The world had changed fundamentally since the great era of Cluny, and the changes came in a matter of only a few decades. The drive for a self-responsible interiorization of the search for God, with its sharp break from the bustle of a worldly life of conventions and institutions, had brought forth new religious movements that traced their core ideals back to the roots of Christianity. But these movements, or at least those that survived, had to be fit into existing models of monastic life, their charismatic energy captured in statutes, their pious passions harnessed by the “methodical practices”1 of a rationally grounded life in community.
The question is whether this integration of early religious energies into renewed institutional frameworks could preserve any of what had inspired so many changes—spiritual self-responsibility, the inner life, the restless search for the salvation of the individual soul. If this question could be answered affirmatively, Otto of Freising’s allusion to a new Egypt could be seen as convincingly realized, as the religious of his generation stood “shining in the brightness of their signs [signa]”2—something that (as he saw it) might even delay the downfall of the world. On this point a few observations are in order.
Around the year 1140, Gratian published a collection of canon law that would soon shape the life of the institutional church as hardly any other work did. In that collection is a canon (C. 19, q. 2, c. 2) that begins as follows: “There are two kinds of law: a public law, and a personal law” (Duae sunt . . . leges: una publica, altera privata).3 The lex publica was understood to be the canon law as it had been written since the days of the fathers; the lex privata, in contrast, was that which had been written in the hearts of the faithful by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (instinctu Sancti Spiritus). Should a cleric wish to enter a monastery to find his personal salvation there, the text continued, he was allowed to do so without asking permission of his bishop. The lex privata, that is, was superior to the lex publica, since the former was the law of the spirit of God—and who, after all, could resist the Holy Spirit? Where the spirit of God is, there is freedom (ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi libertas). Therefore those who were led by the spirit of God were subject to no law of the church. Paul had already used an analogous formulation—ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas—in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor 3:17). Gratian cited another revered authority as further evidence of the reception of this law—no less than a decretal of one of the leading popes of church reform, Urban II. The decretal was not authentic, but no one knew it at the time.
Each individual who was convinced that he could call on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was thus able, in keeping with this text, to dispense with all manner of church regulations—indeed, there was no need to establish norms for spiritual life through the institutional church. In the light of divinely guided decisions, neither the judgments of church officeholders nor the legal claims of a bishop counted for anything. Personal convictions and norms rooted in the heart stood firm against the positive law of a church that saw itself as a mediator of salvation, placed in principle between God and humankind. The same church now saw itself confronted by those who claimed direct personal inspiration by the spirit of God. But above all the challenge played out in the monasteries of the day, since the freedom of the Holy Spirit was leading so many, in keeping with this text, to make their way there.
A rationally designed organization became the standard framework not only for the new monasteries that had grown up across the spectrum of the religious movements of the twelfth century4 but also for the older ones that had opened their doors to the inspiration of reform. Yet principles that could only be anchored in the heart were valued at least as highly. The challenge was to find a balance between the needs of an individual quest for salvation and the demands of the well-ordered community that was once again thought to provide its very foundation.5
Thus the protagonists of the reforming spirit, figures like William of Saint-Thierry (1075/1080–1148), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Peter the Venerable (1092/94–1156), Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167), Hugh of Fouilly (1100–1174), Peter of Celle (1115–1183), Philip of Harvengt (d. 1183), and many others, often anonymous, began around the middle of the twelfth century to write a variety of letters or treatises. Their titles are revealing: “On the status of the virtues” (De statu virtutum), “On claustral discipline” (De disciplina claustrali), and “On conscience” (De conscientia). Each of them sought to pass on core spiritual values as a firm foundation for religious interaction.6 These works came to complement the legal texts. Their claim to validity rested on the fact that they addressed matters essential to salvation. Accordingly, the force behind their sanctions was transcendent, anchored in divine judgment alone, their validity located in the conscience of the individual—that is, it was completely individualized.7 These texts were thus concerned not only with building an inward, personal acceptance of the monastery’s ordering of community life but also with the spiritual formation of the individual and a personal concern for the soul.
Yet the matter could not be left even here. The individual also had to live out the teachings captured in these works. Thus one author asked, “What use are these texts, what is to be read and understood, if you do not read and understand yourself? Move yourself to read inwardly, so that you read, explore, and recognize yourself, and understand.”8 The monasteries of the era fostered, for the first time, a systematic dialogue with one’s own psyche.
Expressions like these were unthinkable without some conceptualization of those dimensions of thought that the lex privata had brought forth through the impetus of the Holy Spirit. They also show how much individual reflection, or at least reflection on the self, had come to be an essential part of monastic life. To peer into the inner life of a person had a strong legitimizing force, insofar as the “inner house” (interior domus)—the title of another prominent text of the twelfth century9—was the place that made possible an encounter with God.
The language of the monastery had become something different. It now cut across all of the mutually exclusive legal constructions and across the different observances and loyalties of the various orders. Its texts advanced ideas that were interchangeable, and in fact readers quite often exchanged them. The new discourse sought to articulate what monasteries were now supposed to be: institutionalized places whose community life allowed the embrace and preservation of the core ideals of the religious transformations of the era, which had begun with the reformulation of the eremitical ideal. And only that new discourse could now allow the formulation of the kinds of striking expressions offered up by a figure like Peter the Venerable, who was still head of the monastic community that had stood as the epitome of an outdated monasticism. Speaking of the search for inner solitude within the monastery, Peter wrote,
And as in the solitude of the mountains, so we have built for ourselves secret places for the solitude of our hearts, where alone the true hermitage is found by those who truly renounce the world, where no distractions are allowed, where the storm and noise of worldly tumult have quieted themselves. . . . Let us always retreat to this silence while we yet live and are away from the Lord and find ourselves in the heart of the crowd, and let us find within ourselves what we would travel to the farthest edges of the world to find.10
Reformed communities of that era were thus understood as places of protection for both body and soul. As Hugh of Fouilly explained, to retreat behind the walls of the cloister was to flee the attacks of the ancient enemy, the devil, and all of the uncertainty of earthly life.11 The reformed houses of the era guarded the spiritual heritage of the new piety, which they deepened through reflection and writing. Otto of Freising was thus able to see them as pure, holy places, where God’s plan of salvation became eschatologically realized.12
The monastery’s traditionally strict separation of inside from outside now came also to represent the differences between starkly opposing worlds—here Jerusalem, there Babylon; here Sinai, there Egypt; here the civitas Dei, there the civitas mundi; here Paradise, there the horrors of the world.13 These communities were no longer forums for presenting a public invitation to salvation, of the sort that the wandering preachers of the streets and plazas of growing cities had sometimes depicted. They were now understood as solitary bastions of religious life. The Cistercians’ refusal to allow the laity access to their churches captures the symbolism perfectly; the same was even true of the foundations of regular canons with pastoral duties in the parishes of a bishopric. It is also revealed in the very small number of cases in which adherents to monastic life went out into the world to preach, as did Bernard of Clairvaux.
The reformed monasteries of that era did more, however, than merely preserve a spiritual inheritance. They clothed that inheritance in models of order that were obedient to rules and that had firm borders—firm, because beyond them lay only a vast, alien world of secular confusion. In that regard, reformed monasteries can be seen as institutional anchor points in the spread of Christendom as it had emerged from the movement to reform the universal church in the eleventh century—a Christendom whose old unity of priesthood (sacerdotium) and kingdom (regnum) the church had broken but now saw as its own patrimony, a church unified anew and set apart from the world around it.
In the Middle Ages, the Christian faith was the foundation of culture, and it was ever present, in all areas of life, as a standard measure and source of justification. In that climate, the reformed monasteries’ attempts to separate themselves from the world could lead to serious problems. A cloistered life, for example, upheld the core ideal that faith could in fact be lived out by embracing monastic life—in humbly following the poor Christ, in the brotherly love of the original Christian community, and in an inner desire for individual salvation. Yet these were ideals that could also become vital options for meeting the needs of the faithful beyond the walls of the traditional cloister. The danger was that those ideals would no longer be negotiable there, thus compelling a search for new configurations of religious life to aid in their realization.
The second half of the twelfth century witnessed a twofold development. On the one hand, quite new social environments and forms of order shaped by the laity began to emerge,14 especially in the comparatively advanced urban communes of northern Italy and lower Lotharingia. In these settings, the structures of the faith established by the church allowed religious identity to find new expression only with great difficulty. On the other hand, heretical currents grew remarkably strong, especially in northern Italy and southern France.15 In many respects those currents had radicalized the old demands of the church reformers. They also settled along the fault lines established between church and world, whether by articulating new religious concepts or by demanding a different kind of church altogether. The two phenomena—the search for religious identity in the context of social transformation, and new models of faith that shattered established boundaries—were not quite identical. But they often found themselves in a complex mutual relationship.
The Roman church, as would soon become clear, had first to adopt strategies that would best allow it to react to these developments in innovative ways. One possible strategy might have been found in the core religious ideals of the reforming monasteries. Both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and secular rulers in fact saw that chance, and they took it: in 1177 Count Raymond V of Toulouse requested the aid of the Cistercian general chapter against the Cathars, who were being persecuted as heretics in his territory. Pope Alexander III gave his support in the matter, and a short time later the Cistercian abbot Henry of Clairvaux arrived to begin work against a heresy that was already deeply rooted in the faith of the common people.16 His chief instrument was the sword, and he failed. In 1203 Innocent III charged the Cistercians anew, under the leadership of Abbot Arnold of Cîteaux, and this time the chief instrument was to be preaching. Yet the monks’ opulent and lordly appearance again limited their success.17 Such a failure clearly shows the degree to which monasteries could become solitary islands that looked out on the world.
New circumstances demanded new forms of religious life, and the search for those forms marked the beginning of a new act in the drama of the monastic world. Although its roots reached back to the eleventh century’s eremitic wandering preachers, who drew around them large crowds especially of female laity, only in the last years of the twelfth century did a strong movement emerge that focused on pious women (mulieres religiosae) from every social rank. The focal point of this movement was the vibrant urban environment of the Low Countries and the Rhineland; it spread from there to northern France and along the Rhine down to Switzerland. At first it had almost no organizational framework, and it never attained anything like the structure of a religious order. The movement belonged to women who wanted to live a life of poverty, penance, humility, chastity, and deeply interior piety but who had no intention of professing vows, observing a traditional rule, or retreating from the world into a monastery. Their designation as Beguines was at first a derogatory term used only by outsiders. In the early years they still lived in their own houses or in those of their families.18 Often they tied some portion of their wealth to a monastery, and each belonged to it as conversa a seculo (a “convert from the world”) but did not reside there.
The story again recalled the eleventh and early twelfth centuries: a way of religious life, this one led by women, that resisted being drawn into the hierarchical structures of the church, and one that when observed from the outside appeared in practice to be entirely unregulated, its religious spirit prompting mistrust and suspicion of heresy. The bishop of Acre, James of Vitry (ca. 1170–1240), a careful observer of religious life in his era and a supporter of the women and their experiments in piety, resented the fact that so many of his contemporaries—high-ranking clerics among them—sought “fraudulently to discredit the spiritual life [of these] women.”19 Because the women lacked any kind of representative body or coordination, their efforts to establish trust worked only on a regional or local level.20 In the first half of the thirteenth century, in many places a form of community life emerged in which the Beguines lived together under the direction of a mistress (magistra). In this case too they renounced lifelong vows, with the result that they could leave the community (to marry, for example), though they had to leave behind the property they had brought when they joined. Scholars thus speak today of these women as representatives of a so-called semireligious life.21 In a few houses of Beguines the women embraced manual labor to support themselves, for example, in textile work, and devoted themselves in addition to religious exercises and prayer to charitable work such as care for the sick and dying and care for the homeless and the poor. In its outward form their pattern of life thus already had a strong affinity to the world of the monastery, and their houses were not infrequently tied, though without vows, to religious life—for example, to the Cistercian Order. They also often assimilated themselves to the mendicant orders by way of the pastoral care offered through those communities.22
Slowly the Beguines began to win respect even among those whose recognition was essential for their continued existence—city governments and leading families in urban settings and the French royal household, for example, as well as numerous bishops and the papacy. In 1233, Gregory IX issued a decree that protected German Beguines and confirmed their way of life under a mistress.23 In Cologne around the middle of the thirteenth century there were around a hundred communities of Beguines, twenty-two in Mainz, and twenty-four in Strasbourg, to name only a few examples. The demand for these communities—above all because they were held together by the deeply interior piety of their members—was thus enormous. In the region of Belgium and the Netherlands in fact there were “Beguine courts”—in the Belgian town of Turnhout, for example—which looked like small, autonomous cities, cut off from the urban landscape by their own walls and trenches.
Yet soon afterward the pendulum slowly began to swing in the opposite direction. At the Ecumenical Council of Vienne, held in 1311/12, the Beguines’ way of life was fundamentally condemned, on the grounds that the Beguines followed no rule, professed no vow of obedience, and had not renounced their property. Thus, the council ruled, they could not be seen as religious. Moreover, and above all, they stood under suspicion of heresy whenever they lived freely and spontaneously beyond the structures of established communities.24 The setback for the Beguines was considerable. But to a certain extent they could make a new start under the right conditions, wherever well-established houses survived and where bishops and orders, especially the Dominicans, could lend their support on questions of Beguine orthodoxy. Pope John XXII recognized these structures in two bulls in 1318 and 1319, thereby allowing Beguine communities in general to continue to survive.
The tragedy of these developments lay in the fact that, on the one hand, with a few exceptions for extreme theological positions, the Beguines articulated a religiosity that they championed passionately and that needed no institutionalization within the traditional vita religiosa. On the other hand, an entirely independent form of women’s piety—one that allowed women to abandon their place in established society and to live together without enclosure or vows—was unthinkable. The power of inherited traditions would not allow itself to yield without contest to the spirit of the age, however compelling—especially when those traditions were supported by a church hierarchy that developed ever-stronger legal frameworks and worked through more strictly differentiated norms. Yet the Beguine way of life remained powerful enough, because of both its strength in numbers and the depth of its faith, to continue to present an alternative path to the monastery’s traditional purpose: preparing the way for the individual soul’s journey back to God.
Developments on another stage reveal that innovative forms of community among devout laity could in any case find solutions of their own on behalf of the hierarchical church, although here too there were numerous points of contention. During the second half of the twelfth century various northern Italian cities saw the emergence of groups of laity, both men and women, coming from a range of levels across society, including the wealthy. These groups embraced a religious life together but remained in the houses of their families. They sustained themselves with the work of their hands and renounced every kind of deception, contention, and oath. They clothed themselves in a kind of monastic habit made of raw, undyed material and thus self-consciously stood apart symbolically from their fellow citizens. They called themselves the Humiliati—those who subjected themselves to humility.25
Little evidence of these groups survives from their earliest beginnings. Whether they shared particular forms of charismatic leadership or patterns of foundation remains unclear, as is the degree to which they established translocal organizational structures. Only one historiographical text,26 unfortunately originating decades later, relates that in 1179 ambassadors of the Humiliati made their way to Pope Alexander III and the Third Lateran Council and sought official confirmation of their way of life and their preaching. They were well received and in fact praised for their pious way of life. They were forbidden only from holding secret gatherings (conventicula), a move designed to guard against both the formation of stable communities and any potential conspiracies. As laity they were allowed to preach only if they received permission explicitly and for each individual occasion from their local bishops. But they refused to accept that limitation, the text further reported, and had thus been excommunicated.
In 1184, a surviving charter issued by Pope Lucius III named the Humiliati in the same breath as the Cathars, the Waldensians, and other heretical groups. The same charter also excommunicated them for a second time, since as laity—along with the others who stood condemned—they had dared to preach “under the appearance of the virtue of piety” (sub specie pietatis virtutum) without having been tasked to do so by any proper authority.27
Both the disgrace of having been cast out from the church community and the infamy of heresy long followed the Humiliati, although the clerics who in the meantime had flocked to their ranks could not be touched by any prohibition against preaching. The prohibition had been directed only against the laity among their ranks, since by virtue of the judgment of heresy against them they had in principle been forbidden to preach. Yet the actual innovation lay precisely in their combining their status as laity who lived a common life among the urban population with their offering of pastoral service to their neighbor through preaching the word of God. This was an entirely new quality of religious life. That the laity should be so bold as to feel themselves responsible for enriching the religiosity of other laity was, in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities, scandalous in principle.
The circumstance was not quite comparable to that of the wandering preachers at the turn from the eleventh to the twelfth century, since they had belonged entirely to the ranks of the clergy and needed a license to preach only beyond the boundaries of their bishoprics. The later figures were also unlike those earlier laity who had gathered around the likes of Stephen of Thiers and had retreated almost without a trace into the forest wilderness. The Humiliati, in contrast, were active in the plazas of the cities. Here again a new circumstance had emerged, albeit in an entirely different way, that did not fit (to recall the concept of deviance deployed against Robert of Arbrissel) into the sensus communis of the church. Moreover, especially in northern Italy, the church hierarchy saw itself as confronted with a palpable expansion of a heresy whose teaching in fact departed dogmatically from orthodoxy.28
Thanks to Innocent III, the Humiliati were eventually brought back into the fold of the church. Innocent, like none of his predecessors, possessed the precious gift of discretion in matters of practice for the advantage of the church. He hit hard against the stubborn holdouts among the Cathars in southern France, going so far as to call a crusade against them that would last from 1209–1229. On the other hand, he sought to lead back into the church those whose uncommon depth of faith and distinct practices of piety had made it seem that they departed from church rules—not least because they were self-organized lay communities, free of hierarchical ties, which sought above all for themselves (but also for others) to fill the holes in pastoral care that had opened up in their new urban societies. The pope recognized particularly well, as became clear from his later actions, the benefit of such efforts at integration. It was an insight he also shared with his predecessors from the days of the wandering preachers.
At the beginning of Innocent’s pontificate in 1198, there had clearly already been contact between the Curia and the Humiliati. In December of 1199 Innocent wrote a harsh letter to the canons and archpriests of Verona admonishing them to exercise discretion (as he had already demanded) in distinguishing between true heretics and those communities of Humiliati that had already explicitly pledged obedience to the Roman church through their bishops. The prejudice against what was for that time such an unusual way of life seems to have been deeply rooted in local society.
In December 1200 the pope instructed the Humiliati to bring together their various communities into one congregation. With the help of Albert, bishop of Vercelli and former prior of the congregation of Mortara, as well as two prominent Cistercian abbots, the Humiliati were also to draw up the norms of their way of life in a new set of statutes. These leaders of established orders had been chosen with intention because they were particularly experienced in the matter of organizing religious communities. The impulse to more firmly establish emergent forms of lay religious community had thus come directly from the world of the reformed monastery—and in fact from the ranks of both regular canons and monks.
A papal commission and even Innocent himself later edited and revised the early statutes, because the pope discerned a fundamental problem: the Humiliati were facing a threefold schism. There were communities of clerics, communities of laity living in ways that imitated monastic life but as yet without any recognized rule, and groups whose members continued to live with their families and who were often married. To create a consolidated corpus of norms binding for all had long been beyond the Curia’s innovative power.
The problem was how to combine two largely irreconcilable ways of life: on the one hand, a mutually supportive life of clergy and laity, and on the other, a life that was either cloistered yet also apostolic and open to the world or that remained fully within secular structures. In a clerical church, increasingly consolidated and grounded in law, the life of the laity fit only with difficulty into a legal structure designed around the clerical estate.
June 1201 witnessed the emergence of a notable solution, one that in substance stood as the beacon of a new era: Innocent III issued two distinct decrees in rapid succession. They took up in expanded form the early draft of the statutes.29 On June 7, 1201, he confirmed the propositum—the spiritual intention—of those laity who lived with their families.30 He especially praised their core ideal of pursuing spiritual perfection within the bond of marriage. Under the name of Third Order they also found an identifiable designation that would later serve as a model for other institutional forms within the vita religiosa—among the Franciscans, for example, albeit in a somewhat different way, with the concept of “tertiary” men and women.31 A few days later, on June 16, 1201, the pope issued the bull Non omni spiritui credere, in which he solemnly established the new order of the Humiliati, preserving its distinct and internally coherent threefold structure and issuing specific statutes for them that were based on the commission’s work.32 These concerned the Order’s inner organization, its general chapter and the hierarchy of its leadership, practices of visitation that were consistent with Cistercian precedents, and the celebration of Mass according to the customs of the congregation of Mortara.33
It is remarkable both how rapidly these developments unfolded at the papal court and how personally the pope was engaged in them. But the real innovation was hidden in the text itself: not only did it create an order that had as one of its essential elements a religious corporation made up exclusively of laity, but these laity were even allowed to preach. The content of their preaching, however, was divided into two forms: dogmatic preaching that treated matters of belief and penitential preaching that focused on moral behavior and on admonitions to live a life pleasing to God. Trusted laity among the Humiliati were henceforth allowed to preach penitential sermons before Sunday congregations, with the bishops’ general understanding that permission to preach would not be withheld.
The church had blazed a new trail. It had begun to occupy a new social space, with the help of the forces that that same space had produced. It had also done so through means that would have an unimagined impact over the coming decades.
Around 1224/25 an anonymous regular canon from the community of Lauterberg near Halle wrote his observations about the impact in his region of two orders with an entirely new way of life (duo novae conversationis ordines).34 One group had only clerics as its members and called itself “the holy preachers” (sancti praedicatores); the other, which also accepted lay members, called itself the “lesser brothers” or Minorites (minores fratres). Both had been confirmed by Innocent III. In view of such high-ranking approval, the regular canon asked himself what the introduction of such novelties might mean. It could only mean, he answered, that those who lived in religious orders, those the church had so long relied on, had become too negligent. But in the end, it could be said that in light of the standard set by Augustine and Benedict, there was certainly no need for new institutions, since those founders had shown—if one would only follow them in obedience—what heights of holiness could be reached. For those who sought holiness through new institutions, all that these most holy fathers had achieved by means of their rules was surely sufficient. The author found it hard to believe that anyone from the ranks of the Order of Preachers or the Minorites could become more holy than Augustine or Benedict. And he did not say this to deny anyone’s genuine zeal. Rather, he found it most painful that the old established orders had become so contemptible by virtue of the undisciplined ways of their members that they were no longer sufficient to save those who wanted to retreat from the world. Had their way of life still remained sufficient, no one would ever have gone chasing after new ones.
This anonymous author was not wrong in his assessment, since what he observed in fact reflected the deeper transformation of religious life’s meaning in his day: from the cloistered world of the twelfth century, which had built bastions to protect an interiorized faith, to a new style of religious life that seemed, in its acceptance by both the Roman church and the broader population, to have overrun the old ways. Soon afterward, the same phenomenon astonished another anonymous author from an altogether different region of Europe, Normandy. He described the impact of the new orders with these words: “And in a short time they filled the earth, so that hardly any city or renowned fortified settlement could be found in Christian lands that was not home to these orders.” To this statement he added, somewhat sharply, that both the Order of Preachers and the Friars Minor were now happily embraced by church and people, and that many nobles and educated youths had been drawn to them because of their unusual novelty (propter novitatem insolitam).35
Surely the anonymous author from Lauterberg was also not entirely wrong in his attempt to explain this crush of new followers by noting the flagging commitment to monastic and canonical norms in the houses of his day, where the dynamic of religious revival had been set aside in favor of the preservation of stability. Yet his observations captured only part of a complex reality, to the extent that he too looked out on the world from a “solitary island” (to recall the phrase, noted above, that attempts to capture the position of the traditional monasteries). What he could not recognize was the fact that the new way of life of these two orders—the nova conversatio, as he called it—represented an institutional response to the new religious needs of the laity.
The Order of Preachers had been founded by Dominic Guzmán (1170–1221), and the Minorites had grown from the circles around Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226).36 The way of life these orders modeled and mediated, as well as the way they organized themselves, signaled a new kind of search for the truth of the Christian faith and a desire for an assurance of salvation grounded in the gospels. Yet that life was now not necessarily to be found only in a cloister closed off from the world. It could also be lived “among the people” (1 Pet 2:12). The example of the Humiliati had already shown that the laity of Europe’s new urban environments knew very well how to articulate that kind of search and desire—and that they saw themselves compelled by their changing social circumstance to embrace it if they were ever to craft an appropriate identity across Christendom’s spectrum of possibilities.
The two orders had divergent ideas about how to meet the religious and organizational needs of the day. In many instances they sought entirely new ways, even as they remained grounded in certain continuities of religious forms of life: the beginnings of the Order of Preachers lay in the vita canonica, and so they sought to link their distinctive model of care for the salvation of their neighbors’ souls to the pastoral office of the regular canons.
Francis and his followers, in contrast, lived out the ideal of voluntary poverty37 and the imitation of Christ “among the people.” They thereby advanced, in their own way, something that for at least two hundred years had been a central focus for anyone who wanted to embrace a pure life according to the gospels. Contemporaries with a broad analytical view—figures like James of Vitry, bishop of Acre and cardinal—recognized this connection and interpreted it as the work of God in the context of salvation history.38 With the Minorites the Lord had created a fourth institution, one that stood alongside the religious life of hermits, monks, and canons and that with them provided the firm durability of a square foundation. Yet upon closer inspection, James continued, God had in fact not introduced a new rule but only revived from the earliest days of the church an old form of religious life, neglected and almost extinct. It was now embodied in the Order of the Minorites, so that new athletes of God could arise in the dangerous last days of the Antichrist and so that the church could be armed against so many threatening afflictions.
These ties to tradition had remained hidden to the anonymous author from Lauterberg. He saw only the ominous acceptance of the new orders, of “unusual novelty,” as the Norman historian put it. These two authors rightly sensed that a new era had arrived for the world of monasticism. A new era had begun, one in which all other religious institutions would be cast into the shadows by the mendicant orders. The Order of Preachers and the Friars Minor, both founded in the early thirteenth century, were their two most important representatives. There were also other thirteenth-century institutions, established through the transformation of older communities. Among these, attention will be given here above all to the Carmelites and the Augustinian Hermits. Common to all these mendicant orders were the command to live in absolute poverty and the renunciation of ties to a particular community in favor of membership in the order as a whole. The latter led to what was perhaps the most unsettling novelty: the crumbling away of distinctive old patterns of community formation. The old notion of large “translocal communities” may have been a fiction, but in many congregations, before the establishment of proper orders, that fiction had preserved a high degree of stability of place and thereby cultivated an individual’s lifelong identification with a single community.
In any event, what actually played out at the beginning of the thirteenth century, despite the continuities of the older bonds of religious life noted thus far, transformed the framework of the world of monasticism in such fundamental ways that it requires a detailed analysis of its own, and one that like the discussion of the outbreak of the eremitical movement cannot be limited to an explanation of external conditions. Of particular interest, moreover, will be a consideration of the genuine core ideas on which the new orders built their overwhelming power, the way they realized the agendas they themselves developed, and the institutional forms they developed to place their beginnings on a lasting foundation.
If one considers only the Order of Preachers (the Ordo praedicatorum, commonly if inaccurately called the Dominicans) and the Order of the Friars Minor (Ordo minorum, again commonly if inaccurately called the Franciscans), a sharp difference appears in the fundamentals discussed above. That difference symbolizes two different principal possibilities for forms of organization and two different ways of understanding the formation of an order. The organization developed by the Order of Preachers can be explained as the result of highly rational procedures that looked to organizational patterns found among the regular canons, creatively adapted those patterns in ways that gave them a new quality, and enhanced them with innovative structures. The process among the Friars Minor, in contrast, was something else entirely: its establishment was unthinkable without the particular role of a unique person. Even when taking care not to overestimate the importance of great personalities in shaping history, it is difficult to ignore that Francis of Assisi embodied a way of life whose shape and meaning became a model for centuries to come, and for thousands of people.
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1 Max Weber, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1169: “Asceticism becomes the object of methodical practices as soon as the ecstatic or contemplative union with God is transformed, from a state that only some individuals can achieve through their charismatic endowments, into a goal that many can reach through identifiable ascetic means just as in the charismatic training of the guilds of magical priests.” Cf. Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Max Weber und das Mönchtum,” in Max Webers Religionssoziologie in interkultureller Perspektive, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Jean Martin Quedraogo (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003), 311–34.
2 See p. 184.
3 On the following, see Gert Melville, “Zur Abgrenzung zwischen Vita canonica und Vita monastica. Das Übertrittsproblem in kanonistischer Behandlung von Gratian bis Hostiensis,” in Secundum regulam vivere. Festschrift für P. Nobert Backmund, ed. Gert Melville (Windberg: Poppe-Verlag, 1978), 205–44; Peter von Moos, “Krise und Kritik der Institutionalität. Die mittelalterliche Kirche als ‘Anstalt’ und ‘Himmelreich auf Erden,’” in Institutionalität und Symbolisierung, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 293–340, 34–44.
4 Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5 Gert Melville, “Im Spannungsfeld von religiösem Eifer und methodischem Betrieb. Zur Innovationskraft der mittelalterlichen Klöster,” Denkströme. Journal der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 7 (2011): 72–92, here 76–80.
6 Caroline Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo. An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979).
7 Mirko Breitenstein, “Die Verfügbarkeit der Transzendenz. Das Gewissen der Mönche als Heilsgarant,” in Gert Melville, Bernd Schneidmüller, and Stefan Weinfurter, eds., Innovation durch Deuten und Gestalten. Klöster im Mittelalter zwischen Jenseits und Welt (Regensburg: Steiner, 2014), 37–56.
8 Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditionis [a twelfth-century anonymous work], PL 184:508.
9 De interiori domo seu De conscientia aedificanda, PL 184:507–52; Philippe Delhaye, “Domo (de interiori),” Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957), 3:1548–51.
10 Ep 58, in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:188.
11 Hugo de Folieto, De claustro animae, PL 176:1019–20.
12 See p. 184.
13 Gert Melville, “Inside and Outside. Some Considerations about Cloistral Boundaries in the Central Middle Ages,” in Ecclesia in medio nationis, ed. Brigitte Meijns and Steven Vanderputten (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011), 167–82.
14 Hagen Keller, “Die Stadtkommunen als politische Organismen in den Herrschaftsordnungen des 11.–13. Jahrhunderts,” in Pensiero e sperimentazioni istituzionali nella societas Christiana (1046–1250), ed. Giancarlo Andenna (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2007), 673–703. For Homobonus von Cremona as a symbolic embodiment, so to speak, of these structures, see André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen Age. Pratiques et experiences religieuses (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 77–82.
15 Jörg Oberste, Zwischen Heiligkeit und Häresie, 2 vols. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003).
16 Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Henry of Clairvaux and the 1178 and 1181 Missions,” Heresis 28 (1997): 63–87.
17 Jörg Oberste, “Prediger, Legaten und Märtyrer. Die Zisterzienser im Kampf gegen die Katharer,” in Beiträge zum klösterlichen Leben im christlichen Abendland während des Mittelalters, ed. Reinhardt Butz and Jörg Oberste (Münster: LIT, 2004), 73–92.
18 Ernest William McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New York: Octagon Books, 1969); Ernest William McDonnell, “Beginen/Begarden,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1980); Martina Wehrli-Johns, “Das mittelalterliche Beginentum. Religiöse Frauenbewegung oder Sozialidee der Scholastik,” in Fromme Frauen oder Ketzerinnen? Leben und Verfolgung der Beginen im Mittelalter, ed. Martina Wehrli-Johns and Claudia Opitz (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1998), 25–51; Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
19 McDonnell, “Beginen/Begarden,” 405. On James de Vitry, see Franz J. Felten, “Geschichtsschreibung cum ira et studio. Zur Darstellung religiöser Gemeinschaften in Jakob von Vitrys Historia occidentalis,” in Christliches und jüdisches Europa im Mittelalter. Kolloquium zu Ehren von Alfred Haverkamp, ed. Lukas Clemens and Sigrid Hirbodian (Trier: Kliomedia, 2011), 83–120.
20 Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012).
21 On the concept, see Kaspar Elm, “Vita regularis sine regula. Bedeutung, Rechtsstellung und Selbstverständnis des mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Semireligiosentums,” in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. Elisabeth Müller-Luckner and František Šmahel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 239–73; James Mixson, trans., Selected Essays of Kaspar Elm (Leiden: Brill, 2015), chap. 8. See also the work of Elizabeth M. Makowski, especially “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005).
22 Christian-Frederik Felskau, “Von Brabant bis Böhmen und darüber hinaus. Zu Einheit und Vielfalt der ‘religiösen Frauenbewegung’ des 12. und des 13. Jahrhunderts,” in Fromme Frauen—unbequeme Frauen? Weibliches Religiosentum im Mittelalter, ed. Edeltraud Klueting (Hildensheim and Zürich: Olms, 2006).
23 Amalie Fössel and Anette Hettinger, Klosterfrauen, Beginen, Ketzerinnen. Religiöse Lebensformen von Frauen im Mittelalter (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 2000), 137–38.
24 Fössel and Hettinger, Klosterfrauen, 147–49; Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter, 171–98.
25 Annamaria Ambrosioni, “Umiliati/Umiliate,” in Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione (Rome: Edizioni paoline, 1997), 9:1489–1507; Maria Pia Alberzoni, “Die Humiliaten zwischen Legende und Wirklichkeit,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 107 (1999): 324–53; Frances Andrews, The Early Humilitati (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
26 Anonymus of Laon, in Alberzoni, “Die Humiliaten,” 333.
27 Texte zur Inquisition, ed. Kurt-Victor Selge (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1967), 26–29 (Ad abolendam).
28 Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (1160/1170–1240) évêque de Saint-Jean-d’Acre, ed. Robert Burchard Constantijn Huygens (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:36–37.
29 Girolamo Tiraboschi, Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (Milan: Galeatius, 1768), 2:139–48.
30 Tiraboschi, Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta, 2:128–34.
31 Karl Suso Frank, “Tertiarier/Tertiarierinnen I und II,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 33:85–93; Alison More, “Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Third Orders, Rules and Canonical Legitimacy,” Church History 83 (2014): 297–323.
32 Frank, “Tertiarier/Tertiarierinnen I und II.”
33 Alberzoni, “Die Humiliaten,” 331–38; Andrews, The Early Humilitati, 64–98.
34 Chronicon Montis Sereni, ed. MGH SS 23, 220. On the following, see Gert Melville, “Duo novae conversationis ordines. Zur Wahrnehmung der frühen Mendikanten vor dem Problem institutioneller Neuartigkeit im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum,” in Die Bettelorden im Aufbau, ed. Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Münster: LIT, 1999), 1–23.
35 Annales Normannici, ed. MGH SS 26, S. 514; Kajetan Esser, Anfänge und ursprüngliche Zielsetzungen des Ordens der Minderbrüder (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 9–11; Clifford Hugh Lawrence, The Friars (New York: Longman, 1994).
36 For a comparison of the two, see Kaspar Elm, “Franziskus und Dominikus. Wirkungen und Antriebskräfte zweier Ordensstifter,” in Kaspar Elm, Vitasfratrum, ed. Dieter Berg (Werl: Dietrich-Coelde, 1994), 123–41; Mixson, Selected Essays of Kaspar Elm, chap. 1.
37 Achim Wesjohann, “Überschüsse an Armut. Mythische Grundlagen mendikantischer Armutsauffassungen,” in In proposito paupertatis, ed. Gert Melville and Annette Kehnel (Münster: LIT, 2001), 169–201, here 184–96.
38 John Frederick Hinnebusch, ed., The Historia Occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry (Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 1972), 158–61; Melville, “Duo novae conversationis ordines,” 7–9.