The events described above demonstrate once again the strength that the papacy could by now bring to bear in matters concerning the religious orders.1 In the twelfth century the popes had been concerned to provide protection for fledgling congregations and orders, including the privilege of exemption from local bishops. They also stood ready to lend their approval whenever circumstances proved threatening to the orders’ progress, as in the case of the Cistercians, for example, or when an impetus toward consolidation was necessary in the wake of the loss of a charismatic founder, as in the case of the Premonstratensians. In the thirteenth century, in contrast, popes like Innocent III had already begun to create new orders and to exercise control over new foundations by way of universally valid legislation, such as that of Lateran IV. In relation to the religious orders, the papacy was no longer merely the highest spiritual authority. It was also, in an institutional sense, the highest and quite inescapable authority with regard to approval, correction, and interpretation. A visible sign of this power was the fact that individual communities alone were no longer handed over to the See of Saint Peter. Rather, entire orders (for example, the Franciscans) allied themselves with the pope.2 Old instruments of monastic exemption were also now deployed to cover entire orders.3
Over against the general laws of the church (ius commune), individual religious communities naturally preserved their own rights (ius particulare) as well as the authority to develop their own laws. In 1245, the canonist Godfrey of Trano correctly characterized the varying subjects of monastic “particularities” that had thereby emerged: “But because different observances and statutes have been established [in the orders], they provide a better guide to the legal circumstance of religious life than the general laws of the church.”4 Regardless of these many different legal situations, the popes nevertheless sought to enforce their power of governance, which rested on the primacy of their jurisdiction, by intervening directly in the particular law of each order.
The Franciscans provided just one illustration of this dynamic. In that instance, popes like Gregory IX and Nicholas III had even nullified the normative text of a founder and subjected another text to a binding exegesis. Yet Gregory IX reformed by decree the constitutional structure of the Cluniacs, the Grandmontines, the Premonstratensians, and the regular canons of Arrouaise; Clement IV did the same with the Cistercians. The list could go on.5
None of these congregations and orders, whether in the thirteenth or in later centuries, was ever able to develop the kind of sovereign self-confidence that had characterized the ecclesia Cluniacensis—an open model, within a closed world order, that could represent all of monastic life. But many congregations were certainly able to preserve an identity that at its core represented a world distinct from that of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Thus while individual orders, such as the Carthusians, sought to distance themselves from every kind of external reform,6 others delayed or resisted reform, or at least sought to correct it. In 1233 Gregory IX, for example, had to initiate his reform of the Cluniacs a second time after the monks had successfully resisted the implementation of a first bull issued the previous year, one that had placed their old competitors, the Cistercians, in a supervisory role over them.7 Even confident and legally sophisticated popes, for all their power, recognized that it was best to be diplomatic about such sensitive issues. A figure such as John XXII was in this respect (as in other areas of ecclesiastical politics) probably an exception.
All that has been outlined here provided the essentials of a procedural starting point for the Cistercian monk and pope Benedict XII as he designed a major initiative to reform the religious orders in the 1330s—the most comprehensive initiative of its kind to that point.8 It was his intention, speaking generally, to arrest a seemingly pervasive decline of morality and discipline through strict statutes, through an emphasis on education, through better regulation of the use of material goods, and through improvement of procedures of oversight and decision making. He pursued these goals with an often obsessive attention to detail. For example, as the texts of the reform decrees make clear, he sought to regulate precisely the length of time that Benedictines studied at the University of Paris.9 He also sought to combat the Cistercian custom, increasingly common from the thirteenth century, of partitioning the common dormitory into individual cells: “No longer should anyone build individual cells in a dormitory. And those already built should be torn down within three months following the promulgation of this apostolic decree. The visitors will oversee the matter.”10 The latter issue seems almost an afterthought; but in reality it represented a breach of norms that symbolized a declining emphasis on values like communal spirit and discipline.
In light of the sheer variety of organizational forms across the orders, a reform project like this was anything but a simple undertaking, even though the pope, with the aid of separate commissions, took counsel from a range of stakeholders:11 from the abbot of Cîteaux and the three Cistercian primary abbots, for example; from six Benedictines who were also scholars of canon law; from the general minister, six provincial ministers, and the procurator of the Franciscans, as well as other theologians from that Order, and so on. Benedict XII then issued three extensive reform decrees in rapid succession: on July 12, 1335, Fulgens sicut stella for the Cistercians, his own Order; on June 20, 1336, Summi Magistri for the Benedictines; on November 28, 1336, Redemptor noster for the Franciscans; and, after a brief delay, a fourth on May 15, 1339, Ad decorem for the regular canons.12
In the prologues of these bulls, Benedict was notably concerned to build consensus for his project and to create the impression that he acknowledged the merits of earlier initiatives, even as he now sought to advance his own thoroughgoing reforms. So, for example, his bull for the Cistercians used a text taken from the Old Testament (Sir 50:6) to flatter their order. It opened with the words Fulgens sicut stella matutina, “Shining like the morning star among the clouds,” and then continued, “the holy Cistercian Order is at work at the heart of the Church Militant through word and example.”13 Pope Benedict in turn sought to win over the regular canons by reinforcing their self-understanding of renewal through apostolic community by tying their way of life back to the earliest days of the church and by reassuring them that he would change nothing of the timeless essentials of their institutions, only establishing something new insofar as it might be useful to them. But at the same time, the pope also intentionally pointed them back to the “holiness of their origins”14 and noted that the distance between those foundations and the present had fostered much that might be in need of reform.
Benedict XII’s intentions as a reformer involved no changes that required any fundamental recasting of the orders’ core ideals. He sought only to reinforce normative structures, so to speak, in both those places that promised to have direct practical impact and that had special symbolic meaning. Nevertheless, his project often faced fierce resistance. The Carthusians remained inaccessible, because they stood as always on their reputation as the strictest order. But the Dominicans, too, successfully resisted any papal effort at reform. Their arguments rested not on any claim like that of the Carthusians that their order was in no need of reform. Rather, they noted the decree of Pope Alexander IV in 1255 confirming the sovereignty of Dominican legal foundations.15 Their constitutions, which reflected the identity of the Order, guaranteed an independent enforcement of reform. The Milanese Dominican and historian Galvaneus Fiamma,16 who was among the sharpest polemicists against the program of Benedict XII, founded his arguments precisely on this principle, declaring that were they to accept interference in their affairs from a papal reform, they would be abdicating their legislative autonomy.
The other orders’ reception of Benedict’s reform bulls was something less than ideal.17 The Franciscans, for example, in fact promulgated his decree at their general chapter in 1337 but thereafter allowed it to fall into oblivion. Among the Benedictines—whose history always resists generalization, who aside from Cluny knew no Europe-wide congregations, and who had to this point never lost their decisive character as independent monasteries—the reforms that provincial chapters (among others) had prescribed for them (as the Fourth Lateran Council had done) met with a widely varied reception. In England, provincial chapters were held steadily over the coming centuries. In Germany they were held continually only in certain regions, though Benedict’s initiatives had some impact on the later emergence of reform congregations in the region, as will be discussed below. In France, the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War stopped every reform initiative before it could even begin. Finally, even the Cistercians failed to ensure the lasting success of the reform measures of a fellow Cistercian, since the content of his bull was never taken up in subsequent Cistercian legislative collections.
In light of such a discrepancy between, on the one hand, the effort to prepare for reform, a strong commitment to reform on the part of a pope fully empowered to enact it, and such an evident need for reform, and on the other hand, such disappointing results, questions arise about the failure of the endeavor.18 The causes can neither be traced in technical details nor pursued in the complexities of the orders’ internal lines of communication, where individual communities made all of the important decisions about the adoption of new norms. Rather, the causes of failure can be found in a fundamental miscalculation of the effectiveness of reform “from above” in orders and communities whose oldest houses had developed their own local customs over centuries and even whose youngest organizations had existed for some two hundred years.
Reformers of an earlier era, who had once set the zeal of inner piety against the “pharisaical” ways of traditional Benedictines, had relied on both the power of charismatic leadership and the stabilizing force of external instruments of institutional organization that they themselves had formulated and created. They were convinced that both were necessary to preserve the energy of the early days of their institutions. The reforms of Benedict XII were conceived in a fundamentally different way. Little was expected from within the orders and communities themselves, and the pope had instruments that could only impose order superficially. But above all, reform was no longer driven by a desire to preserve the zeal of new beginnings. Rather, it aimed to reanimate what had become settled institutions. Only a comparison with later reform movements can clarify whether Benedict failed, whether the orders and communities his reforms addressed were responsible for the failure, or whether they could still be reformed at all. Perhaps many had already long been on the search for new forms of religious life or new content in old forms. The lay movements of the day, the Devotio moderna, the variety of independent pursuits of solitude, and the founding of entirely new orders with their own rules, such as the Birgittines—all showed something of the possibilities.
In any case, a reform of long-established structures was once again soon under way. Benedict XII had certainly properly recognized the need, and the vision articulated in Birgitta’s Revelations of the desolate vineyard of the Lord also had its justification. In the old communities of Benedictine observance, as well as in the orders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, discipline had slowly but increasingly faltered. Monasteries no longer stood as representatives of Paradise on earth. They were bound all the more to earthly affairs whenever they failed radically to complete their turn from the world by renouncing all that had come before, whenever they continued to maintain family ties, as was common in both the cities and the countryside, and whenever their members lived more as nobles or patricians than as monks and nuns. Without inner conviction and without the pressure of external sanctions, there could be no progress toward heaven.
On the contrary, worldly ways became comfortably settled in monastic communities as a long-established way of life. Ascetic commitments invariably became somnolent, along with commitments to poverty, prayer, and meditation, as these were displaced by personal property, alienation of corporate goods, abandonment of chastity, pompous lifestyles, revelry, and so on. The stories told by outside observers, the work of satirists, and the relevant reports of the orders’ visitations, are legion.19 Responsible leaders of monastic communities, as well as bishops, popes, and holders of secular power in every epoch of the vita religiosa had seen such turns toward decay and decline—they were especially visible in the wake of the disintegration of Carolingian power, and then again amid the transformations of church reform unleashed by the Investiture struggle. From the twelfth century on, therefore, the orders used their statutes to establish and demonstrate their embrace of semper reformare, a program of perpetual reform.
In the last two centuries of the Middle Ages still more dangers, and new ones, emerged to threaten the life of the old religious houses in particular. As has already been noted, the attracting power of religious life had shifted away from them toward the newer apostolic orders—and also toward forms of life that made it possible for pious laity to gather in communities that rejected the “pharisaical” ways of old norms long since divorced from daily reality and in communities that instead sought God inwardly. Deeply anchored in the legal system of both the world and the church, as well as in regional structures of economy and lordship, the old monasteries were far more vulnerable to worldly influence than flexible lay communities or communities of hermits without property.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought severe challenges for religious communities—above all the Great Schism, which lasted for decades and unleashed divisions that reached down to the level of individual monasteries, and the Hundred Years’ War, whose destruction was particularly devastating for the Cluniacs and Cistercians in France. Yet the reverse was also true: peace and economic prosperity brought dangers all their own. Rich abbeys quickly became coveted treasures. Of course they had always been so, and at the extreme they had even become the property of lay abbots. But now the papacy itself, and to a lesser extent territorial princes as well, had come to see these communities as prebends that they could give as political favors to high-ranking clerics and even to laity. In such cases, the income of a community, whether from landed property or other rights, would be handed over to a third party, designated as a so-called commendatory abbot,20 who had no particular obligation toward the community itself—and for the most part no interest in its spiritual reform.
Not even the more structurally coherent orders were insulated from these trends. In fact, such dangers threatened the independent communities of Benedictines and Augustinian canons even more strongly than the other groups, since they were without the mutual support of a general chapter, an effective political center, or even a procurator. As Benedict XII had already noted in his decree for the Benedictines, Summi magistri, reform’s chance of success was greater to the extent that it was tied to the formation of congregational networks.21
In the central Italian community of Subiaco—which Gregory the Great had identified in the Dialogues as Benedict’s first home as both a hermit and a founder of a religious community—one of the first transregional movements for Benedictine reform began in the 1360s. Established from two houses nestled on the slopes of the Apennines, Subiaco had already been reformed by Innocent III in 1202.22 But the influence of the local nobility soon again turned the monks off of the right path, and by the early fourteenth century it was a completely broken community. After prodding by the papacy, which at first came to take an interest in the community above all because it was economically vital to the Papal States, Subiaco launched a series of reform projects that in the 1370s led finally to restabilization and to the recording of customs strongly rooted in the Benedictine tradition, the Consuetudines Sublacenses.23 Those customs, in a way that recalls Cluny’s classical age, became what might be called “export commodities.” On the one hand, Subiaco’s way of life spread across all of Italy, through both new foundations and the reform of established communities, and on the other, it worked its way north of the Alps, above all into Germany, where at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it established important anchors for further Benedictine reform at both Kastl (Upper Palatinate [Bavaria]) and Melk (Lower Austria). Reform spread through both written texts and knowledge gained from personal experience, just as it had in an earlier era, for example, from Cluny to Farfa or Hirsau.
In 1403, Nicholas Seyringer (1360–1425), originally a canon of Olomouc in Moravia and from 1401 rector of the University of Vienna, had set out with three companions for Subiaco.24 He hoped to be able to bring his scholarly work into fruitful harmony with a well-ordered ascetic life. After a ten-year stay, he went to S. Anna in Rocca di Mondragone, a dependent of Subiaco in Campania, and became its prior.
Soon afterward, in 1414, the Council of Constance began to work to end the Great Schism, as well as to advance fundamental reforms in the church and in monastic life.25 The means to that end were different, however, from those used in Benedict XII’s grand interventions. The council’s reform plan sought to build from the ground up, using small constellations of communities that would serve as catalysts for wider reform. At an important conference held in the monastery of Petershausen26 near Constance in 1417, the Benedictine abbots gathered there resolved to begin that process through a grandly conceived visitation initiative, its catalogue of mandatory questions formulated according to Benedict XII’s Summi Magistri. The project enjoyed the crucial support of the region’s territorial princes, above all the Austrian Duke Albert V, not least because reforms always worked in the interests of a monastery’s economic stability. The duke’s representative was Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, one of the leading theologians of the day and former rector of the University of Vienna, who had written a treatise (Reformationis methodus) on the prospects of reform in Austrian monasteries.27 He instructed Nicholas Seyringer, whom he knew from Vienna, to take over the visitations in Austria.
Here two important reform initiatives of the fifteenth century had come together: on the one hand, the work of the Council of Constance, which was later continued at the Council of Basel after 1431, resulting in the first consolidation of Benedictine reform in Germany, and, on the other hand, the exemplary renewal of the way of life at Subiaco.
The abbot of the monastery of Melk on the Danube, faced with the demands of reform, resigned in 1418. Nicholas Seyringer was provisionally appointed as the new abbot and resigned his position as visitor. Thereafter began what would be a fifty-year flowering of Benedictine reform that centered on Melk and spread far beyond.28 The spiritual core of the movement took its inspiration from Subiaco. Its hallmarks were strict preservation of the precepts of the Rule of Saint Benedict, with an emphasis on contemplation, on prayer both in private and in community, and on strict observance of silence, fasting, and total abstinence from meat. Also crucial was the total renunciation of individual ownership, a principle upheld so strictly that priests who entered the community were even required to renounce their prebends. Though at first these precepts were modeled after the customs of Subiaco, they provided a basis, after a period of adjustment, for Melk in 1460 to record its own community’s norms: the Caeremoniae regularis Mellicensium.29 Crucial as well were the monastery’s close ties to the University of Vienna, a relationship that helped revive Melk’s culture of writing, its library, liturgy, and theology.
From Melk this way of life spread to several dozen communities of women and men across southern Germany, reaching all the way to the diocese of Constance, where Melk reformers commissioned by the Council of Basel took over the task of visitation. In its ranks were now renowned communities like Tegernsee (in Upper Bavaria), which by that time had become one of the most important focal points for the reception of Italian humanism north of the Alps.30 Saint Peter in Salzburg, Saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, and the “Schottenstift” of Vienna were all reformed as well, and these monasteries in turn led the reform of others. Yet one thing failed to happen—and here the structural developments recall the story of the Hirsau reform long before: no legally established congregation emerged. The exchange of reform ideas and, building on that exchange, the establishment of networks of communication took place exclusively through time spent in Melk itself or through the sending out of monks from Melk to serve either as abbots in newly reformed communities or as visitors.31
The monks of Melk would thus find themselves at a decisive disadvantage with respect to the sustainability of their movement’s momentum. The traditional independence of Benedictine houses was certainly at work here, even though after some three centuries of success in building new orders the path to organizational efficiency ought to have been clear. By around 1470 the potential of the Melk reform to influence other communities had already been spent.
The same weakness beset the Benedictine abbey of Kastl in the Palatinate. There a center of reform inspired by Benedict XII’s decree Summi Magistri had already been established at the end of the fourteenth century, influenced both by reforming currents from Bohemia and, later, by Subiaco. The support of territorial princes was again key in the rapid spread of reform, especially that of the Wittelsbach Count Palatine Rupert II.32 Kastl’s affiliates soon included such prestigious communities as Saint Emmeram in Regensburg, Michelsberg in Bamberg, Münsterschwarzach on the Main, and Saint Gall. Yet the ties among these communities were even looser than those among the communities reformed by Melk.
A more strictly organized congregation, one that approached the character of an order, first emerged in the middle of the fifteenth century from a reform initiative at the Benedictine abbey of Bursfelde on the Weser.33 Here too reform depended on the support of a territorial prince, the Welf Duke Otto of Brunswick-Göttingen. Later Nicholas of Cusa, the cardinal legate and great humanist scholar, also became a notable supporter. In 1446, the Council of Basel gave its approval for the establishment of a congregation, and in 1453 Pope Nicholas V issued a decree of recognition, followed in 1459 by approval from Pope Pius II.
The core of this reform program, again, was precise observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict as well as a special cultivation of proper liturgy, which was made uniform across all of the monasteries of the congregation. Also central was a high degree of contemplative interiority and strict asceticism that in its details drew inspiration from Carthusian statutes. Trithemius, the renowned humanist and abbot of Sponheim, described the spirituality of Bursfelde in his 1497 work, De triplici regione claustralium et spirituali exercitio monachorum,34 which contributed significantly to the spread of the reform.
Inspired by the ideal of “one body and one [uniting] chapter” (unum corpus et capitulum), in a short time a congregation of formerly independent abbeys was established. By 1530 it numbered some ninety-four communities, among them such important houses as Saint Peter in Erfurt and Saint James in Mainz as well as Hirsau, Gembloux, and Corvey. The leadership of the congregation was strong, with a single president, yearly general chapters responsible for judicial affairs and legislation, and a central visitation modeled after (and having the same privileges as) Saint Giustina in Padua, which the Olivetans had reformed in an exemplary way in 1408.35 Furthermore, over sixty women’s communities joined the Bursfelde ranks, albeit without official standing within the congregation.
Yet not only the Benedictine communities embraced reform. The ideal of an inwardly driven return to observance of the earliest forms of religious life came by the end of the Middle Ages to encompass all varieties of the vita religiosa.36
So, for example, the Council of Basel commissioned the community of Windesheim with the reform of Augustinian canons and canonesses in Germany. Rising to prominence as one of the leaders of that project was John Busch (1399–1479/80), who had been assigned to the task by Nicholas of Cusa. The Devotio moderna spread to Italy as well, especially to Saint Salvatore in Laterano in Rome (from 1445/46), where the “Lateran Congregation” emerged and began to build new networks of reform all the way to East Central Europe.37 Under the influence of the piety of Devotio moderna, the Carthusian Order also emerged anew as an attractive community that combined mysticism and learned humanism, its many houses located near the center of cities like Cologne, Basel, and Freiburg im Breisgau.38
Reform took root in the mendicant orders in the second half of the fourteenth century as well, in a movement understood as a commitment to renewed observance, with essentials again centered on a return to the original ideals of each individual order and its rule. Inspired by the master general Raymond of Capua, Dominican reform began in 1390 and was led, for example, in Germany above all by the theologian John Nider (1385–1438), at the Council of Basel.39 Among the Franciscans, who remained handicapped by the legacy of the Spirituals, a return to the core ideals of the Order’s founder emerged both especially strongly in Foligno under the inspiration of Paolucci Trinci after 1368 and in eremitic retreat. But it was carried forward later in other centers of reform, above all under the leadership of Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), and by the middle of the fifteenth century it had grown into what was in a certain sense a new order, the Observants.40
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1 Paravicini Bagliani, Il trono di Pietro. L’universalità del papato da Alessandro III a Bonifacio VIII (Rome: Carocci, 1996), 121.
2 Il papato duecentesco e gli ordini mendicanti, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1998), 23–80.
3 Michele Maccarrone, “Riforma e sviluppo della vita religiosa con Innocenzo III,” Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia 16 (1962): 29–72.
4 Goffredus da Trani, Summa super titulis decretalium (Lyon, 1519; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1992), fol. 154v; Gert Melville, “‘Diversa sunt monasteria et diversas habent institutiones.’ Aspetti delle molteplici forme organizzative dei religiosi nel Medioevo,” in Chiesa e società in Sicilia. I secoli XII–XVI, ed. Gaetano Zito (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1995), 323–45, here 332.
5 Jan Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform. Benedikt XII. und die Reformdiskussion im frühen 14. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 69–74.
6 Florent Cygler, “Cartusia numquam reformata? La réforme constitutionelle de l’ordre cartusien au XIIIe siécle,” in Studia monastica. Beiträge zum klösterlichen Leben im christlichen Abendland während des Mittelalters, ed. Reinhardt Butz and Jörg Oberste (Münster: LIT, 2004), 47–72.
7 Franz Neiske, “Das Verhältnis Clunys zum Papsttum,” in Die Cluniazenser in ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable et al. (Münster: LIT, 1998), 279–320.
8 On the following, see Franz J. Felten, “Die Ordensreformen Benedikts XII. unter institutionsgeschichtlichem Aspekt,” in Institutionen und Geschichte, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), 369–435; Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform.
9 Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform, 265.
10 Bull “Fulgens sicut stella,” chap. 24; trans. from Neuerung und Erinnerung, Wichtige Quellentexte aus der Geschichte des Zisterzienserordens vom 12. bis 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Hildegard Brem and Alberich M. Altermatt (Langwaden: Bernardus-Verlag, 2003), 247.
11 Felten, “Die Ordensreformen Benedikts XII,” 375.
12 Bull “Summi magistri,” ed. Magnum Bullarium Romanum, 3.2 (Rome, 1741), 214–40; Bull “Fulgens sicut stella,” ed. Magnum Bullarium Romanum, 3.2, 203–13; Bull “Ad decorem,” ed. Magnum Bullarium Romanum, 3.2, 264–86; Bull “Redemptor noster,” ed. in Michael Bihl, “Ordinationes a Benedicto XII pro Fratribus Minoribus promulgatae per bullam Nov. 18, 1336,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 30 (1937): 309–90.
13 Trans. from Neuerung und Erinnerung, 217.
14 Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform, 263.
15 Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform, 236–39.
16 Volker Hunecke, “Die kirchenpolitischen Exkurse in den Chroniken des Galvaneus Flamma OP (1283–ca. 1344). Einleitung und Edition,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 25 (1969): 111–208.
17 Felten, “Die Ordensreformen Benedikts XII,” 411–20; Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform, 310–14.
18 Felten, “Die Ordensreformen Benedikts XII,” 420–35.
19 For abundant material on this development, see Hans-Joachim Schmidt, “Klosterleben ohne Legitimität. Kritik und Verurteilung im Mittelalter,” in Institutionen und Geschichte. Festschrift für Gert Melville zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Franz J. Felten et al. (Cologne: LIT, 2009), 377–400; Ramona Sickert, Wenn Klosterbrüder (Münster: LIT, 2006).
20 Giorgio Picasso, “Commenda,” in Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione, ed. Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1975), 2:1246–50.
21 Klaus Schreiner, “Reformstreben im spätmittelalterlichen Mönchtum: Benediktiner, Zisterzienser und Prämonstratenser auf der Suche nach strenger Observanz ihrer Regeln und Statuten,” in Württembergisches Klosterbuch, ed. Wolfgang Zimmermann and Nicole Priesching (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003), 91–108.
22 Uwe Israel, “Der Papst und die Urkunde an der Wand. Innocenz III. (1198–1216) in Subiaco,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 84 (2004): 69–102; Annarita De Prosperis, “Innocenzo III e i monasteri di Subiaco,” Latium. Rivista di studi storici 25 (2008): 3–30.
23 Barbara Frank, “Subiaco, ein Reformkonvent des späten Mittelalters. Zur Erfassung und Zusammensetzung der Sublacenser Mönchsgemeinschaft in der Zeit von 1362 bis 1514,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 52 (1972): 526–656; Uwe Israel, “Reform durch Mönche aus der Ferne. Das Beispiel der Benediktinerabtei Subiaco,” in Vita communis und ethnische Vielfalt, ed. Uwe Israel (Berlin: LIT, 2006), 157–78.
24 Freimut Löser, “Nikolaus Seyringer von Matzen,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 19 (1998): 274; Israel, “Reform durch Mönche,” 172–74.
25 Dieter Mertens, “Reformkonzilien und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, ed. Kaspar Elm (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 431–57.
26 Joseph Zeller, “Das Provinzialkapitel im Stifte Petershausen im Jahre 1417,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 41 (1921–22): 1–73.
27 Alois Madre, Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl: Leben und Schriften (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965).
28 On the following, see Joachim Angerer, “Reform von Melk,” in Die Reformverbände und Kongregationen der Benediktiner im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Ulrich Faust and Franz Quarthal (St. Otttilien: EOS, 1999), 83–95; Meta Niederkorn-Bruck, Die Melker Reform im Spiegel der Visitationen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994). See also the essays in Die Benediktinische Klosterreform im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Franz Xaver Bischof et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013). For a thematic study of the tensions of reform, property, and community in this setting, see James D. Mixson, Poverty’s Proprietors (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
29 Caeremoniae regularis observantiae sanctissimi patris nostri Benedicti ex ipsius Regula sumptae, secundum quod in sacris locis, scilicet Specu et Monasterio Sublacensi practicantur, ed. Joachim F. Angerer, CCM 11.1 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1985).
30 Winfried Müller, “Die Anfänge der Humanismusrezeption in Kloster Tegernsee,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 92 (1981): 28–90.
31 Niederkorn-Bruck, Die Melker Reform, 36–40.
32 On the following, see Peter Maier, “Die Reform von Kastl,” in Faust and Quarthal, Die Reformverbände, 225–67.
33 On the following, see Hans Walter Krumwiede, “Die Geschichte des Klosters Bursfelde,” in Kloster Bursfelde, ed. Lothar Perlitt (Göttingen: Göttinger Tageblatt, 1984), 9–24; Walter Ziegler, “Die Bursfelder Kongregation,” in Faust and Quarthal, Die Reformverbände, 315–407.
34 Paulus Volk, “Ioannis Trithemii Liber de triplici regione claustralium,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 48 (1930): 446–52.
35 Giorgio Picasso, “La spiritualità dell’antico monachesimo alle origini di Monte Oliveto,” in Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter, ed. Giancarlo Andenna et al. (Münster: LIT, 2005), 443–52, here 443.
36 For general orientation to these movements, with further literature, see the essays in Elm, Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen, as well as James Mixson and Bert Roest, eds., A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2015). For broader contexts, see John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257–84.
37 Wilhelm Kohl, “Die Windesheimer Kongregation,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen, 83–106.
38 Heinrich Rüthing, “Die Kartäuser und die spätmittelalterlichen Ordensreformen,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen, 35–58; Thomas Woelki, “Die Kartäuser und das Basler Konzil,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 121 (2010): 305–22.
39 Bernhard Neidiger, “Selbstverständnis und Erfolgschancen der Dominikanerobservanten. Beobachtungen zur Entwicklung in der Provinz Teutonia und im Basler Konvent (1388–1510),” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 17 (1998): 67–122. For Nider as a reformer, see Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), and for reform of religious life, especially chapter 4. See also James D. Mixson, “The Setting and Resonance of John Nider’s ‘De reformatione religiosorum,’” in Kirchenbild und Spiritualität: Dominikanische Beiträge zur Ekklesiologie und zum kirchlichen Leben im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Ulrich Horst O.P. zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Prügl and Marianne Schlosser (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 291–317.
40 Duncan B. Nimmo, “The Franciscan Regular Observance. The Culmination of Medieval Franciscan Reform,” in Elm, Reformbemühungen, 189–205, and Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1987). See also Ludovic Viallet, Les sens de l’observance. Enquête sur les réformes franciscaines (Berlin: LIT, 2014).