collections, not only in independent library rooms but for the entire book collection dispersed around the monastery. Thus, the monk responsible for caring for the books was frequently called the armarius.3 By the end of the fifteenth century, some monastic book collections numbered several thousand volumes. As book collections grew, so too did the space of the library, and dispersed armaria coalesced into more centralized libraries. The content of the literature, but especially the physical form that it took (e.g. format, binding, layout, and material, whether paper or parchment), whether or not it was chained, and its location within the monastic enclosure depended on its respective function and the context of its use in the everyday life of the religious community. We will begin this tour of the various places in which books were located with a view into the choir, and we will end in the library.

Books in the Choir, Church, and Sacristy: Liturgical Books A monastic community’s most precious and essential books were used for service in the choir and for other liturgical purposes.4 Such books were often beautifully and richly decorated large-​format volumes, whose canon depended on the community’s order affiliation. They were usually considered part of the church treasury (ornamenta ecclesie), and were therefore inventoried with the chalices and liturgical clothing, and stored in wall cabinets or chests within the sacristy, on stands in the choir, or in chapels.5 A characteristic example of the size and composition of a collection of choir books from the high Middle Ages is that inventoried at the end of the eleventh century at the

Margot Fassler, “The Office of the Cantor in Early Western Monastic Rules and Customaries: A Preliminary Investigation,” Early Music History 5 (1985): 37–​40. On monastic liturgy, see the articles by Jeffery, Blennemann, Billett, Griffiths, Muschiol, and Boynton in this volume. 5 See the article by Gajewski and Seeberg in this volume. 3

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monastery of Weihenstephan, which comprised approximately twenty-​three volumes.6 A missal, gradual, and book of sequences were kept in the chapel of the abbot (ad capellam abbatis). Two additional missals with graduals and sequences were kept in the main choir, together with four lectionaries, an epistolary, and a Gospel book. Two volumes of nocturns without musical notation (duo nocturnales absque cantu), divided into winter and summer parts, two antiphonals with a hymnal, and two psalters with graduals, sequences, and a hymnal likewise belonged in the main choir. A gradual belonged to the schola (unum gradale ad scolas).7 In 1429, after Hussites attacked the house of Augustinian hermits in Schöntal, the community wrote an assessment of the damage with an inventory of all of the community’s movable goods.8 Three rubricated titles within this inventory differentiated between the three large collections—​housed in the choir, the sacristy, and the library (libri chorales, libri sacristie, libri liberarie). Together with the graduals, psalters, passionals, and antiphonals kept in the choir were a legendary, a martyrology, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (r. 590–​604), a rule, a Life of St. Augustine, and a liber ordinarius.9 Libri ordinarii provided the directions for the performance of liturgy. They often included additional texts that served as memoria for the interaction of the different groups within a monastic community, including clerics, nuns, and lay sisters or brothers.10 One well-​worn exemplar survives from the old double monastery of Nivelles (“Harvard University, Houghton Library,” MS Lat. 422), a book that preserves resolutions of the chapter relevant to both the women’s and the men’s communities.11 Books such as the “Notel der Küsterin,” which survives from the Dominican women’s monastery in Nuremberg, also belonged to the stock of service books used to coordinate and organize the liturgical duties of the different groups within a religious institution.12 This was used as a reference book for the ins and outs of the daily liturgical routine, including, for example, details about which bells were to be

MBK 4/​2:649–​50. See also Bernhard Bischoff, ed., Mittelalterliche Schatzverzeichnisse, Vol. 1: Von der Zeit Karls des Großen bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1967). MBK 4/​2:650. 8 MBK 4/​1:498–​503. 9 MBK 4/​1:499. 10 Charles Caspers and Louis van Tongeren, eds., Unitas in pluralitate: Libri Ordinarii as a Source for Cultural History (Münster, 2015). 11 Jeffrey Hamburger and Eva Schlotheuber, eds., The Liber Ordinarius of Nivelles (Tübingen, forthcoming). 12 Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Cent.VII, 16 (das Notel der Küsterin, St. Katharina Nürnberg, 1436). See also Lena Vosding, ed., “Edition und Kommentierung von HS Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Cent.VII, 16 (das Notel der Küsterin, St Katharina Nürnberg, 1436)” (forthcoming). 6 7

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rung at which times and for how long; how long the matutinal was to be read; the readings for and precedence of certain feast days; and how the altars were to be decorated for individual feast days; as well as strictly practical matters such as how the paraments (ecclesiastical hangings or vestments) were to be cleaned and maintained. The regular canons in Schöntal also had a stock of books in the sacristy that were used for intricate masses on high feast days: five missals, another plenarium, an anniversarium, and a “new and complete” breviary. Additional special liturgica were needed in individual places of liturgical remembrance within the monastery church. At the end of the fifteenth century, for example, Leonhard Wagner (known as “Wirstlin,” d.  1522), a monk of Augsburg who was widely recognized—​even by the emperor himself, who used his services—as a maker of representative liturgical codices, included in his Legend and History of the Holy Sintbert with Notes Regarding his Body in the Grave (Legenda et historia in notis de sancto Simperto ad corpus eius in sepulcro) an annotated set of instructions for the yearly festivities that were to take place at the grave of the former Augsburg bishop, Sintbert (d. 807).13 The stone Roman sarcophagus is still intact today in the Church of St. Ulrich and St. Afra. Over time, books found in the choir and the sacristy accumulated to form impressive collections. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Dominicans in Altenhohenau owned seventy-​ one liturgical manuscripts and printed books.14 In 1466, the Benedictine monks of Münsterschwarzach recorded the possession of sixty-​six books for daily use in their choir, in addition to seventeen liturgical books in the narrower sense. At this time, the collection was already considered relatively heterogeneous, with books both “bound and unbound, in good and bad condition, small and large” (ein teil eingepunden, ein teil ungepunden, gut und böss, klein und gross).15 In the Franciscan monastery of Göttingen, some of the forty-seven choir books listed in the library inventory were chained and locked to stands within the church.16 Precious choir manuscripts are relatively abundant among surviving medieval books, although their origins and exact classification are often unclear,

MBK 3/​ 1:43–​ 56. See also Rolf Schmidt, Reichenau und St. Gallen. Ihre literarische Überlieferung zur Zeit des Klosterhumanismus in St. Ulrich und Afra zu Augsburg um 1500 (Sigmaringen, 1985), 152–​77. 14 Bayerische Landesbibliothek, “Bücher für die Liturgie,” www.bayerische-​ landesbibliothek-​online.de/​altenhohenau (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 15 MBK 4/​2:923–​4. 16 Eva Schlotheuber, Die Franziskaner in Göttingen. Die Geschichte des Klosters und seiner Bibliothek (Werl, 1996), 44. 13

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and it is rare that much is known about how and where they were created. An exception to this are the richly illuminated choir books made by the Cologne Poor Clare Loppa of Spiegel (d. after 1370). She wrote and illuminated the famous missal for Konrad of Rennenberg (d. 1357), the dean of Cologne Cathedral, in 1350 (Diözesan-​und Dombibliothek Köln, Cod. 149). Another “Loppa” codex, now located in Stockholm, contains the following inscription: Sister Jutta of Alfter bought this book with her own means and alms (cum suis expensis et elemoysinis). Pray for her. And sister Loppa of Spiegel completed it, wrote it, drew the staves, added the musical notation, and illustrated it (scribendo, liniando, notando, illuminando); she does not want to be excluded from your hearts … in the year 1350, while the great pestilence raged.17

Jutta of Alfter, who had entered St. Clare at a young age in 1313 and died a few years later, financed the production of the codex using her own Eintrittsgelder (money given by her family at the time of her entrance into the community). The Dominican nuns of Paradies bei Soest similarly wrote beautiful and unusual choir books for their own communities and for the brothers in Dortmund.18

Books for the Community: The Chapter House In the sacral hierarchy of spaces, the chapter house, generally located in the eastern wing of the monastery, comes just below the choir. The community gathered here daily to plan the day’s events and discuss discipline.19 It was also an established place for communal reading, and thus for special books of the community. During the eleventh century, the monks of Weihenstephan apparently did not have a library in the literal sense. Their “other books”—​ that is, the books that were not used in the choir—​were kept in separate collections in the chapter house according to their use, whether for reading in the refectory or for the collatio ([a]lii libri a fratribus in capitolio et ad mensam et ad collationes legendi).20



Stockholm, Kongl. Bibl., Cod. holm. A 172, fol. 106v; see also Renate Mattick, “Drei Chorbücher aus dem Kölner Klarissenkloster im Besitz von Sulpiz Boisserée,” Wallraf-​ Richartz-​Jahrbuch 58 (1998): 59–​101. 18 Jeffrey Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti, and Margot Fassler, eds., Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–​1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent, 2 vols. (Münster, 2017). 19 On the material objects and artistic features of the medieval chapter house, see Heidrun Stein-​Kecks, Der Kapitelsaal in der mittelalterlichen Klosterbaukunst. Studien zu den Bildprogrammen (Munich and Berlin, 2004). On this room, see also the article by Cochelin in this volume. 20 MBK 4/​2:650. 17

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Books stored in the chapter house were typically heavily used, which is often demonstrated by the worn state of those that still exist today. One famous example of a chapter office book survives from St. Gall (Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 915, mid-​ninth century), which contains, in addition to lists of confraternities and a list of the abbots of the monastery, the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), the Rule of St. Augustine, and many other rules, as well as computus texts, a martyrology, and a necrology, since this book was used daily in the chapter to remember not only the community’s own dead brothers but also others from outside who were part of the confraternity.21 A lectern for reading is frequently the only piece of furniture mentioned in references to the chapter house. Our knowledge of the books used in this building (besides the chapter book) is somewhat limited, as texts such as visitation protocols, which were to be read regularly during the chapter meeting, belonged primarily to the administrative records and were thus generally not included in inventories of monastic book collections. The chapter house was a place for special exhortations and announcements to the community. The former took place in the distinctive form of the chapter address, as for example preserved in the text of Charitas Pirchheimer’s Christmas address to her own convent (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 4439 fols. 57v–​60r). Monastic rules and customaries typically prescribe a distribution of books at Lent in the chapter house.22 The late twelfth-​century list from Mondsee Abbey in Austria perhaps represents one such distribution, with individual titles followed by a monk’s name: Augustinus super XV gradus, Willelmus. Passionarum magnum, Adalbertus, and so on.23 It was the duty of the librarian, who was frequently also the vestiarius or cantor, to oversee this distribution and maintain records on the condition of the collection. Among the Cistercians, the distribution traditionally took place on the first Sunday in Lent and the books laid down were handed out following the abbot’s cue.24



Johanne Autenrieth, “Der Codex Sangallensis 915:  ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Kapiteloffiziumsbücher,” in Landesgeschichte und Geistesgeschichte. Festschrift für Otto Herding zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1977), 42–​55. On chapter books, see Jean-​Loup Lemaître, “Liber capituli: le livre du chapitre, des origines aux XVIe siècle. L’exemple français,” in “Memoria.” Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (Munich, 1984), 625–​48. 22 Benjamin Victor, “Aux origines de la bibliothèque monastique:  la distribution du Carême,” Scriptorium 50 (1996): 247–​53. 23 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1314, fol. 100v. See also Herbert Paulhart, ed., Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, vol. 5 (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1971), no. 16, 71. 24 Danièle Choisselet and Placide Vernet, eds., Les Ecclesiastica officia cisterciens du XIIème siècle. Texte latin selon les manuscrits édités de Trente 1711, Ljubljana 31 et Dijon 114 (Reiningue, 1989), 324. 21

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It is also possible that the liber ordinarius was occasionally on hand in the chapter house.

Books in the Cloister The traditional place for private reading was the northern range of the cloister, directly bordering the nave of the church.25 In the high Middle Ages, this area was often laid out, as was the case at the monastery of Königslutter, with two aisles with a row of columns and seats on either side. There was often a book chest (armarium) kept in the cloister. In a Cistercian monastery, according to the Ecclesiastica officia (c. 1120/​1130), the armarium was situated in the northern range of the cloister, under the dormitory stairs, a space used for private reading and meditation. Lamps were usually lit in front of the armarium and in the chapter house to accommodate monks or nuns who might come together there after vigils for individual reading, a longstanding tradition that stemmed from the beloved and universally well-​ known Collationes patrum of John Cassian (d. 435) (Ecclesiastica officia 74.3). If someone had to leave during the reading period, they were to put their book away in the armarium or tell their neighbor to look after it for them (Ecclesiastica officia 11.9). After the evening collatio, the armarium was to be locked. In 1188, the Statutes of the General Chapter stipulated that works on canon law, and Gratian’s (d. 1144/​5) Decretum in particular, were not to be kept in the communal book cabinet (in communi armario) because confusion about legal and theological issues could ensue and potentially lead to heresy.26 The significant deterioration of the climate toward the end of the thirteenth century led to a change in the use of the north range of the cloister. In many monasteries, cloisters were glassed in during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and there are descriptions of the late medieval library room at Tegernsee that mention a stuba collationis, a heated chamber for evening reading. The reading conditions of the stuba collationis were nevertheless maintained at Tegernsee in accordance with the mandates of



25



26

Peter Klein, ed., Der mittelalterliche Kreuzgang. Architektur, Funktion und Programm /​The medieval cloister /​Le cloître au Moyen Âge (Regensburg, 2004). Joseph Canivez, ed., Statuta capitulorum generalium ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, vol. 1 (Louvain, 1933), 108 (ad annum 1188). On the study of canon law in monasteries, see the article by Rolker in this volume.

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the reform, with duplicate copies of the Liber de spiritualibus ascensionibus by Gerhard Zerbold of Zutphen for the entire community.27

The Refectory: Books for Reading during Meals Books that were meant for table reading were kept in the refectory. The texts chosen for refectory reading were usually related to the content and meaning of the spiritual life of the community:  exegetical writings of the Church fathers, sermons or moral tales, and the Lives of saints who exemplified monastic virtues. The significance of table reading is made clear, for example, by the importance that the statutes of the Melk reform placed on the office of emendator lectoris mensae, who was charged with monitoring the accuracy of the person reading aloud and carrying out the duties of the librarian.28 The offices of table reader and correctrix mense were also known in female Dominican communities, where those who held such positions were to provide good and carefully corrected reading material that was both useful and consoling.29 The catalog of refectory readings from the Dominican monastery of St. Katharina in Nuremberg, compiled by Sister Kunigunde Niklasin (d. 1457) in the middle of the fifteenth century, provides a good overview of the type of literature that was available for this purpose.30 The catalog begins, like the Church year, with the first Sunday in Advent, and specifies which texts were to be read on every subsequent Sunday (and often also for the individual weekdays), complete with a short description of the text’s themes, the page number on which the reading should begin, and a precise shelfmark indicating its former place on the pulpit in the library (in the formal sense of the term). The catalog lists fifty-​three manuscripts that encompass a variety of subjects: multiple sermons by a single author arranged according to the cycle of the year, and sermons by individual authors on specific topics, such as the purpose and meaning of rules for fasting, the correct preparation and method of confession, and so on. Guillaume Durand’s Rationale divinorum

MBK 4/​2:784. Joachim Angerer, Die Bräuche der Abtei Tegernsee unter Abt Kaspar Ayndorffer (1426–​1461) verbunden mit einer textkritischen Edition der Consuetudines Tegernseenses (Ottobeuren, 1968), 236. 29 Sara Glenn DeMaris, Johannes Meyer. Das Amptbuch (Rome, 2015), c­ hapter 19 (“Der tisch leserin ampt”), 329–​31, and ­chapter 20 (“Der correctrix mense ampt”), 332–​4. 30 Antje Willing, Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg. Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse, 2  vols. (Berlin, 2012); Burkhard Hasebrink, “Tischlesung und Bildungskultur im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Rekonstruktion,” in Schule und Schüler im Mittlalter, ed. Martin Kintzinger, Sönke Lorenz, and Michael Walter (Cologne, 1996), 187–​216. 27

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officiorum was typically read at least every Sunday in order to impart to the sisters a foundational knowledge of liturgy and its spiritual meaning.31 The inventory compiled in 1533, at the time of the dissolution of the Franciscan brothers of Göttingen, lists about fifty volumes that belonged to the refectory collection32—​a number that is quite close to the one reflected in the Nuremberg refectory book catalog.

Books in the Dormitory or in Individual Cells In men’s communities, dormitories or cells were generally located on the top floor of the east range, while women’s monasteries with western galleries usually had their sleeping quarters on the top floor of the western range. Community members of both sexes who owned books would usually give them over to the monastery library after their death. This was the case, for example, of Abbot Hartmut of St. Gall (d. after 889), who in 883 earmarked his entire personal collection for incorporation into the community library.33 Among his collection was a copy of the RB, as well as the Naturalia bona moralisata and computus of Bede, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, The Marriage of Mercury and Philology by Martianus Capella, Orosius, a medical text, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and an artistically rendered map of the world (mappa mundi opus subtile). In some communities, abbots and abbesses lived separately from the rest of the community, and they usually had their own reference and study library close by. At the end of the fifteenth century, the abbot of St. Godehard in Hildesheim wanted his copy of the acts of the chapter of the Bursfeld congregation on hand in his camera, a manuscript (today Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Hs. 313b) that carried the signature No 115 within the abbot’s library. An astronomical manuscript within this private collection bears the signature No 189, suggesting that the library may have numbered around 200 volumes.34



Willing, Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina, 1:lix–​lx. Schlotheuber, Die Franziskaner in Göttingen,  68–​9. MBK 1:86–​7; Benedikt Kraft, “Der Bücherrücklass der Minderbrüder Hermann und Johann Sack (1438–​1440),” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 28 (1935): 37–​57. 34 See also Eva Schlotheuber and Wolfgang Beckermann, “Die Bibliothek des Godehardiklosters in Hildesheim,” in Wandmalerei in Niedersachsen, Bremen und im Groningerland. Fenster in die Vergangenheit, 2  vols. (Munich, 2001), 1:108–​16; Robert Suckale, Klosterreform und Buchkunst. Die Handschriften des Mettener Abtes Peter I. (Petersberg, 2012). 31

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The abbot of Tegernsee wanted to have the Summa of Angelus de Clavasio on hand, but this text was also available in a larger format in a more legible text size in the communal dormitory (Summa Angelica multum egregia, quere in curia et etiam in dormitorio in maiori quantitate et litera).35 After the reform of the fifteenth century, the Benedictines of Tegernsee again shared a single communal sleeping area. Instead of private book collections in individual cells, this dormitory had a small library of its own with a rather impressive collection of titles. According to the 1483 library catalog, arranged by author, the dormitory contained two biblical concordances and two copies of Hugh of Saint-​Cher’s (d. 1263) Postilla on the Four Gospels; a four-​volume Summa of Antoninus of Florence;36 an eight-​volume Summa of the Franciscan Astesanus of Asti, the last volume of which contains definitions of terms from secular and canon law; a Vocabularius bonus; the Catholicon, a dictionary by the Dominican Johannes Balbus (d. c.  1298)  (from Genoa); and the Summa for Preachers by his fellow Dominican John Bromyard (d. c. 1352).37 The monks also wanted the glossary Mater verborum by Salomon of Constance on hand in the dormitory, and the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis (d. 1150s), a late eleventh-​century theological summa written as a dialogue between a teacher and his student.38 Unlike the other books listed in the Tegernsee library catalog, these dormitory volumes had no recorded shelfmarks; they comprised their own collection with the character of a small study library. The core of the book collections in dormitories or in cells usually comprised books that people brought with them when they entered the monastery, generally books that they had inherited or copied themselves. In 1498, a Franciscan provincial chapter in Kempten ruled that the brothers should not allow their private book collections to grow so large that it would cost an exorbitant amount of money to transport them.39 An example of this kind of extensive private collection is reflected in the bequest of books of the Friars Minor Hermann and Johannes Sack.40 When Johannes died in 1438, his biological brother Hermann (d. 1440) inherited his books, and the resulting combined collection numbered forty-​three volumes, all of which were subsequently given to their home monastery in Munich. The collection of the two brothers reflects a wide range of interests. While the lector Johannes was

MBK 4/​2:765. MBK 4/​2:788 and 763. 37 MBK 4/​2:807, 834, and 810. 38 MBK 4/​2:839 and 793. 39 Schlotheuber, Die Franziskaner in Göttingen,  102–​4. 40 MBK 4/​2:691–​5. 35

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primarily interested in natural science and philosophy, Hermann’s occupation as confessor and guardian strongly influenced his own part of the collection, which mostly comprised theological texts. When the Regensburg canon and jurist Konrad Ohnesorg (d. after 1483) entered the house of regular canons at Indersdorf in 1478, he brought with him 104 volumes on law and theology that were subsequently cataloged according to their physical material (parchment manuscript, paper manuscript, or print).41 Nor did Duchess Kunigunde of Bavaria (d. 1520), who joined the community of tertiaries at Püttrichhaus in Munich in 1508, arrive empty-​ handed. In addition to a number of early printed books, she brought a copy of Dietrich of Plienigen’s German translation of Seneca and a translation of the works of John Chrysostom (d. 407)—​writings that would not have been easy to come by.42 The Söflingen Poor Clares, who at the end of the fifteenth century left their buildings in protest against the impending reform of their monastery, kept psalters in their cells, but also a sizeable number of letters that they had both sent and received, together with the famous Söflinger Lieder, songs that they had written down, apparently for their own use.43

Books in the Infirmary Unfortunately, the books that were kept in the hospital or infirmary are only mentioned rarely. The home for the sick and weak was usually equipped with a chapel in which the basic books for performing the mass were needed. The Cistercian monastery of Wettingen in Aargau lists a psalter and a small missal as the books to be kept in the infirmary chapel.44 It has also been speculated that many medicinal and botanical works were kept on hand in the infirmary. However, although the majority of surviving French medieval medicinal manuscripts originated in monasteries, there is almost no evidence in library catalogues or surviving books indicating that they belonged ad infirmariam.45 The reason for this may be more systematic than coincidental. At the noble Benedictine women’s community

MBK 4/​2:667–​71. See also “München, Franziskanertertiarinnen Pütrich-​ Regelhaus” on the project website Schriftlichkeit in süddeutschen Frauenklöstern, www.bayerische-​landesbibliothek-​ online.de/​sueddeutsche-​frauenkloester (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 43 Max Miller, Die Söflinger Briefe und das Klarissenkloster Söflingen bei Ulm im Spätmittelalter (Würzburg, 1940). 44 MBK 1:415. 45 Ernest Wickersheimer, Les manuscrits latins de médecine du haut Moyen Âge dans les bibliothèques de France (Paris, 1966). On the practice of medicine within monasteries, see the article by Brenner in this volume. 41

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of Nonnberg (Salzburg) in 1600, for example, no fewer than twenty books were kept in the infirmary and in the room dedicated for the dying; but these books were exclusively intended as aids for spiritual preparation for illness and death. By the fifteenth century, the herbals and the pharmacological and medical texts used in the hospital run by the monks at the foot of the Mönchsberg were to be found in the pharmacy. We can thus assume that medical books were generally used in connection with the infirmary and office of the infirmarius/​infirmaria, and thus they were kept within the facilities from which the pharmacy would develop, while literature of meditation and edification and the Ars moriendi were available to the sick and dying within the infirmary itself.

From the Armarium to the Desk/​Formal Library Our tour of books in the medieval monastery concludes within a more formal space: the library proper. As discussed above, the monastic library is a dispersed collection. A  somewhat fluid institution, it could encompass armaria and collections spread throughout the community, as well as an independent room strictly for the storage of books. These definitions changed, of course, throughout the Middle Ages and with the size of the community. The library at St. Gall provides an example par excellence for the Carolingian period, since we have comparatively rich sources describing the contents and conception of the collection, not to mention just over a hundred codices extant from before the tenth century.46 One of the most important documents for early medieval library history is the Plan of St. Gall (Codex Sangallensis 1092), produced about 820 at the island monastery of Reichenau.47 It provides an image of the perfect monastery equipped with all of the necessary facilities for cloistered life. At the northeast corner of the church is a two-​story room with the inscription Infra sedes scribentium, supra bibliotheca (“Below the seats for writing, above the library”). The plan includes desks for scribes interspersed with windows, and we can only assume that the ideal library above would have been organized in a similar fashion, with armaria in place of the scribal desks.



See Anton von Euw, Die St. Galler Buchkunst vom 8. bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (St. Gall, 2008). 47 On the Plan of St. Gall and an image of the Plan, see the article by Lauwers in this volume.

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The Plan of St. Gall provides a theoretical framework for the location of the library in monastic life, and we must be careful about ascribing too much architectural reality to this drawing. The mid-​ninth century catalog from St. Gall (see below) does not record shelfmarks or locations for any of the titles, so it is unclear whether or not the collection was contained within a single room as prescribed in the plan.48 Existing architectural evidence for early library rooms is scant, while documentary evidence more frequently refers to multiple places for books around a monastery, rather than a single “library” room.49 Nevertheless, this pattern began to change in the thirteenth century as institutions centralized and reorganized their growing book collections.

The Stages of Development of a Monastic Library: The Example of St. Godehard in Hildesheim The monastery of St. Godehard in Hildesheim offers one of the earliest and most interesting surviving examples of a medieval monastic library, strictly speaking. Most of the east range of the cloister has survived from the period of the foundation (c. 1160–​1170). On the ground floor, the choir is connected to the sacristy in the classic layout, and separated from the chapter room by a narrow space of unknown function. Above the sacristy, and following the same floor plan, is the former library, a roughly square room (3 meters by 3 meters), even though it was not identified as such at the foundation. Its cross-​arched vaults rest on variously contoured columns or wall projections. An iron-​covered door (twelfth century) in the south wall provided access, and three windows in the east wall let in the necessary light. Although Edgar Lehmann, one of the best authorities on medieval library rooms, was not aware of this particular example, he identified the space above the sacristy as the classic place for the monastery library.50 While there is no written evidence for the use of this space at St. Godehard during its founding period, the assumed function of this room as a library is supported by the





MBK 1:66–​82. For example, at Saint-​Wandrille near Rouen a new space for books was built c.  830 but it was not defined as a “library,” and its proximity to the refectory might explain the collection housed there; see Wolfgang Braunfels, Abenländische Klosterbaukunst (Cologne, 1985), 41. 50 Edgar Lehmann, Die Bibliotheksräume der deutschen Klöster im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1957),  2–​7.

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fact that it is followed by another small windowless room with a barrel vault that can only be entered through the “library.” This other space could well have served as the monastery archive, as it was a particularly secure place for keeping the monastery’s privileges and other precious documents. Archive and library would thus have been located side by side. It is only the late medieval wall paintings, however, that clearly demonstrate that the room above the sacristy functioned as a library;51 a series of painted uppercase letters extends clockwise from A to G, comprising a locational catalog designed to direct the user of the library to the desired volume (see Figure 53.1). These letters, painted in a gothic majuscule, appear within slanting coats of arms at the apex of the arches. The G is also crowned with a miter, honoring the name of the monastery’s patron, Godehard. Decorative vines and foliage fill the remaining areas. No comparable example of wall decoration doubling as a library catalog appears to have survived in Germany, although the painting of library rooms was certainly not unusual at the beginning of the fifteenth century. What is truly extraordinary about the library in Hildesheim, however, is that the majuscule letters used for the painted wall catalog can be matched to the signatures of surviving books. Together, the wall decoration and the surviving books constitute a kind of unified ensemble (see Figure 53.2). The library at the monastery of St. Godehard has a long history. Bishop Godehard himself probably brought the earliest manuscripts with him from Tegernsee, and among them a group of classical works. But, as was the case in many other monasteries, the adoption of monastic reform in 1466 introduced a new approach to the library and a general revival of study. Even though the books in Romanesque libraries were kept in armaria, as was probably the case early on at St. Godehard, they were already arranged in order of knowledge, a practice that was carried forward into pulpits of the thirteenth century (see Figure 53.3).

Cataloguing Monastic Collections If the Plan of St. Gall shows an idealized view of the library, the inventory of the library from the mid-​ninth century (Codex Sangallensis 728) provides a clear picture of its textual contents.52 We can distinguish this as an

Schlotheuber and Beckermann, “Die Bibliothek des Godehardiklosters in Hildesheim,” 108–​16. 52 MBK 1:66–​82. 51

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Figure 53.1  Western wall of the library room above the twelfth-​century sacristy of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Godehard, Hildesheim, with fifteenth-​century library signatures (F and G). Diözesanmuseum Hildesheim, Datenerfassungsbogen 4a.

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Figure  53.2  Manuscript containing sermons of the Franciscan friar Bernardinus of Siena (fourteenth/​early fifteenth century, Dombibliothek Hildesheim, St God. 34), with signature of St. Godehard Library F  44. The signature was changed to F  85 in the course of the fifteenth century, when the body of spiritual literature expanded dramatically.

inventory rather than a catalog, per se, since there is no actual indication of locations, and we cannot assume that the genre and author groupings that organize the inventory reflect the physical organization of the books into armaria. Marginal notations in the original inventory indicate when volumes are not currently in their correct place, with notes such as ad scolam (“at the school”) and ad Rorbach (“at Rorbach Abbey,” a daughter house of St. Gall). Four Gospel volumes are annotated ex his duo non inveni (“I did not find two of these”), and in one case there is a provenance note stating that a volume of Gregory the Great’s homilies was given by

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Figure 53.3  Lunette with library signature F, St. Godehard library room.

Charlemagne (r. 768–​814). Aside from a few liturgical books Scottice scripti (“written in Irish script”), there is no section in this inventory devoted to liturgical books. The contemporary catalog from Lorsch Abbey records 60 volumes in the choir and sacristy, even describing the precious covers on several books, and a further 300 volumes in the armarium. Clearly these were not all housed in a single cabinet, but rather the armarium from the Codex Amiatinus has synecdochally come to represent the entire collection, the library. Contemporary inventories from other imperial monasteries such as Reichenau or Saint-​Riquier reflect a certain similarity with the organization and contents of the St. Gall inventory. The production of manuscripts was an inter-​monastic endeavor, and book production and collection management were important sites of monastic exchange. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that inventories reflect connections between fraternal institutions or those with similar imperial support. However, the needs and wants of a bookish abbot or successful school would greatly alter a monastery’s book collections. In spite of a certain uniformity in the contents of known collections, we cannot therefore assume, in the absence of other evidence, that one monastery’s catalog/​inventory can stand in for another’s.

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As evidenced by the St. Gall inventory, extant catalogs follow a common hierarchy of genres. Within the general book collection, Scripture and associated commentaries are listed first, followed by patristic authors and other important theologians, saints’ Lives, and monastic rules. Books on the liberal arts, grammar, history, and medicine form their own subsets, sometimes with books for the monastic school listed separately. Any vernacular works are typically listed last. This basic intellectual organization is remarkably consistent across monastic institutions and can even be found in use well into the early modern period. Unlike the libraries of the mendicant orders, the libraries of the communities that followed the RB were not semi-​public, and the volumes, which were probably accessible only to the community, did not need to be chained. The signatures used at St. Godehard generally comprise a red letter and a black number. The fortunate state of preservation of many of St. Godehard’s late medieval manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before 1501), and the preservation within them of characteristic provenance marks, allow a glimpse of their former order. Barely a century after the reform and this elaborate reorganization came still another transformation, presumably to accommodate the many new releases and acquisitions that the availability of less expensive printed books now made possible. During the Reformation, St. Godehard remained true to the old faith. Abbot Hermann Dannhausen (d. 1566)  added many new works to the old library, and he was probably the person responsible for replacing the old stands with space-​saving wall-​mounted cabinets and shelves. Even today, the traces of this reorganization are visible in the wall paneling, which had to be modified for the installation of vertical wall-​ mounted cupboards. Three temporal stages can thus be distinguished today, all of which reflect modifications to the organization of the library. In the Romanesque period, the space above the sacristy, together with the presumed archival vault, served to preserve the monastery’s precious stock of books. After 1466, the reorganization of the library brought the catalog painted on the wall, which offered a clearly visible division of the volumes that lay on the various stands. Finally, it was probably the sixteenth century that saw the installation of bookshelves to replace the space-​consuming stands. It was in this last phase that the signatures were placed on the spines of the volumes, and the old signatures with the iron fittings on the front covers removed. With the books now standing side by side, it was necessary to remove this

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metal to prevent the iron on the cover of one book from damaging the neighboring one.

From Manuscripts to Printed Books: Renovatio bibliothecae under Reform at Scheyern Abbey Medieval monastic libraries underwent two revolutions in the fifteenth century: monastic reform movements and the advent of the printing press.53 The late medieval library must be understood as the product of both of these events, since both affected the literary and physical character of libraries. This is well illustrated by the history of the library of the Benedictine monastery of Scheyern in Bavaria. While there is no complete library catalog for Scheyern until 1588, an examination of volumes with Scheyern provenance allows for the reconstruction of the contents of the late medieval library.54 Scheyern’s library, it seems, was not large by contemporary standards, with some 600 to 700 books in its collection at the end of the fifteenth century.55 The only information we have regarding the monastery’s earlier book collection is a thirteenth-​century list of books written or acquired just prior to 1241 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 17403, fol. 7r). Of the approximately thirty manuscripts listed, six are extant and identified today, along with a few liturgical leaves preserved as pastedowns in bindings. The fourteenth century was something of a laconic period for Scheyern as few documents exist to describe the monastery at this time. The vehemently negative descriptions of abbots pawning monastic property in the Chronicon Schirense, however, do not portray a flourishing community. It was this type of community—​not unique in the Holy Roman Empire—​that was considered to be in serious need of renewal. Several monastic reform movements were active in the fifteenth century, given impetus by the Councils of Constance (1414–​18) and Basel (1431–​45), and they addressed what were considered by the



James G. Clark, “Print and Pre-​Reformation Religion: The Benedictines and the Press, c.1470–​c.1550,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–​1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge, 2004), 71–​92. 54 See John T. McQuillen, “In Manuscript and Print: The Fifteenth-​Century Library of Scheyern Abbey” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012). 55 John T. McQuillen, “The Uses of Provenance Evidence: Reconstructing the Fifteenth-​ Century Library of Scheyern Abbey, Bavaria,” Journal of the Early Book Society 16 (2013): 130. 53

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reformers to be much-​needed changes.56 These concerned a wide variety of monastic practices, including liturgical, devotional, fiscal, and educational, all of which had a dramatic impact on the library. There is a direct correlation between the spread of the reforming movements and the increase in manuscript production at individual monasteries. While the Melk reform was introduced at Scheyern in 1426, a new abbot was sent in 1449 to reinforce its implementation. This marked a turning point for the library; there are only four dated manuscripts from the first half of the century, but twenty-​nine from the second half, with a further twenty-​eight undated but mostly belonging to the later period. This push for a renovatio bibliothecae is often codified in reform customaries (consuetudines), which invariably recommend book production, regulated reading, and even university education for the monks,57 as can be seen in the Consuetudines Schyreneses (Scheyern Abbey, Ms. 37, written in 1452). This customary also provides examples of appropriate refectory reading, including the Bible, sermons and homilies, and Gregory’s Moralia in Job. This list, in turn, gives us clues to the expected contents of a library under the Melk reform. Many monasteries employed commercial scribes and illuminators to help bring about the renovatio. Scheyern hired Heinrich Molitor of Augsburg, who wrote and/​or illuminated nine large volumes for the monastery between 1452 and 1471. Molitor also produced manuscripts for Tegernsee Abbey, as well as for the archbishop of Augsburg, and possibly illuminated a copy of the Gutenberg Bible for Andechs Abbey—​all institutions connected to the Melk reform. The ready use of commercial craftsmen to produce books prepared cloistered communities for the advent of print, which brought an economic model of book production completely foreign to manuscript tradition, but one that answered the growing demand for books.58 When Johann Gutenberg (d. 1468) developed printing with movable type in the early 1450s, he might have been partially reacting to the need of local Bursfeld Union reform monasteries for multiple copies of standard texts. Of the approximately 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible that were printed, 48 complete copies exist today, and most of these can be traced back to monastic communities, including several with marginal annotations for refectory reading. The first printers focused

On the rhetoric of reform and its problems, see the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 57 See the articles by Clark and Roest in this volume. 58 John T. McQuillen, “Fifteenth-​Century Book Networks: Scribes, Illuminators, Binders, and the Introduction of Print,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107 (2013),  500–​6. 56

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on the monastic market and produced texts that they knew would sell to this pan-​European group. While a bishop’s intent upon uniformity within a diocese sponsored some early printers, a few monasteries, such as that of St. Ulrich and St. Afra in Augsburg, set up their own commercial presses and produced works largely determined by monastic reading needs. Scheyern began acquiring incunabula around 1470, and within a decade they owned approximately sixty, a rate of acquisition unmatched by manuscripts. Library organization had to adapt to such unprecedented expansion, which is probably why both St. Ulrich and St. Afra in Augsburg and St. Emmeram at Regensburg constructed new library buildings at this time to hold their growing collections and even to accommodate the lay readers who used them. While there is no fifteenth-​century catalog of Scheyern’s collection, the books themselves reveal two distinct organizational systems which disregard the divisions between manuscript and print.59 One, an alphanumeric inventory code, orders the books more or less chronologically, probably in order of accession. A second, a red numeral on the binding, organizes the books into subjects (for instance, the signature 3 groups Gospel commentaries). Both St. Emmeram and St. Gall used alphanumeric codes as inventory demarcators in the fifteenth century, while Tegernsee and St. Ägidien in Nuremberg organized their collections in numerical genre groupings.

Reconstructing Medieval Libraries in the Twenty-​First Century The library is not a stagnant institution, and no library has escaped the centuries unscathed. The reconstruction of medieval libraries is hampered both by the movements of books in the medieval period and by depredations of the collections over the last several centuries. Librarians got rid of books when they had outlasted their usefulness, which is especially true for liturgical manuscripts, which were reused in bookbinding; in some cases, manuscripts were replaced by printed editions. In the course of the dissolution of the German monasteries in the nineteenth century, libraries were culled and dispersed to regional repositories. For example, Scheyern was secularized on 4 November 1803, and all 126 manuscripts (there were 220 recorded in a catalog from 1595), 689 incunabula, and 707 other books were sent to the Munich Hof bibliothek (which ultimately sold off thousands of its duplicate printed books); approximately 2,200 additional volumes went to the University



McQuillen, “Uses of Provenance Evidence,” 130–​1.

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Library at Landshut and local schools; close to 6,000 other books were destroyed. This same pattern is found at most Bavarian monasteries. Evidence of provenance such as binding and ownership inscriptions are unfortunately easy to remove, erasing a book’s history in the process. Digital databases are providing new ways to reconstruct medieval libraries from collections that are now widely disbursed, such as Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, the digital repository for manuscripts formerly at Lorsch Abbey, or Fragmentarium, which digitally reunites leaves from dismembered and dispersed manuscripts.60 There is still much work to be done examining, cataloging, and sharing the descriptions of manuscripts and incunabula in our collections, and these constituents of medieval libraries still have much to tell us regarding the production and organization of intellectual life in medieval monasteries.

Bibliography Bell, David N. The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe: A Study of Its History from the Twelfth Century to the French Revolution. Turnhout, 2014.   What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries. Kalamazoo, MI, 1995. Bischoff, Bernhard, ed. Mittelalterliche Schatzverzeichnisse. Vol. 1: Von der Zeit Karls des Großen bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1967. Bünz, Enno, ed. Bücher, Drucker, Bibliotheken in Mitteldeutschland. Neue Forschungen zur Kommunikations-​und Mediengeschichte um 1500. Leipzig, 2006. Carmassi, Patrizia, Eva Schlotheuber, and Almut Breitenbach, eds. Schriftkultur und religiöse Zentren im norddeutschen Raum. Wiesbaden, 2014. Caspers, Charles, and Louis van Tongeren, eds. Unitas in pluralitate:  Libri Ordinarii as a Source for Cultural History. Münster, 2015. Christ, Karl. The Handbook of Medieval Library History. Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1984. Clark, James G. “Print and Pre-​Reformation Religion:  The Benedictines and the Press, c.1470–​c.1550.” In The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–​1700, edited by Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, 71–​92. Cambridge, 2004. Coates, Alan. English Medieval Books:  The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal. Oxford, 1999. Hamburger, Jeffrey, Eva Schlotheuber, Susan Marti, and Margot Fassler, eds. Liturgical Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–​1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent. 2 vols. Münster, 2017. Heinzer, Felix. Klosterreform und mittelalterliche Buchkultur im deutschen Südwesten. Leiden, 2008.

Bibliotheca Laurenhamensis  –​digital:  Virtual Monastic Library of Lorsch http://​ www.bibliotheca-​laureshamensis-​digital.de/​ (date of last access:  31 August 2018); Fragmentarium:  Digital Research Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments, https://​ fragmentarium.ms/​(date of last access: 31 August 2018).

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Books and Libraries within Monasteries Janota, Johannes, and Werner Williams-​Krapp, eds. Literarisches Leben in Augsburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen, 1995. Kautz, Michael. Bibliothek und Skriptorium des ehemaligen Klosters Lorsch. Katalog der erhaltenen Handschriften. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 2016. Ker, Neil R., and Andrew G. Watson, eds. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain:  A List of Surviving Books. London, 1987. Klein, Peter, ed. Der mittelalterliche Kreuzgang. Architektur, Funktion und Programm /​The medieval cloister /​Le cloître au Moyen Age. Regensburg, 2004. Lehmann, Edgar. Die Bibliotheksräume der deutschen Klöster im Mittelalter. Berlin, 1957. Mentzel-​Reuters, Arno. Arma spiritualia. Bibliotheken, Bücher und Bildung im Deutschen Orden. Wiesbaden, 2003. Milde, Wolfgang. “Über Anordnung und Verzeichnung von Büchern in mittelalterlichen Bibliothekskatalogen.” Scriptorium 50 (1996): 269–​78. Roest, Bert. A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1220–​1517). Leiden, 2000. Schlotheuber, Eva. Die Franziskaner in Göttingen. Die Geschichte des Klosters und seiner Bibliothek. Werl, 1996. Schlusemann, Rita, Jos. M.  M. Hermans, and Margriet Hoogvliet, eds. Sources for the History of Medieval Books and Libraries. Groningen, 1999. Sharpe, Richard. “Accession, Classification, Location: Shelfmarks in Medieval Libraries.” Scriptorium 50 (1996): 279–​87. Thompson, James Westfall. The Medieval Library. Chicago, IL, 1939. Willing, Antje. Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg. Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse. 2 vols. Berlin, 2012.

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Art in Monastic Churches of Western Europe from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century Al e x a n dr a G a je wski a n d St efanie Seeberg

He transferred to the inside all the church’s splendour; The pomp of beauty glistens throughout the golden ceilings; Metallic shell, gemmed fabric, inspiring wonder.

With these words, the monk Peter celebrated the achievements of Abbot Faricius (d. 1117) on behalf of his abbey of Abingdon.1 As Meyer Schapiro noted in his essay on the aesthetics of Romanesque art, without texts such as these, we could hardly imagine the original aspect of medieval churches and monasteries. Their paintings, sculptures, decorated floors, textiles, and metalwork reliquaries or crosses have largely disappeared. The few surviving objects are now mostly displayed in the safety of museums and galleries.2 Our aim is to re-​contextualize monastic art and to analyze objects and decorative elements within their original settings in the abbey churches wherever the evidence survives or can be reconstructed. The essay is divided into three parts. In asking how art functioned practically and spiritually within the monastic church, we are confronted with the problem of defining “art” in this context, as well as with the question of the status of “art” in the Middle Ages. Part one will therefore discuss the difficulties of twentieth-​century art historians in classifying different types of medieval art, and show how recent approaches

Passage partially quoted and translated in Meyer Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art, in Romanesque Art (New  York, 1947; reprint 1977 and 1993), 1–​27. See also William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops, vol. 1: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney Malcolm Thomson (Oxford, 2007), 300–​5. 2 Brigitte Buettner, “Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA, 2006), 466–​87; on the enthusiasm for collecting monastic art in England in the post-​medieval period, see James G. Clark, “Introduction:  The Culture of Medieval Monasticism,” in The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism, ed. James G. Clark (Woodbridge, 2007), 1–​20. 1

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resonate with the attitudes of medieval writers. In the second part, we will take a walk through the medieval monastic church, visiting the main liturgical areas that were singled out for decoration, always with an eye to differences between male and female houses and considering both the patrons and the intended audiences. As would have been the case in a medieval church, in which time-​worn sacred vessels could serve on a newly decorated altar, we will discuss objects of different periods in this section without keeping to chronological order. The third part of the essay will address opposition to sumptuous decoration of churches among monastic communities. Calls for physical austerity and for the elimination of gold, silver and other outward splendor in monastic churches resurfaced at regular intervals in the period we are discussing. Although this opposition did not put an end to art in abbey churches, it often shaped monastic art in a decisive way.

Questioning Art in the Ecclesiastical Context In 1947, Schapiro was exceptional among art historians in his interest in all aspects of medieval church decoration. Although the early twentieth-​century modernist movements had generated admiration for the abstract and iconic qualities of medieval art, most art historians concentrated their scholarship on the more illusionistic and naturalistic art of, for example, the Renaissance.3 Moreover, according to the traditional hierarchies of value within the discipline, only painting and sculpture belonged to the “fine arts,” whereas goldsmith work and textiles—​so central to medieval art production—​were considered “minor arts” to be ranged among the crafts. One of the main justifications was that most such objects were made for use within the church and therefore served a religious and not an aesthetic purpose.4 A change in perception was generated from within the world of museums through several important exhibitions, starting with the Louvre’s Trésors des églises de France in 1966.5 By moving hundreds of medieval objects into the limelight, these helped to shift the place that medieval art held within the discipline. Schapiro’s essay was republished in 1977, and his powerful case for the aesthetic value of medieval art became more widely available.

Conrad Rudolph, “Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art,” in Rudolph, Companion to Medieval Art,  1–​43. 4 Buettner, “Toward a Historiography,” 470–​2; Clark, “Introduction,” 2; Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude.” 5 See Trésors des églises de France. Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1965 (Paris, 1965); see also Anton Legner, ed., Ornamenta Ecclesiae. Kunst und Künstler der Romanik in Köln, 3 vols. (Cologne, 1985). 3

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With the inclusion of medieval artifacts in the art-​historical canon increasingly assured, scholars now turned precisely to those questions of religion and function that in Shapiro’s time had been used to denigrate medieval art.6 As a result, the characteristics of medieval art that had confounded earlier writers, in particular the absence of a stable stylistic progression, now provided the basis for new approaches to medieval art, including the question of how ecclesiastical art was made to function within the church liturgy. Summarizing such views, Herbert Kessler argued in 1988 that the medieval artifact was more agent than object, made to invite reflections on issues of devotion, learning and ritual.7 The idea of a separate norm for medieval art was taken farthest by Hans Belting, who argued that medieval images should not be categorized as “art” in the way that the term has been understood since the Renaissance. He advocated a contextual approach that takes into account the reception of images.8 Since the 1980s, there has been continued interest in what might be called the “functional approach,” starting from the basis that medieval “images, far from being ends in themselves, always stood in the service of other goals.”9 As a result, the medieval church is studied today as a space for performances that derived its sense from the rituals that took place in it, such as the celebration of the liturgy of the hours (opus dei), processions and the sacrament of the Eucharist, as well as private devotion.10 One of the major insights of this line of research has been to include not just architecture, sculpture and stained glass as active parts in this holistic experience, but to recognize that all of the objects present in the church, from the altar itself to liturgical manuscripts, from the censer to the priest’s



Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra, 800–​1200, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT, 1994), xi. Herbert L. Kessler, “On the State of Medieval Art History,” Art Bulletin, 70 (1988): 166–​ 87. See also Herbert Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (North York, Ontario, and Tonawanda, NY, 2011). 8 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL, 1994). Among the critics of Belting’s theory, see Jeffrey Hamburger, “Hans Belting. Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, 1990,” in The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, ed. Richard Shone and John-​Paul Stonard (London, 2013), 202–​15. 9 Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History:  Problems, Positions, Possibilities,” in The Mind’s Eye:  Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-​Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 17. 10 See, as an introduction to the long bibliography on sacred space, Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005). For space and function within the monastic context, see Jörg Sonntag, ed., Geist und Gestalt. Monastische Raumkonzepte als Ausdrucksformen religiöser Leitideen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 2016). On gendered spaces of liturgy, see the article by Muschiol in this volume and Stefanie Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum. Leinenstickereien im Kontext mittelalterlicher Raumausstattungen aus dem Prämonstratenserinnenkloster (Altenberg an der Lahn, 2014), 33–​56. 6

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chasuble, played both a material and a metaphysical role in the various liturgical spectacles.11 At the same time, this emphasis on function is sustained by a new understanding of style. Robert Suckale famously compared style to the different levels of expression (genera dicendi) chosen by rhetoricians for particular audiences.12 Style, in this interpretation, is not (only) the result of a generic formal development but (also) a potential vehicle, chosen by patrons and artists, in order to adapt architecture or objects to a particular place or occasion, for example by reserving the most complex and decorative designs for the area of the church surrounding the high altar. The materials from which objects are made also contribute to their message and meaning. It was no coincidence that the most exquisite and enduring materials, such as lustrous metals and precious stones, were used for reliquaries, crosses, or monstrances, since their glimmering, shining quality could evoke heavenly light.13 This current interest in recreating the functional space of the medieval church with its furniture and fittings echoes the concerns of medieval writers. For them, the manual artes did not constitute a separate category of human endeavor. In his Didascalion, Abbot Hugh of Saint-​Victor (1096–​1141) classified architecture, sculpture, and painting not among the seven liberal arts but among the mechanical arts, together with agriculture, medicine, hunting, and navigation.14 Clergymen and theologians generally emphasized the functional, didactic, and spiritual aspects of artifacts. Throughout the Middle Ages, authors reused or reformulated Pope Gregory the Great’s (r. 590–​604) reprimand to the iconoclastic Bishop Serenus of Marseille—​“in it the illiterate read” —​thus highlighting the pedagogical function of images and their value in structuring or directing religious experience.15





Paul Crossley, “The Integrated Cathedral:  Thoughts on ‘Holism’ and Gothic Architecture,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, ed. Evelyn Staudinger Lane, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, and Ellen M. Shortell (Farnham, 2009), 157–​73. 12 See Robert Suckale, “Stilgeschichte zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts:  Probleme und Möglichkeiten,” in Stilfragen zur Kunst des Mittelalters. Eine Einführung, ed. Bruno Klein and Bruno Boerner (Berlin, 2006), 271–​81. For a discussion of Suckale’s approach, see Alexandra Gajewski, “The Patronage Question under Review:  Queen Blanche of Castile (1188–​1252) and the Architecture of the Cistercian Abbeys at Royaumont, Maubuisson, and Le Lys,” in Reassessing the Roles of Women as “Makers” of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Therese Martin (Leiden, 2012), 197–​244. 13 On materiality, see Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, 19–​ 42; Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011). 14 George Ovitt, “The Status of Mechanical Arts in Medieval Arts in Medieval Classifications of Learning,” Viator 14 (1983): 89–​105. 15 Gregory the Great, Registrum epistularum XI, 10, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140A, 873–​ 6. See also Celia M. Chazelle, “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,” Word & Image 6 (1990): 138–​53; Lawrence Duggan, 11

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The monastic church was itself a functional space. As the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) demanded, “an oratory should be in fact what it is called”—a place made for prayer (RB 52). But art in monastic churches could be justified on a number of grounds centered on the purpose of artifacts.16 According to the learned monk and artist Theophilus (fl. c. 1070–​1125), good craftsmanship was a God-​g iven talent.17 Made in the image of God, humans were bound to make use of reason in order to realize in material form the words of the psalm: “Lord, I loved the beauty of your house” (Ps. 25:8).18 Abbot Suger (d. 1152) insisted, moreover, that the many exquisite objects and complex images he commissioned at great cost for Saint-​Denis were made for learned monks like him, and that they assisted spiritual endeavors and prayers.19 Read at face value, such remarks might suggest that monks like Theophilus and Suger considered artifacts only as signs “pointing beyond.”20 Modern readers of Suger’s writings, however, cannot doubt the aesthetic pleasure that the abbot took in the sensuous beauty of his “gem-​encrusted liturgical toys.”21 On the other hand, there is no need to consider Suger’s and others’ justifications for art in monastic churches as mere deceit camouflaging greed with devotion. The iconophile Christian West always maintained an









“Reflections on ‘Was art really the Book of the illiterate?’,” in Reading Images and Text:  Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication, ed. Mariëlle Hagemann (Turnhout, 2005), 109–​ 19, revd. from original publication in Word & Image 5 (1989): 227–​51. 16 See Heidrun Stein-​Kecks, “Bilder: ein Medium der Kommunikation für Mönche?” in Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen, vol. 1: Netzwerke. Klöster und Orden im Europa des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Cristina Andenna, Klaus Herbers, and Gert Melville (Stuttgart, 2012), 223–​39. 17 Theophilus, On Divers Arts:  The Foremost Medieval Treatise on Painting, Glassmaking, and Metalwork, ed. and trans. John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith (New York, 1979). See also, with a summary of the literature, Hiltrud Westermann-​Angerhausen, “Stoff-​Hierarchien in der Schedula Diversarum Artium, Aktuelle Re-​Lektüren,” in Licht(t)räume. Festschrift für Brigitte Kurmann-​Schwarz zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Katharina Georgi, Barbara von Orelli-​Messerli, Eva Scheiwiller-​Lorber, and Angela Schiff hauer (Petersberg, 2016), 241–​7. 18 Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”:  Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia, PA, 1990); Heidrun Stein-​Kecks, “ ‘Heiligkeit ist die Zierde deines Hauses’:  wer sollte die Bilder sehen?” in Kirche und Kloster. Architektur und Liturgie im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Clemens Kosch zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Gereon Beuckers and Elizabeth den Hartog (Stuttgart, 2012), 120–​3. 19 See Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-​Denis:  Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth-​Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, NJ, 1990). 20 See Bynum, Christian Materiality, whose timeframe (1150–​1550) excludes Suger and Theophilus. 21 Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-​Denis:  Church and State in Early Twelfth-​Century France (New York, 1998), 5. See also Erwin Panofsky, ed., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-​Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ, 1979), 14; Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic Attitude”; Mary J. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013).

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awareness of and deep respect for the potential power of images and precious objects.22 From early Christian times onwards, inscriptions can be found on buildings or objects warning the viewer to think past the visual appeal of precious materials or lifelike representations.23 One example is the inscription on the triumphal cross in the nave of the Cistercian Abbey of Doberan, probably made just before 1368, which has been reconstructed as:  “Before the image of Christ prostrate yourself with adoration, you who pass by; but adore not the image [itself] but what it designates.”24 It is true that, in the wake of the eleventh-​century Church reforms, while medieval clergy increasingly lavished money and care on art, a vociferous group of critics declared that such art had no place in the monastic context; we will discuss these critics in the last section of this essay. Nonetheless, a moderate prevailing attitude in Western Christendom considered art as neither merely a means to an end nor an end in itself, but situated at a vital point between the two extremes. Thus, if for Peter the beauty of Abingdon Abbey was a delight, it was also, on a higher level, evidence of the sanctity of its abbot-​patron, and, ultimately, it revealed “God through matter.”25

The Abbey Church: Artifacts, Furnishings, and Decorative Elements The decorative program of a church was never permanently fixed. Throughout the liturgical year, movable objects such as reliquaries or hangings provided temporary adornment in addition to stationary wall paintings or capital sculptures. When they were not in use, these portable and often costly and venerated objects were stored in a safe place. Many abbeys had a specific treasury room for this purpose.26 Medieval documents tell us that the treasury



See Hamburger, “Place of Theology,” who reviews the fundamental works on the subject: Belting, Likeness and Presence; and David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL, and London, 1989). 23 Robert Favreau, “Les inscriptions médiévales:  reflet d’une culture et d’une foi,” in Études d’épigraphie médiévale. Recueil d’articles de Robert Favreau rassemblés à l’occasion de son départ à la retraite (Limoges, 1995), 299–​300. 24 See Johannes Voss, “Anmerkungen zur Geschichte des Kreuzaltares und seines Retabels im Doberaner Münster: Konzeption und Ergebnisse der Restaurierung 1975–​1984,” in Figur und Raum. Mittelalterliche Holzbildwerke im historischen und kunstgeographischen Kontext (Berlin, 1994), 115. 25 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 35. 26 Pierre Alain Mariaux, “Collecting (and Display),” in Rudolph, Companion to Medieval Art, 213–​32. See also Michele Tomasi, “Des trésors au Moyen Âge: enjeux et pratiques, entre réalités et imaginaire,” Perspective 1 (2009):  137–​41; Lucas Burkart et  al., eds., Le trésor au Moyen Âge. Discours, pratiques et objets (Florence, 2010). For the location and architecture of treasuries, see Andreas Bräm, “Schatz und Schatzkammer:  zur 22

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housed objects used to decorate the church (ornamenta), such as images and statues, and those needed to celebrate the liturgy (apparata), such as sacred vessels, liturgical books, and vestments.27 Some authors also record a variety of other precious or curious items, including ostrich eggs that could be suspended in the church on certain days.28 The most treasured objects, however, were the relics, the bodies of the saints. All of these things needed to be both kept safe from thieves and easily accessible so that they could be taken out on feast days to animate masses or processions, prayer, and contemplation. The treasury was therefore usually a small, lockable room, located immediately adjacent to the sanctuary or even within the church itself. At the twelfth-​century monastery and cathedral of Winchester, a treasury room was inserted into the western aisle of the south transept and decorated with figurative sculpture.29 At Quedlinburg, a house of secular canonesses, Abbess Agnes of Meissen (r. 1184–​1203) had a square treasury built in the north transept of the church and enriched the treasure with a variety of new items, among them a carpet to which we will return later.30 At the monastery of Ely, an inventory of the treasury made after the death of Abbot Theodwine in 1075 contained thirty-​one entries, each specifying several items, among them fifty bench-​covers and three silver straws for the administration of communion wine.31 Contemporary chronicles and saints’ Lives regularly reported on the largesse with which an abbot or abbess treated his or her monastery. In the poem quoted at the beginning of this article, Peter provides a list of the various donations made by Abbot Faricius to Abingdon (in this order): estates, royal pallia (normally describing unused, complete pieces of silk), gifts, fabrics, rich vessels, and decorated hangings.32 In 1261, King Louis IX (r. 1226–​70)





Interdependenz um 1200,” in Burkart et al., Le trésor au Moyen Âge, 345–​65; Lesley Milner, “Secret Spaces: English Sacristies, Vestries and Treasure Rooms, 1066–​1300” (PhD diss., University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2014). 27 On the liturgical books in the sacristy, see the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in this volume. 28 See Guillaume Durand, Guillelmi Duranti Rationale divinorum officiorum I–​IV, ed. Anselme Davril and Timothy M. Thibodeau, CCCM 140, 49. 29 Milner, “Secret Spaces,” 94–​104. 30 For canonesses, see Jeffrey Hamburger and Robert Suckale, “Between This World and the Next: The Art of Religious Women in the Middle Ages,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti (New York, 2008), 76–​108; for the treasury at Quedlinburg, see Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–​circa 1204 (University Park, PA, 2012), 187–​95. 31 See Janet Fairweather, ed. and trans., Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth (Woodbridge, 2005), 233–​5. 32 See William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, 1:303–​5.

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confirmed Saint-​Denis’s treasury (where the coffers had been filled notably by Abbot Suger) as the official depository for the royal regalia: the crown, and other symbols and emblems used for royal coronations.33 If monastic treasuries started overflowing at this time, it was also due to the many donations made by the laity. Berthold (d. c. 1169), the chronicler of the abbey of Zwiefalten, the family mausoleum of the counts of Berg, hailed Salomea (d. 1144), Richeza, and Sophia of Berg as “three sisters beloved by God who united in order to adorn the place.”34 Salomea of Berg, in particular, donated land and hundreds of objects to Zwiefalten, among them ninety saints’ relics, liturgical vestments and vessels, altar cloths, a beautiful crystal, and, most importantly, the hand of Stephen the protomartyr, which had been in the possession of her late husband, the Polish Prince Bolesław III Wrymouth (d. 1138).35 Zwiefalten later had to sell some of these gifts, and indeed one of the functions of such treasuries was to provide assets that could be liquidated in times of difficulty. Important abbeys could nevertheless amass huge fortunes: a 1382 inventory of jewels, ornaments, and relics made at Cluny contains 484 entries, each describing one or several items, stored in various places around the abbey.36 The objects preserved in monastic treasuries were generally of the same type as those found in cathedrals or collegiate churches. Nor did the interiors of monastic churches, their furnishings, and their decorations differ fundamentally from those of churches served by secular canons. Nevertheless, just as the organization of the monastic buildings reflected the particular needs of their residents,37 monastic art addressed in various ways (through iconography, form, and style) the spiritual exigencies of the cloistered community, while also serving the specific worldly needs of the institution. As we will





Suger, Abt Suger von Saint-​Denis, Ausgewählte Schriften:  Ordinatio, De consecratione, De administratione, ed. Andreas Speer and Günther Binding (Darmstadt, 2005). For the English translation of selected texts, see Panofsky, Abbot Suger. For the regalia at Saint-​ Denis, see Danielle Gaborit-​Chopin, Regalia. Les instruments du sacre des rois de France (Paris, 1987), 23. 34 Luitpold Wallach, “Berthold of Zwiefalten’s Chronicle, Reconstructed and Edited with an Introduction and Notes,” Traditio 13 (1957): 199. 35 Edina Bozóky, “Le trésor de reliques de l’abbaye de Zwiefalten: un précieux témoignage des échanges culturels entre Orient et Occident,” in Les échanges culturels au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2002), 117–​33; Szymon Wieczorek, “Die Schenkungen Bolesławs III.  und Salomeas von Berg an die Benediktinerabtei Zwiefalten in den 1130–​40er Jahren,” in Monarchische und adlige Sakralstiftungen im mittelalterlichen Polen, ed. Eduard Mühle (Berlin, 2013), 131–​70. 36 Armand Bénet, “Le trésor de l’abbaye de Cluny:  inventaire de 1382,” Revue de l’art chrétien, 4th ser. 38 (1888): 195–​205. 37 See the article by Lauwers in this volume. 33

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discuss, this is perhaps particularly true for art made for female communities, as religious women were not allowed to become priests or to attend the altar and were (at least theoretically) confined to an enclosure.38 The high altar, where Christ’s sacrificial death was commemorated during the daily celebration of mass, was the liturgical heart of every church and usually situated at its eastern end. In the twelfth-​century east end of the abbey church of Saint-​Remi at Reims, built by Abbot Peter of Celle (c. 1115–​ 1183), the symbolism of the altar was made visible to the monks sitting in their stalls and to any visitor entering the church from the west. Shining brightly in the dim light of the church interior, a stained-​glass window that is still today situated in the axial bay, right above the high altar, shows the Crucifixion with a massive cross that fills the entire window, outlined in red on a blue background. A chalice placed at Christ’s feet is an immediate reference to the Eucharist taking place below on the altar itself.39 The high altar was, of course, the central area for decoration in any church.40 As Abbot Suger wrote: We hastened to adorn the Main Altar of the blessed Denis where there was only one beautiful and precious frontal panel from Charles the Bald, the third Emperor … We had it all encased, putting up golden panels on either side and adding a fourth, even more precious one; so that the whole altar would appear golden all the way round. On either side, we installed two candlesticks of King Louis, son of Philip, of twenty marks of gold, lest they might be stolen on some occasion; we added hyacinths, emeralds, and sundry precious gems; and we gave orders carefully to look out for others to be added further.41

Suger’s conduct was characteristic of medieval patrons in several respects. He valued both old and newly made objects, and he carefully preserved the memory of their donors. We know of the Carolingian altar frontal that Suger incorporated in his refurbishing of the high altar from a painting dating to c. 1500 and showing the legendary Mass of St. Giles in the real-​life setting of

For a summary and bibliography, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Art and Architecture of Female Monasticism,” in A Companion to Medieval Art:  Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ, 2019), 823–​56. 39 Madeline H. Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine: ornatus elegantiae, varietate stupendes (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 44–​7. 40 See Verena Fuchβ, Das Altarensemble. Eine Analyse des Kompositcharakters früh-​und hochmittelalterlicher Altarausstattung (Weimar, 1999); Justin Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt, eds., The Altar and Its Environment, 1150–​1400 (Turnhout, 2009). 41 Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 61. See also Stephan Albrecht, Die Inszenierung der Vergangenheit im Mittelalter. Die Klöster von Glastonbury und Saint-​Denis (Munich and Berlin, 2003), 166–​70. 38

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Saint-​Denis (London, National Gallery). By the time that the painting was made, the frontal had been moved to the top of the altar to be used as a retable. Three arches on the rectangular metal panel separated a Christ in Majesty in the center from the depiction of saints on both sides.42 Among the surviving gilt frontals from the early eleventh century that show Christ in Majesty is one from the cathedral of Basel (Paris, Musée de Cluny; see Figure 54.1) and another that is still preserved in the church of St. Mary in Aachen (the former Palatine Chapel). At Sant’Ambrogio in Milan a golden frontal and a silver back panel are still in situ.43 Next to metal, silk was also used to create luxurious antependia. An example survives from the monastery of Rupertsberg (Brussels, Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire), where it was made probably fifty years after the death of its famous abbess Hildegard in 1179.44 Made from red Byzantine silk and embroidered with gold and silk thread, it shows Christ in Majesty surrounded by the Virgin and saints, including Hildegard, as well as five noble lay and ecclesiastical donors, a nun who can probably be identified as an abbess of Rupertsberg, and busts of other nuns in the lower border. This striking textile not only demonstrates the important role of women in the making of medieval art, but also illustrates further the multiple roles that art could play in the monastic context. In a highly respected monastic institution such as Rupertsberg, a sumptuous artifact like the antependium would be employed to dress the church as the bride of Christ while at the same time honoring the contribution of the patrons from both inside and outside the institution.45 The nuns at Rupertsberg and Abbot Suger would have felt at liberty to decorate their high altars as sumptuously and as expensively as they thought appropriate. Although the basic furnishing of altars was regulated in canon law texts, their decoration and ornamentation was usually left to local



For the history of the frontal, see Blaise de Montesquiou-​Fezensac and Danielle Gaborit-​Chopin, Le trésor de Saint-​Denis, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973–​7), 2:96–​8. 43 See Erik Thunø, “The Golden Altar of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan,” in Decorating the Lord’s Table: On the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle Ages, ed. Søren Kaspersen and Erik Thunø (Copenhagen, 2006), 63–​78. 44 Leonie von Wilckens, “Das goldgestickte Antependium aus Kloster Rupertsberg,” Pantheon 35 (1977):  5–​ 10; Stefanie Seeberg, “Women as Makers of Church Decoration: Illustrated Textiles at the Monasteries of Altenberg/​Lahn, Rupertsberg, and Heiningen (13th–​14th c.),” in Martin, Reassessing the Roles of Women, 1:375–​84. 45 For the multiple role of women as “makers” of medieval art and the complex meanings of the word fecit (“made”) in connection with medieval artifacts and architecture, see Therese Martin, “Exceptions and Assumptions: Women in Medieval Art History,” in Martin, Reassessing the Roles of Women, 1:1–​33; For textiles, see Seeberg, “Women as Makers”; Alexandra Gajewski and Stefanie Seeberg, “Having Her Hand in It? Elite Women as ‘Makers’ of Textile Art in the Middle Ages,” JMH 42 (2016): 1–​25. 42

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Figure 54.1  Metal gilt altar frontal, Basel. Musée de Cluny, Paris.

preferences.46 Our best source on the topic comes from the ordinals (Libri ordinarii).47 Generally speaking, altars needed a pyx (a container for the host), which could be placed either on the mensa, next to it, or suspended above it. For the celebration of mass, the table was always covered with a cloth. Reliquaries could be set on it, and, by 1200, legislative texts required a cross and two candles.48 All other decorations were left to the discretion of the abbot or abbess and the sacristan, the monk or nun charged with the care of both the sacristy and the treasury, and responsible for handling the liturgical vessels and vestments.





Julian Gardner, “…Ante et super altare…:  from antependium to altarpiece,” in Das Aschaffenburger Tafelbild. Studien zur Tafelmalerei des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Erwin Emmerling and Cornelia Ringer (Munich, 1997), 25–​40; Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT, and London, 2013), 112–​13. 47 For ordinals, see Tillmann Lohse, “Stand und Forschung der Liber ordinarius Forschung,” in Liturgie in mittelalterlichen Frauenstiften. Forschungen zum Liber ordinarius, ed. Klaus Gereon Beuckers (Essen, 2012), 215–​55. 48 Julian Gardner, “Altars, Altarpieces, and Art History: Legislation and Usage,” in Italian Altarpieces 1250–​1550:  Function and Design, ed. Eve Borsock and Fiorella S. Gioffredi (Oxford, 1994), 7–​9. 46

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From the early Christian period onwards the spaces above, around and on the altars were associated with imagery.49 In Italy, and especially in Rome, there was a long tradition of showing a glittering mosaic with an image of Christ in the apse above the high altar. Such images had a profound effect on church decoration north of the Alps, although painting was more widespread here than mosaics. In the newly built abbey church of Cluny, around 1100, the half-​dome covering the apse above the high altar was painted with a figure of Christ in Majesty. The apse was, furthermore, surrounded by eight, reused antique marble columns, each about ten meters high and carrying carved, figurative capitals. Unusually, two of these showed the personifications of the eight tones of plainchant, while the others included the more familiar subjects of the four rivers of paradise, the Seasons, the Virtues, and a personification of Grammar, one of the seven liberal arts.50 Various objects could be placed directly on the altar table, although it is often unclear how permanent these were. Abbot Suger tells us that he placed the “crest,” an “incomparable ornament”—later known as the “escrain de Charlemagne” (Charlemagne’s chest) and dismantled only in 1794—​on top of the high altar.51 This complex piece of goldsmith work was probably, like the antependium, a gift from Charles the Bald (r. 840–​77) and consisted of three registers of delicate arches, measuring about one meter in height and set with more than 700 pearls and hundreds of precious stones.52 Images could also form part of the installations of objects on the altar. Statues of the seated Virgin and of saints, for example, were widespread, honoring and also identifying the saints to whom the altar was dedicated.53





Fuchβ, Das Altarensemble; Sible de Blaauw, “Altar Imagery in Italy before the Altarpiece,” in Kroesen and Schmidt, Altar and Its Environment,  47–​56. 50 See, most recently, Neil Stratford, Brigitte Maurice-​Chabard, and David Walsh, eds., Corpus de la sculpture de Cluny, 2 vols. (Paris, 2011), 1:515–​92. 51 Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 63. See Jean-​Pierre Caillet, “De l’antependium au retable: la contribution des orfèvres et émailleurs d’Occident,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 49 (2009): 3–​20, esp. Fig. 5; Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in Rudolph, Companion to Medieval Art, 239. 52 Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown:  Art and Imagination in Gothic England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), 157–​62; Justin E.  A. Kroesen, “The Altar and Its Decorations in Medieval Churches. A  Functionalist Approach,” in Kroesen and Schmidt, Altar and Its Environment, 154–​83; Caillet, “De l’antependium au retable”; Paul Binski, “Statues, Retables, and Ciboria:  The English Gothic Altarpiece in Context, before 1350,” in Kroesen and Schmidt, Altar and Its Environment,  31–​46. 53 See Ilene H. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ, 1972); Anna Pawlik, Das Bildwerk als Reliquiar? Funktionen früher Großplastik im 9.–​11. Jahrhundert (Petersberg, 2013); Beate Fricke, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints:  Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (Turnhout, 2015).

49

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Written sources suggest that, even before 1100, retables were placed at the back of the altar table or behind the altar.54 Like early altar frontals, early retables were often oblong to fit the width of the altar and made from sculpted metal depicting an arcaded relief with a centrally seated Christ and flanking saints. And, like the Saint-​Remi window and the Cluny apse painting, their images and accompanying inscriptions could invoke Christ’s sacrificial death and glory in relation to the Eucharist and to the liturgy taking place on the altar, while also commemorating the patron saints.55 Next to the high altar, an increasing number of side and lesser altars were also selected for decoration with image complexes, sometimes combining images and relics. At Stavelot Abbey, Abbot Wibald (r. 1130–​58) commissioned a monumental retable that is now lost, but known from a drawing made in 1666.56 It originally measured c. 2.75 by 3.10 meters and was probably placed behind the matins altar that was located east of the high altar.57 The retable included a niche containing the reliquary shrine of the abbey’s founder, St. Remacle, and was decorated with enamel plaques showing scenes of the life of the saint and his resurrection in paradise.58 Over the next hundred years, the retable developed into a common altar decoration, offering a wide field for innovative artistic strategies. Both in Italy and in northwestern Europe, regions that underwent similar but only distantly related developments, an increasing number of altarpieces were produced from painted wood, although their frames often emulated the lustrous aesthetics of earlier retables with their precious stones and metals.59 The reasons for the profusion of retables in the medieval West that began in the thirteenth century are complex and not easy to define. Scholars now reject the idea that the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) provided a turning point.60 The



Binski, “Statues, Retables, and Ciboria,” 32–​8. On mosaic or painted programs in apses, see Ursula Nilgen, “Die Bilder über dem Altar, Triumph-​und Apsisbogenprogramme in Rom und Mittelitalien und ihr Bezug zur Liturgie,” in Kunst und Liturgie im Mittelalter, ed. Nicolas Bock et  al. (Munich, 2000), 75–​89; Tobias Frese, Aktual-​und Realpräsenz. Das eucharistische Christusbild von der Spätantike bis ins Mittelalter (Berlin, 2013); Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, 107–​29, 165–​ 79; Montserrat Pagès, “Romanesque Mural Painting in Catalonia,” Catalan Historical Review 6 (2013): 45–​60. 56 Liège, Archives de l’État. 57 Susanne Wittekind, Altar –​Reliquiar –​Retabel. Kunst und Liturgie bei Wibald von Stablo (Cologne, 2004), 244. 58 Ibid., 317–​19; Caillet, “De l’antependium au retable,” 10; Une Renaissance, l’art entre Flandre et Champagne, 1150–​1250, exhibition catalogue (Paris, 2013), 57 and 60–​1. 59 Examples are the retable with the Crucifixion from the Wiesenkirche in Soest, c. 1240, the Westminster Retable from c. 1260, and early retables from Catalonia. 60 Gardner, “…Ante et super altare…,” 25–​40; Stephan Kemperdinck, “Altar Panels in Northern Germany, 1180–​1350,” in Kroesen and Schmidt, Altar and Its Environment, 54 55

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profession of Faith in the Trinity or in Transubstantiation that is contained in the Council’s canons relates to the elevation of the Host that was increasingly performed around 1200. As we have seen, however, retables had existed long before the ritual came into being. Naturally, images on altars now became the backdrop for this new ritual but they continued to have multiple functions, especially identifying and venerating the altar’s saint(s).61 Retables never became a liturgical necessity, and even outside the austere monastic orders, to which we will turn later, some communities may not have approved of images on the altar. There is rare written evidence for this in the late thirteenth-​century ordinal of Magdeburg Cathedral, in which images were declared to be deceptive. Magdeburg never had a retable on the high altar.62 Moreover, the evidence suggests that as late as the thirteenth century, installations on altars could consist of a combination of different objects and remain impermanent. At Altenberg, a monastery of Premonstratensian nuns, on the occasion of the feasts of St. Elisabeth (d. 1231) and of the consecration of the church, an embroidered hanging with scenes of the Life of Elisabeth was probably suspended behind the high altar, while her arm reliquary and other relics were displayed on the altar table.63 At Magdeburg, on certain feast days, most of the cathedral’s reliquaries were piled up on four levels on the high altar.64 As late medieval images—​such as the one accompanying the chronicle of the Council of Constance (Richentalchronik) from 1465—​show, retables could be combined with a great variety of movable objects.65 Generally, retables were part of the multisensory orchestration of the altar, with incense, candlelight,









125–​46; for the historiography of the antependium–​retable debate, see Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum 79 (2004): 341–​406. 61 Binski, Becket’s Crown, 157–​62; Binski, “Statues, Retables, and Ciboria”; Kroesen and Schmidt, Altar and Its Environment. For recent results and new perspectives on this question, see Jochen Sander, Stefanie Seeberg, and Fabian Wolf, eds., Aus der Nähe betrachtet. Bilder am Hochaltar und ihre Funktion im Mittelalter (Berlin, 2016). 62 Renate Kroos, “Quellen zur liturgischen Benutzung des Domes und zu seiner Ausstattung,” in Der Magdeburger Dom. Ottonische Gründung und staufischer Neubau: Bericht über ein wissenschaftliches Symposion in Magdeburg vom 7.10. bis 11.10.1986, ed. Ernst Ullmann (Leipzig, 1989), 88–​97 (91). 63 Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum, 70–​103; Stefanie Seeberg, “The Imagery of the Altenberg High Altar, Function and Presentation,” in Schaufenster des Himmels. Der Altenberger Altar und seine Bildausstattung /​Heaven on Display: The Altenberg Altar and Its Imagery, ed. Jochen Sander, exhibition catalogue (Berlin, 2016), 142–​4. 64 Kroos, “Quellen zur liturgischen Benutzung des Domes,” 91. 65 Hartmut Kühne, “Reliquien und Reliquiare des Magdeburger Domes im 13. Jahrhundert:  Versuch einer Bestands-​ aufnahme,” in Auf bruch in die Gotik. Der Magdeburger Dom und die späte Stauferzeit, ed. Matthias Puhle, 2  vols. (Mainz, 2009), 2:180–​91.

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relics, and various other objects, aimed at increasing the devotion of the faithful, both clerical and lay. Next to the sanctuary, the liturgical choir played a central role in monastic life. Often occupying part of the transept or nave, it accommodated the stalls provided for the monks or nuns who gathered there for the liturgical offices. If located to the west of the presbytery, in the crossing or the nave, it had a visual connection to the high altar. Images such as the Cluny capitals depicting the eight tones of plainchant may have been too small to be seen clearly from the choir stalls. Their presence nonetheless associated the sanctuary with the choir, where psalmody was performed by the monks. But the liturgical choir itself was also a place of choice for decoration and embellishment within the abbey church. Many abbots were keen to bring elements of learning out of the schoolroom and into the choir for the edification of the monks. Figurative decoration was deployed on the floors of choirs and presbyteries. Cosmological representations were a favorite subject, together with depictions of the Rivers of Paradise, the Seasons, the liberal arts, or the Virtues, themes that at Cluny had moved to the capitals.66 Another subject straight out of the medieval schoolbook was that of the Seven Sages holding scrolls with the aphorisms attributed to them. Around 1180, this subject was depicted on the floor of the monks’ choir of St. Ludgeri, an abbey church in Helmstedt.67 Whereas many floors from this period were decorated with mosaics or tiles, St. Ludgeri’s floor was made in gypsum plaster. Before setting, the mortar of such floors was engraved, and the design was filled with pigmented mortar.68 Not all floor decorations were permanent, however. From Quedlinburg, a house of secular canonesses, survive fragments of a twelfth-​century knotted carpet, which was displayed in front of the high altar of the church on feast days. The carpet is decorated with scenes from the allegorical marriage of Mercury and Philologia according to Martianus Capella, whose work on the seven liberal arts was assigned as a standard textbook in monastic schools.69 Martianus’ text, recomposed in hexameters, is shown on the scrolls held by the



Xavier Barral i Altet, Le décor du pavement au Moyen Âge. Les mosaïques de France et d’Italie (Rome, 2010). 67 Thomas Weigel, Schmuckfußböden des 12. Jahrhunderts aus inkrustiertem Estrichgips (Petersberg, 2009), 194–​263. 68 Ibid., 33–​107. To view the remains of the floor, now in the Dom-​Museum, Hildesheim, see www.inschriften.net/​hildesheim/​inschrift/​nr/​di058-​0034.html (date of last access:  31 August 2018)  and www.inschriften.net/​hildesheim/​inschrift/​nr/​di058-​0037. html#content (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 69 Johanna Flemming, “Der spätromanische Bildteppich der Quedlinburger Äbtissin Agnes,” Sachsen und Anhalt 19 (1997): 517–​53. 66

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Figure 54.2  Textile crown with embroidered medallions (crown of the nuns), first half of twelfth century, Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, inv. no. 5257, 2009 (photo: Christoph von Viràg).

figures on the carpet.70 The scenes chosen from the text for the carpet’s visual program matched the concerns of the female institution. The upper register of images shows seated personifications of imperium and sacerdotium on an equal level, surrounded by the Virtues. This was effectively a political statement, commenting on the battle between the Church and the emperors that had caused such disruption in the late eleventh century and early twelfth century, a subject befitting a religious institution that had in the past enjoyed close imperial connections. The middle register of the carpet represents the marriage scene itself, in which the handing over of the garments to the bride offered a point of reference and identification for the canonesses of Quedlinburg. On the day of their consecration they handed over their lay garments in order to become brides of Christ. The scene also made the carpet highly suitable as decoration for consecrations, which were often celebrated as politically and publicly high-​profile events for daughters of the elite. On such occasions, the sanctuary space was accessible to the convent and the carpet was the means by which the liturgical choir and sanctuary were visibly linked.

70

Ibid., 519.

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The walls of liturgical choirs offered another convenient surface for ornament. At St. George in Prüfening, near Regensburg, an abbey with connections to the reforming circle associated with Hirsau, the crossing of the abbey church (the location of the monks’ choir) and the presbytery to the east were decorated with wall paintings around 1120, heavily restored between 1897 and 1916. On the north and south walls of the presbytery, the monks sitting in their stalls would have observed four levels of standing figures, starting at the bottom on each side with a bishop and a king and followed by three levels of hermits, monks, saints, and prophets. As at Quedlinburg, the figurative program addressed religious as well as political issues. Facing the choir stalls, on the south side of the northeastern crossing pier, a painting depicts Peter enthroned, handing a sword to an emperor and to a pope flanking him. This is a representation of Pope Gelasius’ (r. 492–​6) doctrine of the Two Swords, according to which earthly power was divided between the temporary authority of the secular rulers and the spiritual authority of the papacy. The saints and prophets shown in the upper two levels of the presbytery hold a continuous scroll on which can be read the words of the Te Deum, the Ambrosian hymn usually sung at matins. During the divine office, when the monks celebrated together in the church, the community, their visitors, and the Old and New Testament saints chanting on the walls would have become a single unified congregation dominated by the figure of the Virgin as Ecclesia, decorating the cupola above the presbytery. Boto (c. 1103–1170), a monk and later the prior of Prüfening, expressed this when he paralleled multicolored figurative depictions of churches with the spiritual Church. For him, as for the writers discussed in the first section, the invisible reality of heaven was made tangible through its visible depiction in the church.71 The spatial arrangements inside the monastic church were different for female communities, whose residents were usually subject to strict enclosure and not expected to participate in the masses at the high altar. The nuns’ choir was therefore typically separated by screens from the high altar and often situated on a tribune (a raised platform).72 These could be richly painted and decorated with wall paintings, hangings, images, and objects. Subjects considered appropriate included the Last Judgment and representations of the Passion of Christ, saints, and the Virgin Mary, inspiring the nuns to imitation, meditation, and intercession. In the Clarissan church of Santa Maria Donna Regina in Naples, for example, the wall paintings in the nuns’ gallery

Stein-​Kecks, “ ‘Heiligkeit ist die Zierde deines Hauses’,” 120–​3. See the articles by Griffiths and Muschiol in this volume.

71 72

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were clearly meant to stimulate contemplation, and at the same time to compensate for the women’s exclusion from the Eucharist taking place at the altar.73 Here, the subject matter was taken from the Meditationes vitae Christi, a meditative text written around 1350, probably by a Franciscan monk for a Clarissan nun.74 The choirs of both male and female communities were separated by barriers from the part of the church that was usually accessible to the laity, a feature already visible in the Plan of St. Gall.75 Western choir screens were therefore a vital point of interaction with the laity and their decoration must be seen in this context. According to ancient Christian tradition, they could consist of low walls, such as the schola cantorum in the early twelfth-​century San Clemente in Rome, which belonged to a much earlier building but was reused during the construction of the present basilica.76 The choir screen in the (now destroyed) early twelfth-​century abbey church of Cluny was decorated with blind arcades and fluted pilasters inspired by antique architecture, but all the evidence suggests that the enclosure was much taller than that at San Clemente.77 Indeed, in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tall screens that enclosed the clergy on all sides became common for monastic churches as well as for cathedrals. West of the choir stalls, the screens that separated the clergy from the lay visitors could be richly decorated with sculpture or paintings and include pulpits or altars; they were often surmounted by a large crucifixion scene (rood). Shielding the community and the main altar from view, screens nonetheless served as “permeable barriers.” They always had doors and openings that could be unlocked on special occasions, thus disclosing and framing the view of the inner sanctuary.78



Carola Jäggi, Frauenklöster im Spätmittelalter. Die Kirchen der Klarissen und Domini­ kanerinnen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Petersberg, 2006), 247–​333. Ibid., 258–​60; Holly Flora, “The Devout Belief of the Imagination”: The Paris “Meditationes Vitae Christi” and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Turnhout, 2009); Sarah McNamer, “The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 (2009): 905–​55. 75 For the plan of St. Gall, see the articles by Cohen and Lauwers in this volume. 76 Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000). 77 Stratford, Maurice-​Chabard, and Walsh, Corpus de la sculpture de Cluny, 609–​61. 78 Quoted from Jaqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–​1400 (Cambridge and New York, 2012), 2. See also Monika Schmelzer, Der mittelalterliche Lettner im deutschsprachigen Raum. Typologie und Funktion (Petersberg, 2006); Reinhard Köpf, “Die Lettner aus dem Werkkreis des Naumburger Meisters:  Mainz, Gelnhausen, Naumburg, Meißen. Typologische Voraussetzungen und Bildprogramme,” in Der Naumburger Meister. Bildhauer und Architekt im Europa der Kathedralen, exhibition catalogue, 2  vols. (Petersberg, 2011), 2:608–​17. 73

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Although the small number of surviving choir screens precludes generalizations, recent studies and reconstructions hint at a greater variety than previously assumed among monastic and cathedral churches. Some monastic screens had carved decoration, as in the Benedictine church of the Holy Cross at Wechselburg or in the Augustinian monastery at Gelnhausen, both in Germany, and in the Benedictine abbey of St. Alban in England. At Fontevraud, where the abbey church housed a female community, the western choir screen probably showed a dramatic Last Judgment, depicted in high, almost freestanding relief.79 Nonetheless, it is striking that the most highly decorated examples that have survived north of the Alps belong (or belonged) to cathedrals served by canons, for example at Naumburg and Chartres. Some monasteries, like those of the Cistercian order, did not officially allow the laity access to its churches, and screens therefore had a different function, separating the choir monks from the lay brothers. They were meant to be plain, with only a large painted cross suspended above as a possible decoration. Such screens without figurative carvings have survived from German Cistercian abbeys at Maulbronn and Haina.80 In Italy, it seems that canons’ choirs in cathedrals generally had low walls, while the choirs of monastic and mendicant churches were separated from the west by sometimes complex rood screens (tramezzi), such as the ones reconstructed by Marcia Hall.81 Like the screens in the northern mendicant churches, as for example the one in the Dominican church of Guebviller, these screen included altars for the laity.82 The permanent and temporary decorations of the monastic church could thus play a number of roles. Even though the monks and nuns were not the illiterate people that Gregory the Great had in mind, figurative and narrative images were used to highlight and define specific areas in the church, such as the high altar, in order to instruct communities and as an aid to meditation on transcendental subjects. As the example of the choir screens shows, art in monastic churches also played a role in communication between the monastic and lay communities.



Léon Pressouyre and Daniel Prigent, “Le Jugement dernier de Fontevraud,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-​lettres 133 (1989): 804–​9. 80 For Maulbronn, see Celia Haller and Silvina Martin, “Von der Schranke zum Lettner, vom Baldachin zur Kanzel: ein neuer Blick auf Ausstattungsstücke in der Maulbronner Klosterkirche,” Denkmalpflege in Baden-​Württemberg 42 (2013): 221–​6. 81 Marcia B. Hall, “The Tramezzo in the Italian Renaissance, Revisited,” in Thresholds of the Sacred, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Washington, DC, 2006), 215–​25; Donal A. Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-​Sided Altarpieces in Pre-​ Tridentine Umbria,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001):  1–​54; Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches. 82 Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches,  29–​34. 79

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Tomb sculpture provides further evidence for this function of monastic art. Lay burial was a vital service that brought monks and nuns into contact with the laity and led to the production of art for various forms of commemoration in the church. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, monastic institutions—​ most famously among them Cluny—​developed into Christianity’s keepers of the memory of the dead, with necrologies commemorating long lists of monks, nuns, and secular friends of the institutions.83 Against the initial refusal of some abbeys, like Cluny, and whole monastic orders such as the Cistercians, the laity, led by the royalty, pushed to have their tombs as close as possible to the high altar and to the liturgical choir, where the prayers of monks and nuns were felt to be most effective.84 The pursuit of burial locations in churches was closely linked to the idea of purgatory (according to which a soul dying with unexpiated sins had to suffer in a place of spiritual cleansing until, released by the prayers of the living, it could enter heaven), which increasingly gained importance in the Middle Ages and was formulated as a doctrine at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.85 The design of the tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342–​ 1404), made in 1384–​1411 by Jean de Marville, Claus Sluter, Claus de Werve, and their workshop for the Carthusian abbey of Champmol (near Dijon), shows how the wishes of the patron could be met by the needs of his chosen monastic institution. Until it was removed after the French Revolution, the tomb stood in the liturgical choir of the church, in front of the high altar (it is now in Dijon, Musée des beaux-​arts). The tomb is made of contrasting black and white marble as well as partially painted alabaster. The effigy of Philip rests on the upper tomb slab; below the duke’s head a procession of mourners begins, led by three choirboys and a bishop, weaving in and out of the projecting arcades. Among the mourners are several Carthusian monks, easily identifiable by their habits. It is known that on Philip’s death on 27 April 1404 monks of Champmol traveled up to the County of Hainaut in order to accompany the funeral procession back to their abbey. The design thus



See the articles in Joachim Wollasch, ed., Synopse der cluniacensischen Necrologien (Munich, 1982); see also the articles by Blennemann and Lyon in this volume. 84 See Jackie Hall, and Christine Kratzke, eds. Sepulturae cistercienses. Sépulture, mémoir et patronage dans les monastères cisterciens au Moyen Âge /​Burial, Memorial and Patronage in Medieval Cistercian Monasteries /​Grablegen, Memoria und Patronatswesen in mittelalterlichen Zisterzienserklöstern. Commentarii Cistercienses 56 (2005). 85 On purgatory, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, IL, 1984); Isabel Moreira, Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford and New York, 2010). For the importance of purgatory in the late Middle Ages, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–​c. 1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), 8 and 338–​68. 83

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records a historic event of central importance for the duke and for the monastery, and highlights both the duke’s status and the importance of Carthusian intercession.86 Alongside the permanently installed tombs, there were also impermanent objects to commemorate the dead, such as textiles or carpets that were used on the anniversary of a person’s death, sometimes even though—​or precisely because—​there was no tomb monument in the church. A  unique survival is a catafalque cover from Altenberg made in the second half of the thirteenth century. This cover was probably used for the commemoration of the landgraves of Thuringia and Hesse, who belonged to the same the family as Gertrud (d.  1297), the magistra of Altenberg, and her mother, Elisabeth of Hungary, who was canonized in 1235. Although the tombs of the landgraves were located not at Altenberg but at Reinhardsbrunn and Eisenach, Gertrud ensured that her family was commemorated at her own foundation. It is likely that, on memorial days, a temporary catafalque in the shape of a small house with a gable was erected in the crossing before the high altar. Once the cover, a long rectangular textile (135 by 327 cm) made from undyed linen, was draped over this catafalque, its design, embroidered in blue linen, would have fallen into place for the viewer. Eleven crowned figures are arranged in two registers that mirror each other along either side of a central axis. A border of busts surrounds the figures. The standing figures and the busts show male and female rulers with haloes, representing the forbears of Elisabeth, sanctified by the actions of their saintly descendant, in the company of what are probably prophets and apostles. As at Champmol, the monument served the living and the dead, the secular family and the cloistered nuns at Altenberg.87

Criticisms of Monastic Luxury Not all observers rejoiced in the splendor created in monastic churches through the use of bright paintings, precious objects, and ostentatious tombs. Criticisms of luxury in the cenobitic environment go back, in fact, to the beginnings of institutionalized monastic life. In a letter to his sister Caesaria, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) cautioned the women of the community

See recently, Sophie Jugie, The Mourners:  Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy (Dallas, TX, New Haven, CT, and Dijon, 2010). 87 Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum, 104–​41; Stefanie Seeberg, “Monument in Linen: A Thirteenth-​Century Embroidered Catafalque Cover for the Members of the Beata Stirps of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary,” in Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages, ed. Kate Dimitrova and Margaret Goehring (Oostkamp, 2014), 81–​94.

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she headed: “For there are unfortunately those who … wish for the sake of visual pleasure to acquire at huge cost and superfluous expense beautiful carpets, decorated tapestries, embroideries, and the like.”88 Caesarius was primarily concerned about the nuns owning personal property. “Distribute your earthly wealth,” he urged them.89 In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, numerous writers continued to question the limits of the appropriate display of wealth within ecclesiastical institutions. This debate was not primarily focused on monastic establishments, as both abbots and bishops were singled out for criticism of their clothing, dining habits, and buildings.90 Nonetheless, as Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) stated in his Apologia, written in the early 1120s, material excesses were all the more dangerous to the soul of a monk who had left the world behind and, according to the RB, had renounced possessions (RB 58:24). Although Bernard found the display of gold unacceptable in churches, he acknowledged that secular churches needed material ornamentation in order to arouse the devotion of their lay public.91 Therefore, although the luxury controversy concerned the Church as a whole, it had a special significance for Bernard in a monastic context because of the vow of poverty and the exclusion of the laity from monastic churches demanded by the Cistercian order. Many traditional monastic houses rejected such calls for austerity, as can be seen in the correspondence (c. 1150) between Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of the monastery of Rupertsberg, and Tenxwind (d. 1152/​3), magistra of the canonesses of St. Marien at Andernach. Tenxwind challenged the highly respected abbess to explain how she could justify an “unusual custom” taking place at Rupertsberg: on feast days the nuns wore unbound hair, long silken veils, gold filigree crowns with an image of the Lamb of God, and golden rings on their fingers. Tenxwind argued that such outward splendor contradicted the instructions of Paul in 1 Timothy 2:9, that “women adorn themselves in modest apparel … not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array.”

William E. Klingshirn, trans., Caesarius of Arles:  Life, Testament, Letters (Liverpool, 1994), 136. 89 Ibid., 134. 90 Gerhard Weilandt, Geistliche und Kunst. Ein Beitrag zur Kultur der ottonisch-​salischen Reichskirche und zur Veränderung künstlerischer Traditionen im späten 11. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1992), 253–​94. 91 Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum abbatem 12.28, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais, 8 vols. (Rome, 1955–​98), 3:104–​6. See also Rudolph, “Things of Greater Importance.” On the fact that elsewhere, however, Bernard was critical of the display of episcopal wealth, see Bernard of Clairvaux, Ep. 42, in Leclercq and Rochais, Sancti Bernardi Opera, 7:100–​31. 88

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A gold filigree crown with a Lamb of God, which would have been worn by a nun, is preserved in the collection of the Abegg-​Stiftung in Bern and probably resembles the crowns of the nuns at Rupertsberg (see Figure 54.2).92 Hildegard rebuffed the complaint, arguing that, by wearing such attire on feast days, the nuns became brides of Christ.93 It is likely that the abbess would have used similar justifications for embellishing her physical church, which, as a representation of Ecclesia, could also be interpreted as the bride of Christ, as shown by the painting in the cupola of the crossing at Prüfening discussed above. Hildegard founded Rupertsberg in 1150 with the support of local nobility, and the church was completed by 1165. All that survives from the church today, however, is the antependium described above. Despite the many key functions that art performed within the monastic church, criticism of luxury in churches gathered momentum in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, going hand in hand with the creation of new monastic orders at that time, and it continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.94 What distinguished these new communities from previous monastic institutions was that they considered poverty not merely a vow pertaining to the individual members of the community but a corporate obligation. Thus, the institutions themselves were to avoid material riches, including, of course, richly decorated churches. For many of the new orders, this represented a logistical problem, dependent as they were on the good will and donations of the laity and members of the secular church, often demonstrated in the form of precious objects. Paradoxically, therefore, refraining from the decorative elaboration of their environment was as vital to the self-​definition of these new orders as it was impossible to uphold.95 Bernard



Evelin Wetter, Textilsammlung der Abegg-​Stiftung, vol. 6:  Mittelalterliche Textilien III. Stickerei bis um 1500 und figürliche gewebte Borten (Riggisberg, 2012), cat. no. 1; Philippe Cordez and Evelin Wetter, Die Krone Hildegards von Bingen (Riggisberg, 2019). 93 Hildegard of Bingen, Ep. 52, “Textwindis ad Hildegardum (Andernach),” in Epistolarium Hildegardis Bingensis, vol. 1, CCCM 91, 125–​7. 94 For art in late medieval monasteries, see Julian M. Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540:  A Patronage History (Woodbridge, 2005). Among the increasing number of case studies on luxury objects and items current in monasteries of the reformed orders in the later Middle Ages, see Michael Carter, “Remembrance, Liturgy and Status in a Late Medieval English Cistercian Abbey: the Mourning Vestments of Abbot Robert Thornton of Jervaulx (1510–​33),” Textile History 41 (2010):145–​50. 95 See also Anne-​Marie Helvétius and Michel Kaplan, “Aestheticism and Its Institutions,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity Vol. III:  Early Medieval Christianities, c.  600–​c. 1100, ed. Tom Noble and Julia Smith (Cambridge, 2008), 275–​98 and 703–​12; Alexandra Gajewski, “Stone Construction and Monastic Ideals, from Jotsald of Cluny to Peter the Chanter,” in Ex quadris lapidibus. La pierre et sa mise en œuvre dans l’art médiéval. Mélanges d’histoire de l’art offerts à Éliane Vergnolle, ed. Yves Gallet (Turnhout, 2011), 35–​49.

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Figure 54.3  Retable (altar shrine) (Schloss Braunfels), Madonna and Child (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich), Wings (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main) c. 1330, for the main altar of the former church of the Premonstratensian Monastery in Altenberg-​an-​der-​Lahn. © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

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of Clairvaux insisted on the rejection of exterior adornment for monks and their environment in numerous letters and treatises. According to him, the functions performed by precious objects and narrative images in instructing the monks and guiding their contemplation were no longer valid; in fact, they might lead monks’ souls astray. Cistercian statutes and Instituta formulated restrictive choices regulating almost every aspect of monastic life. Among the earliest of these resolutions was the rejection of gold and silver as a decoration for crosses; Cistercian houses were to have only painted crosses.96 A large painted cross (4.76 by 3.12 meters) from c. 1240–​1250 survives at the Cistercian abbey of Schulpforta in Germany, where it was probably positioned over the screen that separated the monastic choir from the lay brothers’ choir in the west.97 The painting on the cross is badly damaged, but the figure of the suffering Christ, surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists on the trefoils decorating the cross arms, can still be discerned on the western side. Although the use of painted crosses was endorsed by the order, the Schulpforta cross was decorated in a way that seems to contradict the ideas of simplicity, as Christ was originally painted on a rich gold ground.98 It would be misleading to suggest, however, that the art of the austere reformed orders was a battle lost at the outset between highflying idealism and prosaic decadence or greed. As we have shown, art and ornament served a range of important functions within monasteries. Nonetheless, the desire for apostolic austerity espoused by some new religious groups was part of their spiritual and existential identity and vital to the promised special efficacy of their intercession. For many abbeys, a compromise was reached. This is already evident in the Premonstratensian statutes, which stated that on feast days the altars were to be suitably decorated. At the same time, they demanded that liturgical vestments be of a single color and that altar cloths should not carry images.99 The compromise found at Premonstratensian Altenberg in the thirteenth century was to produce hangings for the altars,





Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux (Brecht, 1999), 257; for a recent overview on art and liturgical furnishing in Cistercian churches, see Stefanie Seeberg, “Liturgie und ihre Dinglichkeit:  die Ausstattung von Liturgie und Hochaltar bei den Zisterziensern,” in Die Zisterzienser. Das Europa der Klöster (Darmstadt, 2017), 66–​80. 97 On lay brothers, see the article by Cassidy-​Welch in this volume. 98 Ebbe Nyborg, “Das ältere Sorø Kruzifix: ein Versuch, zisterziensische Traditionen für die Gestaltung monumentaler Kruzifixe zu umreißen,” Spiritualität und Baukunst. Leben und Wirken der Zisterzienser im Kloster Doberan (Weimar, 2013), 22–​76; Manuela Beer, Triumphkreuze des Mittelalters. Ein Beitrag zu Typus und Genese im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 2005), 777–​80. 99 See P. F. Lefèvre, L’Ordinaire de Prémontré d'après des manuscrits du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Louvain, 1941), 6. 96

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walls, and temporary tomb monuments in undyed linen, as was seen in the example of the catafalque discussed above. The choice of material and the lack of color was an expression of modesty and humility. But the community did not want to renounce the assistance of images, and contours and important details were embroidered with dyed threads, adding subtle but effective messages and meaning to the textiles.100 The Franciscans and Dominicans belonged to a renewed wave of reforming orders from the early thirteenth century. Francis of Assisi (1181/​2–​1226), in particular, demanded an extreme form of asceticism and a rejection of all possessions. But the next generation of Franciscans modulated the significance of poverty for the order, and in 1228, two years after Francis’s death, Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–​41) laid the foundation stone for a large and richly decorated, two-​story shrine church for the founder at Assisi.101 In 1239, the master general of the Dominicans, Raymond of Peñafort (r. 1239–​40), prohibited the use of silk vestments, precious stones, and gold or silver ornaments, except for chalices, within the order. Just a year later, the statute was modified and was later completely abandoned under Master General Humbert of Romans (r. 1254–​63).102 Abbot Suger would have been sympathetic. In 1292, however, the Franciscan general chapter legislated against retables.103 Nevertheless, the multi-​sensory orchestration of altars, tombs, and other sites of devotion with different media was hard to resist. In the first half of the fourteenth century, the nuns at Altenberg, who had probably previously relied on temporary installations on feast days, as noted above, installed a winged retable with a richly decorated, gilded central reliquary shrine, an early example of what would become a common type of altarpiece (see Figure 54.3).104 In contrast to the earlier orders, however, the Franciscans and Dominicans did not rely on landholding for economic support and therefore depended even more on pious donations for survival. Art in the form of wall paintings or retables installed in the areas of the churches that were accessible

Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum. For the late thirteenth-​century renovation of Assisi, see recently Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi:  The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven, CT, 2013). 102 Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches, 113–​14. 103 Ibid. 104 Seeberg, Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum, 57–​212; Sander, Heaven on Display. For the earliest surviving example of this type of retable, at the Cistercian abbey of Doberan, see Annegret Laabs, Malerei und Plastik im Zisterzienserorden. Zum Bildgebrauch zwischen sakralen Zeremoniell und Stiftermemoria 1250–​1430 (Petersberg, 2000); Norbert Wolf, Deutsche Schnitzretabel des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2002), 22–​39; Gerhard Weilandt and Kaja von Cossart, eds., Die Ausstattung des Doberander Münsters. Kunst im Kontext (Petersberg, 2018).

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to the laity thus played a heightened role in the interchange between friars and the laity. But pictures were not just meant for the laity. Images—​both permanently fixed or impermanent installations on the altar—​were deeply integrated into the devotional practices of the communities themselves, and played an important role in consolidating their self-​image. For example, two of the scenes of the fresco cycle in the upper church of San Francesco at Assisi, the Funeral of St. Francis and the Miracle of the Crib at Greccio, include faithful representations of, respectively, the front and back of a large painted crucifix raised on the rood beam of the church. In the scene of the funeral of St. Francis, the crucifix is flanked by images of the Virgin and Child and the Archangel Michael.105 Similarly, the scene of the death of Mary Magdalene on the carved altar retable dedicated to the saint, donated by the apprentice tailors to the Dominican church in Lübeck in 1519, shows Bishop Maximin of Aix administering the last rites before an altar on which a crucifix has been placed, flanked by figures of the Virgin and John the Baptist and a candelabrum. The use of images within religious communities was not limited to communal devotion; they also served as objects of personal devotion for monks, friars, nuns, and novices. In the illustrated Book on the Education and Consolation of Novices (Libellus de instructione et consolatione novitiorum), probably made for the male Dominican convent in Toulouse around 1300, one of the twenty-​two illuminations shows a kneeling novice in prayer before Christ on the cross.106 The tradition of decorating the cells of friars, monks, nuns, and novices, often with scenes from Christ’s Passion in the form of wall or panel paintings, started at this time and continued long into the post-​medieval period. Around 1270, the Dominican hagiographer Gerald of Frachet (d. 1271) described the positive effect of wall paintings in the cells.107 In the late fifteenth century, the Sisterbook of the female convent of St. Gall expressly allowed the nuns the use of small paintings of saints in their cells.108



Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches,  47–​8. Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, ms 418, fol. 245r. See Maria Alessandra Bilotta and Marie-​Pierre Chaumet-​Sarkissian, eds., Le Parement d’autel des Cordeliers de Toulouse. Anatomie d’un chef-​d’œuvre du XIVe siècle (Paris, 2012), 98–​9. 107 See Gerald of Frachet, Fratis Gerardi de Fracheto O.P. Vitae fratrum Ordinis Praedicatorum, necnon chronica Ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque ad MCCLIV, ed. Benedictus Maria Reichert (Louvain, 1896), 149; see also Joanna Cannon, “Giotto and Art for the Friars: Revolutions Spiritual and Artistic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Giotto, ed. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (Cambridge and New York, 2004), 124. 108 Stefanie Seeberg, “Wir hand gemacht:  das Engagement der Schwestern von St. Katharina für Gebäude und Kunstausstattung ihres Klosters, Konvents-​ und Schwesternbuch als kunsthistorische Quelle,” in Das Konventsbuch und das Schwesternbuch aus St. Katharina in St. Gallen. Kritische Edition und Kommentar, ed. Antje Willing (Berlin, 2016), 110–​11. 105

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In conclusion, the use of art in monasteries between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and beyond is marked more by continuity than by change. Ultimately, and despite the important and recurrent call for material poverty among monastic communities, art was and remained a central part of monastic life, both for the monks and nuns themselves, and in their relationship with the laity. Even among the most austere communities, such as the early Cistercians and the Premonstratensians, art had its place, albeit sometimes in simplified forms, like painted crucifixes or textiles with reduced colors. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the personal and devotional use of objects and imagery in monasteries proliferated. The reason for the irrepressible presence of art within monastic space was that, beyond its aesthetic appeal, objects and imagery fulfilled key functions in almost every aspect of monastic life.

Bibliography Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence:  A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago, IL, 1994. Burkart, Lucas, Philippe Cordez, et al., eds. Le trésor au Moyen Âge. Questions de perspectives de recherche /​Der Schatz im Mittelalter. Fragestellung und Forschungsperspektiven. Neuchâtel, 2005. Cannon, Joanna. Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT, and London, 2013. Carruthers, Mary J. The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages. Oxford, 2013. Gajewski, Alexandra. “Stone Construction and Monastic Ideals, from Jotsald of Cluny to Peter the Chanter.” In Ex quadris lapidibus, la pierre et sa mise en oeuvre dans l’art medieval. Mélanges d’histoire de l’art offerts à Éliane Vergnolle, edited by Yves Gallet, 35–​49. Turnhout, 2011. Gajewski, Alexandra, and Stefanie Seeberg. “Having Her Hand in It? Elite Women as ‘Makers’ of Textile Art in the Middle Ages.” JMH 42 (2016): 1–​25. Hall, Jackie, and Christine Kratzke, eds. Sepulturae cistercienses. Sépulture, mémoir et patronage dans les monastères cisterciens au Moyen Âge /​Burial, Memorial and Patronage in Medieval Cistercian Monasteries /​Grablegen, Memoria und Patronatswesen in mittelalterlichen Zisterzienserklöstern. Commentarii Cistercienses 56 (2005). Hamburger, Jeffrey F., and Susan Marti, eds. Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries. New York, 2008. Kessler, Herbert. Seeing Medieval Art. North York, Ontario, and Tonawanda, NY, 2011.   “Konvents-​und Schwesternbuch als kunsthistorische Quelle.” In Das “Konventsbuch” und das “Schwesternbuch” aus St. Katharina in St. Gallen. Kritische Edition und Kommentar, ed. Antje Willing (Berlin, 2016), 110–​11. Kroesen, Justin, and Victor M.  Schmidt, eds. The Altar and Its Environment, 1150–​1400. Turnhout, 2009.

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Alex andr a Gajewski and Ste fanie S ee be rg   Krone und Schleier:  Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern. Exhibition catalogue. Munich, 2005. Laabs, Annegret. Malerei und Plastik im Zisterzienserorden. Zum Bildgebrauch zwischen sakralen Zeremoniell und Stiftermemoria 1250–​1430. Petersberg, 2000. Lasko, Peter. Ars Sacra, 800–​1200. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT, 1994. Legner, Anton, ed. Ornamenta Ecclesiae. Kunst und Künstler der Romanik in Köln. 3  vols. Cologne, 1985. Luxford, Julian M. The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540: A Patronage History. Woodbridge, 2005. Rudolph, Conrad, ed. A Companion to Medieval Art:  Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Malden, MA, 2006. Rudolph, Conrad. The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art. Philadelphia, PA, 1990. Sander, Jochen, Stefanie Seeberg, and Fabian Wolf, eds. Aus der Nähe betrachtet. Bilder am Hochaltar und ihre Funktion im Mittelalter. Berlin, 2016. Schapiro, Meyer. “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art.” In Romanesque Art, 1–​27. New York, 1947 (reprint 1977 and 1993). Seeberg, Stefanie. Textile Bildwerke im Kirchenraum. Leinenstickereien im Kontext mittelalterlicher Raumausstattungen aus dem Prämonstratenserinnenkloster. Altenberg an der Lahn, 2014.

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Lay Brothers and Sisters in the High and Late Middle Ages M e ga n Ca ssidy -​W e lch Lay brothers and lay sisters—​usually referred to as conversi and conversae—​ became a significant and very visible part of monastic life from the late eleventh century. The word conversus itself originally signified an adult convert to monastic life, as distinct from an oblatus, or child recruit to a monastery.1 But increasingly, the conversi and conversae of Western monasticism denoted a unique and sometimes quite multivalent status within an abbey or convent. Other Latin terms were sometimes used for these men and women, some of which are very general (such as laici, fratres, and sorores) and some of which denote difference on the basis of location (forinseci) or on the basis of physical appearance (barbati); a combination of these terms can also be used, such as fratres barbati. Confusingly for the modern historian of monasticism, some of these terms could occasionally also refer to men and women who were not lay brothers or lay sisters, but rather lay individuals or, in the case of fratres and sorores, monks and nuns. The looseness of terminology itself invites serious rethinking of the division between monastic and secular, formal and informal modes of religious life, especially from the thirteenth century, when the proliferation of new forms of religious life tested the dominance of the older vocations. The story of the changing status of the lay brothers and lay sisters in Western monastic life is thus the story of transformation of monastic life more generally. Historians have long noted the rise of lay brother and lay sister numbers in the reform movements of medieval monasticism, focusing particularly on three main areas:  the status of lay brothers and sisters, their function within the monastic economy, and their eventual decline as an integral part of monastic life from the thirteenth century. The Cistercians, who relied heavily on the labor of conversi on their granges, or agricultural estates,

See the article by Cochelin in this volume.

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have been discussed in most detail.2 For some historians, lay brothers were exploited in this economy, lacking the spiritual status of professed monks but integral to the work of the monastery.3 The marginalization of lay brothers in this regard has also been much debated, and a significant historiography exists on the various rebellions and revolts of lay brother communities as evidence of their own perceptions of exclusion.4 Other historians have traced monastic economic change through the history of the lay brothers, again concentrating mostly on the manual labor provided by these men (and to a lesser extent women) as their primary function within the monastery.5 What has mostly been missing from this historiography until recently has been the question of lay brother vocation. Why did people choose this status? What was the spiritual work undertaken by conversi and conversae, and was it a significant and meaningful element of their status and function? Martha Newman and others have begun to address the question of lay brother spirituality, finding that, although the lay brothers’ participation in liturgy may have been limited, their vocation was understood to be fundamentally spiritual, and ascetic practices such as bodily mortifications were a significant way of participating in monastic life.6 It is also worth recognizing that, while we know much of the lay brotherhood in the Cistercian order as a result of a series of studies, more attention still needs to be paid to lay brothers and lay sisters in other monastic settings: the order of Sempringham, la Grande Chartreuse, and Fontevraud all had important communities of these lay affiliates, too.

For a recent synthesis, see James France, Separate but Equal: Cistercian Lay Brothers, 1120–​ 1350 (Collegeville, MN, 2012). See also the article by Berman in this volume. 3 Jean Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les frères convers.” Analecta Cisterciensia 21 (1965): 241–​6. 4 David Knowles, “The Revolt of the Lay Brothers of Sempringham.” English Historical Review 50 (1935):  465–​87; Jane Sayers, “Violence in the Medieval Cloister,” JEH 41 (1990): 533–​42. 5 James Donnelly, The Decline of the Medieval Cistercian Laybrotherhood (New York, 1949). 6 See Martha Newman, “Crucified by the Virtues:  Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in Thirteenth-​Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), 182–​201; also Martinus Cawley, ed. and trans., Send Me God:  The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramee, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villlers, and Abundus, Monks of Villers by Goswin of Bossut (Turnhout, 2003); Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer, “Imitation of Christ and Ritual Flogging as a Form of Lay Brother Spirituality,” in Shaping Stability:  The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2016), 89–​102; Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer, “The Constructions of the Cistercian Lay Brothers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” (MA diss., Carleton University, 2010). 2

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Lay association with monastic life had always been varied and there had long been informal ways in which laici could engage with and contribute to the work of a monastery. Sometimes this work was entirely pragmatic, and there are many examples of the custom of including servants and other manual or agricultural workers in monastic communities.7 At Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and Fonte Avellana, those who supported these Italian hermits seem to have adopted a quasi-​spiritual life, although they remained unprofessed. More formal recognition of lay involvement in monastic life is clear in the context of the Hirsau reform, where we find that the lay converts, referred to in the Vita of William of Hirsau (d. 1091), were to be used for the administration of the exterior affairs of the monastery and would, in return, receive the benefit of prayer and direction from the professed monks.8 This “new type” of conversus who emerged amid the long era of monastic reform was distinguished from what Giles Constable called the “old type” of monastic convert (that is, the generic term conversus denoting an adult recruit) by virtue of careful delineation of status. By the late twelfth century, lay brothers were not to change status to become choir monks or clerics. In reality, across a longer sweep of historical time, even this changed: the Caulite order was founded by a priest who was also a lay brother.9 But limitation of certain sorts of spiritual work was what seems to have distinguished lay brothers from other members of monastic communities. The institutional status of the lay brother was mapped out in various constitutions and customaries, as well as in other more narrative texts. At Hirsau, both the Vita Wilhelmi and the Constitutiones Hirsaugenses contained some description of the lay brothers’ role, as did the detailed regulations



Giles Constable, “Famuli and Conversi At Cluny:  A Note on Statute 24 of Peter the Venerable,” Revue bénédictine 83 (1973):  326–​50; Kassius Hallinger, “Woher kommen die Laienbrüder?” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 1–​104 ; Conrad Greenia, “The Laybrother Vocation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” Cistercian Studies 16 (1981): 38–​45; Isabelle Cochelin, “Les famuli à l’ombre des monastères (Cluny et Fleury, Xe et XIe siècles,” in La vie quotidienne des moines en Orient et en Occident (IVe–​Xe). II. Questions transversales, ed. Olivier Delouis and Maria Mossakowska-​Gaubert (Cairo, 2018), 321–​44. 8 Haimo of Hirsau, Vita Willelmi Hirsaugiensis, MGH SS 12, 219–​20; Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 77–​81. 9 Phillip C. Adamo, New Monks in Old Habits:  The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193–​1267 (Toronto, 2014). For general overviews, see Othon Ducourneau, “De l’institution et des us des convers dans l’Ordre de Cîteaux (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles),” in Saint Bernard et son temps (Dijon, 1929), 151–​3; Jacques Dubois, “L’institution des convers au XIIe siècle: forme de vie monastique propre aux laïcs,” in I laici nella “Societas Christiana” dei secoli XI e XII (Milan, 1968), 183–​216. 7

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for lay brethren in the Carthusian customary of the early twelfth century.10 The early existence of lay sisters is evidenced at Sempringham, where the Gilbertine experiment of double houses in England during the twelfth century had also included a community of lay sisters to serve the professed nuns.11 These conversae were, like lay brothers, separate from the monastic community, but were understood to be a formal part of it.12 Most well known of the prescriptive texts delineating lay brothers’ and lay sisters’ roles is probably the Usus conversorum of the Cistercian order, whose early written usages relating to the duties of the lay brothers were drafted by Stephen Harding (d. 1134) in the first decades of the twelfth century.13 The Cistercian Usus conversorum was possibly composed around 1120 (and updated as the Regula conversorum in 1174) and indicates that lay brothers were always understood to be spiritual members of the monastic community, not simply glorified serfs. Some features of these legislative texts pertain to the practical details of the lay brothers’ and lay sisters’ appearance and conduct. They include stipulations about dress, which differed from that of the choir monks and nuns. In the Cistercian order, for instance, this included wearing a hood that covered only the chest and shoulders, unlike the monks’ cowl, and a black tunic. At Sempringham, the lay sisters were to wear a black habit, like the nuns, but made of a rougher fabric and without the cowl and scapular.14 Lay brothers were untonsured (and unshaven, hence their name barbati), and they were to observe the rule of silence, although this was somewhat relaxed for those who worked on the granges and were allowed to communicate with passersby, herdsmen, and shepherds. The principles of poverty, obedience, and stability applied to lay brothers, too, and, for the Cistercians at least, the act of profession was formal: after a year of his novitiate had elapsed, the lay brother would come to chapter and prostrate himself before the abbot, promising obedience.15 At Hirsau, the lay brothers were understood to have the same obligations of conversion as the choir monks.16

William of Hirsau, Willehelmi abbatis Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, ed. Pius Engelbert with Candida Elvert, 2 vols., CCM 15. Guigues I, Coutumes de Chartreuse, ed. a Carthusian (Laporte), SC 313. 11 On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 12 Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c.  1130–​ c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995). 13 Chrysogonus Waddell, ed. and trans., Cistercian Lay Brothers:  Twelfth-​Century Usages with Related Texts (Brecht, 2000). 14 Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham, 124. 15 Waddell, Cistercian Lay Brothers,  164–​5. 16 Haimo, Vita Wilhelmi 23, 219–​20; on lay brothers within Hirsau circles, see Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-​Century Bavaria (Cambridge, 2018), 55–​71. 10

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The Cistercians’ remarkable economic activities certainly benefited from the labor provided by these lay brethren, who were also delegated to act as economic agents at fairs and markets, and, increasingly from the later twelfth century, to do the bulk of the farming labor with the assistance of servants and even serfs. Indeed, it was lay brothers who acted as commercial agents for the sale of wool in the great northern English monasteries of the thirteenth century, some of which could attribute their early great prosperity almost entirely to the wool trade.17 Lay brothers performed other work within monastic communities, including as blacksmiths, cobblers, and millers. Although it has long been asserted that women were not formally integrated into the Cistercian order until the early thirteenth century, more recent histories have shown that, from the twelfth century, women’s houses were calling themselves Cistercian and included conversae. These women also eventually performed agricultural work, sometimes alongside male conversi, as well as other domestic tasks as they did at Sempringham, as maidservants or dairymaids.18 But, as historians are increasingly beginning to emphasize, lay brothers and lay sisters were simultaneously thought to occupy a unique and significant space in the spiritual work of the Cistercians and other reform orders. Their humility was particularly highlighted, both in prescriptive texts and in collections of edifying exempla used for instruction and preaching. Indeed, Nicholas of Clairvaux (also known as Nicolas de Montiéramey; d. 1178) saw the lay brothers as performing the work of Martha while the choir monks did Mary’s work, a common motif in the monastic texts of the high Middle Ages.19 In the Cistercian order, spiritual work was undertaken by the lay brothers in a similar vocational sense to the meditative and prayer ritual practiced by the choir monks: the Usus conversorum delineated a pared-​down divine office for the lay brethren and the prologue of this text stressed the equal spiritual value of monks and lay brothers. The virtue of being unlettered was also noted by St. Bruno the Carthusian, who thought that literacy was not necessary for these humble members of the community as God had “with his own finger … written love and the



Hallinger, “Woher kommen die Laienbrüder?” For the economic activities of the Cistercians and the grange economy, see the article by Berman in this volume; Colin Platt, The Monastic Grange in Medieval England (London, 1969); Constance Berman, Medieval Agriculture, The Southern French Countryside and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-​Three Monasteries (Philadelphia, PA, 1986). 18 Herman of Tournai, De Miraculis sanctae Mariae Laudenensis, PL 156, 996. 19 Nicholas of Clairvaux, Ep. 36, PL 196, 1632. On this motif, see also the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume. 17

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knowledge of the holy law into your hearts.”20 In a letter to the lay brothers of La Grande Chartreuse, Bruno wrote that “it is clear that you are wisely reading the sweet and refreshing fruits of the Divine Scriptures.”21 In this way the Carthusians, who produced their own Consuetudines around the same time as the Cistercian Usus conversorum, seem to have shared the Cistercian view that humility was a defining feature of the lay brethren. Sermons and exempla collections written by cloistered monks throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries frequently emphasize that lay brothers were required both to possess humility themselves and concomitantly to serve as models of humility for others. Thus we read of the edifying example of the lay brother Arnulf of Villers (d. 1228), whose bodily mortifications (including wearing a garment made from hedgehog pelts) were represented by his biographer Goswin as evidence of both his great charity and his humility—“our wonderment will never match the measure of this man’s grip on humility.”22 Monastic landscapes were carefully constructed and delineated to protect and keep separate from visitors and lay members of the community what might be termed the “deep space” of the monastery (the cloister and the east end of the monastic church). In the larger Cistercian monasteries, the lay brothers’ living quarters were also separate from the choir monks’ domain, with conversi living either on the granges or in the wing of buildings to the west of the cloister, which was sometimes removed even further by an arcade known as the lay brothers’ walk. One of these walks may still be seen at the northern Yorkshire house of Byland, where the thirty-​five niches that held seats along the eastern side of the walk established further segregation between the spaces of the conversi and those of the choir monks, who used the opposite side of the cloister garth. At Clairvaux Abbey in France and at Fountains Abbey in northern England, the lay brothers’ dormitories survive in part. At Clairvaux, the kitchen and lay brothers’ refectory occupied the ground floor with the sleeping quarters above, while a similar arrangement can be seen at Fountains, where the ground floor of the lay brothers’ wing included storage areas. In the monasteries of other orders, such as the Carthusians, conversi were similarly separated, occupying their own quarters at some distance from the monastic cloister. Within the monastic church, too,

See Alison More, “Both in the World and of It: Affectivity, Corporeality and Cistercian Conversi in Thirteenth-​Century Liège,” Studies in Spirituality 23 (2013):  61–​79; France, Separate but Equal. 21 Bruno of Cologne, Expositio in Psalmos, PL 152, 419A. For the Carthusian customs see Guigues I, Coutumes. 22 Cawley, Send Me God, 157.

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as we see at the Cistercian abbey of Maulbronn in southern Germany, lay brothers were separated visually from the rest of the community by virtue of a stone screen dividing the eastern and western areas of the church. By the end of the twelfth century, then, lay brothers were an integral part of most new orders on the Continent and in the British Isles, at the same time as they were very distinct from the choir monks. These recruits were of mixed social status and of varying age, and their numbers in proportion to the choir monks were sometimes very high. Lay brothers outnumbered monks in houses of the Hirsau reform from very early on:  at Zwiefalten, for instance, there were 70 monks and 130 lay brothers by 1138.23 At Rievaulx abbey in northern England, the 500 conversi of the mid-​to late twelfth century eclipsed the 140 choir monks, although this was not the case at all Cistercian houses. At the women’s house of Bonneville in France, it was recorded that, in 1255, there were thirty nuns, five lay sisters, two novices, three lay brothers, three clerics, servants, children, and some of the prioress’s family members.24 The expansion of Cistercian nunneries throughout the thirteenth century meant that the population of lay sisters increased concomitantly even as communities of lay brothers were in decline. Throughout the thirteenth century lay sisters assisted the nuns in all religious orders, whether old or new, and, although it seems that they were never in danger of outnumbering the nuns (there were eight lay sisters to the thirty nuns in the Cistercian house of La Barre in Champagne in the late thirteenth century, for example), they were nonetheless an integral part of the female monastic landscape.25 The early lay brothers of Hirsau seem to have been of higher social status, although the letter of Ulrich of Zell to William of Hirsau shows that there seems to have been a demand from the lower rungs of society to enter monastic life as conversi.26 Among the Cistercians, some conversi were servants of noblemen who entered a monastery as a choir monk; others were local peasants whose land had been acquired by the abbey. In 1188, the Cistercians formalized the status distinction between monk and lay brother, legislating that noblemen who joined their monasteries were not to become lay brothers,

Constant Mews, “The Witness of Zwiefalten and the Hirsau Reform,” in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (London, 2000), 185. 24 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 180. 25 For La Barre, see ibid., 131. 26 Ulrich of Zell, “Coutumier d’Ulrich de Zell, épître dédicatoire et premium /​Ulrich of Zell’s customary, dedicatory epistle and proemium –​Ulr, Paris, BNF. 18353 (II), ff. 1r–​3r,” ed. and French and English translation by Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), 329–​47. 23

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but had to join as monks.27 Lay sisters seem to have been peasant women in some cases and the historiography often refers to them as servants, but their status could also cut across classes: in Cistercian convents in Champagne, for instance, women from very diverse backgrounds ranging from noble widows to former prostitutes were able to inhabit the small communities of the thirteenth century, as Anne Lester has shown, and at least some of these were conversae.28 It is important to exercise some caution when assuming that adult recruits who were described as conversa or conversus occupied the status of lay sister or lay brother, even into the twelfth century. As Constance Berman has pointed out, those terms could still be deployed to indicate an adult convert (rather than denote a particular status). One well-​known example is Pons de Léras, a knight who gave up his family and property to found a community that later became Cistercian in the 1130s. Although the author of his Vita, composed in the 1170s described him as a conversus on the basis of his great humility, it is not entirely clear that this did not simply refer to his act of conversion and profession.29 Nonetheless, the spiritual benefits of becoming a lay brother or lay sister seem to have been very appealing, as the great numbers of these members of monastic communities seem to attest. As the thirteenth century progressed, lay brothers became increasingly associated with various infractions within and without the monastic precinct. Although as early as the 1160s, we hear of the famous revolt of the lay brothers of Sempringham, as well as demands made by lay sisters to wear the same veils as the nuns, it is in the statutes of the Cistercian general chapter from the end of the twelfth century that we find a proliferation of examples of lay brother riots, dissent, and apostasy.30 That these reports are recorded increasingly throughout the thirteenth century has been interpreted by scholars of the Cistercian order both as evidence of the gradual breakdown of monastic discipline and as proof of institutional commitment to reassert

Joseph M. Canivez, ed., Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, 8 vols. (Louvain, 1933–​41), 1:8 (1188). Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY, 2011), 75. 29 Constance Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Peasant Lay Brother and Sister, and the Converted Knight in Medieval Southern France,” in Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–​1400, ed. Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton (Turnhout, 2006), 266. 30 Knowles, “Revolt of the Lay Brothers”; and more recently Katherine Sykes, Inventing Sempringham:  Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master (Berlin, 2012), 9. On the Cistercian lay brother riots, see Megan Cassidy-​Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings: Thirteenth-​Century English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout, 2001), 180–​6; for an older analysis, see Anselm Dimier, “Violence, rixes et homicides chez les Cisterciens,” Revue des sciences religieuses 46 (1972): 38–​57. 27

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the foundational principle of enclosure in Cistercian cenobitic life, especially in an environment of rapid social and religious transformation. Whatever the case, it is clear that, from the thirteenth century, the lay brothers’ position in the monastic world became increasingly marginal. This change in status was at least partly economic. The gradual shrinking of the grange economy in England over the course of the thirteenth century meant that lay brothers were slowly displaced, with the granges replaced by peasant settlements and the lay brothers themselves often replaced by villeins donated by benefactors. In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294–​1303) allowed the renting out of Cistercian land and granges and it seems that, in the British Isles at least, this sounded the death knell for the economic importance of the lay brothers.31 The practice of advance selling of wool had proved a disastrous strategy for some of the larger English houses in the later thirteenth century, many of which were taken into royal custody from 1275, and the lay brothers found themselves increasingly marginalized as unproductive and expensive economic agents. It was simply cheaper for monasteries under financial strain to reallocate granges to non-​monastic laborers and this is what seems to have occurred among the Cistercians. The category of conversus and conversa continued to undergo further transformation throughout the later Middle Ages, as new forms of religious life drew men and women into other affiliations. The history of lay brothers in Western monasticism is thus sometimes narrated as a story within a trajectory of decline, and there are good reasons to read it as such. The fortunes of lay brethren, however, may also be used to trace the more complex story of profound religious transformation that swept across Western Christendom from the early years of the thirteenth century. At a time when the traditional distinctions between religious and lay life were again being recast, more people could and did describe themselves as lay religious. This was particularly the case for women, who not only claimed affiliation with both established and new orders, but also created new forms of religious life for themselves. The environment in which they did so was profoundly shaped by the establishment and rise of the mendicant orders, the revival of lay interest in the vita apostolica, and even the upsurge in heretical movements in western Europe at this time. But this new religiosity also drew on the more conventional model of lay/​religious spirituality established by the sometimes fluid categories of conversi/​conversae in the monastic milieux of the high Middle

Donnelly, Decline of the Medieval Cistercian Laybrotherhood; Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks, and Paul Dryburgh, The English Wool Market 1230–​1327 (Cambridge, 2007).

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Ages. Indeed, it might be argued that the existence of lay brothers and lay sisters within the old and new orders of the central Middle Ages laid some of the groundwork for the efflorescence of new manifestations of lay piety in the later Middle Ages. The looseness with which women were sometimes affiliated with monastic orders was of course a concern of Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–​1216), who, in 1204, had begun the long process of drawing together the diverse communities of female religious in Rome into one universal cenobium monialum (monastery of nuns). The idea here was to achieve not only institutionalization in a practical sense, but also uniformity in a spiritual sense. This early papal attempt (played out in the foundation of San Sisto) set the path for the increasing intervention of subsequent popes in the religious life of unaffiliated or loosely affiliated religious women throughout western Europe, some of whom were lay sisters. By the time that the famous bull Periculoso had demanded the total claustration of all religious women in 1298, religious women had faced a century of increasing regulation.32 Other population pressures during the fourteenth century had a significant impact on monasticism in general and on the lay brothers and sisters in particular. In England, for instance, David Knowles measured the entire population of monks, nuns, and conversi in England in the early fourteenth century to be about 17,500 and estimated that half this number died in the two years of the Black Death in the middle of the century.33 At the Cistercian house of Ebrach in southern Germany, the population had been recorded for the years 1306–​27 as 102 choir monks and 72 lay brothers; this number had dwindled to 46 monks and 21 conversi for 1349–​85.34 Population decline was also assisted by war: in northern France, where monastic houses were often sites of devastation during the Hundred Years War, some communities disbanded entirely, others were laid waste, and still others were deprived of land and any movable goods, making it impossible for them to continue to function. The lay brethren were among the many victims of the disasters of the fourteenth century and, by that century’s end, numbers of lay brothers—​in the form that had been modelled so successfully by the Cistercians—​had significantly diminished. The disasters of the fourteenth century were acutely



Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545 (Washington, DC, 1997), and the article by Andenna in this volume; for regional cases studies and a useful European survey of women religious, see Alistair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds., Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c.1100–​ c.1500 (Turnhout, 2010). 33 David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1955), 2:256. 34 France, Separate but Equal. 32

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felt by female monastic houses as well. Economic failure and war, especially in northern France, wrought havoc among the established orders, some of which relocated destroyed houses to the urban areas once favored by the beguines. The fact that so many female houses failed during the mid-​to late fourteenth century on the basis that they no longer had enough professed women to maintain communal life would indicate that lay sisters—​in the traditional sense—​had disappeared too. The nature and role of conversi and conversae during the central to late Middle Ages changed according to institutional, economic, social, and religious transformations. From the eleventh century, these changes were extensive in western Europe; for the institutional incarnation of lay brotherhood made popular by the Cistercians, they were not felicitous by the end of the thirteenth century. However, it seems that the end of traditional ways of life for some medieval religious men and women meant the flowering of new ones. For women in particular, the mutability of lay association with the religious life created opportunities for involvement in ways that would have seemed unthinkable in the eleventh century.35 The story of medieval lay brothers and lay sisters must be told as one not so much of decline but of transformation and adaptation. From the thirteenth century, lay religious women, building partly on the established presence of lay people in monastic life, created quite distinctive groups, especially in urban centers, and throughout Europe. These groups can be connected to the status of lay sister in some cases but in other cases they were more independent. Such affiliations, complicated as they could be, nevertheless bring into sharp relief the sometimes indistinct boundary between institutional and non-​institutional monastic life.

Bibliography Adamo, Phillip C.  New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193–​1267. Toronto, 2014. Berman, Constance. Medieval Agriculture, The Southern French Countryside and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-​Three Monasteries. Philadelphia, PA, 1986. Cassidy-​Welch, Megan. Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings:  Thirteenth-​Century English Cistercian Monasteries. Turnhout, 2001. Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1996. Donnelly, James. The Decline of the Cistercian Laybrotherhood. New York, 1949. Dubois, Jacques. “L’institution des convers au XIIe siècle: forme de vie monastique propre aux laïcs.” In I laici nella “Societas Christiana” dei secoli XI e XII, 183–​216. Milan, 1968. France, James. Separate but Equal: Cistercian Lay Brothers, 1120–​1350. Collegeville, MN, 2012.

See the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume.

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Megan Cassidy-Welch Golding, Brian. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130–​c. 1300. Oxford, 1995. Greenia, Conrad. “The Laybrother Vocation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.” Cistercian Studies 16 (1981): 38–​45. Hallinger, Kassius. “Woher kommen die Laienbrüder?” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 1–​104. Jamroziak, Emilia, and Janet Burton, eds. Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–​1400. Turnhout, 2006. Johnson, Penelope D.  Equal in Monastic Profession:  Religious Women in Medieval France. Chicago, IL, 1991. Knowles, David. “The Revolt of the Lay Brothers of Sempringham.” English Historical Review 50 (1935): 465–​87. Leclercq, Jean. “Comment vivaient les frères convers.” Analecta Cisterciensia 21 (1965): 239–​58. Lester, Anne E. Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne. Ithaca, NY, 2011. Makowski, Elizabeth. Canon Law and Cloistered Women:  Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545. Washington, DC, 1997. Minnis, Alistair, and Rosalynn Voaden, eds. Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c.1100–​c.1500. Turnhout, 2010. More, Alison. “Both in the World and of It: Affectivity, Corporeality and Cistercian Conversi in Thirteenth-​Century Liège.” Studies in Spirituality 23 (2013): 61–​79. Newman, Martha. “Crucified by the Virtues:  Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in Thirteenth-​Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives.” In Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, edited by Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack, 182–​201. Minneapolis, MN, 2003. Sykes, Katherine. Inventing Sempringham: Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master. Berlin, 2012.

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Female Religious Life in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries Cristina A n de n na The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a remarkable diversification of forms of the vita religiosa, and women were often at the forefront of these developments. Inspired by the gospel, and often open to the participation of the laity, many of the emerging modes of religious life combined the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, and their religious members occupied a liminal space between the cloister and the world. In many ways, these innovations can be seen as a response to the demands of a changing world.1 Already in the twelfth century, it became clear that traditional monasticism alone could not meet the needs of a shifting spiritual climate. Innovative experiments within the boundaries of traditional monasticism, such as the Paraclete community of Abelard (d. 1142) and Heloise (d. 1164) in the 1120s, were no longer an adequate response to a new female religiosity.2 Thanks to the research of Herbert Grundmann,3 and to the increasing importance of gender history as a subject of research,4 the topic of religious women, particularly in the

Cristina Andenna, “Neue Formen der Frömmigkeit und Armutsbewegung,” in Verwandlungen des Stauferreichs. Drei Innovationsregionen im mittelalterlichen Europa, ed. Bernd Schneidmüller, Stefan Weinfurter, and Alfried Wieczorek (Darmstadt, 2010), 246–​ 63; still useful is Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1978); see also the article by Magnani in this volume. 2 Franz J. Felten, “Verbandsbildung von Frauenklöstern: Le Paraclet, Prémy, Fontevraud mit einem Ausblick auf Cluny, Sempringham und Tart,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit. Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums des Projekts L 2 im SFB 231 (22.–​23. Februar 1996), ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske, 277–​341 (Munich, 1997), http://​digi20.digitale-​sammlungen.de/​de/​fs1/​object/​display/​bsb00042683_​00001. html. See also the article by Griffiths in the volume. 3 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN, 1995). 4 Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More, “Introduction,” in Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe:  Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–​ 1530, ed. Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More (Farnham, 2011), 1–​14; Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and History (Basingstoke, 2012). 1

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twelfth and thirteenth centuries, has attracted growing scholarly interest.5 As recent research has shown, many women, especially from the twelfth century onward, managed to organize themselves into smaller, less formal communities, and to position themselves outside the boundaries of ecclesiastical institutions.6 This article explores the institutional responses to spiritual developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, taking into account the variety and importance of new forms and ways of women’s religious life, and particularly papal concerns about the risks that life outside the cloister held for female religious. To mitigate the perceived dangers, the papacy made repeated efforts to recast these new forms of life in the image of traditional monasticism.7 As a result, innovative “double communities” were increasingly expected to observe traditional rules and, more importantly, to accept enclosure. Further, the male members of these orders gradually tried to free themselves from their female counterparts, or at least to ensure that authority rested in male hands. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, many women still drew inspiration from the climate of radical penitence and renewal, and embraced new forms of religious life based on radical poverty and active charity. But these new female communities were often regularized, institutionalized, and steered toward traditional cloister walls.

Diversification in the Twelfth Century While diverse forms of women’s religious life had existed since late antiquity and the early Middle Ages,8 the twelfth century brought a new phase of rapid expansion and experimentation. Women from all backgrounds—​ virgins, widows, wives separated from their husbands, and young women of “ill repute”—sought to abandon their old lives in favor of a new and radical vita religiosa characterized by penance, asceticism, and charity. Some took their inspiration from and attached themselves to preachers such as Robert

For an overview, see Annalisa Albuzzi, “Il monachesimo femminile nell’Italia medioevale,” in Dove va la storiografia monastica in Europa? Temi e metodi di ricerca per lo studio della vita monastica e regolare in età medievale alle soglie del terzo millennio, ed. Giancarlo Andenna (Milan, 2001), 131–​89; Vita religiosa al femminile (secoli XIII–​XIV). Atti del Convegno di Pistoia (19.–​21. maggio 2017) (Rome, 2019). 6 See the article by Magnani in volume 1 and the article by Mulder-​Bakker and More in this volume. 7 James Arthur Brundage and Elizabeth M. Makowski, “Enclosure of Nuns: The Decretal Periculoso and Its Commentators,” JMH 20 (1994), 143–​55. 8 See the articles by Giorda, Réal, Magnani, Lifshitz, Bitel, Leclercq, and Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 5

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of Arbrissel, Stephen of Obazine, Vital of Savigny, Bernard of Tiron, and Norbert of Xanten, espousing forms of religious life modeled on a fresh interpretation of the apostolic life. In the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities, however, the unregulated contact between men and women that could result presented a danger to both groups. To minimize the peril, it was seen as necessary to find new ways to organize this spreading religious desire: some women were guided toward traditional monastic communities; those who were opposed to enclosure were encouraged to marry.9 At the same time, emerging models of religious life that included both women and men within a single community could allow women to play a more central role.10 For example, in the early days of Robert of Arbrissel’s community at Fontevraud, which was home to subcommunities of religious men and women, lay women, and lepers, the nuns were responsible for all temporal administration, as well as for maintaining the spiritual discipline of the community. The male community was in charge of manual labor and liturgical functions.11 Robert of Arbrissel was not the only innovator. In southern Italy, William (d. 1142), a pilgrim and hermit from Vercelli, decided to lead a life of voluntary penitence in the first decades of the twelfth century. His zeal and charisma attracted a number of men and women seeking to follow his example. After settling in the Apennines, William established several monastic communities, the most significant of which was the male monastery of Santa Maria di Montevergine (Avellino). Owing to conflict among the clerics of the community, he took refuge in another mixed, but predominantly female, community that he had founded near San Salvatore al Goleto. There, he decided to entrust the women with a central authoritative role. This situation lasted for at least two generations, until the monastery was transformed into an exclusively female establishment.12 In England, Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189), who originally attended to the cura of women who desired to dedicate themselves wholly to God,13



See the article by Jasper and Howe in this volume. On double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 11 Jacques Dalarun, Robert of Arbrissel:  Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce Venarde (Washington, DC, 2006); see also the article by Griffiths in this volume. 12 Jean-​Marie Martin, “Le Goleto et Montevergine en Pouille et en Basilicate,” in La società meridionale nelle pergamene di Montevergine. I Normanni chiamano gli Svevi (Montevergine, 1989), 101–​28; F. Panarelli, “Tre documenti sugli esordi della comunità di San Salvatore al Goleto,” in Mediterraneo, Mezzogiorno, Europa. Studi in onore di Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, ed. Giancarlo Andenna and Hubert Houben (Bari, 2004), 799–​816. 13 Glyn Coppack, “‘And then he added canons’:  Gilbert of Sempringham, and the Developing Framework of Gilbertine Life,” in The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Turnhout, 2011), 291–​311. 9

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founded two double monasteries, Sempringham and Haverholme, between 1130 and 1150. The men and women in these two houses lived in communities that embraced the ascetic and contemplative life, while still taking care of those in need. To regularize this form of coexistence, Gilbert was compelled to compose a rule and statutes that the Church approved in 1178. The structure of the new order of Sempringham was based on double monasteries, in which, at least initially, both women and men played important leadership roles.14 The military orders, which had initially refused to admit women, also began to accept sorores and consorores (women who had made a partial religious profession) in the twelfth century. Although men and women were not originally separated, they were soon forbidden to live within the same houses. The women were then given a choice: they could live in physically divided double communities in which governance was sometimes entrusted to them, or they could choose to live in traditional female monasteries in which it was generally not possible for them to engage in the charitable and hospital activities so central to the vocation of the military orders. For the ones who chose the former, there were many double houses, including the Templar commanderie in Rouell near Tarragona, that were directed by a preceptrix. In the thirteenth century, two other military orders, the Teutonic Knights and the Order of St. John, also began to accept sorores and consorores.15 From the very beginning, the Order of Santiago had included female houses and double communities, such as Santa Eufemia de Cozuelos and San Mateo de Avila, led by a woman called the commendadora. Some houses comprised married couples who had taken vows of chastity. These couples would live with their children except in times of war, when men were called to fight, or during times of fasting, when both men and women would withdraw to separate houses.16 A similar situation existed among the Humiliati, who admitted married couples alongside more traditional communities of men and women.17



Katherine Sykes, Inventing Sempringham: Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master (Zürich, 2011). Alain Demurger, Chevaliers du Christ. Les ordres religieux-​militaires au Moyen Âge (XIe–​ XVIe siècle) (Paris, 2002), 96–​111; Alan J. Forey, “Women and the Military Orders in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Anton T. Luttrell and Helene J. Nicholson (Aldershot, 2006), 43–​70; Myra Miranda Born, Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades (New York, 2012). 16 María Echániz Sans, Las mujeres de la orden militar de Santiago en la Edad media (Salamanca, 1992),  57–​8. 17 See the various publications by Maria Pia Alberzoni, including “Sub eadem clausura sequestrati:  uomini e donne nelle prime comunità umiliate lombarde,” in Uomini e donne in comunità, ed. Giuseppina De Sandre Gasparini (Verona, 1994), 69–​110, and “Die Humiliaten zwischen Legende und Wirklichkeit,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für 14 15

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In his thirteenth-​ century Historia Occidentalis, Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) wrote about the complexities and variety of the vita religiosa, emphasizing the exceptional character of these “mixed” forms of life, and evincing fascination with several of the new female religious experiments.18 On the one hand, he criticized traditional forms of female religious life, both monastic and canonical.19 Among his targets were the secular canonesses, particularly in the Low Countries (modern Belgium, the Netherlands, and part of Germany), whose way of life he considered to be old-​fashioned and very elitist. In keeping with conciliar provisions of the twelfth century, Jacques condemned the canonesses for what he considered their lax form of life—​ particularly citing the temporary nature of their vocation, as they did not make a solemn profession.20 On the other hand, Jacques praised at length many of the new forms of female religious life that had emerged in the course of the twelfth century. He spoke positively, for example, about the experiment at Fontevraud21 and about the beguines, discussed below. He also praised the women who gathered around Norbert of Xanten and the Premonstratensians, and those who gravitated toward the Cistercian world. Among the Premonstratensians, communities of women lived close to, but physically separate from, the men, although the two groups were united for liturgical celebrations.22 The cura mulierum presented two difficulties:  not only was it necessary to deal with the care of the sisters’ souls, but the men also had to manage the administration of their worldly goods. From 1137 on, the Premonstratensian general









Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 107 (1999): 324–​53; see also Francis Andrew, The Early Humiliati (Cambridge, 1999). Jacques de Vitry, The Historia Occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry: A Critical Edition, ed. John Frederick Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972), 20 and 130; Maria Pia Alberzoni, “ ‘Regulariter vivere’: le nuove forme duecentesche di monachesimo femminile,” in Vita religiosa al femminile,  13–​30. 19 Franz J. Felten, “Geschichtsschreibung cum ira et studio:  zur Darstellung religiöser Gemeinschaften in Jakob von Vitrys Historia Occidentalis,” in Christliches und jüdisches Europa im Mittelalter. Kolloquium zu Ehren von Alfred Haverkamp, ed. Lukas Clemens and Sigrid Hibordian (Trier, 2011), 83–​120. 20 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis 31, 156–​8; Franz J. Felten, “Wie adelig waren Kanonissenstifte (und andere weibliche Konvente) im frühen und hohen Mittelalter?” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius (Göttingen, 2001), 39–​129. Among the rare studies on secular canonesses, see Hedwig Röckelein, ed., Frauenstifte. Frauenklöster und ihre Pfarreien (Essen, 2009); Sabine Klapp, “Negotiating Autonomy: Canons in Late Medieval ‘Frauenstifte’,” in Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500, ed. Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin (Turnhout, 2014), 367–​400. 21 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis 20, 130. 22 Ibid. 22, 134–​5. On the Premonstratensians and women, see also Bruno Krings, “Die Prämonstratenser und ihr weiblicher Zweig,” in Studien zum Prämonstratenserorden, ed. Irene Crusius and Helmut Flachenecker (Göttingen, 2003), 73–​106. 18

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chapter intervened increasingly to prohibit “dangerous” double communities, although recent research has questioned the reach and efficacy of these efforts. At the end of the century, Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–​1216) allowed the Premonstratensians to refuse the reception of women in general, and only existing female monasteries could still benefit from the cura monialium.23 At the same time, Jacques de Vitry relates that widows and married women, as well as powerful women from noble families, had abandoned the world to serve Christ in poverty and humility. He recounts that these women often joined the cisterciensis ordinis religio sanctimonialium, which had multiplied “like the stars in the sky.”24 According to Jacques, unlike women in traditional monastic life, which was afflicted with a general dissolutio, women affiliated with the Cistercian order were remarkable for their deliberate choice to live a strict and irreproachable life, allowing them to be true to their vow of poverty. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, forms of female Cistercian life had spread, not only within France, but also in Hainaut, Germany, England, Spain, Denmark, and Italy.25 The problems that had afflicted Premonstratensian women soon came to trouble the Cistercians. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the general chapter placed limits on new female communities being admitted to the order. Initially, women could only be accepted if they possessed sufficient means of support and if they observed strict enclosure. In 1228, the general chapter decided to forbid the reception of new women’s communities. This prohibition ensured that male Cistercians were no longer responsible for any aspect of cura animarum and visitation for female communities.26 Those that had already become affiliated with the order by the will or the political authority of the pope or the bishops were exempt from this decision. Recent research





Alexis Grélois, “L’institutionnalisation des religieuses dans les ordres de Prémontré et de Cîteaux (Xlle–​XIlle siècles),” in La place et le rôle des femmes dans l’histoire de Cluny. En hommage à Ermengarde de Blesle, mère de Guillaume le Pieux. Actes du colloque de Blesle des 23 et 24 avril 2010, ed. Jean-​Paul Renard et al., 251–​68 (Saint-​Just-​près-​Brioude,  2013). 24 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis 15, 117. 25 Constance Hoffman Berman, “Were There Twelfth-​Century Cistercian Nuns?” in Medieval Religion: New Approaches, ed. Constance Hoffman Berman (New York, 2005), 217–​48; Franz J. Felten, “Der Zisterzienserorden und die Frauen,” in Franz J. Felten, Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Christine Kleinjung (Korb, 2011), 199–​274; see also the article by Jamroziak in this volume. 26 Statuta capitulorum generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, ed. Joseph Marie Canivez, vol. 1 (Louvain, 1933), 405 (1213) and 517 (1220); vol. 2 (Louvain, 1934), 36 (1225) and 68 (1228). See also Alexis Grélois, “Clairvaux et le monachisme féminin, des origines au milieu du XVe siècle,” in Le temps long de Clairvaux. Nouvelles recherches, nouvelles perspectives (XIIe–​XXIe siècle), ed. Arnaud Baudin and Alexis Grélois (Paris, 2017), 155–​82. 23

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has shown, however, that women were still free to choose. If attracted to the rigor of the Cistercian way of life, they could adopt Cistercian customs in the knowledge that the men of the order would have neither authority nor cause to intervene in their affairs, whether economic, moral, or religious. Despite the repeated provisions of the general chapters and the Roman Curia, the spectrum of female Cistercian religiosity in the thirteenth century ranged from formal incorporation, to varying degrees of informal association, to identification without any institutional link.27 Even with these problems of incorporation, however, many women who were affiliated with the order—​ including Mechtild of Magdeburg, Lutgard of Aywières, and Mechtild of Hackborn—​wielded considerable influence from within the walls of their cloisters, both in the Church and society, through their visions and writings.28

New Experiences in the Thirteenth Century From the early thirteenth century, the Roman Curia again focused its attention on new forms of religious life characterized by apostolic poverty and living in the world rather than within the cloister. In particular, the papacy continued to steer women to religious expressions more suited to the monastic world. Contemporary clerics used sermons to curb unregulated forms of religious life, but they also recognized their benefit and sought to inspire and encourage new movements.29

Mulieres devotae and sorores penitentes The efforts of such preachers often focused on a large group of women in northern Europe known as beguines. In particular, these women could be found in the dioceses of Liège, Brabant, Artois, and Flanders, and, from 1223, in Germany, Rhineland, Thuringia, and Saxony. These mulieres devotae lived communally in beguinages, which were individual houses sometimes arranged around a court. They devoted themselves to prayer, contemplation,



On the process of incorporation and the creation of a complex feminine Cistercian identity in France, see Anne Elisabeth Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns:  The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY, 2011). For northern Italy, see Guido Cariboni, “Cistercian Nuns in Northern Italy: Variety of Foundations and Construction of an Identity,” in Women in the Medieval Monastic World, ed. Janet E. Burton and Karen Stöber (Turnhout, 2015), 53–​74. 28 Ursula Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum. Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1988). 29 Nicole Bériou, L’avènement des maîtres de la Parole. La prédication à Paris au XIIIème siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1989); on monastic preaching in this period, see the article by Baker and Kienzle in this volume. 27

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charity, and care of the sick and poor, often without following a canonically recognized rule or professing religious vows.30 Jacques de Vitry and Thomas de Cantimpré (d. 1272), among others, sought ways to have these women officially recognized within the framework of traditional ecclesiastical structures. Both by preaching and writing saints’ Lives, they attempted to validate these models for female religious devotion and to offer some guidance as to the role that the clergy should play in the spiritual direction of the beguines.31 Preaching was also seen as a means of curbing the problem of prostitution, which had become alarmingly widespread in urban areas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The female audiences of itinerant preachers such as Robert of Arbrissel included a number of repentant prostitutes. After their conversion, which was often represented as the result of intense spiritual care, these women were generally faced with a choice between marriage or a monastery. Thanks largely to popular preaching, however, prostitution received increased attention from theologians and canonists who sought new ways to convert these women and lead them toward a Christian life.32 In northern France, Fulk of Neuilly (d. 1201) worked toward the conversion of publice meretrices and their rehabilitation within society. Fulk’s example was followed in Paris by the creation of a community that observed the Cistercian institutiones at the monastery of Saint-​Antoine, and by the foundation of the filiae Dei by the bishop of Paris William of Auvergne (d. 1249) in 1226.33 Ideas of morality were also circulated







See the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume; Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565 (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 48–​60; Alison More, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200–​1600 (Oxford 2018). For Germany, see Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter. Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich (Cologne, 2012); Letha Böhringer, “Beginen und Schwestern in der Sorge für Kranke, Sterbende und Verstorbene: eine Problemskizze,” in Organisierte Barmherzigkeit. Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Artur Dirmeier (Regensburg, 2010), 127–​55. 31 Cristina Andenna, “Ein besserer Weg zu Gott:  Freundschaftskonzepte und Freundschaftszeichen in den Viten weiblicher Heiliger des 13. Jahrhunderts,” in Freundschaftszeichen. Gesten, Gaben und Symbole von Freundschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Marina Münkler, Antje Sablotny, and Matthias Standke (Heidelberg, 2015), 179–​206. 32 Guido Cariboni, “Una prostituta in famiglia: uno spazio di redenzione per le pubbliche meretrici a cavallo tra XI e XII secolo,” Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 7 (2010): 391–​ 405; Cristina Andenna, “Il fenomeno delle ‘convertite’:  reti di comunità di ‘sorores penitentes’ e esperimenti di organizzazione istituzionale fra Europa, Terra Santa e Italia meridionale nel secolo XIII,” in Vita religiosa al femminile,  55–​75. 33 Nowacka, “Networks of Ideas, Networks of Men:  Clerical Reform, Parisian Theologians and the Movement to Reform Prostitutes in Twelfth-​and Thirteenth-​ Century France,” in International Religious Networks, ed. Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod (Woodbridge, 2012), 55–​ 66; Keiko R.  A. Nowacka, “Persecution, Marginalization, or Tolerance: Prostitutes in Thirteenth-​Century Parisian Society,” in Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France, ed. Meredith Cohen and Justine Firnhaber-​Baker (Farnham, 2010), 175–​96.

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by crusade preachers in Germany. For example, Rudolph of Worms (d. after 1227), canon of Hildesheim and chaplain of the Cistercian cardinal Conrad of Urach (d. 1227), initiated a movement of conversion and rehabilitation of “fallen women.” Following his initiatives, penitent women who wanted to lead a religious life could now do so. Their lives were organized in claustra (“enclosures”), and they were known as the sorores penitentes de Alemania. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–​41) institutionalized this new form of female religious life as the Order of St. Mary Magdalene (ordo Sancte Marie Magdalene).34 A wider movement, though not institutionally related to the penitentes de Alemania, also took hold in the thirteenth century in Europe and the Levant. In 1231, Archbishop Andrea of Acerenza (d. after 1237) brought a community of women of “dubious origins” from the Holy Land to Matera in Puglia in southern Italy. He called this community the women of the New Penitence (moniales novarum penitentium). Two privileges issued by Gregory IX December 1237 reveal that the foundation of Matera was part of a small network of women’s houses that became known as the Enclose Penitent Sisters (sorores penitentes inclusae). At the heart of this network was the church located in the city of Acre and dedicated to St. Mary and all the saints, and there were other foundations in the East, located in Cyprus, the Holy Land, and present-​day Lebanon.35

Mendicant Examples The Roman Curia did not limit its efforts to regularizing the religious lives of “fallen women.” It also sought to control other female communities that were based on apostolic models of absolute poverty while living in the world, and particularly those that were connected in various ways to the two most important mendicant orders: the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Throughout the thirteenth century, the popes repeatedly sought to place women firmly under the spiritual care of the friars.36





Guido Cariboni, “Gregorio IX e la nascita delle ‘sorores penitentes’ di Santa Maria Maddalena in ‘Alemannia’,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-​ germanico di Trento 25 (1999):  11–​44; Jörg Voigt, “Der Hildesheimer Bischof Konrad II. (1221–​1246/​47) und die Anfänge des Ordens der hl. Maria Magdalena in Deutschland,” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 87 (2015): 33–​60. 35 Cristina Andenna, “Da ‘moniales novarum penitentium’ a ‘sorores ordinis Sancte Marie de Valle Viridi’: una forma di vita religiosa femminile fra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XIII–​XV),” in Da Accon a Matera. Santa Maria la Nova, un monastero femminile tra dimensione mediterranea e identità urbana (XIII–​XVI secolo), ed. Francesco Panarelli (Berlin, 2012), 59–​130. 36 Maria Pia Alberzoni, “Papato e nuovi ordini religiosi femminili,” in Il papato duecentesco e gli ordini mendicanti. Atti del XXV Convegno internazionale della Società internazionale di studi francescani (Assisi, 13–​14 febbraio 1998), ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto, 1998), 205–​61; Alberzoni, “ ‘Regulariter vivere’,” 13–​30. 34

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The house of San Sisto in Rome represents a special case of papal engagement in regulating and regularizing female religious experience. Here, Innocent III attempted to create a universale coenobium that would be home to all the female religious in Rome, including not only the nuns but also the female penitents who had not yet made a profession. He also sought to impose strict enclosure on them. As Maria Pia Alberzoni has shown, this example includes all of the main elements of the reform of female religious life that would be undertaken by subsequent popes. Innocent III first asked the help of Gilbert of Sempringham. This was unsuccessful, however, and Honorius III (r. 1216–​27) placed San Sisto under the direction of Dominic (d. 1221) and his brothers, who took responsibility for the spiritual care of the monastery and first introduced the institutiones of Prouille.37 The “Constitutions of San Sisto” were created on the basis of this text and the Rule of St. Augustine (RA) for the sole use of this Roman monastery; Gregory IX would give these same constitutions to the German Order of Mary Magdalene in 1232.38 The role of Dominic of Calaruega and his brothers in the 1206 foundation of Prouille in Languedoc, often regarded as the first monastery of Dominican women, is well known. Two other female monasteries also sought a privileged connection with the emerging order, and, like Prouille, adopted the Dominican form of life adapted for women: the monastery of Sant’Agnese in Bologna, which had its origins in the connection that its foundress, Diana d’Andalò (d. 1236), had with Dominic and later Master General Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237);39 and the communities of Madrid and Montargis, the latter founded by the Countess Amicie de Montfort (d. 1252/​3), who had a similarly close relationship with Dominic and his brothers.40 After Dominic’s death in 1221, the general chapters of Dominicans were concerned with the growing number of requests from women’s communities





Ibid.; Guido Cariboni, “Problemi d’identità:  le prime comunità femminili legate ai predicatori tra distinzione e appartenenza,” Revue Mabillon n.s. 20 (2009): 151–​72. 38 Alberzoni, “Papato e nuovi ordini religiosi femminili,” 244–​6; see also Guido Cariboni, “Zur Datierung der Interpolationen in den ‘Institutiones Sancti Sixti de Urbe’: die normative und institutionelle Entwicklung der ‘sorores penitentes’ der Heiligen Maria Magdalena in ‘Alemannia’ im 13. Jahrhundert,” in “Regula Sancti Augustini.” Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Paring, 2002), 389–​418. 39 Maria Pia Alberzoni, “Jordan of Saxony and the Monastery of St. Agnese in Bologna,” Franciscan Studies 68 (2010): 1–​19; Andrea Löther and Birgit Tramsen, “‘Du liebst mich mehr, als Du von mir geliebt wirst’: Jordan von Sachsen und Diana von Andalò,” in Meine in Gott geliebte Freundin. Freundschaftsdokumente aus klösterlichen und humanistischen Schreibstuben, ed. Gabriela Signori (Bielefeld, 1998), 88–​97. 40 Julie Anne Smith, “Prouille, Madrid, Rome: The Evolution of the Earliest Dominican Instituta for Nuns,” JMH 35 (2009): 340–​52. 37

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to join the order. In particular, the order felt that the duties related to caring for religious women constituted an obstacle to their own theological studies and preaching. They adopted the same solution as the Premonstratensians and Cistercians, refusing to admit new female communities and forbidding brothers to receive women into the religious life, to accept their profession, or to cut their hair.41 The resistance of Amicie de Monfort, however, marked the beginning of a new development; she refused to accept the master general’s decision not to incorporate her community into the order. She turned to Innocent IV (r. 1243–​54) in 1245 and obtained his permission to have her house incorporated.42 From that moment onward, the papacy forced the order to accept female monasteries and to take responsibility for their spiritual care, even though, as we will see, these monasteries did not all follow the same regulations. The Dominicans first took a definitive position on the inclusion of women during the generalate of Humbert of Romans (r. 1254–​63). In 1257, the general chapter of Florence decreed that female monasteries were to be incorporated and proclaimed their dependence on the order, not only de facto but also de jure. The nuns were henceforth required to make profession to the master general, and were subject to the constitutions of the order and its liturgy, as well as to visitation by brothers chosen by the masters general or provincial priors. They were also exempt from the jurisdiction of the local bishop; they were not subject to him in their choice and consecration of their superiors, nor were they required to pay him tithes. This permission to incorporate radically changed the perception of women within the order. The general chapter of Valenciennes of 1259 approved the Liber constitutionum sororum ordinis Praedicatorum, a text for women that was modeled on the constitutions of the brothers, but that did not include the requirements of preaching and study. In concrete terms, however, the Dominican sisters within communities formally incorporated into the order were virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts in other women’s monasteries. Strict enclosure, visitation, pastoral care, and the issue of individual, rather than communal, poverty were fundamental and obligatory in all female houses.43

For a counterexample that shows women seeking freedom from the Dominican order in the late Middle Ages, see the article by Hirbodian in this volume. 42 Raymond Creytens, “Les constitutions primitives des sœurs dominicaines de Montargis,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 17 (1947): 41–​84. 43 Cariboni, “Problemi d’identità,” 168–​71; Guido Cariboni, “Osservazioni sui percorsi normativi per le comunità religiose femminili nell’ambito dei Predicatori fino a Umberto di Romans,” in Il velo, la penna e la parola. Le domenicane. Storia, istituzioni 41

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In his De eruditione predicatorum,44 written between 1263 and 1277, Humbert of Romans explained this change of attitude regarding the incorporation of women into the Dominican order. To give legitimacy to the change of policy, he asserted that Dominic himself had created a female order. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Dominicans thus reimagined the role of Dominic and his first female disciples, inventing fictive histories. By authoring new hagiographic texts, they created, a posteriori, a narrative that insisted that the presence of women within the order stemmed from close friendships between Dominic and certain of his female followers.45 The situation, however, never became completely stable, as can be seen in Clement IV’s (r. 1265–​8) 1267 bull, Affectu sincero, which allowed other women’s communities to be associated with the order in a more flexible manner. As a result, the relationship between sisters and brothers regarding the cura animarum and other matters were always handled on a case-​by-​case basis. In theory at least, the nuns affiliated with the Dominicans had to be subject to the RA and to the observance of the Liber constitutionum sororum, but there were numerous exceptions to this practice. Nevertheless, women in the Dominican sphere of influence were all known as the moniales Ordinis Sancti Augustini sub cura and instituta fratrum praedicatorum viventes (“nuns of the order of St. Augustine, living under the care and the constitutions of the preachers”). According to Affectu sincero, it was the responsibility of the brothers to carry out the mandated annual visitation to ensure that the order’s constitutions were being observed. Beyond these visitations, the cura monialium was reduced to preaching, confessing, and celebrating the sacraments by Dominican chaplains; the latter, however, were not required to reside in the female monasteries. Moreover, the material assets of the women’s communities did not have to be overseen by the brothers.46 This flexible spiritual cura did not need official approval and thus paved the way



e scritture, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Florence, 2009), 31–​48; Isnard Wilhelm Frank, “Die Dominikanerinnen als zweiter Orden der Dominikaner,” in Fromme Frauen—​unbequeme Frauen? Weibliches Religiosentum im Mittelalter, ed. Edeltraut Klueting (Hildesheim, 2006), 105–​25. 44 See Simon Tugwell, “Humbert of Romans’s Material for Preachers,” in De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Leslie Amos, Eugene Green, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Kalamazoo, MI, 1989), 105–​17. 45 Guido Cariboni, “Domenico e la vita religiosa femminile:  tra realtà e finzione istituzionale,” in Domenico di Caleruega e la nascita dell’Ordine dei Frati Predicatori. Atti del XLI Convegno storico internazionale (Todi, 10–​12 ottobre 2004) (Spoleto, 2005), 327–​60. 46 Sylvie Duval, “Les Dominicains et les femmes (fin du Moyen Âge–​début de l’époque moderne),” in Les Dominicains en France (XIIIe–​XXe siècle), ed. Nicole Bériou, André Vauchez, and Michel Zink (Paris, 2017), 21–​38.

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for other women’s institutions, including houses of penitents, beguines, and Cistercian nuns, to use Dominican brothers for their cura animarum. The example of Clare of Assisi (d. 1253) and the Order of San Damiano is another useful case in point in the context of the problems facing communities of women religious.47 Clare was born in Assisi, where, unlike Francis, her family belonged to the urban aristocracy. Fascinated by Francis’s message, she received the tonsure at his hand and began a life of penance based on the model of the first Friars Minor. After spending some time as a penitent in two female monastic communities, Clare settled with a small group of women, the pauperes sorores, in the monastery of San Damiano near Assisi. At first, these women lived a life grounded in the Franciscan ideal of poverty with the support of Francis and his male followers. The Franciscan concept of evangelical radical poverty, considered dangerous by the Roman Curia, was particularly controversial for female communities. It was thus not long before San Damiano was steered in a more traditional direction and Clare was made abbess of her community. While life at San Damiano would gradually be regularized, another new form of religious life first emerged under the influence of Cardinal Hugo of Ostia, the future Pope Gregory IX. During his legations in northern and central Italy between 1218 and 1219, the cardinal regularized several women’s communities that had previously lived an apostolic and penitential life. He gave these sisters a forma vitae based on the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) and influenced by Cistercian regulations. Papal letters describing this are addressed specifically to four monasteries: Santa Maria di Monticelli near Florence, Monteluce near Perugia, Santa Maria outside Porta Camollia near Siena, and Santa Maria di Gattaiola near Lucca. Any donations made to them were to be handed over to the Curia, which in this way became the guarantor of their poverty. At the same time, Hugo granted these communities both apostolic protection and freedom from episcopal jurisdiction. The cardinal’s project, however, conflicted profoundly with the original intentions of the women concerned: radical poverty and charitable activities were forbidden to these communities and strict enclosure was imposed upon them. This new group of monasteries was approved by the Roman Curia under the name of the Religion of the Poor

Maria Pia Alberzoni, Clare of Assisi and the Poor Sisters in the 13th Century (St. Bonaventure, NY, 2004); Leslie S. Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi:  Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy (Leiden, 2008); Bert Roest, Order and Disorder:  The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform (Leiden, 2013); Catherine M. Mooney, Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-​Century Church:  Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance (Philadelphia, PA, 2016).

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Ladies of the Spoleto Valley or Tuscany (religio pauperum dominarum de Valle Spoleti sive Tuscia). The female network that was slowly being created was initially entirely independent of Clare and her monastery. Papal documents show, however, that the community of Monticelli in 1219, and then also a group of women in Milan in 1223, developed closer ties with San Damiano of Assisi.48 After becoming pope, Gregory IX promoted his forma vitae outside the Italian peninsula and sought to connect it with the order of the Friars Minor. In December 1227, he entrusted the cura animarum within this female network to the order in the letter Quoties cordis. The model adopted was very different from either that of San Damiano in Assisi or anything directly inspired by Clare’s example. Tradition holds that, while in Assisi for Francis’s canonization in July 1228, Gregory invited Clare and her community at San Damiano to join the network of his monasteries.49 For Clare and San Damiano, this would have meant renouncing the radical poverty of Francis’s teaching that had characterized the life of the pauperes sorores from the beginning. In September 1228, after much protest, Clare secured the right to live in keeping with her commitment to absolute poverty in a Franciscan manner. She was granted a papal privilege of poverty, which was also granted to the monastery at Perugia, Monteluce, in the following year.50 Now closely linked to the Friars Minor and having been granted a privilege of absolutely poverty, Clare had ensured that San Damiano would hold a unique place in the new papally sanctioned order, which would assume the name of the Order of St. Damian (ordo Sancti Damiani) after 1235.51 The bull Quo elongati, issued on 28 September 1230, addressed, among other things, the question of women’s monasteries, and made their access to the





Alberzoni, “Papato e nuovi ordini religiosi femminili”; Cristina Andenna, “Dalla ‘Religio pauperum dominarum de Valle Spoliti’ all’‘Ordo Sancti Damiani’: prima evoluzione istituzionale di un ordine religioso femminile nel contesto delle esperienze monastiche del secolo XIII,” in Die Bettelorden im Auf bau. Beiträge zu Institutionalisierungsprozessen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Münster, 1999), 429–​92. 49 Alberzoni, “Papato e nuovi ordini religiosi femminili”; Maria Pia Alberzoni, “Curia romana e regolamentazione delle damianite e delle domenicane,” in “Regulae  –​ Consuetudines –​Statuta.” Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del medioevo (Bari-​Noci-​Lecce, 26–​27 ottobre 2002 /​Castiglione delle Stiviere, 23–​24 maggio 2003), ed. Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville (Münster, 2005), 501–​38; but also Mooney, Clare of Assisi. 50 Maria Pia Alberzoni, “‘Servus vestrum et ancillarum Christi omnium’: Gregorio IX e la vita religiosa femminile,” Franciscan Studies 64 (2006): 145–​78. 51 Maria Pia Alberzoni, Santa povertà e beata semplicità. Francesco d’Assisi e la Chiesa romana (Milan, 2015), 171–​93; Werner Maleczek, Das “Privilegium paupertatis” Innocenz’ III. und das Testament der Klara von Assisi. Überlegungen zur Frage ihrer Echtheit (Rome, 1995). 48

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Franciscan brothers dependent on a license from the Apostolic See. Clare’s reaction compelled the pope to acknowledge the special bond that existed between San Damiano and the Friars Minor, thus exempting the community from the bull’s prescriptions. Once again, San Damiano was recognized as having a distinct and preeminent place among houses of women in the Franciscan sphere. The systematic regularization of the other female monasteries initiated by the pope, however, was not yet complete. In 1247, Innocent IV wrote a new rule for the so-​called Damianite monasteries. Inspired by Gregory’s forma vitae, this new rule strengthened the connection of the women’s communities to the Friars Minor. The vow of profession in the forma vitae, which initially had conformed to the RB, was now to be taken “according to the regula Sancti Francisci.” The sorores of the ordo Sancti Damiani were placed under the control and jurisdiction of the general minister and the provincial minister of the male order, to whom the responsibility for visitation was also entrusted. Like the forma vitae of his predecessors, Innocent IV’s rule stipulated that female communities were to own property. Perhaps not surprisingly, Clare and San Damiano refused to submit to this new rule. Instead, with the help of some friars and the guidance that Francis had given her, she herself wrote a normative text that was to be followed at San Damiano. This new text required absolute poverty, both individual and communal. On the eve of Clare’s death in 1253, a letter from Innocent IV gave official approval for this new forma vitae, but its use was restricted to the ordo sororum pauperum—​that is to say, it was to be used only at the monastery of San Damiano.52 Although Clare was made a saint by Alexander IV (r. 1254–​61) in 1255, the Franciscan general chapters that met in the years immediately following ignored the canonization; it was considered dangerous in light of the tensions that divided the order, particularly around the issue of the friars’ duties regarding the cura mulierum. It was not until 1260, in fact, that Bonaventure (d. 1274), then minister general, added Clare to the list of Franciscan saints. But the Curia’s creation of a female religious order was still not complete. In his 1263 letter, Beata Clara virtute clarens, Urban IV (r. 1261–​4) ordered that all of the different communities that followed the various papal formae vitae should be united into a single ordo Sanctae Clarae. To this end, with the support of a commission of cardinals and the Franciscan minister general, Bonaventure, Urban IV wrote yet another rule, inspired by the formae vitae championed by

Alberzoni, “Curia romana.”

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his predecessors—​a text that had nothing to do with the one written by Clare. Under Urban’s rule, communities were forced to accept both enclosure and the ownership of property, and the responsibility for their spiritual care was placed directly, not in the hands of the Friars Minor, but rather in those of the cardinal protector of the male order. Even so, Clare herself was still held up as an ideal model of religious life for women.53 In 1296, Boniface VIII (r. 1294–​ 1303) confirmed that the Friars Minor were to undertake the cura monialium for the Order of the Poor Clares (ordo Sanctae Clarae) and all of the various other female communities influenced in different ways by Clare.54 The twelfth century witnessed a remarkable diversification of forms of religious life, inspired in particular by the example of Christ and the apostles. Both women and men were drawn to these new expressions of radical asceticism, absolute poverty, and devotion to caring for the poor and sick. As the experiences of women among the Gilbertines, Premonstratensians, and Cistercians show, however, women were generally only able to engage in these new modes of religious life with the support and assistance of men. During the thirteenth century, this process of diversification culminated in the development of many forms of new female religious life, such as the sorores penitentes de Alemania and those of Acre, but also communities of female Dominicans, Damianites, and Clarissans. As these examples show, the papacy consciously pursued an institutionalizing agenda with regard to women’s religious life. The papal goal of regularization gradually pushed women who desired to live according to the gospel and to embrace radical poverty into more traditional communities that were subject to strict enclosure and the ownership of communal property. The popes sought support for this effort among privileged allies and advocates within the mendicant orders. The Dominican and Franciscan general chapters, however, often resisted the duty of providing pastoral care to these female communities. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the



Giancarlo Andenna, “Urbano IV e l’istituzione dell’ordine delle clarisse,” in Andenna and Melville, Regulae –​ Consuetudines –​ Statuta, 539–​68; Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, 57–​ 86; Roest, Order and Disorder, 54–​60; Cristina Andenna, “Women at the Angevin Court between Naples and the Court of Provence: The ‘Struggle’ for a Female Franciscan Life,” in Queens, Princesses and Mendicants: Close Relations in a European Perspective, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Imke Just (Vienna, 2019), 29–​51. 54 Cristina Andenna, “‘Secundum regulam datam sororibus ordinis sancti Damiani’: Sancia e Aquilina: due esperimenti di ritorno alle origini alla corte di Napoli nel XIV secolo,” in Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context: Formal and Informal Structures of the Friars’ Lives and Ministry in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Robson and Jens Röhrkasten (Berlin, 2010), 139–​78. 53

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papal drive for institutionalization was aided by the Dominican creation of what amounted in practice to a “double order.” In addition, the Clarissan order that seems to have emerged through this process was, in fact, an institutional fiction; the diversity of expressions of female religious life was not compatible with the creation of a single form. Clare’s experience, on the one hand, and the normative intentions of Hugo/​Gregory IX and Innocent IV, on the other, had led to the creation of different ‘institutional’ forms of life, which survived and were continually reconceived in the course of the later Middle Ages. Nor were ties with the Friars Minor uniform or always binding. Consequently, there was no “female Franciscan order” in the strict sense of the term. The desire of women to lead religious lives entirely according to the gospel message always came into conflict with the needs and limits imposed by ecclesiastical structures. But the papacy was increasingly forced to acknowledge this desire and to conceive new institutional solutions for women that took into account the variety of their original objectives. In the fourteenth century, with the help of her confessor, Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373) composed a rule for the new order that she had founded (ordo Sancti Salvatoris) and for which she had obtained papal approval in 1346. In the wake of previous religious experiences, however, the new institutional reality she conceived was not limited to women but again had to include a constitutive male component.55 This tension between the diversity of female religious impulses and the desire of the papacy to institutionalize them continued into the following centuries, although women managed to win ever greater autonomy.

Bibliography Alberzoni, Maria Pia. Clare of Assisi and the Poor Sisters in the 13th Century. St. Bonaventure, NY, 2004.   “Curia romana e regolamentazione delle damianite e delle domenicane.” In “Regulae – Consuetudines – Statuta.” Studi sulle fonti normative degli ordini religiosi nei secoli centrali del medioevo (Bari-Noci-Lecce, 26–27 ottobre 2002 / Castiglione delle Stiviere, 23–24 maggio 2003), edited by Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville, 501–38. Münster, 2005.   “Papato e nuovi ordini religiosi femminili.” In Il papato duecentesco e gli ordini mendicanti. Atti del XXV Convegno internazionale della Società internazionale di studi francescani (Assisi, 13–14 febbraio 1998), edited by Enrico Menestò, 205–61. Spoleto, 1998. Andenna, Cristina. “Ein besserer Weg zu Gott:  Freundschaftskonzepte und Freundschaftszeichen in den Viten weiblicher Heiliger des 13. Jahrhunderts.” In



Brigit Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge, 1999).

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Cristina Andenna Freundschaftszeichen. Gesten, Gaben und Symbole von Freundschaft im Mittelalter, edited by Marina Münkler, Antje Sablotny, and Matthias Standke, 179–​206. Heidelberg, 2015.   “Da ‘moniales novarum penitentium’ a ‘sorores ordinis Sancte Marie de Valle Viridi’: una forma di vita religiosa femminile fra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XIII–XV).” In Da Accon a Matera. Santa Maria la Nova, un monastero femminile tra dimensione mediterranea e identità urbana (XIII–XVI secolo), edited by Francesco Panarelli, 59–130. Berlin, 2012.   “Women at the Angevin Court between Naples and the Court of Provence:  The ‘Struggle’ for a Female Franciscan Life.” In Queens, Princesses and Mendicants: Close Relations in a European Perspective, edited by Nikolas Jaspert and Imke Just, 29–51. Vienna, 2019. Berman, Constance Hoffman. “Were There Twelfth-​ Century Cistercian Nuns?” In Medieval Religion:  New Approaches, edited by Constance Hoffman Berman, 217–​48. New York, 2005. Born, Myra Miranda. Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades. New York, 2012. Burton, Janet E., and Karen Stöber, eds. Women in the Medieval Monastic World. Turnhout, 2015. Cariboni, Guido. “Una prostituta in famiglia: uno spazio di redenzione per le pubbliche meretrici a cavallo tra XI e XII secolo.” Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 7 (2010): 391–​405.   “Problemi d’identità: le prime comunità femminili legate ai predicatori tra distinzione e appartenenza.” Revue Mabillon n.s. 20 (2009): 151–72. Dalarun, Jacques. Robert of Arbrissel: Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages, trans. Bruce Venarde. Washington, DC, 2006. Felten, Franz J. “Geschichtsschreibung cum ira et studio:  zur Darstellung religiöser Gemeinschaften in Jakob von Vitrys Historia occidentalis.” In Christliches und jüdisches Europa im Mittelalter. Kolloquium zu Ehren von Alfred Haverkamp, edited by Lukas Clemens and Sigrid Hibordian, 83–​120. Trier, 2011.   “Verbandsbildung von Frauenklöstern:  Le Paraclet, Prémy, Fontevraud mit einem Ausblick auf Cluny, Sempringham und Tart.” In Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit. Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums des Projekts L 2 im SFB 231 (22.–23. Februar 1996), edited by Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske, 277–341. Munich, 1997. http://digi20.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb000 42683_00001.html.   Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, edited by Christine Kleinjung. Korb, 2011. Grélois, Alexis. “L’institutionnalisation des religieuses dans les ordres de Prémontré et de Cîteaux (Xlle–​XIlle siècles).” In La place et le rôle des femmes dans l’histoire de Cluny. En hommage à Ermengarde de Blesle, mère de Guillaume le Pieux. Actes du colloque de Blesle des 23 et 24 avril 2010, edited by Jean-​Paul Renard et al., 251–​68. Saint-​Just-​près-​Brioude,  2013. Klueting, Edeltraut, ed. Fromme Frauen—​unbequeme Frauen? Weibliches Religiosentum im Mittelalter. Hildesheim, 2006. Knox, Leslie S. Creating Clare of Assisi: Female Franciscan Identities in Later Medieval Italy. Leiden, 2008. Roest, Bert. Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform. Leiden, 2013. Sykes, Katharine. Inventing Sempringham: Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master. Zürich, 2011.

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Striving for Religious Perfection in the Lay World of Northern Europe A l i s on M ore a n d A n n e ke B . M ulder- B​ ak k er A sermon detailing the active and contemplative life by the Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (d. c. 1328) opens, “St. Luke writes in his gospel that our Lord Jesus Christ entered a little town where a woman named Martha received him. She had a sister named Mary who sat at Christ’s feet and listened to his words; but Martha hurried about serving our dear Lord.”1 As Giles Constable has demonstrated, both Martha and her sister Mary were popular and important models in later medieval devotion.2 Mary was identified with the anonymous sinner who washes Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:36–​50) and with Mary Magdalene.3 Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that Martha, this quiet and industrious woman from Bethany, became an influential model for pious lay women during the high and later Middle Ages. Given her importance, the late medieval cult of Martha both offers a point of entry to the subject of lay religious life and forms the basis for this chapter. As a lay woman and a model of holiness, Martha is the ideal representation of the spiritual life lived by lay people outside the traditional institutional structures of the Church. Martha is a principle character in the short Middle Dutch text on the conversion of Mary Magdalene, Van sunte Maria Magdalena Bekeringhe.4 We know of seven Middle Low German and Dutch versions of this particular legend, and three Latin ones. It is striking that the Latin texts of this particular short story are from the Netherlands and neighboring

Meister Eckhart, Sermon 86, translated in Bernard McGinn, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher (New York, 1986), 338. 2 Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995),  1–​141. 3 See Katherine L. Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2000). 4 See C. G. N. de Vooys, “De legende ‘Van Sunte Maria Magdalena bekeringhe’,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde 24 (1905): 16–​44; Hans Hansel, Die Maria-​Magdalena Legende. Eine Quellen-​Untersuchung (Greifswald, 1937); not mentioned in Constable’s foundational study “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha,” in Constable, Three Studies. 1

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areas (i.e. from the countries in which, as will be discussed, ascetic domestic households were most prevalent). Here, Martha is portrayed as the chaste lady of the house (“Martha, the lady who led a religious and virtuous life”),5 who attended to the aristocratic household as well as to the affairs of her chivalrous brother, Lazarus, and frivolous sister, Mary Magdalene. Early one morning Martha was on the way to the market with her maid Marcella when she encountered her sister returning from another night of singing and dancing. She asked her whether “the most pleasing and sweetest king, who brings joy to all” (den alre genoechtelicsten ende suverlicsten coninc, die alre menschen harten verblijt) had also been at the feast, as she was concerned about bringing her sister to Christ’s love (sij pijnde mit veel inwijsens dat harte hore suster te beweghen).6 Nor was this in vain: Mary’s curiosity was awoken and she began to reflect on her actions. That evening when Jesus came for dinner with the neighbor Simon the Pharisee, Martha served and Mary stood by the door. Struck by Jesus’ penetrating gaze, she buckled at her knees. As we know from Scripture (Luke 7:36–​50), Mary washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, and anointed them with fragrant oil. Jesus then forgave her sins, saying: “Mary, your sins are all forgiven, go in peace” (Maria, dy sijn vergheven alle dijn sonden; ganc in vreden).7 Mother Mary, who had come to catch a glimpse of her son, took Mary Magdalene in her arms and an angel raised them from the earth for a moment. The women rejoiced, and Martha thanked God that her efforts toward her sister’s conversion had succeeded. Here, Martha is presented as a model of religious perfection in the world. She lives a life devoted to pursuing holiness in the midst of urban society and is concerned about the redemption of those around her. Later, Mary Magdalene would conform to this same model:  other legends relate that, when she arose from Jesus’ feet (representing the monastic vita contemplativa), she proceeded to the vita activa of preaching in Marseille and southern France.8 Like Martha, she would live a vita mixta, or combination of the active and contemplative life. There have always been men and women living “a life fundamentally oriented towards contemplation”—as Beach and Cochelin define monasticism—​ but within a household setting.9 From the early thirteenth century on, their

De Vooys, “De legend ‘Van Sunte Maria Magdalena bekeringhe’,” 28. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 39. 8 See Jansen, Making of the Magdalen. 9 On the house ascetics, see the article by Magnani in this volume. 5

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lives began to form patterns, and clear models of lay spirituality can be identified.10 As Daniel Bornstein writes, “laypeople self-​consciously adopted penitential practices that had long been the special preserve of the monastic orders, took upon themselves the obligation to live chastely and act charitably, and claimed for themselves a religious identity that remained distinctively lay.”11 Those who lived according to these new models received support from sympathetic church officials who endeavored to help them find devotional expressions proper to the lay world. However, churchmen more commonly encouraged models that resembled traditional forms of religious life.12 The consequences of the resulting confusion are still evident in modern scholarship, which automatically considers pious lay women to be members of “new” religious communities, or as “semi-​religious” (a term that has no direct equivalent in canon law).13 The discussion below both demonstrates the role that lay men and women played in the spiritual climate of the later Middle Ages, and highlights possible reasons why scholars often regard them as “lay monastics” rather than as pious members of the laity.

Full-​Time Spiritual Life in the Lay World In the thirteenth century, Elisabeth of Hungary, Landgravina of Thuringia (d.  1231), became a prominent model for holy lay women in continental Europe.14 According to her handmaids, Elisabeth traveled with her husband, Louis (d. 1227), and endeavored to help him build a strong Christian government in their territories. After Louis died, Elisabeth’s confessor asked whether she wished to enter a monastery (as was common for women of her social position), or opt instead for an anchorhold. Elisabeth resolutely dismissed both options and chose to remain in the secular world as a devout lay woman, or, as



For a discussion of these patterns and the associated problems in terminology see the essays in Leta Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, eds., Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 2014). 11 Daniel E. Bornstein, “Relics, Ascetics, Living Saints,” in Medieval Christianity, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein (Minnesota, MN, 2009), 102. 12 Alison More, “Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval Europe,” Church History 83 (2014): 297–​323. See also the article by Andenna in this volume. 13 For a discussion of the term, see Kaspar Elm, “Vita regularis sine regula:  Bedeutung, Rechtsstellung und Selbstverständnis des mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Semireligiosentums,” in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel and Elisabeth Müller-​ Luckner (Munich, 1998), 239–​ 73. On its limitations, see Elizabeth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”:  Quasi-​Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC, 2005), xx–​xxi. 14 See Uwe John and Helge Wittmann, eds., Elisabeth von Thüringen. Eine europäische Heilige, 2 vols. (Petersberg, 2007), for further references.

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the text says, “a sister in the world” (soror in seculo). Mechthild of Magdeburg described her as “a messenger whom [God] sent to wretched women living in castles … [and said that] many a lady followed her example.”15 In Marburg, she set up a private household, founded a hospital for the poor, and practiced works of charity. Her various biographies—​both in Latin and the vernacular—​ make it clear that she combined active charity with mystical piety.16 Elisabeth was widely promoted as a model of lay spirituality. Even thirteenth-​century legendaria from England include Lives of Elisabeth.17 Sermons invoking her not only discuss her charity in the secular world, but often also include domestic imagery. A  sermon by Guibert of Tournai (d. 1284) uses the theme “She seeks wool and flax and works with her own hands” (Prov. 31:13) to show that—​like Martha—​Elisabeth disdained neither manual labor nor service.18 Similar portrayals of Elisabeth occur in her various Lives and in art from the period. In the fourteenth century, men, women, and married couples often experienced religious conversions that resulted in them leading lives of contemplation. In some German-​speaking lands, they lived communally, shared their possessions, and devoted themselves to penance and chastity. Although their ideals were compatible with traditional religious life, these Gottesfreunde (Friends of God) remained part of the secular world. The banker Rulman Merswin (d. 1382) and his second wife, Gertrude, were two of the earliest members of this movement. Rulman’s writings confirm that these men and women modeled themselves on the ideal presented by Martha.19 Both Elisabeth of Hungary and Rulman Merswin lived in a world that had changed considerably and offered many opportunities for seeking religious perfection within secular society, and both found this ideal embodied by Martha. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a profound transformation reshaped the countries of Latin Christendom. As the work of André Vauchez demonstrates, city dwellers not only began to accumulate political and



Frank Tobin, trans., Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead (New York, 1998), 215. 16 See Ottó Gecser, “Lives of St Elizabeth:  Their Rewritings and Diffusion in the Thirteenth Century,” Analecta Bollandiana 127 (2009): 49–​107. 17 See Jocelyn Wogan-​Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), 145–​6. 18 See Alison More, “Gracious Women Seeking Glory: Clare of Assisi and Elisabeth of Hungary in Franciscan Sermons,” in Franciscans and Preaching: Every Miracle from the Beginning of the World Came About Through Words, ed. Timothy Johnson (Leiden, 2012), 209–​30. 19 Quoted in Constable, Three Studies, 117. See also Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York 2005), 407–​31. 15

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economic power at this time, but also became active in religion.20 The religious sphere ceased to consist solely of professional clergy and monastics. In particular, women held a prominent role in taking advantage of the opportunities offered by this new world and pursued new—​urban and secular—​forms of the mixed life outside the cloister. The most common were the beguines and the sisters of the Devotio moderna.21 In his Prologue to the Life of Mary of Oignies (c. 1215), Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) discusses the beginnings of this way of life in the southern Low Countries.22 He describes Mary as caring for the salvation of the “whole city of God,” which is to say the community of the faithful. Mary and her husband dedicated their lives to God in what would later be called a beguine court, and then Mary continued a lifestyle of charitable activity and spiritual guidance as a recluse. Jacques also includes the example of Christina the Astonishing (c. 1150–​1224), as well as “a multitude of holy virgins … [who] scorned carnal enticements for Christ, despised the riches of this world for the love of the heavenly kingdom … and earned a sparse meal with their hands although their families abounded in great riches.” He also described, “widows serving the Lord in fasts and prayers, in vigils and in manual labor … applying themselves to works of mercy.”23 He mentions only one nun, and does not include any saintly men, either lay or monastic. The women whom Jacques lists are individual cases of female religious living in the secular world. These officially enclosed anchoresses and informal recluses, independent virgins, and widows living alone or in small groups fashioned their own lives and shaped their own relationship with God.24 In so doing, they embraced a model of spirituality embodied by Martha. Such women chose to lead a mixed life of contemplation and action in the context of active participation in communal city life.25 They did not take vows and





André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel Bornstein, trans. Margery Schneider (Notre Dame, IN, 1996). 21 For beguines, see Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565 (Philadelphia, PA, 2003); for the Devotio moderna, see John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). 22 Jacques de Vitry, Mary of Oignies, Prologue 3–​9 (here 6), in Mary of Oignies:  Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker (Turnhout, 2006), 45. On women who lived this way of life in the Low Countries and northern Germany, see Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2005). 23 Jacques de Vitry, Mary of Oignies,  42–​3. 24 For more on recluses, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in this volume. 25 On the economic activities of communities of women known as beguines, see Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris:  Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual

20

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enjoyed no ecclesiastical status. They retained ownership of their possessions and did not live in monasteries. The written regulations or even rules that sometimes governed their lives carried no canonical weight, and certainly did not make them members of a religious order. These women were responsible for earning their own living. At the same time, they took on tasks traditionally seen as religious. Like Mary of Oignies, they worked for the salvation of all Christians. In particular, they taught children to read the Psalter and explained points of Christian doctrine to their neighbors. Likewise, they regularly gathered both ordinary believers and learned men in their homes for discussions of the faith. At the same time, these women helped those suffering from illness and the dying. Ultimately, they were responsible for praying for the souls of the deceased. Despite their lay status, Jacques de Vitry called these women “religious” in his Historia Occidentalis. He explained his reasoning, saying, “we do not consider religious only those who renounce the world and go over to a religious [i.e. a monastic] life, but we can also call regulars (regulares) all the faithful of Christ who serve the Lord under the evangelical rule and who live in an orderly way under the one highest and supreme abbot by the same name.”26 Other churchmen and canonists in the thirteenth century expressed similar views. The influential canonist Hostiensis (or Henry of Seuse, d. 1271) wrote: “One who lives in a holy and religious way in his own house, although not professed, is also called religious (religiosus), in a broad sense (in largo modo), not because that sort of person is bound by any particular rule, but because he lives a more rigorous and holier life than other secular people.”27 Jacques de Vitry’s Prologue shows that, at this time, he was familiar with individual cases rather than organized groups or institutions. In recording the tales of these women in a format recognized as holy, he was searching for some kind of recognition of this independent way of living. In 1216, he obtained permission from Pope Honorius III (r. 1216–​27), granting that: “religious women, not only in the diocese of Liège but also in France and the



Authority (Philadelphia, PA, 2014), 59–​80. See also Tanya Stabler Miller, “ ‘Love is Beguine’:  Labelling Lay Religiosity in Thirteenth-​Century Paris,” Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “From Case Studies to Comparative Models:  Würzburg Beguines and the Vienne Decrees,” and Letha Böhringer, “Merging into Clergy: Beguine Self-​Promotion in Cologne in the 13th and 14th Centuries,” in Böhringer, Deane, and van Engen, Labels and Libels, 135–​50, 53–​82, and 151–​86 respectively. 26 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Occidentalis, ed. J. F. Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972), 165–​6. See also the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. 27 Henri de Suse, “Summa aurea III,” in Dossier de l’ordre de la pénitence au XIIIe siècle, ed. G. G. Meersseman (Fribourg, 1961), 308.

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empire, are permitted to live in the same house (in eadem domo simul manere) and to incite each other toward the good by mutual exhortation.”28 The implications of Honorius’ permission were, first, that women were permitted to live together in private houses; and, second, that they were to encourage one another, so that they could maintain spiritual independence. By living, working, and praying together, they established ascetic domestic households, which gave recognition and stability to their way of life. Their households developed in a manner typical of homes in cities at this time. Increasing numbers of merchants and artisans started to establish urban homesteads that combined living space and the workshop, and incorporated both the nuclear family and the servants. Thanks to Jacques de Vitry and Pope Honorius III, this model of the urban household was adapted as an approved paradigm for small groups of religious women. Jacques does not appear to have found it necessary to request similar privileges for holy men, who, indeed, do not seem to have been subjected to the same rigorous process of institutionalization. Instead of the complex trail that follows quasi-​ religious women, men such as Rulman or Mary of Oignies’ husband, John, are mentioned only in passing.

The Ascetic Domestic Household Honorius’ permission seems to have been influential both in the Low Countries and in the German territories. From around 1230 onwards, groups of holy women in both areas became both more prevalent and more formal.29 In the southern Low Countries, such women enjoyed considerable political support from the countesses Joanna (d. 1374)  and Marguerite (d. 1405)  of Flanders, which enabled them to live as they chose despite ecclesiastical regulations that were soon created to attempt to limit and control them.30 Smaller informal communities soon developed into large “court beguinages.” As Walter Simons has shown in his Cities of Ladies, devout women started to build houses that were recognized by the civic authorities.31 In their daily



R. B.  C. Huygens, ed., Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (1160/​1170–​1240), évêque de Saint-​Jean d’Acre (Leiden, 1960), 74, no. 1. 29 On the Low Countries, see Walter Simons, “Beginnings:  Naming Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, 1200–​50,” in Böhringer, Deane, and van Engen, Labels and Libels, 9–​52. On the German lands see, Deane, “From Case Studies to Comparative Models,” and Böhringer, “Merging into Clergy.” 30 Erin L. Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York, 2006), 81–​3 and 93–​4; Erin L. Jordan, “Female Founders: Exercising Authority in Thirteenth-​ Century Flanders and Hainaut,” Church History 88 (2008): 553–​61. 31 Simons, Cities of Ladies. 28

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religious routine these locally recognized beguines often took on certain characteristics of the monastic life. The regulations for beguines in the diocese of Liège had official (but non-​ canonical) recognition from 1246 onward.32 The rule by Robert of Thourotte (d. 1246) is frequently cited by later bishops, such as Jean de Heynsberg (d. 1459) on 1 January 1420.33 These regulations appear to have been widely known among beguines, and freely adapted to fit the needs of various communities throughout the diocese. They are explicit about which ways of life were to be recognized, and read: “those who do not reside within the enclosure of a beguinage, but live outside although they call themselves beguines, and are attired like them in modest habit, we do not wish to favor with extraordinary privileges.”34 But these regulations neither created an official ordo beghinarum, nor brought any kind of uniformity to beguine houses. The devout “living outside” continued to be considered independent lay religious women. The ongoing commitment that these women had to active, manual, and domestic forms of piety can be seen in the esteem they held for Martha; indeed, the female leaders of beguine communities in the southern Low Countries were often given the title of “Martha” (Marte). At the same time, beguinages were given privileges denied to “ordinary” members of the laity. Beguines in Liège were exempt from guild regulations as they were thought of as a religious community, and could allow both their prices and earnings to compete with those set by the guilds.35 Moreover, certain beguine communities began to move toward a new model of property ownership in that they now owned houses and land as a community rather than as individuals. That is to say, the property was no longer in the hands of private individuals, but in what was known as the “dead hand.” The countesses of Flanders and other secular rulers in the Low Countries endowed beguinages with large donations and offered them protection; at the same time, they encouraged beguines to live in larger groups.36 This led to the rise of court beguinages, which were walled areas of the city that often became separate parishes. From this it is clear that recognized and recognizable communal living arrangements had now emerged from the scattered lifestyles of the early

Hector Nimal, Les béguinages. Origine, développement, règlement de Robert de Langres, organisation intérieure, influence (Nivelles, 1908). 33 Ibid., 41. 34 Ibid., 99. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage, 81–​3 and 93–​4; see also Jordan, “Female Founders,” 553–​61. 32

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mulieres religiosae. These new communities were regulated by informal statutes and civil, not canon, law. Indeed, beguines were lay women and not recognized as having canonical status. Even those in formally recognized institutions were and continued to be lay rather than monastic. At the same time, it is extremely important to keep in mind that the movement of widows and single women living devout lives in private households (either individually or in small groups) discussed in the article by Magnani in this volume continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages. Both groups of women combined a spiritual life of penitence and contemplation with active participation in the town’s life. In German territories, the situation developed differently; here, there were no secular rulers like the Flemish countesses who took initiatives to protect or endow court beguinages, and ecclesiastical authorities established measures to restrict the proliferation of houses of non-​monastic women.37 Although the research of Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Letha Böhringer shows that such communities existed, they never achieved the prominence of court beguinages in the Low Countries.38 In 1233, a synod of bishops in Mainz decreed that: women who did not want to follow a recognized rule, but practiced chastity and wore special clothing, should not wander around but live in their own privately owned houses from their own wealth (in domibus suis vivant de proprio), if they were able; however if they were poor, they were to earn their own food and other necessities by their own labor or by serving another.39

This decree was confirmed in later statutes, which can be seen as developments on the privilege of Honorius III and should be interpreted as an episcopal recognition of the ascetic domestic households in the Rhineland and approval for lay women to live as religious in the secular world.40 In this way, lay religious women and their households were accepted as belonging to the religious landscape, but also as not belonging to the ecclesiastical domain. Their houses had no status in canon law but they offered women—​particularly widows and those with whom they lived—​an appropriate forum for achieving



Gertrud Neumann, Rheinisches Beginen-​und Begardenwesen. Ein Mainzer Beitrag zur religiosen Bewegung am Rhein (Meisenheim-​am-​Glan, 1960); Frank-​Michael Reichstein, Das Beginenwesen in Deutschland. Studien und Katalog (Berlin, 2001); Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter. Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich (Cologne, 2012). 38 Deane, “From Case Studies to Comparative Models”; Böhringer, “Merging into Clergy.” 39 Neumann, Rheinisches Beginen-​und Begardenwesen, 21, n. 28. 40 Ibid., 22; Reichstein, Das Beginenwesen, 301. 37

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perfection while remaining in the world. The women themselves were known by a variety of names such as arme Schwestern (“poor sisters”). It soon became clear that such houses needed protection. During the year 1251, the papal legate Hugh of Saint-​Cher (d. 1263) decreed that women who lived outside the protective walls of a cloister in Cologne and were not subject to a canonical rule needed extra care. He claimed that these women, whom he called “beguines,” were adrift on the stormy waves of the sea, as it were, lashed by the perils and temptations of this world. He took them under his protection.41 He showed admiration for their strength of mind and wanted to protect them from trouble—​as he did in the Low Countries for Juliana of Cornillon (d. 1258) and Eve of Liège (d. 1266), the women responsible for instigating the feast of Corpus Christi—​but felt highly uncomfortable with their non-​regulated way of life. His preference was to place them behind the walls of a cloister. In 1261, Hugh’s friend Pope Urban IV (r. 1261–​4) decreed that the beguines of Cologne should follow the (non-​canonical) 1246 rule for beguines of Liège.42 In the German lands, it was primarily the mendicant orders that took on the spiritual care of these women. They attended mass in Franciscan churches, had Franciscan or Dominican confessors, and were usually buried in Franciscan cemeteries. Some of them followed a rule that had Franciscan associations: either the precepts in Memoriale propositi, or the 1289 rule written by Nicholas IV, today known as the Rule of the Third Order of St. Francis. Although these rules did not confer official canonical standing upon these women, the 1289 rule in particular gave them the external appearance of membership in the Franciscan order. Women who professed this rule and took vows were often referred to as “regular tertiaries.” Although they were not recognized by canon law, they were considered (both by popular acclamation and by certain canonists) to have a different status from those simply in pious lay households.43 At the same time, many pious lay men and women adopted this rule without entering a convent or professing public vows, as is illustrated by the example of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg (d. 1335), who is discussed below.



Leonard Ennen and Gottfried Eckerts, eds., Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Köln, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1863; reprint 1970), 2:306, no. 301. 42 Urban IV, “Pontificis alterum Diploma in favorem Beghinarum Leodiensium, datum anno 1261, aut 1262,” in Opera diplomatica, ed. Aubertus Miraeus and Johannes Franciscus Foppens, 4 vols. (Louvain and Brussels, 1723–​48), 1:430 (chapter CXIX). 43 For examples from canonical case law, see Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman,” 71–​135. 41

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Despite the synodal statutes, considerable suspicion remained concerning lay women in religion, whether they were poor sisters, beguines, or tertiaries. Those skeptical of these women wanted them either to choose the monastic life under a canonically approved rule and a regular confessor, or to stay within the local community of the faithful. On matters in which their desires were met with controversy, such as frequent confession or communion, they were to adhere to the wishes of the local parish priest. These suspicions were soon given a voice in the Clementine decrees, principally the rulings of the Council of Vienne (1311/​12), which were published in Strasbourg in 1318. In particular, Cum de quibusdam condemned women commonly known as “beguines” who neither promised obedience nor professed a canonical rule. As Jacqueline Tarrant made clear, however, it must be kept in mind that the Council’s intent was not to suppress all non-​monastic women.44 Instead, the last lines of the document read: “Of course, by the preceding we in no way intend to forbid any faithful women, whether or not they promise chastity, from living honestly in their own dwellings, doing penance, and serving the Lord in a spirit of humility, this being allowed to them as the Lord inspires them.”45 Notwithstanding this, non-​monastic communities of women in Strasbourg and other areas of Europe were temporarily criticized and scrutinized by bishops and local clergy.46 As a result of the criticisms, a number of communities of women chose to adopt a more traditional monastic lifestyle in an effort to distance themselves from the term “beguine.” As Sigrid Hirbodian (Schmitt) has shown, these convents of regular tertiaries developed into centers for commemoration of the dead (Totenmemoria) and were increasingly institutionalized.47 At the same time, the saintly biographies of pious lay women were now widely rewritten, presenting them as traditional religious. For example, Elisabeth of Hungary came to be seen as having taken on the characteristics of a Franciscan, while the Italian lay saint Catherine of Siena was hailed as a Dominican.48



Jacqueline Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees on the Beguines:  Conciliar and Papal Versions,” Archivum Historiae Pontificae 12 (1974): 300–​8. Quoted and discussed in Alexander Patschovski, “Straszburger Beginenverfolgungen im 14. Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv für die Erforschung des Mittelalters 30 (1974): 154; see also Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”, 24; and Elizabeth Makowski, “Mulieres religiosae, Strictly Speaking: Some Fourteenth-​Century Canonical Opinions,” Catholic Historical Review 85 (1999): 1–​14. 46 See Sigrid Schmitt, “Verfolgung, Schutz und Vereinnahmung: die Strassburger Beginen im 14. Jahrhundert,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 27 (2008): 124–​6. 47 Ibid.,  122–​4. 48 Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker, “Devoted Holiness in the Lay World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Women and Gender, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 464–​79. 44 45

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Nevertheless, non-​monastic households continued to exist, particularly in the areas identified by Jacques de Vitry of the Low Countries, northern France and the German lands. The papal cleric Alberic of Metz (d. 1354) observed: “By this it appears that the prohibition of this constitution [Cum de quibusdam] does not extend to the beguines of Metz, Verdun, and many other places in which they live in their own houses (in domibus propriis morantur).”49 That is, they were neither to wander nor to live in communal houses. In the fifteenth century, the Dominican reformer Johann Nider (d.  1438) wrote a treatise outlining the various types of lay people living as religious in the world. He observed groups of poor women, particularly widows, living together in houses that were commonly called domus animarum (“houses of souls”).50 Indeed, many city archives still include material pertaining to gotzhusen (“houses of God”) and seelshuzen (“houses of souls”) run by widows and other pious women. Much scholarly work remains to be done on these houses. Eva Gertrud Neumann provides a clue to the reason why recent scholarship seems to have forgotten these private religious households. Although her sources indicate that there were many more beguines in the private sphere (im Privatbereich) than officially recognized convents, she decided not to include these findings in her work because “Only the model of order and convent are available for a structural analysis of the beguine houses.”51 Jörg Voigt has produced an initial inventory of such houses.52 Such lay men and women who lived in a religious manner represented a significant section of the population. From the information that we have for late medieval Strasbourg, we can see that in addition to the clergy from the cathedral and the nine parish churches, there were at least fifteen houses with some degree of affiliation to the mendicant orders: five houses of men and ten of women. Moreover, the convent of St. Stephen housed a community of noble canonesses who did not take vows. In the fourteenth century, there were at least six recluses as well as pious lay women living as religious in more than thirty beguine houses (usually five to ten per house). At the end of the century, there were more than eighty-​f ive beguine houses. We should add to these the unknown number of ascetic domestic households like that of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (see below),

Apparatus on the Cum de quibusdam, cited in Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”, 36. John Van Engen, “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World,” in Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter, ed. Franz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert (Berlin, 2004), 605. 51 Neumann, Rheinisches Beginen-​und Begardenwesen,  72–​4. 52 Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter.

49 50

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as well as the Gottesfreunde.53 This atmosphere of lay religious life must have been extraordinary. Heilke describes the city as being “full of grace” (wo der gnade inne ist). It would be interesting to see whether these same findings are true of independent houses of pious men. As noted above, Jacques de Vitry did not mention the activities of devout lay men alongside his “multitude of holy virgins” in the prologue to his Life of Mary of Oignies. Indeed, male houses do not seem to have been as prolific in northern Europe as their female counterparts. What few archival sources we have from communities of devout lay men (generally known as “beghards”) suggest that, like the women, they were often criticized for living a non-​traditional life, and even accused of heresy. From the mid-​thirteenth century onward, they were encouraged to join official religious orders. Like their female counterparts, a number of beghard households took up the 1289 rule of Nicholas IV, and were known as members of the “Franciscan third order.” Examining the way of life lived by these men and their like-​minded contemporaries among the Gottesfreunde offers the potential for future insight. At the same time, many joined the main branches of the mendicant orders and were able to live the vita mixta in a more official manner; this was not a viable option for the women.

Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg For women, the household (particularly the private household of a widow) was a fitting place to shape full-​time religious life while remaining active in the world. The case of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg shows an example of one of the forms that this ascetic domestic household—​both embodied and inspired by Martha—​could take. Lady Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg (c. 1275–​1335), from Ortenberg castle high above Strasbourg, was a woman of remarkable character.54 A  spiritual biography written by a woman from her immediate circle, Heilke of Staufenberg (d. after 1335), was only discovered in the 1980s, and has recently been edited by Anneke Mulder-​Bakker.55

Médard Barth, Handbuch der elsässischen Kirchen im Mittelalter (Strasbourg, 1960, 1980). For Cologne, see Letha Böhringer, Geistliche Gemeinschaften für Frauen im mittelalterlichen Köln (Cologne, 2009). 54 Epitaph, AASS Feb. 23, vol. 6, new ed. (Brussels, 1868–​1925), 366. 55 Anneke B. Mulder-​Bakker, in collaboration with Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis (translation), and Michael Hopf and Freimut Löser (edition and annotation), The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble Women:  A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-​Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Turnhout, 2017), 113–​250. 53

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This text relates that Gertrude was widowed around 1301 while pregnant with her fourth child, and that she saw her widowhood as an opportunity to take control of her own life. She had previously made the acquaintance of poor sisters (arme swestern) in Offenburg, and she now chose to live that form of life. Gertrude settled in Offenburg near the Franciscans, where she was soon joined by Heilke of Staufenberg, a younger relative. They formed a private household and “were together for thirty years and twenty-​eight weeks.”56 The women often prayed in the Franciscan church, and Gertrude personally accepted the so-​called third rule of St. Francis. She lived a very ascetic life, and spent her last years in complete detachment from the world. Heilke did not follow this rigid discipline. Initially, the two women went to Strasbourg regularly to hear famous mendicant preachers. Around 1317, they moved to the city and bought a house in the patrician neighborhood. They invited prominent mendicant scholars to join them there for conversations about matters of faith. Heilke “re-​preached” the homilies they had heard, for “she could retain homilies very well and repeat them quite meaningfully.”57 Gertrude put into practice the words she heard or read from Meister Eckhart’s sermons, particularly sermon 86, which portrayed Martha as a symbol of wisdom and understanding. The sermon states that she was of “respected age and rich in experience. This made her think that no one could do the work as well as she.” Like Gertrude, Martha lived completely detached from all property and temptations of the world and had “a mature power of reflection, which enabled her to accomplish external works with the perfection that love demands.” To Eckhart, the act of Martha’s sister Mary—​of sitting at Jesus’ feet—​was merely a first step toward religious perfection. In his view, it was Martha’s work in the world that represented the fullness of this state. He preached that “Martha was so grounded in being that her activity did not hinder her. Work and activity led her to eternal bliss.”58 In his view, true contemplation of God was realized in fruitful action. From such preaching, Gertrude felt called, like Martha, “to go out into the world … to see to the needs of her neighbors and come to their aid.”59 At the same time, she engaged in charitable activity, hosted young mothers, taught children, and worked in the hospital. Gertrude can be seen as a living

Ibid., 131. Ibid., 239. 58 Meister Eckhart, Sermon 86, translated in McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 338 and 343. See also Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York, 2001). 59 Mulder-​Bakker, Dedicated Spiritual Life, 242. 56 57

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embodiment of the precise goals of Eckhart’s sermon 86; she and Heilke realized the ideal of perfection while remaining in the world.

Conclusions The decision to live in an ascetic private household in the city was a conscious choice, rather than a result of not being able to enter a monastery. Lay women such as Elisabeth, Gertrude, and Heilke combined a rich spiritual life and, in many cases, physical asceticism with active roles in the social and secular world—​an ideal modeled on the biblical Martha. The documentary trail for women who lived this form of life is much richer and more easily traced than for their male contemporaries. Their houses were meeting places for pious women, fellow townspeople, and learned mendicants. Sympathetic churchmen such as Jacques de Vitry, Hostiensis, and Johann Nider called women who lived this form of life true religiosae. In the Low Countries, northern France, and the German territories, secular and ecclesiastical authorities accepted them and protected their homes. Here, sympathetic preachers used the models of the biblical Martha as portrayed in the legend Van Sunte Maria Magdalena Bekeringhe. Many city governments were favorably inclined toward these women as they were full members of society; it might also have helped that they did not have the ecclesiastical exemption from urban duties and taxes. According to medieval monks writing the history of the quest for religious perfection, this search meant withdrawal from society and living in a monastic institution, which, in turn, necessitated (at least in theory) following a canonical rule and renouncing both property and personal freedom. This changed significantly in the urban society of the later Middle Ages. Groups such as the early Franciscans lived in the world and supported themselves by begging. As women were restricted from begging and preaching by both social and religious norms, however, they seldom participated in the mendicant life of the friars. Many of the so-​called “female branches” of the mendicant orders observed the traditional feminine norms of contemplation and enclosure. At the same time, a number of mulieres religiosae sought religious perfection while remaining in the secular world. These women lived in ascetic domestic households and found justification for their way of life in the writings of churchmen such as Meister Eckhart. Although they are now often thought of as a “new type of nun,” these pious lay women were a vital and vibrant part of the secular world. This chapter has explored the lives of these women in northern Europe, but there is still much work to be done, not only 1071

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for northern Europe, but also for similar households and communities in Italy and throughout southern Europe.

Bibliography Böhringer, Leta, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, eds., Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe. Turnhout, 2014. Constable, Giles. Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. Cambridge, 1995. De Vooys, C. G. N. “De legende ‘Van Sunte Maria Magdalena bekeringhe’.” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde 24 (1905): 16–​44. Elm, Kaspar. “Vita regularis sine regula: Bedeutung, Rechtsstellung und Selbstverständnis des mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Semireligiosentums.” In Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, edited by František Šmahel and Elisabeth Muller-​Luckner, 239–​73. Munich, 1998. Gecser, Ottó. “Lives of St Elizabeth:  Their Rewritings and Diffusion in the Thirteenth Century,” Analecta Bollandiana 127 (2009): 49–​107. Hansel, Hans. Die Maria-​Magdalena Legende. Eine Quellen-​Untersuchung. Greifswald, 1937. Jansen, Katherine L. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ, 2000. Makowski, Elizabeth. “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”:  Quasi-​Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages. Washington, DC, 2005. McGinn, Bernard. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany. New York, 2005. More, Alison. “Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval Europe.” Church History 83 (2014): 297–​323. Mulder-​Bakker, Anneke B. The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noble Women: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-​Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg. In collaboration with Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis (translation), and Michael Hopf and Freimut Löser (edition and annotation). Turnhout, 2017.   “Devoted Holiness in the Lay World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Women and Gender, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, 464–79. Oxford, 2013.   Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia, PA, 2005.  ed. Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation. Turnhout, 2006. Nimal, Hector. Les béguinages. Origine, développement, règlement de Robert de Langres, organisation intérieure, influence. Nivelles, 1908. Schmitt, Sigrid. “Verfolgung, Schutz und Vereinnahmung: die Strassburger Beginen im 14. Jahrhundert.” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 27 (2008): 111–​36. Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–​1565. Philadelphia, PA, 2003. Tarrant, Jacqueline. “The Clementine Decrees on the Beguines:  Conciliar and Papal Versions.” Archivum Historiae Pontificae 12 (1974): 300–​8. Van Engen, John. “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World.” In Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter, edited by Franz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert, 583–​615. Berlin, 2004.

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Monks and the Universities, c. 1200–​1500 Ja m e s G .   Cla rk

When at the end of the twelfth century the universities first emerged in Italy, Spain, and France, the culture of monastic learning was already centuries-​old and clearly defined. Indeed, it was the monasteries’ lively discourse on the place and purpose of study in the years after the Gregorian reform that gave form and focus to the emerging intellectual program of the new, secular schools. Europe’s monasteries did not react to the rise of the universities; rather, they were active in their evolution, shaping their learned culture with a mature syllabus of their own. Secular masters fashioned an image which was set self-​consciously in opposition to the professed path of humility. Yet as a corporate, and later collegiate, body, these masters found much inspiration in the monastery, from its cloister, a purpose-​built study space, to its morning schedule of teaching and its seasonal circulation of books. In their turn, the schools extended the intellectual horizons of the monks and equipped them to participate in the clerical culture of the institutional Church. It was no easy exchange. The secular university struck out frequently at a source of such obvious cultural influence and immutable institutional strength. For their part, in almost every generation after Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), monks questioned the priorities of their mental opus, and struggled to reconcile traditional ascetic and modish academic impulses.1

Monks and the Making of the Universities The learned environment of the university itself represented an evolution, from the informal schools and itinerant masters who spread across France, Italy, and Spain at the beginning of the twelfth century. Under the influence of dominant foundations, they became settled and protected, and, after 1200,

See the publications by Mews, including his article in this volume.

1

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acquired a corporate identity of their own. In their formative years, what marked their relationship with the monasteries above all was its common ground. The charisma of the new masters and their new critical methodology may have challenged the conventions of the cloister, but the sources of authority (scriptural, patristic, classical), the topics (philosophy, theology), and even the questions that commanded their attention were the same in these first decades. Monastic masters followed the progress of secular scholars closely, expressed their admiration and were even disposed to hear them for themselves. When Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux descended on Paris in 1140 to condemn the new schools, he found his own monks among the students.2 The rise of the house of canons of Saint-​Victor in the third decade of the twelfth century, at the heart of Parisian scholarship, is indicative of a common culture.3 It did not efface the differences between the monasteries and the schools, as the famous confrontation between Abbot Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) and Master Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) bears witness.4 Yet at Oxford and Paris in these early years there were just as many signs of mutual support. It was the abbot of Sainte-​Geneviève who tempted Parisian masters over the Petit Pont with his own licenciae docendi when their place on the Île de la Cité was threatened.5 In southern Europe it was not philosophy and theology but law (Bologna) and medicine (Montpellier, Salamanca) that formed the syllabus of the schools, but this did not distance them from their monastic neighbors. The lawyer Gratian (d. 1144/​5) may himself have been a monk; his early follower, Stephen of Tournai (d. 1203), was a canon of Sainte-​Geneviève.6 Such was monastic interest in the new medical schools that the Second Lateran Council (1139) was moved to exclude them.7 The increasing integration of the two milieux was halted before the schools had taken on the corporate identity of the “universitas.” In southern Europe

Paul Savage and Benedicta Ward, eds., with Rozanne Elder, The Great Beginning of Cîteaux:  A Narrative of the Beginning of the Cistercian Order (Collegeville, MN, 2012),  29–​30. 3 On the regular canons, see the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. 4 John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1983), 200–​2 and 209–​15. 5 Richard William Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2  vols. (Oxford, 1995), 2:22–​3; Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origin of the University (Stanford, CA, 1985), 16. 6 James Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession:  Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago, IL, 2008), 101–​2 and 107; Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, 2000), 5–​7. 7 Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2  vols. (London and Washington, DC, 1990), 1:198–​9 (canon 9). See also the article by Brenner in this volume. 2

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it was the economic and political muscle of the commune that pressed a secular identity on the nascent universities; in the north, it was the result of reforming programs of papacy, prelacy, and the monasteries themselves. The prohibitions of the Second Lateran Council signaled a new direction driven more forcefully in the generation that followed. In a conspicuous challenge to their early cooperation, both Cluny and Cîteaux now closed their claustral schools to the unprofessed.8 Their spokesmen began to articulate a refined view of the monastic life as a spiritual and intellectual summit “where God’s grace itself is the teacher,” an advanced academy entered on graduating from the elementary school of the secular clergy.9 Alexander Nequam (d. 1217), whose route from Parisian master to abbot had been far from easy, declared that “the life of the monk stands midway between the life of the scholar and the life triumphant.”10 This defense of the monastic syllabus did not, in fact, result in the complete separation of the cloister from the schools. Over time it offered a principled foundation for stronger and sustained ties. The turn in monastic discourse delineated a career structure for ambitious schoolmen, which many of them followed in the generations between the trial of Abelard (1140) and the Paris commission of Robert of Courçon (1215). The progress from magister to monachus is most clearly traced at radial points from Paris, where we find such famous names as Alain of Lille (d. 1202, Cîteaux) and Peter the Chanter (d. 1197, Longpont), but Bologna lawyers also turned to the monastic life.11 In fact, the rhetoric of a superior vocation raised the educational threshold for monastic profession. For entrants, the daily lecturae of the larger monasteries would not have been far removed from those in the schools.12 To capture the spirit of his own abbey of St Albans in this era, Matthew Paris (d. 1259) represented it as “a school that was master to others.”13

Ferruolo, Origin of the University, 52. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1982), 79. 10 Richard William Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam, 1157–​1217, ed. Margaret T. Gibson (Oxford, 1984), 9, n. 43. 11 Wim Verbaal, “Cistercians in Dialogue:  Bringing the World into the Monastery,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge, 2012), 242; Brundage, Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession, 101–​2 and 107. 12 Christopher J. Holdsworth, “John of Ford and English Cistercian Writing, 1167–​1214,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 11 (1961): 134–​6. 13 Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani a Thoma Walsingham, regnante Ricardo Secundo, ejusdem ecclesiæ præcentore, compilata, 3  vols. (London, 1867), 1:59. 8 9

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University Monks Yet within a generation—​between the early and mid-​thirteenth century—​ the relationship between cloister and schools was forever transformed. The energy of contemporary scholarship burgeoned in the schools, securing their status as the gravitational center for advanced study and, increasingly, for clerical advancement. In northern Europe the traffic between monasteries and the nascent universities now turned and it was the professed monks who were pulled into their orbit. In the south, the civic identity and the secular syllabus of the schools stifled any such turn; in fact, it was only the late provision of a theology syllabus in the fifteenth century that brought regulars into their midst, and then it was not the monastic orders but the mendicants that became the dominant presence.14 The coming of the monks to the northern universities might be seen as a natural consequence of their institutional development, which gave them not only a permanent structure but also a place in the governing priorities of the papacy and the provincial churches. Yet there was also a new appetite for academic study arising in the regular church. The passing of a generation of charismatic leaders, and political and practical tensions in their wide network, made the Cistercians anxious over their very survival.15 Church leaders feared a general monastic decline, their alarm sharpened by the spread of heresy and the resurgence of Islam. Channeling their fears into canons for reform, they all promoted, for the first time, learning as a means of monastic renewal. As early as 1199, the Cistercian general chapter acted to prescribe a syllabus of reading.16 There was a conspicuous concern for learning among the canons issued at the Fourth Lateran Council, which included a call for every collegiate and monastic church to provide a master to instruct its members and to retain a qualified preacher to serve both as pastor and instructor.17 The new departure intended by the Lateran Council did not come quickly. The Council had called for the creation of general chapters of black monks to ensure the success of the reforms. Only in England did they accept this new form of governance. Even here it was more than thirty years (1247) before the appointment of a teaching master in every cloister was first proposed. The response of the other monastic constituencies was slower still. The regular

Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 2002), 370, 373–​5, 378, and 382–​4. 15 Holdsworth, “John of Ford,” 132. 16 William Doremus Paden Jr., “De monachis rithmos facientibus: Helinant de Froidmont, Bertran de Born and the Cistercian General Chapter of 1199,” Speculum 55 (1980), 669. 17 Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:239–​40 (canons 10–​11). 14

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canons first considered the introduction of an instructional sermon in the cloister in 1267.18 It might have been expected that the Cistercians would respond readily to the papal reforms but by the time of the Fourth Lateran Council they were pursuing measures of their own. Abbot Arnaud of Cîteaux (d. 1225) imported school texts from Paris to support study at the abbey and (at least) its nearest daughter houses.19 The regular canons were also developing their own conventual models of learning. The Victorine Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) led a colony to Vercelli (Italy) to create a house of studies modeled on the celebrated Parisian abbey.20 Prominent monastic voices continued to represent their culture of learning as the polar opposite of the universities. John of Ford (d. 1214) called for the Cistercian cloister to be a scola caritatis (“school of love”), a true learning not to be found in earthly books; his confrère Adam of Perseigne (d. 1221) contrasted the wisdom of the worldly school with the “greater wisdom” of the professed.21 Matthew Paris’s dyspeptic report of the first monastic studium at Paris was symptomatic of an anti-​scholastic current also passing through the black monks.22 What weakened this counter-​ tow may have been a groundswell of monastic opinion receptive to the schools. It has often been suggested that the monks were led to the universities by an individual, the Cistercian Stephen of Lexington (c. 1198–​c. 1258), who provided the guiding hand in the foundation of the order’s inaugural university studium in 1245. Yet the record of rentals at Paris paid by French abbeys points to the presence of Cistercians at the beginning of the thirteenth century; scholastic books in the hands of monks of this period strengthen this suggestion.23 This early contact with the universities may have been largely a French phenomenon, although outliers are also known, including Abbot Gunner (d. 1251) of Øm, Denmark.24 The

William Abel Pantin, ed., Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, 3 vols. (London, 1930–​7), 1:3, 7–​8, and 27–​8; H. E. Salter, ed., Chapters of the Augustinian Canons (Oxford, 1922), 4–​5. 19 Brian Noell, “Scholarship and Activism at Citeaux in the Age of Innocent III,” Viator 38 (2007): 21–​53. 20 Ferruolo, Origin of the University, 29; Martina Schilling, “Victorine Liturgy and Its Architectural Setting at the Church of Sant’Andrea in Vercelli,” Gesta 42 (2003): 115. 21 Ferruolo, Origin of the University, 81; Bynum, Jesus as Mother,  78–​9. 22 H. R. Luard, ed., Matthaei Parisiensis monachi sancti Albani Chronica majora, 7  vols. (London, 1872–​83), 5:79–​80 and 195. 23 Derek Baker, “Heresy and Learning in Early Cistercianism,” in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, ed. Derek Baker (Cambridge, 1972), 93–​107; Noell, “Scholarship and Activism at Citeaux in the Age of Innocent III,” 21–​53. 24 Brian Patrick McGuire, Conflict and Continuity at Øm Abbey (Vigborg, 1976), 58 and no. 169. 18

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ad hoc support of monks at Paris was not unique to the Cistercians: Cluniac abbeys also retained lodgings in the city in the first quarter of the thirteenth century.25 The presence of black monks at the universities before the mid-​thirteenth century remains shadowy. A  record of a payment reveals men from Saint-​ Denis occupying their own hostel at Paris as early as 1229–​30.26 They may have been the first house to maintain their own premises there by some margin but there was occasional traffic from (much) further afield. There may be more than meets the eye in some of the thirteenth-​century manuscripts of scholastic texts held at significant centers such as Worcester.27 There can be little doubt that, before the new mendicant orders had even been recognized by the papacy, there was already a monastic population in the schools. It was the Cistercians, whose old identity and new initiatives for reform were subject to central direction, who first acted to coordinate and concentrate this traffic and to establish an institutional presence at the universities. The creation of their own studium at Paris was conceived under Abbot Evrard (d. 1238) and the scheme was brought to completion by 1248.28 The Cistercians’ plans were not confined to Paris. They also sought accommodation for their student monks at Montpellier, Toulouse, and perhaps even Salamanca two or three decades before studia generales were formalized there.29 Formal studia on the Paris model followed in northwest Spain at Estella (1260) and at Montpellier (1263). In addition, by the close of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians were looking to support the learning of their central European network, founding studia at Cologne (1284) and Würzburg (1285).30 The spectacle of Cistercians settled at Europe’s universities did not propel the monks to them en masse. The anti-​scholastic reaction of the black monks may have persisted and, even if not, the wealthy and independent abbeys may





Thomas Sullivan, “The Quodlibeta of the Canons Regular,” in Theological Quolibeta in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Chris D. Schabel (Leiden, 2007), 379–​80. 26 Thomas S. Sullivan, Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, AD 1229–​1500: A Biographical Register (Leiden, 1995), 1, no. 4. 27 For example, Worcester Cathedral Library, MS F71, containing inter alia Peter Comestor’s Scholastic History, Peter of Poitiers’s distinctions on the Psalter, and the Summa of Richard Wetheringsett:  R. M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library (Cambridge, 2003), 44–​5. 28 Baker, “Heresy and Learning in Early Cistercianism,” 96. 29 Constance H. Berman, “Monastic Hospices in Southern France and Colleges in Montpellier, Toulouse, Paris and Oxford:  The Cistercian Urban Presence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 102 (2007):  747–​80; Caroline Obert, “La promotion des études chez les Cisterciens,” Citeaux 39 (1988): 66–​7. 30 Louis J. Lekai, The White Monks: A History of the Cistercian Order (Okauchee, WI, 1953), 61; Obert, “La promotion des études chez les Cisterciens,” 65–​77. 25

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have been satisfied with their own individual arrangements and investments. Certainly, beyond the Cluniac congregation, the principle of capitular governance was still too raw to promote collective action. In fact, it was the comparatively small and close-​knit congregations of regular canons that were the first to follow suit with studia being established at Paris when the Cistercian house was still under construction. The abbey of Saint-​Victor was recognized as a studium in its own right as early as 1237. The order of Val des Écoliers (literally the “Valley of students”), which, like Saint-​Victor, grew from the scholarly community in Paris, established its first house at Langres but had also set up a Parisian university studium by 1250. In the same year the Premonstratensians opened a hospitium in Paris whose main function was to support canons studying at the university. By the end of the decade, Cluny was prompted to act, and its own Paris studium finally opened its doors in 1262.31 The idea of a monastic studium at the universities can be said to have been the fruit of French monasticism. It was not until the last quarter of the thirteenth century that there was any institutional presence for monks at northern Europe’s other leading university, Oxford. The English Cistercians came to Oxford only in the 1270s, after sending their students to Paris for several decades, and the foundation that resulted, Rewley Abbey, was meagre by comparison with the order’s Paris studium. The English black monks followed their example, establishing a common studium for monks of any house in their network in 1277. Named Gloucester College after the abbey that provided the building plot, it was closer to the Paris model of a monastic studium than the Cistercians’ own house. Sited centrally, it was planned as a college, with student accommodation positioned around a common hall, although it was at least a century before it acquired the chapel required for regular observance.32



Catherine Guyon, Les écoliers du Christ. L’ordre canonial du val des écoliers 1201–​1539 (Saint-​ Étienne, 1998), 21–​2; Marshall E. Crossnoe, “Education and the Care of Souls: Pope Gregory IX, the Order of St. Victor, and the University of Paris in 1237,” Mediaeval Studies 61 (1999):  137–​72; Bernard Ardura, “Les collèges de l’ordre de Prémontré, du Moyen Âge au concile de Trente,” in Die regulierten Kollegien im Europea des Mittelalters under der Renaissance /​Les collèges réguliers en Europe au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, ed. Andreas Sohn and Jacques Verger (Bochum, 2012), 179–​93; Sullivan, “Quodlibeta of the Canons Regular,” 360 and 373–​4; Ursmer Berlière, “Les collèges bénédictins aux universités du Moyen Âge,” Revue bénédictine 10 (1893): 145–​58; Denyse Riche, L’ordre de Cluny à la fin du Moyen Âge. Le vieux pays clunisien, XIIe–​XVe (Saint-​Étienne, 2000), 212. 32 R. Barrie Dobson, “The Religious Orders, 1370–​1540,” in The History of the University of Oxford, II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Jeremy I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford, 1992), 546–​8 and  562–​3. 31

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The Monastic University By 1300, the monastic orders had raised only a slight profile on the academic skyline, almost exclusively at northern Europe’s largest universities, Paris and Oxford. Yet in spite of war, famine, and plague, in the course of the fourteenth century their position was transformed. By 1450 the monks were the most conspicuous clerical presence at the northern universities and, in the higher faculties at least, perhaps the most numerous.33 The catalyst for change was again the intervention of a reforming papacy. Amid mounting ecclesiological tension at the turn of the century there were renewed calls for learned reform. At the Council of Vienne (1311), general anxiety over monastic laxity narrowed into a critique of claustral education and formation. The Vienne decretal Ne in agro required the monasteries to ensure that their recruits were adequately educated in the “primitive sciences” of grammar, logic, and philosophy, the principal disciplines of the university arts course.34 Previously there had been no formal provision in the monasteries for teaching in these fields, even for those monks who progressed to a period of study at their university studium. From the outset the student monks were forbidden by the university authorities from entering their faculty of arts, and they had been obliged to prepare for their advanced studies in theology with whatever resources they had to hand. Now, in the wake of Vienne, the monasteries were compelled to consider creating an arts course of their own. The new departure signaled in this decretal was sealed by the systematic reforms of Benedict XII (r. 1334–​42). The first Cistercian pontiff since the foundation of their Paris studium, whose own career had prospered in the schools, Benedict devoted his reign to monastic reform. Between 1335 and 1339 he issued canons for the Benedictines, the Cistercians, and the regular canons.35 The conduct of the Cistercian colleges was critiqued; the black monks and canons were required to show more commitment to university study. Each house of each order was now bound to commit a quota of its brethren to advanced study, and the university studia of the orders were to be



Ibid., 541; Peter Cunich, “Benedictine Monks at the University of Oxford and the Dissolution of the Monasteries,” in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. Anthony Marrett Crosby and Henry Wansborough (London, 1997), 155; Paul F. Grendler, “The Universities of the Renaissance and Reformation,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 8; David Ditchburn, “Religion, Ritual and the Rhythm of the Year in Late Medieval St Andrew’s,” in Medieval St Andrew’s: Church, Cult, City, ed. Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson (Woodbridge, 2017), 101 and 104. 34 Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), 270; Sophie Menache, Clement V (Cambridge, 2003), 299. 35 Orme, Medieval Schools, 270. 33

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sustained by a congregational subscription; the Vienne program of teaching in the “primitive sciences” was reaffirmed, although no reference was made to a claustral lector in theology.36 The response of the orders, at least among their most populous and prosperous constituencies in France and England, was immediate, committed, and, by contrast with the reform of 1215, coordinated. At Paris a new studium for the black monks of Marmoutier was established (1329); under Pope Benedict’s canons, the Cistercians founded new studia at Metz, Salamanca, and Bologna. Investment in the order’s Oxford studium may have been hampered by the secession to Stamford (1333–​5), but the number of monks at the university undoubtedly rose. The English Benedictine chapters enforced the papal requirements determinedly and now also dispatched monks to the university at Cambridge.37 The papal reforms encouraged the expansion of the monastic presence at the universities. Yet it was the reforming impulses of clerical and lay patrons which really enhanced their position in the generation after the Black Death. New collegiate and university foundations raised in the hope of social renewal and religious reform offered the monastic orders not only additional infrastructure to support their learning but also new opportunities to lead. In eastern Europe, the colony of Scots monasteries in Austria (Schottenklöster) became founding fathers of the new universities at Prague (1355), Cracow (1363), and Vienna (1365). In Cracow, the experience was short-​lived, but a Cistercian master, Jan Stekna (d. c. 1407), was engaged to advise on the refoundation before 1400.38 The Benedictine Pope Urban V (r. 1362–​70) provided his order with the presence it had previously lacked in the academic centers of southern France, at Trets and Montpellier.39 In England, the reallocation of church endowments for the support of university education benefited monastic interests as much as secular ones. Appropriated churches were the







Thomas Merton, Medieval Cistercian History: Initiation to the Monastic Tradition 9, ed. Patrick F. R. O’Connell (Collegeville, MN, 2019), 225–​44; David Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, AD CCCCXLIV ad AD MCCCCCXVII, 4 vols. (London, 1737), 2:588–​613, 629–​51. 37 Berlière, “Les collèges bénédictins,” 153–​ 4; Lekai, The White Monks, 62; Barrie Dobson, “The Monastic Orders in Late Medieval Cambridge,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy and the Religious Life, ed. Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson (Woodbridge, 1999), 250. 38 Kathleen Walsh, “Bishop John O’Corcoran of Clogher (1373–​1389) at the University of Prague, the Purgatorium Sancti Patricii and the Debate about Purgatory in the Later Middle Ages,” Clogher Record 16:1 (1997): 7–​36; Otakar Odlozilik, “Prague and Cracow Scholars in the Fifteenth Century,” Polish Review 9 (1964): 19. 39 Sullivan, Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, 165. 36

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main source of income for further Benedictine studia at Oxford, Canterbury College (1362) and Durham College (1379–​81).40 Reform and fresh patronage in the face, at least in northern Europe, of a falling mendicant profile projected the monastic orders into the scholastic hierarchy, especially in the years of schism and heresy before and after 1400. The century after the end of the papal schism (1378–​1417) has often been represented as the triumph of the secular university, marked by the steady expansion of collegiate foundations and the spread of new currents of thought. This advance was not at the expense of the monastic orders as it has so often been told. In fact, the monks acted as champions of the changing syllabus. It was the reformed Benedictines of Bursfeld, Melk, and Santa Giustina of Padua in the second quarter of the fifteenth century who were the first fully to implement the pedagogic program of the humanists; their commitment to the universities contributed to the rise of the new learning in central Europe.41 The humanist tastes of Oxford monks ensured their continued influence despite the presence of patrons determined to strengthen the university’s ties to the secular state. Archbishop Henry Chichele of Canterbury (r. 1414–​43) assisted in the foundation of a new Cistercian studium at Oxford; a parallel project for the regular canons was initiated by his master, King Henry V (r. 1413–​22). Henry VI (r. 1422–​61 and 1470–​1) supported the Benedictine foundation at Cambridge.42 In the midst of competing secular models, Tudor statesmen were still inspired by the monastic studium. Sir Robert Rede (d. 1519), Henry VII’s Lord Chief Justice, made the regular canons of Waltham trustees of his tripartite lectureship at Cambridge.43 Bishop Richard Fox (d. 1528) conceived his humanist College of Corpus Christi (1517) for monks, secularizing it only at the eleventh hour.44 The conviction that advanced learning could revive monastic religion persisted in the Reformation, and as late as



William Abel Pantin and Walter Mitchell, eds., Canterbury College, Oxford, 4  vols. (Oxford, 1947–​85), 4:9–​40; R. Barrie Dobson, Durham Priory, 1400–​1450 (Cambridge, 1973),  348–​9. 41 Noel L. Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–​1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden, 1981), 107–​208; Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina di Padua (Oxford, 1985), 4, 8–​9, 11, and 29–​32; Franz Posset, Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches (Leiden, 2005), 18–​23, 133–​54, and 155–​71. See also the article by Roest in this volume. 42 Ernest F. Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele (London, 1967), 77–​8; Dobson, “Monastic Orders in Late Medieval Cambridge,” 251. 43 Damian R. Leader, “Professorships and Academic Reform at Cambridge: 1488–​1520,” Sixteenth-​Century Journal 14 (1983): 223. 44 James J. McConica, “The Rise of the Undergraduate College,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1984–​94), 3:17–​18.

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1549 the Scottish Kirk (Church of Scotland) called upon its monasteries to provide claustral lecturers.45

Courses of  Study The first monks to study at the nascent universities in the twelfth century were exposed to their entire intellectual program. But as their institutional structure took shape, they issued statutes to restrict the monks’ access to their teaching. By the time that the first monastic studia were established, student monks were formally confined to the university’s higher faculties of theology and canon law. Since scholastic theology was founded on the methods and discourse of the arts, to succeed in their university studies the monks were obliged to educate themselves. Monasteries secured copies of university textbooks, and compiled cribs of their own, culled from eclectic and often very ancient sources, to teach an approximation of the arts course in their own cloisters. Despite the general prohibition, at times the monks could gain access to the university’s own teaching. Certainly, the original compositions of student monks reveal a familiarity with the idiom of the arts masters. The central and eastern European universities even permitted the monks to teach the arts syllabus.46 The growing influence of humanism in the universities in the fifteenth century may have assisted the monks’ efforts to keep up with the arts course, since older, pre-​scholastic, and classical authorities were again in vogue. In the higher faculties to which they were permitted entry—​theology and canon law—​the majority of monks studied theology. For the Cistercians it was always solum studium (the “sole topic of study”) although some houses objected to the stricture. In 1466 the monks of Kirkstall (Yorkshire) sought a dispensation to permit a brother to study law “for the defence of the rights of the monastery.”47 Only the Benedictines sent brethren to study canon law in any numbers, although regular canons at cathedral chapters were also drawn toward the discipline.48

Alec Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester, 2006), 95. Siegfried Wenzel, “A Sermon in Praise of Philosophy,” Traditio 50 (1995):  253; Denis D. Martin, Fifteenth-​Century Carthusian Reform:  The World of Nicholas Kempf (Leiden, 1992), 41. 47 Jesse A. Twemlow, ed., Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 12: 1458–​1471 (London, 1933), 457. 48 Joan Greatrex, The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories:  Rule and Practice, 1270–​1420 (Oxford, 2011), 129; Antonia Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmund’s, 1257–​ 1301: Simon of Luton and John of Northwold (Woodbridge, 2014), 261; Graham Mayhew, The Monks of Saint Pancras:  Lewes Priory, England’s Premier Cluniac Monastery and Its Dependencies 1076–​1537 (Lewes, 2014), 275; James Murray, Enforcing the English Reformation 45

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Only a minority of the monks studying at the universities completed a degree course. This made sense in the Iberian and Italian universities, given that they did not establish faculties in the disciplines of theology and canon law until the fifteenth century. At the northern universities, the academic demands were themselves a constraint. Some monks were free to study only in the summer months, when university teaching was suspended, because of the needs of their house, leaving them entirely dependent on their own resources for learning. Another obstacle to complete a degree was the typical seven-​year term required for the baccalaureate, and the costs associated with inception, supplication, and regency—​the ceremonial acts required to take the degree. The monks were not alone in being deterred by these demands and they joined many secular scholars in securing testimonial letters from the university as a proxy for graduation.49 The level of study was not prescribed, deliberately perhaps, given the practical difficulties of completing a degree. At Paris, a high proportion of Benedictines completed both the baccalaureate and the doctorate, but in England fewer than half did so. There were fewer doctorates among the Cistercians, although, in the early years of the Paris studium, and at Oxford in the age of Wyclif (d. 1384) and after the foundation of St. Bernard’s College, the rate of progression was greater. For the regular canons there was a marked difference between the studium at Paris and elsewhere. In fact only a handful of Premonstratensian graduates from Oxford, Montpellier, and Salamanca can be named.50 While they joined the university faculties for the formal requirements of their degree, in their studies the monks held themselves apart. Generally, when there was a cohort of student monks at the same house, they were taught in their own studia by their confrères who were qualified as masters. Some teaching was also done in the monasteries themselves. A  course of university-​level lectures in theology was delivered at Worcester Priory in 1448–​9; at Winchcombe Abbey (Gloucestershire) there is a record of claustral



in Ireland:  Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–​1590 (Cambridge, 2009), 74. 49 Sullivan, Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, 93, 168, 183; Alan B. Cobban, English University Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1999), 24. 50 Sullivan, Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, 413–​30; Jeremy I. Catto, “The Cistercians at Oxford,” in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. Henry Wansborough and Anthony Marret-​Crosby (London, 1997), 110–​11; William P. Hyland, “Premonstratensian Voices of Reform at the Fifteenth-​ Century Councils,” in Reassessing Reform:  Historical Investigation into Church Renewal, ed. Christopher M. Bellito and David Z. Flanagin (Washington, DC, 2012), 171.

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lectures on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.51 Mendicant and even secular masters could also be recruited to make ad hoc contributions. When theology faculties were established in the Iberian and Italian studia in the fifteenth century, the mendicant convents were the main source of university teaching for monks.52 The rare survival of a notebook (now Oxford, Bodl., MS Bodley 692) made by an English Benedictine completing the baccalaureate in theology at Oxford between 1432–​3 and 1448–​9 offers a rare glimpse of the student experience. John Lawerne, a monk of Worcester, compiled the book over sixteen years of university study. He made notes on lectures on Scripture and juxtaposed them with draft letters concerning monastery business, lending weight to the suggestion that teaching took place either in the Benedictine studium or in the home cloister. Lawerne also made a note of a quodlibet answer—​arising from an open debate led by an experienced master—​on the question Utrum sit monachus non doctoris sed plangentis officium habet? (“Whether the role of the monk is to pray and to intercede, not to study and to teach?”), perhaps an indication that the uneasy position of the student monks, between an observant monastery and a secular university, weighed heavily upon them.53 Generally, it was only at the end of their degrees that the monks interacted directly with the university faculties. Now the wider university could witness their scholarship, and reportationes (“précis”) of their work can be found in surviving university manuscripts. Nonetheless, over the span of their university history, the profile and influence of the monks’ scholarship seems meagre, perhaps especially so considering their sustained numerical presence. Of course, any account of the prevailing authorities or patterns of thought between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries is skewed by the extraordinary effects of a handful of wholly untypical figures—​the Dominicans Hugh of Saint-​Cher and Aquinas, the Franciscans Occam and Duns Scotus, and Wyclif and Hus—​none of them monks. Given the poor preservation of university books in general, and scholastic exercises such as Sentence commentaries in particular, it is perilous to judge readership or renown. Nonetheless,



Joan Greatrex, A Biographical Register of the English Benedictine Cathedral Priories (Oxford, 1997), 830; David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1948–​59),  3:92. 52 Luis Enrique Rodríguez-​San Pedro Bezares, The University of Salamanca from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, 1218–​1516/​29: Historical, Aspects, Power and Knowledge, trans. David González-​Iglesias González (Salamanca, 2013), 110; Paul F. Grendler, “The University of Perugia, 1308–​2008,” Catholic Historical Review 96 (2010): 284. 53 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 692, fol. 6r; Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Late Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge, 2005), 301. 51

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from the available evidence it seems that only a handful of monks achieved either immediate or enduring attention for their contributions to scholastic theology or canon law. In the southern universities these faculties came too late and the mendicants were too dominant for monastic masters to win renown before the Reformation, although at the smaller universities—​ Naples, Siena, Turin—​the monks may have provided a valuable anchorhold.54 The first generation of monks to benefit from their Paris studia, in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, was nevertheless quite productive: the Sentence commentary of the first, official Cistercian graduate, Guy de l’Aumone (fl. 1250–​60), survives, and a manuscript anthology bears witness to the academic exercises of the French Premonstratensians.55 A  clutch of codices from c. 1300 point to the active teaching of the Benedictine masters of Worcester Priory, which may have had some impact at Oxford even in an era dominated by Occam and Scotus. If ever there was a period at Paris when the voices of monastic masters were raised above their rivals, it was perhaps in the generations between the Great Famine (1314–​17) and the Black Death (1348–​51). It was in the first half of the fourteenth century that three future pontiffs, Jacques Fournier (the Cistercian Benedict XII, r.  1334–​42), Pierre Roger (the Benedictine Clement VI, r. 1342–52), and Guillaume Grimoard (the Benedictine Urban V), were serving as masters in the schools. Cistercian and Victorine scholars at the university contributed to the formal case in two causes célèbres, against the Templars and Marguerite Porete.56 The Sentence commentary of an unidentified English Benedictine in Oxford attracted the critical attention of Gregory of Rimini, as far away as the mendicant studia of central and northern Italy; at least one other Sentence commentary of the same decade, perhaps the work of a Norwich Benedictine John de Stukle (fl. 1333/​4–​1346/​7), resonated outside Oxford.57 The energy of these pre-​plague years may have provided the foundation for the generation of monastic masters which exerted the greatest influence in all of Oxford history. The Benedictine and Cistercian scholars regent at the university between the mid-​1350s and mid-​1370s led the scholastic response to successive controversies, over Archbishop Fitzralph

Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, 50. Sullivan, “Quodlibeta of the Canons Regular.” 56 Ibid., 370 and 372. 57 Damasus Trapp, “Augustinian Theology of the Fourteenth Century:  Notes on Editions, Marginalia, Opinions and Book-​Lore,” Augustiniana 6 (1956): 201–​13; William J. Courtenay, “The ‘Sentences’ Commentary of Stukle:  A New Source for Oxford Theology in the Fourteenth Century,” Traditio 34 (1978): 435–​8; Greatrex, Biographical Register,  560–​2. 54

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(d. 1360) and the mendicants (1356), Wyclif (1377–​82), and the papal schism (1378–​1417). While the instinct of these scholars was to defend orthodoxy, at times their methods and propositions appeared to challenge the conventions of the university faculty, arousing general suspicion and, on occasion, official condemnation.58 While the monks’ intellectual influence was intermittent, their institutional presence in the universities steadily grew. In the century after the Black Death, at both the new and the established universities of northern Europe, they acquired greater authority. At Cracow and Vienna, the monks acted as guarantors of the new foundations. At Paris and Oxford, they were permitted a place in the collegiate, faculty, and university hierarchies, as provisor, dean, and, on occasion, chancellor.59 Over the course of the fifteenth century, Oxford’s governing body came to regard the monastic orders as patrons and special counsellors, seeking their approval and investment, both material and figurative, in initiatives such as the building of a university library.60 In the volatile Italian communes, the security and stability of the monasteries ensured the continuity of teaching.61

The Effects of the Monks’ University Experience Entry into the universities did not erode monastic identity, but its effects were profound. As we have already seen, the university studia pioneered by the Cistercians and adopted by their counterparts led papal reformers to recast the traditional claustral syllabus as a scholastic program. Although it was only a fraction of the monks of any generation who experienced university, from the second quarter of the fourteenth century every monk and canon was exposed to its elementary disciplines. To accommodate these studies the training period of both monks and canons was extended. The new syllabus brought new modes of teaching to the cloister, as the lecture replaced the collation or homily, and sometimes a new status of teacher, as mendicants and



Jeremy I. Catto, “Wyclif and Wyclifism at Oxford 1356–​1430,” in Catto and Evans, History of the University of Oxford, II, 183–​6 and 205–​8; Sylvain Piron, “Nicholas of Bar’s Collection,” in Theological quodlibeta in the Middle Ages, ed. Chris Schabel (Leiden, 2007), 333–​44. 59 Odlozilik, “Prague and Cracow Scholars,” 19–​29; Sullivan, “Quodlibeta of the Canons Regular,” 364; William J. Courtenay, Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1999), 105; Dobson, “Religious Orders,” 564. 60 Henry Anstey, ed., Epistolae academicae Oxon. (Registrum F, 1421–​1509), 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), 1:20, 52, and 62; 2:242. 61 Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance, 43 and 71. 58

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even secular masters were employed.62 Although the notion of a year’s novitiate persisted, in practice the late medieval monks or canons might now be in custody and under tutelage for as much as a decade after their profession.63 The influence of the scholastic topics and tropes was most apparent in the provision of books. When the papal reforms required a quota of monks to pursue university study, many monasteries embarked on a re-​stocking of their libraries on a scale not seen since the twelfth century. The integrity of the conventual book collection was challenged as the university monks were permitted to carry a sors (consignment) of books with them to college.64 By the early fifteenth century, many monasteries had moved their books from their cloister chests and cupboards to a purpose-​built library chamber following the university model.65 Their collections of scholastic texts never quite displaced so-​called monastic genres but there is no doubt that the university syllabus affected the monks’ use of books. To equip the student monks the traditional restriction on the holding of property was necessarily relaxed and personal libraries became an increasingly common feature of later medieval convents. The format and layout of monastic books also evolved as monastic authors and copyists adopted scholastic apparatus—​such as the tabula (index)—​in their own writings.66 For professed monks passing years in the university an altered identity was inescapable. The greatest change was personal independence. How far the daily demands of the monastic horarium were enforced at their university studia is difficult to establish for every case. It may have been possible for the larger Parisian studia to function in the same fashion as a dependent cell, but it is telling that the Oxford studia of the Benedictines and the regular canons lacked a common chapel until their last years; here dietary discipline was also relaxed.67 A sequence of model letters written in the early fourteenth century



Michael Robson, “Franciscan Lectors at Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Canterbury, 1275–​1314,” Archaeologia Cantiana 112 (1994):  261–​ 81; Alan Coates, English Medieval Books: The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal (Oxford, 1999), 69. 63 Barbara F. Harvey, “A Novice’s Life at Westminster Abbey in the Century before the Dissolution,” in The Religious Orders in Pre-​Reformation England, ed. J. G. Clark (Woodbridge, 2002), 55–​74. 64 Coates, English Medieval Books, 119–​20; James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and His Circle, c.1370–​c.1440 (Oxford, 2004), 82–​3 and 86. 65 Dobson, Durham Priory, 365–​6. See also the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in this volume. 66 Barbara F. Harvey, “The Monks of Westminster and the University of Oxford,” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), 125; Dobson, Durham Priory, 375–​6; Clark, Monastic Renaissance at St Albans,  150–​2. 67 Pantin and Mitchell, Canterbury College, Oxford 4:49 and 96. 62

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purporting to be composed by Oxford University in honor of the student-​ monks but probably of monastic origin praises them for their traditional claustral virtues, holy reading and pious conversation, no doubt reflecting an anxiety that the opposite was true.68 Student monks were also afforded other privileges, including private chambers in place of dormitory cells and the opportunity to manage a personal stipend. Such benefits were not easily given up at the end of studies. Some houses anticipated difficulties, affording their graduates certain distinctions, such as precedence in chapter and refectory, and the privilege of confession to another graduate. Some were able to channel the habit of independence into responsibilities in the conventual hierarchy as an obedientiary officer or a superior. If such an opportunity were denied or delayed, however, tensions arose. The influence, of course, went both ways. The imprint of a permanent monastic presence on Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and the middle and eastern European universities was unmistakable. While it cannot be claimed that any of the monastic orders gave rise to transformative patterns of thought, their studia did much to shape intellectual life. It was the resources of the Benedictine library at Durham College, copies of contemporary as well as patristic authorities, that informed orthodox theology at Oxford in the years after Wyclif.69 In the new universities of the Rhineland, the classical and humanist books of the monastic masters fixed the new learning on the horizons of the university as a whole. The institutional development of the universities also owed much to their monastic residents; the secular college is often represented as a mark of the universities’ discrete identity but its physical form and its constitution in fact reflect the permanent effect of its relationship with the monasteries. The Observant regime required by founders of secular colleges even in the sixteenth century was similarly informed by the monastic regime.70 Monks entered the universities to recover the vigor which they feared had faded with the passing of a remarkable generation of charismatic originals. The implication that advanced learning should serve as a tool of monastic reform was taken up by internal and external overseers and introduced permanent changes to the training of the professed. The monks and canons

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 450, fols. 70r–​71r. Catto, “Wyclif and Wyclifism,” 220n; Jeremy I. Catto, “Theology after Wyclifism,” in Catto and Evans, History of the University of Oxford, II, 271; Dobson, “Religious Orders,” 562–​3; Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Provision of Books,” in ibid.,  448–​9. 70 Noel L. Brann, “Humanism in Germany,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy. 2. Humanism beyond Italy, ed. Albert Rabil (Philadelphia, PA, 1988), 124–​5; Posset, Renaissance Monks, 3.

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who experienced the universities, whether or not they achieved the status of graduates, often did return to their communities to take on leadership roles, although as superiors and obedientiaries their scholastic acumen was applied for the most part to the legal, financial, or political challenges of their institution’s seigniorial role. Many also provided a degree of pastoral leadership, serving as the convent’s conscience in its formal acta, such as the election of the superior or the reception of an episcopal visitor. Rarely were such performances a catalyst for reform. It may be only in the congregations of Bursfeld, Melk, and Padua that it is possible to trace the transmission of university learning into currents of Observant reform. If the scholastic experience did not effect a general monastic revival, there can be little doubt that it did reinvigorate the intellectual culture of the monasteries and houses of canons. Growing to be the largest clerical constituency of the pre-​Reformation university, a source of ideas, leadership, and patronage, the monks’ experience also worked to restate their claims to the service of wider society.

Bibliography Ardura, Bernard. “Les collèges de l’ordre de Prémontré, du Moyen Âge au concile de Trente.” In Die regulierten Kollegien im Europea des Mittelalters under der Renaissance /​ Les collèges réguliers en Europe au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, edited by Andreas Sohn and Jacques Verger, 179–​93. Bochum, 2012. Baker, Derek. “Heresy and Learning in Early Cistercianism.” In Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, edited by Derek Baker, 93–​107. Cambridge, 1972. Catto, Jeremy I. “The Cistercians at Oxford.” In Benedictines in Oxford, edited by Henry Wansborough and Anthony Marret-​Crosby, 108–​15. London, 1997.   “Theology after Wyclifism.” In The History of the University of Oxford, II: Late Medieval Oxford, edited by Jeremy I. Catto and Ralph Evans, 263–70. Oxford, 1992. Clark, James G. A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans:  Thomas Walsingham and His Circle, c.1370–​c.1440. Oxford, 2004. Courtenay, William J. Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century:  A Social Portrait. Cambridge, 1999.   “The ‘Sentences’ Commentary of Stukle: A New Source for Oxford Theology in the Fourteenth Century.” Traditio 34 (1978): 435–8.   “Study Abroad:  German Students at Bologna, Paris and Oxford in the Fourteenth Century.” In Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, edited by William J. Courtenay, J. Miethke, and D. B. Priest, 7–31. Leiden, 2000. Dilworth, Mark. “The Canons Regular and Reformation.” In The Renaissance in Scotland:  Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture. Essays Offered to John Durkan, edited by A. A. Macdonald, M. Lynch, and I. E. Borthwick Cownan, 164–​82. Leiden, 1994.

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James G. Clark Dobson, R. Barrie, “The Religious Orders, 1370–​1540.” In The History of the University of Oxford, II: Late Medieval Oxford, edited by Jeremy I. Catto and Ralph Evans, 539–​80. Oxford, 1992. Ferruolo, Stephen C. The Origin of the University. Stanford, CA, 1985. Greatrex, Joan. The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories:  Rule and Practice, 1270–​1420. Oxford, 2011. Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, MD, 2002. Harvey, Barbara F. “The Monks of Westminster and the University of Oxford.” In The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, edited by F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron, 108–​30. London, 1971. Noell, Brian, “Scholarship and Activism at Citeaux in the Age of Innocent III.” Viator 38 (2007): 21–​53. Pantin, William A., and Walter T. Mitchell, eds. Canterbury College, Oxford, Volume 4. Oxford, 1985. Posset, Franz. Renaissance Monks:  Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches. Leiden, 2005. Sullivan, Thomas S. Benedictine Monks at the University of Paris, AD 1229–​1500: A Biographical Register. Leiden, 1995. Sullivan, Thomas. “The Quodlibeta of the Canons Regular.” In Theological Quolibeta in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Chris D. Schabel, 359–​400. Leiden, 2007. Verger, Jacques. “Les chanoines et les universités.” In Le monde des chanoines (XIe–​XIVe s.), edited by Marie-​Humbert Vicaire, 258–​307. Toulouse, 1989.

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Bishops, Canon Law, and the Religious, c. 1140–​1350 Trista n   Sha rp

“The power of bishops is harmful to the monastic way of life (regimini religiosorum).”1 So the Cistercian abbot Jacques de Thérines (d. 1321) summed up the relationship between bishops and monks around the year 1300. Whether or not the abbot was correct about the effect of episcopal power, most scholars have agreed that tension, if not outright conflict, was a normal part of this relationship. To some extent this was inevitable. Tightly knit communities with a strong sense of vocation and heritage rarely welcome outside interventions, even if they are well-​meaning. Nonetheless, there was also a happier aspect to monastic–​episcopal relations. Bishops could act as patrons, providing monasteries with resources and defending their interests, while preventing serious internal abuses. Monasteries, for their part, could serve an important role for bishops’ flocks as pilgrimage sites, and centers for networks of devotion and learning. The relationship between the religious—​this essay will consider male cloistered monasticism and female religious, but it will not consider the male mendicant orders directly—​and bishops after c. 1200 differed from previous centuries in two important respects. By the early thirteenth century, the papacy was firmly established as a leader of religious reform, and as the court of final appeal in an elaborate and professionalized system of canon law.2 Although monarchs and secular nobles continued to influence episcopal–​ monastic relations, Rome (or Avignon) became a third party with unprecedented influence. The papacy and the bishops should not be conflated into one group—“the secular hierarchy”—to be set against the religious (not



Quoted in William Chester Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear:  Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 48; and William Chester Jordan, “The Anger of Abbots in the Thirteenth Century,” Catholic Historical Review 96 (2010): 230. 2 For canon law, see the article by Rolker in this volume. 1

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to mention the fact that the religious could become bishops themselves3). Monks had been early supporters of papal reform, and the exemption of monasteries from episcopal oversight remained an important demonstration of papal authority, despite strident protests from bishops. Indeed, the growth of the papal power was initially favorable to monastic communities. In local disputes the papacy could serve as a relatively neutral adjudicator. Nonetheless, it is true that the papacy, together with many bishops, increasingly saw the cloistered religious as patients, rather than agents, of reform. Well into the twelfth century popes might have generally agreed with the dictum of Jacques de Thérines, but by the early thirteenth century they were actively encouraging bishops to play a greater role in overseeing and reforming religious communities. This change was connected to a general decline in the social prestige of traditional forms of cloistered monasticism. As friars and a variety of mulieres religiosae set a new standard for a holy life, and the nascent universities took over intellectual leadership, reformers identified the cloistered religious strongly with withdrawal from the world, contemplation, and a stable community life.4 The pastoral quality of episcopal government had likely also improved. Whatever the qualities of a particular bishop, the papacy could often rely on the presence of a body of learned pastoral administrators among the bishop’s household and subordinates.

General Rights and Responsibilities of Bishops and the Religious According to Canon Law The basic rights and responsibilities of bishops and monasteries were relatively clear, even if details provided endless headaches for canonists and administrators. A  bishop had a general responsibility to ensure the spiritual and financial health of the monasteries within his diocese. He should visit monasteries annually (or more often, if necessary) to exhort the community and correct abuses.5 He must ensure that a monastery had peace (quies), protecting it from interference by secular patrons and defending it in disputes.6 He must try to capture and return fugitives or other wandering

See Robert Brentano, Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1988), 208–​10; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa IIae Q.185 art. 8. 4 On the participation of monks in university life, see the article by Clark in this volume. 5 Gratian, Concordia discordantium canonum (“Decretum,” hereafter Decr. Grat.) C.18 q.2 cc.28–​9. 6 Ibid., C.18 q.2 c.6, c.19; Liber decretalium extravagantium Gregorii IX (“Decretales Gregorii IX,” “Liber extra,” hereafter X) 3.35.7. 3

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religious.7 He had the right to confirm the election of an abbot, and in extreme circumstances could depose or appoint a co-​administrator for a negligent abbot, or nullify an election.8 He had the right and responsibility to oversee monastic clergy in their role as clergy, as opposed to their role as monks.9 At the same time, he was not to place any burdens on monasteries through excessive exactions, or by interfering with their management of their own property.10 The religious, for their part, owed the bishop “submission, reverence, and obedience” (subiectio et reuerentia et oboedientia).11 In large part this consisted of accepting the visitation of the bishop and paying him various customary fees.12 Monasteries had to send representatives to synods if they controlled parish churches, or if there were some other reasonable need for their attendance.13 Most significantly, the establishment of a new house or cell required the permission of the diocesan bishop.14 Yet the religious should obey their bishop only so long as this was “according to their rule” and “preserved their way of life” (secundum regulam … saluo ordine).15

Monasticism as Understood by the Bishops Bishops, in their relations with the religious, would be guided by an assumption that monasticism was an exceptionally holy form of life, characterized by contemplation, chastity, and withdrawal from the world.16 By the end of the twelfth century canonists began to specify that this life had to be entered freely through a binding vow, rather than through child oblation.17

X 1.31.7, 3.31.24. For fugitives, see Megan Cassidy-​Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings: Thirteenth-​Century English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout, 2001), 195–​216; F. Donald Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England, c.1240–​1540 (Cambridge, 1996). 8 Decr. Grat. C.18 q.2 c.1 with gloss (Gl.) Instituere, C.18 q.2 dicta ante c.9, c.11, c.15; X Gl. Infamia ad 2.28.32, Gl. In communi capitulo ad 3.35.8. All glosses cited from Corpus iuris canonici emendatum et notis illustratum… (Rome, 1582). 9 Decr. Grat. C.18 q.2 dicta post c.9. 10 Ibid., C.18 q.2 c.5, c.28 with Gl. Gravamen, C.18 q.2 c.30. 11 X 5.3.43; see Decr. Grat. C.18 q.2 c.31. 12 On customary obligations, see for example Decr. Grat. C.18 q.2 dicta ante c.30, Gl. Usque ad hoc tempus ad C.18 q.2 c.31. 13 X Gl. Diocesana ad 1.33.9. 14 Decr. Grat. C.18 q.2 cc.12–​14; X 3.36.4, 9. 15 X 5.3.43. 16 See for example Decr. Grat. C.19 q.2 c.2. 17 See for example X 3.31.13. See also Nora Berend, “Une invisible subversion: la disparition de l’oblation irrévocable des enfants,” Médiévales 26 (1994): 123–​36; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago, IL, 1988), 310–​15. 7

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Canon law placed different forms of monastic life on a scale of perfection based on the rigor with which a community or an order followed these ideals; Cistercians were held to live a more rigorous, and thus more meritorious, life than black monks, who were in turn higher on the scale than regular canons.18 Nevertheless, the view of monks as ideally poor, secluded, and dedicated to contemplation appears more in preaching and theological discussion than it does in law, which is, by its nature, concerned more with basic requirements and practical compromises than with ideals.19 The Liber extra, for example, required monks to use procurators to conduct secular business on their behalf, but the Gloss readily concedes that monks may serve as their own procurators.20 Beyond these general principles, thirteenth-​ century canonists and theologians noted that religious life had become highly diverse, and attempted to comprehend this diversity in several ways. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the Second Council of Lyon (1274) limited diversity by forbidding new rules, and insisted that monastic communities belong to an ordo united by general chapters and common legislation.21 The authors of ad status sermons produced a detailed taxonomy of contemporary religious life.22 At the same time, scholars and legislators identified poverty, chastity, and obedience as the fundamental common elements (substantialia, essentialia) of monasticism that could provide a unity in diversity, and that established minimum requirements from which there could be no dispensation.23 Beginning







Decr. Grat. C.19 q.3 cc.1–​3, C.20 q.4; X 5.3.7. See, for example, Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield (Louvain, 1968), 244–​5; Jessalynn Bird, “The Religious’s Role in a Post-​Fourth Lateran World: Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones ad Status and Historia Occidentalis,” and James R. Ginther, “Monastic Ideals and Episcopal Visitations: The Sermo ad religiosos of Robert Grosseteste,” in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, 1998), 209–​ 30 and 231–​55 respectively; Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, in Maxima Biblioteca Veterum Patrum, ed. Margarin de la Bigne, rev. Philippe Despont et al., 27 vols. (Lyon, 1667), 25:462; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa IIae Q.188. 20 X 1.39.1, with Gl. Generaliter debere negotia commendare. 21 See the articles by Melville and Andenna in this volume. Fourth Lateran Council, cc.12–​13 (= X 3.35.7, 3.36.9) in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London and Washington, DC, 1990), 1:240–​2; Second Council of Lyon, c.23 (= Liber sextus decretalium (“Liber Sextus,” henceforth VI) 3.17.1), in ibid., 1:326–​7. 22 For these distinctions, see Bird, “Religious’s Role”; Humbert of Romans, De eruditione praedicatorum, 456–​506; Jean Longère, “Les chanoines réguliers d’après trois prédicateurs du XIIIe siècle: Jacques de Vitry, Guibert de Tournai et Humbert de Romans,” in Le monde des chanoines (XIe–​XIVe siècles), ed. Marie-​Humbert Vicaire et al. (Toulouse, 1989), 257–​83. 23 See the references in Ludwig Hertling, “Die professio der Kleriker und die Enstehung der drei Gelübde,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 56 (1932): 171–​2. For the canonistic development after 1234, see Gert Melville, “Zur Recht des Religiösen im ‘Liber Extra’,” Zeitschrift des Savigny-​Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 118 (2001): 171–​4. 18 19

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in the second half of the thirteenth century there was a tendency to create a new category of “mendicants,” while “canon law … increasingly assimilated the regular canons to the monks, under the one designation of regulares.”24 Despite the creation of formal orders and of general categories, legal scholars recognized that the diversity of customs and privileges for the religious made it difficult to apply general norms.25 A 1281 statute of the archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham (d. 1292) (himself a Franciscan), provides a good instance of the nuances of the hierarchy’s view of the religious. After the Fourth Lateran Council, religious houses that shared a rule, but that had previously been independent, were supposed to meet together in national chapters. Resistance to this centralization was widespread, and Pecham was concerned in particular about regular canons of the new Augustinian chapter whose mother houses were outside England (alien priories). Many of these houses: do not meet (convenire) with the others in a general chapter … But since it is shameful that a part not be in accord with (convenire) its whole, we decree that henceforth all houses of this kind, while preserving the special observance of their own practices (ceremoniae), be warned by their local bishops to meet in a general chapter with the other canons who are going to consider together (communiter) the governance and reform of the order …26

The conflict here is between two visions of monastic organization. One, supported by the papacy and reform-​minded bishops, held that the religious belonged to orders that were conceptually prior to individual houses (whole to part), and that these orders should be organized by national or provincial chapters that ensured effective reform. This model is exemplified by the mendicant orders, and to some extent the Cistercians. Many religious preferred older practices in which houses were independent, or related by more or less strong



Michele Maccarone, “Le constituzioni del IV Concilio lateranese sui religiosi,” in Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, reprinted in Michele Maccarone, Nuovi studi su Innocenzo III, ed. Roberto Lambertini (Rome, 1995), 25. On regular canons and their similarities to and differences from monks, see the article by Vones-​Liebenstein in this volume. For the development of the concept of a “mendicant order,” see Augustine Thompson, “The Origins of Religious Mendicancy in Medieval Europe,” in The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies, ed. Donald S. Prudlo (Leiden, 2011), 3–​30. For the distinction between mendicant and non-​mendicant, see Second Council of Lyon, c.23 (in Tanner, Decrees, 1:326–​7), and William of Pagula’s compilation of monastic law, cited in Leonard Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–​1400 (London, 1981), no. xiv, 436. 25 Melville, “Recht des Religiösen,” 169. 26 Council of Lambeth (1281), c.16, in Councils and Synods, with Other Documents relating to the English Church, ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (Oxford, 1964) (hereafter C&S), 2:911. 24

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bonds of filiation. Nevertheless, Pecham was tolerant of distinctive customs, so long as they were in keeping with “the governance and reform of the order.” His main responsibility as a bishop was to support particular mechanisms of internal governance, not to determine the details of regular practice. As the example of John Pecham, archbishop and Franciscan, suggests, it would be a mistake to see the hierarchy’s view of monks, canons, friars, and nuns as merely an outside imposition on monasticism. Rather, this view reflects the dominance of certain groups, particularly the Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans, who often enjoyed close relationships with the ecclesiastical hierarchy and had a significant presence in the universities. The ideal of strictness, withdrawal, and contemplation reflected in the canonical hierarchy of religious perfection draws on Cistercian rhetoric (although not necessarily practice), and the mendicants were keen to insist that monks were contemplative, while only they, the friars, had an active mission.

Visitation Visitation, the formal inspection of a monastery by a bishop, was the clearest expression of episcopal responsibility for monasteries.27 During the first half of the thirteenth century the papacy encouraged regular visitation throughout Latin Christendom, although records of visitation survive best for England and northern France, which may mean that bishops were most active there. Yet visitation seems to have become a common practice in many areas by 1300, even if documentary evidence is less conclusive.28 Visitation, as practiced in the thirteenth century, had a consistent structure, and generally lasted between half a day and two days, depending on the size of the house and the thoroughness of the investigation.29 The bishop and his



See C. R. Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA, 1982); Phyllis Pobst, “Visitation of Religious and Clergy by Archbishop Eudes Rigaud of Rouen,” in Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth, ed. Thomas E. Burman, Mark D. Meyerson, and Leah Shopkow (Toronto, 2002), 223–​49. For a guide to primary sources and older literature, see Noël Coulet, Les visites pastorales (Turnhout, 1977). For the most important primary source for visitation, see Théodose Bonnin, ed., Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis. Journal des visites pastorales d’Eudes Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen (1248–​1269) (Rouen, 1852); English translation in The Register of Eudes of Rouen, trans. Sydney M. Brown, ed. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (New York, 1964). 28 Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries, xiii–​xvii. 29 For the procedure of visitation, see ibid., 54–​103 and 119–​20. For a visitation itinerary, see Fabrice Délivré, “La visite du primat d’Aquitaine Simon de Beaulieu, archevêque de Bourges, dans la province ecclésiastique de Bordeaux (1284),” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 13 (=74) (2002): 159–​60. 27

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entourage were welcomed formally within the monastic precincts with elaborate ceremony, after which the bishop said mass and preached a sermon. Then the bishop would examine the records and personnel of the monastery. By law a bishop was supposed to visit each monastic house in his diocese annually, but in practice a visitation once every three years would have been a high frequency even for a conscientious bishop. As Christopher Cheney points out, bishops tended to concentrate their efforts on houses with serious problems. For example, John le Romeyn, Archbishop of York (r. 1286–​96), made a total of fifty-​f ive visitations covering thirty-​two houses, but twenty-​ four visitations occurred during his first year in office. Subsequent visitations concentrated on seven houses that received three or four visits each.30 Scholars have focused on the investigative part of the visitation.31 After mass (and perhaps a meal), the bishop or his representative, aided by a few clerks, would first examine the whole community in the chapter house, and then perform an individual interview with the head of the house, the major administrators, and sometimes a sample of the others, or even the whole community. Even when bishops were examining senior officials, their interviews were rarely exhaustive; they often consisted of little more than a review of the monastery’s finances.32 The ceremonial and financial aspects of a visitation were at least as important as the inquisition. The solemn reception provided a dramatic confirmation of the bishop’s rights and the community’s obedience.33 The community also had to support the bishop and his entourage during the visitation, a practice known as procuration. Bishops generally requested a similar payment from all monasteries, to ensure their rights, but waved it for small or poor houses.34 Procuration was naturally a prime source of conflict, and papal law frequently tried to limit the size of episcopal entourages.35 Most scholars have emphasized conflict between the religious and visitors, and there is much truth to this picture.36 Monasteries deployed a range of



Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries, 125. For legal context, see Richard Fraher, “IV Lateran’s Revolution in Criminal Procedure:  The Birth of Inquisitio, the End of Ordeals, and Innocent III’s Vision of Ecclesiastical Politics,” in Studia in honorem eminentissimi cardinalis Alphonsi M. Stickler, ed. Rosalio José Castillo Lara (Rome, 1992), 97–​111. 32 Pobst, “Visitation of Religious and Clergy,” 247–​8. 33 For the ceremonial importance of visitation, see Brentano, Two Churches,  122–​3. 34 Ibid., 115. 35 Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries,  106–​7. 36 See, for example, Alain Boureau, “How Law Came to the Monks:  The Use of Law in English Society at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century,” Past & Present 167 (2000): 29–​74. 30

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strategies to resist visitation. The most effective tactic was to claim exemption or some other legal grounds for opposition. Seemingly trivial cases could drag on for decades:  in 1235 the monks of Coventry Priory claimed that their bishop brought too many secular clerics with him, and the dispute was not resolved for fifty years.37 Even without the cover of the law, bold resistance could prove surprisingly effective. The prior of Sigy (Normandy) simply refused to admit Archbishop Rigaud in 1249, and a visitation did not occur until a new prior was installed in 1258.38 Yet dissimulation was at least as common as confrontation: Boniface VIII (r. 1294–​1303) found it necessary to condemn conspiracies of silence.39 The tension between the religious and visitors could, at its most extreme, result in violence. There are several reports of bishops or their delegates suffering injury,40 but bishops could respond in kind. When Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury (d. 1270)  arrived at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, the canons refused to allow his visitation, whereupon, Matthew Paris recounts, “the archbishop … rushed on the subprior … and … struck that holy man, a priest and a religious, standing in the middle of the church, with an impious fist … and called for his sword … Meanwhile his retinue … savagely fell upon the rest of the canons who were peaceful, unarmed and unprepared.”41 Despite such notorious examples, it would be wrong to see the relationship between episcopal visitors and monasteries as always one of conflict. Brian Golding has found that the visitation of Gilbertine nuns by the papal legate Ottobuono Fieschi (d. 1276) was largely amicable.42 Phyllis Pobst and Penelope Johnson have shown that some regulars used the bishop as an ally against superiors who were seen to be harsh or incompetent.43 Episcopal concern to protect witnesses also suggests that some regulars were willing to risk the enmity of their brethren in the interest of reform.44 Pobst has suggested that, in general, “exhortations to keep financial records, and to observe the customary fasts … met with passive resistance everywhere[, but] concerns

Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries, 67. Ibid., 99. 39 VI 1.16.4. 40 Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries, 131. 41 Matthew Paris, Matthæi Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica majora, ed. Henry R. Luard, 7 vols. (London, 1872–​82), 5:122–​3. 42 Brian Golding, “Keeping Nuns in Order:  Enforcement of the Rules in Thirteenth-​ Century Sempringham,” JEH 59 (2008): 657–​79. 43 Pobst, “Visitation of Religious and Clergy,” 227–​8 and 249; Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 67 and 75. 44 Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries,  85–​7. 37

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about chastity and the proper care of church ornaments were shared by the religious.”45

Monastic Exemption From around the turn of the first millennium, the papacy granted privileges that exempted some monasteries from the oversight of the local bishop, and placed them under the direct care of the papacy.46 This practice underwent a significant development with the exemption of the entire network of houses loyal to Cluny in the eleventh century, and then of the Cistercians and the military orders in the twelfth, and later of the mendicants (although recent historiography has emphasized that the general privileges of the Cistercian order were realized differently in local contexts).47 By the second half of the twelfth century, bishops confronted both individual exempt houses (often large and wealthy) and Europe-​wide networks of exempt orders. The exact nature of a house’s exemption could be a matter for confusion and disagreement. Non-​exempt houses joined exempt orders. The language of papal privileges could be contestable, and some houses claimed exemption without firm evidence of a papal privilege.48 In addition to full exemption, monasteries had a variety of lesser privileges that added complexity in determining episcopal rights. Some houses did not have to pay procurations.49 For nuns, the freedom to choose their own chaplains was particularly valuable.50 Exempt houses often attempted to claim exemption not only for themselves and their daughter houses, but for all chapels and parish churches connected to their houses in any way.51 Boniface VIII attempted to resolve some of this





Pobst, “Visitation of Religious and Clergy,” 248. See also the article by Knudsen in this volume. 46 For the classic studies on this topic, see the citations in Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 245–​9. For more recent scholarship, see Nicoangelo D’Acunto, ed., Papato e monachesimo “esente” nei secoli centrali di medioevo (Florence, 2003); Ludwig Falkenstein, La papauté et les abbayes françaises aux XIe et XIIE siècles. Exemption et protection apostolique (Paris, 1997). See also the article by Vanderputten in this volume. 47 See Guido Carlboni, “Esenzione cistercense e formazione del Privilegium commune: osservazioni a partire dai cenobi dell’Italia settentrionale,” in D’Acunto, Papato e monachesimo, 65–​108; Francesco Renzi, “The Bone of Contention: Cistercians, Bishops and Papal Exemption: The Case of the Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela (1150–​ 1250),” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 5:1 (2013):  47–​68. For Cistercian nuns, see Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY, 2011), 113–​15. 48 See X 3.36.8, 5.33.15. 49 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 81. 50 Ibid. 51 Jordan, “Anger of Abbots,” 227–​8. 45

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confusion by more carefully defining the meaning of different privileges, but disputes persisted.52 Exempt houses tended to be highly sensitive about any infringement on their rights. In 1270 Matthew of Vendôme (d. 1286), abbot of Saint-​Denis, was leading the procession to inter Louis IX (soon to be known as St. Louis, r.  1226–​70) in the royal crypt in the monastery, when he noticed that the bishop of Paris was wearing his pontificals, the vestments that symbolized his authority.53 Saint-​Denis had a privilege declaring that the bishop could not wear his pontificals within the bounds of the monastery. The abbot locked the gates, and refused to allow the funeral procession, the cream of French nobility, into the abbey until the bishop divested. Even the body of a saintly king could rot in the sun if monastic rights were ignored. In addition to the disagreement about when exemption applied, bishops had a long list of complaints about abuses of monastic privileges. Tensions around exemption reached a high point in the early fourteenth century during the preparations for the ecumenical council at Vienne (1311),54 when Clement V (r. 1305–​14) asked bishops to submit lists of concerns (gravamina) to a committee of cardinals.55 Monastic exemption was near the top of these lists, and some supported eliminating or severely curtailing exemption.56 Giles of Rome (d. 1316), a prominent theologian and archbishop of Bourges, exchanged a series of polemical treatises on the subject with the Cistercian abbot Jacques of Thérines.57 The bishops’ central arguments were that monasteries could not be trusted to govern themselves, and that the control of parishes by exempt houses made it impossible to carry out the duties of a bishop. Jacques replied that the religious were islands of sanctity in a sea of corrupt and rapacious secular clergy who only wanted to divert wealth from houses of prayer to their own coffers. Despite episcopal pressure, Clement V neither ended nor significantly curtailed exemption, although he did condemn specific abuses, many of which had been attacked by his predecessors.58 The debate continued into

VI 5.7.7, 10. See also X 5.33.19. Jordan, “Anger of Abbots,” 231. 54 Joseph Lecler, Vienne (Paris, 1964), reissued as Le Concile de Vienne (1311–​12) (Paris, 2005); Sophie Menache, Clement V (Cambridge, 1998), 279–​305; Ewald Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne 1311–​1312. Seine Quellen und seine Geschichte (Münster, 1934). 55 For this consultation, see Menache, Clement V,  284–​5. 56 Lecler, Vienne, 61. 57 Jordan, “Anger of Abbots,” 228–​30; William Chester Jordan, “The Incident at Loroy and the Controversy over Ecclesiastical Exemption,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 45:2 (2010): 125–​39; Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear,  48–​84. 58 Clem. 3.6.1, 5.7.1, 5.10.1. See also X 5.33.5, 24; VI 5.7.3, 6, 8. 52 53

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the reign of John XXII (r. 1316–​34),59 but local conflict and compromise over exemption continued largely unchanged down to the end of the Middle Ages, and even beyond. The process of negotiation and compromise around exemption applied to female monasteries as well, although the privileges of exemption were often less extensive for women.60 The Council of Trent provided for more episcopal oversight in the interest of reform,61 but monasteries continued to effectively exert their privileges.62

The Religious in Episcopal Statutes There is a complex relationship between ius commune, the papal canon law that applied to the whole Church, and the local statutes of diocesan synods, or of the provincial councils called by archbishops and papal legates. Papal law provided guidelines and set the general direction for reform, but bishops had to apply this law in diverse situations, which required a certain amount of adaptation and varying emphasis. It is fruitful to compare these local receptions across Europe. Boniface VIII’s notorious canon Periculoso (1298), on the strict enclosure of nuns, provides a good example. Many episcopal statutes throughout Europe made reference to Periculoso during the late Middle Ages.63 English bishops normally granted a dispensation that allowed nuns to visit friends for up to three weeks, hardly a rigid seclusion.64 Florentine bishops, in contrast, produced increasingly strict and detailed statutes on enclosure, reflecting the centrality of nuns to local dynastic politics and republican ideology.65 Despite regional differences, common threads run through episcopal statutes regarding the religious. Many attempted to enforce rights of visitation, oversight, and consultation.66 For obvious reasons, bishops were particularly



Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear,  74–​84. Ghislain Baury, “Les abbayes exemptes face à l’évêque diocésain (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles): une histoire genrée?” in Évêques et abbés à l’époque romane. Textes, monuments, images et objets. Actes du 23e colloque international d’Issoire (18–​20 octobre 2013), ed. Sébastien Fray and David Morel (Aurillac, 2015), 141–​56. 61 Council of Trent, session 25, Decretum de regularibus et monialibus, cc.9 and 11–​14, in Tanner, Decrees, 2:779–​80. 62 Marc R. Foster, “The Elite and Popular Foundations of German Catholicism in the Age of Confessionalism: The Reichskirche,” Central European History 26 (1993): 311–​25. 63 Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545 (Washington, DC, 1997), 46–​7. 64 Ibid., 114–​18. 65 Richard C. Trexler, Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole, 1306–​1518 (Vatican City, 1971), 91–​102. 66 Oxford, 1222, c.54; Winchester, 1224, cc.68–​9; English diocese, 1225x30, c.91; Worcester, 1240, c.8; Salisbury, 1238x44, c.48; Norwich, 1240x66, c.61 (C&S, 1:123, 136, 196, 358–​9, and 59

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concerned to prevent the religious withholding tithes on property under their control.67 Local statutes reflect bishops’ concern to ensure the financial well-​ being of religious houses,68 a concern that also appears frequently in visitation.69 Statutes insisted that monasteries maintain the customary number of inmates, since patrons often put pressure on houses, particularly those of women, to admit relatives and clients beyond their capacity (although some houses, especially in Germany, had the opposite problem).70 Bishops had a responsibility to retrieve apostate monks, and many statutes deal with the problems of wandering and apostasy.71 It is notable that local legislation has little to say about the conduct of daily life within religious houses. By far the largest concerns about the quality of monastic discipline relate to private property and the breakdown of communal life.72 These two chronic problems of late medieval monasticism were











384). León, 1288, c.11; León, 1303, c.11; León, 1406, c.1 in Synodicon Hispanum (hereafter SH), vol. 3: Astorga, León y Ovideo, ed. Federico R. Aznar Gil et al. (Madrid, 1984), 257, 265, and 296–​7. Trexler, Synodal Law,  87–​8. 67 English diocese, 1222x25, c.77; English diocese, 1225x30, c.91; Salisbury, 1238x44, c.49; Wells, c.1258, c.59; Winchester, 1262x65, c.36 (C&S 1: 153–​4, 196, 384–​5, 616–​17, and 709). Benevento, 1378, c.44 in Mansi 26, 642–​3. León, 1267 (or 1262), cc.31–​2; León, 1306, cc.10 and 13 (SH 3:242 and 284). 68 Oxford, 1222, c.38; Worcester, 1240, c.81; Norwich, 1240x66, c.61; London, 1268, c.50 (C&S, 1:118, 316, and 358–​9; 2:788–​9). Bordeaux, 1234, c.125; Angers, 1262, c.3, cited in Joseph Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers dans les conciles et synodes des XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” in Moines et monastères dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin, ed. Jean-​ Loup Lemaître, Michel Dmitriev, and Pierre Gonneau (Geneva, 1996), 325. Santiago de Compostella, 1289, c.20; Santiago de Compostella, 1320, cc.1–​2, in SH, vol. 1, Galicia, ed. A. Bernal Palacios et al. (Madrid, 1981), 277 and 296–​7; Giuseppe Briacca, ed., Gli statuti sinodali novaresi di Papiniano della Rovere (a. 1298) (Milan, 1971), Ti. 2, c.2, art. 1 (226–​7). 69 See above, nn. 33 and 46. 70 Oxford, 1222, c.55 (C&S, 1:123–​4); Langeais, 1255, c.12 (Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers,” 325); León, 1288, c.12 (SH 3:257); Ravenna, 1317, c.6 (Mansi 25, 606). For underpopulation, see Richard W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Toronto, 1970), 233–​5. 71 York, 1195, c.12; Bordeaux, c.87; Liège, 1288; Angers, 1262, c.2; Cologne, 1260, c.26; St Luc, 1261, c.3 (Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers,” 320–​1). Salisbury, 1217x19, c.102; Oxford, 1222, c.52; English diocese, 1222x25, cc. 71–​2; English diocese, 1225x30, cc. 62–​4 (C&S 1:93, 123, 152–​3, and 191). Santiago de Compostella, 1320, c.4 (SH 1:297). Trexler, Synodal Law,  88–​9. For apostasy, see Cassidy-​Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings, 195–​216; Logan, Runaway Religious. 72 Property: Château-​Gontier, 1231, c.25; Béziers, 1233, c.14; Bordeaux, 1234, cc.85 and 96; Tours, 1239, c.10; Laval, 1242, c.7; Samur, 1253, c.16; Angers, 1262, c.3; Bourges, 1286, c.19; Angers, 1292, iii.152–​4; Synodal of Tournai, xx.6; Livre rouge du chapitre d’Auch (Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers,” 323–​4). Oxford, 1222, cc.48 and 57; Ely, 1238x56, c.40; Worcester, 1240, c.60; London, 1268, c.41 (C&S, 1:121–​2, 124, 310–​11, and 523; 2:785–​ 6). Communal life: Paris, 1248, c.11 (Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers,” 325); Salisbury, 1217x19, c.101; Ely, 1238x56, c.38; London, 1268, c.42; Oxford, 1222, cc. 48 and 50; English diocese, 1222x25, c.69; Ely, 1238x56, cc.40–​41(C&S, 1:93, 121–​2, 152, and 522–​3;

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linked, since the proliferation of administrators and the need to oversee far-​ flung landholdings often meant that monks lived alone or in small groups, and participated little in corporate life. Bishops showed special concern about one kind of property, luxurious clothing, probably because it could cause public scandal.73 In contrast, concern about sexual sin appears only rarely. As noted above, religious generally agreed with bishops in condemning sexual misconduct, so there was less need for bishops to apply external pressure.74 The statutes, taken as a whole, are concerned with episcopal rights, finances, and behavior that could provoke public scandal, but otherwise refrain from interfering with the life of the monastery.

Patronage Bishops did not relate to houses only as overseers; they had important ceremonial roles to play for the religious, and could be significant sources of patronage.75 By 1200 the expansion of male cloistered monasticism had largely ceased, but bishops continued to be important as patrons of female religious and recluses.76 Such patronage could take the form of grants of property, privileges, or indulgences for benefactors and bequests.77 William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury (r. 1381–​96), was thorough, but not exceptional, in leaving small bequests to every anchorite in his diocese, and to fifteen female houses.78 In a more unusual gift, Conrad, archbishop of Cologne, secured relics of the city’s Eleven Thousand Martyrs for his sister, an abbess near Namur.79







2:786). Novara, 1298, Ti. 2, c.1, art. 6 (Briacca, Gli statuti sinodali novaresi, 222–​3). Trexler, Synodal Law, 87. 73 London, 1200, c.16; Decrees of Galo, 1208, c.5; Bordeaux, 1234, cc. 92 and 96; Rouen, 1231, c.  39; Beziers, 1233, c.15; Saumur, 1276, c.5; Saumur, 1294, c.1; Angers, 1298, c.1; Liège, 1288 (Avril, “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers,” 328). Oxford, 1222, c.39; English diocese, 1222x25, c.76; English diocese, 1225x30, c.66 (C&S, 1:118, 153, 191–​2). 74 See above n. 45. 75 See the article by Lyon in this volume. 76 For patronage of female religious, see Constance Hoffman Berman, “Agriculture and Economies,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge, 2013), 115; William A. Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order, 2  vols. (Staten Island, NY, 1965), 1:97–​8; Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns, 11, 97, and 131–​3; Bert Roest, Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform (Leiden, 2013), 84, nn. 27, 97, 136, 240, and 143; Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Los Angeles, CA, and Berkeley, CA, 1985), 80–​7. See also the discussion of “regularization” below. 77 For indulgences, see Roest, Order and Disorder, 99, n. 89; Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons,  80–​2. 78 Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 87. 79 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession,  78–​9.

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Bishops’ patronage of nuns and recluses related to their important ceremonial role in these women’s lives. The bishop veiled nuns and stood in persona Christi at the symbolic marriage of their consecration. Bishops were supposed to examine would-​be anchorites and to preside at their ceremonial enclosure, although these duties were often delegated, and some recluses did not seek episcopal approval.80 Female houses, in return, sometimes enjoyed special ceremonial traditions with regard to the bishop, such as hosting him on the eve of his installation or laying out his body.81 These more amicable ties provide an important counterpoint to the tedious history of monastic–​episcopal conflict. Although bishops were not as central to the ceremonial lives of male religious, they did provide the sacrament of ordination. They conducted the examination and ordination of candidates four times a year, an occasion which involved considerable ceremony and the gathering of dozens, if not hundreds, of clergy, normally in a prominent town. Of the ordinands to major orders, a significant portion were religious, and some of the secular clergy would have taken up benefices in parishes that belonged to monasteries.82 Ordination ceremonies provided a powerful reminder that the clergy were the assistants of the bishop, who had ultimate responsibility for the cure of souls in his diocese. In a category that blurs the distinction between patronage and oversight, bishops also had an important role in the “regularization” of communities that were either informal or had an unacceptable rule, encouraging or compelling them to adopt an established rule, in accordance with the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council and the Second Council of Lyon.83 This was a particular concern for female religious, who, as Eliana Magnani argues in this volume, had always tended to blur the distinction between monastic and secular life, and who fit poorly into categories designed for male religious. The bishops often worked in collaboration with established orders, who could benefit by absorbing or replacing the community.84 Such regularization would seem to be a classic example of heavy-​handed hierarchical control of religious aspirations.



Johannes Busch, Liber de reformatione monasterii 42, translated in Gabriella Signori, “Anchorites in the German-​Speaking Regions,” in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2010), 59–​62; on reclusion, see the article by L’Hermite-​Leclercq in this volume; Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 63. 81 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 66 and 77. 82 F. A. C. Mantello and Joseph Goering, “In libro Numerorum scriptum est de Leuitis: Robert Grosseteste on Clerical Orders,” Mediaeval Studies 75 (2013): 2–​4. 83 See the article by Andenna in this volume. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns, 88 and 97. For the canons, see above n. 21. 84 Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns, 133; Roest, Order and Disorder, 113, 136, n. 240, 158, and 198, n. 127.

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Yet Mario Sensi has argued that many communities sought regularization as the price for acquiring a legal personality, and thus security for their property.85 On the other hand, the patronage of a local bishop could sometimes give an “unregulated” community protection for a time, as when Hermann von Lobdeburg (d. 1254), bishop of Würzburg, installed beguines in a defunct friary c. 1250.86

Conclusion It is easy to see the history of the relationship between monks, nuns, and bishops after 1200 as two long disputes, one concerning visitation, exemption, and property, and the other concerning the attempt of the episcopate, with the support and guidance of the papacy, to direct religious life into certain approved channels, over against both experimental enthusiasm and compromised standards. This narrative of conflict should not overwhelm the role of bishops as patrons. One should also not exaggerate the success of bishops in controlling religious communities. Bishops were encouraged to take an active role in reforming them, but their ability to do so was limited, and they never succeeded in overturning exemption. For the most part they provided a last line of defense against serious abuses. When they were more successful, as in the regularization of communities, it was often because they worked in tandem with other monastic actors. While this essay has attempted to provide a general overview of relations between monks, nuns, and bishops, it remains important to consider the specific factors that influence particular local interaction.

Abbreviations for Legal Sources F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964) Decr. Grat. Gratian, Concordia discordantium canonum (“Decretum”) VI Liber sextus decretalium (“Liber Sextus”) SH Antonio García y García, ed., Synodicon Hispanum, 11 vols. (Madrid, 1981–​2013) X Liber decretalium extravagantium (“Decretales Gregorii IX,” “Liber extra”) C&S



Mario Sensi, “Anchorites in the Italian Tradition,” in McAvoy, Anchorite Traditions, 81–​2. See Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns, 133. 86 Roest, Order and Disorder, 132, n. 228. See also the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume. 85

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Bibliography Avril, Joseph. “Les moines et les chanoines réguliers dans les conciles et synodes des XIIIe et XIVe siècles.” In Moines et monastères dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin, edited by Jean-​Loup Lemaître, Michel Dmitriev, and Pierre Gonneau, 313–​34. Geneva, 1996. Baury, Ghislain. “Les abbayes exemptes face à l’évêque diocésain (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles): une histoire genrée?” In Évêques et abbés à l’époque romane. Textes, monuments, images et objets. Actes du 23e colloque international d’Issoire (18–​20 octobre 2013), edited by Sébastien Fray and David Morel, 141–​56. Aurillac, 2015. Boureau, Alain. “How Law Came to the Monks: The Use of Law in English Society at the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century.” Past & Present 167 (2000): 29–​74. Brentano, Robert. Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1988. Cassidy-​Welch, Megan. Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings:  Thirteenth-​Century English Cistercian Monasteries. Turnhout, 2001. Cheney, C.  R. Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA, 1982. D’Acunto, Nicoangelo, ed. Papato e monachesimo “esente” nei secoli centrali di medioevo. Florence, 2003. Golding, Brian. “Keeping Nuns in Order: Enforcement of the Rules in Thirteenth-​Century Sempringham.” JEH 59 (2008): 657–​79. Johnson, Penelope D. Equal in Monastic Profession:  Religious Women in Medieval France. Chicago, IL, 1991. Jordan, William Chester. “The Anger of Abbots in the Thirteenth Century.” Catholic Historical Review 96 (2010): 219–​33.   Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de Thérines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians. Princeton, NJ, 2005. Lester, Anne E. Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-​Century Champagne. Ithaca, NY, 2011. Maccarone, Michele. “Le constituzioni del IV Concilio lateranese sui religiosi.” In Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, 5:474–​95, reprinted in Michele Maccarone, Nuovi studi su Innocenzo III, edited by Roberto Lambertini, 1–​45. Rome, 1995. Makowski, Elizabeth. Canon Law and Cloistered Women:  Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​1545. Washington, DC, 1997. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, ed. Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe. Woodbridge, 2010. Muessig, Carolyn, ed. Medieval Monastic Preaching. Leiden, 1998. Pobst, Phyllis. “Visitation of Religious and Clergy by Archbishop Eudes Rigaud of Rouen.” In Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth, edited by Thomas E. Burman, Mark D. Meyerson, and Leah Shopkow, 223–​49. Toronto, 2002. Roest, Bert. Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform. Leiden, 2013. Trexler, Richard C. Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole, 1306–​1518. Vatican City, 1971. Warren, Ann K. Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England. Los Angeles, CA, and Berkeley, CA, 1985.

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In November 1519, Cardinal Wolsey (d. 1530), the most powerful religious leader in England, presented a series of proposed reforms to the Benedictine order of monks. Although Wolsey’s proposals have not survived, the Benedictines’ response to them has. In a letter to the cardinal, the order pleaded that the reforms should not be adopted since they would lead to “flight and apostasy,” and that “in our age (with the world now drawing to its close) those who seek austerity of life and regular observance are very few and very rare.”1 Many contemporary critics agreed with Wolsey on the necessity of monastic reforms. Indeed, the closing centuries of the Middle Ages had witnessed a host of monastic criticism. From humanists such as Erasmus to poets such as William Langland (d. c. 1386) or Chaucer (d. 1400), late medieval monks and nuns were frequently the subject of derision for, among other things, their perceived wealth and slothfulness.2 The Benedictine–​Wolsey exchange lends support to what was (until recently) an abiding theme of institutional decline in monastic (and particularly English monastic) historiography. Traditionally, historians presented late medieval monastic life as lax and far removed from the austere asceticism that had supposedly been common in monasteries of the so-​called golden age of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Over the past few decades, most scholars have moved away from such broad negative generalizations, and have argued for a more nuanced and balanced view that recognizes that late medieval religious life was complex and varied, and should be understood in its context.3

William A. Pantin, ed., Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215–​1540, 3 vols. (London, 1931–​7), 3:123–​4; translated in Martin Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, c.1300–​1535 (Manchester, 2009), 126–​7. 2 See, for example, Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge, 1989), esp. Chapter 4; and the article by Steckel in this volume. 3 See the article by Roest in this volume. 1

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Although the traditional monastic decline narrative is no longer supported, there has been much less consensus, however, on the quality of the day-​to-​ day life of late medieval monks and nuns. On the one hand, Continental late monastic history has been dominated by scholarship on the Observant movement that emphasizes the success of reformed congregations such as Melk and Bursfeld, and the renewed vocational fervor that they inspired.4 But the Observant movement was not universal: for instance, it hardly touched England at all. On the other hand, as a consequence of the nature and distribution of surviving sources, most research on late medieval monastic daily life (as opposed to institutional or legislative history) has been focused on England. This has contributed to an odd historiographical phenomenon where we know far more about daily life in English monasteries than on the Continent, where the Observant movement had its greatest success in reforming monasticism. Historians of the British Isles, however, continue to struggle to reconcile contemporary reports of monastic misconduct with other sources that suggest that late medieval monasteries were still highly valued and respected institutions.5 Although as a consequence of the distribution of the primary sources on monastic daily life, this article must focus on England, parallels and comparisons to Continental life will be explored where possible.

Different Times, Different Sources, Different Perspectives The yardstick by which monastic practice should be measured has always been problematic. Should late medieval monks and nuns be compared to earlier ages, or should they be judged by their own standards? Largely because of one type of source in particular, episcopal visitation records,6 we know far more about the interior world of fifteenth-​and early sixteenth-​century monasteries than we do about earlier ones. Visitation records document the bishop’s official inspection of monasteries, colleges, hospitals, and other religious institutions in his diocese, and are unparalleled in what they can show us about the private lives of monks and nuns. They are especially numerous in England, where they first appear toward the end of the thirteenth century,

For an overview of Continental scholarship on the Observant movement, see James Mixson and Bert Roest, eds., A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond (Leiden, 2015). 5 See, for example, Joseph A. Gribbin, The Premonstratensian Order in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2001), 94; Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, 26. 6 On bishops and visitation records, see also the article by Sharp in this volume. 4

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and become increasingly common thereafter; the most detailed come from the dioceses of Lincoln and Norwich between 1430 and 1530.7 Sadly, there are few equivalent records for Continental monasteries, although the thirteenth-​ century register of Archbishop Eudes (or Odo) Rigaud of Normandy and the fifteenth-​century German visitations of Johannes Busch (d. 1489/​90) are notable exceptions.8 The vision of scholars of late medieval monasticism is framed and colored by these visitation records. The monastic who is depicted in these sources is one far removed from the austere asceticism and ideals offered by the monastic rules that supposedly formed the basis for this way of life. During visitations, indeed, the bishops or their representatives were focused on finding and writing exclusively about the misbehavior they encountered; they were not there to offer written praise. Monks and nuns were encouraged to confess their sins and report on their brethren. Consequently, visitations are usually filled with a litany of complaints and accusations: everything from minor or petty grumblings about food, to gross misconduct or larceny on the part of the abbot or prior, to various forms of sexual misconduct by members of the community. The negative nature of these sources has led to an emphasis on the failings of late medieval monks and nuns that is absent from the studies on earlier periods as they offer no comparable sources. Prior to the fourteenth century, indeed, when episcopal visitations were still uncommon, sources documenting real monastic misconduct were exceedingly rare. Thus, studies on monastic misconduct deal primarily with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For instance, whenever actual monastic sexual activity (as opposed to literary topoï or debatable case figures found in penitentials or canon law) is discussed by historians, they almost invariably draw their examples from the later Middle Ages. There tends, therefore, to be a huge difference in how late medieval monks and nuns are depicted by historians compared to those of earlier times. As Martin Heale recently remarked, when one compares the sources from which early monastic history has been written with those of the later Middle Ages, the disparity between

For Lincoln, see edition and (partial) translation in A. Hamilton Thompson, ed., Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, ed. 3 vols. (London, 1915–​27); A. Hamilton Thompson, ed., Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1517–​1531, 3 vols. (Hereford, 1940). For Norwich, see Augustus Jessopp, ed., Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich, 1492–​ 1532 (Westminster, 1888). 8 Théodose Bonnin, ed., Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis. Journal des visites pastorales d’Eudes Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen (1248–​1269) (Rouen, 1852); English translation as The Register of Eudes of Rouen, trans. Sydney M. Brown, ed. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (New York and London, 1964). 7

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the two should come as no surprise. The monasticism of the early and high Middle Ages has largely been reconstructed based on rules, customaries, monastic chronicles, saints’ vitae, and other sources naturally positive toward monasticism.9 So, were late medieval monks and nuns all that different from their predecessors? Surely earlier periods had their own share of sexual scandals and lax monasteries of which we are unaware. If it is impossible to prove conclusively that earlier monastic men and women held to a higher standard of observance, then it follows that it is impossible to conclude that their later medieval brethren were any worse. Certainly, many things about monastic life remained the same. The daily rhythm of the liturgy continued as it had for centuries.10 The internal organization under an abbot or abbess, and the basic way of life all changed little. As the famous late Benedictine historian David Knowles once remarked, although many of the details had changed, overall the monastic “life lived in 1500 was essentially that of 1200 and 1300.”11 Nevertheless, in other ways that are more easily documented, daily life in late medieval monasteries was undeniably different from that of the early and high Middle Ages—​ although whether these differences amounted to a less vigorous spiritual life for monastic men and women is debatable. By the late Middle Ages, economic changes had forced monasteries to adopt new strategies to survive that transformed their relationship with the secular world. At the same time, there was renewed administrative pressure to regularize episcopal oversight and monastic observance. Formerly autonomous monasteries moved to formalize their relationships between houses and organized themselves into orders. In the interest of practicality and standardization, all cloistered orders (including traditionally strict orders such as the Cistercians) felt the pressure to relax “officially” certain aspects of monastic asceticism—​particularly with respect to diet and private property. In order to contextualize properly the daily life in late medieval monasteries, these changes must be understood.

The Changing Economy and Laity All monasteries were challenged by the economic changes arising out of the Black Death during the period that Christopher Dyer recently termed the



Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, 3. See also the article by Cochelin in this volume. 10 See the article by Boynton in this volume. 11 David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1948–​59), 2:6. 9

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“long fifteenth century (1350–​1520).”12 What started as an economy dominated by a powerful aristocracy whose wealth was built upon the rents and services of a large subordinate peasantry, and by a Church that controlled vast tracts of land and likewise enjoyed a sizable income from rent and services, was transformed progressively by the later Middle Ages into a market-​dominated economy.13 The Black Death accelerated this change. Traditional customs and services declined, wages rose, and consumption patterns changed. The overall decline in population across England caused the price of grain and other staples to fall dramatically during the second half of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century.14 Like the rest of the population, monasteries were hit hard during the Black Death. In England where records allow estimates, a monastic population of approximately 13,000 monks and nuns at the start of the fourteenth century had contracted to perhaps only 7,000 by the beginning of the fifteenth century.15 The fact that fewer monks were available to manage the estates, combined with the rise of wages, meant that large-​scale direct cultivation of monastic estates became unprofitable. Large landholders like monasteries and the aristocracy were forced to switch to leasing out their lands, but, since room needed to be made for lessees to make a profit after the cost of rent, the overall revenues fell for landlords. Moreover, income derived from Church tithes also began to fall after the Black Death. Fewer parishioners meant fewer tithes. This effect would have been felt most strongly by monasteries that derived the majority of their income from this type of source, such as the regular canons who drew a third of their income from spiritualities.16 At the same time, changes in the patterns of lay patronage put further financial pressure on monasteries. By 1300, lay patronage of English monasteries had reached its height and was beginning to decline. Founding a monastery was always an expensive option, but the cost of religious foundations increased with the price of land during the fourteenth century. The great

Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), 1–​6. On monastic economics in the High Middle Ages, see the article by Berman in this volume. 14 Dyer, An Age of Transition?, 96; John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy 1348–​1530 (London and Basingstoke, 1977), 49–​51; Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086–​1348 (London, 1978), 61. 15 David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, eds., Medieval Religious Houses:  England and Wales (London, 1971), 488–​95; Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England,  7–​8. 16 Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, 12; Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge, 2004), 237–​49; David Robinson, The Geography of Augustinian Settlement in Medieval England and Wales, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980), 1:128 and 172, and 2:373–​80. 12 13

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monastic patrons such as the king and upper nobility would have already had many religious foundations associated with them and, as Karen Stöber suggests, “may have felt their souls were sufficiently taken care of by those existing foundations.”17 Although the lower gentry and merchant classes in England continued to make donations to monasteries in their wills right up until the Dissolution, traditional monasteries increasingly had to compete for potential patrons with newer, more fashionable foundations such as the mendicant orders, hospitals, and colleges.18 Naturally, these economic challenges precipitated a number of monastic adaptations. Abbots and abbesses now potentially had to expend much more effort providing services to the community. They had to employ more people in the collection of rents as the latter now formed a substantial portion of their income. Not surprisingly, one of the consequences of the difficult economic conditions arising from the Black Death was the increase in monastic debt. Credit seems to have been reasonably available to most monasteries. For example, over half the monasteries visited by Bishop William Alnwick (d. 1449) in the diocese of Lincoln between 1436 and 1449 reported debt of some amount, and some were very high relative to income.19 Nevertheless, debt seems to have been a sensible strategy for the many monasteries that did manage to pay back these amounts during the better times.20 Under the recessionary conditions of the fifteenth century, fiscal savvy and prudence became a much more important quality of monastic leadership. In the course of episcopal visitations of monasteries, concern over financial matters often seemed to trump other issues of monastic observance, including sexual incontinence. For example, at Catesby Priory, the bishop removed a financial incompetent in 1442 and appointed an admitted fornicator to audit the priory.21 Some of these adaptations, however, put monks and nuns into direct conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. In addition to the traditional monastic provisions of hospitality and charity, monasteries began to provide a larger range of services for the laity, which necessitated a much closer relationship between monks and nuns and the lay community. One example was the

Karen Stöber, Late Medieval Monasteries and Their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–​1540 (Woodbridge, 2007), 16. Ibid., 117 and 207; See also Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–​1540 (Woodbridge, 1998), 156. 19 Christian Knudsen, “Promiscuous Monks and Naughty Nuns:  Poverty, Sex and Apostasy in Later Medieval England,” in Poverty and Prosperity: The Rich and the Poor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. A. Scott and C. Kosso (Turnhout, 2012), 87. 20 See for example Oliva, Convent and the Community,  98–​9. 21 Knudsen, “Promiscuous Monks and Naughty Nuns,” 89–​91. 17

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selling of corrodies (an allowance of food, clothing, and shelter in a monastery in return for a lump-​sum gift), which peaked in the mid-​fourteenth century and became a common strategy for both male and female monasteries weathering financially difficult times.22 The practice, however, brought increased tensions into the monastic environment because it represented the inclusion of secular people within the monastery. Moreover, corrodies could become excessive financial burdens on a house if too many were sold, or if the money received from a corrody sale was treated as income rather than capital reserve (i.e. the income was spent on immediate expenses rather than invested or saved). For all of these reasons, the practice was certainly frowned upon by bishops, who routinely forbade it without their express permission.23 Another example of the closer relationship that developed between monks and nuns and the laity can be seen in the context of parish churches. By the late Middle Ages, more than one third of all English parish churches were under the control of monasteries.24 While direct comparisons between England and the Continent are not possible owing to the nature of surviving sources, the pattern may not be unique. Based on charter evidence, Giles Constable argues that, by the end of the twelfth century, nearly all major monasteries owned churches and derived income from spiritualities in some form or another.25 The increasing reliance of many monasteries on their parochial duties has led some scholars to suggest that late medieval monasteries were largely interchangeable with secular churches of similar sizes.26 Late medieval monasteries also played an important role through operating schools and providing a range of spiritual services such as the registration and execution of wills, religious burials, and intercessory prayers.27





Barbara F. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–​1540 (Oxford, 1993), 188. See generally on the subject ibid., 179–​209; Richard I. Harper, “A Note on Corrodies in the Fourteenth Century,” Albion:  A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 15.2 (1983): 95–​101; John H. Tillotson, “Pensions, Corrodies and Religious Houses: An Aspect of the Relations of Crown and Church in Early Fourteenth-​Century England,” Journal of Religious History 8 (1974): 127–​43. 24 Knowles, Religious Orders in England, 2:294. See also B. R. Kemp, “Monastic Possession of Parish Churches in England in the Twelfth Century,” JEH 31 (1980):  133–​60; Ben Dodds, “Tithe Income and Management in Southern England 1280–​1480,” Monastic Research Bulletin 12 (2006): 22–​6. 25 Giles Constable, “Monastic Possession of Churches and Spiritualia in the Age of Reform,” in Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–​1122) (Milan, 1971), 331. 26 See the article by Clark and Bush in this volume, and Benjamin Thompson, “Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England,” in The Religious Orders in Pre-​Reformation England, ed. James Clark (Woodbridge, 2002), 189. 27 Roger Bowers, “The Almonry Schools of the English Monasteries c.  1265–​1540,” in Monasteries and Society in Medieval Britain, ed. Benjamin Thompson (Stamford, 1999), 177–​222; Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973); Oliva, Convent and the Community, 139–​59. 22 23

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For example, at least thirty male monasteries (but potentially more) operated almonry schools (charity schools for poor boys) in England between 1265 and 1530.28 Evidence shows that English female monasteries continued to run schools for both sexes right up until the Dissolution. Although a Cistercian statute of 1256–​7 forbade the education of boys in female houses belonging to the order, the stipulation seemed to have been widely ignored by the nuns. Boys as old as twelve were commonly recorded in visitation records as boarders and pupils. Other sources corroborate this fact; for example, in 1527 a nobleman named John Stanley stipulated in his will that his son should be brought up until the age of twelve by the abbess of Barking, at which point he was to be transferred to the care of the abbot of Westminster.29 In Germany, fifteenth-​century reforms associated with the Observant movement similarly attempted to prohibit the practice of women’s monasteries educating outsiders. The monastery of Lüne (at least), however, ignored the prohibition and continued to offer education to young girls as late as 1555.30 Naturally, this closer relationship with the secular world necessitated a more fluid and permeable monastic enclosure. Although secular people had been present within monasteries for centuries, in the later Middle Ages it became commonplace to see seculars of both sexes within the cloister for even the most eremitical of orders.31 For example, in 1402 the Cistercian abbot of Kirkstall Abbey allowed an exception for women to enter the monastery’s church on certain days.32 Even the Carthusians forged closer relationships with lay communities by the late Middle Ages, founding urban charterhouses, allowing boarders, and running schools.33 In England and elsewhere, parish space increasingly found itself superimposed on the monastic space; in female houses, nuns and parishioners would simply be separated by a screen.34 In late fifteenth-​century Germany, in an effort to reverse this trend, ecclesiastical reformers attempted to increase the barriers between parishioners and nuns. For example, in 1483, ecclesiastical officials ordered the nuns of Wienhausen to close up external entrances to their chapel and

Bowers, “Almonry Schools,” 180. Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries c1275–​1535 (Cambridge, 1922), 263. 30 June L. Mecham, Shared Communities, Shared Devotions:  Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, ed. Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa M. Bitel (Turnhout, 2014), 7. 31 For the earlier centuries and the presence of lay people within monasteries, see the article by Cochelin in this volume. 32 John Richard Walbran, ed., Memorials of the Abbey of St. Mary of Fountains, 3  vols. (Durham, 1878), 1:205–​6. 33 Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, 34. 34 Oliva, Convent and the Community, 148.

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wall up the windows with stone in order to eliminate the parishioners’ visual and physical access to the nuns.35

Relaxations and Reform While the twelfth century marked a period of massive enthusiasm for both male and female cloistered life, and witnessed an explosion of new orders such as the Cistercians and Premonstratensians, this era of expansion came to a close at the beginning of the thirteenth century. If outward monastic expansion slowed, internal reform continued to be frequent and substantial until 1400. Beginning in the thirteenth century, even traditional male monasteries were caught up in a wave of reorganization that resulted in a much more standardized form of monastic life. Formerly autonomous houses that followed the same rule were organized into orders such as the Benedictine monks and Augustinian canons, which would eventually include complex hierarchies of chapters and jurisdictions. Influenced by the Cistercian monastic structure, the Fourth Lateran Council’s (1215) stipulation in singulis regnis required all the abbots of traditional houses that were not already affiliated in an order to meet in a general chapter, in each province, once every three years.36 Moving formally autonomous monasteries into orders, however, required that these houses standardize their monastic practice. In the century following the Fourth Lateran Council, the newly organized Benedictines struggled to reconcile two opposing camps within their order: those who wished for official relaxation of some aspects of the rule (particularly the stipulations against eating meat), and a more conservative camp that wished to “return” to a more strict, literal interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB). By the end of the thirteenth century, it seems, the former camp had prevailed.37 The impact of uniformity from the top down may have led to the implementation of the lowest common denominator being applied in matters of asceticism. In the interest of practicality and standardization, all cloistered orders felt the pressure to relax officially some aspects of monastic asceticism, particularly with respect to diet. For example, as the Carthusian order expanded

Mecham, Shared Communities, Shared Devotions,  140–​1. Alain Boureau, “Prout moris est iure: les moines et la question de la coutume (XIIe–​XIIIe siècle),” Revue historique 303 (2001): 374; Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London and Washington, DC, 1990), 1:240–​1. 37 Peter McDonald, “The Papacy and Monastic Observance in the Later Middle Ages: The Benedictina in England,” Journal of Religious History 14 (1986): 119–​20; Knowles, Religious Orders in England, 1:18. 35

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during the thirteenth century, the requirement to fast was reduced from three days a week to just one day (and only for those who were healthy enough to do it).38 By the end of the fourteenth century, some other so-​called strict orders such as the Cistercians had begun to allow the eating of meat on a weekly basis.39 Visitation reports provide evidence that many other aspects of late medieval monastic daily life differed in practice from ideals. Especially striking is a general toleration of some degree of private property. Individual allowances of money seem to have been relatively common in late medieval English monasteries. Sometimes these allowances seem to have been for the purpose of purchasing books or necessary personal items such as clothing; in other cases, they seem to have represented some sort of discretionary spending on the part of the monk or nun. The English Benedictine chapter of 1444 acknowledged that, although it was contrary to the RB, the practice of monks and nuns receiving private allowances for both necessities and recreation had become so customary in most monasteries that it was no longer officially forbidden. The expenses still had to be approved and a faithful account of them given, however.40 It is not clear whether these relaxations of monastic rules in male houses represented a retreat from strict observance, or simply an acknowledgement of a dichotomy between ideals and practice that had always been present in most communities. For example, Alain Boureau has demonstrated that there was frequently a reinterpretation of both monastic rules and papal edicts in the customaries of English monasteries (particularly wealthy and important ones such as Bury St. Edmunds), indicating that, ultimately, monastic practice remained somewhat locally determined, even after the reforms of the thirteenth century.41 Indeed, the earlier debate about diet in the thirteenth century and before would seem to confirm that a gulf between official interpretation and practice existed before the later Middle Ages. An earlier example is the stipulation of a one-​year novitiate. In her examination of abbots’ vitae and customaries, Isabelle Cochelin found that, despite this official requirement,



James Hogg, “The Carthusians: History and Heritage,” in The Carthusians in the Low Countries:  Studies in Monastic History and Heritage, ed. Krijn Pansters (Leuven, 2014), 38–​9; Heale, Monasticism in Late Medieval England, 24. 39 Barbara F. Harvey, “Monastic Pittances in the Middle Ages,” in Food in Late Medieval England, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford, 2006), 221. 40 Pantin, Documents Illustrating the Activities, 2:203; Robert Hugh Snape, English Monastic Finances in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1926), 164. See also Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies:  Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 5 and 186–​7. 41 Boureau, “Prout moris est iure,” 363–​402. 38

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the practice was not actually followed until the beginning of the twelfth century.42 The emphasis of the great sweeping reforms of the thirteenth century was very different for female religious. Rather than relaxing certain aspects of monastic life in the interest of standardization (as had been the case in male houses), religious authorities increasingly imposed stricter rules for monastic asceticism on female monasteries.43 For example, the Council of Oxford in 1222 had made a number of decrees aimed at female houses. Clothing rules and strict requirements regarding the specifics of their veils were passed, along with recommendations that nuns should not sleep together in the same bed. There was also a strong emphasis on limiting the relationship between the cloister and the outside world. Nuns were enjoined not to allow any secular women except for necessary servants into their houses, as well as not to leave their cloister except with a good reason and permission from their superior.44 It is difficult to determine whether these rules were actually implemented on a wide scale but the pressure of the institutional Church on these issues never stopped. By the end of the thirteenth century, the official rhetoric concerning women’s claustration entered into its most restrictive era with the publication of Boniface VIII’s (r. 1294–​1303) Periculoso in 1298.45 This papal mandate required all professed women (i.e. those who had taken solemn vows) to be part of an approved order and to be completely enclosed—​technically never to leave the monastery. This strict enclosure threatened both the nuns’ economic and spiritual lives, and led to some terrible clashes between nuns and religious authorities over its implementation. Although it was common for bishops to censure both men and women for traveling outside their monastery without permission, or for allowing secular people entry to the interior of the monastery, such censorship was much more strident regarding female houses. Indeed, the importance of strict female enclosure had been a hallmark of ecclesiastical attitudes toward religious women since the early Middle Ages. One cannot but contrast the frequency



Isabelle Cochelin, “Peut-​on parler de noviciat à Cluny pour les Xe–​XIe siècles?” Revue Mabillon 70 (1998): 17–​52. 43 On the interaction between popes, bishops, and nuns in the late Middle Ages, see also the article by Andenna in this volume. 44 C. R. Cheney and F. M. Powicke, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), 2:118–​23. 45 Sexti Decretal. Lib. II, Tit. XVI, ed. Emil Albert Friedberg, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879–​81), 2:1054. 42

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with which medieval jurists argued for female enclosure46 with the repetitive lapses of it found in visitation reports for nuns’ houses. The frequency of these same complaints raises the question: did the nuns really accept and integrate in their daily life these strict limitations to their movements? There is evidence that early attempts by bishops to implement Periculoso in female houses were met with resistance. According to his report, when Bishop John Dalderby (d. 1320) visited Markyate priory in 1300 to enforce the new rules, the nuns “hurled the said statute at his back and over his head.”47 The nuns of Meaux Abbey refused to accept the new strict rules of enclosure mandated by Periculoso, arguing that they were not bound by law or reason to a stricter observance than had been stipulated in their original profession.48 At the minimum, there appears to have been a bit of a disconnect between the regularity of medieval sermons that preach the importance of female enclosure and the commonplace manner in which lapses are recorded in visitation reports. This in turn has contributed to the perception of monastic “decline” in female houses of the late Middle Ages. But should we read the inefficacy of these strict attempts at enclosure as lapses, or rather as the determination of female communities to live their monastic lives as their forbears had? Nevertheless, some bishops clearly recognized the difficulty in reconciling Periculoso with the realities of religious life. Superiors (and even simple nuns) had to leave the monastery occasionally in order to conduct business, do work, or perform services. For example, in the diocese of York, after an initial period of strict interpretation, a more flexible approach to the rule developed where exceptions to enclosure could be made during harvest time in poor female houses.49 Periculoso was also incompatible to a certain extent with many of the demands that society and patrons imposed upon religious houses, such as hospitality. Thus, episcopal visitors, rather than forbidding visitors altogether, instead limited the duration of their stay and contact with the nuns.50





On this subject, see generally Elizabeth M. Makowski, English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and Their Lawyers 1293–​1540 (Woodbridge, 2011), esp. 101–​21. 47 Lincolnshire Archives Office, Episcopal Register III, fol. 10v; translation in Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 351–​2. See also John H. Tillotson, “Visitation and Reform of the Yorkshire Nunneries in the Fourteenth Century.” Northern History: A Review of the History of the North of England and the Borders 30 (1994): 2; William Page, ed., Victoria History of the Counties of England: Bedford, vol. 1 (Oxford and London, 1900), 359. 48 Thomas de Burton, Chronica monasterii de Melsa, ed. Edward A. Bond, 3 vols. (London, 1866–​8),  2:243. 49 Tillotson, “Visitation and Reform,” 10. 50 Ibid., 10–​11; Oliva, Convent and the Community,  35–​6. 46

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While few records exist to test the effectiveness of Periculoso enforcement outside England, the pattern appears to have been the same. A  synod in Bologna in 1310 wrestled with the difficulties that authorities faced in enforcing Periculoso and detailed numerous lapses in Italian urban female houses.51 Similarly, Johannes Busch’s fifteenth-​century visitation of female houses in Germany noted the widespread custom of relatives and friends visiting and attending services within the cloister.52 It may be that Periculoso conflicted not only with the practical demands of a monastery, but also with the nuns’ own conception of claustration. Indeed, as a number of scholars have suggested, late medieval nuns created their own gender-​specific spirituality that sometimes differed from that of authorities.53 There is even some evidence to suggest that late medieval nuns could reinterpret claustration to their advantage, creating a type of “mobile claustration.” This different conception allowed nuns the ability to travel and operate outside the convent walls because they carried their cloister with them, in the form of their veils, wherever they went.54

Chastity While economic factors and legislative changes explain why late medieval monastic life was said (often erroneously) to have declined considerably from its past grandeur, historians are still left to reconcile the broad documentation for monastic misconduct detailed in visitation reports. Indeed, it is the perceived frequency of crime and misconduct (particularly sexual misconduct) found in visitation reports that has formed the basis for much of the negative view of late medieval monastic life found in historiography. There is no shortage of examples:  nearly half of the monasteries of Lincoln and Norwich experienced a case of sexual misconduct between 1430 and 1530, and a bishop could certainly expect to encounter numerous instances of this sort of problem during his career. These findings, however, may be misleading. Slightly more than half of the monasteries of Lincoln and Norwich did not report a case of sexual misconduct over the course of a century. At an individual level, sexual misconduct remained relatively uncommon and only

Sherri Franks Johnson, Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna (Cambridge, 2014), 187. 52 Mecham, Shared Communities, Shared Devotions, 52. 53 On this subject, see in particular Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987). 54 Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2001), 128. 51

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about 4 percent of the monks and nuns who lived in Lincoln and Norwich were accused of sexual crimes.55 While that number might still be considered notable, it matches nearly exactly the rate of monastic sexual crimes found in French monasteries 200  years earlier.56 This could suggest that monastic sexual misconduct always occurred at the same predictable low levels. Thus, rather than depicting a strikingly different late medieval monastic life, visitation reports may simply document problems that had always existed to one degree or another.

Conclusion The direction of scholarship over the past few decades has resoundingly demonstrated that the traditional monastic “decline narrative” as a model to understand the past is deeply flawed. This shift in historiography has been eased by the fact that monastic historiography has moved beyond the traditional confessional divisions that used to define it. In England, for instance, the Dissolution is no longer presented as a direct and predictable consequence of monastic failings, which, as most historians would now agree, were overstated by confessional scholars of the past. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to suggest that late medieval monastic life was identical to that of the high Middle Ages either. The legislative changes of the thirteenth century had forced many monasteries to become more homogeneous than they had ever been before. The common standards that newly organized orders such as the Benedictines and Augustinians settled upon, at least for men, do appear to have been more relaxed on issues of diet and private property than the monastic standards of earlier periods. And by the end of the Middle Ages, even the Cistercians and Carthusians had followed suit to some degree. Moreover, economic necessity forced monasteries to adapt in ways that further differentiated monastic life from the past. The gap between official ideals and actual practice can in some ways be detected most easily in women’s houses, which faced the most restrictive top-​down legislation. Their frequent struggle for autonomy from outside ecclesiastical authorities is, of course, one of the perennial characteristics of monasticism, but it took on new dimensions for female monastics under the weight of Periculoso and the increasing interventions of bishops within the

Christian Knudsen, “Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks:  Monastic Sexual Misconduct in Late Medieval England” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012), 225–​6. 56 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL, 1991), 112–​30. 55

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management of the female monasteries of their dioceses.57 Late medieval communities had to adapt to the same economic challenges faced by male houses, but they were forced to do so within a more restrictive construct. Yet, remarkably, female monasteries continued to survive and thrive in a world in which they were valued. In England, for example, women’s houses continued to attract new recruits, as well as donations in wills from the lower gentry and merchant classes right up to the Dissolution.58 Like their male counterparts, female monasteries persisted in providing a range of services to the lay community, including education, probating wills, and accommodations for both permanent and temporary lodgers. Moreover, as numerous scholars have demonstrated, late medieval nuns constantly reinterpreted legislation and regulae through the lens of a gender-​specific female spirituality. Given the lopsided nature of surviving sources, interpreting evidence of lax standards is always problematic. One can never be sure whether notes about monks staying up late drinking after compline, abbesses entertaining overnight visitors, or nuns inviting family members into the cloister are simply the isolated failings of individuals or symptomatic of some sort of broader trend. We should not forget that visitation reports are, by definition, reports made by outsiders looking in. Local customs no doubt continued to conflict with outside expectations long after the great monastic standardizations of the thirteenth century. We are thus confronted with the problem of interpreting late medieval monastic life via a top-​down approach using legislative yardsticks and idealized standards from a golden age that may or may not have ever really existed outside the vitae and the normative sources. The problem is summed up nicely by the fifteenth-​century abbess of Wienhausen Katherina von Hoya, a remarkable individual under whose leadership the abbey become an important center for devotional art and literary activity. At the end of her career, Wienhausen was visited by a group of monastic reformers led by Johannes Busch. Upon being confronted by a list of the abbey’s supposed shortcomings and required changes, Katherina replied that “she had kept the monastery’s practices just as she had found them forty years earlier and had no wish to change them.”59

See the article by Sharp in this volume. Oliva, Convent and the Community, 156. Johannes Busch, Des Augustinerpropstes Ioannes Busch Chronicon Windeshemense und Liber de reformatione monasteriorum, ed. Karl Grube (reprint Farnborough, 1968), 630. For a detailed analysis of Johannes Busch’s reform efforts at Wienhausen, see Mecham, Shared Communities, Shared Devotions, 144–​52. See also Julie Hotchin, “Guidance for Men Who Minister to Women in the Liber de Reformatione Monasteriorum of Johannes Busch,” in What Nature Does Not Teach:  Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-​ Modern Periods, ed. J. F. Ruys (Turnhout, 2008), 231–​60.

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Bibliography Boureau, Alain. “Prout moris est iure: les moines et la question de la coutume (XIIe–​XIIIe siècle).” Revue historique 303 (2001): 363–​402. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast:  The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, CA, 1987. Clark, James, ed. The Religious Orders in Pre-​Reformation England. Woodbridge, 2002. Gribbin, Joseph A. The Premonstratensian Order in Late Medieval England. Woodbridge, 2001. Heale, Martin. The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries. Woodbridge, 2004. Harvey, Barbara F. Living and Dying in England, 1100–​1540. Oxford, 1993.   “Monastic Pittances in the Middle Ages.” In Food in Late Medieval England, edited by C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron, 215–27. Oxford, 2006. Hogg, James. “The Carthusians:  History and Heritage.” In The Carthusians in the Low Countries:  Studies in Monastic History and Heritage, edited by Krijn Pansters, 31–​56. Leuven, 2014. Hotchin, Julie. “Guidance for Men Who Minister to Women in the Liber de Reformatione Monasteriorum of Johannes Busch.” In What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-​Modern Periods, edited by J. F. Ruys, 231–​60. Turnhout, 2008. Johnson, Sherri Franks. Monastic Women and Religious Orders in Late Medieval Bologna. Cambridge, 2014. Knowles, David. The Religious Orders in England. 3 vols. Cambridge, 1948–​59. Knudsen, Christian. “Promiscuous Monks and Naughty Nuns: Poverty, Sex and Apostasy in Later Medieval England.” In Poverty and Prosperity:  The Rich and the Poor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by A. Scott and C. Kosso, 75–​82. Turnhout, 2012. Makowski, Elizabeth M. English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and Their Lawyers 1293–​1540. Woodbridge, 2011. McDonald, Peter. “The Papacy and Monastic Observance in the Later Middle Ages: The Benedictina in England.” Journal of Religious History 14 (1986): 117–​32. Mecham, June L. Shared Communities, Shared Devotions:  Gender, Material Culture and Monasticism in Late Medieval Germany, edited by Alison I. Beach, Constance H. Berman, and Lisa M. Bitel. Turnhout, 2014. Mixson, James, and Bert Roest, eds. A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond. Leiden, 2015. Oliva, Marilyn. The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–​1540. Woodbridge, 1998. Salih, Sarah. Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England. Woodbridge, 2001. Stöber, Karen. Late Medieval Monasteries and Their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–​1540. Woodbridge, 2007. Tillotson, John H. “Visitation and Reform of the Yorkshire Nunneries in the Fourteenth Century.” Northern History:  A Review of the History of the North of England and the Borders 30 (1994): 1–​21.

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Monastic Preaching, c. 1350–​1545 J am e s G . Cla rk a n d Kate E.   Bush

The sermon was a feature of monastic life from early times as a vehicle for spiritual instruction, pastoral guidance, and formal ceremonial (for example, to mark the election of a superior), but it was only in the later Middle Ages that the practice of preaching to audiences inside and outside the cloister became a common occupation for monastic men and women.1 The change in the significance of the monastic sermon, which may be traced from at least the middle years of the fourteenth century, was a reflection of a wider transformation in the secular Church. Since the early thirteenth century, successive waves of reform had directed the clergy toward the development of a more systematic pastoral program; recurrent anxieties over the number and quality of parish pastors and the threat of heterodoxy fixed attention above all upon instruction in doctrine. The commitment of the mendicant orders to preaching and the evident popularity of their sermons only heightened the sensitivities surrounding the issue in the hierarchy of the Church. At the same time, the developing profile of the lay community, growing numbers of whom were now concentrated in towns, displaying distinctive spiritual tastes and a degree of functional literacy, created a demand for preaching quite independent of the Church’s own initiatives for reform. The monasteries were not detached from these developments:  monks shared directly in them, some in their individual capacity as prelates and even (increasingly in the later period) parochial clergy, but also both monks and nuns in their role as the custodians of churches, chapels, and “precinct” parishes, and as spiritual directors of diverse lay folk, patrons, benefactors, and their own kin. The new significance attached to the sermon was also the result of the reform of monastic education initiated by the major orders in the thirteenth

On monastic preaching in the earlier Middle Ages, see the article by Baker and Kienzle in this volume.

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century and codified by the Avignon papacy.2 Cistercians, Cluniacs, and the Benedictines in England, for instance, had adopted a program of advanced studies which saw a proportion of each generation sent to the universities. The primary aim was to train a cadre of monastic leaders in academic theology, so as to ensure better claustral discipline at home and to equip them better to defend their interests beyond the cloister. These university monks absorbed the magisterial culture of the secular schools and, perhaps above all, its preferred modes of discourse. The academic sermon, a variant of the genre in many ways quite different from the forms previously known in the cloister, emerged not merely as another academic tool but also as a self-​conscious symbol of a new monasticism positioning itself at the head of the Church militant. The statutes of the general chapter of the English Benedictines issued in 1363 acknowledged that student monks might be sent to university only to acquire and perfect the art of expounding the word of  God.3 Quite apart from the academic enterprise, which was only ever the preserve of a select few men, there was a parallel shift in the pattern of monastic formation in this period as the expanding suffrage obligations born by male houses necessitated that nearly every entrant prepare for ordination to the priesthood. Here, too, the professed monk entered the cultural world of the secular priests, and in particular took up their textual apparatus, at the center of which was the sermon itself.4 Finally, from at least the mid-​thirteenth century there was a progressive transformation of monastic governance. It was not simply that external visitation became more regular, but rather that it became more uniform and rigorous in its formulation and enforcement; monasteries were weighed in the balance of a growing body of canon law that aimed to enforce claustral discipline, and were bound over at each successive visitation with another set of injunctions.5 The sermon—​in this context less a homiletic collation than an exhortation delivered by the visitor (legate, bishop, monastic prelate, or their delegate)—was now anchored as a central part of the experience.6



See the articles by Clark and Roest in this volume. William Abel Pantin, ed., Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, ed. 3 vols. (London, 1931–​7), 2:76. 4 James G. Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2011), 87–​9. 5 See the articles by Caby, Knudsen, and Sharp in this volume. 6 Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge, 2005), 2, 9–​10, 15, and 32; Siegfried Wenzel, Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation (Washington, DC, 2008), 270–​82. 2 3

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The Practice of Preaching in Community The frequency and variety of preaching activity were among many features of claustral life which separated the experience of later medieval monks and nuns from their forbears. What traditionally had been only one element of their devotional life in the cloister and their pastoral interactions outside was repositioned as a primary tool of intellectual and spiritual formation—​for the men as graduate theologians and serving priests, for the women as claustral pastors and teachers—​and their principal mode of discourse in lay society. It should be said that there was no daily sermon, at least not until the introduction of “evangelical” reforms in England (1535) and the reforming German states after 1525.7 While there are scarcely any direct accounts to tell us how the daily chapter meetings were conducted, it does appear that from the thirteenth century the reading of the rule was sometimes (perhaps often) replaced by the reading of the canons concerning monastic discipline, but there is nothing to suggest that the traditional homily delivered by the superior or his deputy was now transposed into a sermon. The requirement for a weekly lecture on Scripture to be delivered in claustro, which was first promulgated at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and later prescribed by the governing chapters of some congregations (for example, by the English Benedictines in 1247), may have been fulfilled, where it was observed at all, by means of an academic sermon.8 In practice, the most routine moment for preaching within the monastic community—​and, it would appear, the main focus for the efforts of its expert practitioners—​was the Sunday sermon which began the week’s cycle of observance. Collections made by English Benedictines in the years on either side of 1400 were dominated by Sunday sermons, arranged in the manuscript according to the time of year and including examples evidently prepared for a mixed audience of regulars, secular clerks, and lay folk, an indication that the weekly preaching of the community was often open to those outside the monastery precinct and also that the monasteries now ministered directly to the parish churches under their jurisdiction.9

David Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, AD CCCCXLIV ad AD MCCCCCXVII, 4 vols. (London, 1737), 3:790; Greg Peters, Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life (Eugene, OR, 2014), 10–​11. 8 See the article by Clark in this volume. 9 Patrick J. Horner, ed. and trans., A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England: Oxford, MS Bodley 649 (Toronto, 2006), 4 and 10; Holly Johnson, “Robert Rypon and the Creation of London, British Library MS Harley 4854: A Master Preacher and His Sermon-​Collection,” Medieval Sermon Studies 59 (2015): 43. 7

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To the weekly pattern of preaching were added sermons delivered on a growing number of special occasions. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was the well-​established custom for a sermon to be preached on every occasion on which the superiors and their convent acted as a corporate body:  at an election, at the reception of a Visitor, at the ordination of new entrants (for those houses with the privilege to do so internally), and, at least in England, at the nomination of brethren for periods of study at a university studium.10 The principal feasts of the calendar may also have been more commonly marked by a conventual sermon, just as the patronal festival was now typically an occasion for preaching ad populum (that is, to the general public).11 The educational reforms promoted in Benedictine networks by the Bursfeld, Melk, and Padua congregations of the fifteenth century also had the effect of establishing an academic sermon as a regular feature of claustral instruction. The sermons of the Bursfeldian Bernhard of Waging (c. 1400–​ 1472) accrued an unofficial canonical status across the network of reformed cloisters in south Germany.12 It may have been the greater frequency of preaching in claustro that caused the Carthusian general chapter to renew its prohibition on preaching outside the monastery.13 The sermon was additionally taken up as a tool for the governance of the congregations, unions, and provinces under which, in the later Middle Ages, not only the Cistercians and regular canons but also many regional networks of Benedictines were organized. Meetings of the Benedictine provincial and general chapters were routinely framed by sermons. In England, these capitular sermons were circulated in the constituent convents, apparently as a further means of enforcing the general authority, and particular injunctions, of the governing body.14 Even



Thomas Brinton, The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, ed. Mary Aquinas Devlin, 2  vols. (London, 1954), 1:94 (Sermon 23)  and 2:343 (Sermon 75); Horner, Macaronic Sermon Collection, 5; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 286; Johnson, “Robert Rypon,” 40. 11 Horner, Macaronic Sermon Collection, 6–​7; Helen L. Spencer, English Preaching in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), 61; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 283–​4 and 286. 12 Noel L. Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–​1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden, 1981), 120–​2, 155; Richard J. Serina, Nicholas of Cusa’s Brixen Sermons and Late Medieval Church Reform (Leiden, 2016), 123–​5; Christine Glaßner, “Stift Melk und die Melker Reform im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Die benediktinische Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz Xaver Bischof and Martin Thurner (Berlin, 2013), 75–​91; James D. Mixson, Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownershp and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Leiden, 2002), 144–​54; Susan Kaup, “Bernhard von Waging: sein literarisches Werk als Spiegel zentraler Themen der Benedikinischen Kosterreform,” in Bischof and Thurner, Die benediktinische Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert, 34–​9; Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation (Oxford, 1985), 8, 31, 33, 73, and 111–​12. 13 James A. Hogg, “Early Fifteenth-​Century Carthusian Sermons at the Charterhouse of Mainz,” in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, 1998), 53–​72. 14 Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections,  284–​5.

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the Carthusians, whose early legislation had proscribed preaching, now made provision for a sermon at gatherings of the general chapter, with the qualification that the speaker might present the published collation of another author rather than produce original work.15 Female monasteries shared in this greater exposure to and engagement in preaching. A  Sunday sermon, delivered by their chaplain, or in the double houses by one of their own male supervisors (either a secular clerk or a monk), was the cornerstone of their routine pastoral care.16 It became increasingly common for a sermon from women’s spiritual directors to be added to their observances for selected feasts in their calendar. The Assumption, the summit of the year’s Marian devotions, appears to have become a particular prompt for preaching in female communities. The Brigittine Regula salvatoris required a sermon for every major feast.17 Preaching was now also adopted in the same way as it was for the men as a means of marking their corporate acts as a community:  the election and entry of a new superior, the submission to a male monastic or episcopal Visitor, and the profession of a postulant.18 The profession sermon in particular developed as a subgenre for clerical discussion of the female vocation. An example delivered at the profession of an English Benedictine nun, a sermon laden with word-​play and learned, classical allusion, gestured as much to the male clerics attending as it did to the sisters under their pastoral care.19 Sermons of this type were copied and later printed, with the expectation that their written form might serve the sisters’ ongoing spiritual formation. Bishop John Alcock’s (d. 1500) Spousage of a Virgin to Christ, first printed in 1486, became a popular primer of female spirituality in pre-​Reformation England.20 The positioning of such sermons as part of a syllabus of instruction for female religious reflected the more systematic and sustained intellectual program now developing in women’s houses of both the oldest and the newer orders.



Hogg, “Early Fifteenth-​Century Carthusian Sermons.” On the male clergy serving in female monasteries, see the article by Griffiths in this volume; on double monasteries, see the article by Beach and Juganaru in this volume. 17 Veronica O’Mara, “Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England,” in Muessig, Medieval Monastic Preaching, 99 and 107. 18 Ibid., 100–​10. 19 Wenzel, Preaching in the Age of Chaucer, 273–​97. 20 Barry Collett, Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England, with a Translation of Richard Foxe’s Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517 (Aldershot, 2002), 60; O’Mara, “Preaching to Nuns,” 115. 15

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Female Preachers Frequently, the renewed effort to enforce enclosure in this period acted only to stimulate an intellectual autonomy, which in turn was strengthened by the increasing concentration of women from elite families whose educational values were now very well established. Not only did these later generations of female religious realize a full life of learning; they also acted in their own right as teachers and preachers. For them, Pauline warnings regarding the perils of female speech did not hold sway, and they took full advantage of the fact that there was no prohibition against women teaching other women in a convent setting.21 Nuns sometimes even allied themselves with the figure of Paul to enhance their prestige as teachers.22 Preaching to her charges was often a crucial part of the office of the abbess, and designed to dispel the dangers of vice or ignorance through regular spiritual instruction.23 The voice of the teaching abbess frequently rang out as part of the nuns’ weekly chapter meeting, thus linking sermon-​g iving to practices of communal supervision and discipline.24 Extant sources reflect the flexibility of the sermon form in female houses. Didactic speeches, given by either a male or a female religious, could occur on important feast days or at ordinary mealtimes, upon the initiation of novices, or at the deathbed of the mother abbess herself. That women’s preaching was common is demonstrated in the opening words of some sermons. For example, leaders such as Caterina Vigri (1413–​63), the Clarissan abbess of Corpus Domini in Bologna, and Domenica Narducci da Paradiso (1473–​1553), the Dominican abbess of Santa Croce in Florence, were wont to remind their charges that they had spoken on certain points “many, many times before.”25 These frequent sermons came, in fact, to constitute communal identity,



Alistair J. Minnis, “Religious Roles, Public and Private,” in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–​c.1500, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Alastair Minnis (Turnhout, 2010), 62. 22 Domenica da Paradiso, I sermoni. Studio e testo critico, ed. Rita Librandi and Adriana Valeria (Florence, 1999), 157–​9. 23 Gabriella Zarri, “Places and Gestures of Women’s Preaching in Quattro-​and Cinquecento Italy,” in Charisma and Religious Authority:  Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200–​1500, ed. Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin, trans. Donald Bathgate (Turnhout, 2010), 177–​96; Beverley M. Kienzle, “Sermons and Preaching,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encylopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (Abingdon, 1996), 739–​40; Kathryn Kerby-​Fulton, “When Women Preached: An Introduction to Female Homiletic, Sacramental, and Liturgical Roles in the Later Middle Ages,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-​Fulton (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), 31–​55. 24 See the article by Baker and Kienzle in this volume. 25 Caterina Vigri (a.k.a. Caterina De’ Vigri and Catherine of Bologna), I sermoni, ed. Gilberto Sgarbi (Bologna, 1999), 265. 21

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memory, and history. Such a tendency was manifested in the practices of the Brigittines at Syon Abbey in England, who commemorated the Sermo Angelicus of Bridget of Sweden (1303–​73) by placing sections of it in their daily liturgy.26 In addition, the New Year’s sermons that Ursula Haider (1413–​98), the Clarissan abbess of the Bickenkloster at Villingen, delivered to her nuns were placed in the extensive chronicle of the abbey, thus becoming a part of its official record.27

Preserving Women’s Words Quite often female sermons are preserved in hagiographical manuscripts, and were therefore woven into an abbess’s vita as part of the narrative of her sanctity. This is the case with several female figures, notably the Clarissan abbess of Santo Sepulcro in Venice, Chiara Bugni (1471–​1514), as well as Caterina Vigri.28 Caterina often wrote down her words for her sisters, but even more often, they transcribed her sermons themselves. The resulting manuscript materials were compiled 150 years after her death by the nuns’ spiritual advisor, Paolo Casanova (d. 1614). A similar process occurred in Chiara’s case, but this time just a few decades after her death. The preservation of an abbess’s words often occurred thanks to such acts of collaborative reconstruction, in which men and women interested in commemorating her sanctity worked together to compile her sermons. In doing so, they enhanced the abbess’s reputation, but also their own. Manuscript compilations of this nature constituted attempts to widen the audience for teaching that occurred in cloistered settings. Those receiving such teaching therefore recognized their spiritual mothers’ exceptional ability to teach and give solace. This dynamic is suggested by the title given to the sermons of the Clarissan Juana de la Cruz (1481–​1534): “The Book of Comfort,” a work first copied down by her follower and scribe, Sister Maria Evangelista.29 Often, those who publicized these women’s addresses assured readers of their authenticity by recounting the circumstances of their dramatic delivery in introductory or summation text. Some texts affirmed that

Katherine Zieman, “Playing Doctor:  St. Birgitta, Ritual Reading, and Ecclesiastical Authority,” in Olson and Kerby-​Fulton, Voices in Dialogue, 307. 27 Anne Winston-​Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 13. 28 Francisco Zorzi, “Vita di una Santa Monaca” in La vita e sermoni di Chiara Bugni Clarissa Veneziana, ed. Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri (Rome, 2011), 135–​240. 29 Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte. Sermones de una mujer: la santa Juana, ed. García Andrés, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1999). 26

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these sermons were recorded “word for word,” or noted the “fervor and speed” with which the abbess spoke.30 It is not just the voices of teaching abbesses that are preserved in female sermons but also those of their many students. In fact, the sermons in this context can take on a notably conversational form and tone. Surviving sermon texts show that these conversations started with a demanding audience, eager to consume spiritual information from their teacher. Chiara Bugni’s sisters, for example, rushed to finish their dinner at one point because they had the “great desire” to hear their abbess speak.31 Caterina Vigri’s sermons often constituted a direct response to a question from one of her curious sisters concerning either a point of doctrine or a more personal concern. She would return the favor by asking them questions in the body of her addresses. Her use of questions in her sermons—​a tactic common in notable male preachers of the quattrocento—​seems, initially, to be rhetorical. But, given the conversational context of these sermons, they are more probably a teacher’s real demands for information. Caterina also conversed with Jesus in her sermons, and they describe how he “spoke to her in a familiar way” as a reward for her continual contemplation of his Passion.32 When female preachers discussed their enlightening conversations with Christ in their sermons, they mirrored positive behaviors to their communities, showing that female inquiry, far from being negative, could bring them ever closer to the “mind and will” of  God.33 When female communities became Observant, they often began to follow a rule requiring more austere behavior and a limited sphere of action. Paradoxically, however, the prestige that they gained by participating in this movement frequently resulted in greater scholarly activity and freedom. Women’s sermons can often be characterized, in fact, as reform-​in-​action. Ursula Haider’s preaching can be connected with the reform at Villingen during the 1480s. Chiara’s Bugni’s mention of reform is direct: she emphasizes the importance of the Osservanze regulare (Regular Observance) in her sermon on charity.34 The most palpable connection of preaching with reform practice can be found in a commentary on the Rule of St. Clare by Caterina Vigri, known as the Ordinazione. Many Clarissans in the later Middle Ages adopted Clare’s original rule as part of their reform efforts, and some wrote commentaries on it. But Caterina’s commentary is the only one that specifically states

Domenica da Paradiso, I sermoni, 94. Mueller and Zarri, La vita e sermoni di Chiara Bugni, 279. Caterina Vigri, I sermoni, 225 (Sermon 29). 33 Ibid., 216 (Sermon 28). 34 Mueller and Zarri, La vita e sermoni di Chiara Bugni,  253–​5.

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that during the weekly chapter meeting the abbess should make sure that she is “exhorting and leading [the sisters] with holy words and examples of the observance of the profession and virtuous living.”35 Preaching was important enough to this reforming abbess that she changed the normative documents governing communal life to include this request for weekly sermons by the abbess.

Learned Skill The rise of the sermon as a conventual act was accompanied by the spread of preaching as a general claustral art. Before the thirteenth century, the requisite knowledge and rhetorical flair for preaching were rare skills possessed and practiced by few monastics. Just as almost any monk in the later Middle Ages could expect to take on the obligations of the priesthood, most of them would at least have learned the principles of constructing a sermon and a good many might be called upon to preach in the course of a lifetime in the cloister. It was this characteristic skill of the university master which superiors most sought as they turned, increasingly, to the secular schools to educate their brethren. Booklists of the period show that, alongside old copies of early, patristic, and monastic homilies, there were now contemporary sermon collections, of acclaimed scholars, prelates, and even parochial preachers (such as John Felton (fl. 1434), vicar of the parish of St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford), as well as manuals on how to compose a sermon of one’s own.36 In England the monks’ exposure to some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary theology, such as the anti-​fraternal (i.e. opposed to the orders of the friars) Richard Fitzralph (d. 1360), came through the study of their sermons.37 That these were not merely intended to be a source of reference but rather models for new work is suggested by the presence of instruction manuals for the composition of sermons. One English Benedictine, Ranulf Higden (d. 1364)  of Chester Abbey, wrote his own guide, Ars componendi sermones (“The Art of





Bologna, Archivio Generale Arcivescovile di Bologna, Archivio Beata Caterina carton 25, [Libro 3,] no. 2, fol. 178v. Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (Turnhout, 1996), 243–​4 (lists copies at Canterbury, Norwich, and Worcester); Richard Sharpe, James P. Carley, Karsten Friis-​Jensen, and Andrew G. Watson, eds., English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues (London, 1996), B43.3a, 220, B68.17, 353, and B68.188, 371; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 278–​80. 37 Sharpe et al., English Benedictine Libraries, B105.28b, 619, and B104.14, 632 (Westminster Abbey). 35

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Writing Sermons”).38 The manuscript anthology, or diary, of sermons, a mix of original compositions and memorable examples, recorded as they were heard or culled from other sources, emerged as a new genre of monastic book. Often it was the staple possession of the monk educated at a university.39 Monastic expertise in preaching was now recognized by the wider clerical community. When the hierarchy of the Church required orthodox speakers, monastic preachers were placed in the front rank. In England, the monks were often selected to speak for Mother Church ahead of the friars or secular clergy, to silence critics such as Wyclif (1377), Hus (1415), and Luther (1521), and to settle internal discord as at Constance (1414–​17).40 The increasing prominence of the sermon in claustral studies made it a vehicle for the exploration and display of wider learning. Examples surviving from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries bear witness to the showcasing of scholarship in literature, philosophy and even classical mythography.41

Public Preaching The new preaching enterprise of monks and nuns increasingly extended beyond the enclosure of the monastery itself. Generally, the monasteries’ relationship with their spiritual properties—​churches, chapels, and constituent chantries—​ changed in the later Middle Ages; as well as taking control of their finances, they were also more closely involved in their ministry. Not only did the monks exercise their right to provide clergy, but it became more common for them to appoint a priest from their own professed community to serve the parish. It is impossible to say precisely how many monks filled the role of parish clergy in the period after 1200, but it is clear that the practice was widespread and not confined to any one monastic order; certainly it is a misconception that houses of regular canons, many of which were raised from parochial properties, were a greater presence in parish churches than Benedictines, Cistercians, or Cluniacs. Even if they did not always place the parishioners under their authority in the pastoral care of their own brethren, monasteries of the later period were more disposed to direct their spiritual lives.42 Increasingly, the observance of

Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., Medieval artes praedicandi:  A Synthesis of Scholastic Sermon Structure (Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London, 2015), 23–​4. 39 Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 289. 40 Ibid., 208 and 384–​6. 41 Ibid., 287; Siegfried Wenzel, “The Classics in Late Medieval Preaching.” Mediaeval Antiquity, ser. 1, Studia 24 (1995):  127–​43, reprinted in Siegfried Wenzel, Elucidations: Medieval Poetry and Its Religious Backgrounds (Louvain, 2010), 121–​38. 42 See the articles by Lusset and Roest, and Knudsen in this volume. 38

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the liturgical calendar by these parishioners was bound to that of the monastery; the ceremonies for the principal and patronal festivals were orchestrated by the monastic community, often to the point that they culminated in a procession to the monastic church. Their liturgical books were also prepared under the direction of, and perhaps by, the supervising monastic community; it is possible that this provision of books extended to the sermon collections made by the monks. The spiritual discipline of their parishes was also strictly policed by the office of the monastic archdeacon, and, in a period that saw renewed anxiety over irreligion and heresy, many monastic communities positioned themselves in the frontline of the battle for orthodoxy.

Pastoral Care The sermon was central to the monasteries’ changing interactions with their lay subjects. Monk-​priests carried their training as preachers with them into the churches they served. Among the surviving examples of sermons composed by monks in the period after the Black Death is a substantial corpus preserved in vernacular text, the rhetorical “color” of which would suggest that it was also the original language of delivery. Others are recorded in a macaronic (bilingual) text, the purpose of which may have been to entertain monastic readers, but which may also point to original delivery before an unlearned, or at least mixed, audience.43 The ongoing search for the origin of the Middle Dutch Limburg sermon collection, which is not now thought to have originated in a monastic community, nonetheless points to the close involvement of monks in its evolution and transmission. The vernacular preaching of Dutch abbeys can be traced from as early as the 1230s, when Abbot Jarich of Mariengaarde (d. 1242) was actively preaching in Old Frisian.44 Monks certainly addressed sermons to the laity to mark the feasts of their own patronal saints and of those of the parish churches under their jurisdiction. The surviving sermon collection of the sub-​prior at Durham Priory in the years around 1400 contains nearly sixty sermons prepared for services at the parish churches in the monastery’s care and in the monastic cathedral itself.45 The obligation on the male brethren of the order “opunly to preche” was written into the 1415 foundation charter of the Brigittine double monastery of Syon.46 By the end of the fifteenth century, even the Carthusians came

Horner, Macaronic Sermon Collection, 6–​7; Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 19. Wybren Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century (Leiden, 2008), 35. 45 Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 66–​73; Johnson, “Robert Rypon.” 46 Susan Powell, “Preaching at Syon Abbey,” Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 229–​67. 43

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to recognize public preaching as a stimulus for popular devotion, and at their greater city convents offered collations ad populum in the outer courts.47 Their active ministry made the monks aware of the social and cultural shifts among the laity in the later Middle Ages, their rising literacy, and their growing taste for books in general, and devotional reading in particular. Whether or not the monks themselves held pastoral responsibilities beyond the monastic precinct, it became increasingly common for them to support individuals and entire social networks in their private devotion, and to make provision for their reading. Sermons were recopied for circulation; perhaps they were also composed for the purpose of written circulation. With the advent of print, a number of monastic writers prepared editions of texts, sometimes their own, to satisfy a readership which they themselves had created. In England, the Brigittine male Brethren of Syon were at the forefront of this activity; in mainland Europe, the Carthusians were perhaps the most prominent.48 The diocesan clergy were conscious of the monastic presence in the parishes and in the difficult years after the Black Death, as numbers of secular clergy struggled to recover, they sought their collaboration. The monastic writers of this period prepared a wide range of pastoral literature, with sermons, new renderings of old authorities, and original compositions among them. In the metropolitan district of York, the archbishop turned to a Benedictine, John Gaytrick (fl. 1367), to write a sermon in English which summarized the main articles of faith—​the seven deadly sins, the seven works of mercy, the Ten Commandments—​which might be used (in effect, ventriloquized) by the poorly educated parish clergy throughout his very large and very rural diocese.49 It was another (unnamed) monk of York whose public preaching targeted the vexatious vowess Margery Kempe, as her amanuensis recorded in her Book.50 The experience of preaching outside their precincts to the unprofessed returned the monks to an involvement in public discourse which they had not known, at least not in a sustained way, since their early, pioneering



Denis D. Martin, Fifteenth-​Century Carthusian Reform:  The World of Nicholas Kempf (Leiden, 1992), 230; Sigrun Haude, “The Silent Monks Speak Up:  The Changing Identity of the Carthusians in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 86 (1995): 124–​40. 48 J. T. Rhodes, “Syon Abbey and Its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century,” JEH 44 (1993): 11–​25; Haude, “Silent Monks Speak Up.” 49 David A. Lawton, “Gaytryge’s Sermon, Dictamen and Middle English Alliterative Verse,” Modern Philology 76 (1979): 331. 50 The Book of Margery Kempe: The Text from the Unique Manuscript Owned by Col. W. Butler Bowden (London, 1940), 123 (Chapter 52). 47

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centuries. In the years before the Reformation, the sermon emerged as their preferred medium for addressing matters of general controversy. The English Benedictine prelate Thomas Brinton (d. 1389) was called upon to preach to the political nation at sessions of parliament, and in his sermons directly addressed current affairs, such as the Peasants’ Revolt which had threatened the life of the king in 1381.51 In 1524 a Cluniac preacher seized the opportunity of a public sermon to make a direct attack on his monarch, Francis I.52 Indeed, it might be suggested that the familiarity and frequency of preaching in monastic life lent these later generations a critical edge which their forbears had lacked. As evangelical reform and anti-​monasticism spread rapidly across northern Europe after 1517, the monks turned to preaching as their principal means of responding to the threat. Although the success of the Tudor Dissolution has left the documentary record very sparse, there is no doubt that there was great alarm over hostile monastic preaching at the height of the Henrician Reformation. The Carthusians’ tentative turn toward public preaching was set firm in the face of aggressive Protestant reform—​notably at Cologne–​although, true to their tradition, they were as productive in the production and transmission of their (printed) texts as they were in manning the pulpit themselves.53 At the end of the Middle Ages, the monastic sermon retained the role it had assumed in the formative generations of conventual life as an effective means of conveying both pastoral and disciplinary guidance to the professed community. In a period when the fragility of regular observance was the common anxiety of monastic and secular Church leaders, preaching was employed more frequently, more forcefully, and perhaps more profitably than it had been in the central Middle Ages. It might be argued that it reinvigorated the authority of the monastic superior; certainly the testimony of female communities would suggest that the spectacle of the sermon now enhanced the status of the sisters’ head. The greater prominence of the sermon in the claustral discourse of these later centuries also returned to the monks and nuns something of the profile in scholarship, theological controversy, and spiritual leadership of the laity which had waned with the advent of the friars and the expansion of the secular Church. When the doctrine of the Church was challenged, by new heresies in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth

51



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Brinton, Sermons, 2:315–​18 (Sermon 69) and 2:454–​66 (Sermons 99–​100); Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 49. Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ:  Preaching in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (New York, 1992), 36. 53 Haude, “Silent Monks Speak Up.”

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centuries and by calls for reform in the early sixteenth century, monastic preachers were prominent in the front line of defense. They also entered the pulpit to contribute to the routine pastoral care of the lay congregations under their jurisdiction. In the century before 1517, the people of Europe were as likely to discover Scripture and doctrine from the lips of a professed monk as they were from a friar or a secular priest.

Bibliography Devlin, Mary Aquinas, “Introduction.” In Thomas Brinton, The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, 2 vols., edited by Mary Aquinas Devlin, 1:i–​xxxviii. London, 1954. Harvey, Margaret. Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham. Woodbridge, 2006. Haude, Sigrun. “The Silent Monks Speak Up: The Changing Identity of the Carthusians in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 86 (1995): 124–​40. Horner, Patrick. J. “Introduction.” In A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England. Oxford, MS Bodley 649, edited by and trans. Patrick J. Horner, 1–​24. Toronto, 2006. Johnson, Holly. “Robert Rypon and the Creation of London, British Library MS Harley 4854:  A Master Preacher and His Sermon-​Collection.” Medieval Sermon Studies 59 (2015): 38–​56. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, and Pamela J. Walker, eds. Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. Berkeley, CA, 1998. Lawton, David A. “Gaytryge’s Sermon, Dictamen and Middle English Alliterative Verse.” Modern Philology 76 (1979): 329–​43. Muessig, Carolyn, ed. Medieval Monastic Preaching. Leiden, 1998. Olson, Linda, and Kathryn Kerby-​Fulton, eds. Voices in Dialogue:  Reading Women in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame, IN, 2005. Powell, Susan. “Preaching at Syon Abbey.” Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 229–​67. Roest, Bert. “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum: The Validation of Knowledge and the Office of Preaching in Late Medieval Female Franciscan Communities.” In Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, edited by Mathilde van Dijk and Renee Nip, 65–​83. Turnhout, 2005.   Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform. Leiden, 2013. Scheepsma, Wybren. The Limburg Sermons:  Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century. Leiden, 2008. Valerio, Adriana. “Le prediche di Domenica da Paradiso.” In I sermoni di Domenica da Paradiso. Studi e testo critico, edited by Rita Librandi and Adriana Valerio, v–​clxxix. Florence, 1999. Voaden, Rosalynn, and Alastair Minnis, eds. Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–​c.1500. Turnhout, 2010. Wenzel, Siegfried. “The Classics in Late Medieval Preaching.” Mediaeval Antiquity, ser. 1, Studia 24 (1995): 127–​43; reprinted in Siegfried Wenzel, Elucidations: Medieval Poetry and Its Religious Backgrounds (Louvain, 2010), 121–​38.

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Monastic Preaching, c. 1350–1545   Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England:  Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif. Cambridge, 2005. Winston-​Allen, Anne. Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages. Philadelphia, PA, 2004. Zarri, Gabriella. “Places and Gestures of Women’s Preaching in Quattro-​and Cinquecento Italy.” In Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200–​ 1500, edited by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin. trans. Donald Bathgate, 177–​96. Turnhout, 2010.   “Predicazione e cura pastorale: i Sermoni della clarissa Veneziana Chiara Bugni (1471–​ 1514).” Anuario de estudios medievales 42 (2012): 141–​61.

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Research on Monasticism in the German Tradition Sig rid Hirb odian ( tr a n slate d b y A l ison I. Beac h )

The German Approach: Perceptions and Problems Regional history (Landesgeschichte) has long been considered to be a quintessentially German approach to medieval history, particularly among scholars outside German academic circles. On the one hand, some of the expectations associated with this kind of research are positive, marked by respect and appreciation for work that is deeply rooted in abundant archival materials and records—​sources that are evaluated with great care and in fine detail to the highest academic standards. Such work, which might focus on a single monastery or a small, precisely defined region, is known for its painstaking analysis of all of the preserved sources. These positive expectations, however, are often countered with criticism or even contempt. German historians of this sort are seen to be obsessed with the petty minutiae of a narrowly defined place or region, or to be deeply entangled in an academic discourse that is hardly comprehensible to outsiders, overly focused, for example, on issues of narrow national interest such as characteristic developments in constitutional history. The approach is limited, in this critical view, to positivist narratives that seek to produce the most detailed possible reproduction of a small world.1 In short, Landesgeschichte is seen to be precise in detail, but completely out of sync with contemporary research on an international level. My aim in this article is not to attempt to disprove these judgments. Too often, they correspond precisely to what has characterized (and in some cases still characterizes) research in Landesgeschichte. I  will begin, however, with two important observations that highlight the value and relevance of

See, for example, Patrick Geary, “Ein wenig Wissenschaft von gestern: der Einfluß der deutschsprachigen Mediävistik in Amerika,” in Die deutschsprachige Mediävistik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Peter Moraw and Rudolf Schieffer (Ostfildern, 2005), 381–​92.

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current research in this tradition. First, this type of regional research is a sensible and necessary part of the process of testing and contextualizing the results of research that has been done in broader contexts. Second, state-​of-​ the-​art research in regional history is now opening up avenues of research and seeking to enter into dialogue with medieval studies internationally. In this essay, I will first introduce Landesgeschichte as a characteristic discipline within German historiography, and then present two case studies that focus on women’s monastic communities in the late Middle Ages. Contemporary Landesgeschichte, as I will demonstrate, is engaging many of the “big questions” that animate the current study of medieval monastic history, offering its own broader perspectives through comparative regional history (vergleichende Landesgeschichte).2

What Is Landesgeschichte and How Is It Done? The deep roots of this approach to history can be traced back to two traditions, both related to the process of state-​building in the German territories. The first is the assembling of collections of the documents, laws, and statistics on regional jurisdiction that elucidate the lordship and land ownership that were the foundations of various principalities (Territorialstaaten) within the German Empire, a process that began in the sixteenth century. Second, dynastic historiography was used as an instrument of self-​representation, status-​securing, and tradition-​building for various regional ruling houses, beginning in the late Middle Ages.3 Landesgeschichte in the proper sense developed from these two roots, in parallel with the methodologies, philosophies, and institutions associated with the modern discipline of history that emerged in the nineteenth century. One leading figure in the movement was Karl Lamprecht (1856–​1915), who called for a turn away from the history of “great men” and toward social and economic history, thus toward the history of more ordinary people.4 With the founding of the Bonn Institute for the Study of Historical Regional Research (Bonner Institut für Geschichtliche Landeskunde) in 1920, the concept of

Sigrid Hirbodian, Christian Jörg, and Sabine Klapp, eds., Methoden und Wege der Landesgeschichte (Ostfildern, 2015). 3 Alois Gerlich, Geschichtliche Landeskunde des Mittelalters. Genese und Probleme (Darmstadt, 1986). 4 Luise Schorn-​ Schütte, “Karl Lamprecht:  Wegbereiter einer historischen Sozialwissen­schaft?,” in Perspectum. Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Frühen Neuzeit und zur Historiographiegeschichte, ed. Anja Kürbis, Holger Kürbis, and Markus Friedrich (Munich, 2014), 144–​90. 2

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interdisciplinary research on cultural landscapes (Kulturräume) emerged, a particular cooperation among German studies, geography, and regional history.5 This interdisciplinary perspective, and its view of space as a “constructed” object of investigation (rather than as a naturally determined frame), clearly distinguishes the method of historical regional research from other approaches such as microhistory and regional history (Regionalgeschichte).6 Investigations may focus on a politically constructed space such as a country, a territory, or a city, but also a culturally or socially defined space such as an urban or monastic landscape. While the main focus of German research in this field has always been the Middle Ages, historical regional research explicitly encompasses later historical periods; the space under consideration must be investigated over the centuries as a continuum—​in the longue durée. It is no coincidence that this concept is reminiscent of the “total history” (histoire totale) of the Annales School. Or, as Ludwig Petry put it in 1961, historical regional research (Geschichtliche Landeskunde) works within “unbounded boundaries” (in Grenzen unbegrenzt).7 The concept of a “cultural space” (Kulturraumforschung) advanced by research institutes in Bonn and Leipzig was easily (and willingly) reinterpreted in the Nazi era as a framework for investigating and, above all, asserting the reality of a specifically German cultural space. Prominent historians such as Hermann Aubin, the head of the Bonn Institute, played an inglorious role in the so-​called Westforschung, which sought to prove the “Germanic” character of entire areas west of the Rhine, areas that were contrasted with “Romania”—just as “Ostforschung” had done for cultural spaces in the East.8 This deep involvement in the policy of the Nazi regime led to a retreat of Landesgeschichte in the years after the Second World War into what was perceived as the apolitical safety of medieval constitutional history. This approach dominated research on the German Middle Ages in the 1950s and 1960s, as reflected by its importance within such influential groups as the

Marlene Nikolay-​ Panter, “Geschichte und methodischer Ansatz des Bonner Instituts: eine Skizze,” in Rheinische Landesgeschichte an der Universität Bonn. Traditionen –​ Entwicklungen  –​ Perspektiven, ed. Manfred Groten and Andreas Rutz (Göttingen, 2007),  11–​37. 6 Stefan Brakensiek, ed., Regionalgeschichte in Europa. Methoden und Erträge der Forschung zum 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2000). 7 Ludwig Petry, “In Grenzen unbegrenzt: Möglichkeiten und Wege der geschichtlichen Landeskunde (1961),” in Probleme und Methoden der Landesgeschichte, ed. Pankraz Fried (Darmstadt, 1978), 280–​304. 8 Matthias Werner, “Zwischen politischer Begrenzung und methodischer Offenheit: Wege und Stationen deutscher Landesgeschichtsforschung im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Moraw and Schieffer, Die deutschsprachige Mediävistik im 20. Jahrhundert, 251–​364. 5

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Constance Working Group on Medieval History (Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte), as well as in the reestablishment of a number of institutes for regional history at German universities.9 Since the end of the twentieth century, however, Landesgeschichte has been continuously on the defensive. Institutes have been closed, chairs reallocated or eliminated, and few among the new generation of scholars present themselves as historians in this tradition. Recently, however, Landesgeschichte has sought to reposition itself. A  Working Group on Regional History within the Association of Historians of Germany (Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands) was founded in 2012 with the goal of assessing the state of the field, discussing current research trends in international history, and networking within other subdisciplines both nationally and internationally. This group has affirmed Landesgeschichte as a discipline dedicated to source-​intensive interdisciplinary research that crosses traditional chronological boundaries. It explores historical phenomena in a space whose historicity itself is the subject of research. While Landesgeschichte always works close to the sources, it can connect its questions to broader research trends, not stopping at a single conclusion for a single region, but comparing information from different regions.10 In sum, Landesgeschichte is focused on a defined space but is also interdisciplinary, drawing on history, archaeology, art history, cultural studies, and other areas. And Landesgeschichte works across historical periods. It is not bounded by the Middle Ages, but can reach into the early modern and modern periods in order to investigate the long-​term formation or re-​formation of the region under study across epochs. Regional historical developments are always placed at the center, and comparison and the drawing of broader conclusions are only warranted when these can be based upon thoroughly researched regions. Finally, Landesgeschichte is committed to the intense study of every available piece of historical evidence for the region in question. A  scholar must dig deeply into the archives and not rely on a single source (such as a monastic chronicle), nor privilege just one historical perspective (for example, the internal perspective of the individual or individuals who created that chronicle), as illustrated in the two case studies offered below. The work that historians in the field of Landesgeschichte do is thus deductive; they first collect



Anne Christine Nagel, “ ‘Gipfeltreffen der Mediävisten’:  der Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte,” in Die Rückkehr der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in die “Ökumene der Historiker.” Ein wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Ansatz, ed. Ulrich Pfeil (Munich, 2008), 73–​90. 10 Hirbodian, Jörg, and Klapp, Methoden und Wege der Landgeschichte. 9

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all of the available sources and then try to answer historical questions that have emerged during this source-​intensive work. To illustrate the mode of operation of Landesgeschichte and to clarify the added broader value of this historical method, I will present two case studies from my own research on female religious communities in the late Middle Ages. The first leads us to the medieval county of Württemberg, and to a single female community: the Dominican monastery of St. John the Baptist in Kirchheim unter Teck. The second example will take us into the urban monastic landscape of late medieval Strasbourg.

St John the Baptist in Kirchheim unter Teck In 1478, at the instigation of Count Ulrich of Württemberg (d. 1480), the Observant reform was introduced at the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Kirchheim unter Teck. Seven experienced sisters were sent from the Observant monastery of Silo in Schlettstatt (Alsace) to help establish the new way of life mandated by the reform. One of these reformed sisters, probably a nun named Magdalena Kremerin from Strasbourg, wrote a chronicle of the reform and the events of the following years.11 This text, which is well known among historians of late medieval religious life for its strong narrative structure and informed theological arguments, provides in-​depth insight into the ways of life and thinking of the sisters themselves. Studied in conjunction with other local sources available, the chronicle offers a remarkably nuanced portrayal of the drama that took place within and around the monastery. When the succeeding count, Eberhard the Younger (d. 1504), sought to reverse the reform of Kirchheim in 1487, these reforming sisters were to be sent back to their home monastery. But the community refused to comply with this order, and the count was forced to exert considerable pressure, even resorting to cutting the monastery off from the outside world and starving the women. It was only after protracted struggles that the count’s cousin, Count Eberhard the Elder (“Eberhard im Bart,” d. 1496), came to the women’s aid; he succeeded in bringing the monastery under his control and protection and so confirmed the Observance there. The chronicle describes all of these dramatic struggles from the perspective of the sisters themselves and thus provides remarkable insight into the mental world and perceptions

The only printed edition to date is Christian Friedrich Sattler, Geschichte des Herzogtums Württemberg unter der Regierung der Graven, 13 vols. (Ulm, 1768), 5:173–​280; the two surviving copies of the manuscript are Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart A 493, Bü 2 (c. 1490), and Vienna, Schottenkloster, Cod. 307 (c. 1488).

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of a community of religious women. Magdalena Kremerin’s chronicle can usefully be read on its own or in conjunction with similar texts from other women’s communities as a window on the history of piety and theology,12 the history of literature, and the cultural history of religious women in the fifteenth century. For a better contextualization of the events at play, however, a Landesgeschichte approach is essential.13 A question that is repeatedly raised in the research on Observant monasteries is the extent to which the monastic reforms of the fifteenth century were politically motivated. This problem can be answered in detail on different levels through a close reading of the Kirchheim Chronicle through the lens of Landesgeschichte. Count Ulrich’s motivation for introducing the Observant reform in all Dominican monasteries in his territory, while certainly rooted to some extent in his piety, can be traced back to his desire for strict control and instrumentalization of the churches—​ultimately a step toward the creation of an early modern sovereign control over the Church (Kirchenregiment) by the territorial princes.14 The dramatic story of the women of Kirchheim shows clearly how deeply a single women’s religious community might be drawn into, and stand strong amid, a struggle between two competing counts seeking to secure exclusive rule.15 It was not the religious conviction of the counts, the spiritual life of the sisters, or the religious care by Observant or conventual Dominicans that was decisive in the conflict over the reform of the monastery, but the power struggle between Count Eberhard the Younger and Count Eberhard the Elder.16 Here, as well as in many other reform contexts, the great influence of political circumstances on the success or failure of Observant reforms is clearly demonstrated and might offer insight for the interpretation of other examples.17



See, for example, Anne Winston-​Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 2005). Sigrid Hirbodian and Petra Kurz, eds., Die Chronik der Magdalena Kremerin im interdisziplinären Dialog (Ostfildern, 2016). 14 See the foundational Dieter Stievermann, Landesherrschaft und Klosterwesen im spätmittelalterlichen Württemberg (Sigmaringen, 1988). 15 Hans-​ Martin Maurer, “Von der Landesteilung zur Wiedervereinigung:  der Münsinger Vertrag als ein Markstein württembergischer Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte 43 (1984): 89–​132. 16 For all individual records and source documents, see Georg Moritz Wendt, “Eine Nonne im Dienste Württembergs? Die Chronik der Magdalena Krämerin als Element spätmittelalterlicher Herrschaftsverdichtung,” in Hirbodian and Kurz, Die Chronik der Magdalena Kremerin,  16–​28. 17 See Sigrid Hirbodian, “Dominikanerinnenreform und Familienpolitik: die Einführung der Observanz im Kontext städtischer Sozialgeschichte,” in Schreiben und Lesen in der Stadt. Literaturbetrieb im spätmittelalterlichen Straßburg, ed. Stephan Mossman, Nigel F. Palmer, and Felix Heinzer (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012), 1–​16. 12 13

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The events at Kirchheim can also serve to illustrate how the “big questions” of historical research—​considered here in the context of gender studies—​ can be productively approached within the context of Landesgeschichte. The case of the Kirchheim sisters shows that, contrary to the older interpretation of these events, the women of the count’s family, and particularly Eberhard the Elder’s mother, Mechtild von der Pfalz (d. 1482), and his wife, Barbara Gonzaga of Mantua (d. 1503), had a decisive influence on the reform itself and on its concrete implementation.18 Further, it is remarkable how precisely the religious self-​concept of the reformed sisters in the Kirchheim community, as well as their agency concerning both internal matters pertaining to the Dominican order and their continued involvement in family networks, can be read through the chronicle. It may well be, for example, that the women who had been brought from Alsace to Kirchheim in 1478 to carry out the reform had long sought and actively cultivated the opportunity, because at least their leader, Barbara Bernheimerin, who was to become prioress in the newly reformed community, came originally from Kirchheim. Some twelve years earlier she had been transferred to the Observant monastery of Silo in Schlettstatt, perhaps with the idea that she would return to Kirchheim at some point, equipped with great knowledge and great influence.19 The religious self-​confidence of the women is reflected, among other things, by the fact that they did not attribute their ultimate victory over the opponents of reform exclusively to the “heroic” Count Eberhard the Elder, who won a military and political victory over his cousin, or to their superiors within the Dominican order who had brought all of their influence to bear in support of the reform. The chronicle rather credits the immediate intervention of God, facilitated by the prayer and the exemplary attitude and readiness to suffer of the community in times of extreme danger, as the decisive factors in the victory of the Observance. Or, as the chronicler herself states: “they were sure that if there had been monks in the monastery instead of sisters, they would not have struggled so long and had suffered so much. God be praised in eternity. Amen” (sy wöltent wol wetten, werent so

See Sigrid Hirbodian, “Gefahr, Entbehrung und Rettung aus höchster Not: die Reform des Kirchheimer Dominikanerinnenklosters aus der Sicht der Magdalena Kremerin,” in Hirbodian and Kurz, Die Chronik der Magdalena Kremerin, 9. 19 Ulrich P. Ecker, Die Geschichte des Kloster St. Johannes Baptista der Dominikanerinnen zu Kirchheim unter Teck (Freiburg, 1985), 346 (document no.  543); see also, more generally, Sigrid Hirbodian, “Reformschwestern und Reformverliererinnen: Strategien und Handlungsmöglichkeiten geistlicher Frauen in den Reformen des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Reformverlierer 1000–​1800. Zum Umgang mit Niederlagen in der europäischen Vormoderne, ed. Andreas Biehrer and Dietmar Schiersner (Berlin, 2016), 449–​73. 18

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vil mann hinn gewesen, sy hettent nit also lang gestritten und so vil erlyten. Got sy lob ewiclich, Amen).20

Religious Women in Late Medieval Strasbourg We travel next to medieval Strasbourg, in present-​day French Alsace. Strasbourg offers an excellent opportunity to illustrate the methods of Landesgeschichte in action, thanks to the richness of the surviving sources from the late Middle Ages. We have, for example, charters, letters, economic records, and a variety of administrative documents, as well as chronicles, books, and writings of every possible kind. There are also funerary inscriptions for a number of nuns and abbesses, and these provide the starting point for investigating their identities and lives. Finally, we have the minutes of the city council, the charters of the town, and documents from the families of origin of the nuns—​including monastery admission agreements and letters—​which have much to reveal about their historical context. These sources permit us to look into the lives of many of the people connected to Strasbourg’s monasteries, and, in some cases, to determine the nature of those connections, as well the nature of their connections to powerful individuals in the city and beyond.21 Medieval Strasbourg was ruled by the bishop, although it had become largely autonomous under the direction of the city council by the end of the thirteenth century. It was home to eleven women’s religious communities—​a house of canonesses, seven Dominican communities, two houses of Poor Clares, and a monastery of the order of St. Mary Magdalene (Reuerinnen or Weißfrauen)—​together with as many as seventy houses of beguines. The religious landscape of Strasbourg thus included a range of forms of religious life for women from almost all of the social levels of the city and the surrounding area. The Landesgeschichte approach calls for an investigation of these diverse communities that focuses not so much on spiritual life and developments in theology and spirituality, but rather on the social, political, and economic contexts of communities and individual religious women.22





Chronik des Kloster St. Johann Baptist in Kirchheim, in Sattler, Geschichte des Herzogthums Württemberg, 5:211; on the theological ideas expressed by the authors of the Kirchheim Chronicle, see Stefanie Monika Neidhardt, “Die Kirchheimer Chronik: ein Werk für die Observanz,” in Hirbodian and Kurz, Die Chronik der Magdalena Kremerin, 85–​101. 21 See also the article by Röckelein in this volume. 22 Sigrid Hirbodian, “Geistliche Frauen und städtische Welt. Kanonissen  –​Nonnen  –​ Beginen und ihre Umwelt am Beispiel der Stadt Straßburg im Spätmittelalter (1250–​ 1525)” (Habilitationsschrift, University of Mainz, 2001).

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A drama that played out between 1370 and 1377, well documented in a variety of surviving sources, offers an interesting case in point. The trouble began when three of the seven female Dominican communities in Strasbourg attempted to leave the Dominican order and to become houses of canonesses under the protection of the bishop.23 The desire to separate from the order was likely related to serious allegations made some years before that the Dominicans had abused their control and supervision of the women in their charge. Although these claims were unproven, they led in 1358 to a restructuring of the relationship between male and female Dominicans in Strasbourg by the provincial of the Dominican order. Another complaint voiced by women, who were predominantly from the urban patriciate, was that male Dominicans no longer came from families of equal rank but increasingly from simple peasant and bourgeois families—​a situation that they found untenable. It was hard for the status-​conscious sisters to endure the supervision of brothers with much lower social origins than their own. In order to press their demands, the nuns of St. Marx (St. Marcus), St. Catherine, and St. Nicholas in Undis left their monasteries and fled into the protection of their families of origin. To the great annoyance of the Dominican provincial, the city council of Strasbourg initially made no effort at all to assist the order in disciplining these women or in forcing their return to their monasteries. Clearly, as the superior of the order speculated in a letter to the city council, they actually supported the intention of the nuns never to return to the order’s obedience. The renegade nuns were, of course, excommunicated, a ruling that was soon confirmed by the pope, who also called on the nuns to return to their monasteries. But some Dominican brothers seem to have, whether openly or secretly, actively supported (or at least tacitly approved of ) the women’s behavior. Despite several papal letters and three successive rulings that declared the women’s allegations against the Dominicans to be unfounded, the nuns refused to return to their monasteries—​even after the city council had withdrawn their support and ordered them to return to their communities and to the obedience of their order. The council, however, had acted in support of the Dominican order and against the secession-​seeking women only after the Dominicans had given the council the authority to intervene in the internal affairs of the women’s monasteries. In this way, the conflict led ultimately to an increase in the degree of secular control over the

Sigrid Hirbodian, “Pastors and Seducers:  The Practice of the cura monialium in Mendicant Convents in Strasbourg,” in Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–​1500, ed. Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin (Turnhout, 2014), 303–​37, with detailed references to the sources.

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monastery, in this case by the city council; similar maneuvering toward the goal of establishing secular control over the Church was seen above in the case of Count Eberhard the Elder’s dealings with St. John the Baptist in Kirchheim. One critical line of current research focuses on the question of the religious affiliation of male and female monasteries, the religious identities associated with each, and the religious self-​image of monks and nuns. Scholars have tended to approach such questions from an internal perspective, from within the particular community or order in question, without reference to the role played by social relationships. In particular, the question of incorporations, of religious affiliations, and of the associated duty of male orders to cura monialium has been extensively researched for the Cistercians and for the two great mendicant orders.24 In the case of fourteenth-​century Strasbourg, however, we witness a different process: three women’s monasteries, which were among the first to be incorporated with great effort and cost into the Dominican order in the thirteenth century, wanted to leave it. This unusual turn of events can be studied, of course, from the inside by focusing on the allegations that the Dominicans had neglected their spiritual duties, and instead had sex with and impregnated (carnaliter cognoverant et impregnaverant25) the sisters. But placing the investigation within its precise local and historical context brings to light much more far-​reaching issues and leads us to the question whether the religious affiliation and the identity of the women was, indeed, shaped by quite different factors: their social status (the women were of a much higher social rank than most of the Dominican friars caring for them);26 a conflict, ongoing since the end of the thirteenth century, between the Strasbourg city council (on which numerous close relatives of the nuns sat) and the Dominican order;27 the immediate model of the neighboring house of St. Stephan, a community of secular canonesses to which the daughters of the Strasbourg patriciate had long eagerly sought admission, but that had recently (in the fourteenth century) taken the decision to exclude



Franz J. Felten, “Zisterzienserinnen in Deutschland: Beobachtungen und Überlegungen zu Ausbreitung und Ordenszugehörigkeit,” in Unanimité et diversité cisterciennes (Saint-​ Étienne, 2000), 345–​400. See also the articles by Griffiths and Andenna in this volume. 25 Wilhelm Wiegand et al., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg, 7 vols. (Strasbourg, 1896), 5/​ 2, no. 1000, 773 (heavily abridged); the original documents are preserved in the Archives Municipales de Strasbourg, Archives St. Thomas, Hist. Eccl. I, 212 (1372, 02 07). 26 Hirbodian, “Geistliche Frauen und städtische Welt,” 75–​91 and 578–​629. 27 Ibid., 39–​43; Charles Schmidt, “Les Dominicains de Strasbourg au treizième siècle,” Revue d’Alsace 15 (1854): 241–​88. 24

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them and accept only candidates from the landed gentry;28 and the above-​ mentioned attempt by the city council to deprive the Dominicans of control over the internal conditions in the women’s monasteries and bring them into its own power.29 All of these various aspects can be examined through a more detailed analysis of the Strasbourg sources and their significance for the secession attempt of the three Dominican nunneries. But this also leads to fresh answers to the more general question of how the religious identities of women were shaped: not only through formal religious affiliation, but also by social background, by political climate in the hometown, and by spirituality, especially by the model of neighboring institutions that followed a very different way of  life. The scenario presented here takes on a completely different character when it includes urban events, the back and forth of political factions within the city, and their influence on the fortunes of urban monasteries. It also offers insight into the agency of religious women in the late Middle Ages, an issue often at the center of international research. It is astonishing that, for more than seven years, women from three urban Dominican monasteries succeeded in defying their superiors, the papal commissars, and the pope himself; in open disobedience in the face of repeated and most emphatically expressed orders, they pursued their political goals. Without more detailed knowledge of the circumstances on the ground, one might be tempted to assume that the women were pawns of urban monastic policy in the hands of the city council. A more detailed analysis of the active networks of people, however, leads us down a completely different path. Among the leaders of the “recalcitrant nuns” were women from Strasbourg’s leading families. Several from the prominent Merswin family led the opposition as prioresses; these women were close relatives of both Rulman Merswin (d. 1382), who endowed the monastery of the order of St. John in Strasbourg between 1367 and 1371, and Johann Merswin (d. c. 1380s), who was one of the most famous bankers in Strasbourg, and who, among other things, worked for the papal Curia. It is quite conceivable that the women themselves wanted to bring the influence of their relatives to bear on their goal of following a different way of spiritual life. It was clearly not the interests of the city council alone that were the driving force behind the whole affair. This became evident in 1375, when some of the women refused to give up their demands and return to the obedience

Sabine Klapp, “Frauenstifte in Städten am südlichen Oberrhein: das Beispiel St. Stephan in Straßburg im späten Mittelalter,” Markgräflerland 2 (2011): 71–​89. 29 Hirbodian, “Geistliche Frauen und städtische Welt,” 296–​312. 28

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of the order, despite the fact that the city council had long since withdrawn their support. A network analysis of this case and of other examples, some of which are even better documented in the sources, suggests that female agency is always exceptionally strong when women can activate and use the networks provided by their families of origin for themselves and their concerns.30

Conclusion As the two cases presented here make clear, research in the tradition of Landesgeschichte has more to offer to the broader study of medieval monasticism than just a meticulous listing of the events or landholdings connected to a particular religious community. Landesgeschichte can serve to clarify and refine research results or hypotheses, and can provide a lens through which historians can investigate current research questions, providing insights that can be formulated into general theses (with the help of comparative studies). Landesgeschichte has always had the strength—​or the problem, depending on the perspective—​of diving deep into the archives. This means, of course, that only questions for which relevant regional sources exist can be investigated though this method. Landesgeschichte seeks to bring together as many sources as possible for a well-​defined and intentionally defined space. The questions that are then applied to these sources can and should certainly be inspired by the main problematics that now animate international historiography. While it is true that the sources offer answers that are often applicable only to a very circumscribed micro-​landscape (such as a single monastery or city), they have been created and interpreted while also taking into account the respective regional (and broader) context. How to make the step responsibly from this micro level to the macro level—​whether through comparative studies or overarching theorizing—​has always been a problem, and it cannot be solved here. But, as the two case studies have illustrated, broad theory-​oriented and regional source-​oriented approaches can work together to produce excellent results. The value of combining work in Landesgeschichte with the more theory-​ and thesis-​oriented English-​and French-​language scholarship is clearly demonstrated in recent work by Jennifer Deane, Anne Winston-​Allen, and Alison



Ibid.

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Beach.31 Research on the history of religious women in the Middle Ages has benefited particularly from more than a decade of intensive cooperation between German-​and English-​speaking researchers in the Arbeitskreis geistliche Frauen im europäischen Mittelalter/​Working Group on Religious Women in the European Middle Ages (AGFEM). Such collaborations across traditions have already yielded rich rewards, and continue to bring greater clarity to a wide range of shared research questions.

Bibliography Barthelmé, Anette. La réforme dominicaine au XVe siècle en Alsace et dans l’ensemble de la province de Teutonie. Strasbourg, 1931. Brakensiek, Stefan, ed. Regionalgeschichte in Europa. Methoden und Erträge der Forschung zum 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Paderborn, 2000. Elm, Kaspar, ed. Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Berlin, 1989. Fried, Pankraz. ed. Probleme und Methoden der Landesgeschichte. Darmstadt, 1978. Gerlich, Alois. Geschichtliche Landeskunde des Mittelalters. Genese und Probleme. Darmstadt, 1986. Hirbodian, Sigrid. “Die Dominikanerinnen: ein Überblick.” In Die deutschen Dominikaner und Dominikanerinnen im Mittelalter, edited by Sabine von Heusinger, Elias H. Füllenbach OP, Walter Senner OP, and Klaus-​Bernward Springer, 21–​36. Berlin and Boston, MA, 2016.   “Pastors and Seducers: The Practice of the cura monialium in Mendicant Convents in Strasbourg.” In Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100–1500, edited by Fiona J. Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, 303–37. Turnhout, 2014.   “Was ist Landesgeschichte? Überlegungen am Beispiel einer spätmittelalterlichen Klosterchronik.” In Trier – Mainz – Rom. Stationen, Wirkungsfelder, Netzwerke. Festschrift für Michael Matheus zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Anna Esposito, Heidrun Ochs, Elmar Rettinger, and Kai-Michael Sprenger, 27–44. Regensburg, 2013. Hirbodian, Sigrid, and Petra Kurz, eds. Die Chronik der Magdalena Kremerin im interdis­ ziplinären Dialog. Ostfildern, 2016. Hirbodian, Sigrid, Christian Jörg, and Sabine Klapp, eds. Methoden und Wege der Landesge­ schichte. Ostfildern, 2015. Mertens, Dieter. “Klosterreform als Kommunikationsereignis.” In Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Althoff, 397–​420. Stuttgart, 2001.

Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Geistliche Schwestern: The Pastoral Care of Lay Religious Women in Medieval Würzburg,” in Griffiths and Hotchin, Partners in Spirit, 237–​270; Anne Winston-​Allen, “Networking in Medieval Strasbourg: Cross-​Order Collaboration in Book Illustrations among Women’s Reformed Convents,” in Mossman, Palmer, and Heinzer, Schreiben und Lesen in der Stadt, 197–​212; Alison I. Beach, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-​Century Germany (Cambridge, 2017).

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Research on Monasticism in the German Tradition Mossman, Stephan, Nigel F. Palmer, and Felix Heinzer, eds. Schreiben und Lesen in der Stadt. Literaturbetrieb im spätmittelalterlichen Straßburg. Berlin and Boston, MA, 2012. Neidhardt, Stefanie Monika. Autonomie und Gehorsam. Die dominikanische Observanz in Selbstzeugnissen geistlicher Frauen des Spätmittelalters. Münster, 2017. Neidiger, Bernhard. “Die Observanzbewegung der Bettelorden in Südwestdeutschland.” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 11 (1992): 175–​96. Sauerbrey, Anna. Die Straßburger Klöster im 16. Jahrhundert. Eine Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Geschlechtergeschichte. Tübingen, 2012. Schlotheuber, Eva. Klostereintritt und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Tübingen, 2004. Stievermann, Dieter. Landesherrschaft und Klosterwesen im spätmittelalterlichen Württemberg. Sigmaringen, 1988. Uffmann, Heike. Wie in einem Rosengarten. Monastische Reformen des späten Mittelalters in den Vorstellungen der Klosterfrauen. Bielefeld, 2008. Werner, Matthias. “Zwischen politischer Begrenzung und methodischer Offenheit: Wege und Stationen deutscher Landesgeschichtsforschung im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Die deutschsprachige Mediävistik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Peter Moraw and Rudolf Schieffer, 251–​364. Ostfildern, 2005. Winston-​Allen, Anne. Convent Chronicles:  Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages. University Park, PA, 2005.

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Introduction Geoffrey Chaucer’s (d. 1400) Canterbury Tales, written about a decade before his death, begin with a well-​known description of the various participants of a pilgrimage. The text draws heavily on satirical traditions, and Chaucer’s portrayal of the Monk, presented in a superficially sympathetic and even complicit voice, offers a clearly articulate subtext of criticism: A monk ther was, a fair for the maistrie, An outridere, that lovede venerie, A manly man, to been an abbot able. Ful many a deyntee hors hadde he in stable, And whan he rood, men myghte his brydel heere Gynglen in a whistlynge wynd als cleere And eek as loude as dooth the chapel belle.1

Rather than an ascetic, we meet a highly secular-​minded, masculine nobleman who loves hunting. The monk also dresses richly, spends money on horses, and likes to eat roast swan. This behavior is rooted in his lack of inner conviction, as he does not give “a pulled hen” for monastic rules, which would of course have forbidden hunting or unnecessary business outside the monastic enclosure. By undercutting monastic ideals in this way, this description provides a critical and even openly negative perspective on a representative of monasticism. As most modern histories of monasticism are necessarily focused on the self-​ image of monastics and on the ideals shaping their life, such a perspective For their help and suggestions, I would like to thank the editors and Christina Brauner, Mirko Breitenstein, Christoph Dartmann, Pia Döring, Maria Hillebrandt, Emilia Jamroziak, Christel Meier-​Staubach, Andreas Pietsch, Theo Riches, and especially Hannah Skoda.

Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA, 1987), 27, ll. 165–​71.

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is often underrepresented. In contrast, satira, considered a mode of writing rather than a fixed genre in the Middle Ages, aimed to offer criticism of vice in various rhetorical forms. Medieval authors who wanted to expose and criticize faults and vices either used ridicule (expressed as irony, sarcasm, parody, or burlesque), or wrote complaint, lament, and invective.2 The present chapter sketches internal continuities and changes in the content and audience of satires about monks and nuns, predominantly from the twelfth century to the fourteenth. To limit the broad possible range of sources (visual and literary), the thematic focus is limited to poems and short stories. Given the remit of the present volume, the chapter concentrates on contemplative monasticism, excluding not only the military orders but also the mendicant ones, even though the latter, as well as the secular clergy and heretical groups, were often satirized in similar terms.3 The chapter cannot offer a complete overview and merely aims to draw attention to several typical problems of interpretation. It is all too easy, for example, to interpret Chaucer’s description as evidence for the decline of late medieval religious life, or to see him as a forerunner of the Reformation with its growing anticlericalism, attacks on monasticism, and eventual disestablishment of monasteries and mendicant convents in various European regions.4 The fact that Chaucer was a lay man may also wrongly be taken as an illustration that criticism of monks and nuns was the province of the laity. A second glance shows that such assumptions must be questioned, differentiated, or at least nuanced—​and that the technical and literary characteristics of satirical writing need to be appreciated. First and most importantly, medieval satires were predominantly literary texts, often meant for entertainment, and drawing heavily on established literary traditions. As Jill Mann has shown, the depiction of Chaucer’s Monk as a worldly “outridere” used many stereotypes also transmitted in other texts.5 Only familiarity with medieval satire and anti-​ monastic writing enables readers to identify those criticisms that are particular to Chaucer, or that receive particular prominence in his work, accentuating issues with which he wanted his readers to engage. Second, satires tended to

See Laura Kendrick, “Medieval Satire,” in A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, ed. Ruben Quintero (Oxford, 2007), 53–​69; Udo Kindermann, Satyra. Die Theorie der Satire im Mittellateinischen. Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte (Nuremberg, 1978). 3 See Guy Geltner, The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (Oxford, 2012). 4 See Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 1993), esp. x; Robert W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), 243–​57. 5 See Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1973), 17–​36. 2

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exaggerate the dimensions and gravity of the vices and weaknesses that they hoped to expose. Like polemical texts, they linked well-​known observations and partial truths to insinuations and generalizations. So-​called estates satire, one of the most popular medieval types, ascribes certain typical faults broadly to the various groups and professions of society. It would be futile to interrogate such texts for “facts”; rather, they should be understood as a specific type of social commentary. Readers must be prepared to reconstruct individual contexts and appreciate an author’s play on established stereotypes. When and why certain stereotypes emerged is therefore important. The tradition of estates satire, which Chaucer frequently draws upon, did not originate in the fourteenth century or with vernacular literature, but emerged out of older, predominantly Latin traditions that Mann traced back as far as the tenth century.6 Unfortunately, there are no systematic studies of satirical depictions of monks and nuns in the Middle Ages that provide a sense of development across the whole period. Extant studies on critical views of monasticism7 and on anti-​clerical satire more generally8 only offer some signposts. As their evidence suggests, however, most of the elements evoked by Chaucer date to the twelfth century and its monastic reforms. Many late medieval satires indeed drew on the Latin discourse of reform emerging from monastic and clerical milieux in the high medieval period. This complicates the straightforward assumption that we can distinguish a “lay” or “outside” perspective from an internal perspective informed by idealized self-​images. Rather than a separate inside and outside view, we seem to observe an ongoing exchange between religious orders and “outsiders” —​ clerics, mendicants, and lay people—​about the status of monastic life. In this

See ibid., 8–​10 and 203. Edward Coleman, “Nasty Habits:  Satire and the Medieval Monk,” History Today 43 (1993):  36–​42; Rudolf Schneider, Der Mönch in der englischen Dichtung bis auf Lewis’s “Monk” 1795 (Leipzig, 1928); Graciela S. Daichman, Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature (Syracuse, NY, 1986); Derek Pearsall, “Medieval Monks and Friars:  Differing Literary Perceptions,” in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. Terry Jones, Robert F. Yeager, and Toshiyuki Takamiya (New York, 2012), 59–​73. 8 See Brian P. McGuire, “Anti-​Clerical Invective and the Growth of Clerical Satire, 1075–​ 1400,” in Master Golyas and Sweden: The Transformation of a Clerical Satire, ed. Olle Ferm and Bridget Morris (Stockholm, 1997), 45–​98; Helga Schüppert, Kirchenkritik in der lateinischen Lyrik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1972); Birgit Beine, Der Wolf in der Kutte. Geistliche in den Mären des deutschen Mittelalters (Bielefeld, 1999); Nikolaus Henkel, “Gesellschaftssatire im Mittelalter:  Formen und Verfahren satirischer Schreibweise in den Sermones Nulli Parcentes (Walther 6881), im Carmen Satiricum des Nicolaus von Bibra, in der Ständekritik von Viri Fratres, Servi Dei (Walther 20575) und im Buch der Rügen,” in Epochen der Satire. Traditionslinien einer literarischen Gattung in Antike, Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Thomas Haye and Franziska Schnoor (Hildesheim, 2008), 95–​117; Paul J. G. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1963), 68–​75. 6 7

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exchange, or at least in the documents that are still extant, certain themes, tropes, and stereotypes in satires about monastic life became increasingly familiar and popular from the long twelfth century onwards.

Twelfth-​Century Latin Satires: Inside and Outside Voices Owing to the broad medieval understanding of satire as criticism or reprehensio, specific points of origin for anti-​monastic writing are hard to discern. As monasticism evolved and transformed, it seems that satire evolved and transformed with it. Even the introductory chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict (RB) discusses bad monks, the sarabaitae and gyrovagi, before turning to laudable monks. This suggests that late antique and medieval perceptions were always shaped by the assumption that there were “good” and “bad” religious individuals. Other early examples of ridicule addressed to monks and nuns are usually tied to individual conflicts. The Carmen ad Rotbertum regem by Bishop Adalbero of Laon (d. 1030/​1), for example, describes Abbot Odilo of Cluny (d. 1049) as a king, and ridicules the Cluniac monks as bloodthirsty knights eager to ride to battle against the Saracens. This diatribe was sparked by rivalry between Adalbero and Odilo at the royal court. But it also caused Adalbero to demand that all monks should refrain from meddling in politics, a generalizing thought that he conveyed by discussing the well-​known model of a threefold order of society, in which every group—​those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked—​had its own task.9 A visibly coherent tradition of critical appreciation in satire appears to date from the long twelfth century. But, while we possess a few longer works containing anti-​monastic satire, such as the beast epics Ysengrimus (c. 1150) and Speculum stultorum (c. 1180),10 most materials are transmitted in the form of shorter satirical texts, predominantly in verse. Typically, they are transmitted anonymously in thirteenth-​and even fourteenth-​century manuscripts, though the texts often appear to date to the twelfth century.11 Many instances of satirical texts from this period belong to the so-​called Goliardic tradition. In poetry

Adalbéron de Laon, Poème au roi Robert, ed. Claude Carozzi (Paris, 1979). See also the article by Rosé in this volume. Jill Mann, ed., Ysengrimus: Text with Translation, Commentary and Introduction (Leiden, 1987); Nigel de Longchamps, Speculum stultorum, ed. John H. Mozley and Robert R. Raymo (Berkeley, CA, 1960). 11 See, for instance, Alfons Hilka, Otto Schumann, and Bernhard Bischoff, eds., Carmina Burana, 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1961–​78); Thomas Wright, ed., The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes (London, 1841); Édélestand du Meril, ed., Poésies populaires latines du Moyen âge (Paris, 1847). 9

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and occasional prose, sometimes ascribed to a fictional author Golias, these texts ridicule the corrupt state and morals of ecclesiastical office-​holders or students, especially in the modes of lament and exhortation or through the parodical use of biblical language.12 The complex layers of discourse feeding into satirical depictions of monks and nuns can be shown by tracing one of the most popular satirical motifs, the accusation of gluttony in the cloister. Food and fasting had long been of great religious significance for religious communities, and the quantity and quality of meals became a focus of intense debate among different monastic groups of the high Middle Ages.13 The topic featured prominently, for example, in the mid-​twelfth-​century debate between Cluniac and Cistercian monks. This conflict prompted the composition of several comparative and polemical tracts on monastic customs, such as the Dialogus, written about 1155 by the German Cistercian Idung of Prüfening (fl. c. 1133–​1155).14 One passage of the Dialogus debates at length how to legitimately interpret the two dishes granted for dinner by the RB, and accuses the Cluniac side of overeating.15 Apparently drawing on such sources, the topic of monastic overeating was then fleshed out in satirical works:  staging the conflict between Cluniacs and Cistercians dialogically in verse, a Latin satire entitled De Mauro et Zoilo enlarges on the topic of food. The Cistercian speaker, Zoilus, first accuses the Cluniacs of cultivating a rich table and indulging in many sweet beverages. The Cluniac, Maurus, proffers many defenses and eventually turns the tables by pointing out the Cistercian’s considerable girth.16 Another poem satirizes the Cistercian practice of visitation, describing how a visiting abbot fails to notice or punish the moral decay of a Cistercian monastery because he is constantly plied with rich foods.17 Drawing on this poetic background, some more pointed satires took up further concerns arising over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One particularly vivid example appears to articulate a reform issue of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in criticizing abbots who kept a rich table



See Jill Mann, “Satiric Subject and Satiric Object in Goliardic Literature,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 15 (1980): 63–​86. 13 See Isabelle Rosé, “Le moine glouton et son corps dans les discours cénobitiques réformateurs (début IXe siècle–​début XIIIe siècle,” in Le corps du gourmand. D’Héraclès à Alexandre le Bienheureux, ed. Karine Karila-​Cohen and Florent Quellier (Rennes, 2012), 191–​221. 14 See Idung of Prüfening, Cistercians and Cluniacs: The Case for Cîteaux, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, Joseph Leahey, and Grace Perrigo (Kalamazoo, MI, 1977). 15 Ibid., 112–​13. 16 Wright, Latin Poems, 247–​50 (“De Mauro et Zoilo”). 17 Ibid., 184–​7 (“De Visitatione Abbatis”). 12

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while their monks suffered.18 This short, undated, and anonymous prose text inscribes itself into the Goliardic tradition by using the title Magister Golias de quodam abbate (“Master Golias, on the topic of a certain abbot”). Making parodic use of Bible verses, the text describes an abbot who indulges in gluttony and scheming rather than monastic asceticism and thoughtful piety: In the second or third hour of the day, when the sun is still young and without its warmth, the abbot nevertheless rises from his bed. And while he vomits up the late supper and the drinks of the long night hours, he immediately meditates: how shall his stomach, not quite empty yet, be filled again? For he meditates more on this than on God, more on the sausages than on the sacraments, more on salmon than on Salomon—​and this is hardly surprising, since his stomach is God to him, and his glory must therefore come through his gorge. In this way, he fulfils what is written, namely “But seek first the kingdom of God.”19

The poem goes on to heap mock praise on the abbot’s eating habits, as they conform to the letter—​though not the spirit—​of monastic rules: following some monastic commentators in the opinion that only the consumption of quadruped meat was forbidden, the gluttonous abbot consumes vast quantities of fat fish and fowl, adding swans, crane, and geese to chickens and capons. As he is not allowed to eat bacon, he has it boiled until it becomes lard and can be poured. He obeys the monastic rule’s recommendation to eat no more than five eggs, if only literally; he has five hard-​boiled eggs, five soft-​boiled eggs, five fried, and five jellied, five with cumin, five with pepper, and so on. The rather repulsive description may well have been penned by a monk satirizing a greedy abbot. The insistence on monastic rules and their infraction in the Magister Golias de quodam abbate implies that the abbot’s rich meals are outer indicators of his inner worldliness and laxity. The text also adds other elements current in didactic texts for monks, for example the argument that overindulgence in food led the mind to weaken toward other forms of temptation, such as sexual desires. Yet the emphasis on misinterpretations of the content of rules, as well as the insistence on a “Master” Golias as author, is also evocative of a school context. This link to school milieux is clearer in a brief twelfth-​century stanza in the well-​known Carmina Burana manuscript, which talks about an Abbas

For this accusation, see for instance Humbert of Romans, Opus tripartitum, in Appendix ad fasciculum rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum, ed. Edward Brown, 2 vols. (London, 1690), 2:224–​5. 19 Wright, Latin Poems, 40–​1 (my translation). 18

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Cucaniensis, “Abbot of Cocania,” who presides over the eating, drinking, and gambling usually associated with students.20 We can thus conclude that accusations of gluttony, which had long featured in internal monastic debates, eventually became ammunition in satires attacking monasticism from an external perspective. Later texts develop the link between monastic overabundance and the ancient concept of a Land of Plenty (Cocania or Cockaigne in English and French texts). The fourteenth-​century satirical Middle English poem “Land of Cokaygne,” for example, situates an apparently Cistercian monastery in a land of milk and honey, where the very houses are made of food and all kinds of indulgence are possible.21 In this text, the abbot’s role is reinterpreted and criticism shifts to a different issue: while all the monks indulge in gluttony, sexual adventures, and worldly posturing, the office of abbot is given to the most relaxed and sleepy contender. This shows a reformist subtext beneath the fantasy, which warns that the appointment of a lax abbot typically leads to deviance among the monastic community. The long chain of adaptations of texts concerning monastic gluttony illustrates fairly typical mechanisms. From the eleventh century onwards, reform initiatives often formulated very specific criticisms of monastic life and customs. These points became a matter of interest and debate—​and consequently of satire—​at first within monastic circles, but soon also in the emerging twelfth-​ century communication networks linking monasteries to other centers such as cathedral towns, courts, and schools.22 As the new monastic observances rose to prominence in these contexts, and clashes between monks and the established elites or other rising groups became more common, internal debates were taken up, decontextualized, and exaggerated to form satires. By the thirteenth century, satirical attacks on monastic life had coalesced to form a web of typical themes and topoi—​as had satires about other groups and estates satire. Typically, they denied monasticism’s claim to holiness and diagnosed it as superficial, hollowed out, and empty of true merit. Instead, satirists accused monks and nuns of worldliness on a physical, social, or spiritual level. Satires drawing strongly on internal debates about monastic customs often censured



Hilka, Schumann, and Bischoff, Carmina Burana, 1.3:81. “The Land of Cokaygne,” in Early Middle English Verse and Prose, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers (Oxford, 1966). On the background, see Peter Dronke, “The Land of Cokaygne:  Three Notes on the Latin Background,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature:  Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge, 2011). 22 See the article by Clark in this volume.

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monks and nuns on a physical level; typically, monastics were criticized for choosing the pleasures of food or sex over abnegation and piety. External criticisms, on the other hand, frequently added accusations targeting worldliness on a social level, possibly because this comprised fairly visible offenses. Particularly in male houses, political duties, the administration of possessions, or pastoral care led monks to engage in all kinds of business and litigation, and caused them to leave the cloister to travel, visit markets, or attend schools and courtly assemblies. As monasteries were important landowners and engaged in frequent legal conflicts over possessions or tithes, a stereotype of monastic greed emerged early on. The mid-​twelfth-​century beast epic Ysengrimus, for example, revolves around a wolf-​monk whose greed for meat, lands, and prestige is symbolized by his wide open maw.23 Some cases of early estates satire, which appear to speak in a clerical voice, also criticize conflicts and quarrelsome dispositions among monks and nuns—​a form of behavior that damaged a monastery’s reputation and was frequently sanctioned in episcopal or abbatial visitations.24 In satire, such quarrels were seen as a sign of undisciplined minds contradicting the claim of the religious outer habit. It was often argued that, rather than striving for superhuman virtue, such monks and nuns fell below human behavior and resembled animals. A  Latin piece of estates satire in rhythmical verse, the thirteenth-​century Sermones nulli parcentes (“Sermons that spare no one”), paints this picture concerning nuns: “they do not hold each other in peace and charity, do not visit each other, but accuse each other and insist on quarreling; they envy each other, exchange bad words and sharpen their teeth on each other like wild pigs.”25 These accusations also imply a worldliness of the mind or spirit under­ mining the monastic claim to elevated religious status. This discrepancy between “inner” and “outer” is the open or covert core of all anti-​monastic satires, but it is articulated in different fashions on different occasions. Where reformed orders criticized traditional monasticism, they often drew on a dichotomy of reform and decay to label the splendid monasteries as inwardly degenerate. With the rise of new orders like the mendicants, this argument was eventually turned against members of the newer observances such as



See Mann, Ysengrimus,  10–​20. See Thomas Füser, Mönche im Konflikt. Zum Spannungsfeld von Norm, Devianz und Sanktion bei den Cisterziensern und Cluniazensern (12. bis frühes 14. Jahrhundert) (Münster, 2000), 123–​57. On visitations, see the articles by Caby, Sharp, and Knudsen in this volume. 25 “Sermones nulli parcentes,” in Theodor von Karajan, “Buch der Rügen,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum 2 (1842): 31, ll. 573–​80 (my translation). 23

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the Cistercians. From a contrasting perspective, reforming orders like the Cistercians (and later the mendicant orders) could be accused of false piety and arrogance by their more traditionally minded opponents. As was the case with heretics, the radical asceticism of newcomers was decried as a cover for inner vices, and accusations of hypocrisy were leveled against them.

Monastic Vice in Short Stories and Estates Satire: From Entertainment to Condemnation Perhaps the most important change affecting traditions of satire about monks and nuns in the Middle Ages was their continuing spread and adaptation for broader audiences. An important vehicle for this spread were short stories, whose spectrum ranges from Latin facetiae and exempla to comic or moralizing tales in the vernacular, such as the often obscene Old French fabliaux or the Middle High German Mären. But they also include sophisticated examples of storytelling in elaborate frameworks, such as the novellae of Giovanni Boccaccio’s (d. 1375) Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.26 The adaptations of satirical stereotypes often reflect the function and audience of these genres, which were increasingly written for readers and listeners including more—​or even exclusively—​lay people. This transformation began in the thirteenth century and effected overall changes in tone, outlook, and function of anti-​monastic satires by the fourteenth century. Descriptions of the sexual misdeeds of monks and nuns illustrate the range of different audiences and modes of satires exceptionally well. Like the appetite for rich food, sexual desire was widely seen as a force which bound humans to the physical, carnal sphere of life.27 Latin exempla for male novices like those written by the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. c. 1240), for example, exhorted monks to show their masculinity by resolutely battling this temptation rather than indulging it.28 But problems persisted and, given the fundamental tension between the ideal and the reality of chastity, satirists could score cheap but nevertheless smarting hits against monastic life by



On exempla literature, see Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-​Claude Schmitt, L’“exemplum” (Turnhout, 1982). On monks and nuns in vernacular literature, see for example the relevant passages in Schneider, Der Mönch; Daichman, Wayward Nuns; Beine, Der Wolf in der Kutte; Paul Bretel, Les ermites et les moines dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge: (1150–​1250) (Paris and Geneva, 1995). 27 On this link, for instance in Cassian, see Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005), 101–​11. 28 See Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004), 24–​42. 26

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referring to sexual activity among monks and nuns. Typically, anti-​monastic satire was not content to expose illegitimate sexual relations, but implied that they were widespread, a norm rather than the exception. As monasteries contained all-​male or all-​female groups, and their activities were largely hidden from outside observers, accusing them of same-​sex activities was an obvious weapon for satirical attacks. Like other insinuations about misdeeds in the domestic or private sphere, such charges were hard to disprove, and occasional public persecutions of known cases—​which occurred with a low but continuous frequency29—​invested them with an appearance of realism. An elegant Latin example, which squeezes highly damaging claims into a few lines, occurs among the anecdotes of the Welshman Walter Map (d. 1210). As a cleric and courtier, Map had clashed with the Cistercians in several conflicts, and became one of the harshest critics of the order.30 As he recounts in a story aimed at a courtly audience, Cistercian abbots could be met at court, telling miracle stories about their great leader and figurehead, Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). These events appear to have been part of the Cistercian campaign to have Bernard canonized. But, as Walter was keen to note, some people also reported that Bernard sometimes failed to perform miracles. Called to heal a sick boy, for example, the abbot arrived too late and the boy was already dead. Undaunted, Bernard threw himself on top of the boy, emulating saints who were able to raise the dead by prayer, and tried to revive him through contact. But his efforts remained fruitless, and the boy remained dead on the floor. Not content with this failed miracle story, Walter then intervened and cleverly turned it into an innuendo of monks’ alleged widespread desire for sex with boys: “ ‘Then he was the most unlucky of monks,’ said I; ‘I have heard before now of a monk throwing himself upon a boy, but always, when the monk got up, the boy promptly got up too.’ The abbot grew very red, and a lot of people left the room to have a good laugh.”31 Without openly claiming that Bernard of Clairvaux was himself guilty of sexual misdeeds, Walter thus managed to imply their omnipresence.



See Christian Knudsen, “Naughty Nuns and Promiscuous Monks: Monastic Misconduct in Late Medieval England” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2012), 112–​13, https://​ tspace.library.utoronto.ca/​handle/​1807/​67281 (date of last access: 31 August 2018). 30 See Coleman, “Nasty Habits”; Lewis Thorpe, “Walter Map and Gerald of Wales,” Medium Ævum 47 (1978):  6–​21; Jacques Berlioz, “Saint Bernard dans la littérature satirique, de l’Ysengrimus aux Balivernes des Courtisans de Gautier Map (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles),” in Vies et légendes de Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, ed. Jacques Arabeyre, Jacques Berlioz, and Philippe Poirrier (Cîteaux, 1993), 211–​28. 31 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, Christopher N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 81.

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Scrutinized closely, however, satires can be seen to discuss non-​monastic sexuality as well as the vices of monks and nuns. This appears to be the case in an early fourteenth-​century Old French fabliau, Du Moigne (“Of the monk”), which at first glance seems specifically designed to ridicule monks and their lustfulness.32 In the story, a black monk (uns noirs moignes) is riding out on business and promptly encounters temptation in the form of some desirable young women. Lying in his bed in a tavern at night, he allows himself to lust after them, dwelling on intercourse and imagining their bodies. Upon falling asleep, the monk then dreams and finds himself in a bizarre sexual market where disembodied female genitalia (cons) are bought and sold. True to form, he immediately attempts to buy a nice exemplar. But the purchase is complicated by a series of impediments. First, the market is packed and he has to jostle through the throngs, which significantly consist of other monks and clergymen. Soon, a seller tries to offer him ugly, old, and shriveled cons, which cause him to break out in disgusted protest. Once the monk finds a very nice, youthful, soft vagina with downy hair, it is horrendously expensive. He finally decides to invest but, wanting to grasp it, wakes up and instead hurts himself on some thorns lying beside his bed. The fabliau ends as it began, with the monk riding on the next day, suggesting an endless cycle of sexual frustration, temptation, and dream escape. The underlying reformist message of this tale might as well come from a Cistercian exemplum; it illustrates the assumption that lustful thoughts pollute the mind. The monk in the fabliau fails to battle this temptation manfully, allowing himself to dwell on the desirable female body, and ends up both humiliated and frustrated. The story’s satirical message might have been used to teach monks to avoid this type of vexation and ridicule. But the story, which would have been recounted orally and probably to mixed audiences,33 also discusses issues confronting lay people and clerics. The frustrations of a real rather than metaphorical “sexual market” would have been experienced by many men who wished for a lovely young bedfellow but lacked the social or economic means to attract one. By ridiculing the restrictions imposed on monks, the fabliau may have allowed such readers and listeners to reflect on their own, comparatively light fate, strengthening their gendered identity



Arthur Långfors, “Le fabliau du moine. Le dit de la Tremontaine. Deux poèmes inédits, tirés du manuscrit 2800 de la bibliothèque du baron James de Rothschild,” Romania 44 (1915–​17):  560–​3. See www.arlima.net/​mp/​moigne.html (date of last access:  31 August 2018). 33 Marie Cailly, Les fabliaux, la satire et son public. L’oralité dans la poésie satirique et profane en France, XIIe–​XIVe siècles (Cahors, 2007).

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at the expense of monastic masculinity. While dealing with men’s everyday sexual frustrations in an entertaining way, however, Du Moigne also transmitted the motif of illicit monastic lust, contributing to the spread of this stereotype. It also contained generalizing passages; one of the most damaging remarks may well be the brief aside that the monk found the “sexual market” packed with other monks and clerics. Other literary reflections used such stereotypes to make coherent arguments about sexuality, and monasticism, in general. Bocaccio’s Decameron, written c. 1349/​51, targeted a more educated and affluent urban lay audience of both sexes, but dealt with the sexual transgressions of monks and nuns prominently and at some length across several novellae.34 The stories are divided as if they had been told over ten days, and the first story of day three, for example, recounts how the young lay man Masetto, seeking food and work, pretends to be a deaf-​ mute to obtain shelter in a female monastery. At first two, but in the end all nine of the nuns, including the abbess, decide to take sexual advantage of the peasant youth, using him as an on-​call lover unable to speak about their lack of chastity. The truth only comes out when Masetto, worn out by the constant sexual services, breaks his disguise and voices a spirited complaint to the abbess. But this does not end the sexual entanglements, as the nuns simply arrange to take turns with him. Masetto finally goes home in old age, a “rich, old man who had fathered numerous children, but spared himself the trouble of feeding them and the expense of raising them.”35 At first glance, this story appears in a conventional moralizing framework, as the speaker, Filostrato, introduces the tale with the express intention of speaking about the nuns’ lustfulness. Rather than criticizing a particular female monastery, however, he targets the very assumptions underlying ideals of chastity. In keeping with Boccaccio’s general take on sexuality, Filostrato sets out to disprove the assumption that a nun is “no longer a woman and no longer feels female cravings,” a belief he calls “deluded.”36 Several other novellae, including one which features a hermit as falling prey to temptation, make the same point, which is obviously Boccaccio’s own: he considers sexuality a force of nature, which cannot be completely controlled.37 This opinion,



Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York, 2013). Ibid., 211. 36 Ibid., 204. 37 See Michael Calabrese, “Men and Sex in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Medievalia et Humanistica. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 28 (2002): 45–​72, and the story of the hermit in novella 3.10. 34

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which was also held by several theological schools of the day,38 is at times conveyed in stories about lay people, for example in novella 4.1, in which a young widow defends her right to take a lover. But pitting the protagonists’ sexual drive against religious vows, as in the story of Masetto, made for a much better conflict—​and charged the story with a titillating whiff of scandal, as well as subtle criticism of monastic life. Further novellae expanded the topic of forbidden desire and illicit sex in the cloister. They insist on the additional charge that natural desire must necessarily lead monks and nuns into deceit and hypocrisy, and that monastic sexual transgressions tend to go unpunished because the superiors of both sexes are as guilty as their subordinates.39 While the monks and nuns portrayed are no more than clichés, their continued depiction as lechers turns sexual transgressions in the monastery into a matter of course—​even, quite literally, into something that is “only natural.” Boccaccio’s repeated treatment thus makes this representation of monastic lustfulness more pessimistic than many reform-​oriented satires.40 Though non-​censorious and highly entertaining, Boccaccio’s stories underline the fact that monastic communities’ elevated ideals demanded a practically superhuman virtue, and therefore remained built on very precarious foundations. Did Boccaccio’s critical attitude toward monks and nuns mean that he condemned monasticism as a way of life? The question is surprisingly hard to answer. In Boccaccio’s works as in others, it was suggestively raised rather than definitively explored. Rather than all-​out condemnation, Boccaccio’s stance may have conveyed disappointment, or something like the deep ambivalence visible in the work of his influential compatriot Dante Alighieri (d. 1321). In Dante’s Paradiso, the souls of true contemplatives inhabit no less august a place than the seventh sphere of heaven. As the wise men, warriors, and just rulers remain confined to the spheres below, monks and hermits (and, one assumes, nuns) are thus literally situated at the apex of medieval society. They appear to Dante and Beatrice as shining presences illuminated with divine grace. But this bright vision of monasticism is undermined as soon as it has been established; none other than St. Benedict appears to Dante to

James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL, 1987),  421–​7. 39 See Boccaccio, Decameron, novellae 3.4 and 3.8 (deceit and machinations) or 1.4 and 9.2 (superiors are equally guilty). 40 See Cormac Ó. Cuilleanáin, Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Rome, 1984),  100–​9. 38

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give a speech about the contemptible state of monastic life in the present day. Formerly holy abbeys have turned into robbers’ dens, where usury and unjust profit rule and the poor are spurned. Where monks were once striving toward heaven like the angels on Jacob’s ladder (an allusion to RB 7) they are now earthly and worthless: “what once were cowls are sacks of rotten meal.”41 Though monasticism had great beginnings, Benedict’s message concludes, its state is now degenerate, the consciences dark rather than white. The passage pinpoints ambiguity as a central feature of many late medieval perceptions of monasticism voiced by educated lay people. The ideals guiding monastic life were often recognized as high and saintly, but to pessimists, their elevation appeared inaccessible, as it remained beyond the grasp of all but a few saints. The widely circulating stories about monastic vice would have reinforced this view, regardless of the fact that they were originally put into circulation for specific purposes (ranging from attempts at reform to individual conflicts or even entertainment) and that they hardly constituted a representative picture of the reality of monastic life. As long as occasional instances of monastic worldliness and vice could be witnessed, as would invariably happen, the widespread assumption that vice was common in the cloister could be upheld. This provided a strong basis for anyone wishing to criticize or even completely discredit the high-​reaching ideals of radical chastity, poverty, and obedience. Even though Dante mostly repeated well-​known commonplaces, the shift of perspective, from internal criticisms to an external view articulated by a lay author, is significant. As long as satire was voiced in a mode of exhortation, as for example in early examples of estates satire like the poetical “Sermons that spare no one” briefly discussed above, its message remained close to the rhetoric of reform pervading the high and late medieval Church. If monks, nuns, or clergymen voiced complaints about their respective groups, the initiative for moral reform remained with these established elites, avoiding an impression of hopeless decay. When lay authors like Dante, Boccaccio, or Chaucer adapted reformist criticisms of monastic orders, however, belief in the ability of the criticized to reform themselves was largely lost. Accusations of worldliness in individual instances could merge into more wholesale condemnations of monasticism—​or even the Church. This negative development was only partly tempered by the fact that pessimistic judgments were

Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri:  Paradiso, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New  York, 1986), canto 22, l.  77 (online at www.worldofdante.org/​comedy/​dante/​ paradise.xml/​3.22 (date of last access: 31 August 2018)).

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not aimed at monasticism alone, but often at the clergy, the mendicants, and lay people as well.

Satire between Reform Rhetoric and Anti-​Monastic Polemic Did the public assessment of monks and nuns—​or, at least, those instances we know of—​g row more negative toward the late Middle Ages? As the many satires penned over the course of the high and late Middle Ages suggest, comments certainly became more polarized. As the history of monasticism amply attests, there were always enthusiastic supporters of monastic communities and monastic life. But there were also increasingly vocal critics. Yet we should probably remember that, while critics may have wanted to describe widespread decay, they mostly did so in a vocabulary that originated in a period of reform and renewal, and cannot be taken as indicative of decline per se. A bird’s-​eye view indeed shows how strongly the themes and stereotypes of late medieval satire were indebted to the long twelfth century and its conflicts of competing reform orders and observances. Almost all lay critics used accusations first formulated in internal debates. In its way, this is hardly surprising, as it is a classic strategy of polemical argumentation to attempt to prove opponents wrong not only by one’s own standards, but by theirs as well. But many criticisms appear to go back directly to perceptions formulated under the impression of renewal and growing diversity rather than decline, and are thus linked to competition more than decay.42 The diversity and multiplicity of religious orders also became essential in critical treatments of monasticism in scholarly form. Though the Dissolution of the Monasteries in sixteenth-​century Henrician England drew very heavily on a rhetoric of reform and abuses, for example, the church reformers John Wyclif (d. 1384)  and Martin Luther both appear to draw also on criticisms first voiced by observers of twelfth-​century diversity. As the twelfth-​century Premonstratensian canon Anselm of Havelberg (d. 1158)  reported, the growing diversity of monastic rules and the increasing strife among different orders caused people to distrust monastic observances as manmade rather than God-​g iven:  “for what could a wise man find to imitate in something mutable and inconsistent?”43 Polemicists like Wyclif and Luther were quick to



On the question of a “decline” in late medieval monasticism, see the articles by Roest, Knudsen, and Clark in this volume. 43 Anselm of Havelberg, Anticimenon: On the Unity of the Faith and the Controversies with the Greeks, trans. Ambrose Criste Opraem and Carol Neel (Collegeville, MN, 2010), 1.1, 48.

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take up the argument that monastic rules lacked the authority of Scripture, and diverged from each other and from apostolic precept.44 The caveats emphasized here should not be taken to imply that satires tell us little about medieval monasticism (or that there were no abuses in medieval monasteries).45 But satires must be carefully contextualized and analyzed, and to document monastic abuses, additional sources should be consulted. Beyond the question of its relation to reality, however, satire yields specific insights into the history of monasticism. Even a brief overview shows that this mode of writing, which is often overlooked and discounted as merely literary, had a significant impact on the perception of monasticism, especially among lay people. As the examples discussed here suggest, we might consider satire to be one of the political languages of high and late medieval Europe, and one that was increasingly understood and spoken by common people as well as elites. In the growing appropriation of satirical themes and topoi, we witness the spread of a conceptual vocabulary that allowed both religious and lay people to compare, contrast, and criticize—​and thus to evaluate—​not only monasticism but religious life as a whole.

Bibliography Beine, Birgit. Der Wolf in der Kutte. Geistliche in den Mären des deutschen Mittelalters. Bielefeld, 1999. Berlioz, Jacques. “Saint Bernard dans la littérature satirique, de l’Ysengrimus aux Balivernes des Courtisans de Gautier Map (XIIe–​XIIIe siècles).” In Vies et légendes de Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, edited by Jacques Arabeyre, Jacques Berlioz, and Philippe Poirrier, 211–​ 28. Cîteaux, 1993. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago, IL, 1987. Calabrese, Michael. “Men and Sex in Boccaccio’s Decameron.” Medievalia et Humanistica. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 28 (2002): 45–​72. Coleman, Edward. “Nasty Habits:  Satire and the Medieval Monk.” History Today 43 (1993): 36–​42. Coulton, G. G. Five Centuries of Religion, Volume II: The Friars and the Dead Weight of Tradition, c. 1200–​1400. Cambridge, 1927. Daichman, Graciela S. Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature. Syracuse, NY, 1986. Diem, Albrecht. Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens. Münster, 2005.

See Thomas Renna, “Wyclif ’s Attacks on the Monks,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1987), 267–​80. On Luther, see Heinz Meinolf Stamm, Luthers Stellung zum Ordensleben (Wiesbaden, 1980). 45 For an attempt to collect and evaluate accusations and criticisms of monastic life, see, for example, G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, Volume II: The Friars and the Dead Weight of Tradition, c. 1200–​1400 (Cambridge, 1927).

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Sita Steckel Dykema, Peter A., and Heiko A. Oberman, eds. Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Leiden, 1993. Füser, Thomas. Mönche im Konflikt. Zum Spannungsfeld von Norm, Devianz und Sanktion bei den Cisterziensern und Cluniazensern (12. bis frühes 14. Jahrhundert). Münster, 2000. Geltner, Guy. The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism:  Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance. Oxford, 2012. Henkel, Nikolaus. “Gesellschaftssatire im Mittelalter:  Formen und Verfahren satirischer Schreibweise in den Sermones Nulli Parcentes (Walther 6881), im Carmen Satiricum des Nicolaus von Bibra, in der Ständekritik von Viri Fratres, Servi Dei (Walther 20575) und im Buch der Rügen.” In Epochen der Satire. Traditionslinien einer literarischen Gattung in Antike, Mittelalter und Renaissance, edited by Thomas Haye and Franziska Schnoor, 95–​117. Hildesheim, 2008. Lehmann, Paul J. G. Die Parodie im Mittelalter. Stuttgart, 1963. Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge, 1973. McGuire, Brian P. “Anti-​Clerical Invective and the Growth of Clerical Satire, 1075–​1400.” In Master Golyas and Sweden: The Transformation of a Clerical Satire, edited by Olle Ferm and Bridget Morris, 45–​98. Stockholm, 1997. Murray, Jacqueline. “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity.” In Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, edited by Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, 24–​42. Cardiff, 2004. Pearsall, Derek. “Medieval Monks and Friars:  Differing Literary Perceptions.” In The Medieval Python:  The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, edited by Terry Jones, Robert F. Yeager, and Toshiyuki Takamiya, 59–​73. New York, 2012. Renna, Thomas. “Wyclif ’s Attacks on the Monks.” In From Ockham to Wyclif, edited by Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, 267–​80. Oxford, 1987. Rosé, Isabelle. “Le moine glouton et son corps dans les discours cénobitiques réformateurs (début IXe siècle–​début XIIIe siècle.” In Le corps du gourmand. D’Héraclès à Alexandre le Bienheureux, edited by Karine Karila-​ Cohen and Florent Quellier, 191–​ 221. Rennes, 2012. Schüppert, Helga. Kirchenkritik in der lateinischen Lyrik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1972.

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A Crisis of Late Medieval Monasticism? B e rt   Roe st

The history of late medieval monasticism, covering roughly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, used to be hampered by negative connotations. It shared in the overall negative interpretation of late medieval ecclesiastical history, which was bound up with the Avignon papacy, the papal schism, and the Conciliarism crisis. Scholars affirmed that traditional monasticism had long been losing out to the regular canons and especially the mendicant orders, which would have been much better suited for the new pastoral realities within an urbanizing world that was increasingly uncertain about doctrinal purity. The study of late medieval monasticism also suffered from a venerable historiographical legacy, initiated by medieval and early modern order historians, yet maintained by later scholars, namely that attention was nearly always focused on the origins and first age of dynamic expansion of a given order. Historians of the Benedictine, Cluniac, or Cistercian worlds were never very interested in later periods, when these orders no longer constituted the transformative forces that seemed to shape the dynamics of religious history. In 1948, in his study of religious orders in England, David Knowles wrote about monasticism after 1300:  “The tide of monastic fervour, after flowing far up the shores, had now receded towards the horizon.”1 This verdict still resounded in 1997, when Bruce Venarde considered the thirteenth century as a natural endpoint for his monograph Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society. What followed was an aftermath that could be ignored.2 The same narrative endpoint is espoused in Christopher Brooke’s The Age of the Cloister:  The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (2003). This reworking



David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge, 1948), 319. Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society:  Nunneries in France and England, 890–​1215 (Ithaca, NY, 1997).

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of a book first published in 1974 likewise does not dwell on the late medieval period; by then, the age of monasticism was over.3 Long before Venarde and Brooke published their surveys, specialist evaluations of late medieval monasticism had been shifting, acknowledging the vitality of Observant religious reforms and the surprising development of monastic, canonical, mendicant, tertiary, beguine, and penitential communities precisely in this proverbial period of contraction and decline. Specialists also recognized that monasticism as the “old model” was not just fading away in the face of new forms of communal religious life. Moreover, scholarship began to overcome the cult of origins. The traditional triad of holy origins, spectacular early expansion, and subsequent stagnation, sometimes followed by attempts at reform and “second” foundings, is now understood to be a narrative ruse, rooted in cherished modes of emplotment in order chronicles written by late medieval monastic reformers such as Trithemius.4 Once these perspectives are questioned, it becomes possible to acknowledge the enduring survival, the ongoing transformation, and even the continuous attraction of monasticism. All of this is not to deny that many monastic communities did encounter huge difficulties during the socioeconomic, demographic, military, and religious upheavals of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, or that many individual houses had recruitment problems, suffered income losses, lacked discipline, and/​or disappeared altogether. It is, however, fruitful to understand the limitations of the crisis paradigm, and to accept that it does not cover the complexities of the late medieval situation. This essay provides a different viewpoint. It addresses the transformation of existing orders and the creation of new orders and congregations during the late medieval period, and reflects on the way in which monastic models functioned in a normative manner for a variety of religious communities (male and especially female), and how this can be interpreted as indicative of the ongoing validity of monastic ideals. It concludes with more sweeping statements about the societal impact, during the same period, of monastic models of learning, comportment, devotion, and discipline. It is a truism that for many older monastic institutions, notably Benedictine, Cluniac, and Cistercian monasteries, the age of spectacular expansions had

3



4

Christopher Brooke, The Age of the Cloister: The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (Mahwah, NJ, 2003). Klaus Schreiner, Gemeinsam leben. Spiritualität, Lebens-​und Verfassungsformen klösterlicher Gemeinschaften in Kirche und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, ed. Mirko Breitenstein and Gert Melville (Berlin, 2013), 453–​507.

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come to an end by the thirteenth century. Many of these went into serious decline and a number of them were forced to close down during the crises of the fourteenth century. Seen from this angle, all attempts at reform—​starting with the reform canons adopted by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the decrees regarding the introduction of provincial structures (convening general and provincial chapters and conducting periodical visitations) issued by Gregory IX (r. 1227–​41) and Innocent IV (r. 1234–​54) between 1231 and 1245, and the detailed reform statutes directed at all major orders put forward by the Cistercian Pope Benedict XII between 1332 and 1342—​can be seen as failed attempts at stemming the tide. It can also be argued, however, that this was the period in which the Benedictines and Cluniacs transformed into regulated orders properly speaking, and entered a different stage of their institutional development, something that is of intrinsic historical interest.5 Likewise, instead of reading the many reform and regulation attempts solely as a sign of decline, they can in part also be seen as evidence for a professionalizing transformation—​a move away from a society trusting in individual charisma toward a society trusting in the power and the equity of well-​regulated institutions and administrative procedure, with, in this case, an increasing faith in normative rules and checks and balances to guarantee monastic observance. It also can be seen as the vindication of a specific type of monastic organization, more or less the Cistercian one, which would remain an example for the organization of nearly all new religious monastic and mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages.6

Benedictine Reform The reorganization of the Benedictines and Cluniacs into orders properly speaking bolstered the resilience of monastic houses in the face of the socioeconomic challenges of the fourteenth century, and in the face of increasing royal intervention throughout. In the Benedictine provinces of York and Canterbury, the provincial chapter organization and visitation cycles devised by the Fourth Lateran Council and the decrees of Gregory IX and Innocent



Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, “Zisterzienserideal und Kirchenreform:  Benedict XII. (1334–​1342) als Reformpapst,” Zisterzienser-​Studien 3 (1976): 11–​43; Jörg Oberste, Visitation und Ordensorganisation. Formen sozialer Normierung, Kontrolle und Kommunikation bei Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern und Cluniazensern (12.–​frühes 14. Jahrhundert) (Berlin, 1996). 6 Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser (Münster, 2002). 5

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IV continued almost uninterrupted until 1532.7 This helped to maintain and strengthen a corporate identity, and to some degree explains how, through collaboration, recourse to chapter regulations and visitation statutes, and careful alliances, numerous English Benedictine houses experienced a renaissance during the second half of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the sixteenth, which expressed itself in a growing number of vocations, substantial building programs, and a strong involvement with university learning.8 Elsewhere, partly in the wake of the reform councils of Constance and Basel, which led to important visitation initiatives,9 and later also in the context of the reform journeys of the legate Nicholas of Cusa, provincial chapter structures facilitated the initiation of reforms.10 An early case in point is the large 1417 provincial gathering of Benedictine abbots in the Mainz-​Bamberg province at Petershausen (just across the Rhine from Constance). This gathering and the near-​continuous three-​year meetings of abbots of all houses (reformed and unreformed) in the Mainz-​Bamberg Benedictine order province throughout the following hundred years provided an infrastructure for the implementation of visitations and reforms, and for the cultivation of contacts and the dissemination of ideas.11 The creation of several Benedictine Observant reform congregations likewise built upon pre-​existing notions of provincial or regional visitation regimes and proper adherence to statutes and constitutions approved during legitimate chapter meetings, or imposed by visitors appointed by reform councils or papal legates. Possibly the oldest of these is the Santa Giustina network, initiated during the papal schism from the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua. Around Santa Giustina a network of affiliated houses spread through Italy, incorporating many of the larger Benedictine houses,



James G. Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Rochester, NY, 2011), 290; Ursmer Berlière, “Les chapitres généraux de l’ordre de St-​Benoît du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Revue bénédictine 9 (1892): 545–​57. 8 Julian Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540: A Patronage History (Woodbridge, 2005). See also the article by Clark in this volume. 9 Clark, Benedictines in the Middle Ages, 297, 300–​1. 10 Donald Sullivan, “Nicholas of Cusa as Reformer: the Papal Legation to the Germanies, 1451–​2,” Medieval Studies 36 (1974): 381–​428. 11 Joseph Zeller, “Das Provinzialkapitel im Stifte Petershausen im Jahr 1417,” and Peter Maier, “Die Epoche der General-​und Provinzialkapitel,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 41, neue Folge 10 (1922):  1–​73 and 195–​224. 7

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including, by 1505, the famous monastery of Montecassino. This network was henceforth also known as the Cassinese congregation.12 Slightly younger was the reform congregation of Melk, which started around 1418, although it had been long in the making. As early as 1364, monks from Melk had helped initiate reforms at Subiaco, considered to be one of Benedict of Nursia’s original foundations. At the Council of Constance, representatives from Melk enticed some of their former brethren in Subiaco to return with the Subiaco customary, to start reforms in Austria as well. Soon, reforms at Melk, with recourse to the Subiaco customary, spilled over in the reform of other monasteries in Austria and southern Germany. Hence, the famous Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee in Bavaria adopted the Melk reform in 1425, leading to an outpouring of regulatory and educational literature.13 Yet another reform congregation was initiated at Bursfeld with the support of Duke Otto of Brunswick under its abbots Johann Dederoth (d. 1439)  and Johann von Hagen (d. 1468/​9). They and their successors spread the Observance to houses in Schleswig-​Holstein, and in central and eastern Germany. It received recognition from the Council of Basel in 1446, followed by papal recognition five years later. By 1517, the Bursfeld congregation counted nearly a hundred houses. Unlike Melk, Bursfeld was keen to push through strict organizational guidelines for member houses, and as such was considered by several later monastic spokesmen as a more strictly Observant congregation than Melk.14







Tommaso Domenico Leccisotti, Congregationis S. Iustinae de Padua O.S.B. ordinationes capitulorum generalium, vol. 1:  1424–​1474 (Montecassino, 1939); Giovanni Spinelli, “La Congregazione Benedettina Cassinese e l’arte italiana (secoli XV–​XVIII),” in Benedetto. L’eredità artistica, ed. Roberto Cassanelli and Eduardo López-​Tello García (Milan, 2007), 311–​26. See also Franz Xaver Bischof and Martin Thurner, eds., Die benediktinische Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2013). 13 Albert Groiss, Spätmittelalterliche Lebensformen der Benediktiner von der Melker Observanz vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Bräuche. Ein darstellender Kommentar zum Caeremoniale Mellicense des Jahres 1460 (Münster, 1999); Christian Bauer, Geistliche Prosa im Kloster Tegernsee. Untersuchungen zu Gebrauch und Uberlieferung deutschsprachiger Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1996); Joachim F. Angerer, Die Bräuche der Abtei Tegernsee unter Abt Kaspar Ayndorffer (1426–​1461), verbunden mit einer textkritischen Edition der Consuetudines Tegernseenses (Ottobeuren, 1968). 14 Paulus Volk, Urkunden zur Geschichte der Bursfelder Kongregation. Kanonische Studien und Texte, ed. A. M. Koeniger (Bonn, 1951); Petrus Becker, “Benediktinische Reformbewegungen und klösterliches Bildungsstreben:  die rheinischen Abteien der Bursfelder Kongregation,” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 11 (1992):  161–​74; Pius Engelbert, “Die Bursfelder Benediktinerkongregation und die spätmittelalterlichen Reformbewegungen,” Historisches Jahrbuch 103 (1983): 35–​55.

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Another Benedictine reform congregation crystalized from 1450 onwards around the Benedictine monastery of Valladolid. With consistent royal and papal support, this congregation comprised about forty-​five houses, including female communities, by the early sixteenth century. It was inspired by the model of Santa Giustina in Padua, especially with regard to election procedures and the dominant position of the general chapter.15 Farther to the north, an important Benedictine reform congregation was started in the later fifteenth century by the monastery of Chezal-​Benoît, which promulgated reform constitutions in 1491, received official papal recognition as an autonomous congregation in 1498, and with royal support helped reform communities at Bourges, Clermont, Le Mans, Lyon, Paris, and elsewhere.16 In part thanks to such reform congregations, Benedictine monasticism saw a remarkable resurgence during the fifteenth century and beyond. This resurgence had repercussions for the social impact of Benedictine monasticism, including the place of Benedictine learning within the European respublica litterarum (as will be discussed below). By no means all monastic renewal took place within the context of these reform congregations. Several individual Benedictine houses underwent reforms, including economic reorganization, stricter rule observance, and an intensification of liturgical memoria—​thus attracting new donor families—​ without ever joining a reform congregation. One example is St. Peter in the Black Forest, which, under a succession of abbots, culminating in the abbacy of Peter Gremmelsbach (r. 1496–​1512), experienced a socio-​religious transformation and reasserted its autonomy vis-​à-​vis its immediate territorial overlord, by reclaiming its status of imperial abbey (Reichsunmittelbarkeit).17 A slightly different example is provided by the Benedictine monastery of Blaubeuren, which had suffered in the fourteenth century but started a remarkable economic and spiritual recovery from 1386 on. In the wake of the Council of Constance and in the context of both the above-​mentioned Benedictine provincial chapter of Mainz and the reform drive of the bishop of Bamberg, Blaubeuren provided visitation parties for the correction and



Clark, Benedictines in the Middle Ages, 301–​2; E. Zaragoza Pascual, Los generales de la Congregación de San Benito de Valladolid, 6 vols. (Silos, 1973–​87); Elisabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain:  The Permeable Cloister, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, 2005), 117–​18. 16 Ursmer Berlière, “La congrégation bénédictine de Chezal-​Benoit,” Revue bénédictine 17 (1900): 29–​50, 113–​27, 252–​74, and 337–​61. 17 Dieter Mertens, “Peter Gremmelsbach, Abt von St. Peter im Schwarzwald 1496–​1512,” in Das Kloster St. Peter auf dem Schwarzwald, ed. Hans-​Otto Mühleisen, Hugo Ott, and Thomas Zotz (Waldkirch, 2001), 215–​48. 15

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reform of other Benedictine houses. Yet only after 1451, following the visitation journey of Nicholas of Cusa, did it develop close connections with the Melk reform, which in turn brought additional visitations and reforms of male and female monasteries, sometimes in collaboration with reformed monasteries such as Wiblingen, St. Ulrich und St. Afra, Michelsberg, and Alpirsbach.18 Hence a focus on reform congregations alone does not provide a complete picture of the dynamics of monastic renewal, especially within the Benedictine world, in which, even by the late fifteenth century, many monasteries still cherished their relative independence and were not always eager to submit completely to overarching order structures or congregations with visitation powers.

Reform in the Cistercian Order Such qualms should have carried less weight in orders with longstanding centralized traditions. Hence, around 1400, the Cistercian general chapter produced a detailed Modus visitandi. Abbots were to use this as a guideline for their visitations of dependent female houses.19 After the end of the papal schism in 1417, subsequent Cistercian general chapters addressed the issue of reform more generally, and tried to reassert control over regions in which monasteries lacked religious discipline, faced socioeconomic difficulties, or felt commenda pressures—​i.e. the practice that secular clerics and even lay people were allowed to exploit the monastic patrimony to their own benefit as titular abbots. Frequently, these titular abbots were appointed by secular rulers, who in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries obtained far-​reaching appointment privileges from the papacy.20 Cistercian general chapters of 1422 and 1439 addressed reforms and visitations head on, and issues of reform reappeared in later gatherings, culminating in the Articles of Paris, approved by the Cistercian general chapter of 1494.21 Although the



Franz Machilek, “Zur Rechts-​und Reformgeschichte der Benediktiner-​ Abtei Blaubeuren: Anmerkungen zu einer Neuerscheinung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 87 (1967): 373–​91. 19 E. G. Krenig, “Mittelalterliche Frauenkloster nach den Konstitutionen von Cîteaux unter besonderer Berücksichtigung fränkischer Nonnenconvente,” Analecta Cisterciensia 10 (1954): 2–​105. 20 Clark, Benedictines in the Middle Ages, 294–​5; Kaspar Elm and P. Feige, “Der Verfall des zisterziensischen Ordenslebens im späten Mittelalter,” in Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, ed. Kaspar Elm, Peter Joerisse, and Hermann J. Roth (Cologne, 1980), 237–​42. 21 Kaspar Elm and Peter Feige, “Reformen und Kongregationsbildung der Zisterzienser im Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit,” in Elm, Joerisse, and Roth, Die Zisterzienser, 243–​54. 18

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impact of these top-​down reform initiatives was unequal, which was also due to difficulties of asserting the authority of the general chapter in regions in which monasteries faced ambitious secular policies, they were not without success. Attention for reforms also facilitated the growth of reform congregations at local and regional levels, at times nearly independent from the Cistercian general chapter. An early example is the Observant congregation of Sibculo in the Low Countries and northwestern Germany. This was a gathering of (eventually nineteen male and at least one female) strict Cistercian houses influenced by the Devotio moderna movement; it obtained separate constitutions as early as 1418, but received full recognition within the Cistercian order only by the late fifteenth century.22 Such semi-​independent congregation initiatives were frowned upon by Cistercian order leaders (not unlike the semi-​independent Observant initiatives in the mendicant orders during the same period), who saw such developments as an infringement upon their authority.23 This attitude shows in the reaction to the emerging Congregation of Castille, started by Martin de Vargas, a former Hieronymite monk and confessor of Pope Martin V. After he transferred to the Cistercians of La Piedra, he worked from about 1425 onwards toward the creation of an Observant congregation, independent of the Cistercian general chapter. In 1437 this congregation obtained papally approved statutes. In reaction, the Cistercian general chapter excommunicated the founder in 1445 and had him incarcerated. Martin died in prison, but his congregation flourished, and by 1458 the measures of suppression were lifted. Until 1670 the congregation was an important Cistercian Observant force in Spain, also expressing itself in the creation of academic colleges.24 The creation of various Cistercian congregations in Italy resulted from the interplay of local monastic reform initiatives, papal ambitions, and the imposition of princely power. The Sforza and Medici families controlled abbeys in Tuscany and Lombardy in commenda, and supported their reform along strict Cistercian lines from the 1440s onwards. Led by the abbeys of Settimo



Peter King, “The Cistercian Order, 1200–​1600,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge, 2013), 38–​49; Rudolf van Dijk, “Ontstaan, ontwikkeling en ondergang van de Colligatio Sibculoensis,” in Moderne devoten in monnikspij. Klooster en Colligatie van Sibculo 1406–​1580, ed. R. van Dijk (Kampen and Nijmegen, 2007), 209–​47. 23 On Observant initiatives in Ireland, see Colmán Ó Clabaigh, The Friars in Ireland, 1224–​ 1540 (Dublin, 2012), 53–​76. 24 Maria Damian Yanez Neira, “En el monasterio de Piedra se forjo la Congregación de Castilla,” Revista de historia Jerónimo Zurita 27–​8 (1974–​5): 153–​72. 22

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(near Florence) and Chiaravalle (Milan), these houses came together in 1489 in two congregations, both named Congregation of San Bernardo, one in Tuscany and one in Lombardy. Nine years later, Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–​ 1503) approved the formation of one encompassing Italian Congregation of San Bernardo. As was the case with its Castilian counterpart, the Cistercian general chapter at first loathed the autonomy of the Italian conglomerate and asked for (and for a while obtained) its suppression. But, by 1511, Julius II (r. 1503–​13) had re-​confirmed its legitimacy and to an extent its autonomous status.25 These examples illustrate how debatable it is to impose an image of decadence on the late medieval Cistercian order.

Reform and Transformation in the Cluniac World Within the complex world of Cluniac monasticism, a similar movement can be observed, starting even earlier. Reforms had been discussed and implemented in the thirteenth century, starting with the statutes of Hugues V c. 1205/​6, and several reform bulls by Gregory IX and Nicholas IV. With the adoption of the 1301 and 1314 reform statutes issued under the Cluny abbots Bertrand I (d. 1309) and Henry I (d. 1320), the Cluniacs finally looked well on the way to developing into a well-​regulated order with chapter and visitation regulations.26 Additional reform initiatives were begun prior to the end of the Hundred Years War. In 1427, Pope Martin V appointed Jean de Vincelles (d. 1439), Abbot of Saint-​Claude, and Valentin de Massays (d. c. 1435), auditor of the Apostolic Palace, as commissaries to perform visitations in Cluny. This was followed in 1458 by the reform statutes of Jean III de Bourbon (d. 1485), which themselves built on older texts, including the 1399 statutes of Abbot Jean de Damas-​Cozan (d. 1400). Subsequent general chapter decisions and papal directives followed, and their core message was reinforced by the 1500 reform statutes of Saint-​Martin-​des-​Champs at Paris, which became a Cluniac model house for the Île-​de-​France region during the early sixteenth century.27

See the contributions of Marco Pellegrini and Marco Bascapè in Chiaravalle. Arte e storia di un’abbazia cistercense, ed. Paolo Tomea (Milan, 1992), 139–​77. 26 E. M. Pinkl, “Die Neuorganisation des cluniazensischen Verbandes (1146–​1314) in der Reflexion des Betroffenen,” in Institutionen und Geschichte. Theoretische Aspekte und mittelalterliche Befunde, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1992), 343–​68. 27 Philippe Racinet, Crises et renouveaux. Les monastères clunisiens à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIIIe–​XVIe siècles). De la Flandre au Bery et comparaisons méridionales (Arras, 1997), esp. 61–​3, 354–​76, and 396; Pierre Caillet, “La décadence de l’ordre de Cluny au XVe s. et la tentative de réforme de l’abbé Jean de Bourbon (1456–​1485),” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 89 (1928): 183–​234. 25

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The mixed fate of the 1458 reform statutes and the importance of a regional center such as Saint-​Martin-​des-​Champs might have been a sign that the order of Cluny was experiencing a disintegration of its traditional international obedience structure in relation to the Cluny mother house. While this threatened the stability of the order as a whole—​something that could be seen as a decline of the order properly speaking, as the mother house did lose influence over houses outside Burgundy and France—​it meant the creation of provincial and proto-​national networks of influence and authority, which proved quite successful in renegotiating relations of patronage and protection with territorial rulers, even though many Cluniac monasteries, like their Benedictine and Cistercian counterparts, could not escape commenda situations.28 The commenda system could endanger monastic life, but not all commendatory abbots were opposed to religious reforms (as was mentioned above with regard to the Cistercian houses controlled by the Sforza and Medici families). In some cases, the actions and influence of well-​placed titular abbots even stimulated the socioeconomic development of their houses.29 A number of smaller Cluniac houses and dependencies closed down in the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and contemporary commentators expressed dismay about the quality of religious life in Cluniac monasteries.30 Nevertheless, in many areas the second half of the fifteenth century saw a remarkable socioeconomic recovery, signaled by building programs, successes in recruitment, and the attraction of a wider patronage base, in connection with the careful management of cults and relics of popular saints. This was true for England, where, according to Dobson, the major Cluniac houses were extremely successful between 1430 and 1530,31 but also for many parts of France (such as in Charité-​sur-​Loire and connected houses) and Flanders, once war had retreated.32 It is not completely clear to what extent this recuperation went hand in hand with the adoption of a more Observant religious lifestyle. It could well be that in the Cluniac world, owing



Richard B. Dobson, “English Cluniac Houses towards the End of Their Story,” in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-​sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable, Gert Melville, and Jörg Oberste (Münster, 1998), 572. 29 Racinet, Crises et renouveaux, 379–​82. 30 Jean Leclercq, “Cluny pendant le Grand Schisme,” Revue Mabillon 32 (1942):  119–​32; Ursmer Berlière, “Les monastères clunisiens du XIIIe au XVe s.,” Revue bénédictine (1893): 97–​112. 31 Dobson, “English Cluniac Houses,” 563. 32 Racinet, Crises et renouveaux, 11 and 306–​48. 28

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to the expectations of its patrons, the link between religious Observance and monastic success was less univocal.

The Carthusians: Expansion and Impact The appeal of properly reformed but in a sense “traditional” monasticism in late medieval society is shown above all in the successes of the Carthusians. This order experienced a spectacular expansion in the fifteenth century, thanks to its reputation of never-​faltering observance, and also to its visitation regime and to its circumspection with regard to the foundation and endowment of new houses. This expansion started by the late thirteenth century but became very impressive between about 1380 and 1520. By the latter date, the order counted approximately 200 charterhouses divided over eighteen provinces. In contrast to older rural foundations, many fifteenth-​century houses were created near or in urban centers. However, aside from a significant phase of episcopal patronage between about 1250 and 1350, their most important patrons remained (rural and urban) nobles and territorial princes.33 The Carthusian success also meant that individual Benedictines and Cistercians abandoned their order to take up the Carthusian habit. Furthermore, several Observant congregations, such as the Benedictine conglomerates of Melk and Bursfeld, and the Cistercian congregation of Sibculo, adopted key elements of the Carthusian visitation regime, and its organization of religious discipline.34 Finally, individual Carthusians became involved with producing reform treatises on behalf of other monasteries, and helped reform non-​Carthusian monasteries and order families. This began with Carthusian involvement with the organization and guidance of general chapters of other orders (such as the Hieronymites).35 It extended to Carthusian visitors being called to reform other religious houses, and the production of concomitant constitutions and statutes—​hence the Carthusian Leonhard Paetraer (d. 1435), the prior of Gaming, Mauerbach, and Brünn,



James Hogg, “Die Ausbreitung der Kartäuser,” in Die Ausbreitung der Kartäuser/​ La Chartreuse de Lugny, 1172–​1789, ed. James Hogg and Leon Landel (Salzburg, 1987), 5–​26; Die Kartäuser und ihre Welt. Kontakte und gegenseitige Einflüsse, 2  vols. (Salzburg, 1993); Dennis D. Martin, “Carthusians during the Reformation Era: Cartusia nunquam deformata, reformari resistens,” Catholic Historical Review 81 ( January 1995): 41–​66. 34 Schreiner, Gemeinsam Leben, 453–​507; J. Lourdaux, “Kartuizers-​Moderne Devoten: een probleem van af hankelijkheid,” Ons Geestelijk Erf 37 (1963):  402–​22; Elm and Feige, “Reformen und Kongregationsbildung,” 244–​9. 35 Heinrich Rüthing, “Die Kartäuser und die spätmittelalterlichen Ordensreformen,” in Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, ed. Kaspar Elm (Berlin, 1989), 42. 33

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visited and reformed houses in Austria and Steiermark at the request of the pope and local rulers.36 At the highest level it led to the temporary or permanent transfer of Carthusians, who became abbots and priors of newly reformed or soon-​to-​be-​reformed Benedictine or Cistercian monasteries. Hence, after much resistance, the Carthusian Johannes Rode (d. 1438/​9) became abbot of the Benedictine house of St. Matthias in the 1420s.37

New Monastic Families The success of the Carthusians is not the only example of an ongoing appeal of older monastic forms. Several new monastic families emerged that were indebted to Benedictine, Cistercian, and Carthusian traditions. This was true for new congregations of regular canons, including the famous Congregation of Windesheim, which itself was connected to the Devotio moderna in the Low Countries, but also built on Carthusian and Cistercian guidelines and devotional models.38 Other cases in point are the Spanish Hieronymites (monks and nuns) and the female Brigittines, both of which emerged during the 1370s, expanded throughout the fifteenth century, and can be said to be fully monastic. Hence, in between their liturgical obligations, Hieronymites devoted their mornings to manual work and their afternoons to contemplation, reading, and prayer. In some cases they engaged in pastoral outreach, but that was not so novel, as could be seen in the pastoral engagement of Cistercian and Benedictine communities in northwestern Europe in this period.39 The successes of such new monastic order families show that the





Herbert Paulhart, Die Kartause Gaming zur Zeit des Schismas und der Reformkonzilien (Salzburg, 1972). 37 Rüthing, “Die Kartäuser,” 54. On Rode, see also Petrus Becker, Das monastische Reformprogramm des Johannes Rode, Abtes von St. Matthias in Trier (Münster, 1970); Gerhard Schlegel, “Johann Rode (1373–​1439):  Leben und Werk eines Kartäusers,” in Liber amicorum James Hogg. Kartäuserforschung 1970–​2006. Internationale Tagung Kartause Aggsbach/​K artause Mauerbach 28.8.–​1.9.2006, ed. Meta Niederkorn-​ Bruck, 6  vols. (Salzburg, 2007), 6:69–​92. 38 See Ludo Milis, “Reformatory Attempts within the Ordo Canonicus in the Late Middle Ages,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen, 61–​9; Petrus van den Bosch, “Studien over de observantie der kruisbroeders in de vijftiende eeuw,” Clairlieu 26 (1968): 3–​205. 39 For early Hieronymite constitutions, see Lukas Holste and Mariano Brockie, eds., Codex regularum monasticarum et canonicarum, 6  vols. (Augsburg, 1739–​59), 6:74–​7. See also Sophie Coussemacker, “Relations entre religieux et religieuses de l’ordre des hiéronymites dans la péninsule ibérique (XIVe–​XVIe siècles),” in Les religieuses dans le cloître et dans le monde. Des origines à nos jours (Saint-​Étienne, 1994), 435–​53. On the Brigittines, see Tore Nyberg, “Der Birgittenorden als Beispiel einer Neugründung im Zeitalter der Ordensreformen,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen, 373–​96; Tore Nyberg, Birgittinische Klostergründungen des Mittelalters (Lund, 1965); T. 36

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monastic ideal was still very much alive, even if current decay was deplored and, as was the case with the Brigittines, formed a major initial motivation for the creation of a new order.

Urban (Female) Communities The distribution of religious houses in Europe’s urbanized regions suggests that older monastic houses experienced competition from new forms of communal religious life: all kinds of regular canons, mendicant houses, tertiary groups, grey sisters, beguines, communities of the Devotio moderna, etc. Looking at the Low Countries in particular, the number of religious houses founded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in relatively small towns was impressive, and many belonged to these newer religious movements.40 This phenomenon used to be interpreted as a transformation toward a form of communal religious life in tune with urban socioeconomic and religious needs.41 However, the fact remains that, except for beguinages and houses of grey sisters involved with hospital work, many new urban religious houses were monastic in outlook, especially the female ones. Cases in point, in addition to the Hieronymites and Brigittines mentioned earlier, are the (Observant) Poor Clares and the Colettines, the female Dominicans, the Augustinian Canonesses, the Sisters of the Common Life, the Cell Sisters, most late medieval tertiary communities, and other less-​defined groups, many of which pursued an enclosed life of prayer and meditation. In the course of the fifteenth century, the number of enclosed female houses increased dramatically. In that sense, the late medieval period was a golden age of female monasticism.42 The works of religious instruction circulating in these communities, as well as the meditative and mystical models adopted by their members, were deeply influenced by Benedictine, Cistercian, Victorine, and Carthusian models, alongside mendicant traditions and those associated with the Devotio



Nyberg, ed., Dokumente und Untersuchungen zur inneren Geschichte der drei Birgittenklöster Bayerns 1420–​1570, 2 vols. (Munich, 1974). 40 See the online monasticon, www2.let.vu.nl/​oz/​k loosterlijst/​ (date of last access:  31 August 2018). See also the article by More and Mulder-​Bakker in this volume. 41 See the classic study by Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 42 See the studies of Eva Schlotheuber, including Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintrit und Bildung. Die Lebenswelt der Nonnen im späten Mittelalter. Mit einer Edition des “Konventstagebuchs” einer Zisterzienserin von Heilig-​Kreuz bei Braunschweig (1484–​1507) (Tübingen, 2004); see also Bert Roest, Order and Disorder:  The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013).

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moderna, which themselves were closer to older monastic models than scholars once realized. To a significant extent, these traditions were deemed to be equivalent and equally useful in shaping a proper religious persona.43 For newer female houses, order allegiance could be secondary to monastic lifestyle. This expressed itself in the ease with which houses changed orders.44 What mattered above all was a properly disciplined monastic life. This was a concern for religious and secular authorities, who wanted properly disciplined religious communities and increasingly displayed anxiety about “irregular” forms of female religious life in their jurisdictions. Yet it was also an intrinsic part of the self-​representation of such communities, which prided themselves on their enclosed purity and liturgical prowess. As shown above, especially in the context of the Carthusians as reformers and visitors of non-​Carthusian houses, a certain disregard for order differences is also visible in male monastic communities in the context of imposing Observant reforms.45 Likewise, the founding of an Observant house could involve neighboring monasteries from different orders; a shared ideal of rule observance transgressed traditional order boundaries.

Monastic Reform Treatises Late medieval monastic reform treatises written by Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians, Augustinian Hermits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and regular canons frequently dealt with comparable issues of monastic observance, and were written for and used by all sorts of religious houses engaged with the restoration of religious discipline. Works such as Collatio de perfecta religionis plantatione by the Cluniac Jean Raulin (1400),46 De reformatione religiosorum by the Dominican Johann Nider (d. 1438),47 Liber de vita monastica by the Augustinian Hermit Conrad von Zenn (d. 1460),48 and De reformatione



Bert Roest, “Franciscan Educational Perspectives: Reworking Monastic Traditions,” in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (London, 2000), 168–​81. 44 See Bert Roest, “Order Matters, Exceptions Rule: The Poor Clares as a Historiographical Problem,” in Shaping Stability: The Normation and Formation of Religious Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Krijn Pansters and Abraham Plunkett-​Latimer (Turnhout, 2015), 263–​75. 45 Rüthing, “Die Kartäuser,” 52–​3. 46 Sebastian Brant, Collatio habita in publico conventu Cluniacensium ordinis sancti benedicti: … de perfecta religionis plantatione, incremento & instauratione (Basel, 1498). 47 Johann Nider, De Reformatione Religiosorum Libri Tres (Paris, 1512). 48 H. Zschoch, Klosterreform und monastische Spiritualität im 15. Jahrhundert. Conrad von Zenn (d. 1460) und sein Liber de vita monastica (Tübingen, 1988). 43

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claustralium by Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471),49 to name but a few, were deemed appropriate for many different audiences.50 In other cases, we see that one and the same author was asked by communities from different orders to provide them with suitable guidelines. Hence, like Denis the Carthusian, his fellow Carthusian Johannes Hagen (d. 1475)  wrote for Augustinians, Brigittines, communities of the Devotio moderna, female Benedictines, and his own order, and his overall message was very consistent.51 This idea that all forms of monasticism drew from a common source was in itself not new; it had inspired canon 12 of the Fourth Lateran Council and had informed Benedict XII’s reform program for all religious institutions in the 1330s. This type of legislation had sought, in vain, to curb the proliferation of new types of religious life. But it set a common standard for monastic life in general, regardless of order differences. It would be formulated even more radically in Libellum ad Leonem X, written in preparation for the Fifth Lateran Council by the Venetian Camaldolese authors Tommaso (Paolo) Giustiniani (d. 1528) and Vincenzo (Pietro) Querini (d. 1514), who argued that only a unified and Observant monasticism could be a profoundly benevolent force for Christianity.52 Overall, it can be said that a focus on decline belies late medieval transformations of monasticism. While many monastic authors, Church reformers, and outsiders lamented the lack of monastic discipline, this was both based in historical reality and part of a performative reform discourse.53 Pointing out decadence was functional in legitimizing reform projects that had to overcome vested interests and traditions. By the later fifteenth century, many monasteries were flourishing, and their members could claim





For works of monastic reform by Denis the Carthusian, see Opera minora, 9  vols. (Cologne, 1907–​9), vol. 6, as well as their discussion in Dennis D. Martin, Fifteenth Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf (Leiden, 1992). 50 As has been studied in relation to the reception of reform writings by Jacob the Carthusian. See Dieter Mertens, Iacobus Carthusiensis. Untersuchungen zur Rezeption der Werke des Kartäusers Jakob von Paradies (1381–​1465) (Göttingen, 1976). See also Ralph Weinbrenner, Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert zwischen Ideal und Praxis. Der Augustinereremit Andreas Proles (1429–​1503) und die priviligierte Observanz (Tübingen, 1996). 51 See Johannes Hagen’s Tractatus de diversis gravaminibus religiosorum, the Sermo pro reformationum recommendatione, the De reformatione religiosorum et modo practicandi, the De reformatione et instructione visitationis in ordine Augustinensi, the De modo vivendi in religione for the Birgittine monastery of Stralsund, etc. An overview is provided in Dictionnaire de spiritualité 8:543–​52. 52 Paolo Justiniani and Pietro Quirini, Libellus ad Leonem X Pontificem Maximum, in Annales Camaldulenses Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, 9 vols. (Venice, 1755–​73), 9:612–​719, esp. 688–​91. 53 See the article by Steckel in this volume.

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to uphold monastic ideals that helped them to fulfill important services for society at large. Observant reforms certainly played a role in this. Many Observant monasteries had a stronger pastoral outlook than their non-​reformed counterparts. They were able to tap into different client networks that included upcoming urban middle classes, and they frequently profited from the support of secular and ecclesiastical authorities (urban governments, bishops, and territorial rulers). Indeed, these authorities liked “leaner” and/​or pastorally more efficacious monastic institutions. They also encouraged enclosed female houses because, in their minds, the increased purity of such houses enhanced their status as burial places and as agents of intercession, and their churches could support the religious life of parishes and lay confraternities.54 That is not to say that the goals or the outcomes of Observant reforms were always the same. Much depended upon the social stratification of communities, the wishes of benefactors, and longstanding traditions related to the identity of the community in question. A return to rule observance could mean the divestment of property and a return to a more austere way of life. It could also mean a more thorough commitment to liturgical and intercessory activities without a noticeable shift in material circumstances. The fact that many Observant monastic houses combined increased recruitment with new resources and substantial building programs should make us wary of automatically identifying Observant reforms with austerity. It was more important that monastic communities were able to sell their spiritual, socio-​political, and economic relevance to their surroundings. Quite a few non-​Observant houses were quite successful in doing so without ever joining a reform congregation. This should be a warning against approaching the history of late medieval monasticism only from the angle of Observant reforms. By the later fifteenth century, to give but one example, the imperial Benedictine abbey of Ellwangen and the Benedictine house of Komburg withstood pressures of reform and the opening of their communities to non-​noble postulants. To continue serving a specific social niche with which the inhabitants of these houses identified themselves, they obtained papal approval to transform into secular canons (Chorherrenstiften), not bound by a strict monastic rule, but with precise guidelines with regard to the acceptance of (noble) postulants.

For lay interventions, see Clark, Benedictines in the Middle Ages, 304–​9; Bernhard Neidiger, “Stadtregiment und Klosterreform,” and Felix Escher, “Landesherr und Reformen in brandenburgischen Prämonstratenserklöstern,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen, 539–​67 and 515–​19, respectively.

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Rather than using this as proof for monastic decadence—​ resistance to Observant reforms frequently concerned matters of inclusion or exclusion of new social groups, and we tend to adopt wholesale the perspective of victorious Observant reforms—​historians can also study such a phenomenon from a different angle, as it apparently fulfilled specific needs in a quickly changing society.55 Criticism of monastic failings and claims of Observant reform successes resonated precisely because late medieval society as a whole was “monasticized” through its progressive adoption of concepts of discipline, religious devotion, and Christian learning that built on monastic precedents.56 There is much to say about these topics, but I will limit myself to a few remarks with regard to learning. Many connections did exist between monastic and mendicant Observant life and contemporary intellectual currents, including forms of humanism. This indicates that monastic learning, which according to dominant scholarly master narratives had been marginalized after about 1200 with the development of the urban schools and universities, regained part of its intellectual appeal. Of course, this marginalization had never been absolute. Although secular clerics and mendicant friars dominated the world of scholasticism during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, monastic orders—​sometimes urged to do so by papal reform decrees—​created their own colleges near emerging universities and sent promising young monks to the schools. Some monasteries, such as the Benedictine house of Blaubeuren, even became instrumental in the creation of universities.57 This phenomenon, which could coincide with monastic involvement with forms of pastoral care outside the cloister walls, nowadays receives more scholarly attention than previously, and shows that we should avoid exaggerating dichotomies between monastic and scholastic learning.58

Schreiner, Gemeinsam Leben, 291–​328. See Berndt Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation:  der Prozeß normativer Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1993): 7–​82. 57 Machilek, “Zur Rechts-​und Reformgeschichte,” 385–​6. 58 Andreas Sohn and Jacques Verger, Die regulierten Kollegien im Europa des Mittelalters und der Renaissance /​Les collèges réguliers en Europe au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance (Bochum, 2012); Racinet, Crises et renouveaux, 99–​100; Jean Leclercq, “Les études universitaires dans l’ordre de Cluny,” in Mélanges bénédictins publiés à l’occasion du XIVe centenaire de la mort de saint Benoît (Paris, 1947), 349–​71; P. Cunich, “Benedictine Monks at the University of Oxford and the Dissolution of the Monasteries,” in Benedictines in Oxford, ed. H. Wansborough and A. Marret-​Crosby (London, 1997), 155–​84; Clark, Benedictines in the Middle Ages, 261, 279–​80, and 311–​13. See also the articles by Clark, and Bush and Clark in this volume. 55

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Insofar as this dichotomy did exist, the partial late medieval dissatisfaction with technicalities of scholasticism and the search for forms of learning more commensurate with the exigencies of society and the nature of humanity, encouraged Church reformers such as Jean Gerson (d. 1429) and Pierre d’Ailly (d. 1420), as well as early humanists, to embrace forms of scholarship and situations of scholarly repose consonant with monastic ideals of study and meditation.59 This caused a convergence between conceptions of humanist scholarship and conceptions of Observant religious life, and it is no accident that reforms within the Melk and Bursfeld congregations, but also in other houses (including Cistercian and Camadolese communities), often went hand in hand with a humanist pursuit of arts, theology, natural science, medicine, and at times also the study of history.60 Many fifteenth-​and early sixteenth-​century monastic scholars were in the vanguard of the humanist movement.61 This left traces in monastic book collections, some of which, such as those of St. Emmeran in Regensburg, Michelsberg in Bamberg, Tegernsee, Melk, Hirsau, Neresheim, and St. Jakob in Mainz, were exceptionally rich.62 Finally, beyond scholarship properly speaking, monastic ideals of devotion and discipline had a huge impact on late medieval society. This can be seen in the popularity of vernacularized monastic devotional classics, the sacralization of time through the lay appropriation of the canonical hours (for instance in the books of hours), and in the way that vernacular pedagogical treatises, which scholars often associate with humanist innovation, disseminated concepts of bodily and mental comportment first introduced by







Denis Martin, “The Via Moderna, Humanism, and the Hermeneutics of Late Medieval Monastic Life,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 179–​97. 60 See also Dieter Mertens, “Monastische Reformbewegungen des 15. Jahrhunderts: Ideen –​ Ziele –​Resultate,” in Reform von Kirche und Reich zur Zeit der Konzilien von Konstanz (1414–​ 1418) und Basel (1431–​1449), ed. Ivan Hlavacek and Alexander Patschovsky (Konstanz, 1996),  157–​8. 61 Harald Müller, “Nutzen und Nachteil humanistischer Bildung im Kloster,” in Funktionen des Humanismus. Studien zum Nutzen des Neuen in der humanistischen Kultur, ed. Thomas Maissen and Gerrit Walther (Göttingen, 2006), 191–​213; James G. Clark, “Humanism and Reform in Pre-​Reformation English Monasteries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 19 (2009): 57–​93; Noel Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–​ 1516):  The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden, 1981); Paul O. Kristeller, “The Contribution of Religious Orders to Renaissance Thought and Learning,” in Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning (Durham, NC, 1974), 95–​158; Franz Posset, Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches (Leiden, 2005). 62 See the article by Schlotheuber and McQuillen in this volume. See also Ladislaus Buzas, Deutsche Bibliotheksgeschichte des Mittelalters (Wiesbaden, 1975), 24–​52; Virgil Fiala, “Humanistische Frömmigkeit in der Abtei Neresheim,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 86 (1975): 109–​29. 59

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monastic novice training manuals.63 All of this requires additional research. It seems valid, however, to say that the monastery had not only retained—​and to an extent regained—​a valid place within late medieval society, but also reasserted itself as a dominant force in shaping the spiritual aspirations of people beyond its walls.

Bibliography Bischof, Franz Xaver, and Martin Thurner, eds. Die benediktinische Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 2013. Clark, James G. The Benedictines in the Middle Ages. Rochester, NY, 2011. Constable, Giles, Gert Melville, and Jörg Oberste, eds. Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-​ sozialen Umfeld. Münster, 1998. Cygler, Florent. Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser. Münster, 2002. Elm, Kaspar, ed. Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Berlin, 1989. Elm, Kaspar, Peter Joerisse, and Hermann J. Roth, eds. Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit. Cologne, 1980. Groiss, Albert. Spätmittelalterliche Lebensformen der Benediktiner von der Melker Observanz vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Bräuche. Ein darstellender Kommentar zum Caeremoniale Mellicense des Jahres 1460. Münster, 1999. Hamm, Berndt. “Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation:  der Prozeß normativer Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft in Deutschland.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1993): 7–​82. Die Kartäuser und ihre Welt. Kontakte und gegenseitige Einflüsse. 2 vols. Salzburg, 1993. Lehfeldt, Elisabeth A. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, 2005. Luxford, Julian. The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–​1540:  A Patronage History. Woodbridge, 2005. Martin, Dennis D. Fifteenth Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf. Leiden, 1992. Melville, Gert, ed. Institutionen und Geschichte. Theoretische Aspekte und mittelalterliche Befunde. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1992. Nyberg, Tore. Birgittinische Klostergründungen des Mittelalters. Lund, 1965. Oberste, Jörg. Visitation und Ordensorganisation. Formen sozialer Normierung, Kontrolle und Kommunikation bei Cisterziensern, Prämonstratensern und Cluniazensern (12.–​frühes 14. Jahrhundert). Berlin, 1996.

See Dilwyn Knox, “Disciplina:  The Monastic and Clerical Origins of European Civility,” in Renaissance Society and Culture:  Essays in Honor of Eugene F.  Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New  York, 1991), 107–​35. See also Martina Wehrli-​Johns, “Lebensregeln für Laien: Dionysius der Kartäuser als Kommentator der franziskanischen Drittordensregel und Verfasser eines Regelwerkes für alle Christen (‘De doctrina et regulis vitae christianorum’),” in Das Gesetz /​The Law /​La loi, ed. Andreas Speer and Guy Goldentops (Berlin, 2014), 628–​49.

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Index

Aachen (chapel), 420 Aachen, Synods of (816-819), 184, 186–​7, 291, 323, 375, 387, 422, 424, 438–​41, 455, 462, 482, 497–​8, 508–​9, 526 Aaron, Bishop of Kraków, 885 Abelard, Peter, 652, 675, 682, 697, 735, 740, 741, 743, 777, 967, 1076 Sic et Non, 458 Abbaye-​aux-​Dames of Saintes (monastery), 252–​53 Abbo of Fleury, 595, 627 Collectio, 621, 627 Abraham of Kaškar, 69 Abraham of Pboou/​Farshut, 54 Abraham of Quiduna, Life of, 749, 759 Adalbero of Laon, Carmen ad Rotbertum regem, 1157 Acemetes (monastery), 343–​44 Acta Murensia, 572 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 43, 99 Acts of Peter, 43 Acts of the Apostles, 42 Acts of Thomas, 43 Adalard of Corbie, 460, 472 Statutes, 470, 471 Adalbert of Prague, 641–2, see also Wojciech/​ Vojtěch, missionary bishop Adam of Bremen, 496 Adam of Perseigne, 721, 1078 Adela (Adala, Adula) of Bavaria, 745 Adela of Normandy, 581 Adelaide, 412 Adémar de Chabannes, 429, 961 Admonitio Generalis (General Instruction, 789), 452–​53, 458, 459, 461, 716 Admont (monastery), 570, 575–​77, 711, 721–​22, 723, 805, 812–13, 862 Adrian IV, Pope, Laudabiliter, 907 adult converts (conversi), 228–​29, 513, 550–​51, 553, 582, 1027, 1029, 1034, see also entrance ad succurrendum; lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae)

advocates, 859–​61 lay nobility as, 581, 585 Áed mac Bricc of Rahugh, 301 Ælfric of Eynsham, 511, 513 Colloquy, 415 Aelred of Rievaulx, 573, 721, 751, 753, 756 Rule for a Recluse, 753, 759 Æthelwold of Winchester, 426, 507–​17, 534, 539–​40 Agaune, Life of the Abbots of, 61 Agaune, Saint-​Maurice d’ (monastery), 37, 116, 181, 244, 248, 292–3 Agde, Council of (506), 750 Agilulf, Lombard King, 238 Agnes of Antioch, 889 Agnes of Babenberg, 889 Agnes of Bohemia, 893 Agnes of Hereford, 907 Agnes of Meissen (or Quedlinburg), 1004 Agriculture, see also property and land animal husbandry and pastoralism, 841–​44 in Byzantium, 354–​56, see also property and land cereal production, 841 in Ireland, 910–​11 land management, 834–​36 viticulture, 845 Aibertus of Crespin, 690, 750 Ailly, Pierre d’, 1188 Aimon of Fleury, 591 ainmchairde (soul friendship), 313 airchinnech, 304–5 Alain of Lille, 1076 Alberic, hermit outside of Jerusalem, 692 Alberic of Metz, 1068 Albert, Bishop of Riga, 892 Alberzoni, Maria Pia, 1048 Albigensian Crusade, 725 Alcock, John, Spousage of a Virgin to Christ, 1129 Alcuin of York, 58, 396, 457–8, 460 Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 63, 513 On Virginity, 572

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192

Index Aldwyn, prior of Winchcombe Abbey, 691–​92 Alexander II, Pope, 638 Alexander III, Pope, 573, 638, 738–​9, 1053 Alexander IV, Pope, 1053 Alexander VI, Pope, 1179 Alexander Nequam, 1076 Alexander of Christ Church, Canterbury, 719 Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor, 350–4 Alferius, saint, 411 Alfons Lopez, 832 Alfred the Great, King of England, 506 Alix of Mâcon, 845 Alpirsbach (monastery), 1177 altars, 1006–​1012, 1008f. 54.1 Altenberg (monastery of Premonstratensian women), 814, 1011, 1018, 1023 Altenhohenau (monastery), 978 Altmann, Bishop of Passau, 773 Amadeus, Bishop of Lausanne, 721 Amalarius of Metz, 125, 419, 421 Amand, saint, 490 Life of St Amand, 749 Amatus of Remiremont, 294 Ambrose of Milan, 45, 58, 123, 147, 166, 214, 217, 570, 699, 701 De virginibus, 269 Ambrosian office hymns, 959, 1014 Ambrosius Autpertus, 526, 527 Amicie de Montfort, 1048, 1049 Ammonius, hermit, 104 Amos, Thomas, 714, 717 Amun, hermit, 104, 567 Anastasius Bibliothecarius, 633 Anastasius of Venice, 637 anchorites, as term, 747–​48, see also reclusion and recluses Ancren Riwle, 751, 753, 761 Andechs (monastery), 994 Andenna, Cristina, 776 Andrea, Archbishop of Acerenza, 1047 Andreas Grecus, 638 Andreas of Fontevraud, Life of Robert of Arbrissel, 674, 742 Andrew I, King of Hungary, 896, 897 Andrew of Saint-Victor, 676 Angenendt, Arnold, 283 Angilbert (Engelbert) of Fulda, 531 Anglo-Saxon England, see England Aniane (monastery), 247–​48 animal husbandry, 841–​44 Anna, prophet, 215 Anna of Bohemia, 893–​94 Annales Regni Francorum, 438 Annales School, 1142 Annegray (monastery), 250 Ansegisus of Fontenelle, 326, 549

Anselm of Aosta or Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, 229, 702–​3, 719, 761, 902, 971 Anselm of Havelberg, 777, 1168 Anselm of Laon, 704, 706, 1075 Anselm of Lucca, 625, 741 Anskar (missionary priest), 489–​90, 492, 495, 496, 498 Ansteus of Saint-Arnould, 331–​32 anthropomorphites, 137–​8 Anthusa of Mantinea, 345 Antiphonary of Bangor, 123, 279, 295 antiphons and antiphonaries, 123, 294–​95, 423–​24 Antony of Egypt, 2, 4, 20, 23–5, 32, 137, 641, 686, see also Athanasius, Life of  Antony Aphraates, 56 apocalyptic theology, 703–​5 Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 42–3, 99 Apophthegmata patrum, 25, 43, 64, 101, 114, 116, 159, 168, 169–​70 apostolic life, historiography of, 662–​63 Aquinas, Thomas, 698, 1086 Ardo Smaragdus, Vita Benedicti Anianensis, 442, 443 Arianism, 133 aristocracy, see nobility, lay Armagh, 300–​1, 305 Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, 1078 Arno of Reichersberg, 777 Arnobius the Younger, 124 Arnold I of Ardres, 860 Arnold, Ellen F, 817 Arnould of Saint-​Médard, 750 Arnulf of Villers-​en-​Brabant,  1032 Arnulf, Abbot of Saint-​Martin of Troarn, 720 Arnulf, Count of Flanders, 606 ascetics and asceticism, see house ascetics and asceticism Arrouaise, Saint-Nicholas of (house of regular canons), 772, 773, 904, 906 Asella, saint, 216, 221 Aston, Mick, 828 Athanasius of Alexandria, 63, 100, 130–​31, 132, 144, 147 evidence of female asceticism in, 7, 101 heresy issues in, 132 Life of Antony, 7, 41, 44, 6​ 0, 101, 132, 144–​5, 147–​8, 159, 391, 631 prominence and translations of, 43, 60, 63, 144–​45, 147–​50, 158–​59 in traditional historiography, 24 Athanasius the Athonite, 347–​48, 352 Athassel (priory), 916 Attaliate, Michael, 349–​50 Attigny, prayer association, 285 Aubin, Hermann, 1142

1192

193

Index Augustine of Canterbury, 504, 5​ 07–8 Augustine of Hippo on Antony and ascetic life, 147–​48 ascetic terminology, use of, 166 on corrupt monks, 30–​31 on hierarchical Church, 214–​15 influence on Anselm of Bec, 702 on intercessory prayer, 282–​83, 294 on manual labor, 260–​1 monastic communities of, 85, 86 Pelagius vs, 140–​41 on religious women, 7 rule(s) of, 2, 7, 163–4, , 166–7, 170, 174, 269, 672, 766, 767, 768, 771–​72, 867, 1048 sermons of, 713 theology of, 28, 190, 699, 701, 707–​8 in traditional narrative of monastic history, 1–​4, 2f1.1 Cassiciacum Dialogues, 155–​56 De cura pro mortuis gerenda, 733 De opere monachorum, 30–​31, 135, 261 Soliloquia, 515 Augustinian canons and canonesses, 1–​4, 642, 867, 905–​7, 910, 915–​16 Augustinian hermits, 800 Aula Regis (monastery), 887 Aurelianus of Arles, 35, 122, 176, 181 Regula ad monachos, 170, 176, 178–​79, 182, 189, 267, 419 Regula ad virgines, 178–​79, 267, 729–​30 Ausonius of Bordeaux, 156–​57 Austin, John L., 711, 757 Avitus of Vienne, 58 Awgen (Eugenios), 69 Azecho of Worms, 741 Babenberg family, 889 Baily, Lisa Kaaren, 713 Baldwin, Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 877 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, 725 Balthild, Merovingian queen, 289 Bangor (monastery), 279, 904 Barbara Gonzaga of Mantua, 1146 Barcelona, Council of (540), 198 Barking Abbey, 967, 973 La Barre (monastery), 1033 Barsanuphius of Gaza, 57 Bartholomew of Simeri, 412 Bartlett, Robert, 850 Basel, Council of (1431–1445), 993 Basil of Caesarea, 730 advocacy of dual-sex communities, 571, 574 hagiographies, importance to, 61 letters of, 57

rules of, 19, 24, 54–​55, 83, 116, 124, 150–1, 166, 168–​69 in traditional narrative of monastic history, 2, 4, 43 Asketikon, 54–​55, 574 Basil the Younger, 639 basilical monasteries, 86–​87, 526–​27, 529–​30 Bateson, Mary, 563–​64 Baudonivia, Life of Radegund, 61 Baudri of Dol, 674, 689 Baugulf of Fulda, 533 Baury, Ghislain, 840 Beach, Alison, 722, 1058, 1152 bearded brothers, see lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae) Bec (monastery), 229, 736 Becket, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 724, 879 Bective Abbey, 910 Bede, 195–​6, 456, 487, 505, 508, 530, 701, 713, 716 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 58, 485, 502–​3, 691–​92 beehive monasteries, 92 beguines, 1045–​1046, 161–​8 Béla III, King of Hungary, 889 Belting, Hans, 1000 Benedict XII, Pope, 948, 1081–​1082, 1087, 1173 Benedict, missionary monk in Poland, 885 Benedict of Aniane, 768 as educational architect, 454 hagiography on, 442, 443 impact on monastic historiography, 19–​20, 162–​3, 167–​8, 172, 174, 182, 188, 367, 387 memorial liturgy by, 284 prominence in Carolingian reform narrative, 163, 184–​7, 441–​43 Codex Regularum, 162–​63, 167, ​180, 190, 443 Concordia Regularum, 162–​63, 188, 197, 443 Benedict Biscop, 530 Benedict of Nursia, 2, 89–​90, 284, 317–​18, 387, 400, 450, 714, 730, 1167, 1175, see also RB (Rule of St. Benedict) Benedict of Saint-Germain at Auxerre, 691 Benedictine, as term, 5 Benignus, Bishop of Armagh, 301 Berengar of Tours, 702 Berman, Constance, 656, 658–​59, 1034 Bernard of Angers, 591 Bernard of Clairvaux 554 criticism of luxury, 1019, 1020–​1022 criticism of universities, 698, 1075 crusades, involvement in, 724–​25 education of, 675 in historiography, 651 Irish connections, 904 letter-writing and, 944

1193

194

Index Bernard of Clairvaux (cont.) missions, involvement in, 892 on preaching, 710, 723 in satire, 1163 scholarship on, 699 sermons of, 720–​21, 722, 723 theology of, 697, 705, 706–​8 on women, 735–​6 Apologia, 1019 De laude novae militiae, 724 On Loving God, 708 Bernard of Tiron, 689, 1041 Bernard, Auguste, 386 Bernhard of Waging, 1128 Bernheimerin, Barbara, 1146 Berno of Reichenau, 680 Berthold of Zwiefalten, 1005 Bertilla, Abbess of Chelles, 271, 289 Bezant, Jemma, 819 Billett, Jesse, 513 bishops, see ecclesiastical authority Bitel, Lisa, 901, 914 Black Death, 918, 1036, 1112–​14 Blair, John, 503, 504, 505, 506 Blanche of Castile, 833, 837 Blasios of Amorion, 639 Blaubeuren (monastery), 1176–​177 Bloch, Marc, 840, 956 bloodletting, 867, 868, 870–​71 Bobbio (monastery), 238–​39, 474–​75 Bobbio Missal, 286 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 1162, 1165–​166 Boethius, 700, 702 Bohemia, see East-​Central  Europe Böhringer, Letha, 1065 Bolesław I Chrobry, King of Poland, 885 Bolesław II the Generous, King of Poland, 885 Bolesław III of Wrymouth, 1005 Bologna, Council of (1310), 1121 Bonaventure, John, 870, 1053 Bond, James, 819, 828 Bondeville (monastery), 868 Boniface, saint letters of, 58 missions and foundations of, 487, 494 tomb of, 533 use of RB, 186 Boniface of Canterbury, 1100 Boniface VIII, Pope, 1054, 1100, 1101 Periculoso, 1103, 1119–​121 Bonneville (monastery), 1033 Bononius of Lucedio, 639 Book of the Founders of Schools and Monasteries, 69 Book on the Education and the Consolation of Novices (Anonymous), 1024 book production, see also libraries

as manual labor, 270–​71 for missions, 490–​91 as preaching, 711 printed books, emergence of, 993–​95 veneration of saints through, 534–​35 women’s involvement in, 812–​13, 979 Bornstein, Daniel, 1059 Bosch, Hieronymus, 938 Boto, prior of Prüfening, 1014 Bouchard of Vendôme, 596 Boureau, Alain, 1118 Boynton, Susan, 679 Brann, Noel, 936 Bretha Nemed Toísech, 310 breviaries, 126 Břevnov (monastery), 896, 897 brides of Christ, as term, 99, 224 Bridget of Sweden, 1055, 1131 Brigit of Kildare, 301–​2, 303 Brigittine order, 935, 969, 1182–​183 Brinton, Thomas, 1137 Brockie, Marianus, 162 Brooke, Christopher, 1171 Brothers of the Sword, 892 Brown, Peter, 156–​57, 692 Bruel, Alexandre, 386 Brunhild, Merovingian Queen, 181, 182 Bruno Candidus, monk at Fulda, 328, 530–​31 Bruno of Cologne, 411, 614, 671, 675, 687, 788, 954, 1031–​1032 Bruno-​Boniface (missionary monk), 885 Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens (Meyer), 805 Bugni, Chiara, 1131, 1132 Bugyis, Katie, 971 Burchard of Worms, 620, 626 Decretum, 624, 625 Burckhardt, Jacob, 653 Bursfeld congregation and reform, 960, 969, 973, 1091, 1128, 1175 Bury St. Edmunds (monastery), 736, 877, 1118 Busch, Johannes, 751, 1111, 1121, 1123 Butler, Cuthbert, 663 Byland (monastery), 1032 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 775–​76 Byrhtferth of Ramsey, 511 Byzantine monasticism, see also Eastern influences on the West, see also Greek/​ Byzantine monasteries (in the East) in East-​Central Europe, 884, 896–​97 Caesaria, Abbess of Arles, 271–​72 Caesarius of Arles, 713, 714, 753, 1018–​1019 monasteries of, 87, 245 spiritual view of monasteries, 35, 291, 319 training at Lérins, 172

1194

195

Index Regula ad monachos, 122, 177–​78, 267 Regula ad virgines, 100, 122, 176–​77, 178, 191–​2, 218, 262–​64, 266, 267, 729–​30, 737, 767 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 1162 Caesarius of Prüm, 476 Cáin Adomnáin (Law of Adomnán), 303 Camaldolese order, 642, 671, 686, 943, 946 Camaldoli (hermitage and monastery), 946, 1029 Cambridge University, 1083 Candidus Brun, monk at Fulda, 328, 530–​31 Caner, Daniel, 134 canon law collections of, overview, 618–​20 on ecclesiastical authority, 51–​52, 172–​73, 198, 344 education in, 1075, 1084 exemption and, 626–​29 on female asceticism, 217–​18, 220–​23 forgeries, 627–​29 monastic contributions to, 621–​23 and monastic exemption, 1101–​103 as normative source, 51–​52 penitentials and, 623–​26 on reclusion, 750 on rights and responsibilities of bishops and religious, 1094–​1095 on spatial organization of monasteries, 322, 323 and statutes on the religious, 1103–​105 understanding of monasticism in, 1095–​1098 canons, see regular canons and canonesses Canterbury Christ Church Cathedral, 516 St. Augustine’s Abbey, 515 Canterbury College, 1083 Capitulare Monasticum (Synod of Aachen), 438–​39 Capitulary of Herstal (779), 435 Cappadocia, archaeology in, 83–​84 Cariboni, Guido, 949 Carmelites, 3, 800, 916–​17, 967 Carmen in Honorem Hludowici, 442–​43 Carmina Burana manuscript, 1159 carpets, church, 1012–​1013, 1013f. 54.2 Carta Caritatis, 671, 784–​86 Carthage, Council of (418), 221 Carthusians and Carthusian order, 411, 642 administration and organization of, 788–​89, 944 care for the sick, 870 customs, 671, 792 hagiographies, lack of, 953–4 lay brothers and sisters, 1032 monastic networks, 822 reform efforts, 1181–​182 cartography, 827–​29 Casanova, Paolo, 1131 Cashel, Synod of (1101), 902 Cassian, John, 24, 42, 45, 121, 133–​34, 137, 170–​71, 244, 307, 309, 699

Conferences (Collationes patrum), 140, 171, 713, 718, 981 Institutes, 171 Cassinese congregation, 1175 Cassiodorus, 90, 237, 714, 976 Institutiones, 399–​400, 451 castles, 856 Castor of Apt, 171, 244 Caterina Vigri, 1130, 1131, 1132 Ordinazione, 1132–​133 Catesby Priory, 1114 Catherine of Siena, 8 Caulite order, 1029 Cava, Holy Trinity of (monastery), 410 cave monasticism, 77, 81, 407–​8 Céli Dé (Clients of God), 311–​14 Cellach, Archbishop of Armagh, 904 Central Europe. see East-Central Europe Centula, see Saint-Riquier Chalcedon, Council of (451), 51–​52, 139, 172–​74, 221, 344 Chalcedonian Lives (Cyril of Scythopolis), 68 Champmol (monastery), 1017–​1018 chanting, 426–​28, 459 chants, new compositions, 961–​64 chapter books for, 979–​81 preaching in, 719–​20, 1127 chapter house and meeting, 546, 547–​50 charistike (conditional donation to charity), 354 Charitas Pirchheimer, 980 Charlemagne, 435, 437, 459, 460, 468, 494, 716 Epistola de litteris colendis, 452 Charles the Bald, 468, 480, 1009 Chartreuse (monastery), 614 chastity, 907, 1111–​112, 1121–​122, 1162–​166, see also virginity Châtillon, Jean, 776 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales, 1109, 1154, 1155–​156, 1162 Chelidonia, female hermit, 694, 695 Chelles (monastery), 271, 291 Cheney, Christopher, 1099 Chenu, Marie-​Dominique,  662 Chezal-​Benoît (monastery and congregation), 1176 Chiara Bugni, 1131, 1132 Chiaravalle (monastery), 1179 Chilandar (monastery), 358 child oblation and oblates, 107, 489, 502, 550–​53, 582, 705, 885, 972–​73, 1027, 1095 Childebert I, Merovingian King, 178, 181 choirs (church space), 1012–​1016 Chotěšov (monastery), 887, 888 Christ Pantocrator (monastery), 351 Christian of Oliva, 885, 892

1195

196

Index Christina the Astonishing, 1061 Christina of Markyate, 741 Christodoulos, monk in Patmos, 352 Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, 768 Regula canonicorum, 186, 420, 508, 512, 514–16 Chunegunde II, Abbess of Göss, 745, 813 Cikádor (monastery), 889 Cistercians and Cistercian order, 5, 411, 497, 621, 622, 642, see also lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae) administration and organization of, 784–​87, 798, 942–​45 austerity of, 1020–​1022 care for the sick, 868 in East-​Central Europe, 889–​92 Grande Chartreuse, 788, 789 hagiographies, 953 historiography of, 658–​59 ideals, 791–​92 in Ireland, 903–​5, 910–​11, 912–​15 land management, 833–​36, 910–​11 liturgy, 959–​60 as model for adaptations, 787–​91 monastic networks, 821–​22, 823 preaching, 719–​21, 724–​26 reform efforts, 1177–​179 rules and customs, 671 in satire and polemics, 1158, 1163 university interactions, 1077–​1080 women, inclusion of, 944–​45, 1044–​1045 Cîteaux (monastery), 614, 784, 1078 cities, monasteries as, 26, 478–​80 Clairvaux (monastery), 497, 1032 clamor ritual, 590–​91 Clanchy, Michael, 667 Clare of Assisi, 893, 1051–​5 Rule, 1053 Clark, Elizabeth, 138, 150 Classen, Peter, 780 Claus de Werve, 1017 Claus Sluter, 1017 Clement IV, Pope, Affectu sincero, 1050 Clement V, Pope, 1102 Clement VI, Pope, 1087 Clement, Richard W., 715 Clement of Alexandria, 55, 159 Clement of Rome, Pope, 43 clergy, see ecclesiastical authority clericalization, of monasticism, 35, 286 cloisters, 318, 326–​28, 545–​47 reading in, 981–​82 Cluny (monastery) abbot in dormitory, 547 adaptation of Cistercian model, 789–​90, 792 adult converts, 597 care for the sick at, 869–​70 charters of, 384, 385, 386, 587

congregation of, 789–​90, 960 customs and customaries, 330, 333, 389, 411, 544, 552, 557, 670, 671, 869 female ascetics at, 229 foundation of, 524f. 27.2, 580 hermits at, 690 historiography of, 369–​70, 372–​73, 656–​57 influence in southern Italy and Sicily, 411 land ownership and circulation at, 587, 589, 608 lay servants, 556–​57 liturgy at, 281, 587–​88, 960 monasteries modeled after, 610–​11 oblation in, 551–​52 ordination of monks at, 732 preaching at, 717–​19 reform efforts, 1179–​181 reforms of, 446, 602–​3, 604–​5, 608–​10 in satire and polemics, 1158 sacred ban around, 335, 336f. 16.5, 589 sign language, 516 sovereignty and formality of, 793–​94, 795–​96 spatial organization of, 330 viticulture at, 845 Cochelin, Isabelle, 603, 670, 1058, 1118 Codex Albeldensis, 519–​21, 520f. 27.1 Codex Amiatinus, 52, 344–​45, 562, 975–​76 Codex Gisle, 964, 970 Cogitosus, 302, 307 cohabitation, and gender, 103–​5 Coleman, Edward, 911 collect (collecta), 118, 122 Collectio Dionysiana, 620 Collection in 74 Titles, 621, 627–​28 Collection in Five Books, 621, 626 College of St. Bernard, Paris, 1085 Columbanus, 902 hagiography on, 61, 238 letters of, 58 monasteries of, 90–​91, 181–​84, 238–​39, 250–​51 rules of, 122, 181–​84, 185, 419, 488 commemorative art and architecture, 527–​29 computus (liturgical computation), 459–​60 Conant, Kenneth, 396 Concilium Germanicum (742–​743),  434–​35 Condat (monastery), 246, 321–​22 Congregation of Castille, 1178 Congregation of San Bernardo, in Tuscany and Lombardy, 1179 Congregation of the Holy Sepulchre (house of regular canons), 773 Congregation of Windesheim, 1182 Conrad, hermit, 692 Conrad of Hochstaden, Archbishop of Cologne, 1105 Conrad of Hirsau, 703 Disputation of Synagogue and the Church, 703

1196

197

Index On Contempt or Love for the World, 703 Speculum virginum, 681, 703 Conrad, Archbishop of Salzburg, 773 Conrad von Zenn, Liber de vita monastica, 1184 Consortia, Life of, 219 Constable, Giles, 566, 654, 656, 657–​58, 659, 661, 769, 775, 1029, 1057, 1115 Constance, Council of (1414-​1418), 993, 1134, 1175 Constantine IX Monomachos, Byzantine Emperor, 352–​53 Constantinople, Council of (553), 139 conversi, see adult converts (conversi); lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae) cooking and kitchens, 553–​55 Corbie (monastery), 628 Corpus Christi College, 1083 corrodies, 1114–​115 Cosmas of Prague, Chronicle, 897 cosmos, monasteries as reflection of, 317–​21 councils and synods Aachen (816-​819), 184, 186–​7, 291, 323, 375, 422, 438–​41, 455, 462 Agde (506), 750 Barcelona (540), 198 Basel (1431-​1445),  993 Bologna (1310), 1121 Carthage (418), 221 Cashel (1101), 902 Chalcedon (451), 51–​52, 139, 172–​74, 177, 221, 344 Concilium Germanicum (742–​743),  434–​35 Constance (1414–1418), 993, 1134, 1175 Constantinople (553), 139 Epaone (517), 221 Ephesus (431), 134 Fifth Lateran (1512–1517), 1185 Fourth Lateran (1215), 658, 766, 790, 801, 866, 1010, 1077, 1096, 1117, 1127, 1173 Gangra (340), 131 Kells/​Mellifont (1152), 902, 907 Lérida (546), 198 Lyon (1274), 1096 Orange (529), 140 Orléans (511), 752 Orléans (549), 218 Oxford (1222), 1119 Paris (614), 218 Paris (829), 222 Ráith Bressail (1111), 902 Saragossa (691), 202 Second Lateran (1139), 230, 1075 Seville (619), 199 Tarragona (516), 198 Toledo (c. 400), 217, 218 Toledo (633), 221 Toledo (656), 222 Tours (567), 221, 322

Trullo (692), 750, 752 Vienne (1311/​12), 1067, 1081 courier systems, 476 court culture, 633–​34 Coventry (monastery), 583 Coyroux (monastery), 576 crisis and decline historiography of, 1109–​110, 1171–​172 revising narrative of, 1185–​189 crowns, for nuns, 220, 226, 1016, 1019–​1020 Crusades military orders, 800, 843, 911–​12, 1042 preaching in, 718, 724–​25 Crutched Friars, 909 cultural space, as concept, 1142–​143 cursus monastic, 125–​26 Roman, 125–​26, 418–​20 customaries, 388–​90, 416–17, 425, 509, 516, 542–​45, 552, 554–5, 606–​7, 670–​72, 963, 970, 994, 1029 Cygler, Florent, 658 Cyprian of Carthage, 214, 282 De habitu virginum, 269 Cyril Phileotes, Life of, 351 Cyril of Scythopolis, 67–​68, 342 Chalcedonian Lives, 68 Cyril, apostle to the Slavs, 884 Czerwińsk (monastery), 888 Dag Eilivsson, 497 Dalderby, John, Bishop of Lincoln, 1120 Damasus of Rome, 61 Dannhausen, Hermann, Abbot of St. Godehard, 992 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 1166–​167 databases, 825–​27, 996 Davies, Wendy, 317 Davinus of Armenia, 638 Dawson, Christopher, 652 de Lubac, Henri, 698 De Mauro et Zoilo, 1158 Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff, 1065, 1151 death funerary rites, 756–​58 intercessory prayer, 733–​34, 809–​10, 891–​92 decline, see crisis and decline Decretum Gratiani, 619, 620, 621, 625, 629, 710, 771, 981 Defensor of Ligugé, Liber scintillarum, 43 Demetrianos of Chytri, 639 Denis the Carthusian, De reformatione claustralium, 1185 Denis of Paris, 62 Dereine, Charles, 774, 776 Desiderius of Montecassino, 411 Dialogues, 685

1197

198

Index Desprez, Vincent, 44 Destephen, Sylvain, 49 Devotio Moderna movement, 1178, 1182 Dhuoda, 462 Diana d’Andalò, 1048 Dickinson, John Compton, 774 Dicuil, monk, 460 Didascalia of the Apostles, 56 Didymus the Blind, 139 Diemut of Wessobrunn, 570, 736 Dionysio-​Hadriana,  768 Dionysius the Areopagite, 62, 394 Dionysius Exiguus, 64, 620 Dionysius of Paris, 62 Dioscorus of Alexandria, 128–​29, 132 Disibod, Irish saint, 965 Disibodenberg (monastery), 738–​39, 824, 965 Doberan (monastery), 1003 Dolbeau, François, 60 Domenica Narducci da Paradiso, 1130 domestic households, lay religious in, 1063–​1069 domestic asceticism, see house ascetics and asceticism Dominic of Guzmán (or Calaruega), 761, 790–​91, 1048, 1050 Dominicans (male and female) and Dominican order, 2 administration and organization of, 790–​91, 792, 798–​99 austerity of, 1023–​1024 care for the sick, 867–​68 Constitutiones, 791 flexibility of, 797 in Ireland, 916–​18 sovereignty and formality of, 794, 795–​96 in Strasbourg, 1147 women, inclusion of, 1048–​1051, 1054–​1055 donations and patronage, see also property and land and aristocratic expansion, 849–​53 authority and, 857–​62 from bishops, 1105–​107 of church objects, 1004–​1005 circulation of, among laity and monasteries, 586–​88 connection to mass, 733, 809–​10 decline in, 1113–​114 historiography of, 930–​31 legitimacy through, 584–​86 memorial and spiritual function of, 279–​81, 523–​25, 585, 586 motivations behind, 853–​57 Donatus, Aelius, 460 Donatus of Besançon, Regula, 181, 262, 266, 289, 737

Donnadieu Rigaud, Dominique, 956 Dormitories, 94, 318, 322, 323, 546–​47 reading in, 983–​85 double monasteries, 823–​24, 934, 1030, 1040, 1041–​1042 in Code of Justinian, 52, 562 as concept, 561–​63 emergence of, 567–​70 historiography of, 563–​66 ideological foundations of, 570–​72 managing interactions between the sexes within, 572–​77 Douglas, Mary, 33 drama, liturgical, 962–​64, 965–​66 Du Moigne (fabliau), 1164–​165 Duby, Georges, 384, 385 Duiske (monastery), 914 Duns Scotus, 1086 Dunstan of Canterbury, 424–5, 509–​10, 512–​13, 539, 743 Durand, Guillaume, 225, 964 Durham College, 1083 Durham Gospels, 1112–​13 Durham Priory, 1135 Dyer, Christopher, 534–​35 dynastic monasteries, 854, 891–​92 Eadburga, Abbess of Minster, 271, 272, 490 Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, 534–​35 Eadmer of Canterbury, 552 Eadmund, King of England, 508 Ealdwine of Malvern, hermit, 691 East-​Central Europe Cistercians in, 889–​92 cultural role of monasticism in, 895–​99 earliest foundations in, 885–​89 female founders and patrons in, 499, 892–​94 hermitism in, 687–​88 historiography of, 882–​83 military orders in, 892 missions in, 883–​85 Eastern influences on the West, see also Greek/​ Byzantine monasteries (in the East) modes of contact, 632–​39, 631–2, 639–41 overview, 639–​44 in southern Italy and Sicily, 408–​9, 411–​12 Western interpretations of Eastern literature, 147–​51, 632–​33 Western syntheses of Eastern psalmody, 121–​26 Eastern Saints, Lives of, 68 Ebbo of Reims, 495 Eberhard VI, Count of Nellenburg, 568 Eberhard the Elder (“Eberhard im Bart”), 1144, 1145, 1146 Eberhard the Younger, 1144, 1145

1198

199

Index Ebrach (monastery), 1036 ecclesiastical authority canon law on, 51–​52, 172–​73, 198, 344 distinction between clergy and monks/​nuns, 113, 291 heresy and, 128–​29, 132–​33 intercessory prayer and, 291–​92 for missions, 490 monastic claims of superiority to, 29–​30, 594–​95 monastic exemption from, 1101–​103 as non-​gendered,  271–​72 patronage and, 858–​59, 1105–​107 over property, 836 over recluses, 753–​54, 755–​56 over women’s religious life, 223, 462–3, 1036, 1046–​1054, 1064–​1067, 1119–​121 rights and responsibilities, 1094–​1095 sanctity of, 65 schools in monasteries, 450–​56 in southern Italian and Sicilian monasteries, 406 statutes on the religious, 1103–​105 teaching methods, 456–​63 tithes, 836, 837–​38, 1104 understanding of monasticism, 1095–​1098 visitation, 1098–​1101, 1110–​111 Eckenstein, Lina, 374 Eckhart, Meister, 1057, 1070–​1 economy, see agriculture; property and land Edgar the Peaceful, King of England, 447, 508, 539–​40 Edith of Wilton, 743 Ediva, founder and abbess of Godstow, 855 education, see also preaching and sermons; universities historiography of, 935–​36 of lay adolescents, 1115–​116 through liturgy, 972–​73 in medicine, 876–​79, 1075 scholasticism and, 699, 725–​26, 1187–​188 schools in monasteries, 450–​6 Edward I, King of England, 917 Edward II, King of England, 917–​18 Edward Bruce, 917 Egypt archaeology in, 77–​80 diversity of early female monastic practice in, 98–​103 monastic economy in, 341–​42 monastic families in, 106–​9 preservation of familial bonds in, 99–​100, 103–​6 Eigil of Fulda, 477 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 824 Eleanor of Vermandois, 844 Elias the Cave Dweller, 403, 635

Elias the Younger, 635 Elijah, “heretic,” 128–​29 Elijah, prophet, 641, 686 Elisabeth of Hungary, 651, 893, 1018, 1059–​1060, 1067 Elisha, prophet, 686 Elkins, Sharon, 565–​66 Ellwangen (monastery), 1186–​187 Elm, Kaspar, 566, 656 Elst (monastery), 488 Ely (monastery), 1004 Empey, Adrian, 915 “Enanisho,” monk, The Paradise, 68 enclosure, see space Engelberga of Aquitaine, 580 Engelbert (Angilbert), 531 England, see also Ireland; ministers (mynstru) aristocratic expansion in, 849–​50 hermitism in, 691–​92 Old English terms for religious life, 503–​5 Old English texts, 513–​15 reform according to the RB in, 507–​13, 515–​17, 539–​40 entrance ad succurrendum, 588, 594 environment, see landscapes, monastic; space Ephesus, Council of (431), 134 Ephrem the Syrian, 43, 56 Epiphanius of Salamis, 130–​31, 134, 136, 150, 571 Epiphanius of San Vincenzo al Volturno, 527–​29, 528f27.3 episcopal authority, see ecclesiastical authority Epistola de litteris colendis (Charlemagne), 452, see also Charlemagne Erasmus, 1109 Ercanbert of Fulda, 456 eremitism, see hermitism and hermits Erhard, saint, 534 Erik Eiegod, Danish King, 497 Eriugena, John Scottus, 633 Ermoldus Nigellus, 442 Essen (monastery), 523–4, 811 estates satire, 1156, 1161, see also satire Estefanía Armengol, 862 Étaix, Raymond, 715 Ethelburga, founder and first abbess of Barking, 967 Eucharist, theology of, 702 Eucherius of Lyon, 103, 155, 568, 756 In Praise of the Desert, 167, 319 On the renunciation of the world, 153 Eudes (or Odo) Rigaud, Archbishop of Normandy, 1111 Eugenia of Rome, 63, 66 Eugenios (Awgen), 69 Eugippus, 60 Eusebius Gallicanus, Sermones, 58

1199

1200

Index Eusebius of Caesarea, 144 Ecclesiastical History, 42, 58, 151 Eustathius of Sebaste, 131, 574 Eustochium, saint, 216, 221, 562 Eusebius of Vercelli, 85, 767 Eutropius of Valencia, De districtione monachorum, 202 Evagrius of Antioch, 147 Evagrius Ponticus, 23, 45, 48, 55, 115, 137–​39 Eve of Liège, 1066 Everelmus, hermit, 690 Evesham (monastery), 497 Evrard of Clairvaux, 1079 exegesis, see preaching and sermons; theology exemptions, 334, 410, 608–​9, 610, 626–​29, 668–​69, 947–​48, 1101–​103 experiential theology, 705–​8 Fabri, Felix , Sionpilger, 808 family familial bonds, preservation of, 99–​100, 103–​6, 406–​7 memory, preservation of, 523–​25, 585 monastic, 106–​9, 302–3, 305–6 and monastic networks, 861–​62 prestige and legitimacy through monastic ties, 154–​55, 584–​86 Fantinus the Younger, 406, 635 Fantinus the Younger, Life of, 402 Farfa (monastery), 967 Faricius, Abbot of Abingdon, 998 fasting, 99, 191, 308 Fathers of the Church, theological tradition, 461, 699–​700 Faustus of Riez, 141 Feast of All Souls, 960 Fécamp (monastery), 516, 610 Feissel, Denis, 49 Felten, Franz J., 656, 817, 825 Felton, John, 1133 Fergusson, Peter, 679 Ferreolus of Uzès, Regula, 176, 179, 191, 265 Fieschi, Ottobuono, 948, 1100 Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), 1185 Finglas (monastery), 311, 312 Finnian, saint, 307–​8 Finnian of Cluain Iraird, 307–​8 fisheries, 839–​40 Fitzralph, Richard, Archbishop of Armagh, 1087, 1133 FitzRoger, William, 912 Fleury (monastery), 318, 544, 588, 589, 590, 611, 637 customs and customaries, 332, 543, 553 Fonseca, Cosimo Damiano, 775 Fontenelle (monastery), 325, 475, 549

Fonte Avellana (monastery), 1029 Fontevraud (monastery), 570, 572, 614, 741–​42, 824, 935, 1016, 1041, 1043 Foot, Sarah, 228, 503–​4 forest rights, 844–​45 forgeries and forgers, 627–​29 Foucault, Michel, 33 Fountains (monastery), 497, 841 Fournier, Jacques, 1087, see also Benedict XII, Pope; benedict 12 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 658, 766, 790, 801, 866, 1010, 1077, 1096, 1117, 1127, 1173 Fox, Richard, Bishop of Winchester, 1083 Franca, recluse and then hermit, 694 France archaeology in, 87–​88, 90–​91, 241–​53, 322 “Benedictinization” of liturgy in, 421–​24 psalmody in, 122–​23 Romanization of liturgy in, 417–​21 Francesco da Castiglione, 954 Francis of Assisi, 761, 1023 Franciscans and Franciscan order, 3 austerity of, 1023–​1024 care for the sick, 867–​68, 870 in Ireland, 916–​18 rules, 800 women, inclusion of, 1051–​1055, 1066, 1069–​1071 Franco of Francavilla, 636 Frange, monk in the Thebaid, 105–​6 Franklin, Carmela, 395 Frederick I Barbarossa, 860 Fritzlar (monastery), 490 Frotharius of Toul, 323, 432 Fructuosus of Braga, 179, 196 Regula, 197, 200, 203–​4 Fruttuaria (monastery), 610 Fulbourn, Stephen de, 912 Fulda (monastery) Annales necrologici, 287 buildings and structures at, 323, 325, 328–​30, 476–​78, 530–​31, 533 economy at, 478 foundation of, 476–​78, 488 spiritual influence of, 489, 494–​95 Fulgentius Ruspensis, 58 Fulk of Neuilly, 1046 funerary rites, 756–​58 Galenic medicine, 865–​66 Gangolf, Lives of, 593, 594 Gaussin, Pierre-​Roger,  775 Gaytrick, John, 1136 Gaul, see France Gaza, archaeology in, 82–​83 Geary, Patrick, 385

1200

1201

Index Gelasius I, Pope, 224, 1014 Gelasius II, Pope, 772 Gelasius of Derry, 904 Gellone (monastery), 597 Gelnhausen (monastery), 1016 gender in early Irish monasticism, 311–14 and intercessory prayer, 287–92 and liturgy, 729–46, 803–15 and monastic labor, 258–​77 third gender concept, 34, 268–​9 General Chapter (Carthusian), 944 General Chapter (Cistercian) administrative function, 658, 786, 798, 941, 942 reform efforts, 1177–​179 representation in, 823 statutes, 944, 953, 981, 1034, 1044 General Chapter (Dominican), 798, 1048–​1049 General Chapter (English Benedictine), 948, 1077, 1126 General Chapter (Franciscan), 1023, 1053 General Chapter (Premonstratensian), 1043 General Instruction (Admonitio Generalis, 789), 452–​53, 458, 459, 461, 716 Genevieve of Paris, Life of, 61 Geoffrey of Auxerre, 721 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 672 Gerald of Aurillac, 584, 594 Gerald (or Gerard) of Frachet, 1024 Gerard of Brogne, 769 Gerard of Nazareth, 692 Gerhoch of Reichersberg, 572, 780 Gerlach of Houthem, 690–​91 Germany advocates in, 859–​61 aristocratic expansion in, 850–​51 hermitism in, 687–​88 Investiture Controversy in, 858–​59 Gernrode (monastery), 523 Gero, Count, 523 Gerson, Jean, 1188 Gertrud of Altenberg, 814, 1018 Gertrud of Babenberg, Duchess of Bohemia, 889 Gertrude of Helfta, 966 Spiritual Exercises, 971–​72 Gertrude of Nivelles, 271 Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg, 1066, 1068, 1069–​1071 Géza II, King of Hungary, 889 Gibbon, Edward, 28 gifts, see donations and patronage Gilbert of Hoyland, 721 Gilbert of Poitiers, 706

Gilbert of Sempringham, 569, 743, 773, 825, 1041–​1042, 1048 Book of St. Gilbert, 741 Gilbertines, 773, 825, 935, 1030, 1041–​1042 Gilchrist, Roberta, 819 Giles of Rome, 1102 Gimsøy (monastery), 497 Girart of Vienne, 585 Gisela, Abbess of Chelles, 271 Gisela von Kerssenbrock, 964 Giustiniani, Tommaso, 1185 Glastonbury (monastery), 908 Glossa ordinaria, 706 glosses, 456–​57, 706 Gloucester College, 1080 gluttony, 1158–​160, 1162 Godden, Malcolm, 515 Godehard of Hildesheim, 637 Godfrey of Cappenberg, 853 Godric of Finchale, 735 Godstow (monastery), 855 Goffman, Erwing, 33 Gold, Penny Schein, 565 Golding, Brian, 1100 Goliardic tradition, 1157–​158, 1159 Gorze (monastery), 446–​47, 589, 602–​3, 612 Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, 681, 741, 743 Göss (monastery), 745, 813 Gottesfreunde (Friends of God), 1060, 1069 Gottfried of Disibodenberg, 739 Göttingen (monastery), 978, 983 Goullet, Monique, 59 Grace Dieu (monastery), 907 Graiver, Inbar, 34 grammar, 460–​61 Granard (monastery), 918 Le Grand-​Beaulieu at Chartres (monastery), 874, 875 Grande Chartreuse (monastery), 614, 788, 789 Grandmontines, 642, 800 grange agricultural system, 835–​36 Gratian, 1075 Decretum, 619, 620, 621, 625, 629, 710, 771, 981 Great Laura of Sabas (monastery), 81, 117, 139 Great Lavra of Athos (monastery), 347–​49, 351–​53, 358 Greek/​Byzantine monasteries, in the East, see also Eastern influences on the West alms and labor as income, 341–​44 early legislation on monastic property, 344–​45 hagiographies, 24–5, 63–​68 post-​1204 developments,  356–​60 prosperous foundations, 345–​53 struggling foundations, 353–​54 use of land, 354–​56

1201

1202

Index Greek/​Byzantine monasticism, in East-​Central Europe, 499, 884, 896–​97 Greenblatt, Stephen, 937 Gregory the Great, Pope, 58, 218–​19, 504–​8, 627 on pedagogy, 1001 in Rule of Aachen, 768 sermons of, 713, 714–​16 theology of, 699–​700, 701, 707 Dialogues, 61, 174, 184, 283–4, 287–​88, 317–​18, 400, 685, 714, 731 Forty Homilies, 715 Homilies on Ezekiel, 715–​16 Moralia on Job, 705, 715 Regula pastoralis, 506, 715 Gregory VII, Pope, 591, 859, 897, 902 Gregory IX, Pope, 913, 1023, 1047, 1048, 1052–​1053, 1173, 1179, see also Hugo of  Ostia Quo elongati, 1052–​1053 Gregory the Armenian, 65, 638 Gregory of Cassano, 636 Gregory of Nazianzus, 748 Gregory of Nyssa, 567, 571 De virginitate, 269 Life of Macrina, 574 Gregory Pakourianos, 350, 355 Gregory of Rimini, 1087 Gregory of Tours, 58, 61, 88, 180, 219, 750 Historiae, 180 Liber in gloria martyrum, 292–​93 Liber vitae patrum, 180 Gremmelsbach, Peter, 1176 Grey Abbey, 909 Grimaldus of Reichenau, 444 Grimlaicus, author of rule for recluses, 751, 753, 759 Grimoard, Guillaume, 1087, see also Urban V, Pope Grottaferrata (monastery), 631 Grundmann, Herbert, 6, 662, 775, 1039 Grunebaum, Gustave von, 632 Guda of Bonnenberg, 568–​69 Guerric of Igny, 721 guests and guest houses, 263–​64, 266, 332, 555–​56 Guibert of Gembloux, 739–​40, 741 Guibert of Nogent, 641 Guibert of Tournai, 1060 Guido of Arezzo, 680 Guigo I, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, 671, 711, 789, 801 Guigo II, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, Ladder of Monks, 675 Guisborough (monastery), 906 Gunner, Abbot of Øm then Bishop of Viborg, 1078 Günther, hermit, 687–​88 Gutenberg, Johann, 994 Gutenberg Bible, 994

Guy de l’Aumone, 1087 Guy of Vaux-​de-​Cernay,  725 Guyotjeannin, Olivier, 50 hagiographies Italo-​Greek, in southern Italy and Sicily, 401–​2 manual labor models in, 262, 264, 265–​66, 642 overview of Greek, 63–​68 overview of Latin, 59–​63, 390–​94 overview of Syriac, 66–​70 Western translations of Eastern, 24–5, 147–​51, 632–​33 Haider, Ursula, 1131, 1132 Haimo of Auxerre, 455, 456, 458, 461–​62 Hákon, Norwegian ruler, 496 Hall, Derek, 819 Hallinger, Kassius, 602–​4, 657 Hamage (monastery), 249–​50, 252, 322 Hamilton, Bernard, 374 Hamilton, Sarah, 623 Harold Bluetooth, Danish King, 496 Harrison, Anna, 972 Hartmut, Abbot of St. Gall, 983 Haskins, Charles H., 659, 664 Haverholme (monastery), 1042 Heale, Martin, 1111 health, see medical care Hedwig, Duchess of Silesia, 893 Heiligenkreuz (monastery), 857, 889 Heilke of Staufenberg, 1068, 1069–​1071 Heimerad, hermit, 687 Heinzelmann, Martin, 60 Heiric of Auxerre, 458, 460, 461–​62, 593 Hélinand of Froidmont, 722, 723, 724, 725–​26 Helisachar of Saint-​Riquier/​Saint-​Aubin,  421 Heloise, Abbess of the Paraclete, 659, 675, 682, 740 Henning, Joachim, 466 Henry IV, Emperor, 859 Henry II, Emperor, 611–​12 Henry II, King of England, 724, 824, 907, 911 Henry III, King of England, 911 Henry V, King of England, 1083 Henry VI, King of England, 1083 Henry I the Bearded, 852 Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1083 Henry of Wolfratshausen, 860 Henryków (monastery), 852 Herce (monastery), 832 heresy among monastic pioneers, 130–​34 discourse of, 129 Messalians, 134–​35 Origenist controversy, 128, 135–​40, 150 Pelagianism, 140–​41 Herluca of Epfach, 736

1202

1203

Index Hermann of Reichenau, 680 Hermann Sack, 984–​85 Hermann von Lobdeburg, 1107 Hermières (house of regular canons), 845 hermitism and hermits, see also reclusion and recluses in cave dwellings, 407–​8 in Central Europe, 687–​88 defined, 684, 748 dichotomy of coenobitism and, 23–​24, 129 in England, 691–​92 evidence in historical sources, 55, 57 fluidity of, 635–6, 749–​50 in France, 688–​91 gender of, 762 in Holy Land, 692 in Italo-​Greek hagiography, 401, 635–6, 640–1 in Italy, 685–​87 lay, 690–​91, 694 reformers’ promotion of, 613–​14 models for, 686 revival characteristics, 684–​85, 692–​95 Western contact with Eastern, 635–​41 Herrad of Landsberg, 659, 681 Hortus Deliciarum, 684, 752 Hetti of Trier, 323 Hieracas of Leontopolis, 130–​31 Hieronymites, 1182 Higden, Ranulf, Ars componendi sermones, 1133 Hilarion of Gaza, 82 Hilary of Arles, 171 Life of Honoratus, 60 Hildebold of Soissons, 461 Hildegard of Bingen, 8, 556 conflict over pastoral care, 738–​39 debate on luxury, 1019–​1020 liturgical compositions, 679, 965–​66 medical knowledge, 878–​79 at men’s monastery, 736 theology and preaching of, 659–​60, 681, 704–​5, 711, 721, 723 Book of Divine Works, 705 Causes and Cures, 879 Ordo Virtutum, 965–​66 Physica, 878 Scivias, 965 Hildemar of Corbie (or Civate), 187–​88, 324, 332, 388, 422, 429, 444, 454, 732 Hilduin of Saint-​Denis, 422 Hilpisch, Stephan, 564–​65 Hincmar of Reims, 471 On the Governance of the Palace, 470 Hirbodian, Sigrid, 1067 Hirsau monastery and reform, 570, 611, 614, 824, 851, 859, 960, 1029, 1030, 1033, 1188 Constitutiones Hirsaugenses, 1029

Hispania historical sources in, 196–​97 origins of monasticism in, 197–​99 socioeconomic contexts of contractual texts in, 206–​9 socioeconomic contexts of rules in, 199–​206 Historia monachorum in Aegypto, 25, 43, 60, 101 Holmcultram (monastery), 909 Holstenius, Lucas, 162 Holy Cross of Mortara (house of regular canons), 773 Holy Cross of Wechselburg (monastery), 1016 Holy Land hermitism in, 692 pilgrimage to, 55, 342, 562 regular canons in, 773 sorores penitentes in, 1047 Holy Trinity of Cava (monastery), 410 Holy Trinity of Poitiers (monastery), 581 Holy Trinity of the Scots (monastery), 903 homilies and homiliaries, 712, see also preaching and sermons Honoratus of Arles and Lérins, 60, 103, 153, 167, 171, 954 Honorius III, Pope, 1048, 1062, 1065 Honorius Augustodunensis, 703, 707 Hoskins, William George, 816 hospices, 555–​56 Hospitallers, 843, 911–​12 hospitals, 871–​76 Hostiensis (Henry of Seuse), 1062 house ascetics and asceticism canon law on, 217–​18, 220–​23 distinctions in consecration ceremonies, 223–​26 distinctions in diplomatic sources, 226–​28 ecclesiological distinctions of female asceticism and, 214–​15, 220 interaction with male monasteries, 228–​29 as phenomenon, 99, 215–​20 as term, 213–​14 Hrabanus Maurus, 456, 536–​38, 537f. 27.5, 716–​17 De computo, 460 On the Training of Clergy, 456, 462 Hradiště (monastery), 886 Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, 394, 460, 462, 594, 659, 694, 759 Hroznata the Bold, 888 Hugh of Amiens, Archbishop of Rouen, 777 Hugh of Châtillon, 845 Hugh of Cluny, 637 Hugh of Fouilloy, De claustro animae, 330–​31 Hugh of Fosses, 788 Hugh de Lacy II, 909, 915 Hugh of Saint-​Cher, 1066, 1086 Hugh of Saint-​Victor, 318, 676, 772, 1001

1203

1204

Index Hugh V of Semur, Abbot of Cluny, 228, 589, 597, 637, 718, 789 Hughes, Kathleen, 314 Hugo of Ostia, 1051–​1052, see also Gregory IX, Pope; gregory 9 Hugo of Tholey, 739 Humbert of Romans, 799, 975, 1023, 1049 De eruditione predicatorum, 1049–​1050 Humiliati, 1042 Hundred Years War, 912, 1036 Hungary, see also East-​Central  Europe missions in, 498–​99 Hus, Jan, 1086, 1134 Idung of Prüfening, Dialogus duorum monachorum, 777, 1158 Ildefonso of Toledo, De viris illustribus, 196 Île-​Barbe (monastery),  245–​46 infirmaries, 869–​71, 985–​86 Inishloughnacht (monastery), 905, 914 Innocent I, Pope, 220 Innocent II, Pope, 904 Innocent III, Pope, 725, 1036, 1044, 1048 Innocent IV, Pope, 1049, 1053, 1173 Institutio canonicorum (Synod of Aachen), 422, 438, 439–​40, 508, 512 Institutio sanctimonialium (Synod of Aachen), 263, 264, 438, 440–​41, 508 institutions, see orders intercessory prayer, 733–​34, 809–​10, 891–​92 absence in RB, 185 burial locations and, 292–​94 essential role in monastic communities, 35–​36 in female communities, 288–​92, 523 and imagined community of prayer, 278–​79 liturgy for, 281–​84, 285–​86, 587–​88 necrologies and martyrologies for, 286–​87 prayer associations and, 284–​85 preservation of memory through, 523–​25, 585, 586 scholarship on, 279–​81 theological debates on, 287–​88 Investiture Controversy, 858–​59 Ireland Anglo-Norman invasion, 907–​8 Anglo-Norman mendicants in, 916–​18 Anglo-Norman monastic foundations in, 908–​16 archaeology of religious settlements in, 91–​92 boundaries of religious settlements in, 304–​7 distinctions of monastic life in, 307–​10 psalmody in, 121–​22 reform in, 310–​14 terms for monastic life in, 299–​304 twelfth-​century transformations,  902–​7 Irene, Byzantine Empress, 345

Irene Doukaina, Byzantine Empress, 351 Irimbert of Admont, 575–​76, 721–​22 Isaac, missionary monk in Poland, 885 Isaac of Stella, 721, 723–​24 Isaiah, hermit, Asketikon, 55 Isarn of Saint-​Victor, 597 Isidore of Seville, 122, 179, 204, 713, 768 De viris illustribus, 196 Regula, 196, 200, 201–​3, 323 Išo’denaḥ of Baṣra, 69 Ita of Nellenburg, 568 Italy, see also southern Italy and Sicily archaeology in, 85–​87, 89–​90, 235–​41 aristocratic expansion in, 850 hermitism in, 639–40, 685–​87 psalmody in, 123–​26 Iviron (monastery), 348–​49, 352, 355–​56 Ivo, bishop from Persia, 638 Ivo of Chartres, 620, 625, 626 Jacques de Thérines, 1093, 1094, 1102 Jacques de Vitry, 1046, 1062–​1063 History of the Western World, 766, 1042–​1044 Life of Mary of Oignies, 1061, 1069 Jakobsen, Johnny G., 829 Jaksa, husband of Agafia and lay magnate, 887–​88 Jansen, Joseph E., 6 Jarich of Mariengaarde, 1135 Jean III de Bourbon, 1179 Jean de Damas-​Cozan, 1179 Jean de Heynsberg, Bishop of Liège, 1064 Jean de Marville, 1017 Jean de Vincelles, Abbot of Saint-​Claude, 1179 Jędzejów (monastery), 889, 895 Jerome, saint, 699, 701, 710, 768 criticism of corrupt monks, 30, 133 hagiographies by, 24, 60, 148–​50 on heresy, 141 on hierarchical Church, 214 letters of, 58, 133, 215–17 monasteries of, 562 on monastic office, 621 on monastic origins, 42 in Origenist controversy, 136, 150 on self-​discipline,  151 translation of Pachomian rules, 168–​69 travels and literacy of, 45 Life of Hilarion, 149–​50 Life of Malchus, 149 Life of Paul, 148–​49 Jerome of Mondsee, 975 Jerpoint (monastery), 905, 913, 914 Jerusalem, see Holy Land Jindřich Zdík, Bishop of Olomouc, 888 Joachim of Fiore, 676, 704

1204

1205

Index Joanna of Flanders, 1063 Jocelyn of Beaubec, 914 Johann Dederoth, 1175 Johann Merswin, 1150 Johannes Affligemensis, 680 Johannes Hagen, 1175, 1185 Johannes Rode, 1182 Johannes Sack, 984–​85 John XIX, Pope, 608 John XXII, Pope, 917, 1103 John XXIII, Pope, 3 John II Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor, 351 John V Palaiologos, Byzantine Emperor, 359 John I, King of England, 724 John III Vatazes, Emperor of Nicaea, 357 John, missionary monk in Poland, 885 John, husband of Mary of Oignies, 1063 John the Baptist, 641, 686 John of Biclaro, 199 John Chrysostom, 62, 65, 136, 571 Against the opponents of the monastic life, 154–​55 De virginitate, 269 John Climacus, 23, 55–​56 John, Archbishop of Corinth, 637 John de Courcy, 909 John the Evangelist, 741–​43, 965 John of Ephesus, 68 John of Fécamp, 643, 705–​6 John of Ford, 721, 724, 1078 John of Gaza, 57 John of Gorze, 331, 425, 751 John Gualberti, 613 John of Jerusalem, 150 John le Romeyn, Archbishop of York, 1099 John of Matera, 411 John of Montecassino, 639 John Philagathos, 636 John of Salisbury, 621–2 John Scottus (Eriugena), 633 John de Stukle, 1087 Johnson, Penelope, 1100 Jolenta, sister of Kunegunda and wife of Duke Bolesław the Pious, 894 Jonas of Bobbio, 32, 182, 333 Life of Columbanus, 181–4, 61, 181, 183, 238, 288 Jones, Claire Taylor, 970 Jordan of Saxony, 1048 Joris, Bishop of Sinai, 638 Joshua of San Vincenzo al Volturno, 526–​27 Juana de la Cruz, The Book of Comfort, 1131 Judaism, prayer cycles, 118 Judean Desert archaeology in, 81–​82 monastic economy in, 342–​43 Julian of Eclanum, 45, 701 Julian of Norwich, 763

Julian Saba the Elder, 67 Juliana of Cornillon, 1066 Julianus Pomerius, De vita contemplativa, 167 Julien of Vézelay, 719 Julius II, Pope, 1179 Jumièges (monastery), 319 Jura Fathers, 25, 246–​47 Life of the Jura Fathers, 45, 60, 103, 166, 168, 172 Justinian I, Emperor, 52, 344–​45 Jutta of Alfter, 979 Jutta of Sponheim, 8, 704, 736 Karsbach (monastery), 493 Kazimierz the Restorer, Duke of Poland, 885 Kellia (monastery), 77–​78 Kells (monastery), 916 Kells/​Mellifont, Synod of (1152), 902, 907 Kessler, Herbert, 1000 Khirbet ed-​Deir (monastery), 82 Khirbet es-​Suyyagh (monastery), 82 Kildare (monastery), 303, 309 Kirkstall (monastery), 1084, 1116 Kirkstead (monastery), 497 kitchens and cooking, 553–​55 Klaudruby (monastery), 887 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 882 Klosterneuburg (monastery), 857 Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, 893 Knowles, David, 654, 1036, 1112, 1171 Komburg (monastery), 1186–​187 Königslutter (monastery), 981 Konrad Ohnesorg, jurist, 985 Konrad of Rennenberg, 979 Kremerin, Magdalena, 1144–5 Kruckenberg, Lori, 964 Kunegunda (or Kinga), patroness of Poland and Lithuania, 894 Kunigunde Niklasin, 982 Kunigunde of Bavaria, 985 Ladder of the Divine Ascent, 55–​56 Ladner, Gerhart, 652, 659 laity, see family; lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae); nobility, lay Lambert of Ardres, History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, 860 Lamprecht, Karl, 1141 Lamspringe (monastery), 825 land, see property and land Landesgeschichte (regional history) applied to medieval Strasbourg, 1147 applied to St. John the Baptist monastery, 1144–​147 criticism of, 1140 as discipline, 819–​20, 1141–​144 value of, 1151–​152

1205

1206

Index Landévennec (monastery), 250 landscapes, see space landscapes, monastic as concept, 816–​17 evolution of networks in, 821–​22 gender and, 822–​25 maps, charts, and diagrams, 827–​29 methodologies in study of, 819–​21 source-​based data,  825–​27 sources for study of, 817–​19 Lanfranc of Canterbury, 702, 902 Decreta (Statuta), 544, 672 Langland, William, 1109 Lauconne (monastery), 246 Laudabiliter (Adrian IV), 907 laura, as term, 68, 642 Laura of Sabas (monastery), 81, 117, 139 Laurence O’Toole (Lorcán Ua Tuathail), Archbishop of Dublin, 906, 911 Lavra of Athos (monastery), 347–​49, 351–​53, 358 law, see canon law Law of Adomnán (Cáin Adomnáin), 303 Lawerne, John, 1086 Lawrence, Clifford Hugh, 6, 775 lay brothers and sisters (conversi/​ae), 15, 551, 557–​58, 569, 573, 613, 614, 1116–18 historiography of, 932, 1027–​1028 rise and regulation of, 1028–​1030 social status of, 1033–​1034 space for, 1032–​1033 terminology, 1027 transformation of status, 1034–​1037 work of, 834, 872–​74, 910, 1030–​1032 Leander of Seville, 179, 196 Leclercq, Henri, 214 Leclercq, Jean, 463–​64, 652, 663, 664, 685, 698–​99, 723, 744, 776 lectionaries, 712, see also preaching and sermons Lehmann, Edgar, 987 Łekno (monastery), 889 Lembos (monastery), 357 Leo I, Pope, 713 Leo IX, Pope, 628 Leoba, 271, 272, 493 Leo-​Luke, Life of, 402 Leonhard Paetraer, 1181 Leonien, recluse in Autun, 760 Leontius of Byzantium, 139 Leontius of Fréjus, 171 Leopold III of Babenberg, Margrave of Austria, 889 lepers, leper houses, and leprosaria, 692, 757, 871–​76 Lérida, Council of (546), 198 Lérins (monastery), 19–21, 23, 25, 36–7, 103, 152–​53, 155, 167, 171–​72, 175, 243, 322, 954 Lester, Anne E., 868, 1034

Leyser, Conrad, 153 Libanius, 29 Liber Glossarum, 457 Libellum ad Leonem X, 1185 Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in Aecclesia, 780 Liber Fundationis Claustri Sanctae Martiae Virginis, 898–​99 liberties, monastic, 182, 186, 334, 410, 608–​9, 610, 626–​29, 668–​69, 947–​48, 1101–​103 libraries, see also book production catalogues, 988–​93 chapter house books, 979–​81 cloister books, 981–​82 design and layout, 986–​88 dormitory books, 983–​85 historical writing, 897–​99 historiography of, 936–​38 infirmary books, 985–​86 liturgical books, 812–​13, 976–​79 manuscripts as historical sources, 394–​95 medical books, 877–​79, 985–​86 reading programs facilitated by, 451 reconstruction of, 995–​96 record keeping and notarial services, 895–​96 refectory books, 982–​83 survival of contents, 382–​83 university books, 1089 Libri Ordinarii, 811, 812, 977 Lietbert of Saint-​Ruf, 777–​78 Lieu-​Notre-​Dame-​de-​Romorantin (monastery), 844 Lifshitz, Felice, 34 Ligugé (monastery), 90, 242 Lindisfarne Gospels, 534–​35 Lippoldsberg (monastery), 146, 575, 824, 825 Lismullin (monastery), 907 literacy, 942–​47, 969–​71 literature, see satire Little Malvern (monastery), 908 liturgy, see also intercessory prayer; psalmody altars, 1006–​1012, 1008f. 54.1 “Benedictinization” of Frankish, 421–​24 books for, 812–​13, 976–​79 Carolingian influence on tenth-​and eleventh-​century reform of, 424–​28 chants, new compositions, 961–​64 choirs, 1012–​1016 clamor ritual, 590–​91 consecration ceremonies for female ascetics, 223–​26 devotion and, 971–​72 education and, 458–​59 of enclosure, 755–​58 as historical source, 679–​81 historiography of, 933–​34 identity and, 809–​11, 966–​69

1206

1207

Index intercessory prayer in, 281–​84, 285–​86, 587–​88, 733–​34, 809–​10, 891–​92 Latin syntheses of Eastern, 121–​26 limitations in study of, 428–​30 literacy and education through, 969–​71, 972–​73 materiality of, 744–​45, 813–​14 Romanization of Frankish, 417–​21 space and, 333–​34, 806–​9 theological expression in, 964–​66 uniformity of, 959–​61 women’s engagement in, 288–​91, 730–​31, 744–​45, 811–​12 Liudger, missionary priest, 489, 491 Liutius of Montecassino, 642 Longpré (monastery), 844 Loppa of Spiegel, 979 Lorenzetti, Pietro, 722 Lorsch (monastery), 326, 460, 479, 990, 996 Louis the Pious, Emperor, 394, 422, 432, 438, 497–8, 768 Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, 1059 Louis IX, King of France, 840, 844, 872, 1004, 1102 Lubiń (monastery), 885, 886 Ludwig I of Thuringia, 862 Ludwig of Arnstein, 568–​69, 855 Luke of Messina, 413 Lupus of Ferrières, 455–​56, 461–​62, 473 Lupus of Toul, Bishop of Troyes, 153 Lutgard of Aywières, 1045 Luther, Martin, 1134, 1168–​169 Lutter, Christina, 660 Luxeuil (monastery), 36, 90–​91, 181–2, 250–​51 luxury, criticism of, 1018–​1024 Lyon, Second Council of (1274), 1096 le Lys (monastery), 844, 845 Mabillon, Jean, 463–​64, 652, 715 Macarius, Archbishop of Antioch in Armenia, 638 Macarius of Egypt, 43 Macrina the Younger, 65, 131, 567, 574 Máeldithruib (Céile Dé), 312 Máelruain (Céile Dé), 311–​12 Máelruain of Finglas, 311–12 Magdeburg cathedral, 1011 Magister Golias de quodam abbate, 1159 Magna Carta Dunstani, 628–​29 Makowski, Elizabeth, 925 Malachy (Máel Máedoc Ua Morgair), 904, 906 Manasses II, Bishop of Orleans, 838 Manglieu (monastery), 249 Manichaeism, 131–​32 Mann, Jill, 1155, 1156 manual labor economic necessity of, 471–​72 of monks, 265–​66, 641–2

non-​gendered,  268–​72 of nuns, 262–​64 principles and divisions of, 260–​62 servants for, 388, 472, 553–​55 social norms reflected in monastic, 267–​68 sources on, 259–​60 Manuel II Palaiologos, Byzantine Emperor, 359 manuscript production, see book production; libraries Map, Walter, 1163 maps, 827–​29 Marazzi, Federico, 325 Marbach (house of regular canons), 772 Marbode, Bishop of Rennes, 689 Marcella, saint, 148, 215–​16 Marcellina, saint, 217 Margaret/​Marina of Antioch, Passion of, 62 Margaret of France, wife of Béla III, 889 Margaret the Lame, 758 Marguerite of Flanders, 1063 Maria Alvarez, 832 Maria Evangelista, 1131 Marinus, hermit, 686 Markus, Robert, 321 Markyate (monastery), 1120 Marmoutier (monastery), 90, 93, 242–​43, 335–​38, 445 marriage, deprecation of, 131 Marseilles (monastery), 244 Marshal, Richard, 911 Martha, as model, 1031, 1057–​1059, 1060, 1061, 1064, 1069, 1070–​1071 Martial, saint, 961 Martianus Capella, 1012 Martin V, Pope, 1179 Martin III (Camaldolese prior), Libri tres de moribus, 943 Martin of Braga, 198 Martin of Tours, 60, 90, 151–​52, 242–​43, 750 Martin de Vargas, 1178 martyrologies, 286–​87 Mary, Virgin, 701, 707, 741–​42, 895 Mary, sister of Pachomius, 53, 569 Mary the Egyptian, 762 Mary Magdalene, as model, 700, 701, 1031, 1057–​1059 Mary of Oignies, 1061 mass, see also liturgy female participation in, 288–​91 intercessory prayer in, 283–​84, 285–​86 ordination of monks for, 731–​32 and pastoral care for women, 737–​43 in rules, 729–​30, 737–​38 women excluded from ordination, 732–​36 Mathilda-​Otto Cross, 523, 524f. 27.2 Matilda of Tuscany, 741

1207

1208

Index Mathona, sister of Bishop Benignus, 300–​1 Matrona of Perge, 66 Matthew (Mateusz), Bishop of Kraków, 892 Matthew, missionary monk in Poland, 885 Matthew Paris, 1076, 1078, 1100 Matthew the Templar, 911 Matthew of Vendôme, Abbot of Saint-​Denis,  1102 Maubuisson (monastery), 833, 837 Maulbronn (monastery), 1016, 1033 Maundy (mandatum), 549–​50 Maurice (Maurus), Bishop of Pécs, 884 Maurists, 663 Mauss, Marcel, 280 Maximus of Turin, 713 Mayr-​Harting, Henry,  693 McNamara, Jo-​Ann, 34, 258 meadows, 839–​40 Meaux (monastery), 1120 Mechthild of Helfta, 966 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 1045, 1060 Mechtild of Hackborn, 1045 Mechtild von der Pfalz, 1146 medical care for community members, 869–​71 hospitaller orders, 909 knowledge and learning, 876–​79, 985–​86, 1075 for lay society, 871–​76 lepers and leprosaria, 692, 757, 871–​76 provisions for, 865–​68 rules on, 263–​64, 266 Medici family, 1178 Melania the Elder, 45, 136, 562 Melania the Younger, 45, 65, 217, 568 Melk monastery, congregation, and reform, 960, 975, 982, 994, 1083, 1091, 1128, 1175, 1177, 1188 Mellifont (monastery), 904, 905, 913–​15 Melville, Gert, 389, 658, 776, 817 Memleben (monastery), 884 memorial practice, and intercessory prayer, 733–​ 34, 809–​10, 891–​92 mendicants, see also Dominicans (male and female); Franciscans Meridan Fathers, Lives of, 202 Merswin, Johann, 1150 Merswin, Rulman, 1060, 1150 Merton, Thomas, 699 Messalians, 134–​35 Methodius, apostle to the Slavs, 884 Meyer, Johannes, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, 805 Michael Attaliate, 349–​50 Michel Psellos, 354 Michelsberg (monastery), 1177, 1188 Migne, J.P., 163 military orders, 800, 843, 911–​12, 1042 mills, 838–​41

Milo II, Count of Bar-​sur-​Seine, 856 minsters (mynstru) reform according to the RB, 507–​13, 515–​17 subsidence of, 505–​7 as term, 504–​5 Miroslav, lay magnate of the House of Wartenberg, 888 missions community networks in, 491–​95 in East-​Central Europe, 883–​85 in Hungary, 498–​99 manuscripts for, 490–​91 overview of Willibrord and Boniface’s, 487–​88 recruitment for, 488–​90 in Scandinavia, 495–​98 Mlada-​Maria, Bohemian princess, 886 Mogilno (monastery), 885 Mois, Jakob, 774 Molitor, Hainrich, 994 monachization, 769–​70 Monasterboice (monastery), 529 Monastery of Jeremias, 80 “monastic cities” concept, 478–​80 monastic landscapes, see landscapes, monastic monasticism(s), as term, 7–​8, 27, 44, 164–​65 Mondsee Abbey, 980 Monegund, recluse in Tours, 750 Monheim (monastery), 744 monk (monachos), as term, 43, 144–​45, 164 Montalembert, Charles Forbes René de, 649–​52 Montecassino (monastery), 89–​90, 400–​1, 403, 409, 421, 631, 877, see also Cassinese congregation Montmajour (monastery), 227–8, 589, 842 Moschos, John, Spiritual Meadow, 65 Moses, patriarch, 686 Môtiers (monastery), 248 Mt. Mula (monastery), 403 Muchelney (monastery), 878 Muiredach mac Domhnall, 529 Mulder-​Bakker, Anneke,  1069 Münster (monastery), 491 Münsterschwarzach (monastery), 978 Murbach (monastery), 461 Muri (monastery), 851 Muschiol, Gisela, 59, 258, 731, 734 music, see also liturgy chanting, 426–​28, 459, see also liturgy; psalmody Myler de Bermingham, 916 mysticism, 763, 810–​11, 971–​72 Naqlun (monastery), 79 Naucratius, 567 necrologies, 286–​87

1208

1209

Index Neresheim (monastery), 1188 networks as analytical framework, 820–​21 evolution of monastic, 821–​22 gender and, 822–​25 Neumann, Eva Gertrud, 1068 Newman, Martha, 1028 Ní Dhonnchadha, Mairín, 304 Nicholas of Sion, 65 Nicholas IV, Pope, 1066, 1179 Nicholas of Clairvaux (Nicholas of Montièramey), 944, 1031 Nicholas of Cusa, 1174, 1177 Nicholas Cusack, Bishop of Kildare, 917 Nicholas Maniacoria, 699 Nichols, John A., 375 Nider, Johann, 1068 De reformatione religiosorum, 1184 Nidibrius of Narbonne, 421 Nightingale, John, 386 Nikephoros I, Byzantine Emperor, 346 Nikephoros II Phokas, Byzantine Emperor, 346–​47, 348, 353–​54, 360 Niklasin, Kunigunde, 982 Nilus of Rossano, 631, 635, 640 Nitria (monastic settlement in Egypt), 104, 136 Nivelles (monastery), 977 nobility, lay authority over monasteries, 857–​62 circulation of land with monasteries, 586–​88 legitimacy through monastic ties, 584–​86 lordship expansion and intensification, 849–​53 monastic foundation motivations, 853–​57 monastic theories on relationship with, 592–​97 ownership of monasteries, 580–​81, 585 recruitment into monasteries, 581–​82 reform impact on monastic ties, 583–​84, 591–​92 and seigneurial power of monasteries, 588–​92 Nonnberg (monastery), 985 Nonnenwerth (monastery), 824 Norbert of Xanten, 5–6, 675, 774, 787–8, 853, 1041, 1043 Norbertines, see Premonstratensians Notitia de servitio monasteriorum (819), 436, 473 Notker Balbulus, The Stammerer (or of St. Gall), 459, 962, 963–​64 Novalesa (monastery), 240 O’Brien (Ua Briain) family, 907 O’Connor (Ua Conchobair) family, 907 Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, 306 Obazine (monastery), 837, 844

oblation and oblates, 107, 489, 502, 550–​53, 582, 705, 885, 972–​73, 1027, 1095 Observant movement, see reform, Observant Odile of Alsace, Abbess of Hohenbourg, 744 Odilo of Cluny, 587, 717, 718, 960, 1157 Odo of Cluny, 424, 552, 594, 595, 605, 717–​18 Life of Gerald of Aurillac, 594 Odorannus of Sens, 680 Oexle, Otto Gerhard, 294 Of the True Apostolic Life, 777 Ohrdurf (monastery), 490 oikonomia (household administration), 470–​72 Olbert of Gembloux, 620 Oliver, Judith, 964 Olympia the Deaconess, 65, 99, 136 Orange, Council of (529), 140 Order of Dobrzyń, 892 Order of St. John, 1042 Order of Mary Magdalene, 1047, 1048 Order of the Poor Ladies of Spoleto Valley (Tuscany), 1052 Order of Saint Clare, 1052 Order of San Damiano, 1053 Order of Santiago, 1042 Orderic Vitalis, 673 orders, see also reform adaptations, 787–​91 flexibility, 796–​98 historiography of, 923–​27 ideals, 791–​93 organizational principles, 784–​87, 798–​99 sources for, 942–​47 sovereignty and formality, 793–​96 in traditional narrative of monastic history, 4–​5 uniformity and identity, 799–​801 ordination ecclesiastical authority and, 1106 of monks, 286, 730–​32, 1126 women excluded from, 732–​36 Ordo Monasterii, 120–​21, 163, 170 Orestes, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 635 Origen, 55, 128, 698, 699, 700–​1, 707 Origenist controversy, 135–​40, 150 Orléans, Council of (511), 752 Ortlieb of Zwiefalten, 575 Osek (monastery), 888 Ostrov (monastery), 886 Oswald of Worcester, 509–​10 Otto I, Emperor, 805, 903 Otto II, Emperor, 884 Otto III, Emperor, 395–6, 885 Otto, count palatine for King of Hungary, 888 Otto of Brunswick, 1175 Ottokar II Přemyslid, Duke then King of Bohemia, 887 Ottomans, Byzantine conflict with, 359–​60 outer courts, 555–​57

1209

1210

Index Ovid, 706 Oxford, Council of (1222), 1119 Oxford University, 1080, 1083 Oyend, Abbot of Condat, 321–​22 Pachomius, 25, 166, 737, 753 hagiographies on, 43, 63, 101, 576 monasteries of, 53, 79, 562, 569, 576 rules of, 53, 63, 105, 164, 166, 168–71, 179, 189 in traditional narrative of monastic history, 2, 4, 7, 19, 43, 54, 57, 164 Pactum, 197, 203, 207–​8 Page, Christopher, 430 Palestine archaeology in, 81–​83 monastic economy in, 342–​43 Palladius, Lausiac History, 30, 43, 60, 64, 102, 104, 125, 170, 576 Pannonhalma (monastery), 896, 898 Panormia, 625 papal authority, 858–​59, 1093–​1094, see also ecclesiastical authority papal schism (1378-​1417), 1088 Paraclete (monastery), 967, 1039 Paradies bei Soest (monastery), 979 The Paradise (“Enanisho”), 68 Paradise, monasteries as reflection of, 318–​21 le Parc (monastery), 844 Pargoire, Jules, 564 Paris, Council of (829), 222 Parisse, Michel, 566 Paschal II, Pope, 410 Paschasius Radbertus, 455 pastoral care for laity, 1114–​117, 301–2, 1134–​137 for women religious, 737–​43 pastoralism, 841–​44 Patmos (monastery), 341, 352, 353, 360 Patrick, saint, 300 Rule, 303 patronage, see donations and patronage Paul of Latros, 639 Paul of Thebes, 2, 43, 148–​50, 641, 686, 800 Paul the Deacon, 387, 717 Paula the Elder, 148, 216, 562 Paulina, founder of Paulinzelle, 694 Paulina of Paulinzella, life of, 573 Paulines, 800 Paulinus of Nola, 87, 156–​57, 568 Peace of God movement, 594–​95 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 1137 Pecham, John, 1097–​1098 Pelagius and Pelagianism, 24, 45, 140–​41, 190 penance intercessory, 283 penitentials and, 307–​8, 623–​26

Perpetua and Felicity, Passion of, 62 Peter, Apostle, 1014 Peter, Apa of the monastery of Mary, Pachomius’s sister, 569, 737 Peter Abelard, 675, 682, 697, 735, 740, 741, 777, 967, 1076 Sic et Non, 458 Peter of Cava, 411 Peter of Celle, 719, 1006 Peter the Chanter, 1076 Peter Damian, 613, 639–40, 643, 675, 684, 686–​87 Life of Romuald of Ravenna, 946 Peter the Hermit, 641 Peter the Judge, lay noble from Corrèze, 838 Peter Lombard, 706 Peter of Sebaste, 567 Peter the Venerable, 391, 690, 711, 717, 718–​19, 789, 797, 960 On Miracles, 972 Petershausen (monastery), 571, 824, 1174 Petritzos (monastery), 355 Petry, Ludwig, 1142 Peyroux, Catherine, 563 Pez, Bernhard, 721 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 1017–​1018 Philipp of Harvengt, 777 Philippart, Guy, 59 Philotheos of Theodoret, 343 phlebotomy, 867, 868, 870–​71 Piast family, 886, 889 pilgrimage, monasteries as centers of, 84–​85, 342 Pinianus, 568 Piotr Włostowic, Count of Silesia, 887–​88 Pippin III, King of the Franks, 417, 420 Pirchheimer, Charitas, 980 Pirenne, Henri, 481 Pius X, Pope, 125 Plasy (monastery), 887 Pobst, Phyllis, 1100 Poland, see East-​Central  Europe Poppo, missionary priest, 496 Poppo of Stavelot-​Malmédy, 612 Poppo, Archbishop of Trier, 637 Pons de Léras, 1034 Porto in Ravenna (house of regular canons), 773 Postoloprty (monastery), 886 Poulin, Joseph-​Claude,  60 prayer, see also intercessory prayer; liturgy; psalmody intercessory, 733–​34, 809–​10, 891–​92 as pastoral act, 711 preaching and sermons, see also minsters (mynstru); missions academic, 1125–​126, 1128 as art, 1133–​134 in Carolingian period, 716–​17

1210

1211

Index Cistercian, 719–​21, 724–​26 at Cluny, 717–​19 connection to secular world, 723–​26 justification of monastic, 710–​11 for laity, 1134–​138 in late antiquity and early medieval period, 713–​16 missions in East-​Central Europe, 883–​85 phenomenon of wandering, 662 for religious laywomen, 1046–​1047, 1070–​1071 and spiritual progress, 722–​23 terminology and typology, 711–​13 variety of settings for, 1127–​129 in vernacular, 722, 1135 by visiting bishops, 1126 by women, 493, 721–​22, 1129–​133 Premonstratensians, 5 administration and organization of, 774, 787–​88, 792, 797, 822 criticism of, 777 liturgical decoration, use of, 1022 sovereignty and formality of, 794, 796 women, inclusion of, 1043–​1044 Prémontré (house of regular canons), 772 Přemyslid family, 885–​86, 887, 889 Priscillian, On Faith and Apocrypha, 132 privileges, 182, 186, 334, 410, 494, 608–​9, 610, 626–​29, 668–​69, 947–​48, 1101–​103 processions, 808–​9, 811–​12, 968–​69 Procopius of Gaza, 57 Procopius, priest and founder of the monastery of Sázava, 896 Prodrome (monastery), see Timios Prodromos (monastery) property and land, see also agriculture; donations and patronage acquisition and management, 834–​36 agriculture in Byzantium, 354–​56 beguine, 1064 canon and imperial law on monastic, 344–​46, 352–​54 circulation of, among laity and monasteries, 586–​88 forest rights, 844–​45 inheritance (in Ireland), 305 interdependence of monastic and ecclesiastical, 436–​38 lay nobility’s ownership of monastic, 580–​81, 585 monasteries as, in Hispania, 198, 199 organization of, 474–​76, 481–​83 sacralization of monastic, 334–​38 seigneurial power of monasteries over, 349–​50, 588–​92 urban property acquisition, 845–​46 proprietary monastery (Eigenkloster), 581, 585, 655 proprietorship, see nobility, lay

Prosper of Aquitaine, 768 prostitution and prostitutes, 689, 1034, 1046–​1047 Prouille (monastery), 1048 Prüm (monastery), 475–​76, 478, 479 Psalmody (monastery), 842 psalmody, see also liturgy cycles of, 115–​21 in Ireland, 121–​22 in Italy, 123–​26 meanings of, 112–​13 monastic cursus, 125–​26 in monastic education, 458–​59 monastic vs. cathedral, 113–​15 Roman Cursus, 125–​26, 418–​20 Romanization of Frankish, 418–​20 in southern France, 122–​23 Psellos, Michel, 354 Qal’at Sim’an, 84 Quam sit necessarium, 627–​29 Quedlinburg (monastery), 1004, 1012–​1013 Querini, Vincenzo, 1185 Quinze-​Vingts hospital, 872, 873, 875 Rabanus Maurus (Hrabanus Maurus), 716–​17 Raboula of Edessa, 56, 343 Radegund, saint, 61, 87–8, 243, 271 Ráith Bressail, Synod of (1111), 902 Rajhrad (monastery), 886 Ralph d’Escures, 720 Ralph the Hospitaller, 911 Rameslo (monastery), 495 Raoul and Agnès l’Assaieur, 873 Ratgar of Fulda, 447, 495, 530, 533 Ratio de cursus qui fuerunt eius auctores, 419–​20 Raulin, Jean, Collatio de perfecta religionis plantatione, 1184 Raymond of Peñafort, 791, 1023 RB (Rule of St. Benedict) bad monks in, 1157 care for the sick in, 866 Carolingian promotion of, 162–​63, 184–​87, 387, 400–​1, 434–​35 commentaries on, 187–​88, 324, 332, 387–​89, 443–​44, 548 composition of, 176 connection to Regula Columbani, 182–​84 connection to Regula Magistri, 35, 179 economic concerns in, 467–​68, 470 hermitism in, 685 liturgy in, 730, 738, 961 on manual labor, 261 monastic spatial provisions in, 321 oratories in, 1002 psalmody in, 125 reading in, 450, 716

1211

1212

Index RB (Rule of St. Benedict) (cont.) regular canons and, 766, 768–​69 and reform of Frankish liturgy, 421–​28 on sacred possessions, 333, 334 in southern Italy and Sicily, 405–​6 spiritual progress in, 723 theology in, 697 in traditional narrative of monastic history, 25, 41, 365–​66 in visual history of monasticism, 3 Reccared, Visigothic King, 199 reclusion and recluses, 556, see also hermitism and hermits; house ascetics and asceticism cells for, 754–​55 criticism of, 752 entrance into, 754, 755–​58 fluidity of, 749–​50 gender of, 762–​64 motives for, 758–​60 regulation of, 750–​51, 753–​54, 756 sources for, 751–​52 success and decline, 760–​62 terminology, 747–​48 recruitment, 165, 550–​53, see also adult converts (conversi); oblation and oblates Rede, Sir Robert, 1083 Refectories, 322, 323, 391, 546 in houses of canons, 768 reading in, 970, 982–​83, 994 spatial organization of, 1032 reform, see also orders in Anglo-​Saxon England, 507–​13, 515–​17, 539–​40 aristocratic support for, 851–​52 Benedict of Aniane’s prominence in Carolingian narrative of, 441–​43 Benedictine efforts at, 1173–​177 “Benedictinization” of Frankish liturgy, 421–​24 Carolingian, overview, 432–​49 Carolingian influence on tenth-​and eleventh-​ century movements, 424–​28, 446–​47 Carthusian efforts at, 1181–​182 Cistercian efforts at, 1177–​179 Cluniac efforts at, 1179–​181 decrees from Aachen Synods, 438–​41 educational, 452–​56 historiography of, 369–​74, 599–​602, 656–​59, 662–​63, 928 in Ireland, 310–​14, 902–​7, 912–​15 impact on missions, 497–​98 in the Late Middle Ages, overview, 1171–​1190 in late tenth to twelfth century, overview, 599–619, overview, 608–​15 lay nobility monastic ties impacted by, 583–​84, 591–​92

manuscript production and, 993–​95 new monastic group efforts at, 1182–​184 in normative sources, 671–​72 Observant reform, 1110, ​1132, 1144–7, 1174–6 preaching and, 1132–​133 Romanization of Frankish liturgy, 417–​21 in satire, 1168–​169 self-​reflection and,  445–​46 in southern Italy and Sicily, 409–​13 in tenth century, overview, 602–​8 of universities, 1081–​1084 use of vernacular, 513–​15 Reginbert of Reichenau, 423 Regino of Prüm, 286, 620, 624–​25 Regula Communis, 30, 179, 197, 200–​1, 204–​8, 563, 568, 571, 574, 576 Regula Consensoria Monachorum, 197, 208–​9 Regula conversorum (Usus Conversorum), 1030, 1031 Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, 181, 262–​64, 333 Regula cuiusdam patris (ad monachos), 738 Regula Magistri, 35, 176, 179, 265, 481, 729–​30 Regula Pauli et Stephani, 176 Regula Tarnatensis, 176, 179 Regulae patrum, 175 regular canons and canonesses, 1–​4 distinctions in high medieval period, 769–​72 distinctions in late antiquity and early medieval period, 766–​69 expansion in twelfth century, 772–​74 historiography of, 774–​77 in Ireland, 905–​7, 915–​16 models for, 779 self-​conception of,  777–​81 Regularis Concordia, 425, 447, 514, 543–44, 607, 963 Reichenau (monastery), 285, 444, 457, 525–6, 991 Reinhard of Blankenburg, Bishop of Halberstadt, 773 relics, 395–​96, 493, 495, 538, 584, 590, 635, 1004–​1005, 1011 Remiremont (monastery), 290, 2​ 94 retables, 1009–​1012 Rewley Abbey, 1080 Ríagail Phátraic (Rule of Patrick), 303 Richard I the Lionheart, King of England, 824 Richard Marshal, 911 Richard of Saint-​Vanne, 427, 612 Richard of Saint-​Victor, 676, 772 Rievaulx (monastery), 841, 850, 1033 Rifreddo (monastery), 832 ring-​forts,  91 Robert of Arbrissel, 570, 572, 614, 674, 682, 688–​89, 742, 788, 801, 1040–​1041, 1046 Robert of Attrabate, 879 Robert of Courçon, 1076 Robert of Molesme, 614, 784 Robert of Thourotte, 1064

1212

1213

Index Robert of Turlande, 689 Rochais, Henri, 699 Rodulphus Glaber, 531, 642 Roger, Pierre, 1087 Romainmôtier (monastery), 246–​47, 250 Romanus of Condat, 103, 246 Romuald of Ravenna (hermit), 613, 633, 641, 685–​86, 687 Roncesvalles, order, 773 Rose, Els, 59 Rosenwein, Barbara, 33, 385 Rubenson, Samuel, 159 Rudolf of Fulda, 574–​75 Rudolph of Worms, 1047 Rufinus of Aquileia, 42, 45, 64, 136, 150–​51, 168–​69, 562, 699 rules fifth-​century developments, 167–​72, 175–​76 sixth-​century developments,  176–​81 seventh-​century developments,  181–​84 eighth-​century developments,  184–​88 Chalcedon’s impact on, 172–​74 for clerics and regular canons, 767–​72 diversity and non-​homogeneity of late antique, 163–​67 for female ascetic practice, 100, 105, 176–​79, 262–​64 as historical sources, 52–​57, 188–​92, 387–​90, 670–​72 for lay brothers and sisters, 1029–​1030 mass and pastoral care in, 729–​30, 737–​38 monastic spatial provisions in, 321, 323–​24 for recluses, 751, 753 regula as term, 44–​45, 163 relaxations of, 1117–​119 for religious laywomen, 1066 socioeconomic contexts of, in Hispania, 199–​206 in southern Italy and Sicily, 405–​6 Rule of Aachen, 672, 766, 768–​69, 770 Rule of St. Benedict, see RB (Rule of St. Benedict) Rule of the Third Order of St. Francis, 1066 Rulman Merswin, 1060, 1150 Rupert of Bingen, 965 Rupert of Deutz, 572, 676, 704, 710, 777, 1075 De trinitate, 703–​4 Rupertsberg (monastery), 738–​40, 745, 878, 965, 1007, 1019–​1020 Rusticula, Abbess of Arles, 272 Ryan, John, 297 Sabas the Sanctified, 19, 67, 81, 342–​43 Sabas the Younger, 635 Sackur, Ernst, 602, 653 sacramental theology, 702 Sainsaulieu, Jean, 685

St. Agnes in Bologna (monastery), 1048 St. Blasien (monastery), 610, 611, 851 St. Catherine de O’Conyl (monastery), 907 St. Cecilia (monastery), 812 St. Emmeram (monastery), 534, 995, 1188 St. Felix (monastery), 903 St. Gall (monastery), 962, 980 Plan of, 37, 252, 326–​28, 329f. 16.4, 333, 396, 525–​26, 545–​46, 866–​67, 986–​87, 988–​90 St. George in Prague (monastery), 886 St. George in Prüfening (monastery), 10131014f. 54.2 St. Georgen in the Black Forest (monastery), 824 St. Godehard in Hildesheim (monastery), 987–​88, 992–​93 St. Gregory Armeno (monastery), 403 St. Jakob in Mainz (monastery), 1188 St. James in Regensburg (monastery), 903 St. John the Baptist in Kirchheim unter Teck (monastery), 1144–​147 St. John Lateran (house of regular canons), 773 St. John the Theologian (monastery), 352, 534 St. Katharina (monastery), 813, 982–​83 St. Ludgeri (monastery), 1012 St. Martin in Cologne (monastery), 903 St. Mary in Reno (house of regular canons), 773, 907 St. Mary and All Saints in Acre (monastery), 1047 St. Maximin (monastery), 612 St. Nicholas of Exeter (monastery), 908 St. Pantaleon (monastery), 903 St. Peter in the Black Forest (monastery), 855, 1176 St. Peter on the Lauterberg (monastery), 855 St. Peter’s Basilica, 529–​30 St. Philip in Agyrium (monastery), 403 St. Ruf of Avignon (house of regular canons), 772 St. Stephen in Jerusalem (monastery), 36 St. Stephen of Strasbourg (monastery), 1068 St. Symphorien (monastery), 903 St. Taurin at Evreux (monastery), 908 St. Ulrich and Afra (monastery), 995, 1177 St. Vincent (monastery), 895 Saint-​André-​le-​haut in Vienne (monastery),  245 Saint-​Antoine (monastery),  846 Saint-​Aubin (monastery),  584 Saint-​Bénigne (monastery), 531–​33, 532f. 27.4, 610 Saint-​Bertin (monastery), 425–​26, 860 Saint-​Césaire of Arles (monastery), 842 Saint-​Cybard (monastery),  252 Saint-​Denis (monastery), 248, 445, 476, 533, 628–​29, 966, 1005, 1079, 1102 Saint-​Estève (monastery),  244–​45 Sainte-Foy in Conques (monastery), 590 Saint-​Germain in Auxerre (monastery), 244, 534

1213

1214

Index Saint-​Germain-​des-​Prés (monastery),  475–​76 Saint-​Gilles (monastery), 842, 843 Saint-​Jean in Arles (monastery), 245, 590 Saint-​Laurent of Liège (monastery), 676 Saint-​Lupicin (monastery),  246 Saint-​Martial of Limoges (monastery), 961 Saint-​Martin-​des-​Champs (monastery),  1179 Saint-​Maurice d’Agaune (monastery), 37, 116, 181, 244, 248, 292, 293 Saint-​Mont (monastery),  248–​49 Saint-​Ouen (monastery),  877 Saint-​Quentin (monastery),  244 Saint-Remi in Reims (monastery), 589 Saint-​Riquier (monastery), 325, 327f. 16.3, 420, 478, 531, 539, 732, 991 Saint-​Vaast (monastery), 427–​28, 480 Saint-​Vanne (monastery), 427–​28, 612 Saint-​Victor of Marseille (monastery), 584, 589, 590, 591, 597, 842 Saint-​Victor of Paris (house of regular canons), 318, 676, 772–​73, 1075, 1078, 1080 Saint-Wandrille, see Fontenelle Salomea of Berg, 1005 Salomea of Poland, 894 salt production, 843–​44 Salvian of Cologne/​Trier, 103, 153, 155 San Clemente in Rome (basilica), 1015 San Damiano (monastery), 1051–​1054 San Eufemia in Cozeulos (monastery), 1042 San Frediano in Lucca (house of regular canons), 773 San Giovanni (monastery), 676 San Mateo in Ávila (monastery), 1042 San Salvatore of Goleto (monastery), 410–​11, 1041 San Salvatore of Messina (monastery), 412 San Salvatore-San Giulia of Brescia (monastery), 290, ​376 San Sisto (monastery), 1048–​9 San Vincenzo al Volturno (monastery), 37, 239, 241, 325, 326f. 16.2, 409, 477, 478, 526–​29 Santa Cruz in Coimbra (house of regular canons), 773 Santa Giustina of Padua (monastery and congregation), 960, 1091, 1128, 1174–​175 Santa Maria of Monteluce (monastery), 1051 Santa Maria of Monticelli (monastery), 1051 Santa Maria of Porta Camollia (monastery), 1051 Santa maria of Gattaiola (monastery), 1051 Santa Maria of Sao Montevergine (monastery), 1041 Santa Maria Rotunda in Rome (monastery), 846 Santa Maria in Via Lata (monastery), 846 Santa Sofia (monastery), 410, 585 Sarabaites, 27, 133–​42 Saragossa, Third Council of (691), 202 satire

characteristics of twelfth-​century, 1157–​158, 1160 decline motif, 1166–​168 as genre, 1155–​157 gluttony motif, 1158–​160 and reform rhetoric, 1168–​169 sexual misconduct motif, 1162–​166 worldliness motif, 1160–​162 Sázava (monastery), 896–​98 Scandinavia, missions in, 495–​98 Scetis (monastery), 77–​78 Schaff hausen (monastery), 568, 851 Schapiro, Meyer, 998, 999 Scheyern (monastery), 993–​95 Schmid, Karl, 861 Schneyer, Johannes B., 719, 726 scholasticism, 699, 725–​26, 1187–​188 Schöntal (monastery), 977, 978 schools, see education; universities Schroeder, Caroline, 102 Schulpforta (monastery), 1022 scriptoria, see book production; libraries scriptural interpretation, see theology Second Lateran Council (1139), 1075 secular canons and canonesses, 766, 770, 1043, see also regular canons and canonesses Sedlec (monastery), 888, 889 seigneurial power, of monasteries, 588–​92, see also nobility, lay Semmler, Josef, 497–​98 Sempringham (monastery), 569, 1030, 1034, 1041–​1042, see also Gilbertines Sensi, Mario, 1107 Sentences of Sextus, 151 sequences (liturgical genre), 963–​64 sermonaries, 712–​13, see also preaching and sermons Sermones nulli parcentes, 1161 servants for manual labor, 388, 472, 553–​55 in monastic space, 556–​57 Settimo (monastery), 1178 Severinus of Norcia, Life of, 60 Seville, Second Council of (619), 199 Sextus, Sentences, 43 sexual misconduct, 907, 1105, 1111–​112, 1121–​122, 1162–​166 Sforza family, 1178 Shenoute, 53, 79–​80, 102, 107–​8, 128–​29, 562, 574 Sibculo, abbey and Observant congregation, 1178 Sicily, see southern Italy and Sicily Sidonius Apollinaris, 153 Sieciech, count palatine in Poland, 887 Siegburg (monastery), 610, 611 Sigibod, Life of Paulina, 573

1214

1215

Index Sigismund of Burgundy, 181 Sigismund of Luxemburg, 1 silence, 217, 332, 377–8, 546, 774, 780, 913–4, 975, 1030 Simeon the Armenian, 638 Simeon the New Theologian, 632, 642 Simeon Stylite the Elder, 67, 84 Simeon Stylite the Younger, 67, 84 Simeon of Syracuse, 637 Simmons, Loraine, 572 Simon of Crépy, 596 Simon le Mercer, 918 Simons, Walter, 1063 Simpert, Bishop of Augsburg, 978 Sithius (monastery), 769 Slavek Veliky, lay magnate of Bohemia, 888 slaves and slavery, 489–​90, 553 Slavonic Christianity, 884, 896–​97 Smaragdus of Saint-​Mihiel, 187, 388, 424–5, 432, 444, 447–8, 452, 455, 460–1, 548 Smith, Julia, 395 Snorri Sturluson, 496 Snyder, Parker, 821–​22, 823, 828 Song of Songs, interpretations of, 700–​1, 707–​8 Sophia of Hungary, 862 Southern, R.W., 654, 662 space, see also landscapes, monastic cosmological view of monastic, 317–​21 cultural space, as concept, 1142–​143 environmental considerations in archaeological studies, 396–​97 as historical source, 678–​79 interior vs. exterior, 309, 331–​38, 476–​78 lay brothers and sisters in monastic, 1032–​1033 liturgy and, 806–​9 spatial organization of monasteries, 321–​31, 525–​27, 529–​30, 545–​47, 555–​57 Spain, see Hispania Speculum stultorum, 1157 Springiersbach (house of regular canons), 772 Spytihněv II, Duke of Bohemia, 896 Stancliffe, Clare, 152 Stanley, John, 1116 Stavelot (monastery), 1010 Stekna, Jan, 1082 stemma and stemmatic method, 145 Stephen II, Pope, 420 Stephen I, King of Hungary, 498, 688, 886, 895, 896, 897, 898 Stephen de Fulbourn, 912 Stephen Harding, 784, 1030 Stephen of Lexington, 905, 913–​15, 1078 Stephen of Muret, 642, 694–5 Stephen of Obazine, 689, 1041 Life of, 576 Stephen of Tournai, 1075 Stična (monastery), 889

Stinger, Charles, 936 Stöber, Karen, 1114 Stock, Brian, 946 Stoudios (monastery), 344–5 Stramara, Daniel, 565 Strumica (monastery), 354–​55, 356 Sturmi of Fulda, 476–​78, 533 stylites, 67, 84–​85 Stout, Geraldine, 910 Strasbourg, women religious in, 1067, 1070, 1147–​151 Subiaco (monastery), 89, 1175 Suckale, Robert, 1001 Suetonius, 461 Suger, Abbot of Saint-​Denis, 1002–​1003, 1005, 1009 Sulpicius Severus, 45–6, 151–​52, 243 Dialogues, 151, 152, 170 Life of Martin, 44, 60, 151–​52 Susteren (monastery), 488 Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, 967 Swithun, saint, 534 Symbatios Pakourianos, 355 Syon (monastery), 1131, 1135 Syria archaeology in, 84–​85 monastic economy in, 343 Syriac texts, 47–​48, 56, 66–​70 Szőcs, Jenő, 882–​83 Talbot, Charles, 699 Tallaght (monastery), 310–14 Tarragona, Council of (516), 198 Tarrant, Jacqueline, 1067 Tatto of Reichenau, 444 Taylor, Anna, 373–​74, 393 Tegernsee (monastery), 984, 994, 1175, 1188 Templars, 800, 843, 911–​12, 1042 Tenxwind of Andernach, 1019 Teplá (monastery), 887, 888 Tertullian, 214, 282 Ad uxorem, 269 Teutonic Knights, 892, 1042 Tetta, Abbess of Wimborne, 272 Teucinde of Arles, 227–​28 textual communities as concept, 145–​46 relationships in formation of, 153–​55, 156 Theobald of Provins, 641 Theodemar of Montecassino, 421 Theodore Studite, 55, 167, 345 Theodore of Sycheon, 65 Theodore of Tarsus, 46 Theodoret of Cyrus, 66–​67, 84 Theodrade, Abbess of Notre-​Dame of Soissons, 271 Theodulf of Orléans, 454

1215

1216

Index theology apocalyptic, 703–​5 education in, 1084 experiential approach to, 705–​8 historiography of, 663–​65 in liturgy, 964–​66 monastic theology as concept, 24–6, 28, 32, 171, 187–90, 698–​700 philosophical approach to, 702–​3 Song of Songs interpretations, 700–​1 theologia as term, 697 Theophanu, Byzantine Empress, 636, 884 Theophilus of Alexandria, 136–​37, 138 Theophilus (artist monk), 1002 Theotokos of Boreine (monastery), 357 Theuderic II, Merovingian King, 182 Thierry of Amorbach, 332 Thomas Aquinas, 698, 1086 Thomas de Cantimpré, 741, 1046 Thomas Gallus, 1078 Thomas Shank, Lillian, 375 Thurstan of Caen, 427 Tilhany (monastery), 896 Timios Prodromos (monastery), 358–​59 Tinti, Francesca, 511 Tírechán (bishop), 300–​1 tithes, 836, 837–​38, 915, 1104, 1113 tombs, 760, 1016–​1018 Tours, Council of (567), 221, 322 transhumance, 843, see also pastoralism treasuries, 976, 1003–​1005 Tristernagh (monastery), 916 Trithemius, Johannes, 954 tropes (liturgical genre), 962–​63 Trota of Salerno, Practica, 878 Trotula, 878 Trullo, Council of (692), 750, 752 Trzebnica (monastery), 893, 895 Tuotilo of St. Gall, 962 Turholt (monastery), 492 Tyniec (monastery), 885 Ua Briain (O’Brien) family, 907 Ua Cerbaill, Donnchand, Irish king, 905 Ua Conchobair (O’Connor) family, 907 Ua hÁedecáin, Imar, 904 Ua hAinmire, Máel Ísu, 904 Ua Néill, Domhnall, 917 Ua Tuathail, Lorcán, see Laurence O’Toole Ulrich, Count of Württemberg, 1144, 1145 Ulrich of Zell, 544, 551–2, 557, 1033 Umiltà of Faenza, 722 Unger of Poznań, 884 universities, see also education courses of study, 1084–​1088 emergence of, 1074–​1076

impact of, 1088–​1091 monks in, 1077–​1080, 1125–​126 reform of, 1081–​1084 Unni of Hamburg-​Bremen, 496 Urban I, Pope, 770 Urban II, Pope, 334 Pie voluntatis affectus, 770–​71 Urban IV, Pope, 1053–​1054, 1066 Beata Clara virtute clarens, 1053 Urban V, Pope, 1082, 1087 urban properties, acquisition of, 845–​46 urbanization, 478–​80 Ursula, St. and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, 965 Ursula (monastery), 965 Ursula Haider, 1131, 1132 Usus Conversorum, 1030, 1031 Uta Codex, 534, 536 Vacandard, Elphaege, 653 Václav (or Wenceslaus) I, King of Bohemia, 887 Vadstena (monastery), 969 Valbuena de Duero (monastery), 862 Valentin de Massays, 1179 Valerio, hermit, 195–​96 De genere monachorum, 195–​96, 209 Valerius Maximus, 461 Valladolid (monastery), 1176 Vallombrosa (monastery), 1029 Valmagne (monastery and congregation), 841 Van sunte Maria Magdalena Bekeringhe, 1057–​1058 Vanderputten, Steven, 659 Varennes (monastery), 593 Vauchez, André, 1060 Venantius Fortunatus, Life of Radegund, 61 Venarde, Bruce, 656, 1171 Vercelli (clerical community), 235 vernacular, preaching in, 722, 1135 Venosa (monastery), 410 Verhulst, Adriaan, 480, 483 vernacular, among Anglo-​Saxon reformers, 513–​15 Veszprémvölgy (monastery), 897 Vézelay (monastery), 583, 585 Victorianus of Asán, 198 Victricius of Rouen, 220 Vienne, Council of (1311/​12), 1067, 1081 Vigila (scribe), 519–521 Vikings, 309, 315, 480, 495, 506, 535 Vincent of Lérins (or Toul), 141, 153 Virgil, 456 Virgin Full of Grace (monastery), 350–1 Virgin Mary, 701, 707, 741–​42, 895 virginity, 907, 1111–​112, 1121–​122, 1162–​166, see also chastity clerical celibacy and, 291–​92

1216

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Index connection to female asceticism, 268–​69, 290–​91 distinguished from widowhood, 220–​22 models of, 98–​99, 215 Vision of Tnudgal, 905 visitation, 787, 798, 942, 1098–​1101, 1110–​111 Vital of Mortain (Vital of Savigny), 689, 1041 viticulture, 845 Vivarium (monastery), 90, 237, 319, 320f. 16.1 Vladislav II, Duke and King of Bohemia, 889 Vladislav III Jindřich of Bohemia, 888 Vogüé, Adalbert de, 40–​41, 44, 171 Voigt, Jörg, 1068 Vojtěch/​Wojciech, Bishop of Prague, 895 Volmar of Disibodenberg, 739 Vratislav II, King of Bohemia, 896–7 Waddell, Chrysogonus, 719 Wagner, Leonhard, Legend and History of the Holy Sintbert with Notes Regarding his Body in the Grave, 978 Wala of Corbie/​Bobbio, 421, 472, 474 Walahfrid Strabo, 455, 460 Liber de Exordiis, 445 Walcher, Bishop of Durham, 691 Walter Espec, 850 Walter, Johannes von, 662 Walter Map, 1163 warrior class, see nobility, lay Watton (monastery), 573 Waulsfort (monastery), 903 Wearmouth-​Jarrow (monastery),  502, 530, 691, 975 Weber, Max, 33, 330, 793 Weihenstephan (monastery), 976–​77, 979 Wendhausen (monastery), 493 Werden (monastery), 489, 491 Westminster (monastery), 870 Wettin family, 855 Wettingen (monastery), 985 Wezelin, provost of St. Andrew’s, Cologne, 739 Whitby (monastery), 570 White Monastery, 79–​80, 574 Wibald of Stavelot, 1010 Wiblingen (monastery), 1177 widows and widowhood, 99, 148, 215, 216, 217–​18, 220–​22, 224–6, 551 Wienhausen (monastery), 814 William Alnwick, Bishop of Lincoln, 1114 William of Auvergne, 1046 William de Burgh, 915 William of Canterbury, 879 William of Champeaux, 676, 704, 706–​7 William the Conqueror, 691

William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1105 William of Fécamp, 720 William of Gellone, 584, 597 William FitzRoger, 912 William of Hirsau, 672, 703, 1029 William of Jumièges, 673 William of Malmesbury, 517 William Marshal, Earl of Leinster, 914, 915 William de Montibus, 743 William of Occam (Ockham), 1086 William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine, 524, 580, 605 William de Rodierd, 918 William de Ros, 912 William of Saint-​Thierry, 698, 707 William II of Thurey, Archbishop of Lyon, 756 William of Vercelli, 410, 411, 1041 William of Volpiano, 426–8, 516, 531, 610, 637 Willibald, Bishop of Eichstätt, 46 Willibrord (saint), 487–​88, 491, 492 Wilmart, André, 654 Wimborne (monastery), 574–​75 Winchcombe (monastery), 1085 Winchester, New Minster, 539 wine production, 845 Winston-​Allen, Anne,  1151 Wiprecht of Groitzsch, 852 Wipszycka, Ewa, 569 Władysław II the Exiled, Duke of Poland, 889 Wojciech/​Vojtěch, missionary bishop, 885, 895 Wollasch, Joachim, 372, 603, 604, 615, 657 Wolsey, cardinal, 1109 wool production, 841 Worcester Priory, 1085, 1087 Wormald, Patrick, 509 Wulfric, recluse, 693, 753 Wulfstan II, Bishop of Worcester, 517, 691 Wyclif, John, 1086, 1088, 1134, 1168–​169 Yardley, Anne, 968 Yrieix (Aredius), Life of, 219–​20 Ysengrimus, 1157, 1161 Yves of Chartres, 777 Yvette of Huy, 761 Zachary I, Pope, 46 Zähringen family, 855 Zettler, Alfons, 328 Zlatá Koruna (monastery), 891 Zselicszentjakab (monastery), 888–​89 Zwiefalten (monastery), 575, 851, 1005, 1033

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