3

The Flowering of the Benedictines

A New Beginning in Lotharingia

In both the kingdom of Burgundy (established in 888) and the German kingdom (established in 911 in the eastern regions of the Frankish realm), monastic life stabilized after the coming to power of Otto I in 936, and it did so more quickly than in the politically fragmented western Frankish kingdom. Many of the largest old abbeys continued as royal monasteries, while some among those—like the monastery of Corvey in Saxony, for example—were brought to a great flowering, even expanding the circle of successful communities through additional foundations (the monastery of Saint Maurice in Magdeburg, for example, in 937). Under Otto I the concept of “royal freedom” (libertas regia)¹ was invoked again to designate the legal status of the royal monastery, and in keeping with Carolingian traditions that status encompassed (as has been noted) royal protection, immunity, and free elections—thereby designating the monastery’s place in the imperial church as well as its relationship to the king. A legal decision (Weistum) from the year 951 guarded against the greed of outsiders (especially bishops or the nobility) by articulating the principle that royal monasteries could not be donated to anyone.² The measure concerned well over fifty abbeys. Of course these monasteries were obligated to serve the king in return, and thus the old Carolingian principle of mutuality lived on uninterrupted—although the balance of that mutual relationship, as will be seen, would later shift considerably.

Those Saxon women’s communities noted above—their status as foundations of canonesses or as (Benedictine) nuns often difficult to assess—also now rose to special prominence.³ Taking as examples those foundations (Stifte) that were under royal influence, communities like Essen, Gandersheim, or Quedlinburg, their function is easily outlined in terms of two primary concerns: first, the prayer of the community’s members for their founders, their king, and the kingdom, and second, the education of and provision for the female members of the royal family and its close associates in the upper nobility. Such houses also served as both burial places and as meeting places for representative assemblies, especially on high church feast days, and were thus political centers of the empire. Here again, as was already noted for the community of the Merovingian queen Radegundis⁴ in the sixth century, the interests of lordship were tightly interwoven with devotion and service to the faith, yet in a way that at the time did not necessarily entail a fundamental contradiction.⁵

Yet no account of these structural continuities should ignore the fact that across wide stretches of even the new German kingdom monastic life was in decline—for example in Bavaria, a region that had been particularly devastated by raids from Hungary, and in the regions of the upper Rhine. Efforts to reestablish life according to a monastic rule were undertaken in these regions in the first half of the tenth century, and they were often led by bishops. And bishops could in turn rely on those who, precisely because of such difficult times, were in search of religious fulfillment and who wanted to cross over the threshold, turning from the world and toward a place that could secure their salvation. That kind of place had only to be created once again.

For that purpose, the upper-Lotharingian region (which belonged to the German kingdom and was bounded by the central Mosel in the north, the upper Maas in the west, and Alsace in the east)⁶ proved itself especially fruitful. Here in the early years of the 930s the bishop of Toul, Gozelinus, filled the monastery of Saint-Evre in his city with pious men and placed it under the leadership of an abbot who had come from the already-reformed community of Fleury. This act had an impact on a wider circle of men seeking salvation, those who had personal contacts with Toul, among whom were many who had gained firsthand experience of an exemplary monastic life on journeys that reached Monte Cassino and the monasteries of Basil in southern Italy. Early in 934, with the help of Adalbert, the bishop of Metz, they took over the dilapidated cloister of Gorze.⁷ At the same time, authentic monastic life again returned to the abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier, a community that had until that time been governed by a lay abbot, Duke Giselbert of Lotharingia. King Otto I worked immediately to turn these beginnings into a sustained monastic reform by conferring royal libertas on Saint Maximin and, a decade later, by solemnly confirming the consolidated properties of both Gorze and Saint Evre. From Saint Maximin the monastery of Saint Maurice in Magdeburg, noted above, was settled with monks. That community was chosen as the burial place of the Ottonians; it would soon become an archbishopric.

At the same time there had also been a wave of new women’s foundations, since the monastic life of women had also been in need of renewal—and their way of life should no longer be ignored as part of the later story of Lotharingian reform. Bishop Gozelinus founded the women’s community of Bouxières-aux-Dames near Nancy, and following the model of Fleury he established it on solid material foundations. Bishop Adalbert of Metz founded the communities of Sainte-Marie-aux-Nonnaines in Metz, Saint Goeric in Epinal, and Neumünster near Ottweiler. Existing women’s communities, like the double monastery of Remiremont or St. Pierre-en-Nonnains, were reformed insofar as the strict observance of the Benedictine rule was introduced among them. Other women’s communities followed.⁸

The text of the Benedictine rule had to be made known to each of these communities all over again.⁹ Bishop Gozelinus obtained it from the monastery of Fleury, which also observed the customs of Benedict of Aniane. The precise observance of these norms led to a strict observance of monastic vows (personal poverty, obedience, and remaining bound to the monastery of one’s profession), a renewal of liturgy, balanced asceticism, strict compliance to the rhythms of the monastic day, care for outward appearance in clothing, and above all the banishment of noble influence by means of free abbatial elections. These elements of renewed monastic life were the essential cornerstones of the Lotharingian reform movement¹⁰ that was established across the region in communities such as Saint-Arnoul in Metz and Moyenmoutier on the eastern slopes of the Vosges and that then took root in other monasteries across wide stretches of the German realm. The establishment of this reform depended on two factors: on the one hand, the cohesion of reforming monasteries, sustained by a network (admittedly not exclusive) of affiliations through prayer, and, on the other, the security provided by royal and episcopal privileges—resulting in a distinct harmony with an Ottonian ecclesiastical policy that drew its monasteries into imperial service.

How difficult it could be in that day to bring all religious foundations across the land to live under the guidance of one set of norms (assuming for a moment that they were not already guided by deeply embedded local customs) is made clear from the example of circumstances in tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England. There from 950 on King Edgar sought—with the help of Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury and his suffragan bishops Aethelward of Winchester (909–84) and Oswald of Worcester ( 972)—to revive monastic life after the Viking invasions and other internal disruptions. An intense wave of new foundations resulted, and the two bishops, both of whom were in close contact with reformed monasteries on the continent (especially Fleury), were its main architects. To master so much diversity in monastic life and to lend still more strength to monastic discipline, the king called a synod in Winchester in 970. There, with the aid of learned monks from Fleury and Ghent, and with an eye to the Rule of Saint Benedict, a series of common statutes was crafted to govern everyday life in the monastery (clothing, mealtimes, silence, fasting, choir, and so on). Titled Regularis Concordia Angliae nationis, it was promulgated as a text that was binding on all communities. But its goal was achieved to only a very limited degree, since a leading and coordinating figure like Benedict of Aniane was notably absent.¹¹

Cluny: The Establishment of Monastic Liberty

Yet the reawakening of monastic life according to the Benedictine rule and the articulation of its practice under Benedict of Aniane could have taken on quite a different and essentially more radical form. Beyond a freedom that was protected and deployed by kings, there was an unconditional freedom from any kind of external power. This earthly autonomy actually accorded with the essence of the vita religiosa in a fundamental way, because it sought a retreat from the world and a complete freedom from it for the sake of an encounter with God.

In a region almost entirely without rulers and a time of one of monastic life’s worst degradations, that possibility now became a reality. In 910 there emerged a Benedictine way of life free from every kind of lordly power. And perhaps precisely for that reason—although in a way that could have never been anticipated at the outset—it developed into a self-confident monastic church within the church universal, one that inspired all of Western Christendom and presented itself as the center of Benedictine life, one that soon would far outshine even Monte Cassino, and one that over the next two centuries would ultimately build around one monastery the largest monastic congregation Christendom had ever seen: Cluny, near Mâcon in Burgundy, the “light of the world” as it was later called,¹² broke free from every boundary that had ever been set for monastic life.¹³

Cluny’s liberty was born of the explicit intentions of its founder, Duke William of Aquitaine and Count of the Mâconnais.¹⁴ As the duke emphasized in the foundation charter,¹⁵ in what was at first quite conventional language, he established the monastery for the love of God and out of concern for both his own salvation and that of his family. But the duke then included provision for the souls of his dead king Odo and his followers, and he also emphasized that his founding act was intended to strengthen the standing and the integrity of the Catholic religion (pro statu etiam ac integritate catholicae religionis). In the same breath, with the establishment of an independent abbatial election in keeping with the Rule of Saint Benedict, William appointed the first abbot and confirmed that the monastery was from that point forward to be free from the yoke of any earthly power (cuiuslibet terrenae potestatis iugo)—including that of his own family. At the same time he handed over his new foundation and all that pertained to it to the Roman apostles Peter and Paul. William also enjoined the pope, as the monastery’s future protector and defender (tutor et defensor), to use his canonical and apostolic authority to excommunicate all who tried to deprive Cluny of its property. Anyone who presumed to assail the content of the charter was to fall into eternal damnation as a companion of Judas Iscariot, and God was to erase his name from the book of life—so read the stern final closing lines of the charter’s penalty clause.

William was a pious man but also a powerful one; he ruled as if he were a king, and he was the undisputed overlord of almost all of southern France—a region that, unusually for his time, remained almost entirely at peace.¹⁶ Surely no one underestimated the provisions of his charter. And yet he had thrust Cluny into a state of freedom that was without any protective authority. The papacy had been invoked but found itself—and William himself was probably not fully aware of this—in one of its greatest crises, morally and politically beaten down in its power struggles with the urban nobility in Rome.¹⁷ Thus the papacy would in fact be able to provide no protection, at least in the near future. Moreover, the Carolingian kings were not only geographically distant from Cluny’s region, a borderland between the West Frankish kingdom, the kingdom of Burgundy, and the cultural zones of Aquitaine and the north. They were also worn down from confrontations with the new and increasingly powerful Robertine dynasty, whose descendants, the Capetians, later became the lasting heirs of the West Frankish/French throne. From its beginnings, Cluny was thus in danger of falling victim to a regional power vacuum. While that circumstance could be useful to the abbey, it could also fuel the avarice of powerful secular figures nearby.

Only in retrospect does it become clear how William’s foundation charter, crafted with such impressive care, nevertheless opened up so many chances for the future—and how well Cluny was able to exploit the opportunities. Liberty without protection—when used properly—offered more opportunities for expansion than protection without liberty, since Cluny’s liberty was founded on a great idea, one that stretched beyond the monastery itself and that could inspire both monks and laity. This idea found expression in the words of the foundation charter: “to strengthen the standing and the integrity of the catholic religion.”

The young abbey of Cluny built itself up on these essentials, and through wise integration of both organization and spirituality it was able not only to guard against the dangers of its unprotected status but also to make the improbable a reality: its rapid rise to a monastic “world power” for the preservation of the Christian faith.¹⁸

To meet these challenges the abbey had capable leaders from the beginning and well into the twelfth century. Moreover, the earliest abbots, carefully chosen by their predecessors and then unanimously elected by the community, enjoyed unusually long tenures in office. They were therefore able to make the most of the long stretches of time that were strategically necessary to pursue their far-reaching aims.¹⁹ The series of abbots was as follows: Odo (927–942), Aymardus (942–964), Maiolus (964–994), Odilo (994–1049), and Hugh I (1049–1109).

The founding abbot, Berno,²⁰ already had considerable leadership experience when he came to office, having been an abbot (quite out of keeping with the Benedictine norm) in other monasteries—Gigny, which he founded in Burgundy’s Jura, and its subsequent affiliate Baume, later destroyed by the Normans. At the same time, however, from his earliest days in monastic life, Berno had been steeped in the worldview of Benedict of Aniane²¹ and committed to reforming spirituality. After the founding of Cluny, a follower of Duke William entrusted Berno with the monastery of Déols on the Indre—in this case, revealingly, using the same words as the charter of 910—as well as the abbey of Massay in Berry. Even though Berno bequeathed Gigny and Baume to his brother in his will, here in embryo was one strand of a Cluniac strategy that, while not new, was increasingly pursued with incomparable consistency: to gather together, under the overall leadership of the abbey of Cluny, monasteries that were widely scattered across distant regions yet bound together by a common spirit—thereby not only exponentially enhancing Cluny’s spiritual power but also rendering the community itself (because it was anchored in so many centers of worldly power) virtually unassailable. That Berno came from a noble family and had the best of relationships not only with the Duke of Aquitaine but also with the royal families of Provence and upper Burgundy only enhanced Cluny’s strong beginnings. Successive abbots, by virtue of their own nobility, were able to maintain a similar framework of contacts to the world of the nobles and to the great worldly powers.

Under Berno’s disciple and successor Odo, a mechanism developed that in turn grew stronger under Odo’s successor, Abbot Aymardus, and that established itself as a key element in Cluny’s preservation: at first the nearby nobility but soon more and more even those from distant regions invested considerable wealth in the abbey through their donations.²² That it happened during a time when the “Christianization of the feudal nobility”²³ remained a key task—especially for Cluny—strongly suggests that such donations (at least of land and people) were for the time being offered quite pragmatically for a purpose that could make an impression on even the most hardened warrior:²⁴ genuine fear of eternal damnation.

These kinds of gifts, soon appearing in remarkable numbers, were explicitly made ad sepulturam—to secure both a burial place in the consecrated ground of the cloister and the prayers that would preserve the donor’s memory after death.²⁵ Often accompanying the donation was a promise that allowed the founder to join the monastery if death was near. If that was not possible, a clause ensured that the donor could at least be buried as a member of the community.

In the course of later abbacies, which in many respects worked to civilize the nobility, the bond between Cluny and the laity was further strengthened by the consolidation of bonds of fraternity (fraternitas) between the community and a founder or a founder’s family, sealed again through memorial prayer. One particularly effective method at Cluny for satisfying the demands of their associates was used from the time of the abbacy of Maiolus: to lend donated land back to noble castellans in the region at a nominal rate of interest, thereby ensuring that they remained strongly invested in preserving Cluny’s status. Indeed there was even a kind of pride associated with being a vassal of the abbey—a fidelis S. Petri—as Cluny came to enjoy increasing renown throughout Christendom.²⁶

Moreover, since monastic recruits (often already given to the monastery as children) frequently came from these familiar circles of donors, the resulting interplay of mutual gifts—the exchange of material goods for spiritual—helped to develop a protective zone around Cluny. Since Cluny belonged to no one, all took care to ensure that it not fall victim to any one individual.

This mechanism required only one constant: belief in the spiritual power of Cluniac prayer and in the integrity of those who prayed as mediators of salvation. The future would reveal that in the eyes of its founders, Cluny had fulfilled that expectation for centuries and that it would even deepen its spiritual foundations in unimagined ways, thereby expanding its protective mechanism to encompass the grand political stage of kings and dukes in distant lands.

Abbot Odo was able to acquire two charters whose immediate pragmatic benefit, while seemingly meager because of Cluny’s place within larger structures of power, had a symbolic value that can hardly be overstated—especially since the privileges the charters contained were used as building blocks for consolidating the legal position of the abbey. The first came in 927, when Rudolf I became the first West Frankish king to confirm the terms of foundation set out by Duke William and to extend them to the royal level, thereby renouncing any rights of lordship over the abbey.²⁷ Then in 931, Pope John XI issued a papal bull that for the first time confirmed both the assumption that Cluny had been handed over to the prince of the apostles and its freedom from every kind of secular lordship.²⁸ Moreover, this bull explicitly declared Cluny’s immunity from external interference—the status conferred, notably, not by the king as patron and protector, as was customary, but by the pope. Long passages of this bull took their wording from Rudolf’s document; in turn many of its formulations appeared again in later royal charters. Like almost no other European monastery, Cluny was for centuries able to draw from a treasury of privileges like these, granted by the highest worldly and spiritual powers.

The most important privilege of these papal bulls, however, was the permission not only to accept into the community monks from foreign monasteries who wanted to enter Cluny in order more properly to fulfill their vows but also to take over entire monasteries for the purpose of reform: “If you consent to take on a monastery in order to improve it, and it is the will of those who have the proper authority that it be given to Cluny, then you should receive our permission to do so.”²⁹ The right to take in foreign monks also appeared elsewhere in monastic privileges, but at that time the reform passage was unprecedented. The fact that the text of the charter was surely formulated by the Cluniacs themselves reveals the uncommon self-confidence of the young abbey.

But in fact Cluny could already look back on some striking successes:³⁰ in 928/29 the kings of Burgundy had, for the salvation of their souls, handed over their monastery Romainmôtier, an ancient abbey dating back to the early seventh century. The community was thereby reformed and elevated to a priory. In 930 Odo had assumed the office of abbot at Fleury in order to enforce a reform of discipline there as well.³¹ Aurillac and Tulle are further notable examples. In 932—a year after the great papal privilege—John XI confirmed Cluny’s possession of the abbey of Charlieu to the south, a community that had stood for decades under papal protection. And a short time later, Odo found himself in Italy, where he was active in (among other places) the monasteries of Rome as well as in Farfa and even Monte Cassino—even though he did not seek to affiliate any of those communities with Cluny.³²

Abbot Odo understood the work of monastic renewal at Cluny as “the starting point of a comprehensive reform of church and world.”³³ The weakening of ecclesiastical authority he had observed—driven by embarrassing abuses among even those who were supposed to represent the elite of the faith and who for that reason were expected to stand as exemplars—must in his eyes have had “fatal consequences for the fate of the whole world.”³⁴ His concern was a reflection of Cluny’s goal, articulated in its founding charter, of benefiting the “standing and the integrity of the catholic religion.” From the earliest days of its growth Cluny thus took upon itself a responsibility not only for the salvation of its own monks but also for the salvation of all of Christendom, and in this apostolic ideal it found an as yet incomparably powerful driving force.

Cluny found continual support for its initiatives in the papacy, which from the bull of John XI from 931 onward described the abbey as “forever subject” (subjectum) to the Holy Roman Church. The community thus enjoyed a freedom guaranteed by Rome—a libertas Romana, in the words of the soon-customary phrase.³⁵ From a privilege of Pope Benedict VII in 978, the corresponding curial formula became customary: Cluny was entrusted with the defense and expansion of the Roman church (commissum ad defendendum et dilatandum).³⁶ Cluny also sought to win the goodwill of the bishops and their cathedral chapters across different regions from the tenth century on, primarily through the establishment of confraternal ties.³⁷ But above all, the exemption of the abbey from the authority of the diocesan bishop of Mâcon was an especially important step toward Cluny’s independent expansion. At the end of the tenth century (in 998), Pope Gregory V allowed Cluny freely to choose the bishop who was to consecrate its abbot,³⁸ and a few decades later Pope John XIX freed the abbey from every jurisdiction of the bishop—though that principle was difficult to enforce in practice and was in any case valid only in very restricted ways for the houses that belonged to Cluny.³⁹ A similarly constructed policy of protection found particularly significant expression in the era of the Peace of God movement, as especially in southern France bishops—faced with an onslaught of minor and middling nobility who had begun to assault church property, merchants, and unarmed peasants—sought to establish measures that ensured peace and military protection.⁴⁰ Around 1021–1023, at the request of the abbot of Cluny as well as the French King Rudolf, Pope Benedict VIII drafted a widely circulated bull in which he called nineteen archbishops and bishops from across all of southern France, listed by name, and seven noble laymen and charged them explicitly with the protection of Cluny and its communities scattered across Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Provence.⁴¹

The “Cluniac Church”: A Congregation of Monasteries

After some 180 years, a broad expansion of the congregation of Cluniac monasteries had made clear the success of the central idea that Cluny was a source of overflowing renewal and strength for all of Christendom. If the first list of the monasteries belonging to its congregation, drawn up by Pope Gregory V in 998, was already impressive (there were thirty-eight),⁴² by the year 1109 Abbot Hugh I could happily say that God had spread the influence of Cluniac monks “in their region, but also in Italy, in Lotharingia, in England, in Normandy, in Francia, in Aquitaine, in Gascony, in Provence, and in Spain.”⁴³

Up to this high point of consolidation under Hugh I, “the Great,” Cluny had successfully drawn the monasteries handed over to it together with those it had founded into a transregional alliance of abbeys and priories, which had further organized themselves into affiliations of priories. The groundwork, as noted above, had surely been laid already by the time of Berno, and from there a new practice was quickly developed and preserved, in its essentials, for long afterward: to establish ties of community with those monasteries that were to be reformed by means of a mutual prayer confraternity, including mutual intercession for the dead. Under Abbot Odilo (994–1049), the technicalities of such arrangements were soon refined, perfected, and extended to the monasteries that had institutional ties to Cluny. The Cluniacs thereby made use of an already well-known means of communication, while deploying it so broadly that its very nature began to change. Cluny became the center—as far as we can reconstruct the matter today—of the production of what were known as “books of the dead.”⁴⁴ In these were entered, alongside the names of other benefactors from among the laity and clergy (including popes, emperors, and kings), primarily the names of deceased Cluniac brothers—around 48,000 monks from the tenth through the twelfth centuries.⁴⁵ On the one hand, this practice from day to day created what became an almost impossible obligation for intercessory prayer. On the other hand, it bound the congregation together in a powerful way, as messengers divided the lists of names among Cluniac monasteries wherever they existed, and in turn these communities, which kept their own books of the dead, sent back to Cluny the names of their own dead. The practice thus nurtured a community not only of those who prayed among the living but also of those among the dead for whom the monks prayed—a community, in other words, that seemed to transcend time and place.

By the middle of the twelfth century, the northernmost monastery of the Cluniac congregation (Paisley) was in Scotland near Glasgow, the southernmost (Polirone) in Italy, and the southwesternmost (Pombeiro) in Portugal. Across such a broadly dispersed region could be found monasteries of quite different status: grand and absolutely confident abbeys with a long prehistory, such as Saint-Martial in Limoges or Moissac in southwestern France, for example; grand priories that had other priories under them (some at quite a distance), such as La Charité-sur-Loire on the Loire or Saint-Martin-des-Champs (today in Paris), with important daughter houses in England (e.g., Lewes in East Sussex); and finally small cells, even the smallest, often little more than administrative posts on agricultural estates, staffed with two or three monks.⁴⁶ Altogether around seven hundred Cluniac communities existed by the first half of the twelfth century.

For all of the effort toward a certain kind of planned procedure, this diversity was also the result of contingent events centered on individual foundations, reforms, or takeovers and was thus in no way the result of anything like a linear process. Especially under Abbot Odilo, as the expansion of Cluny’s congregation crossed into northern France and after Cluny in 1027 again received a royal confirmation charter⁴⁷ for the first time in seventy-two years (not least because of the close relationship of the abbot with King Robert II), resistance suddenly broke out. It came from the ranks of the French bishops and directed itself—soon finding a satirical spokesman in bishop Adalbert of Laon—against the monastic power of Odilo, now portrayed as a king who had supposedly turned the divinely ordained order upside down.⁴⁸

But attacks like these were merely a reflection of Cluny’s attraction. It was under Odilo, in fact, that the number of Cluny’s communities doubled, in part because now even the least of the nobility might feel motivated to found a modest monastery and then hand it over to Cluny. Furthermore, Cluny was able to integrate the community of Moissac, noted above, with a network of daughter houses. The foothold in southern France opened up an entirely new dimension to the possibilities of expansion. Under Hugh I, with the support of the papacy as well as an array of regional powers both secular and ecclesiastical, Cluny expanded beyond the boundaries of France.

A certain solidarity began thereby gradually to take hold, one that by the time of the abbacy of Hugh I took the form of a legally established bond between the abbey of Cluny as head (caput) and its houses as corresponding members (membra). The new name for the organization, and certainly a proud one, was Cluniacensis ecclesia, the “Cluniac church.”⁴⁹ With respect to property law it was subject to the administrative authority (dispositio) of the abbot of Cluny, as was expressly emphasized in an 1109 charter of Pope Paschal II.⁵⁰ In the background stood the idea of a kind of enormous but “trans-local” community,⁵¹ so that in theory every monk newly accepted into a Cluniac priory made his profession at Cluny, the center, alone. This construction conformed perfectly to what had been known from the Rule and the life of Saint Benedict. His rule, too, presumed the community of a single abbey, yet Benedict had also referred allegorically to the whole world, “bathed in a single ray of sunlight,” as it had appeared to him one day in a vision.

An achievement like this had of course not come about without setbacks or problems. On many occasions powerful houses (for example, the pilgrimage monastery of Saint Gilles in Provence and the monastery of Saint Cyprian in Poitiers) turned against the prospect of joining Cluny, choosing instead to preserve their old privileges and their particular customs or to cultivate the strongest of ties with local powers and their particular interests.⁵² Nor should it be overlooked that the very structure of the congregation—divided between individual abbeys, on the one hand, and priories directly subject to Cluny, on the other—was in many respects anything but unified. An 1107 charter of Pope Paschal II, for example, differentiated precisely between a right to rule (regimen), on the one hand, which the abbot of Cluny had over its priories and which gave him the right to install and depose priors at his will, and on the other hand, Cluny’s right of arrangement (ordinatio) with respect to its abbeys, which needed only to have Cluny confirm their independently elected abbots.⁵³

The size that the congregation ultimately reached, of course, showed the power of the Cluniac model of Benedictine life. But that same size also concealed considerable points of weakness. These were notably recognizable, for example, in the fact that while the abbot of Cluny had the personal right to visitation in all of his houses, which in this respect were exempt from the power and control of the local bishop, in reality, because of the increasing distance of those houses over the course of the eleventh century, the abbot could no longer exercise that right comprehensively, even though supervision certainly remained absolutely necessary. The larger the congregation became, the more difficult it was for Cluny to use its central authority to organize its affairs.⁵⁴

Yet the task of caring for all of Christendom was one to be carried out not only through the organization of now ubiquitous monastic settlements, and not even by means of a monastic congregation the likes of which had never before been seen. There was also a need to present and spread those forms of community that, by virtue of their spiritual power, made the impact of their care for Christendom credible and that could lead other monastic communities to emulate the Cluniac way of life. The task was not limited institutionally to the Cluniac congregation. It was in fact open to all kinds of religious establishments. Cluny thus became the greatest exporter, to that point, of a monastic model.

Ordo Cluniacensis

The texts of religious rules had always provided only a framework for monastic life. In practice, daily routines had continually produced customs that either became normative for the particular circumstances of a given convent or addressed in detail matters not clearly established through the rule. These customs could be handed down from generation to generation and for the most part changed through practice, or they were written down—designated as consuetudines—in order to make available a handy set of reference points for orientation. Benedict of Aniane, as was noted, had already produced one great work of consuetudines in order to achieve his goal of sustaining proper order in the houses he sought to reform. For the Cluniacs, who themselves made use of Benedict of Aniane’s provisions, such a structured extension of the norms of their rule was not unfamiliar. Their customs of liturgical and ritual practice, of prayer, of interacting with one another in obedience and discipline, of ascesis and work, and the effort to overcome the material and the bodily aspects of their existence—all became an expression of their very specific monastic profile. They coalesced over time into a “Cluniac way of life,” an Ordo cluniacensis, one that not only was standard (albeit with many variations, given the nature of consuetudines) for their own congregation, the Cluniacensis ecclesia itself, but also, in principle, stood ready as a model for all monastic communities.

The writing down of customs⁵⁵ began in Cluny around 990 under Abbot Maiolus with the text of the later so-called Consuetudines antiquiores.⁵⁶ They concerned liturgical practice alone. A subsequent work incorporated a much broader range of material, including even policies and procedures for technical matters of administration. This was the so-called Liber tramitis (the Book of the Way),⁵⁷ whose textual foundations had been set down in the 1020s during the abbacy of Odilo with reference to the collection noted above and which was then revised, after 1033 and once again between 1050 and 1060, at the time of Abbot Hugh. At the end of the 1020s, John (a disciple of Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese⁵⁸ and reforming supporter of the abbot of Farfa) brought the first version of this collection to the Italian abbey of Farfa, where it came to serve as a new normative guide. John had first made a synoptic redaction of two versions of the text that were available at Cluny, where he had also familiarized himself with the customs by reading them with his own eyes.⁵⁹

Presumably in the 1070s, Bernard, a monk in Cluny, completed a new copy of the Cluniac customs.⁶⁰ In the midst of a controversy over proper forms of ritual that was especially unsettling to the novices, Abbot Hugh I charged Bernard to record the procedures as they had come to be actually practiced. He thus wanted to capture the “true” normative circumstance “in a single volume” and thereby to leave behind for the next generation of monks knowledge of the Cluniac way of life. To that end he made use—as he emphasized—of older records, reports of knowledgeable eyewitnesses, and earlier decrees of the abbots of Cluny, as well as his own knowledge of practice and careful observations.

A little later, perhaps shortly after 1079, Ulrich, another monk of Cluny, began to write down its customs. He did so at the request of William, reforming abbot of the community of Hirsau in the Black Forest, who wanted (as will be discussed below) to introduce them to his monastery.⁶¹ Ulrich too made use of written records, asked his fellow monks for their observations, and drew exhaustively from his own experience. What he provided was not enough, however, and Hirsau thus later sent its own monks to Cluny to be properly trained.

These writings served as a condensation, so to speak, of the Ordo cluniacensis, a kind of ready-made form that could now be distributed across broader regions. But at least as important as the written text itself were the people involved, those who learned from Cluny and then passed on or further developed its customs themselves. To note only one example: William, son of the Count of Volpiano (today in Piedmont), was a monk for thirteen years under Abbot Maiolus and then in 990 became abbot of Saint-Bénigne in Dijon, in order to reform it along Cluniac lines.⁶² He was successful, and after his community became a widely influential center of monastic spirituality and education, around the year 1000 he was called to renew the foundation of the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy. This region was an entirely new area of cultivation for monastic life. The Normans had at first left only wasteland behind them. But then, as new lords of the duchy now named after them and as baptized Christians, they quickly recognized the spiritual as well as the material, political, and military worth of monasteries and now supported them with considerable energy. Within a few generations, there had emerged across the duchy a flowering landscape of monasteries influenced by the Cluniac spirit, with outstanding theology and literature.⁶³ Notable alongside Fécamp, for example, were Bec, Caen, Évreux, and Jumièges.

After 1066, through the military and political success of Duke William in conquering England, Normandy in turn became the launching point for the expansion of Cluniac-inspired Benedictine monasticism into England. There it was possible to bring about a fundamental renewal of monastic life, since with the exception of the Anglo-Saxon abbeys of Winchester and Glastonbury,⁶⁴ the remaining monasteries of England, a mere forty in number, faced desolate circumstances. In particular, they no longer served the key interest of political unification, since their loyalty to their new overlord was suspect. The leader of the effort both to coordinate reform (a reform that the Normans now strictly enforced) and to found new monasteries was the highly learned Lanfranc (1010–1089), who had come originally from Pavia and who had been prior of the monasteries of Bec and of Saint-Étienne in Caen.⁶⁵ William the Conqueror, now as king of England, had elevated Lanfranc to archbishop of Canterbury. Among his many accomplishments, he crafted from a range of surviving sources a normative text entitled the Decreta Lanfranci. It was intended as a guide for his monks in the cathedral chapter of Canterbury, but in its strictness it came to serve as a model for all the monasteries of England.⁶⁶ In the same years the Normans also promoted the cultivation of a comparable Benedictine landscape in the lands they had conquered across southern Italy.⁶⁷

In 1003 William of Volpiano founded a monastery of his own in Piedmont, Fruttuaria, for which he received (through privileges of King Arduin of Ivrea and Pope John XVIII) the right both freely to elect an abbot and to choose an advocate, as well as the right to choose the consecrating bishop. The monastery was handed over to the papacy and was thereby exempt from the supervising authority of the local bishop. It was soon to be a community of very broad influence.⁶⁸

In all three of the abbeys noted here, a way of life was introduced that was built on the foundations of the customs of Cluny. They thereby not only came to enjoy great renown and to carry the banner of Cluny’s aims and influence but also to spread their way of life still further by passing it along to other monasteries. For many years between 1012 and 1031, for example, with great influence on the landscape of monasteries in the German Empire, William also served as leader of the abbey of Gorze in Metz. The customs of Fruttuaria came to influence the reform network of the communities of Siegburg and Saint Blaise.⁶⁹

These monasteries thus followed the Ordo cluniacensis in a way that was mediated by and adapted to their circumstances, but they were not part of the Cluniacensis ecclesia. The Cluniac idea of a life consecrated to God was larger than its institutional concentration in a legally defined alliance of monasteries. Yet that concentration itself was proof of the power of the ideal.

The breadth of the ideal also encompassed the lives of women consecrated to God. As is recorded in his Vita,⁷⁰ Abbot Hugh felt obligated to guide Cluny as the ship of Peter (the usual metaphor for the whole church), just as Noah had steered the ark through the flooded world—and in that spirit he believed that God had called him to make room for both sexes. Thus in 1055, for the first time in Cluny’s history, a women’s monastery was founded, established as a priory in Marcigny, in Semur, southwest of Cluny, with which the women enjoyed community of property.⁷¹ Under the leadership of a prioress, with the spiritual and administrative assistance of two priors, ninety-nine noble women—with Mary as the hundredth—were to live in strict enclosure, their lives filled with prayer and contemplation. Along with Mary and Martin of Tours, the patronage of the community was held by Saint Agnes, oldest of the martyrs and patroness of Rome—thereby constructing a meaningful parallel to Cluny’s patronage under Peter and Paul as Roman princes of the apostles.

Many members of the female branches of Hugh’s family, the counts of Semur, entered Marcigny, including his mother, three sisters, and two nieces. From the beginning their presence nurtured the community’s powerful appeal and also established it on a firm financial foundation. As further noble women from distant regions also became members of the community, handing over the property they held in their homelands, already before the end of the eleventh century sub-priories had emerged that were subject to Marcigny and that spread from France to modern Belgium, Castille, England, and Italy.⁷² Because of the institutional unity of Marcigny and the abbey of Cluny, there was no need to make a distinct confederation of these women’s monasteries.

Church for the World

Cluny impressed contemporaries beyond all measure. Pope Urban II, himself once prior of the abbey, described the Cluniacs in 1097 in the words of Matthew 5:14 spoken to the apostles, as the “light of the world,” a place that, he emphasized, lit up the earth like a second sun. Urban spoke here not of cloistered retreat from the world but rather of something typically Cluniac and tied back to the community of the first apostles in Jerusalem: the ideal of reaching out into the world, in order to make it “bright and new.”⁷³

And yet Cluny could only shine out into the world because it lived the ideal that inspired it inwardly, in the cloister of contemplative separation from the world. And in order to render God’s greatness and magnificence visible to those on earth, Cluny praised these as well in all magnificence, in its celebration of the Eucharist,⁷⁴ in the liturgy, in the common prayer life of the community, and in the love of neighbor. This daily spiritual action in turn slowly took on—as did everything in Cluny, in principle—enormous dimensions, forcing certain aspects of monastic life (manual labor, for example) to retreat into the background.⁷⁵

The historian Rudolf Glaber (d. 1047), who dedicated his work to Abbot Odilo, outlined Cluny’s spiritual life by way of a measure that was in his day especially impressive: the ability to drive away demons: “Know that of all monasteries in the Latin world Cluny’s power to free souls from the power of demons is the strongest. The frequency of the performance of the Mass is so powerful there that hardly a day goes by on which their sacred business does not tear souls away from the power of evil spirits. . . . It was in fact the custom of that monastery, as we ourselves have seen, by virtue of the great number of (priest-) monks, to celebrate Mass continuously, from the first light of day all the way through breakfast.”⁷⁶

Cluny also impressed Peter Damian (to note another example), who stayed at Cluny as a papal legate in 1062. Although given to a very different understanding of monastic life, Peter still deeply admired “the order of the holy way of life” that was inspired by the “teaching authority of the Holy Spirit” (sancti Spiritus magisterium) as it was found at Cluny. In fact, he said that the duration of the spiritual work of the community and its liturgy was so long that hardly half an hour a day remained as time for the brothers for an ordinary conversation. And even this was a good thing, because such long and disciplined exercise shored up the frailty of the lax and weak brothers and so deprived them of the occasion for lapses that they could hardly have sinned even if they wanted to. Yet care was taken to guard against the instability of the frail, Damian noted, as long as the demands of the community’s continuously practiced way of life laid claim to every hour of the day and night.⁷⁷ Under Abbot Hugh I, in theory every monk in the Cluniac church had to pray 215 psalms daily, with the greatest of discipline, even though the Rule of Saint Benedict prescribed only thirty-seven.

At the many altars of the churches, passed by long processions of singing and praying monks, the priests who celebrated the Masses constantly changed. In each monastery the monks tirelessly remembered their own dead as well as their deceased benefactors and allies, working through the long lists noted above, calendar entry by calendar entry. Moreover, Abbot Odilo then added a feast for all of the deceased souls in the world on November 2, a feast still celebrated today. The greatness of the Christian faith could also be shown through compassion for the needy, however, and God could thereby also be praised. Hundreds, at times thousands, of the poor were cared for daily by the abbey of Cluny. One trustworthy source reveals that on one occasion some 250 sides of bacon were provided for those who were starving.⁷⁸ All was worship: liturgy, psalmody, and love of neighbor.

Under Hugh I the number of monks at the abbey of Cluny had climbed to 300. To praise God in such numbers required space, and thus the building of a new church began in 1088. It was to be the third, a monumental church some 613 feet long with a 252-foot transept, the largest sacred building in all of Western Christendom.⁷⁹ It was later seen as a wonder of the world, and at the same time it meant much more: it was the tangible symbol of the Temple of the Lord, whose precisely cut stones, in keeping with the allegory of the first letter of Peter, represented monastic community itself.⁸⁰

Already around the year 1000 the Cluniacs had begun to embrace with special intensity the cult of Mary in the form of elaborately staged festivals, the composition of prayers, and so on. In Mary the monks saw a mirror of their own virginity, and they also believed themselves to draw from its heavenly purity their own exceptional strength, one that could elevate them to a special status between humans and angels. It was a model possessed of enormous political power. It offered a transcendent justification for the claim that Christendom should be led by those who were the most pure.⁸¹ To bear spiritual responsibility for making the world “bright and new” created a consciousness that the true leadership of the church was to be found in monastic life, with monks as a Christian elite possessed of a virtuosity of faith—a consciousness that was not always easy to reconcile with the hierarchical models of the secular clergy and the institutional church.⁸²

Despite such a claim to apostolic authority, or perhaps precisely because of it, the powerful of the world flocked to Cluny: well into the twelfth century, a long series of popes supported the Cluniacs.⁸³ At the Lateran Synod of 1080, Gregory VII dramatically acknowledged that thanks to God’s mercy the monks of Cluny had surpassed all in their service to God and their spiritual zeal.⁸⁴ In 1095 Pope Urban II had come personally to dedicate the altar of the new church while it was still under construction.⁸⁵ The abbots of Cluny enjoyed a similar affinity with the German kings and emperors, although the abbey itself lay beyond their borders.

The ruined church of Cluny—even in its side towers—still bears witness to the former majesty of the monastic life that was active there.

These secular rulers, by virtue of their universal claims to spiritual power and governance, ranked alongside the popes,⁸⁶ and the head of the Cluniacs, by virtue of his religious status, was on equal footing with them. From the time of Otto I, their close relationship remained unbroken.⁸⁷ It was shaped by counsel, spiritual encouragement, intercession, and gifts, as well as other aspects: the probable confraternal bond with Emperor Henry II (d. 1024), or in any case his sending an imperial globus cruciger, a scepter and crown to the abbey, the acceptance of Henry III (d. 1056) into the abbey’s rounds of liturgical memory, and Hugh I’s status as godparent of Henry IV. Hugh then proved himself to be the king’s accessible and intercessory ally through all the dangers of the Investiture struggle, and Hugh’s sovereignty also allowed him both to stay in contact with Henry and to have liturgical prayers said for the emperor at Cluny long after he had been excommunicated by the pope.

In the thick of events, in 1077, as Abbot Hugh sat between Henry IV and Gregory VII, as it were,⁸⁸ the symbolism of that moment revealed a fundamental shift. The changes of the era of the Investiture struggle meant that Cluny’s time would soon be over.⁸⁹ As has been noted, Cluny understood itself as ecclesia, as a monastic church that encompassed all of Christendom and that aimed to make all the world “bright and new.” The division of that world into clergy and laity robbed Cluny of the foundation of its impact. And within a Roman church that had now begun slowly to transform itself into an institution claiming to be the only mediator of salvation, there could be no other “light of the world” with claims to its own apostolic validity.

Urban II’s dictum of 1097 was to be one of the last great conferrals of honor before Cluny’s decline. It is true that soon afterward, in 1119, yet another pope, Gelasius II, sought out Cluny in order to die there and that his successor Calixtus II was elected there.⁹⁰ But deeply rooted structures change only slowly. At times the pace quickens, at times it slows—as was revealed at Cluny in dramatic fashion. An abbatial schism erupted there in 1122 when Abbot Pons, successor of Hugh I, was deposed and replaced by the aged Hugh II, who died after only three months.⁹¹ Peter, known as the Venerable (Venerabilis), followed him (1122–1156). Pons contested the affair but was in the end taken prisoner by the papacy in 1126. Peter proved to be yet another distinguished abbot.⁹² Above all he worked to reform Cluny, and not without success, as he rearranged its financial and administrative affairs,⁹³ wrote a book of miracles for the spiritual instruction of his monks,⁹⁴ and produced a comprehensive collection of statutes.⁹⁵

Moreover, Peter too embraced a certain sense of responsibility for all of Christendom. He was impressed by the success of the First Crusade, and he had the Koran translated with the aim of bringing the “Sect of Mohammed” back into the Christian fold, thereby breaking with a centuries-old tradition of ignorance and prejudice.⁹⁶ Finally, he also possessed the pastoral magnanimity and the confidence—or perhaps simply the breadth of vision—in 1141 to give refuge at Cluny to a theologian and philosopher whom the church had recently condemned as a heretic: Peter Abelard, who in hindsight came to be seen as the most progressive thinker of his era.⁹⁷ When Peter the Venerable died in 1156, Cluny found no successor of his caliber.

Pope Urban II consecrates the altar of the new abbey church of Cluny. Miniature from the twelfth century.

Never before, and never after, was the monastic way of life so free and independent as in the great age of Cluny, when it needed only its own power to work for the benefit of all Christendom. But that time now came to an end. Monastic life had been able to become “Cluny” because, on the one hand, it was independent of the powers of the world (even as it understood how to integrate those powers into its own purposes), and on the other hand, because it communicated by every possible means that it had thereby won the power to serve exclusively the glory and the honor of the highest Lord of Christendom, wholly undisturbed by anyone in this world. Its monks served God alone.

Monastic Life in Service of King and Nobility, Pope and Bishop

The German kingdom did not provide fertile ground for Cluny’s expansion. Cluniac monasteries were found only in lower and upper Lotharingia, in Alsace, and in the former kingdom of Burgundy, which from 1033 had been ruled through a personal union with the German king.⁹⁸ Cluny’s settlements were thus in most cases found in regions that were distant from any royal power. The special agreement that the abbots of Cluny had long cultivated with the German kings (all of whom, from Otto I in the tenth century to Lothar III in the twelfth, had also been emperors) reflected Cluny’s place in the universal order of salvation. On the institutional level of monastic settlements, Cluny’s freedom was not to be confused with the freedom of the imperial monastery described above—neither with respect to the relationship with the king himself nor with respect to the ties inherent within that relationship to the imperial bishops, who themselves consistently sought to expand their power as ecclesiastical princes with the help of additional monasteries inherited through royal ties.⁹⁹ In that era, the giving of imperial monasteries to bishops wove itself like a chain throughout royal policy. They might be conferred as property or as fiefs, but in both cases the conferral was a flagrant defiance of the decree of 951 noted above.

Abbot Hugh I of Cluny in Canossa, with Emperor Henry IV before him and Mathilda of Canossa to the right. Manuscript illumination, before 1144.

Henry II, who reigned as the last Ottonian king from 1002 to 1024, was deeply devoted to Saint Benedict, and in his early years, while at the abbey of Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, he had been able to experience monastic life lived perfectly according to the principles of Benedict’s Rule. He advanced an intentional monastic policy whose aim was a “program of formation”¹⁰⁰ according to the Rule, one that led to a strengthening of monasticism under royal authority and that served the stability of the empire. Henry supported already-established imperial monasteries, tore older ones away from the power of bishops and especially of dukes, and established them with the privileges of royal freedom. Yet he also rid himself, so to speak, of seventeen weaker imperial monasteries by giving them to the bishops, thereby improving the balance sheet of the imperial monasteries.¹⁰¹

Under the Salian Henry III,¹⁰² king from 1039 to 1056, imperial monasteries were no longer used as discretionary instruments within a royal policy of distribution. Rather, they came to be seen, in imitation of the Carolingian model, as places serving something larger than the king’s personal utility—namely, the reputation and stability of the realm. Yet under Henry III, bishops nevertheless made notable attempts to bring imperial monasteries under their influence, particularly coveting Benediktbeurn, Disentis, and Fulda. The monasteries involved, however, assertively fended off these efforts, increasingly recognizing the attraction of royal liberty, especially in view of the ever stronger pull of episcopal greed. In 1040, for example, Henry III even granted to the abbey of Pfäfer near St. Gall a privilege of royal liberty (libertas regia) set out in almost Cluniac terms: the abbey was to be free from any external and unjustified power (potestas), and it was not to be given away by its heirs. Of course the difference from Cluny did not concern the potestas of the king himself, since he himself was the source of the libertas.

In 1095, however, Henry III’s son and successor Henry IV handed Pfäfer over to the bishopric of Basel.¹⁰³ For him, imperial monasteries had once again become an asset to be disposed of at will. In 1065, for example, in the face of heavy resistance from those concerned, he had already handed over twelve at once to both spiritual and worldly magnates, thereby shoring up his still notably weak position. Yet over the course of his reign, from 1065 to 1105, the structural basis of monastic life in the German realm—and, in view of the flare-ups of the Investiture struggle, not only these—began to shift fundamentally.

At Gorze, things had already fallen quiet around the end of the tenth century.¹⁰⁴ Other centers of reform had meanwhile been active and had begun to grow in importance—for example, the abbey of Niederaltaich on the Donau under Abbot Godehard (960–1038), later bishop of Hildesheim,¹⁰⁵ and the community of Saint Maximin¹⁰⁶ in Trier, influenced by Gorze. Maximin’s advocate was Count Siegfried of Luxembourg, whose support bolstered the community’s reforming power. With Siegfried’s consent, Bishop Wolfgang of Regensburg, who had spent a certain amount of time in Trier, arranged in 974 to have the remarkably energetic monk Rambold come from Saint Maximin to Saint Emmeram, thereby ensuring that the latter house would become one of the most important spiritual and intellectual centers in Bavaria. The daughter of the count, Kunigunde, married Henry II (the later German king) shortly before 1000 and was therefore able to strengthen the bonds between Maximin and Emmeram still further.¹⁰⁷

Yet soon Gorze, a monastery that had remained subject to the bishop of Metz, itself experienced a period of renewal. Between 1012 and 1031, at the instigation of the bishop of Metz, the former Cluniac monk William of Volpiano¹⁰⁸ took over the leadership of that community. The customs of his home community of Fruttuaria thus came into force in Gorze, and Cluny became an influence on Gorze, however indirectly and faintly.¹⁰⁹ The reform so reawakened Gorze’s reputation that in the following decades it was able to install abbots in many episcopal monasteries, some as far away as Kremsmünster in the east.¹¹⁰

Still another network of reforming monasteries established by a bishop, one that also spread over wide stretches of the empire, was established in these years. Archbishop Anno II of Cologne (1056–1075), one of the most prominent figures among the princes of the imperial church in his era,¹¹¹ founded the abbey of Siegburg near Cologne in 1064. There he established the customs of Fruttuaria, now modified in certain respects so as to render them more rigorous. The reforming aims that thereby emerged were shaped by the tightest of bonds between the power of the lord bishop and his monastery, which was governed strictly by the Rule of Saint Benedict. This was a matter of a “purely episcopal reform,”¹¹² one in which any supposed reverence toward the papacy, possibly mediated by Cluniac influence, played almost no role. And yet Cluny’s characteristic right of the free election of abbots, so decisive for a monastery’s right to self-determination, was not at all restricted.

Also of concern here—thoroughly in keeping with Cluniac traditions but now adapted to the interests of episcopal power—was how best to limit the possibilities of noble interference, insofar as the so-often-powerful position of the monastery’s advocate was weakened. That office was now to be conferred by the archbishop only with the consent of the abbot, so that the procedure would ultimately ensure a free abbatial election. Under the aegis of its episcopal owner (at first in the person of Anno II), Siegburg became the center of a widespread monastic reform, one that spread far beyond the archdiocese of Cologne to exert its influence as far as (among others) Thuringia (Saalfeld) and Bavaria, even though these monasteries failed to form a comprehensive and legally established congregation. Rather, groups began to form around bonds of affiliation, including many female monasteries,¹¹³ organized according to the principle of mother houses and cells (called “Propsteien”), as was the case in 1071, with Saalfeld’s women’s monasteries at Coburg and Probstzella.

Alongside these developments, which took shape under the direction of the imperial bishops, who ultimately thereby strengthened their position over against the king, a fundamental shift also took place in the dynamics surrounding the nobility’s founding of monasteries. It had been customary for nobility who wanted to secure the greatest possible protection for a community they had endowed to transfer it to the king. In 1039/40 the last such act for some time took place when Count Adalbert of Ebersberg sought to secure the freedom of an imperial monastery for his foundation there.¹¹⁴ As part of a process of emancipation from royal power, but surely also because of growing skepticism about the durability of this kind of liberty, noble founders of new monasteries increasingly turned to the one who now claimed to represent the proper ordering of the world: the pope. Another form of Benedictine life, one entirely new for Germany, soon emerged from this relationship.

On the basis of the more recent model of reform advanced from Gorze, the abbey of Hirsau¹¹⁵ in the northern Black Forest was re-founded in 1059 by Count Adalbert II of Calw. Thereafter, Abbot William (1069–1091), who had come to the community from Saint Emmeram, established a Cluniac way of life through a modified adaptation of the customs of the Burgundian abbey. The Cluniac monk Ulrich had written these customs down explicitly for this purpose, and they later informed the so-called Constitutiones Hirsaugienses.¹¹⁶ At the center of this text, which outlined the daily life of the monastery in every detail, was a strict liturgical regimen, as in Cluny. Even the clothing was adapted from Cluny.

One divergence in Ulrich’s Constitutiones, however, was the introduction of the so-called conversi, the fratres barbati, who as lay brothers were exclusively responsible for manual labor so that the monks could be free to devote themselves entirely to their liturgical duties. In a community shaped by the ideals of the nobility, the practice was justified by the assertion that the “true crown of the monk is not the ‘work of the hands [labor manuum]’ but ‘sacred service at the holy altar [sanctum sacri altaris officium].’”¹¹⁷ Moreover the monks of Hirsau renounced the acceptance of children handed over to the monastery by their parents (so-called oblates);¹¹⁸ the community wanted mature men in their ranks, those who had entered by virtue of a fully free decision. From the beginning women had also been a part of monastic life at Hirsau. Some ten years after Abbot William became abbot, the women’s community established at Hirsau relocated to the somewhat more distant community of Kentheim.¹¹⁹

From 1079 on, Hirsau grew to become the center of a broad, independent reform movement led overwhelmingly by the nobility. It soon encompassed more than 120 monasteries, above all in the southern regions of the German kingdom but also in the regions around the Weser and the Saale. The Hirsau reform also spread to include women’s vita religiosa, as witnessed by a number of foundations including many double monasteries¹²⁰—for example, the monasteries of Saint Agnes in Schaffhausen and Lippoldsberg on the Weser, founded in 1080 and 1086, respectively. The monasteries remained bound together only loosely, however, on the level of their common observance; they were unable to form a more strictly organized congregation.

Cluniac influence notwithstanding, Hirsau was strongly shaped by the ideals of a reforming papacy caught in the Investiture struggle. When Hirsau’s new founder, Count Adalbert II of Calw, transferred it not to the king but to the Holy See (traditio Romana), it stood on the side of the opponents of Henry IV. In that position it was able to foster a certain interweaving both of efforts at emancipation and of movements of piety among the nobility (to the extent that it offered a form of monastic life independent from a kingship whose aims were now desacralized). Hirsau also offered—here like Cluny—an investment in a free and therefore spiritually more consequential monasticism. The latter meant in principle that a noble founder would for the most part renounce any claim to direct influence through the exercise of lordship.

Thus, concretely, already in the so-called Hirsau Formulary¹²¹ of 1075, Adalbert II had given up any claim to the monastery as his own and conferred upon it the “right of full liberty” (ius totius libertatis). This included freedom of abbatial election and the appointment of an advocate who was himself to be a member of the founder’s family—and to come from another only in the case of an unsuitable candidate. The advocate was also to have the right to exercise justice, a right conferred upon him by the king. The bishop’s rights were similarly limited: henceforth successive abbots would receive their insignia through the independent action of the monastery; the bishop could only consecrate. That this arrangement was no longer thought to be “anti-episcopal,” as one might have said with regard to the Cluniac congregation, is revealed not only in the fact that the rigid rituals of monastic self-assertion soon softened but also in that the Hirsau movement soon enjoyed the support of the reform-minded bishops themselves, such as famous figures like Otto I of Bamberg (1102–1139).¹²²

The powerful attraction of these Benedictine networks—Gorze, Siegburg, and Hirsau, to which Saint Blaise could also be added—lay in an absolute commitment to live out Christian perfection through the spiritual fulfillment of the Benedictine calling. Yet at the same time they stood, as the Bible said, as “among the people” (1 Pet 2:12), among those who across the full spectrum of their activity were woven tightly into the political and social networks of their time, through intercession both for the welfare of the realm and for their founders and supporters, as well as through the support of growing episcopal power and partisan intervention on behalf of the papacy and its reforming aims. Alongside the imperial abbeys, they advanced the old tradition of political and politicized monasteries. Cluny too involved itself at the highest levels of politics and stood in the political crossfire of the greatest powers, yet it was much more immune to daily disruptions than these monastic centers in Germany, not least because of its exceptional authority. The monasteries influenced by Gorze, Hirsau, or Siegburg, as well as the imperial abbeys, were unable to form themselves into an ecclesia like Cluny. They had therefore either to invest the greater part of their energy in protecting their economic and legal resources from the disruptive interventions of powerful worldly outsiders or always to be careful to find a protective authority that would not become an oppressor.

But the expansive power of these monasteries gave out, after a brief time, over the course of the twelfth century. They could not find the strength to maintain their leading position in the face of the new monastic foundations, which grew from quite different spiritual roots and which sought, by means of innovative forms of organization, to secure a more durable stability. Perhaps in view of the dangers to monastic existence posed by the struggle for earthly preservation, they needed to learn that it was all but impossible to realize a life completely devoted to God while remaining “among the people.” That insight is hardly pure speculation. The ancient words of Anthony, “Wherever you go, have God always before your eyes,” had never been forgotten—especially not in the one place where life could be lived according to that principle: the desert.

__________

¹ Josef Semmler, “Traditio und Königsschutz,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 45 (1959): 1–34, here 25–33; Hubertus Seibert, “Libertas und Reichsabtei,” in Die Salier und das Reich, vol. 2, Die Reichskirche in der Salierzeit, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991), 503–69, here 505–6.

² MGH, Concilia 6.84.

³ Michel Parisse, “Die Frauenstifte und Frauenklöster in Sachsen vom 10. bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Weinfurter, Die Salier und das Reich, 465–501.

⁴ See chap. 1, p. 16.

⁵ Gerd Althoff, “Ottonische Frauengemeinschaften im Spannungsfeld von Kloster und Welt,” in Essen und die sächsischen Frauenstifte im Frühmittelalter, ed. Jan Gerchow and Thomas Schilp (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 29–44.

⁶ On the following, see Egon Boshof, “Klöster und Bischof in Lotharingien,” in Monastische Reformen im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert, ed. Raymund Kottje and Helmut Maurer (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989), 197–245; Josef Semmler, “Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform im 10. Jahrhundert,” in Kottje and Maurer, Monastische Reformen, 22–77; Elmar Hochholzer, “Die lothringische (Gorzer) Reform,” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999), 45–87. In lower Lotharingia the Benedictine abbey of Brogne—founded in 914 by Gerard of Brogne—emerged as another important center of reform. See Steven Vanderputten, “Gérard de Brogne en Flandre. État de la question sur les réformes monastiques du X^e siècle,” Revue du Nord 92 (2010): 271–97.

⁷ Michel Parisse and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., L’abbaye de Gorze au X^e siècle (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993).

⁸ Parisse, “Der Anteil der lothringischen Benediktinerinnen an der monastischen Bewegung des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts,” in Religiöse Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 83–97; 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: LIT, 2011), 275–327, here 279–82.

⁹ Here and above all for a view of women’s communities see Katrinette Bodarwé, “Eine Männerregel für Frauen. Die Adaption der Benediktsregel im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert,” in Melville and Müller, Female vita religiosa, 235–72, here 246–51.

¹⁰ Boshof, “Klöster und Bischof,” 225–45; Hochholzer, “Die lothringische (Gorzer) Reform,” 55–66.

¹¹ Thomas Symons, “Regularis Concordia: History and Derivation,” in Tenth-Century Studies, ed. David Parsons (London: Phillimore, 1975), 37–59, 214–17; Semmler, “Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform im 10. Jahrhundert,” 44–50.

¹² Bull of Urban II from 1097, in Bullarium sacri ordinis Cluniacensis, ed. Pierre Symon (Lyon, 1680), 30; Joachim Wollasch, Cluny—“Licht der Welt.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der klösterlichen Gemeinschaft (Düsseldorf and Zurich: Artemis & Winkler, 1996), 12–13.

¹³ On these beginnings in the context of the monastic life of the time, see Giles Constable, “Cluny in the Monastic World of the Tenth Century,” in The Abbey of Cluny, ed. Giles Constable (Berlin: LIT, 2010), 43–77.

¹⁴ Wollasch, Cluny, 19–29.

¹⁵ Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel, Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, 6 vols. (Paris, 1876–1903; re-ed. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1974); here vol. 1, no. 112, with citations following.

¹⁶ Karl Ferdinand Werner, Die Ursprünge Frankreichs bis zum Jahr 1000 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989), 464–70.

¹⁷ Harald Zimmermann, Das dunkle Jahrhundert. Ein historisches Porträt (Graz: Styria, 1971).

¹⁸ For a comprehensive overview of the historical development of Cluny, see Guy de Valous, Le monachisme clunisien des origines au XV^e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1970); Marcel Pacaut, L’ordre de Cluny (909–1789) (Paris: de Boccard, 1986); Wollasch, Cluny; Gert Melville, “Cluny und das französische Königtum. Von ‘Freiheit ohne Schutz’ zu ‘Schutz ohne Freiheit,’” in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable, et al. (Münster: LIT, 1998), 405–68; Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Odon Hurel and Denyse Riche, Cluny. De l’abbaye à l’ordre clunisien. X^e–XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).

¹⁹ 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: LIT, 2005), 55–72.

²⁰ Semmler, “Das Erbe der karolingischen Klosterreform,” 30–33, 74–77; Wollasch, Cluny, 30–36.

²¹ See p. 39.

²² Johannes Fechter, Cluny, Adel und Volk (910–1156) (Stuttgart: Schwedtner, 1966).

²³ Theodor Schieffer, “Cluny und der Investiturstreit,” in Cluny, Beiträge zu Gestalt und Wirkung der Cluniazensischen Reform, ed. Helmut Richter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 226–54, here 233.

²⁴ Georges Duby, La société aux XI^e et XII^e siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1971; repr. Paris: Armand Colin, 1982), 173–201.

²⁵ Dietrich W. Poeck, “Laienbegräbnisse in Cluny,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 15 (1981): 68–179.

²⁶ Fechter, Cluny, Adel und Volk, 26; Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Dominique Iogna-Prat, ed., Cluny: les moines et la société au premier âge féodal (Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2013).

²⁷ Bernard and Bruel, Recueil des chartes, no. 285; Melville, “Cluny und das französische Königtum,” 413.

²⁸ Symon, Bullarium, 1–2; Barbara Rosenwein, “Cluny’s Immunities in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. Images and Narratives,” in Constable, et al., Die Cluniazenser, 133–63, here 135–39.

²⁹ Cited from Wollasch, Cluny, 50.

³⁰ On the following, see Wollasch, Cluny, 43–48.

³¹ Joachim Wollasch, “Mönchtum, Königtum, Adel und Klöster im Berry während des 10. Jahrhunderts,” in Neue Forschungen über Cluny und die Cluniacenser, ed. Gerd Tellenbach (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1959), 17–165.

³² Wollasch, Cluny, 58–60.

³³ Poeck, Cluniacensis Ecclesia, 216.

³⁴ Poeck, Cluniacensis Ecclesia, 216.

³⁵ On precursors, see Egon Boshof, “Traditio Romana und Papstschutz im 9. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur vorcluniazensischen libertas,” in Rechtsgeschichtlich-diplomatische Studien zu frühmittelalterlichen Papsturkunden, ed. Egon Boshof and Heinz Wolter (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1976), 1–100.

³⁶ Symon, Bullarium, 6.

³⁷ Joachim Wollasch, “Die mittelalterliche Lebensform der Verbrüderung,” in Memoria. Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 215–32, here 221–22.

³⁸ Symon, Bullarium.

³⁹ Georg Schreiber, Kurie und Kloster im 12. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Enke, 1910), 1:75–78; Gaston Letonnelier, L’abbaye exempte de Cluny et le Saint-Siège (Paris: Picard, 1923); Jörg Oberste, “Contra prelatos qui gravant loca et personas Ordinis. Bischöfe und Cluniazenser im Zeitalter von Krisen und Reformen (12./13. Jahrhundert),” in Constable et al., Die Cluniazenser, 349–92, here 353–54.

⁴⁰ Adriaan H. Bredero, Christenheit und Christentum im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 90–108.

⁴¹ Symon, Bullarium, 6–7.

⁴² Symon, Bullarium, 10–11.

⁴³ Imprecatio beati Hugonis abbatis, ed. M. Marrier and A. Duchesne (Paris, 1614), col. 495. On the spread of the congregation under Hugh I, see Armin Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny (1049–1109) (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1993), 135–240.

⁴⁴ Joachim Wollasch, “Totengedenken im Reformmönchtum,” in Monastische Reformen, ed. Kottje and Maurer, 147–66, here 161–65.

⁴⁵ Wollasch, Cluny, 130.

⁴⁶ On the inner structure of the Cluniac congregation, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, “Cluny comme ‘système ecclesial,’” in Constable et al., Die Cluniazenser, 13–92; Poeck, Cluniacensis Ecclesia.

⁴⁷ Melville, “Cluny und das französische Königtum,” 416.

⁴⁸ Wollasch, Cluny, 133–37.

⁴⁹ See Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion.

⁵⁰ Symon, Bullarium, 36–37, here 36.

⁵¹ Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten und die Entstehung des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Barbarossa und die Prämonstratenser (Göppingen: Gesellschaft für staufische Geschichte, 1989), 67–100, here 74.

⁵² Poeck, Cluniacensis Ecclesia, 84–128.

⁵³ Symon, Bullarium, 34–35.

⁵⁴ Giles Constable, “Cluniac Administration and Administrators in the Twelfth Century,” in Constable, The Abbey of Cluny, 131–41.

⁵⁵ 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 (hereafter Customs), ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 29–66; Gert Melville, “Action, Text, and Validity: On Re-examining Cluny’s Consuetudines and Statutes,” in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 67–83.

⁵⁶ Consuetudines Cluniacensium antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis, ed. Kassius Hallinger, CCM 7.2 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1983).

⁵⁷ Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, ed. Peter Dinter, CCM 10 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1980); prologue newly edited in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 319–27.

⁵⁸ See p. 92.

⁵⁹ Susan Boynton, “Uses of the ‘Liber Tramitis’ at the Abbey of Farfa,” in Studies in Medieval Chant and Liturgy in Honor of David Hiley, ed. Terence Bailey and Lásló Dobszay (Ottawa: Institute for Musicology, 2007), 87–104.

⁶⁰ Bernhard, “Ordo Cluniacensis,” in M. Herrgott, ed., Vetus disciplina monastica (Paris, 1726), 133–364; Joachim Wollasch, “Zur Verschriftlichung der klösterlichen Lebensgewohnheiten unter Abt Hugo von Cluny,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 27 (1993): 317–49, here 339–40; Anselme Davril, “Coutumiers directifs et coutumiers descriptifs d’Ulrich à Bernard de Cluny,” in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 23–28. On the contested date of Bernard’s work (as well as that of Ulrich following), see Isabelle Cochelin, “Évolution des coutumiers monastiques,” in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 52–62.

⁶¹ Udalrici Consuetudines Cluniacenses, PL 149:635–778. Dedicatory letter and prologue ed. after MS Paris, Bibl. Nationale de France, lat. 18353 (II), fol. 1^r–3^r, in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 329–47; Burkhardt Tutsch, Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Consuetudines Ulrichs von Cluny (Münster: LIT, 1998). Isabelle Cochelin, “Customaries as Inspirational Sources. Appendix: The Relation between the Last Cluniac Customaries, Udal and Bern,” in Consuetudines et regulae: Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. Carolyn M. Malone and Clark Maines (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 27–72.

⁶² On the following, see Neithard Bulst, Untersuchungen zu den Klosterreformen Wilhelms von Dijon, 962–1031 (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1973).

⁶³ Geneviève Nortier, Les bibliothèques médiévales des abbayes bénédictines de Normandie (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1971).

⁶⁴ Stephan Albrecht, Die Inszenierung der Vergangenheit im Mittelalter (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003), 20–42.

⁶⁵ Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

⁶⁶ “Decreta Lanfranci,” ed. David Knowles et al., in Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, vol. 3 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1967).

⁶⁷ Hubert Houben, Die Abtei Venosa und das Mönchtum im normannisch-staufischen Süditalien (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).

⁶⁸ Mariano Dell’Omo, “L’abbazia medievale di Fruttuaria e i centri della Riforma fruttuariense,” Monastica 5 (1985): 185–201.

⁶⁹ Monica Sinderhauf, “Die Reform von St. Blasien,” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999), 125–40; Stefan Weinfurter, “St. Blasien—seine Frühzeit und das Aufblühen in der jungcluniazensischen Klosterreform,” in Macht des Wortes, ed. Holger Kempkens et al. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009), 1:195–202.

⁷⁰ Wollasch, Cluny, 152; Iogna-Prat, “Cluny comme ‘système ecclesial,’” 13–92, here 37–38.

⁷¹ Else Marie Wischermann, Marcigny-Sur-Loire (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986).

⁷² Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis,” 275–327, here 287–91. On one exemplary region, see Giancarlo Andenna, “Sanctimoniales Cluniacenses”: Studi sui monasteri femminili di Cluny e sulla loro legislazione in Lombardia (XI–XV secolo) (Münster: LIT, 2005).

⁷³ Wollasch, Cluny, 13.

⁷⁴ Angenendt, Charisma und Eucharistie.

⁷⁵ With critical observations, see Jean Leclercq, “Zur Geschichte des Lebens in Cluny,” in Cluny, ed. Richter, 254–318.

⁷⁶ Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque V.13, in Rodulfi Glabri Historiarum libri quinque; Rodulfus Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, ed. Neithard Bulst, trans. John France and Paul Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 234–36; cited from Wollasch, Cluny, 121.

⁷⁷ Petrus Damiani, Epistola 5 (to the Cluniacs), PL 144:378–86; Philibert Schmitz, “La liturgie de Cluny,” in Spiritualità Cluniacense, 12–15 ottobre 1958 (Todi: Presso l’Accademia tudertina, 1960), 85–99. In English, see the translations of Owen J. Blum and Irven M. Resnick: Peter Damian, Letters, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989–2005).

⁷⁸ Wollasch, Cluny, 118.

⁷⁹ Kenneth John Conant, Cluny. Les églises et la maison du chef d’ordre (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1968).

⁸⁰ Gilo, “Vita sancti Hugonis abbatis,” in Two Studies in Cluniac History (1049–1126), ed. Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, Studi Gregoriani 11 (1972): 90.

⁸¹ Dominique Iogna-Prat, “Politische Aspekte der Marienverehrung in Cluny um das Jahr 1000,” in Maria in der Welt, ed. Claudia Opitz et al. (Zürich: Chronos, 1993), 243–51.

⁸² On Cluny’s ecclesiology, see Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 99–261.

⁸³ Neiske, “Charismatischer Abt,” 55–72.

⁸⁴ On the political context of this eulogy, see Armin Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny, 109.

⁸⁵ Wollasch, Cluny, 188–90.

⁸⁶ Schieffer, “Cluny und der Investiturstreit,” 235–37.

⁸⁷ Sébastien Barret, “Cluny et les Ottoniens,” in Ottone III e Romualdo di Ravenna (Negarine di S. Pietro in Cariano [Verona]: Il segno dei Gabrielli Ed., 2003), 179–213.

⁸⁸ Kohnle, Abt Hugo von Cluny, 110–15.

⁸⁹ Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Schieffer, “Cluny und der Investiturstreit,” 250–53.

⁹⁰ Wollasch, Cluny, 196.

⁹¹ Adriaan Bredero, “A propos de l’autorité de Pons de Melgueil et de Pierre le Vénérable dans l’ordre de Cluny,” in Adriaan Bredero, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle (Amsterdam/Maarsen: APA - Holland University Press, 1985), 95–113; Joachim Wollasch, “Das Schisma des Abtes Pontius von Cluny,” Francia 23 (1996): 31–52.

⁹² Giles Constable and James Kritzeck, eds., Petrus Venerabilis, 1156–1956 (Rome: Pontificum Institutum S. Anselmi, 1956); Jean-Pierre Torrell, Pierre le Vénérable et sa vision du monde (Leuven: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1986).

⁹³ Constable, “Cluniac Administration.”

⁹⁴ Petri Cluniacensis abbatis de miraculis libri duo, ed. Denise Bouthillier, CCCM 83 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988).

⁹⁵ “The Statutes of Peter the Venerable,” ed. Giles Constable, in Consuetudines Benedictinae Variae, CCM 6 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1975), 19–106; Melville, “Action, Text, and Validity,” 67–83.

⁹⁶ Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 323–57.

⁹⁷ In this regard it should not be forgotten that Abelard himself wrote a rule for Heloise and her Paraclete. See Peter von Moos, “Abaelard, Heloise und ihr Paraklet. Ein Kloster nach Maß, zugleich eine Streitschrift gegen die ewige Wiederkehr hermeneutischer Naivität,” in Peter von Moos, Abaelard und Heloise. Gesammelte Studien zum Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 2005), 1:233–301.

⁹⁸ Armin Kohnle, “Cluniazenserklöster und ihre Stifter in Deutschland, der Schweiz und im Elsaß,” in Constable et al., Die Cluniazenser, 469–84; Florian Lamke, Cluniazenser am Oberrhein (Munich: Alber, 2009); Steven Vanderputten, Reform, Conflict, and the Shaping of Corporate Identities: Collected Studies on Benedictine Monasticism in Medieval Flanders, c. 1050–c. 1150 (Berlin: LIT, 2013).

⁹⁹ On the following discussion of imperial monasteries, see Seibert, “Libertas und Reichsabtei,” 503–69.

¹⁰⁰ Stefan Weinfurter, Heinrich II. Herrscher am Ende der Zeiten (Regensburg: Pustet, 2002), 178.

¹⁰¹ Weinfurter, Heinrich II, 168–85.

¹⁰² Seibert, “Libertas und Reichsabtei,” 524–35.

¹⁰³ Seibert, “Libertas und Reichsabtei,” 535–67.

¹⁰⁴ See pp. 52–54.

¹⁰⁵ Christel Jung, “L’abbaye de Niederaltaich, centre de réforme monastique au X^e et XI^e siècle,” PhD dissertation, Université de Paris, 1988.

¹⁰⁶ Franz-Josef Heyen, “Trier, St. Maximin,” in Die Männer- und Frauenklöster der Benediktiner in Rheinland-Pfalz und Saarland, ed. Friedhelm Jürgensmeier (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999), 1010–88.

¹⁰⁷ Stefan Weinfurter, “Kunigunde, das Reich und Europa,” in Kunigunde, consors regni, ed. Stefanie Dick (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), 9–27.

¹⁰⁸ See p. 69.

¹⁰⁹ Hochholzer, “Die lothringische (Gorzer) Reform,” 81–82.

¹¹⁰ Hochholzer, “Die lothringische (Gorzer) Reform,” 83–85.

¹¹¹ Georg Jenal, Erzbischof Anno II. von Köln (1056–75) und sein politisches Wirken (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1974). Especially for matters of monastic politics, see Josef Semmler, Die Klosterreform von Siegburg. Ihre Ausbreitung und ihr Reformprogramm im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1959); Semmler, “Die Klosterreform von Siegburg (11. und 12. Jahrhundert),” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999), 141–51.

¹¹² Semmler, Die Klosterreform von Siegburg, 255.

¹¹³ Semmler, Die Klosterreform von Siegburg, 337–39; Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis,” 298–302.

¹¹⁴ Seibert, “Libertas und Reichsabtei,” 533.

¹¹⁵ On the following, see Hermann Jakobs, Die Hirsauer. Ihre Ausbreitung und Rechtsstellung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreites (Cologne: Böhlau, 1961); Klaus Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform. Spiritualität, Lebensform und Sozialprofil einer benediktinischen Erneuerungsbewegung im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert,” in Hirsau St. Peter und Paul 1091–1991, vol. 2, Geschichte, Lebens- und Verfassungsformen eines Reformklosters, ed. Klaus Schreiner (Stuttgart: Konrad Thiess, 1991), 59–84; Klaus Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform. Lebens- und Verfassungsformen einer Reformbewegung,” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999), 89–124.

¹¹⁶ Willehelmi Abbatis Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, ed. Pius Engelbert and Candida Elvert, 2 vols., CCM 14 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 2010).

¹¹⁷ Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform,” 75.

¹¹⁸ In opposition to the Cluniacs; see Mirko Breitenstein, “Das Noviziat im hohen Mittelalter,” in Zur Organisation des Eintrittes bei den Cluniazensern, Cisterziensern und Franziskanern (Münster: LIT, 2008), 39.

¹¹⁹ Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis,” 293.

¹²⁰ Röckelein, “Frauen im Umkreis,” 292–96.

¹²¹ MGH, Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser, 6 vols., Die Urkunden Heinrichs IV., 1:359–62.

¹²² Heimo Ertl, ed., Otto von Bamberg (1102–1139). Vorträge zum Jubiläumsjahr (Nürnberg: Pirckheimer, 1989).