4

Return to the Desert

The New Hermits

The eleventh century witnessed the remarkably sudden outbreak of a form of religious life that felt itself drawn beyond the boundaries of traditional Benedictine community and toward the full renunciation of all earthly ties. This new form of life had no concern to strive for monastic self-assertion through legal claims, no concern for political influence or for economic resources. It was not concerned with monastic freedom in the world but with freedom from the dangers of the world.

This new way of life was an eremitical one, and it was fundamentally distinct from that of individual anchorites and anchoresses that had long been realized among monks and nuns living in community—in southern Italy, for example, thanks to the long-lived influence of Basil.¹ The possibility of withdrawing from community and of closing oneself off, all alone with God, in a hermitage, had been part of even the Benedictine tradition from the beginning. The Rule of Saint Benedict said that “the anchorites, that is the hermits,” were “taught by the daily life of the monastery” and that they had “learned to fight against the devil” and were therefore “well prepared for individual combat” (RB 1.1-5). The image of Anthony threatened by demons stood clearly before their eyes. In this sense the eremitical life was the life of those who were qualified for it only because they had first prepared themselves in the monastery and who then lived as hermits for the most part in the vicinity of their community (a great many of them, for example, lived near the abbey of Cluny).² A distinctly female form of the eremitical life was that of the so-called recluse, who was completely enclosed in an individual cell within the monastery precincts, never to leave until death, with only one window for access to the outside world, often with a view of the altar.³

The new understanding of eremitical life, however, had as its starting point not training in a well-ordered monastery, but the way of life of the Desert Fathers.⁴ That way of life was interpreted as an immediate retreat from all worldly affairs (these now seen as something to be despised) and as a new discovery of self in a place undisturbed by earthly concerns (the “desert”). There, in a community of kindred spirits, hermits would follow the charisma of a model ascetic and, with the help of that person’s spiritual support, find a reliable way to God. The concern was to locate the core of religious life in the “inner house of the soul” and not to live, as was said polemically, by means of ritual forms that turned piety into something mostly superficial. Such a way of life was far removed from institutional frameworks. Indeed it had the potential to foster hostility toward institutions, or at least to be seen as doing so by those who wanted to cling conservatively to all that had grown from tradition.

In fact, inherited forms of coenobitic life soon found themselves more and more in crisis.⁵ A revolution was imminent, one that would overshadow everything that to that point had been advanced in the name of reform. It was no longer a matter of merely improving what had been long established but of a completely new start, inspired by a return to the fundamentals of religious life in community.

Such a new beginning had of course to develop slowly at first. The new eremitism⁶ was a religious form of seeking, of experiment. Often there was an attempt, for example, to bring individual ascetics living in one small area into a single larger community, as in the case of the monastery that emerged in 1023 from the anchorites gathered together on the mountain of Montserrat in Catalonia, at the behest of the bishop of Vic and Abbot Oliba of Ripoll.⁷ Most communities, however, had their beginnings in the retreat of a group gathered around a charismatic leader. Valid among them were only the word and the actions of the leader, along with his admonitions, based on revealed texts such as the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, or the lives of the Desert Fathers. But because one had to account for the transient nature of those words, it often happened that (analogously to the gospels themselves) they came to be written down, either by their author or by someone recording the author’s way of life after his death. There was also a distinct possibility that an existing rule might be adapted (most often the Rule of Saint Benedict or the Rule of Augustine) along with other normative writings; these were then quickly brought together with particular Consuetudines. All these affairs reflect a protracted struggle that sought to preserve the power of both content and formlessness, even though content could actually only be preserved through form. It would in the end become clear, of course, that new religious movements might succumb to that struggle, since history unfolded not only as a revolution against institutionalized traditions but also as a development that could lead new movements to be once again institutionalized across a spectrum of traditional forms.

The first eremitical movements were still strongly shaped by their ties to the traditional monastic world, yet they were able to free themselves from those ties in a variety of ways. Because they had at their respective origins such strikingly charismatic personalities, the sketches that follow develop their respective points of emphasis along biographical lines.

An early example from Italy was the community of Camaldoli, founded by Romuald (951–1027) in the solitude of the Tuscan Apennines.⁸ Romuald is known above all from the Vita written by the renowned Peter Damian (1006/7–1072), a like-minded hermit, prior of the nearby monastery of Fonte Avellana, and later Cardinal Bishop of Ostia.⁹ The nobleman Romuald at first entered the Benedictine abbey of Sant’Apollinare near Ravenna in 972. He left there after three years, however (even though it had just been reformed by Maiolus of Cluny), because it seemed too relaxed and because he had been unable to impose a more rigorous form of life upon its brothers. For a time afterward he retreated to various hermitages, and by 978 he had come as far as the Pyrenees, where in affiliation with the Benedictine monastery of Cuxa he founded his first community of hermits. Nevertheless, he returned to Italy, and in the late 990s, under pressure from Emperor Otto III, he even accepted the office of abbot at Sant’Apollinare. He resigned that position after a year, however, and took up a life of erratic wandering that took him, along with a crowd of followers, to Istria, among other places, and to what was still an almost entirely pagan Hungary.

Amid a life shaped by a restless drive for moral perfection, asceticism, and penance, Romuald focused rather late on one remaining task. In central Italy around the turn of the millennium, he had begun to draw together eremitical communities in various places. A few years before his death he founded one of these in Camaldoli, in the Tuscan Apennines. There, as in other settlements, a group of individual houses was built, one for each member of the community. Each member was thus isolated, left to inward contemplation in direct communication with God. Three miles away was a building that was designated a monasterium, but it was not a monastic enclosure. Rather, it was a place of rest for guests, a place to provide care for the sick, and a place for administration. But above all it served to guard the nearby hermits from the world beyond.

Camaldoli grew under the leadership of a general prior—and notably not of an abbot—to become the center of an important congregation of eremitical communities. At first they followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, but already between 1076 and 1081/82 they had received a collection of statutes (constitutiones) from the hand of the prior general, Rudolph I.¹⁰ His text recorded the system of norms that guided the congregation in practice, and it was driven by a concern to maintain the eremitical life of the Camaldolese—strict, grounded in poverty and ascetical renunciation, and shaped by a strong turning from the world, so that Camaldoli would not fall off into a traditional cenobitic monastic life shaped by the comforts of property.¹¹

When around the middle of the twelfth century even Benedictine communities in Italy were being reformed from Camaldoli, when its renown as a leader of the eremitical movement was enormous, and when it enjoyed the highest esteem of the papacy, Camaldoli received its own rule, the Liber heremitice regule.¹² This text offered an opportunity to promote, assertively, the anchorite’s new/old way of life: “Among the many forms of religious life through which the one God is served . . . the eremitical life has long held the most prominent place. This way of life, namely, is the one that conquers the world, puts the flesh in its place, drives away demons, erases crimes, tames vice, and hobbles the carnal temptations that war against the soul.”¹³

Two other early examples can be noted briefly here: the Florentine nobleman John Gualbert (ca. 1000–1073) and Gunther of Niederalteich (955–1045), a member of the family of the counts of Schwarzburg in Thuringia.

The first of these had professed as a monk in the Benedictine abbey of San Miniato in Florence but left that community after a short time because he refused to accept its abbot, who had attained his office through simony. With his companions he founded the community of Vallombrosa in 1037, in the secluded forests east of Florence. There they lived according to the Rule of Saint Benedict and their own Consuetudines. But unlike other Benedictine abbeys, this one strove for complete poverty not only for its individual members but also for the community as a whole.¹⁴ Around the community at Vallombrosa there developed an important network, which Pope Victor II (d. 1057) soon recognized and granted papal protection.

Gunther of Niederalteich¹⁵ entered the community of Hersfeld (in the north of modern Hesse) as a lay brother (conversus) at the age of fifty. He then became a novice in the Bavarian Benedictine abbey of Niederalteich on the Danube. In 1008 he left the monastery and retreated into the Bavarian forest to live as a hermit. Around 1011 he ventured farther still into the desert of the forest and founded the cell of Rinchnach with his followers. From there he went on missionary trips to the borderlands of Bavaria and Bohemia, and by virtue of his personal reputation he came to play a role as a political mediator in the wars of the Salians with the Bohemians. In 1040 he was driven farther still into the uninhabited regions of Bohemia, where after a few years he died in a hermitage near Dobrá Voda. His cell at Rinchnach fell to the abbey of Niederalteich.

To Live by One’s Own Law

The discussion thus far has centered on those who were seekers, those who could not be content with the paths to salvation provided by the traditional monastery. To retreat into the desert with a group of followers was for them a more promising alternative. Yet in the early eleventh century, in an era when the Benedictine monasticism still stood at the pinnacle of religious life, these new followers of the eremitical life seemed not yet to have become generally contemptuous of the life of the monastery. Failing strength and worldliness in the monastery seem not yet to have been understood as a structural weakness, and criticism flared up only around individual cases. This circumstance changed in the next generation. Already in the second half of the eleventh century, and more still by the beginning of the twelfth, the discourse would shift dramatically. The Norman historiographer and Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis, for example, noted how often his contemporaries could take the liberty of denouncing monks as worldly and as “rule breakers” (regulae praevaricatores).¹⁶

Owing not least to what is now known as the Gregorian reform, with its struggles against simony (the sale of spiritual offices), Nicolaitism (clerical marriage and concubinage), and the disruptions of the Investiture struggle, there was now a keener eye for failures within the institutional framework of the church.¹⁷ The recognition of those failures became all the more fundamental in that they coincided with the emergence of a new quality of religious life—one whose demands many traditional ecclesiastical structures could no longer meet, thereby making the church itself seem all the more deficient. Doubt about the ability of established institutions to secure salvation went hand in hand with contemporary demands for a new religious spirit, one oriented toward the internalization of the faith and grounded in the soul’s authentic search for God. The eremitical life now presented the world of monasticism with a powerfully contrasting paradigm: the expectation of a life able to sustain itself alone with God and undisturbed by inherited rules or worldly ways, a life dependent entirely on the inherent strength of the soul. It is almost self-evident that such a new paradigm could also be seen in a negative light, as something novel, indeed revolutionary, and as something that traditionally established powers would resist.

In fact, strong disagreements soon flared up. They were decisive for the coming era and rendered its divergent viewpoints plainly visible. Above all, one fundamental issue was clear from this point forward: a life devoted to God, now in a new form, revealed more sharply the problem of those who found their way to a liminal position—settled at the borders of orthodoxy, of conventional rules or institutionalized regulations.¹⁸ In view of the importance of this discourse, the discussion now turns to explore in more detail one particularly significant case.

One day the renowned canonist and bishop Ivo of Chartres (1040–1115) learned that charismatic figures had sought to persuade the monks of the Benedictine abbey of Coulombs, on the banks of the Eure, to leave their abbey and take up an eremitical life in the forests. One argument among others involved the claim that Coulombs unjustifiably collected the tithe (a tenth of the yield of a given property, given to the church) for the abbey’s own enrichment.¹⁹ In a letter to the monks Ivo vehemently denounced any aspiration (which he intentionally equated to that of the Sarabaites)²⁰ to live separately in individual spaces, according to one’s own law (in privatis locis proprio iure)²¹—that is, far from the generally accepted laws of the church and far from its sacred places—as well as any sinister notion that one could already be a master without ever having been a student. Such monks had cut all ties with the institutional church, so Ivo’s accusation continued, and they could thus not even be sure whether their own motives were just. One could never attain salvation merely through an outward change of place, and salvation was never assured just because of the assumption that it was being sought under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Ivo wrote a similar letter²² to another addressee, a certain Rainald, who was also contemplating a retreat to a hermitage even though he had once professed religious life in a Benedictine community. The argument in this letter ran along similar lines, though Ivo also added another sentiment: that the solitary life (vita solitaria) was to be embraced only at one’s own discretion (voluntaria).

Rainald answered with strong words in two extended letters. In the first,²³ he objected to the assumption that a solitary life, as something embraced voluntarily, was to be thought of as less worthy than coenobitic life. God rejoiced more at a willingly embraced servitude (spontanea servitus) than one embraced under compulsion. Moreover, he said, it was known that Jesus Christ went alone to the mountain to pray; thus all who wanted to be perfect were to be naked and follow the naked Christ. Rainald had played the card of inner conviction against the card of an externally set norm, in a way that he hoped would influence Ivo.

He did the same in his second letter. He began with harsh accusations against traditional monastic communities. One might fulfill monastic regulations reasonably enough there, he said—in the manner of the Pharisees (more Pharisaico),²⁴ as was often said at the time—but not the commands of the Lord. Unfortunately, because those who lived in the old monasteries were ravenous for riches, it was impossible for anyone to fight for salvation while living among them. It was thus fully justified in that situation for an individual to take appropriate action and to leave such a community, even when one had solemnly professed to remain there (stabilitas loci). As an authority in support of his position Rainald cited the renowned Lanfranc of Bec, abbot of Caen and then archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote that he would leave a monastery were he unable to save his soul there, even if he had sworn to stay there forever. Rainald emphasized that those who were bound to God for God’s sake would not be separated from God—so long as they changed, out of love for God, from being a son of Satan to a son of freedom.

The battle lines had thereby been clearly drawn, and on both sides the opponents stood firmly on their principled positions.²⁵ Their irreconcilable differences were rooted not only in the abstract matter of different models for understanding religious practice and its institutional composition but also in concrete historical circumstances. The conflict concerned the opposition of both old and new, of tradition and its rejection. So, for example, Orderic Vitalis could say of the way of life of the hermit Vitalis of Savigny (ca. 1060–1122), “He did not follow the rite of the Cluniacs or of others who have devoted themselves to monastic forms of worship from time immemorial. Rather, he embraced novel ways [modernae institutiones] of training neophytes [here he meant those newcomers who strove to prove themselves] in whatever way occurred to him.”²⁶ The difference was rooted in divergent points of view: Integrating order against arbitrary isolation, or pharisaically empty formalism against the inner fullness of piety.

Nearly everywhere across the lands of the Latin church—in the Holy Land as well as in Italy, but especially in France, and there especially in Limousin and along the borders of Brittany in the forests of Craon²⁷—in the second half of the eleventh century and deep into the twelfth there emerged communities of hermits who did not shy away from explicitly incorporating this departure from tradition into the principles of their way of life.

One of the most uncompromising representatives of this new way was Stephen of Thiers (or of Muret) (1044/45–1124),²⁸ who from the 1070s on drew a group of followers around him in the forest wilderness of Limoges in order to live a life in service of God and in complete poverty. Through a bold polemic that sharply distinguished his way of life from the great Benedictine abbeys of his day, Stephen called his novices to avoid the traditional houses because they would find there only buildings, expensive meals, livestock, and large estates, whereas he could offer them the cross and poverty.²⁹

Stephen prohibited the keeping of livestock, cultivation of land, parish positions, and pastoral care, tithes, buildings—all but the minimal things absolutely necessary for life. Because his followers were already dead to the world, he emphasized, they needed only a piece of land large enough to bury their bodies. And should they produce anything with the labor of their hands, they were always to exchange it for other wares at a loss, so as not to be mistaken for merchants. Moreover, it was forbidden for them to draw up documents over even the smallest of legal affairs, since they were always to yield to any claim made upon them by an outsider. Should they find themselves close to starvation through this way of life, they were first to ask God to save them, and only then to go to their respective bishops to ask for aid. If such requests were also of no help, they were to fast for two more days still. Only then were they allowed, in pairs, to begin begging in their vicinity—and even then only until they had found nourishment enough for one day.

In light of the fact that Benedictine monks had to observe personal poverty while living in what were usually the best-provisioned of monasteries, these pious hermits—who emerged from the forests in all humility, trusting in God and seeking through begging to preserve their life only in the greatest necessity—must have made a striking impression on their contemporaries. In the future the authenticity of religious life would be judged by these kinds of manifestations of poverty. Here were already the first appearances of a way of life that, with the coming of the mendicant orders, and especially the Franciscans, would soon conquer Christendom in an array of different forms.³⁰

The contrast with traditional monasticism could not have been greater. Stephen’s way of life, moreover, had an even deeper dimension. It centered on the difference, noted above, between “integrating order” and “arbitrary isolation.”

Steven had drawn essential inspiration from the Greek monks that in his day still existed in great numbers in southern Italy (until not long before under Byzantine rule), where they lived according to the Rule of Basil.³¹ They had fled to the region at the beginning of the ninth century, driven from Sicily and Sardinia by the advance of the Saracens. Stephen traveled to see them, seeking to learn from those who had a great reputation for living an exemplary eremitical and ascetic life how best to shape his own life in the future.

Soon afterward, in 1076, he resolved to retreat from all worldly affairs and, in keeping with his newly found sense of autonomy, did something highly symbolic: although a layman, he went completely alone into the forests around Limoges and offered up directly to and exclusively before God a vow for his new way of life. No cleric, no prelate of the institutional church, no abbot of a monastery as representative of a monastic rule was present to approve it—only the one who was decisive in Stephen’s eyes: God.

This act was the beginning of a new theology of monastic rules—a vow offered up by a layman, yet one fulfilled (so his Vita relates) by the spark of his faith. To his students, who received the norms of their life in community directly from their teacher’s mouth, he taught that there was no other rule than the Gospel of Christ (Non est alia regula nisi evangelium Christi).³² It was the “rule of rules,” because Jesus Christ alone was the path by which one could ascend to the kingdom of heaven. And it was Christ himself who had thereby established monastic life. But it therefore followed that the rules later drawn up by humans were merely the branch, not the root, of religious life. It was beside the point that Pope Gregory had said Saint Benedict had written the Rule for monks, since the Rule could be called such only because it had been crafted from the teaching of the Gospel.

With this return to the first foundations of Christianity, Stephen had set aside all tradition, pressed forward to the original core of the Christian faith, and thereby gained what was in his eyes the pure norm of life.

Obviously, however, this change created problems for Stephen in the context of contemporary monastic life, because he saw himself compelled to provide for his brothers, as if in a kind of testament, the arguments they would need to protect themselves against attacks on their identity. They were to be aware, he said, that they were obligated to follow none of the usual observances, that they wore the habit of no known monastic congregation, and so on—and that they followed, more and better than others, not just any rule, but the true rule.

The world obviously had first to become accustomed to the outward appearance of what was seen as a new kind of monastic life, even though the Roman church, through a visitation of two legates, had recognized Stephen’s way of life as legitimate.

After Stephen’s death his community’s fortunes took off.³³ First, though, it had to move from Muret, because it had originally settled there without permission, on the estates of a Benedictine abbey. The community now settled nearby, in a glade named Grandmont, and took its name from there. The Grandmontines expanded across France and England as well as the Iberian Peninsula. Their 150 houses were highly esteemed from the beginning and enjoyed the support of both French and English kings. They reconstructed in writing the oral traditions of the teaching of their master under the title “Book of Instruction” (Liber de doctrina),³⁴ and in the fourth generation of successors, under prior Stephen de Liciaco, between 1150 and 1160, they produced their own rule, written down under the name of their founder.³⁵

Stephen of Thiers hands on his spiritual legacy in written form to his disciple Hugh de Lacerta—though in reality Hugh was the one who first had it written down. Altarpiece from the monastery of Saint-Michel de Grandmont.

They also developed a complex organizational structure. They lived in common in small, modest communities with a common dormitory and refectory but far from any habitation. The daily tasks of manual labor and administration were in the hands of lay monks (conversi); ordained monks, in contrast, who early on had come to join the community, were to concentrate on worship, spiritual work, prayer, and contemplation—an arrangement that did not avoid serious internal conflict over the actual leadership of the convent.³⁶

Around the same time that Stephen of Thiers was active, in a remote alpine valley near Grenoble, a community emerged whose powerful expansion—through the whole of the Middle Ages and into every region of Western Christendom—would achieve the greatest renown of all the eremitical forms of life and eclipse all inherited traditions. Bruno³⁷ (ca. 1030–1101), from Cologne, former leader of the cathedral school of Reims and chancellor of the archdiocese of Reims, founded the community in a settlement that would later be known as the Grand Chartreuse. As a supporter of the church reforms of Gregory VII, the pope of the Investiture struggle, Bruno had been deposed from office in 1077 in Reims, an event that only fueled his already long-standing drive for ascetical renunciation. He had begun to seek monastic life and in 1081 had come with his companions to the Lotharingian abbey of Molesme, a community recently established from a congregation of eremitical groups under the leadership of the same Robert who would later found Cîteaux.³⁸

Bruno had been given shelter in a remote locale north of the abbey, in Sèche-Fontaine. But he soon recognized that life in the vicinity of Molesme, a community that had already become an all-too-active center for its granges and priories, was quite unsuitable for his vision of retreat. Living in solitude from day to day inspired Bruno as the ideal and most demanding form of life, but he now aimed to realize it in community with others who were similarly isolated. He believed that in this way he could bring together coenobitic and eremitical life. He thus left Sèche-Fontaine and sought out a remote locale with harsh living conditions.

In 1084 he and a new group of followers found just such a place, with the support of his former disciple Hugh, bishop of Grenoble. It was a wasteland in the mountain range north of Grenoble, given to him by Seguin, abbot of La Chaise-Dieu in the Auvergne. There the community soon erected for each individual member an enclosure in the form of a small hut, each with a room for sleep, prayer, and work, as well as common rooms and a kitchen. But in contrast to Camaldoli, where the individual lodgings stood in isolation, in the Charterhouse (as this design came to be called, taking its name from the valley), in subsequent years a large cloister tied together all of the buildings. The Benedictine historian Guibert of Nogent, writing around 1104, succinctly described this new kind of arrangement as “cells around the cloister walk” (cellulae per gyrum claustri).³⁹

The Charterhouse of Pavia, with the individual dwellings of its members distinctly visible.

In those individual cells, in absolute silence, a daily life of isolation was filled with contemplation, with vigils, with strict fasting and abstinence, and with spiritual and physical labor (especially the copying of manuscripts). In the common rooms, on the other hand—along with the church, the chapter room, and the refectory—were held the common worship service and the divine office, as well as common meals and common readings on high feast days. The architecture of the entire complex was thus the symbolic embodiment of a program that sought to structure the isolation of the individual and the interaction of community in a way that united the two in functional collaboration: in isolation, God would be found in the inner life of the individual soul, and in community, God’s majesty would be praised.⁴⁰ But all of this was physically possible for only a limited number. The community was to consist of precisely twelve members, a number with obvious allegorical meaning. Moreover, the assistance of conversi, the lay brothers, was essential.

At the time there was no rule that could be adopted for this way of life; the community could take inspiration only from the Rule of Saint Benedict, the writings of the Desert Fathers, or Jerome. For the moment, however, they had in any case no need for a written framework of precise regulations, since the charismatic word and exemplary deeds of Bruno himself, as with Stephen of Thiers, were what counted. Once again it was clear that monastic life according to a fixed rule had lost its monopoly.

Problems first arose in 1090 when Bruno was called to Rome by Urban II, who had been his disciple in Reims. Bruno then continued on to Calabria, where he founded a new monastery; he never returned. The community fell apart at first, but it soon found itself partially reconstituted at La Chartreuse, this time as a small, elite group of followers, zealots of strictness and self-discipline, gathered under the leadership of a disciple of Bruno’s named Landuin. Moreover, they continued to enjoy the support of the bishop of Grenoble and the abbot of La Chaise-Dieu. Bruno, too, had not forgotten his foundation: at his request the pope took it under his protection in 1090. But otherwise Bruno sent only a single letter of edification, one that affirmed the Carthusian way of life and praised and encouraged the community for its zeal.⁴¹

Obviously a few years of charismatic leadership seem to have been sufficient to create a way of life that could live on without its founder and soon be stabilized. After a short time it even began to spread: Carthusian communities, modeled after the Grand Chartreuse, soon began to emerge in other regions, and a few hermits and conversi from the Alpine valley were sent to them in order to teach the novices. Guigo (ca. 1086–1136), fourth leader of the Grand Chartreuse after Bruno, saw himself in the end led to respond not only to the encouragement of the bishop of Grenoble but above all to the request of the new convents for authentic accounts of the way of life at the Grand Chartreuse. Between 1121 and 1127 he wrote down the customs (Consuetudines) that had grown up there,⁴² and Innocent II approved these in 1133. He thereby created a foundational normative framework for the emerging Carthusian Order.⁴³

Both of these communities—the Grandmontines and the Carthusians—make clear, on the one hand, the impact that an early charismatic figure could have and, on the other, what considerable effort was needed to ensure that that impact would be a lasting one. The distance from established institutions that at first characterized these new religious forms and that put them in opposition to the traditional constitution of monastic life unleashed a powerful creative potential. But it did so at the price of grave uncertainties.

Especially revealing in this regard is the development of a broader eremitical movement, important in its own right, which took shape somewhat later under the leadership of Stephen of Obazine (ca. 1085–1156).⁴⁴ Originally a secular priest and an engaged pastor in the ecclesiastical province of Bourges, Stephen abruptly set aside those responsibilities so that he himself—as his Vita recorded⁴⁵—could follow “poor and naked . . . the poor Christ.” For a certain time thereafter he wandered around southern France, hoping to join what he thought would be the best form of an eremitical, penitential life. After this time of searching (one similar to that of Stephen of Thiers and Bruno) he resolved around 1134 to retreat with a companion into the wilderness along the banks of the Corrèze, north of the Dordogne valley. His Vita stylized these events in a way that highlighted his autonomous relationship with God, emphasizing that the Lord had in fact wanted him not to be subject to the authority of any other teacher, so that he could remain free to fulfill what God had planned for the holy man.⁴⁶

Thereafter, events unfolded for Stephen almost as they did for his namesake in Thiers: an ascetic way of life attracted a crowd of disciples, with whom he began a life in community. With episcopal license he was allowed to establish a monastery in Obazine (today Aubazine), as long as the inhabitants “followed the customs handed down from the fathers.”⁴⁷ This command, though nowhere fixed in a specific rule, did not in fact make it possible, as it had with Stephen of Thiers, for him to adopt a stance that explicitly rejected all the norms that had grown up after the gospels. Rather, it established a practice of life grounded in the charisma of the leader. On the question of the legally binding norms of this way of life, his Vita reads,

And because no one had taken on the enacted law [lex posita] of any kind of order, the instructions of the master [instituta magistri] were the guide, not those of any statute—instructions that taught nothing more than humility, obedience, poverty, discipline, and above all abiding love. Such things were in that day the holy man’s true and right teaching, which he handed down both confidentially and openly to those who followed him. This law [hec lex] was put in force at that time, and no one was concerned with pharisaical traditions [pharisaïce traditiones].⁴⁸

This postscript in particular underscores with unusual precision—as has been noted—Stephen’s conscious renunciation of a literal adherence to the inherited regulations of monastic life.

Here again the source of the norms guiding this way of life was the charismatic figure whom God had chosen for that purpose, and here too, as a consequence, everything depended on the living person of that charismatic. Had Stephen decided, like Bruno of Cologne, to leave his community, as he at one time considered doing, the community would certainly have been in danger of disintegrating. A structure like this was all the more palpably in danger as the community grew larger through additional foundations, including those of strictly enclosed women. Contemporaries were notably aware of the problem in Obazine, and Stephen’s Vita articulated their concern, framing it in biblical terms: “But because the days of mankind are short [Job 14:15] and human learning lasts only as long as the teacher lives and is present, they resolved to recognize one of those orders authorized in the church, so that also after the teacher’s passing the authority of the written law would remain behind for them, as something that would never have an end.”⁴⁹

The norms of life embodied in the charismatic would thus find a transpersonal support that guaranteed the longevity of the community. But they would also thereby be fixed to norms that were precisely defined and for the most part unalterable—fixed, that is, precisely to that which polemics had long denounced as “pharisaical traditions.” And in fact, Stephen soon compelled his hermits to accept the guardianship of the nearby cloister of Dalon, which had been founded for other hermits as a Benedictine abbey in 1114. They thereby learned how those who by virtue of their pious way of life were “veterans of the heavenly militia”⁵⁰ could still see themselves as the purest of beginners in monastic life. The ironic sentiment of Ivo of Chartres about the arrogance of hermits who already saw themselves as masters here found full expression. The link to Dalon did quickly fall apart, but in 1147 Stephen of Obazine’s congregation of monasteries was successfully integrated into an order that was already institutionally established and that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict to the letter: the Cistercians, who will receive extensive treatment below.

Charismatic Preaching and Religious Movements

The eremitical life did not play itself out on the public stage. By virtue of their retreat from the world, hermits avoided life “among the people” (1 Pet 2:12) and sought seclusion. Hermits in principle thus provoked only those who, as their competitors with respect to form, were directly challenged by their ways—the traditional monasteries, for example, whose members had walked away and which were defended by a figure like Ivo of Chartres as visiting bishop. But a completely different situation emerged when individual hermits graced with a special charisma refused to remain in their remote places and chose instead to leave the “forest deserts” in order to wander “through the land, renouncing all possessions in imitation of the apostles, exhorting to penitence and peace, as well as agitating against the sins of the clergy.”⁵¹

A consciousness of apostolic mission had of course long been seen in connection with eremitic life. Romuald (of Camaldoli) and Gunther of Niederalteich, mentioned above, were two examples, from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, respectively. In the decades around the turn from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, however, not only did the number of such “wandering preachers” grow considerably, but the quality of their apostolic engagement changed in fundamental ways.⁵² They confronted a new, broad public that cut across social ranks, since their times—an age of dissatisfaction with the social order and of longing for new paths to salvation that were now open to every Christian (even to those who remained in the world)—needed charismatic figures who were able to show the way. These wandering preachers did just that by pointing out obstacles to salvation as well as abuses both among the clergy and within the institutions of the church, by calling for repentance and penance, and sometimes even by promising to open the gates to heaven—a promise open to all who turned from the world, who dissolved social bonds, and who turned within themselves. The eremitical ascetics had already made it to heaven’s gates, but they now presented their ideas in the public forum and proclaimed heaven as a goal every Christian could reach. Such a new perspective could be provocative—and for the most part that provocation was quite intentional.

The four most prominent personalities among these wandering preachers were Bernard of Tiron, Vitalis of Savigny, Robert of Arbrissel, and Norbert of Xanten. Their biographies all shared in common one thing that was to be of great significance for their emergence in public, and they shared it with some of the more reclusive hermits—Romuald, for example, Bruno of Cologne, and Stephen of Obazine. Before they renounced the world, they had already put an ecclesiastical career behind them and were priests, whether as secular clerics or monks. Moreover, they had put an end to their restless ways as wandering preachers, turned back to the ways of ecclesiastical institutions, and become founders of monasteries. Precisely because they all embodied a certain kind of Christian zeal, a brief comparison of their individual careers is worthwhile.

Bernard of Tiron⁵³ (1046–1117) entered the Benedictine community of Saint-Cyprian in Poitiers at the age of twenty and by 1076 became prior of the tradition-rich abbey of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in Poitou. In 1096 he withdrew to a hermit colony in the forest of Craon and thereafter to the Chausey-Isles off the coast of Normandy. Four years later he returned to the aforementioned abbey to lead it himself as abbot. After he had been unable to bring any fundamental reform to fruition there, he again became a hermit as well as a highly esteemed wandering preacher. In 1109 he received a plot of land in Tiron, west of Paris, and there, with the support of Bishop Ivo of Chartres, he founded a Benedictine monastery that became the center of a large congregation of monasteries.

Vitalis of Savigny (ca. 1060–1122),⁵⁴ mentioned above, came from Normandy and after his consecration as a secular priest became the chaplain of the brother of William the Conqueror, Robert of Mortain, who gave Vitalis secure provision in the form of a prebend (a position that secured his livelihood) in the canonry of Saint-Evroul, which Robert had founded. Struck by the shallowness of religious life as it had come to be lived there, and seeing no model way of life in Benedictine communities that had become too wealthy, around 1093 or 1095/96 Vitalis too withdrew into the forests of Craon and became the leader of a group of hermits. He too was drawn again and again back into the world both to preach and to found eremitical communities in other regions, communities that in their turn became important centers for retreat. Vitalis’s words, masterfully composed, moved the people because of their honesty, earnestness, and wealth of incorruptible judgment. Nor did he shy away from inserting himself into matters of high politics, working, for example, to establish peace in the civil war between Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, and his brother Robert Curthose. In the end Vitalis also received a plot of land, where in 1113 he founded (becoming sedentary, so to speak) the abbey of Savigny as a double monastery. That community in turn became the center of a large congregation of twenty-five houses in France and England, and in 1147 it was accepted (like the congregation of Stephen of Obazine) into the Cistercian Order.

The life of Robert of Arbrissel⁵⁵ (ca. 1045–1116) was undoubtedly the most spectacular of all those hermits who took up residence in the forest of Craon during the last decades of the eleventh century. Robert, son of a parish priest and himself consecrated as a priest, took up his father’s position in Arbrissel in Brittany in 1076 and there gained his first experience at preaching. Entangled in the struggles over the simoniacal election of the bishop of Rennes, in 1078 he transferred to Paris to study but was called back in 1088/89 to become bishop of Rennes. In the meantime he had transformed himself from a savvy player within a corrupt system into an advocate of church reform who would now combat Nicolaitism—clerical marriage or concubinage—as well as simony in his bishopric. Yet the reactions to his zeal compelled him after a few years to take up study again in a different place—this time in Angers. His teacher there was Marbod, later bishop of Rennes.

In 1095 Robert finally decided to withdraw in asceticism and solitude, which he hoped to find in the forests of Craon. He quickly made a name for himself there, both as a zealot for austerity and penance and as a gifted speaker and convincing charismatic. At his place of residence, La Roë, he founded a community for clerics, so that they could live there undisturbed and in a regulated way (that is, according to the Rule of Augustine and in the “manner of the early church”). The discussion will later return to this form of community.

In 1096 in Angers Robert met Pope Urban II and was allowed to preach before him. Urban came to realize that the “Holy Spirit had personally opened Robert’s mouth.”⁵⁶ Insofar as the sources allow reconstruction of the events, Robert received from Urban a general license to preach, one not bound to any particular diocese. A period of intense preaching activity followed. As Robert moved from place to place, he gathered unprecedented throngs of followers, with every social status represented among them—poor and rich, men and women, established and marginal. Women above all felt drawn to his message, which appealed to the individual soul of every Christian instead of one or another defined position within the social order, which Robert saw as all too often propped up by simoniacal and morally depraved churchmen.

So much proximity to women and so much criticism of the clergy were bound to incite resistance. Marbod, Robert’s former teacher and now bishop, felt compelled to admonish him. The result was a notable written exchange⁵⁷ in which Marbod described Robert’s public appearance in dramatic terms: he showed himself clothed in a threadbare and torn hooded cloak, with his legs half bare, a long beard, roughly cut hair across his face, and bare feet. Robert answered that his manner of appearance allowed him to win authority among the common folk and to arouse a feeling of compassion among the educated. But Marbod strongly disagreed. He told Robert, not without justification, that his clothing and appearance were not appropriate for a priest: “The wise man will not bring public morals into disorder and draw the people to himself through novelties.”⁵⁸ He insisted that Robert was misleading the common people and that the learned elite saw him as creating only the appearance of religious passion. Moreover, Marbod claimed, in his sermons Robert criticized the clergy heavily before the common people, thereby drawing together such crowds of both women and men that many priests no longer had communities to serve. Robert was, he declared, to return to common sense (sensus communis)⁵⁹ and to reintegrate himself into the conventions of the church.

In the year 1100 at the Council of Poitiers, assembled in the presence of two legates of Pope Paschal II, Robert was exhorted in all severity to bring stability to his restless band of followers of both sexes in such a way that he could settle them in a lasting community. One year later Robert founded a monastery for women and men in a glade named Fons Evraldi (Fontevraud) near Saumur, on a property he had received as a gift from the bishop of Poitiers, Peter II. He gave its leadership over to Hersendis, an administratively experienced noblewoman from the house of Champagne, and placed at her side Petronilla of Chemillé, who was by 1115 already her follower.

Petronilla was more than a mere administrator. She had full power over the women as well as the men of the monastery, and she was revered by both the sisters and the brothers as a “spiritual mother.”⁶⁰ This kind of prominence for women, which allowed a level of esteem for female independence foreign to the Middle Ages, rested on Robert’s vision of his own life—which in Robert’s own words was to do everything in the world for the benefit of holy women.⁶¹

In the wake of the decision to institutionalize what was now an enclosed way of life, Robert sought to make every provision necessary to ensure the stability of his community. Somewhat later he therefore wrote for Fontevraud its own constitutions, which took the place of a formal rule and which Pope Calixtus II confirmed.⁶² Robert himself obviously did not feel bound by the command to observe stability of place, however, since already in 1103 and 1104, and once more thereafter, he went on a series of preaching tours—the last of which took him to Berry, where he died in 1116. From Fontevraud would emerge a congregation of monasteries that came to enjoy the decisive support of the Plantagenet dynasty and that would boast some forty settlements by the middle of the twelfth century.

The life of Norbert of Xanten⁶³ (1080/85–1134) took sharper turns than those just surveyed, but it nevertheless remained within the boundaries of what was typical for a wandering preacher. Of noble descent, even as a child he held a prebend that secured him a good income from the community of Saint Victor in Xanten on the lower Rhine. At first he reached only to the rank of sub-deacon within the church hierarchy. His political connections, however, were more significant. Through these, by way of the archbishop of Cologne, Frederick I, Norbert won early access to the German royal court, accompanying Henry V to Rome for his coronation as emperor in 1111.

But then suddenly—after a lightning strike, according to the account of his Vita—in 1115 Norbert had a complete change of heart: the career clergyman now turned from his former way of life, left Saint Victor, and resolved to live a life of repentance. At first he sought the Benedictine abbey of Siegburg (discussed above) and had himself consecrated by the archbishop of Cologne as deacon and priest on the same day—even though that was against the rules laid out by canon law. But a constant search for salvation drew Norbert, like many, away from his own kind and in rapid succession on to the next stages in his journey: first to the regular canonry of Klosterrath, near Aachen, which had been founded shortly before by the hermit Ailbert as a center of strict discipline, then to the hermit Liudolf, a relentless critic of negligent office holders in the church. Subsequently Norbert turned to harsh ascetic exercises in a hermitage he had established near Xanten. But clothed in a garment of animal skin he also struck out on what were presumably preaching tours in Hainault and Flanders, where with great rhetorical skill he called his audience to repentance and reform.

These activities roused suspicion. Before a synod in Fritzlar in July 1118, Norbert was not only accused of preaching beyond the boundaries of his diocese but also explicitly charged with accusations that were usually cast against heretics. Why did he wear clothing made of sheep and goat skins? That was a question Robert of Arbrissel had already faced. Another question followed: Why did Norbert pretend to live like one who had embraced religious life while still drawing from his prebend and remaining involved in worldly affairs? The accusation of hypocrisy thus hung in the air, the same accusation that Ivo of Chartres had leveled against others who had fled their monasteries. Norbert defended himself by appealing to both his duties as a priest and—this point made visibly by the way he dressed—the model of John the Baptist. But he found the most fundamental justification for his penitential preaching in a passage from the apostle James: “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins” (Jas 5:20).

The outcome of these accusations is unknown. But they emphatically reveal the liminal position of all of these wandering preachers—a position that, as the fate of others shows, could be most dangerous for those concerned. So it was that contemporaries had seen a figure like Peter of Bruis⁶⁴ (d. 1139), a priest from the French Alps, as having crossed a still-permeable boundary when he advanced the call for a purely spiritual church in the area around Embrun—thereby radically renouncing nearly all of the symbolism of sacrament and ritual that sustained the institutional church. Although a synod in Reims in 1119 declared Peter a heretic, he continued to preach until he was lynched by an enraged mob. Henry of Lausanne⁶⁵ (d. 1145), an ascetic and a highly educated monk who roughly attacked the lifestyle of the clergy in his preaching around Le Mans and later southern France, met a similar fate.

In face of the inquiry at Fritzlar, Norbert took immediate action. He gave up both his prebend and his cell in the abbey of Siegburg and hurried off with two companions on a pilgrimage to southern France—continually preaching, barefoot and in the clothing of a penitent, “without roof or a secure home,” with “only Christ as leader,” as one of his vitae described him.⁶⁶ In Saint-Gilles in November of 1118, “through God’s providence”⁶⁷ he met Pope Gelasius II, who saw the spirit of God (spiritus Dei) dwelling in him.⁶⁸ Norbert used the occasion to have the pope both free him from the guilt of having received two consecrations on the same day and grant him permission to preach in every place he wished in Christendom (ubique terrarum).⁶⁹

At Easter in 1119, after many of his early companions had died, Norbert found a new companion in the cleric Hugh of Fosses, who would soon play an important role in shaping Norbert’s legacy. Together they wandered through northern France, trusting (as his vitae emphasize) that God would give them what they needed to survive. In a way similar to the experience of the recently deceased Robert of Arbrissel, great crowds of people in cities and towns flocked to Norbert whenever he read Mass, preached penance, and taught his listeners about the way of life of prelates and the obedience of subjects, the temptations of the world, heavenly life, and the happiness of the blessed. It was unavoidable that the success of his teaching inspired envy and animosity. But Norbert did not allow himself to be deterred. Rather, in keeping with the teaching of the Epistle of James, cited above, he instead turned many from their error. And as one of his vitae emphasizes⁷⁰—here taking a swipe at established monasteries—Norbert enjoyed much more acceptance and approval than any monk of his era.

In autumn of 1119 Norbert’s life witnessed another fundamental turn. At the bidding of Calixtus II, who was holding a synod in Reims that was crucial for the course of the Investiture controversy, Norbert was placed under the guardianship of the bishop of Laon, Bartholomew. He was to arrange for Norbert to settle down, and he secured for him at first the leadership of a canonry in Laon. Nor-bert was ultimately able to ward off this move, however, by placing extreme demands on the inhabitants. He declared his intention to continue to live a life guided exclusively by the Gospel and the apostles. The canons whom he governed would be thus required to live as imitators of Christ (imitatores Christi), to be contemptuous of the world, naked and voluntarily poor while voluntarily embracing hunger, thirst, and insult. Norbert’s program crystalized all that his contemporaries typically articulated whenever they sought to live a meaningful Christian life by completely renouncing all worldly things. The same things were said in great detail about Norbert’s contemporary Stephen of Thiers, for example, and Norbert lived out the same ideal himself, often to the point of complete bodily exhaustion. But among the canons who were obliged to obey him, as two worlds of religious life clashed irreconcilably with one another, Norbert’s ways encountered heavy resistance. The project failed before it had even begun.

Thereafter, in 1120, Bartholomew entrusted to Norbert the glade called Prémontré, east of Laon, leaving it to him as his own without any obligation to pay tithes or other duties, so that he could erect a double monastery there. It came together successfully as a community of women and men, laity and clergy. Through his preaching he was able to win them in large numbers and then to bind them together in spirit into one community.

Surviving evidence from this early community of Prémontré—as from the community of Stephen of Obazine—reveals a sense of complete trust in Norbert’s salvation-oriented, charismatic leadership. So one source reports, for example, that whenever Norbert went out to preach, demons always found their way into the monastery—in the metaphorical imagination of the day, his contemporaries thus understood themselves as being completely without protection from the devil. By 1121, according to his Vita, Norbert had already gathered thirty new novices around himself, and he “cared for them morning and night with the word of salvation and admonished them with consoling speech not to fall away from the blessed intentions and the voluntary poverty they had taken upon themselves. And what he taught he showed to them through his own example, just as the eagle teaches his young to fly.”⁷¹ His followers could thus at first trust that what they heard from his mouth was enough to save them, so that they needed neither a fixed order nor a rule for their way of life. But Norbert taught them a better way, declaring the Rule of Augustine, in the strict form of the so-called Ordo monasterii, to be binding upon them. He thus emphasized, as had Stephen of Obazine, that evangelical teaching could not be fulfilled over the long term without written order, without rules or those things established by the fathers.⁷²

Augustine gives his Rule to Norbert of Xanten. Manuscript illumination from the twelfth century.

Norbert was thus able to build a congregation of monasteries that was legally tailored to him. From that congregation grew the Premonstratensian Order, after Norbert’s life took one last turn—his elevation to archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126. The Order’s emergence will be treated below.

A Return to the Institutions of the Church

All of the careers sketched briefly here, both those of the reclusive hermits and of those who had gone out preaching among people of the world, were shaped by a restless agitation that arose from an almost unquenchable desire to find still better paths to salvation. For some, forms of asceticism, of poverty and chastity, seemed ever more dissatisfying. For others there was hope of finding ever more suitable places to build community, or places to advance the message of the faith, calls to repentance, and critiques of established ways. The measure of such things was no longer to be found automatically in fixed rules, dogmatic formulas, or definitive solutions; it would be found within—in the individual self, through expressions like “a burning fire” (ignis ardens), as was said, for example, of Stephen of Obazine.⁷³ The new measure could seem simply boundless in its desire to be close to God, and precisely for that reason a need arose for radically new points of orientation.

Such figures seemed to capture, as through a magnifying lens, the religious desires of so many Christians in their day. Their appearance, set before the background of the established structures of the church, brought about the clash of two seemingly irreconcilable interpretations of how best to realize Christian faith. Herbert Grundmann has characterized this apparent impasse, the result of a fundamental doubt in the ability of the church to ensure salvation, as follows:

Out of such questions and doubts arose a religious consciousness which no longer saw the essence of Christianity as fulfilled in the Church alone as an order of salvation or in the doctrine of the Church alone as its dogma and tradition. Instead, this new consciousness sought to realize Christianity as a religious way of life immediately binding upon every individual genuine Christian, a commitment more essential to the salvation of his soul than his position in the hierarchical ordo of the Church or his belief in the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church and its theologians.⁷⁴

Those who strove for this kind of “realization of Christianity” did not, for all of their retreat from the world, live their lives in hiding, since their way of life was a message and an invitation. Moreover, insofar as they went on pilgrimages of preaching and were endowed with great charisma, almost of necessity they drew together communities that shared a common spirit. But their followers need not always have been of the same mind as the ascetics they took to be their models. Many wanted to retreat again from their positions of leadership—so it was said, at least, of Stephen of Obazine, and Bruno of Cologne in fact turned away from his community. But among the wandering preachers too the same tendency appears after the foundation of their communities: Robert of Arbrissel did not take over as the leader of Fontevraud but continued on his pilgrimage of preaching. Norbert of Xanten’s circumstance was similar, until at last he left his monastic community entirely to take up the office of archbishop. These examples capture a particular field of tensions in an exemplary way. It had been established on the basis of a procedural dynamic that emerged from the initial decisions of the ascetics and that unfolded in three steps.

To renounce all ties to earthly concerns in order to come closer to God, whether alone, or perhaps with one or two companions, either by retreating into solitude or by setting out on a wandering pilgrimage, was to make an individually self-responsible decision for one’s own soul. This was the first step. The second was to launch a collective religious movement. It entailed taking on responsibility for many souls, who trusted that they were being shown the right way to draw near to God—not through external rules, but through the truth that the charismatic leader embodied in word and deed and sought to pass on “like an eagle to his young.”⁷⁵ The third and final step was to transform what had begun as a religious movement into an institutional form with precisely articulated rules, with duties of office and precisely outlined rituals, all of which could be followed, when necessary, in the “manner of the Pharisees.”

Max Weber seems rightly to have conceptualized this process in speaking of the “routinization of charisma.”⁷⁶ And yet his phrasing does not fully account for certain essential elements of this process: the grounds for such “routinization” are here not to be found—as Weber generally thought—primarily in the “character” of charismatic domination.

The special “extraordinariness” (to maintain Weber’s conceptualization) of the charismatically led religious movements of that time had in general pushed a life consecrated to God into a liminal position, as was noted above. From the church hierarchy’s point of view, such movements seemed potentially dangerous, since their claim to be “sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit” might allow them to place their own particular demands ahead of the claims of the institutional church.⁷⁷ Those same movements, however, were quite productive in advancing core ideals about the renewal of the church through a reform of piety and morality. For that purpose there was a special need for precisely those who were able to live out and to model an interiorized and self-responsible faith, a life governed by self-authorized guidelines—proprio iure, as it was said.⁷⁸

As a consequence there were bishops everywhere, and indeed popes, who acted in support of any move toward institutional stabilization, including incorporating the self-authorized or even sanctioning those who lived in privatis locis, proprio iure. So, for example, Bruno, who had retreated with a few followers into the “mountain wilderness” in search of a life withdrawn from the world, was “inspired by the Holy Spirit,” as the surviving account says, to turn to Bishop Hugh of Grenoble, asking him for aid and counsel (auxilium and concilium). In return, Bruno received every kind of support, including land and estates, for the establishment of his community. A figure so chided by a bishop as Robert of Arbrissel received license to preach from the pope after having preached before him with such power that it was said the Holy Ghost himself had opened his mouth. And it was the bishop of Poitiers, in the end, who helped him found the double community of Fontevraud. Norbert of Xanten too had received a pope’s license to preach and was, at a pope’s behest, placed under the supervision of the bishop of Laon, Bartholomew. The bishop then granted Norbert a place to establish a monastery. And when Stephen of Obazine fled his parish, seeking around 1130 to settle with two companions in the solitude of Corrèze, he went first to the bishop of Limoges and articulated the aims of his new way of life. He then received a blessing as well as permission to establish a monastery and to hold worship services.

The examples could be multiplied. They bear witness at first glance to a constant episcopal and papal concern to safeguard the free movement of zeal for the faith, as long as that zeal remained far from any appearance of overt heresy. In this regard there had been a certain model to follow: first to secure a legitimation of the deeds of the charismatic, and then to aid those driven by the Holy Spirit in their search for a secure place to continue to live their religious life by establishing a stable community in a monastery. The institutional church thereby appeared as a supporter of religious movements that in principle could have been a structural threat. The “routinization of charisma” had thus been fostered by the sovereignty of a superior authority, which thereby integrated an institutionally distant “extraordinariness” of hermits and wandering preachers into the institutionality of the hierarchical church. Along with this transformative power came the necessity of securing the community over time after the passing of the charismatic, by way of an organization founded on trans-personal law—as became so clear, for example, in the case of the Carthusians, the Grandmontines, Obazine, and the Premonstratensians.

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¹ Vera von Falkenhausen, “Il monachesimo italo-greco e i suoi rapporti con il monachesimo benedettino,” in L’esperienza monastica benedettina e la Puglia, ed. Cosimo Damiano Fonseca (Galatina: Congedo Ed., 1983), 1:119–35. On the exemplary figure of Nilus von Rossano, who also met with the emperor Otto III, see Giorgio D. Gallaro, “Revisiting the Saintly Founder of Grottaferrata: Nilus the Calabrian,” Nicolaus. Rivista di teologia ecumenico-patristica 37 (2010): 293–300.

² Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, 1000–1150 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 46–52.

³ Jean Sainsaulieu, “Ermites,” in Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de Géographie Ecclésiastiques (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1963), 15:766–87.

⁴ See Regnault, Les pères du désert à travers leurs apophthegmes.

⁵ Jean Leclercq, “La crise du monachisme aux XI^e et XII^e siècles,” Bulletino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo 70 (1958): 19–41; John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150,” Speculum 61 (1986): 269–304; Cristina Sereno, “La ‘crisi del cenobitismo’: un problema storiografico,” Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo 104 (2002): 32–83.

⁶ For an overview, see L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1965); Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism (London: St. Martin’s, 1984); André Vauchez, ed., Eremites de France et d’Italie (XI^e–XII^e siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2003); Cécile Caby, De l’érémitisme rural au monachisme urbain (Paris: École française de Rome, 1999).

⁷ Stefan Petzolt, “Montserrat,” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg: Herder, 1998), 7:448.

⁸ On the following, see Giuseppe Vedovato, Camaldoli e la sua congregazione dalle origini al 1184. Storia e documentazione (Cesena: Badia di S. Maria del Monte, 1994); San Romualdo. Storia, agiografia e spiritualità (Negarine di San Pietro in Cariano [Verona]: Il Segno dei Gabrielli Ed., 2002).

⁹ Nicolangelo D’Acunto, “Un eremita in movimento: il Romualdo di Pier Damiani,” in L’età dell’obbedienza. Papato, impero e poteri locali nel secolo XI, ed. Nicolangelo D’Acunto (Naples: Ligouri, 2007), 327–54.

¹⁰ Pierluigi Licciardello, ed., Consuetudo Camaldulensis. Rudolphi Constitutiones. Liber Eremitice Regule (Florence: Ed. del Galluzzo, 2004), 2–21.

¹¹ Licciardello, Consuetudo Camaldulensis, xlix–l.

¹² Licciardello, Consuetudo Camaldulensis, 22–81.

¹³ Licciardello, Consuetudo Camaldulensis, 22–23. See also the thirteenth-century Libri tres de moribus, also ed. Licciardello, Martino III priore di Camaldoli. Libri tres de moribus (Firenze: Ed. del Galluzzo, 2013). On the later period of Camaldoli, see Caby, De l’érémitisme rural au monachisme urbain.

¹⁴ Nicolangelo D’Acunto, “Monaci poco obbedienti. Le origini vallombrosane fra estremismo riformatore e normalizzazione pontificia,” in L’età dell’obbedienza, 135–65.

¹⁵ Jan Royt, “Religiöse Kulte im Kloster Brevnov. Der Einsiedler Günther,” in Tausend Jahre Benediktiner-Kloster in Brevnov. Benediktinerabtei der Hl. Margarethe in Prag-Břevnov (Prague: Typo plus, 1993), 69–80.

¹⁶ The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie M. Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 4:332–34.

¹⁷ For an overview, see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Werner Goez, Kirchenreform und Investiturstreit. 910–1122 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000).

¹⁸ On the following see Gert Melville, “In privatis locis proprio jure vivere. Zu Diskursen des frühen 12. Jahrhunderts um religiöse Eigenbestimmung oder institutionelle Einbindung,” in Kulturarbeit und Kirche. Festschrift für Paul Mai, ed. Werner Chrobak and Karl Hausbacher (Regensburg: Verein für Regensburger Bistumsgeschichte, 2005), 25–38; repr. in Gert Melville, Frommer Eifer und methodischer Betrieb. Beiträge zum mittelalterlichen Mönchtum, ed. Cristina Andenna and Mirko Breitenstein (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2014), 33–48.

¹⁹ Giles Constable, Monastic Tithes from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964); Giles Constable, “Monastic Possession of Churches and ‘Spiritualia’ in the Age of Reform,” in Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica (1049–1122) (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1971), 304–35.

²⁰ RB 1.6: “Third, there are the Sarabaites, the most detestable kind of monks, who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov 27:21), have a character as soft as lead.”

²¹ Ivo of Chartres, “Epistola 192,” PL 162:198–202, here 200.

²² Ivo of Chartres, “Epistola 256,” PL 162:260–61.

²³ Both texts are edited by Germain Morin, “Rainaud l’ermite et Ives de Chartres. Un épisode de la crise du cénobitisme au XI^e–XII^e siècle,” Revue Bénédictine 40 (1928): 99–115.

²⁴ Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33, 145.

²⁵ Jean Leclercq, “La poème de Payen Bolotin contre les faux ermites,” Révue Bénédictine 68 (1958): 52–86.

²⁶ Ecclesiastical History, 4:312.

²⁷ Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism; Vauchez, ed., Ermites de France et d’Italie.

²⁸ On the following see Gert Melville, “Von der Regula regularum zur Stephansregel. Der normative Sonderweg der Grandmontenser bei der Auffächerung der vita religiosa im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband. Das Werkzeug der Schriftlichkeit, ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1997), 342–63; Jean Becquet, Études Grandmontaines (Ussel: Musée du pays d’Ussel, 1998); Cristina Andenna, “Dall’esempio alla santità. Stefano di Thiers e Stefano di Obazine: Modelli di vita o fondatori di ordini?” in Das Eigene und das Ganze, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 177–224.

²⁹ Liber de doctrina uel Liber sententiarum sev rationvm beati viri Stephani primi patris religionis Grandimontis, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, ed. Jean Becquet, CCCM 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 3–62, here 6.

³⁰ Gert Melville, “In solitudine ac paupertate. Stephans von Muret Evangelium vor Franz von Assisi,” in In proposito paupertatis. Studien zum Armutsverständnis bei den mittelalterlichen Bettelorden, ed. Annette Kehnel and Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 2001), 7–30.

³¹ Biagio Cappelli, Il monachesimo basiliano ai confini calabro-lucani (Naples: Fiorentino, 1963).

³² Becquet, Liber de doctrina, CCCM 8:5.

³³ Carole A. Hutchison, The Hermit Monks of Grandmont, CS 118 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1989).

³⁴ Becquet, Liber de doctrina, CCCM 8:3–62.

³⁵ Regula venerabilis viri Stephani Muretensis, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, ed. Jean Becquet, CCCM 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 65–99.

³⁶ Volkert Pfaff, “Grave Scandalum. Die Eremiten von Grandmont und das Papsttum am Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 75 (1989): 133–54.

³⁷ On the following, see Bernard Bligny, Saint Bruno, le premier chartreux (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1984); Gerardo Posada, Maestro Bruno, padre de monjes (Madrid: Ed. Católica, 1980); San Bruno di Colonia: un eremita tra Oriente e Occidente, ed. Pietro De Leo (Soveria Mannelli [Catanzaro]: Rubbetino, 2004).

³⁸ See chap. 6, pp. 136–37.

³⁹ Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, ed. Edmond-René Labande (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), chap. 11, p. 66; In English, Paul J. Archambault, A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

⁴⁰ On this, see Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, ed. Jean Déchanet, SCh 223 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1975). In English, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu, trans. Theodore Berkeley, CF 12 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971).

⁴¹ Bruno, “Ad filios suos cartusienses,” in Lettres des premiers Chartreux, vol. 1, Saint Bruno—Guigue—Saint Anthelme, ed. Maurice Laporte, SCh 88 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988), 82–89.

⁴² Guigues I ^er, prieur de Chartreuse. Coutumes de Chartreuse. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes par ‘un Chartreux,’” ed. Maurice Laporte, SCh 313 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984).

⁴³ Florent Cygler, “Vom ‘Wort’ Brunos zum gesatzten Recht der Statuten über die ‘Consuetudines Guigonis.’ Propositum und Institutionalisierung im Spiegel der kartäusischen Ordensschriftlichkeit,” in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter, ed. Hagen Keller et al. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 95–110; Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter (Münster: LIT, 2002), 209–14.

⁴⁴ On the following, see Cristina Andenna, “Dall’esempio alla santità”; Gert Melville, “Stephan von Obazine: Begründung und Überwindung charismatischer Führung,” in Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Giancarlo Andenna et al. (Münster: LIT, 2005), 85–102; Alexis Grelois, “Les origines contre la Réforme: nouvelles considérations sur la ‘Vie de Saint Étienne d’Obazine,’” in Écrire son histoire: les communautés régulières face à leur passé, ed. Nicole Bouter (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 369–88; György Geréby and Piroska Nagy, “The Life of the Hermit Stephen of Obazine,” in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 299–310.

⁴⁵ Michel Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne d’Obazine (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’études du Massif Central, 1970), 46.

⁴⁶ Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne, 54.

⁴⁷ Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne, 54.

⁴⁸ Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne, 70.

⁴⁹ Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne, 96.

⁵⁰ Aubrun, Vie de saint Étienne, 106.

⁵¹ Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 18.

⁵² For an overview, see Johannes von Walter, Die ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs. Studien zur Geschichte des Mönchtums, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Dietrich, 1903, 1906); Grundmann, Religious Movements, 17–21. For exemplary contexts in Italy, especially concerning John of Matera and his congregation of Pulsano, see Francesco Panarelli, Dal Gargano alla Toscana. Il monachesimo riformato latino dei Pulsanesi (secoli XII–XIV) (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1997).

⁵³ On the following, see Bernard Beck, Saint Bernard de Tiron, l’ermite, le moine et le monde (Cormeilles-le-Royal: Éd. La Mandragore, 1998).

⁵⁴ On the following, see Jaap J. van Moolenbroek, Vital l’ermite, prédicateur itinérant, fondateur de l’abbaye normande de Savigny (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1990); see also “The Life of Blessed Vitalis of Savigny,” trans. Hugh Feiss, in Lives of the Monastic Reformers, 2: Abbot Vitalis of Savigny, Abbot Godfrey of Savigny, Peter of Avranches, Blessed Hamo, ed. and trans. Hugh Feiss et al., CS 230 (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2014), 41–94.

⁵⁵ On the following, see Jacques Dalarun, Robert of Arbrissel: Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006); Jacques Dalarun, ed., Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse dans l’ouest de la France (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); Jacques Dalarun et al., eds., Les deux vies de Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Hervé Oudart, Robert D’Arbrissel ermite et prédicateur (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2010). Chronology following Jean Longère, “Robert d’Arbrissel prédicateur,” in Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse dans l’ouest de la France. Actes du colloque international de Fontevraud à l’occasion du IX^e centenaire de la fondation de l’abbaye, 13–16 décembre 2001, ed. Jacques Dalarun (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 87–104.

⁵⁶ Baudri de Bourgueil, Historia magistri Roberti, in Les deux vies de Robert d’Arbrissel, fondateur de Fontevraud. Légendes, écrits et témoignages. Édition des sources avec introductions et traductions françaises (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 156.

⁵⁷ Dalarun et al., Les deux vies, 526–57.

⁵⁸ Dalarun et al., Les deux vies, 540.

⁵⁹ Dalarun et al., Les deux vies, 544.

⁶⁰ Jacques Dalarun, Gouverner c’est servir: Essai de démocratie médiévale (Paris: Alma, 2012), 156.

⁶¹ Bruce L. Venarde, “Robert of Arbrissel and Women’s vita religiosa. Looking Back and Ahead,” 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), 329–40.

⁶² Jacques Dalarun, “Les plus anciens statuts de Fontevraud,” in Dalarun, Robert d’Arbrissel et la vie religieuse, 139–72; Dalarun et al., Les deux vies, 388–405.

⁶³ On the following, see Franz J. Felten, “Norbert von Xanten—vom Wanderprediger zum Kirchenfürsten,” in Norbert von Xanten, ed. Kaspar Elm (Cologne: Wienand, 1984), 67–157; Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten als Reformkanoniker und Stifter des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Elm, Norbert von Xanten, 159–88; Stefan Weinfurter, “Norbert von Xanten und die Entstehung des Prämonstratenserordens,” in Barbarossa und die Prämonstratenser (Göppingen: Gesellschaft für staufische Geschichte, 1989), 67–100; Franz J. Felten, “Zwischen Berufung und Amt. Norbert von Xanten und seinesgleichen im ersten Viertel des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Charisma und religiösen Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Giancarlo Andenna et al. (Münster: LIT, 2005), 103–49.

⁶⁴ James V. Fearns, “Peter von Bruis und die religiöse Bewegung des 12. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 48 (1966): 311–35.

⁶⁵ Adriaan H. Bredero, Christenheit und Christentum im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 169–80; Monique Zerner, “L’hérétique Henri dans les sources de son temps (1135–1145),” Revue Mabillon, n.s. 25 (2014): 79–134.

⁶⁶ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1272.

⁶⁷ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1272.

⁶⁸ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1272.

⁶⁹ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1273.

⁷⁰ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1277.

⁷¹ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1291.

⁷² Werner Bomm, “Augustinusregel, professio canonica und Prämonstratenser im 12. Jahrhundert. Das Beispiel der Norbert-Viten Philipps von Harvengt und Anselms von Havelberg,” in Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Paring: Augustiner-Chorherren-Verlag, 2002), 239–94.

⁷³ Vie de saint Étienne d’Obazine, 58.

⁷⁴ Grundmann, Religious Movements, 7–8.

⁷⁵ Vita Norberti B, PL 170:1291.

⁷⁶ Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 246.

⁷⁷ See chap. 9, pp. 186–88.

⁷⁸ On this problem, see the fundamental work of Moos, “Krise und Kritik der Institutionalität. Die mittelalterliche Kirche als ‘Anstalt’ und ‘Himmelreich auf Erden,’” in Institutionalität und Symbolisierung. Verstetigungen kultureller Ordnungsmuster in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2001), 293–340.