This is a study of the lived experience of monastic reform within the troubled and violent landscape of twelfth-century Germany. While the book will be of interest to specialists in medieval history, religion, gender, and manuscript studies, its readability will make it accessible also to undergraduate students and other non-specialists.
This book opens a window on the lived experience of monastic reform in the twelfth century. Drawing on a variety of textual and material sources from the south German monastery of Petershausen, it begins with the local process of reform and moves out into intertwined regional social, political, and ecclesiastical landscapes. Beach reveals how the shock of reform initiated decades of anxiety at Petershausen and raised doubts about the community's communal identity, its shifting internal contours and boundaries, and its place within the broader spiritual and social landscapes of Constance and Swabia. The Trauma of Monastic Reform goes beyond reading monastic narratives of reform as retrospective expressions of support for the deeds and ideals of a past generation of reformers to explore the real human impact that the process could have, both on the individuals who comprised the target community and on those who lived for generations in its aftermath.
New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination. This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.
This collection of studies investigates how people of the 10th to early 12th century experienced and represented processes of intentional change in the Church, and what the consequences are of modern scholars’ reliance on ‘reform’ to describe and interpret these processes. In 11 thematic chapters it takes stock of the current state of research and offers suggestions to deepen our understanding of the ideological, institutional, and cultural dynamics at play. Contributors are Julia Barrow, Robert F. Berkhofer III, Gordon Blennemann, Katy Cubitt, Nicolangelo D'Acunto, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Ludger Körntgen, Rutger Kramer, Brigitte Meijns, Diane Reilly, Rachel Stone, and Steven Vanderputten.
Monastic experience in twelfth-century Germany provides a rare window on to monastery life in the tumultuous world of twelfth-century Swabia. From its founding in 992 through the great fire that ravaged it in 1159 and beyond, Petershausen weathered countless external attacks and internal divisions. Supra-regional clashes between emperors and popes played out at the most local level. Monks struggled against overreaching bishops. Reformers introduced new and unfamiliar customs. Tensions erupted into violence within the community. Through it all the anonymous chronicler struggled to find meaning amid conflict and forge connections to a shared past, enlivening his narrative with colorful anecdotes – sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing. Translated into English for the first time, this fascinating text is an essential source for the lived experience of medieval monasticism.
In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity. Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.
Medieval Monasticism traces the Western Monastic tradition from its fourth-century origins in the deserts of Egypt and Syria through the many and varied forms of religious life it assumed during the Middle Ages. It explores the relationship between monasteries and the secular world around them. For a thousand years, the great monastic houses and religious orders were a prominent feature of the social landscape of the West, and their leaders figured as much in the political as on the spiritual map of the medieval world. In this book many of them, together with their supporters and critics, are presented to us and speak their minds to us. We are shown, for instance, the controversy between the Benedictines and the reformed monasticism of the twelfth century and the problems that confronted women in religious life. A detailed glossary offers readers a helpful vocabulary of the subject. This fifth edition has been revised by Janet Burton to include an updated bibliography and an introduction which discusses recent trends in monastic studies, including reinterpretations of issues of reform and renewal, new scholarship on religious women, and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. This book is essential reading for both students and scholars of the medieval world.
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 intellectual 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.
Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.
The fact that certain cultures and religions produced a way of life which, for the sake of self-perfection, expected its adherents to withdraw from various obligations to the world and to enter into the organisational structure of a monastic community obviously represents a constant anthropological foundation. The spectrum of monastic life within these various cultures was extremely diverse in its manifestations. It was the result of a high degree of flexibility in the face of constantly changing ideas about piety, social needs and concepts of community and individuality. However, an interreligious study with the aim of a scholarly analysis of comparable key elements across different monastic cultures does not exist yet. The editors as well as the authors of this volume are particularly interested in how monastic life was realised communally in many ways according to fixed norms and rules, how it shaped the understanding of community and civilisation and therefore made a decisive contribution to the formation of our cultural identity.
