With the exception of Norbert of Xanten and his community, the eremitical groups surveyed thus far tended to see themselves either as tied to monastic life (insofar as it had shaped their early development) or primarily as movements oriented toward the laity, although their leaders were most often from the clerical ranks, and they often felt strong affinities to that estate—Robert of Arbrissel, for example, who, as noted above, founded the cloister of La Roë exclusively for clergy. Yet already in the early eleventh century an equally momentous religious awakening led individual clerics scattered across Europe to gather together and to live a common life (vita communis) or to transform established houses of canons into the same kinds of cloistered communities that from Late Antiquity had been known only to monks.
From these transformations emerged a central idea, one that went beyond the Aachen regulations of 816 and that sought to regulate the clerical estate (vita canonica) by requiring strict personal poverty, obedience, regulated hours of the day, fasting, and silence—all analogous to monastic life. From the middle of the eleventh century this same concern to regulate the clergy was shared among the reforming leaders of the Roman Curia.1 They would seek to build communities according to the model of the apostles and the first Christians in Jerusalem and would call clerics to imitate Christ—in his absolute poverty, his humility, and the self-renunciation through which he brought about humankind’s salvation. To live in this exemplary way came to be understood as an apostolic mission.2
The beginnings of this movement were often found in the eremitical life as well, since clerics too at first saw communal retreat from the world as the best possibility for leading a life that was radically centered on God and that would secure salvation. The first-known group that sought to realize such a way of life was a band of four clerics who in 1039 withdrew from the world into the church of Saint Rufus, before the gates of Avignon.3 But early on, canons in bishops’ cathedrals—as happened in Saint Martin of Lucca in the first half of the eleventh century—also transformed themselves into communities that submitted to the rule-governed ways (regularitas) of the apostolic life.4 As opposed to the “secular canons,” who were usually part of the Aachen tradition, in the future one would speak self-consciously, and in a way that reflected a distinct identity, of “regular canons” (canonici regulares).
The enormous potential of the apostolic ideals of these new clerical communities to shape the political affairs of the church became quickly apparent as the church hierarchy around Gregory VII began to seek a renewed model of ecclesiastical validity. In centuries past, the church hierarchy had sometimes allowed its own identity to yield—sometimes until it was hardly recognizable—to a secular power that was understood to be equally sacral. But it now rose from the ashes like a phoenix with the goal of libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the church, which would seek to break the bonds of secular power—even at the cost of a break with the foundational lines of the established order.5
For that aim, as has been emphasized, it needed the energy of those who were driven from within by a religious fire, who put their faith before all worldliness, all earthly power, all material wealth. The church hierarchy needed zealots who were driven to a radical reform of Christian life from below, so to speak, because the hierarchy itself was striving for radical reform. And that same need had given rise to the desire to see so many communities of hermits and wandering preachers integrated once again into the institutional church—communities that were led by charismatics and that in many respects stood on the border between heresy and orthodoxy. Yet precisely here was to be found the use of the emergent movement to redefine the clergy. It could become a powerful instrument of church reform—one that in all events now came not from below but from above.
Yet as had been true of the bands of hermits and wandering preachers, such an option for the reform of the church could be embraced only insofar as its proponents did not shy away from setting themselves apart, deliberately and polemically, from established structures. Already in 1059 the Lateran Synod held by Pope Nicholas II had formulated (with Hildebrand, later Gregory VII, as its spokesman) sharp attacks against the lax ways of clerical communities, as well as of canonesses, with regard to private property, and against their pompous lifestyle. The synod had also sharply criticized the old regulations for canonical life crafted at Aachen.6 The call now was for the creation of communities of clerics who would take as their example the apostolic life of the early church in Jerusalem, where according to the Acts of the Apostles all were of “one heart and one mind” (Acts 4:32).7 To pursue and to realize this core aim was to create a renewed clerical estate, one whose integrity and piety, even in its outward appearance, legitimized the church’s movement for independence.
The effort was a success. Apart from canonical life’s eremitical beginnings, which had a long-lived impact (not least with respect to the community that formed around Norbert of Xanten), the focal points for its new foundations of regular canons shifted to cathedral chapters, and even more to new settlements that were “established among the people,” as it was said,8 and that could thereby carry out their apostolic mission in the form of pastoral care. These new communities were supported by bishops who acted locally in support of church reform in the Roman spirit. Among them were figures like the already-mentioned Ivo of Chartres,9 for example, or the bishop of Lucca, Anselm (1035–1086),10 both of whom, significantly, were also great experts in the law of the church.
In Germany the impetus for new foundations came above all from nobility in search of their independence (as has already been shown in the context of monastic foundations) and who therefore preferred to hand over their foundations to the pope rather than to a royal power. But already in the eleventh century, these initiatives often came directly from clergy, about whom there is for the most part little surviving evidence and who were seldom charismatics—figures like the otherwise almost unknown Adam, for example, who founded a church in Mortara, just south of Novara in northern Italy, and who gathered a community of clerics around him.11 In doing so he laid the foundation for a congregation of regular canons that would receive strong papal support and that would become, like Cluny, recognized as a kind of church, the ecclesia Mortariensis.
Across Europe, communities of clerics emerged that began to lead lives of a kind once led only by monks. They did not stand on the border between heresy and orthodoxy, but they very much stood between reactionary forces hostile to reform and the new avant-garde. The clerical movement, too, was thus shaped at first by a search for the best way, by an experiment that carried with it the possibility of compromise and backsliding into old ways.
The dynamic is revealed clearly in the story of a leading protagonist of reform, Bishop Altmann of Passau (1065–1091).12 He was a genuine supporter of the reforming papacy, a true ally of Gregory VII. But his diocesan clergy made it hard for him to realize his ideals because they firmly resisted his ban on clerical marriage. Altmann now dared to experiment. Around 1067–1073 he founded in his episcopal city a community under the patronage of Saint Nicholas and staffed it with regular clergy. He thereby laid the foundation for what was at first a remarkable success story. In 1071, he reformed his own tradition-rich community of Saint Florian near Linz, and in 1073 he worked to found the community of Rottenbuch13 in the so-called Pfaffenwinkel (“priests’ corner”), a region in the southwestern reaches of Bavaria. He staffed that community with canons from Saint Nicholas. Rottenbuch then became a center of its own reform circle and a place of refuge for many clergy loyal to the papacy.
Rottenbuch was also home to one of the most important of all medieval regular canons, Gerhoh (1092/3–1169),14 later prior of Reichersberg and an impressive advocate of an eschatologically oriented church—a zealous teacher, as only the ecclesia militans of his era could produce. But Rottenbuch was also a model foundation for other communities from a legal point of view. Already a few years after its establishment, its founding family, the Welfs, handed it over to the papacy and placed it under papal protection. As a monastery that was the property of the papacy, Rottenbuch enjoyed the so-called libertas Romana. It stood out in combative contrast to the traditional ways of imperial monasteries.15 Within the universal church, Rottenbuch was thus the embodiment of an institution untouched by the traditions of proprietary churches.
From 1078 Bishop Altmann could no longer enter Passau, his episcopal city. His clashes with the clergy—who were for the most part still not reformed—had become too sharp, and he stood prominently on the front lines against Henry IV. But he continued to establish new communities for the regular clergy. In 1081 he transformed his own community of Saint Pölten, in modern Lower Austria, accordingly. In 1083 he then founded Göttweig (also in modern Lower Austria) as a community of regular canons, though later in the same century that community was transformed yet again into a Benedictine abbey. Altmann failed at only one thing: the transformation of his cathedral chapter into a community of regular canons, through which he could have created a spiritual and administrative center for the reform of the clergy.
Also at work in Altmann’s era were Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg (1060–1088) and Bishop Adalbert of Würzburg (1045–1090) in Franconia.16 Both were similarly zealous supporters of church reform and opponents of Henry IV. They too made use of the strategy of creating new foundations in seeking to establish anchor points for the development of a reformed clergy. Their most important creations were Reichersberg, on the River Inn, and Heidenfeld, near Schweinfurt.
One milestone in the development of the regular canons, however, owed its existence to the pope and former Cluniac monk Urban II,17 whom we have already encountered so often in connection with the affairs of the monks and their religious movements. Compactly formulated for the foundation of Rottenbuch in 1092, Urban’s “path-breaking” charter came to serve as a formulary for other houses.18 In the charter Urban set the regulated common life of the canons (the vita canonica) on equal footing with the life of monks (the vita monastica) insofar as he designated the vita canonica as having been the original form of Christian life—albeit one that had fallen into oblivion in the wake of the growth of the church. Because the regular canons, by virtue of this ancient legacy, had been given the task of the cura animarum—pastoral care for the souls of humankind—they could be sure that they held a place superior even to the contemplative lives of the monks. As a text from the following decades put it, Christ himself had provided the vita canonica to humankind as a medicine that would save them from damnation.19
Papal sources from around this time—preserved in the charters of Alexander II and Urban II—contain a formula that sought more precisely to articulate the normative framework of the regular canons’ way of life and to tie the familiar concept regulariter to a concrete guideline: they were tasked secundum regulam beati Augustini vivere (“to live according to the rule of blessed Augustine”). It has been proven, however, that the rule that had been written especially for the common life of clerics was first adopted in 1107/8 in the communities of Springiersbach, Hamersleben (near Halberstadt), and the Parisian abbey of Saint Victor—that is, the Rule of Augustine. Thus regular canons in German-speaking lands are still today called Augustinian Chorherren.20
With respect to the authenticity of the tradition of the text that was called the Rule of Augustine, contemporaries held many different views.21 They had no doubt regarding the authenticity of the text called the Praeceptum; there was, however, doubt concerning another, stricter work, also believed to be a work of Augustine, the so-called Ordo monasterii. From the second decade of the twelfth century, the canonical movement began to divide into two camps: the so-called old order (Ordo antiquus), which used the Praeceptum as its normative text (for example, in Rottenbuch in Bavaria, Marbach in Alsace, and Saint Rufus in southern France, already discussed above) and the new order (Ordo novus), which followed the more strict Ordo monasterii (among the Praemonstratensians of Norbert of Xanten, for example, Springiersbach on the Mosel, in Klosterrath [near Aachen], noted already as one of Norbert’s many stops, and in St. Victor in Paris, one of the greatest spiritual centers of the twelfth century).22 Both the old and the new orders developed around centers that drew together dependent monasteries or that spread their spiritual influence to other houses. But no great merger ever encompassed whole regions and wide stretches of Christendom, as had happened with Cluny and later Prémontré, or even (as will be seen) Cîteaux.
The Roman church emerged as victor in the struggle for its freedom. A decisive, symbolic pause in the battle was the so-called Concordat of Worms of 1122, which ended the Investiture Controversy. For the reformist movements in Germany this truce between pope and emperor marked an important step, since from that point forward foundations of regular canons no longer needed to be seen, as had been true at Rottenbuch, for example, only as places of refuge for persecuted reformers. Rather, such foundations could now align themselves with the new political direction of the church, an order whose reforming and indeed in many respects quite revolutionary eleventh-century dynamic would be followed by the transformation into a more and more juristically shaped institution.
Communities of canonesses, already sharply criticized in 1059, came to feel these developments keenly and were now emphatically required to order their affairs properly.23 The Second Lateran Council of 1139 spoke of the contemptible way in which so many women’s communities seemed to live according to no established rule. In 1148, the Synod of Reims, with Pope Eugene III presiding, required that women who called themselves canonicae (canonesses) and yet who lived irregularly, luxuriously, and without strict enclosure be required to adopt either the Rule of Saint Benedict or the Rule of Augustine. Nor did these accusations disappear thereafter; until the Council of Vienne in 1311 there were repeated demands for canonesses to adopt a religious rule and make profession of lifelong vows. The success of these efforts, however, was in the end rather limited.24
For the regular canons, in contrast, the new ecclesiastical circumstance after the Concordat of Worms proved to be enormously fruitful. What at first served to establish a religiously and morally renewed clerical estate could now in practice be turned toward increasing the efficiency of pastoral efforts within diocesan structures.
In this respect a virtually model enforcement of the apostolic ideal occurred under the archbishop of Salzburg, Conrad I, who led his ecclesiastical province from 1106–1147. A brief sketch of these events can serve to round out the overall developments among regular canons in this period. To do so admittedly provides only an exemplar in a systematic sense. The historical complexity of episcopal politics with respect to the regular canons could and did take many different forms. But apart from papal support,25 everything depended on the sustained reforming energy of holders of episcopal office.26
With Conrad that energy was unstoppable.27 After Henry IV had entrusted him, in the old manner, with ring and staff—and thus not only with the worldly goods and rights of the archbishopric of Salzburg (the temporalia) but also with its spiritual rights (spiritualia)—and after he had clashed with Henry IV in 1111, only in the wake of the Concordat of Worms was Conrad once again able to occupy his archiepiscopal seat.
At once he began to undertake broad measures—freeing church institutions from lay control, improving pastoral care through an emphasis on clerical integrity—intended to realize the principles of church reform in his archdiocese. And religious houses, it seemed to him, were especially promising focal points for his efforts. He was certainly concerned with communities of monks—Benedictines and Cistercians—but above all with communities of clerics, since his aim to improve pastoral care depended on them. In this respect he achieved something that had eluded Altmann of Passau: in 1122 Conrad transformed his own cathedral chapter into a community of regular clerics under vows of personal poverty and the common life. The archiepiscopal clerical community of Reichersberg on the Inn followed, and thereafter Maria Saal in Carinthia, the episcopal chapter in Gurk, the communities of Au and Gars on the Inn, Herrenchiemsee, and a dozen more houses, some of them even in the jurisdictions of his suffragans, or subordinate diocesan bishops.
The instruments of Conrad’s influence were nearly always the same. Quite against the rigid proprietary-church policies of some other bishops (above all in the western regions of the empire), who usually disposed of their foundations’ properties seemingly at random, Conrad established a special propertied estate from which he secured endowments serving the independent administration of each church. He often also tied these, in the case of new foundations, to lands that had been donated by noble families, who now appeared as founders. Each of these strategies helped to preserve the houses by granting them a degree of institutional permanence.
A second element of Conrad’s strategy was to transfer the tithes of the laity to his reformed houses in order to strengthen them further financially. He also often handed the leadership of these houses over to archdeacons, whose office occupied an intermediary position between the archbishop and his churches. In terms of ecclesiastical organization and hierarchy, his churches were to be bound directly to him. A final instrument, adopted in the name of ecclesiastical liberty and in the interest of concentrating the special protection of the archbishop, was to place pronounced limits on the reach of the legal institution known as the advocate—an office that was necessary but still dangerous for the independent development of a monastery.
In Conrad’s diocese the regular canons came to occupy a predominant position, one that placed them in a sort of symbiotic relationship with the office of archbishop. It might seem that they had also lost something that sustained monastic life in general and that other alliances of regular canons might to a certain degree have been able to preserve: the fundamental unassailability of a cloistered way of life focused strictly on itself. Yet this reform circle produced the introduction to the Rule of Augustine already noted above. That text reflected on the establishment and aims of the vita canonica and in doing so reached the exceptionally confident conclusion that the canons’ way of life was superior to all others. It renewed in a modern way the ideal of the common life of the apostles that was understood to lie in the origins of the church, forcing aside an outdated present by way of a newly awakened vigor. This eschatological position could certainly be deployed in the service of episcopal interests, but it was in itself unassailable.28
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1 Cristina Andenna, “Kanoniker sind Gott für das ganze Volk verantwortlich,” in Die Regularkanoniker Italiens und die Kirche im 12. Jahrhundert (Paring: Augustiner-Chorherren-Verlag, 2004), 16–17.
2 On the following, as an overview, see Charles Dereine, “Chanoines,” in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1951), 12:354–405; Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, Medioevo canonicale (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1970).
3 Ursula Vones-Liebenstein, “Der Verband der Regularkanoniker von Saint-Ruf. Entstehung, Struktur und normative Grundlagen,” in Regula Sancti Augustini. Normative Grundlage differenter Verbände im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Paring: Augustiner-Chorherren-Verlag, 2002), 49–103.
4 Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “Il movimento canonicale a Lucca e nella diocesi lucchese fra XI e XII secolo,” in Alluccio da Pescia. Un santo laico dell’età postgregoriana (1070–1134), ed. Cinzio Violante (Rome: Jouvence, 1993), 147–57.
5 On its later impact, see Brigitte Szabó-Bechstein, “‘Libertas ecclesiae’ vom 12. bis zur Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts. Verbreitung und Wandel des Begriffs seit seiner Prägung durch Gregor VII.,” in Die abendländische Freiheit vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991), 147–76.
6 Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Gregor VII. Papst zwischen Canossa und Kirchenreform (Darmstadt: Primus, 2001), 165–66.
7 Klaus Schreiner, “Ein Herz und eine Seele. Eine urchristliche Lebensform und ihre Institutionalisierung im augustinisch geprägten Mönchtum des hohen und späten Mittelalters,” in Melville and Müller, Regula Sancti Augustini, 1–47.
8 Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia, ed. Giles Constable and Bernard S. Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 66–86.
9 Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1962), 139–42.
10 Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, “Il capitolo di San Martino e la riforma canonicale nella seconda metà del secolo XI,” in Sant’Anselmo vescovo di Lucca (1073–1086) nel quadro delle trasformazioni sociali e della riforma ecclesiastica, ed. Cinzio Violante (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992), 51–64.
11 Cristina Andenna, Mortariensis Ecclesia: Una congregazione di canonici regolari in Italia settentrionale tra XI e XII secolo (Münster: LIT, 2007).
12 Egon Boshof, “Bischof Altmann, St. Nikola und die Kanonikerreform. Das Bistum Passau im Investiturstreit,” in Tradition und Entwicklung. Gedenkschrift für Johann Riederer, ed. Karl-Heinz Pollok (Passau: Passavia, 1981), 317–45.
13 Jakob Mois, Das Stift Rottenbuch in der Kirchenreform des 11.–12. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Freising: Verlag des erzbischöflichen Ordinariats München und Freising, 1953).
14 Peter Classen, “Gerhoch von Reichersberg und die Regularkanoniker in Bayern und Österreich,” in Ausgewählte Aufsätze von Peter Classen, ed. Josef Fleckenstein (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1983), 431–60; Reinhold Rieger, “Kirchenreform und Theologiekritik bei Gerhoch von Reichersberg,” in Frömmigkeit und Theologie an Chorherrenstiften, ed. Ulrich Köpf (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2009), 141–56.
15 See pp. 56–57.
16 Stephan Acht, “Die Bischöfe,” in Die Augustinerchorherren in Bayern, ed. Paul Mai (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1999), 19–25.
17 Horst Fuhrmann, Papst Urban II. und der Stand der Regularkanoniker (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984).
18 Stefan Weinfurter, “Reformkanoniker und Reichsepiskopat im Hochmittelalter,” Historisches Jahrbuch 97–98 (1978): 158–93, here 166.
19 Weinfurter, “Vita canonica und Eschatologie,” in Secundum regulam vivere, ed. Gert Melville (Windberg: Poppe-Verlag, 1978).
20 Charles Dereine, “Vie commune, règle de Saint Augustin et chanoines réguliers au 11e siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 42 (1946): 365–406; Stefan Weinfurter, Salzburger Bistumsreform und Bischofspolitik im 12. Jahrhundert (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1975), 236–38.
21 See p. 12.
22 Weinfurter, Salzburger Bistumsreform, 238–40.
23 Hedwig Röckelein, “Die Auswirkung der Kanonikerreform,” in Institution und Charisma, ed. Franz J. Felten et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 55–72.
24 Immo Eberl, “Stiftisches Leben in Klöstern. Zur Regeltreue im klösterlichen Alltag des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit,” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 275–315.
25 Ursula Vones-Liebenstein, “Hadrian IV. regularis inter primos disciplinae aemulator und die Regularkanoniker,” in Päpstliche Herrschaft im Mittelalter. Funktionsweisen—Strategien—Darstellungsformen, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2012), 97–126.
26 Weinfurter, “Reformkanoniker.”
27 On the following, see Weinfurter, Salzburger Bistumsreform.
28 Weinfurter, “Vita canonica und Eschatologie.”