17

Fundamental Structures of the Vita Religiosa in the Middle Ages

Medieval culture viewed the vita religiosa as a domain that in its totality was distinct from all other forms of Christian life. Early on, two formulas emerged that came to mark religious life’s fundamental difference as an alternative to a worldly life. The first was articulated by Augustine (354–450), who developed the long-influential and biblically based model of the “three kinds of man” (tria genera hominum).¹ Typologically, Noah represented the clergy, Job the laity, and Daniel the religious, who like Daniel retreated from the tumult of society to serve God in leisure (otium) and who—as the Cistercian bishop Otto of Freising put it in the twelfth century—were “inwardly undisturbed by the ever-changing course of the world.”²

Ambrose of Milan (339–397) articulated a second model. He was among the first to develop a distinction between the precepts (praecepta) and the counsels (consilia) of the New Testament.³ That distinction came to inform assumptions about a fundamental division in Christian society between those who were expected only to follow the precepts (the laity and the clergy) and those who were also called to live out the counsels under vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty (the religious). To be obedient was to imitate Christ, who subjected himself unconditionally to the will of the Father and thereby represented a turn to God in a spirit of unconditional love. To live in chastity was to overcome the body as a “grave of the soul,”⁴ and to live in poverty in imitation of Christ was to embrace symbolically the contempt of the world. The rules of the orders in the High Middle Ages—for example, those of the Grandmontines and Franciscans, but above all thirteenth-century canon law—saw in the observance of these “evangelical counsels” the core essentials (substantialia) of the vita religiosa.⁵ These concepts allowed the world of monasteries and orders to define itself clearly, to set itself apart, and to form a common identity.

Vita religiosa was understood as a way of life, regulated and lived in community, which led individual souls to holiness through an encounter with and assimilation to God. It thereby presented within broader Christian culture a model that was in principle desirable for all but in practice pursued by only a very few spiritual elite. To realize this way of life, religious houses and orders institutionalized themselves as strongly coherent systems of interaction between individuals and the community that bound them together. Yet for all of their appearance as “total institutions,”⁶ it must not be overlooked that their distinctiveness lay precisely in the ways in which they cut across systemic boundaries.

There were two ways in which religious communities were something larger than their institutional framework. First, however strongly monastic life may have been established institutionally, however ordered and organized according to rules, however strictly led by its appointed officeholders, it was also always “institutionally transcendent.”⁷ The ultimate aim of this way of life—to seek a direct encounter of the individual soul with God—was essentially impossible to capture definitively within any process of institutionalization, because that encounter had always to be achieved anew, uniquely and individually, through inward desire. No external institution could ever coerce a soul’s sacrifice to God, and certainly no institution could offer spiritual fulfillment. The principle of free will was essential, because—as was so often emphasized—it was grounded in the love of the heart.

Second, since the sole function of monastic systems was to lead the individual soul to perfection in God, the ultimate purpose of the vita religiosa was not to be found in any aspect of earthly existence. As a result, its institutions had an essentially transitory character.⁸ Vita religiosa, understood as a vita perfectionis (a “life of perfection”), was thus a life of transition, a temporary stopover for the individual soul between earth and heaven. The Rule of Saint Benedict, for example, thus spoke of a monastery as both a “school for the Lord’s service” (dominici schola servitii) and as a “workshop” (officina). The worth of a religious community was not to be found in itself, however, but rather as a means to a higher end. For that reason, the individual could be expected to submit to its discipline for the sake of salvation, to seek freedom from earthly ties through it, and to devote life fully to the spiritual experience of divine transcendence.

That individual members believed in both the transcendent and the transitory character of their community allowed the monastery to serve its pragmatic function as a staging ground for reaching the world beyond, and that same belief thereby contributed in essential ways to keeping the community stable over many generations and eras.

The Individual and the Community

To be a religious was to bring divine transcendence into the individual soul and, through love and obedience, to allow God to dwell there.⁹ To achieve that goal required a renunciation of the external world and voluntary subjection to the strict rules of life in a monastery.

That monastery was understood, as Benedict’s rule formulated it, as a “House of God” (domus Dei) (RB 31.19). But even if it provided a physical space for the development of an elite virtuosity in its spiritual encounter with divine transcendence, that space alone was not enough to secure salvation. Contemporaries invoked an often used phrase, “The habit does not make the monk” (habitus non facit monachum)—and the truth behind that phrase remained, no matter how often contemporaries tried to weigh down the cut and color of the habit with a symbolism that identified the individual not only as a religious in general but also as a member of a particular observance or monastic organization.¹⁰ Black—so Arno of Reichersberg (1100–1157), who interpreted the colors of the habits typologically—represented the monk, who mourned Christ’s death and therefore lived in contemplation, and white the regular canons, who rejoiced in resurrection and therefore lived actively in the world.¹¹

The leading thinkers of religious life, particularly in the High Middle Ages, insistently emphasized that the main aim of their way of life was to build up the “inner household” of the soul as a temple of the Lord, as the “soul’s cloister” (claustrum animae).¹² But the insights were essential and valid for every era and every form of the vita religiosa—in fact the texts that articulated those insights were not only shared across the boundaries of order and observance but also rested on traditions that went back to the earliest days of the church fathers and that had been upheld for centuries.¹³

Once a religious house had been established—so these texts concluded—the turn inward could be complete only if the soul was able to cease “from going out through the eyes, ears, and other senses, and from taking joy in external things.”¹⁴ God, after all, would not enter in, so went the powerful imagery, where “the walls are damaged and crumbling.” It seemed impossible to establish a relationship with God if the soul could not abandon the impressions of the bodily senses and turn from all exterior things (exteriora).¹⁵ Unconditional “alienation from the world” (alienatio a saeculo) was essential, because “earthly entanglements” (implicamenta terrena) kept every soul from turning fully to God.¹⁶

“Entering into the monastery, he gives skin for skin, and all that he has, his soul, as he puts off the old man and takes up the new, entering into a new form of life.” With these words Peter of Celle, twelfth-century abbot of Moûtier-la-Celle, clearly articulated a view of the boundary between monastery and world.¹⁷ The only way for an individual to cross that boundary was through a dramatic “conversion of the whole heart to God” (conversio totalis ad Deum cordis):¹⁸ when chastity (castitas) became the marker of the unblemished beauty of holiness and demanded ascetic zeal in order to safeguard the health of both soul and body; when there was a call to embrace humility, fasting, and renunciation of meat, to embrace a silence that communicated only through a soundless sign language (signa loquendi), or to embrace contemplation and nightly vigils; when pride and arrogance (superbia) were denounced as the gravest vice; when humility (humilitas), envisioned in the Rule of Saint Benedict (7.7) as a ladder of twelve steps, was upheld as the highest virtue—only then were the essential demands of the new community and its way of life made clear, a way of life that could only be lived in the wake of such a conversio.

These were the fundamental patterns of an asceticism that required the commitment of the whole person; at the same time, they were norms that commanded absolute submission to the will of God. To want to be near God and to “assimilate” to him spiritually (as Bernard of Clairvaux put it)¹⁹ could be realized, so it was emphasized, only through absolute acceptance of God’s power. Yet at the same time, God was to be obeyed not out of fear, but out of love alone—in keeping with the example of Christ himself, who was obedient to his beloved father unto death. Disobedience, in contrast, was a kind of criminal idolatry, because it set up idols of the heart, insofar as disobedience against God was a lapse into the world that had been overcome—a lapse that turned a religious into a rebel against virtue and truth.²⁰

Obedience was submission first to God and then to superiors in the monastery or the order,²¹ even if the rhetorical force of most of the relevant didactic works seemed mostly to emphasize obedience to prelates. The justification here was found already in the Benedictine axiom that a religious superior was God’s representative on earth. Yet precisely this foundational principle—one also found in other rules, such as the Rule of Augustine—in turn put limits on the power of a superior in decisive ways and required that the demands of obedience respect certain boundaries. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, clearly articulated in De praecepto et dispensatione the principle that no monk professed according to the will of an abbot, but rather according to the Rule. As a consequence, while an abbot might in fact command things that were harsh or difficult to bear, he could in no way command something that was against the Rule and therefore against God.

Those who were subject to such commands, as has been emphasized above, could never be compelled to obey the dictates of communal life only by extrinsic norms and their punitive sanctions or by constant controlling interventions. Rather, obedience also required an inward acceptance of fundamental principles. Thus, despite the fact that an independent will had renounced itself in the service of absolute obedience, there was still an individual will that stood poised to obey.²² It was a relationship that captured the full range of tensions (typical for religious life) between the intrinsic value of personal salvation and the need to subdue the individual will. And as such, it was a relationship that had to be both learned and continually trained.

It had been common, from the earliest days of monasticism, for parents or guardians to hand over even young children as oblates to a monastic community.²³ By means of a long process, the children would then become accustomed to current local customs and develop an inward disposition to accept their norms. But from the twelfth century on it became increasingly common that only adults entered religious life,²⁴ with the acceptable age of entry ranging between fourteen and twenty. For that reason, an important concern centered more than ever on how best to transform into monks and nuns those who had already oriented their lives according to their own values. Thus the novitiate, an initiation into daily monastic life whose length had already in Late Antiquity varied from a few days to three years, now took on much greater importance. The novitiate had to be sustainable as a process that would purify prospective monks and nuns not only of sin but also of all their previous ways. The process was also to lead to a willingness to take on the “new yoke of obedience” and the “strictness of discipline,” as Peter of Celle had once put it.

The conclusion of this process of socialization was marked by a solemn ceremony of profession to the local monastery (in the Cluniac congregation, among others, profession to the monastery was complemented by a subsequent consecration in Cluny itself), while mendicants made their profession to the Order. Such ceremonies were understood symbolically as a kind of second baptism. To become a monk,²⁵ which was seen as comparable to the beginning of martyrdom, was also understood to be a kind of dying to the world. Thus among the Benedictines it was often common after profession to completely cover the head of the novice with a hood for three days—the length of time Christ spent in limbo.

From the days of the charismatic Desert Fathers of Late Antiquity through all of the later history of the vita religiosa, reforming protagonists worked to grant permanence to extraordinary spiritual power through both oral instruction and so-called parenetic texts, or works of exhortation. Notably, however, an anonymous author of the twelfth century recognized the core problem of that kind of model of persuasion when he called out emphatically to the monastic audience of his text, “What use are these writings of exhortation if you do not read and understand within yourself?”²⁶ Perhaps no expressions capture more forcefully than these the criteria by which the interiorization of monastic norms was measured: conscience (conscientia), understood as cordis scientia, knowledge from the heart.²⁷

Especially in an era of reform like the twelfth century, religious were taught to embrace conscience as an inescapable companion, to encounter the self in the conscience as an individual faced with the commands of religious life, and to have as a partner only God, who sees into the heart. Though it might be possible to conceal behavior from the outside world, it was impossible to do so before the self. With slogans like “Take care to know yourself” (Aude cognoscere te)²⁸ or “Follow your conscience and your own law will bind you” (lex tua te constringit),²⁹ religious were trained to rely on their own judgment and not that of others, since keeping company with one’s conscience ensured that no one knew one better than oneself.

Such familiarity with the self was deeply internalized spiritually, and it allowed for transcendence directly to God. It was marked by total sacrifice; it was, in the end, at the core of the soul, totally individualized and boundlessly emotional—and therefore inevitably radical and anti-institutional. At the same time, however, it was often institutionally strangled by the pattern of monastic life, subject to discipline and humility, poured out into the molds of a community of peace, and fixed within rational rules that had moderation, measured discretion (discretio), and justice as their foundational principles.³⁰ European culture found in this seeming paradox a model that allowed individual religious devotion to be lived out in tension with rule-bound, practical rationality, in such a way that the two forces did not neutralize but rather strengthened one another.

When women and men of the Middle Ages who had submitted themselves to the vita religiosa praised the “delights of Paradise” (deliciae paradysi) they found in the monastery—because there alone had they found the possibility of achieving perfection in Christian virtues—or when they spoke of the monastery as a “port of salvation” (portus salutis), they outlined the fundamental patterns of a life whose realization was to be found not only by stepping into a “monastery of the soul,” a place of individual interiority, but also by entering into an all-encompassing life of community. With a strictness found almost nowhere else, the common life (vita communis) of the monastery required religious to subject every aspect of their daily lives (if not themselves entirely) to a greater purpose. To that end, they both made use of pragmatic regulations and cultivated a symbolic self-assurance regarding proper behavior.³¹

The dormitory of the Cistercian abbey of Fontenay in northern Burgundy.

The hope, speaking allegorically, was that the convent would resonate like the harp of David, as the individual strings of its members found their way to the harmony of a melody.³² Claiming to have seen the ideal of the vita communis realized already in the first community in Jerusalem, Augustine adopted for his community of clerics the phrase found in the Acts of the Apostles: “one heart and one soul” (cor unum et anima una). He thereby gave the vita religiosa a basic norm, one whose impact would reach far beyond the formation of those communities that invoked his name. Mutual complement and mutual love were the pillars of a community of peace, a community that was to support and encourage its individual members not only throughout an entire life lived on earth as an “angelic existence in God’s army”³³ but also through death and beyond. That ideal was valid for every kind of community, whether made up mostly of nobility or dominated by urban burghers.

This function of monastic community is exemplified in the observation that lengthy liturgical-spiritual work and ascetic exercises that demanded great physical stamina (and among some communities, especially the mendicants, intellectual stamina as well)³⁴ countered the fragility of negligent and weak brothers and indeed almost eliminated occasions for transgression. A strict ordering of monastic life was thus seen as a protective barrier against sinfulness; it strengthened the individual by way of external pressure alone and guarded against transgression even in the face of a will to sin. The Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux thus located the protection against sinfulness in the “battle lines of so many in the monastery who fight in the same way” (in acie multorum pariter pugnantium). With their help, the individual could withstand the attacks of the evil one, since he always had like-minded brothers by his side, and since monks who had been long tested in battle were there to warn of the wiles of the enemy. The only ones in danger were those who fell victim to the vice of self-righteousness (nequissimum vitium singularitatis), who retreated into the narrows of self-will (angulae propriae voluntatis) and thereby undermined the blessed unity of the community.³⁵

The all-encompassing care of community was perhaps never more in evidence, however, than in the fact that while every individual, even in the monastery, died a unique death, it was never experienced alone, but always in the company of fellow religious.³⁶ Drawn together by the choreography of liturgy, the community surrounded the dying as one and bonded with him as if one body—from which the deceased, when finally buried, was not so much released as “enclosed” in another form. Furthermore, the bonds of community did not end after death. Rather, they were immortalized when the names of the dead were written into the community necrology.³⁷ And it was again a choreographed liturgy that communally and repeatedly called off the name (and all of the other names) of the dead. In doing so, the liturgy re-created, year after year, a timeless body established by memory (memoria). With the entry of the name the individual was named as such; that is to say, the distinct identity of one who died a unique death lived on in the recorded name, since the community offered up prayers for the salvation of that individual soul explicitly by name. In its entirety, in all of its hundreds of entries, a monastic necrology thus represented a monastic community as a unique whole. But at the same time—and in a way that could hardly be more meaningful—the very series of names stood as a reminder that the community was also understood to have consisted of each of its individual members.

The dying Dominic, surrounded by his brethren. The surrounding text reads, “This one, the father of the Preachers and leader of the monks, is led to the choir of royalty and the heights of heaven.”

Religious communities claimed to be able to guarantee freedom from earthly mutability by expressing that ideal symbolically. When medieval women and men subjected themselves to a daily rhythm that was forever the same, an ever-repeated daily round of worship, of prayer according to the seven canonical hours, of sleeping and waking, of work and mealtimes, in doing so they lived together in a circle of time that broke from the earthly flow of hours—and they were thus able symbolically to represent timeless eternity.³⁸ When in liturgy, in the singing of the choir, in psalmody, in rituals like the Benedictines’ washing of the feet of the poor,³⁹ but also in a daily life of work and of hearing and reciting religious texts—when in all these ways what counted as the truth of divine revelation was brought permanently and palpably to mind, the result was the embodiment of monastic life’s intention to bring earthly existence into harmony with heavenly order by way of practices that were lived day to day and thereby established institutionally. The same was true of the regular rhythm of chapters of faults, where individuals acknowledged their sin before the community, and which were seen as a representation of the Last Judgment.⁴⁰

When, for example, the four sides of the cloister—that communal monastic space in which contemplative immersion, whispered reading of sacred texts, and communal rituals like shaving took place—were equated allegorically by regular canons like Hugh of Fouilly (ca. 1100–1174) and others with renunciation of self and world and with love of neighbor and love of God, an earthly space thereby became a heavenly one, and fundamental virtues began symbolically to move together in a circular transcendence.⁴¹

These experiences required in principle a monastic space distinct from the secular world and guarded by a sharp differentiation between inside and outside.⁴² As Hugh of Fouilly put it, distinguishing between the spiritual and bodily aspects of human existence, “When they are guarded within the fortress of the monastic walls, the inner and outer man are able to escape the attacks of the ancient enemy and the tumult of temporal affairs.”⁴³ The built environment of the monastery provided a tangible framework in this regard.⁴⁴ The cloister was at the center, and all around it were arranged the spaces that shaped a cloistered existence—one set apart from the outside world. The actual arrangements of the buildings varied widely according to the divergent goals of the many forms of religious community. Thus the common dormitory (dormitorium) typical of Benedictine community arrangements differed from those of the eremitical Carthusians, who preferred separate apartments, and these in turn differed from the Dominican preference for cells devoted to individual study.⁴⁵

Yet with respect to their core functions and symbolism they were all similar, in a way parallel (as noted above) to the cloister, the refectory (the common meal hall), and the library, whose designation as the armarium was a reminder of its function as the arsenal and armory for spiritual warfare.⁴⁶ The chapter room was universally recognized as a place not only of communal conversation and counsel but also of the chapter of faults and its cleansing from sin.⁴⁷ The monastic church served the same purpose, regardless of a remarkably varied architecture shaped by the specific needs of the different forms of observance. Among the early Cistercians, for example, who withdrew by way of liturgy to focus only on communication with God, the church was closed to outsiders.⁴⁸ But it was easily accessible from the monks’ dormitory, allowing them to attend services at night, and was also increasingly divided into distinct areas for conversi and choir monks.⁴⁹

Plan of a Cistercian Monastery
1. Monastery church; 2. Main altar; 3. Monks’ choir; 4. Lay brothers’ section; 5. “Paradise” (Narthex); 6. Door to cemetery; 7. Night stairs to the Dormitorium (second-floor sleeping quarters); 8. Sacristy; 9. Cloister; 10. Lavabo (fountain for hand washing before mealtimes); 11. Chapter room (monks’ assembly room); 12. Day stairs to dormitory on second floor; 13. Parlatorium (conference room); 14. Monks’ work-room; over 8–14, on the second floor, the monks’ Dormitorium (sleeping quarters); 15. Calcefactorium (warming room); 16. Refectorium (dining hall) of the monks; 17. Kitchen; 18. Refectorium (dining hall) of the lay brothers; 19. Cellerarium (storeroom). Over 18–19 on the second floor, Dormitorium (sleeping quarters) of the lay brothers. This reconstruction follows the outline of the monastery of Wettingen in Aargau/Switzerland, built 1227–1256. It has been slightly modified in order to account for all typical elements. Source: Günther Binding and Matthias Untermann, Kleine Kunstgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Ordensbaukunst in Deutschland, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 225.

The latrine (left) of the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont north of Paris is a monument to mastery over the most earthly aspects of the daily life of the monastery.

The needs of the preaching mendicant orders, in contrast, dictated an almost inviting church, one architecturally broad and open for pastoral offerings, for burials, for the altars of guilds, and so on.⁵⁰ Moreover, these many church buildings could be understood symbolically in a variety of ways. In their size and beauty they could serve as a manifestation of the heavenly Jerusalem (as in the Benedictine community of Saint Denis in Paris, for example), or as an expression, also biblically inspired, of humility and renunciation of earthly treasures—churches without towers (among the Cistercians, for example) that sought to imitate the straw-covered hut of Abraham,⁵¹ churches that refused gold and silver (among the Carthusians, for example), and churches that were built as simple halls with vaulted naves (for example, among the Franciscans and Dominicans).

The Monastery and the Law

According to the explicit claims of the Rule of Saint Benedict, but in principle also according to the general understanding of all those responsible for ensuring the best possible realization of the vita religiosa, the monastery was a place for the spiritually weak, those who could not yet stand alone and unprotected in combat with evil out in the world. “Keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teaching and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them,” read the closing words of the Rule of Saint Benedict (RB 73.8-9).

In light of the resulting transitory nature of the vita religiosa, clearly only a highly rationally formed and institutionally governed system of order was capable of realizing and preserving such radical demands and expectations over time. Max Weber long ago pointed out the paradox of the ambitions of a monastic ascetic who was looking for salvation, on the one hand, and the “rational achievements” of monasticism, on the other. He resolved the conflict by articulating that “asceticism becomes the object of methodical practices.”⁵² These concepts of “rational achievement” and “methodical practices” are key to a proper understanding of monasticism’s accomplishments in matters of organization, and they once again deserve a systematic treatment here. Pragmatically, it is proper to speak of methodical rationality whenever there is reflective, objectifying treatment of one’s own actions or the actions of others, and whenever social action unfolds according to systematic design—a design that in turn manages to grasp the various conditions, modes, and aims of that action in differentiated ways. Faced with the necessity of translating the ideals of their otherworldly way of life into institutional forms, monasteries developed precisely this kind of methodically applied rationality.

In so doing, the world of medieval monasticism realized decisive achievements that were full of innovative power, that in many respects surpassed the techniques of organization found in the cities, at the courts of the nobility, or in the circles of secular clergy and that built institutions whose impact long survived the Middle Ages.

A variety of constituencies helped to establish stability and to preserve it. Here, as has already been noted, the matter depended in a fundamental way on many factors: an inescapable compulsion of the individual conscience, which could be sharpened by the impact of texts of exhortation; also the influence of charismatic personalities who formulated the core ideals of a propositum and who through their interaction provided exemplary patterns of life, thereby serving as living rules and ever-present models; and the fraternal bonds of community, which represented a battle line whose closed ranks guarded against spiritual dangers.

No less important was the scaffolding of a legal framework, which structured regulations of daily practice in the form of strict organizations by way of written rules, orally transmitted customs (consuetudines), written statutes (statuta, constitutiones, etc.), an array of legal decisions and administrative measures (definitions, visitation protocols, property surveys, indices), a turn to the common law of the church (ius commune), and authoritative decrees (papal decretals, synodal statutes, etc.). The same legal framework established procedural guidelines, sought to prevent deviation, and made it possible to enforce punishment.⁵³

The best articulation of this model came from the Dominican master general Humbert of Romans (ca. 1200–1277), who wrote as the legalism of the church had begun to reach one of its first high points.⁵⁴ As Humbert explained, every law that was binding on monasteries, congregations, or orders was integrated into the hierarchy of the legal sources of the church. The highest commands, of course, were those of God. These dwarfed even those of the church or the pope. Smaller still were the rules of church fathers like Augustine, Benedict, and others. Smallest of all were those commands of their successors, that is, of the institutional decisions of the monasteries and orders themselves.

From the early days of monasticism the official church had moved repeatedly to intervene in the internal affairs of religious communities. On one hand, it did so through both universal and local synods—Chalcedon in 451, for example, and the Lateran Synod of 1059, and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.⁵⁵ On the other, individual popes sought from early on and by various means to lay their protective and controlling hand on the affairs of monasteries. By way of individual privileges they granted exemptions from episcopal power, as, for example, in 628 at Bobbio.⁵⁶ Other privileges provided papal protection or claimed a monastery as the papacy’s own, as at Cluny at the beginning of the tenth century.⁵⁷ Others confirmed properties and legal rights, such as the election of an abbot or an advocate, and approved new organizations along with their founding documents and their forms of observance, such as the Cistercian Carta caritatis in 1119 or the institutional form of the congregation of Mortara in 1130.⁵⁸ Still others established new orders, like the Hospitalers of Santo Spirito in 1204 or the Augustinian Hermits in 1256.⁵⁹

Another strategy involved the so-called Litterae de gratia, by means of which from the thirteenth century on the papacy sought to confirm summarily all rights, privileges, indulgences, and properties granted by any predecessor, including even secular powers. The popes also issued reform decrees or mandates that in the High and late Middle Ages came to encompass entire orders, including, for example, the Cistercians in 1169 and 1265, the Premonstratensians in 1232, the Cluniacs in 1233, and nearly every transregional order in the context of the reform policies of Benedict XII.⁶⁰

The Roman Curia’s interventions in the affairs of religious communities grew stronger in ways proportional to the growth of papal monarchy in the wake of the church reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the centralization of ecclesiastical power in the Roman Curia. From then on, the curial administration sought to structure the most important communications between the papacy and the religious orders by means of a more uniform discourse and conceptual framework. Already in the twelfth century, a so-called clause de régularité ⁶¹ had been developed, obligating all newly emergent congregations to observe a specific rule and commanding each not to alter either the order that rule had established or the rule’s specific religious intention (propositum).⁶² So, for example, the Premonstratensians were said to live secundum beati Augustini regulam (“according to the Rule of Augustine”). From the beginning of the thirteenth century, these and other turns to properly documentary formulas came to be developed for the individual orders and kept in the records of the papal chancellery.⁶³

Between 1247 and 1264, moreover, some five orders (Franciscans, Camaldolese, Augustinian Hermits, Dominicans, and Cluniacs) established their own procurators, through whom they were able to have their interests represented amid the routine business of the curial courtrooms and the papal chancellery.⁶⁴ Around the same time, the institution of the cardinal protector emerged, providing a crucial link between the papacy and the orders.⁶⁵

Nevertheless, from the thirteenth century on, most orders knew how to set themselves against the all-too-persistent interventions of the papacy, as did the Cluniacs in 1231/33, how to modify them, like the Premonstratensians in 1246, or how to flatly reject them, as the Carthusians did continually.⁶⁶ In this context, there was an almost universal and strict prohibition—though it was by no means always enforced—against individual religious who attempted to appeal directly to the Holy See, bypassing the usual authorities within their own order.⁶⁷ Monasteries had otherwise almost nothing at their disposal to resist the Curia’s late- medieval practice of seeking to hand them over to so-called commendatory abbots, thereby putting them in danger of economic exploitation.

Religious communities—individual monasteries as well as entire congregations and orders—were, however, always in principle tied back into the general framework of the ecclesiastical ius commune.⁶⁸ That framework grew in importance in the wake of the systematic articulation of church law as a scholarly discipline, at the latest from the time of Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum. That text, completed around 1140 and thereafter a fundamental compilation for canon law, was the basis for a subsequent juridification of legal process in church politics, administration, and economy that monasteries and orders also came to feel acutely. An early high point in these developments was the so-called Liber extra, a compilation of papal decrees created by the Dominican master general, Raymond of Peñaforte, promulgated by Gregory IX in 1234. It presented for the first time, and systematically, legal materials concerning religious life, arranged as chapters and as the law of an “estate” (status). The Liber thus represented a kind of legislative framework, the template of a rich catalogue of normative guidelines for the vita religiosa—including materials on renunciation of ownership and abstinence from meat, for example, as well as technical organizational matters such as the procedures guiding the governance of the monastery, provisions for entry, and measures concerning punishment and discipline.⁶⁹

The study of canon law, alongside Roman law, was often condemned in many orders because of the lucrative and worldly careers that it made available.⁷⁰ But those who wished to study it could often find ways around the normative strictures of such prohibitions, not least through papal dispensation.

With regard to the creation of their own law, that is, the establishment of a ius particulare, most religious organizations were granted a wide-ranging autonomy from the outset. Writing in the thirteenth century, Hostiensis, the great scholar of the church’s ius commune, stood speechless before the diversity of the many particular forms of law within the vita religiosa. He noted, however, that it was difficult to articulate the legal status of monasteries within the general laws of the church, because there were so many different kinds of monasteries, and because they had all been established in different ways (diversa sunt monasteria et diversas habent institutiones).⁷¹

Like no other way of life, the vita religiosa had from its ancient beginnings been bound to written guidelines, all of them adapted to a particular set of core ideals (proposita) and organizational structures.⁷² The ability of the written word to endure across time and space was crucial for the institutional stability of monastic communities beyond the early days of their founding. All recognized that writing made possible the authentic preservation of a full range of early traditions, and such knowledge was preserved even in times when literacy had almost totally disappeared across Europe—thereafter to be innovatively deployed, from the eleventh century, in all areas of pragmatically oriented literacy.⁷³

The most important products of this literacy across the spectrum of the vita religiosa were rules, customs, and statutes.⁷⁴ In these texts, more than anywhere else, the foundations of the normative structure of a religious community become visible—albeit in sharply divergent forms and functions, since these three genres of text themselves differ strongly not only in their claims to validity but also in their respective intentions. By no means did every religious community always have a rule, customs, and statutes all at once. To note only three representative examples: the Carthusians had no rule, the Grandmontines no Consuetudines, and until the end of the twelfth century the Cluniacs no constitutional statutes. And long-term developments suggest (speaking generally) that in the first phase of religious life, through the early Middle Ages, rules were predominant; an age characterized by written customs followed, and then, from the twelfth century on, a period dominated by statutes.

Because the categories for these kinds of texts overlap, it is impossible to construct a single typology. It is possible to read the historical evidence of the texts themselves comparatively, however, and thereby to draw a series of representative distinctions. To that end we can offer the following conclusions, here formulated very generally.⁷⁵

In principle, a rule is the work of a single author—sometimes written with the advice of others—who seeks to pass on a compelling message about a proper way of life to a community of followers. Analogously, someone might introduce an already established rule into a community, as Norbert of Xanten did with the Rule of Augustine.

Rules originally required no approval from a higher ecclesiastical authority. Only the High Middle Ages saw a change in the legal circumstances, which were intensified by the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council. From that point forward new rules—like those of Francis, Clare, and Birgitta—always had to be approved by the papacy. Rules originally concerned only the communities of particular monasteries and their dependent houses. At first, however, the same rule could be adopted by numerous monasteries, even if they shared no other legal or institutional ties. Thus from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, the Rule of Augustine, with its remarkably general norms, came to serve as a kind of wild card rule for many new congregations. In the same era, specific rules emerged for the first time for individual orders, texts closely tied to a particular institutional identity and therefore in principle not transferable to other orders. Early examples include the rules of the Templars, the Grandmontines, and the Camaldolese, as well as the one Abelard drew up for the women’s community of the Paraclete. The most famous example, however, is certainly the Rule of Francis.

In terms of its content, a rule encompassed all fundamental aspects of life—norms of behavior and obligations of prayer and liturgy as well as leadership structures, discipline, economic affairs, daily routines, clothing, eating, and living together. As a consequence, a rule dealt with both matters of the spirit and technical matters of organization. Apart from the fact that rules, especially in the early Middle Ages, were combined with one another and used variously in so-called mixed rules, they were in principle unalterable. Rules came to be shaped ever more strongly by the assumption that they were holy texts and therefore untouchable, founded on the Gospel but ultimately, as figures like Francis or Birgitta of Sweden emphasized, handed down by God.

Consuetudines were established customs already approved by the normative power of practice within a community or order. Thus their various written versions had no real author in the proper sense, and the corresponding texts neither needed to be nor could be approved by an ecclesiastical authority. But they were easily transferrable to other communities, as long as their content was used only as a model. In such cases the text itself was most often changed to adapt it according to local circumstance, as was true of the customaries of the regular canons in the twelfth century.⁷⁶ The reception of a customary in this regard was not a marker of legal dependence. A given monastic congregation could have, as distinct from a single rule, a range of sharply divergent customs.

The texts of Consuetudines provided both expansions and supporting interpretations of a given rule. In the widest sense, they primarily concerned interactions and patterns of life, forms of common prayer and liturgy, clothing, mealtimes, rituals, daily rhythms, and so on, but they also addressed the organizational system of offices, recruitment of the next generation (for example, the election of an abbot or guidelines on oblates and novices), and the enforcement of discipline. A model in this regard seems to be the Cluniac Consuetudines, already noted, which were recorded around 1080 by Bernard and Ulrich.

The texts of Consuetudines could also not strictly speaking be changed, because they had captured in retrospect practices that had already been established. Thus they themselves were not bearers of the validity of norms. Nor did they produce or reproduce any validity, because that validity was already to hand in those interactions that had been continually repeated and that continued to be repeated. Acts were valid insofar as they were thought always to have been done. Yet it is possible to discern subtle differences in how these texts communicated validity (though not the validity itself), since some among them are more descriptive and others more directive in function.⁷⁷ In this respect a difference clearly emerges between customary texts intended exclusively for instruction of houses that did not belong to a given congregation (so, for example, the Consuetudines of Ulrich of Cluny for Hirsau, noted above) and those that sought through writing to secure and to preserve, through their textuality, a binding set of customs for posterity, as, for example, the Consuetudines of the regular canons of Springiersbach/Klosterrath from the 1120s.⁷⁸

Statutes were in principle drawn up with the consent of an entire community or their representatives, and in the case of entire orders, of a central legislative body such as diffinitors or a general chapter. Classic examples in this regard are the Carta caritatis of the Cistercians and the Dominican Constitutiones. Statutes were also composed, whether by the founder of a community, as was true for the congregation of Fontevraud and its founder Robert of Arbrissel, or by representatives of a “second generation”⁷⁹ that had begun to pass down established Consuetudines as statutes, especially if the founder had left nothing comparable behind, as was true for the Carthusians. An important dimension of such statutes was that while they were derived from the consensus of the community, they were also binding on even the leading officeholders of a monastery or an order.

In principle, statutes were not transferable to other monasteries, congregations, or orders; in legal terms, because religious communities had created them to be legally valid locally—and locally only—statutes were a decisive marker of a community’s identity. Within a congregation or an order, in contrast, statutes were binding on every house. The model here was the widely influential Carta caritatis noted above, which decisively insisted on normative uniformity in every area of life.

In general, statutes encompassed every area of community life, but they often placed considerable emphasis on matters of organization, hierarchy, and leadership and on daily interaction and matters of discipline. For matters concerning liturgy and spiritual practice, however, there were often collections of statutes dedicated to those particular themes—as in the case of the Cistercian Liber usuum noted above, for example, which despite its name was not a collection of customs but of enacted statutes. At any time, the authority that created the statutes could change, revise, nullify, or rewrite them, although the Cistercian Carta caritatis was an exception to that generalization, as it was often equated to a religious rule. Admittedly, the problem of the mutability of law always presented itself, thereby inspiring critics’ denunciations of a novelty that threatened to overwhelm the unchanging truth of virtue.⁸⁰ Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, confronted that concern head-on in the prologue to his collection of statutes. He made a distinction between unchanging virtues, on the one hand—love of God and neighbor, humility, righteousness, and the corresponding norms that secured them—and on the other hand, the instruments of the virtues, all of them quite variable, such as ascetic practices, manual labor, prescriptions for fasting, and so on. The latter concerns for Peter could thus easily become a matter of statutory legislation. New texts most often displaced the old (as was true among the Premonstratensians and the Cluniacs from the thirteenth century on), but among some orders they steadily accumulated, leading to an increasingly expansive corpus, as happened among the Carthusians.

Statutes resulted from the writing down of norms that were in principle, from the moment of their publication, to be divorced from the circumstances of the past and to point the way into the future. In this respect, the text itself was the bearer of a forward-looking validity, its very words a binding force.

Institutional Forms: Establishment and Preservation

On the basis of such structures of literacy, certain kinds of “rational-legal” communities emerged (from the earliest era of the vita religiosa, though more vigorously from the twelfth century) as a fundamental type of cenobitic monasticism. The legitimacy of this type rested—to frame the issue in the words of Max Weber—“on a belief in the legality of enacted rules,”⁸¹ because the identity of these kinds of religious communities was bound to a normative text that had been either collectively legislated in the form of statutes or established by a papal decree. The normative text occupied a fundamental position—that is, it constituted a given community in a way both grounded in the present and looking toward the future. In this respect, such a text had both an instrumental and a symbolic dimension. Once again the strong opening words of the Cistercians’ Carta caritatis are revealing in this regard: “In this decree, then, the aforesaid brethren, taking precaution against future shipwreck of their mutual peace, elucidated and decreed and left for their posterity by what covenant, or in what manner, indeed with what charity their monks throughout abbeys in various parts of the world, though separated in body, could be indissolubly knit together in mind.”⁸² With these words the Cistercians set down forward-looking norms within the framework of the Rule of Saint Benedict, and those norms were universally valid independent of any particular person. The text looked to a regulated future whose way of life was to be led methodically, even in daily affairs, and which was to be sustained by mutual responsibility. But the text also embodied the guiding ideas that established the community’s identity and therefore possessed a symbolic power of tremendous integrative force.

From the earliest days of religious life, the primordial norms of community life could just as easily emerge from the words and deeds of a charismatic founder. Charismatic leadership is thus the second path toward the formation of religious community. In this case, it was not a text but rather a person who served as the symbolic embodiment of common ideals.⁸³ So it was said, euphorically, of the religious zealot Stephen of Obazine, who in the first half of the twelfth century had gathered a following of hermits around him, “His word is like burning fire, which inflames the souls of his listeners so strongly that their entire lives and mores are changed. His outward appearance as well as his demeanor, and everything that he does, are as it were a sermon, and show nothing other than a way of life and disciplined morals and deeds.”⁸⁴ In principle all leading figures of this kind—Bruno of Cologne, Robert of Arbrissel, Norbert of Xanten, or Francis of Assisi, to name only a few significant examples, already noted above, from the High Middle Ages—positioned their authority beyond the entanglements of daily life and claimed for themselves the power to interpret fundamental principles, which thereby came to be seen as having no alternative. These charismatics often adopted a revolutionary stance, which turned decidedly against tradition and returned to the fundamental structures of the faith. Stephen of Thiers, for example, saw all existing rules as only stems and branches. He called his followers back to the roots, to the Gospel itself. Francis, too, rejected every established rule as a guide for his community, calling instead on the word of God as it had been revealed to him directly as a set of concrete guidelines for his way of life.

The boundaries of embodied norms, however, were set by the corruptibility of the body itself. Stephen of Obazine thus early on subjected his followers to the “authority of written law.”⁸⁵ For the same reason, Norbert of Xanten vehemently rejected his followers’ desire to heed only his words. He knew that no religious goals could be reached without adopting written rules that were valid over the long term.

Only a few examples of the consequences need be noted here. Norbert’s community eventually adopted the Rule of Augustine, but Robert of Arbrissel himself provided a collection of statutes for his double community of men and women. Similarly Guigo, the later successor of Bruno of Cologne as leader of the Grand Chartreuse, had the emerging customs of that community written down and established as binding law for all other Carthusian communities. The successor of Stephen of Thiers wrote a rule, naming it after Stephen himself, and last, Stephen of Obazine’s monasteries, at Stephen’s urging, joined the Cistercian Order.

In the overwhelming number of cases, dynamics like those outlined here played a fundamental role in the formation of religious communities in the Middle Ages. But Weberian models of the transition from “charismatic authority” to the “routinization of charisma”⁸⁶ cannot fully explain those dynamics. They were more complex, not least because they either allowed a charismatic leader to set aside charisma in favor of a rational legitimizing force—as is so remarkably visible in the case of Stephen of Obazine—or because a “second generation”⁸⁷ built up (in the Weberian sense) a “legal authority” while also forming a myth of origins.⁸⁸ A charismatic leader was thus no longer a transitory figure, and the normative power of his memory was now permanently integrated into a written apparatus of justifications for legitimacy—as was the case with the rule ascribed to Stephen of Thiers, for example, or with Francis, whose hagiographies served as a codification of an exemplary and binding way of life.

The successful formation of a religious community proved itself both through long-term survival after a time of beginnings and through lasting pursuit of institutional goals sustained by authorities and organizations that functioned according to expectations. The forward-looking character of early constitutional documents, whether rules or statutes, was first put to the test because of the demands and the resistance of daily life. Thus the process that formed religious communities, whether individual monasteries, congregations, or orders, did not end with a founding act. Rather, that process took place over a long subsequent period of strenuous reform and correction that sought to realize and preserve core essentials.⁸⁹ Monastic life achieved much toward that end, and on that basis, over long stretches of the Middle Ages, it took a leading role in the rational formation of organized communities.

In the Rule of Saint Benedict, the abbot was grounded in a spiritual transcendence that framed his duty as Christ’s representative in the paternal sense as shepherd. But the abbot was given tasks that above all demanded the art of rational analysis in daily affairs. The abbot was to exercise the art of discretion (discretio)—in negotiating the demands of others for fair treatment and their various needs and aptitudes, as well as in matters concerning worldly goods and the proper administration of the household.⁹⁰ The community elected its abbot in accordance with the Rule, not by a majority but rather by the community’s “healthier part” (sanior pars). The abbot thereafter enjoyed almost unlimited power; he could not be removed from office, and it was only recommended, but not required, that he take counsel with his brothers. In the end, the abbot alone would render an account before God for each member of the community.

From the eleventh century on, most eremitical reformers of religious life, as well as the later mendicants, set aside the title of abbot in their communities because of its symbolically charged, sacrosanct character. They refused to name their superiors abba (father) or abbatissa. Instead they chose relatively unencumbered designations such as prior or priorissa (prior, prioress),⁹¹ provost (from praepositus), guardian (guardianus), minister, or master.

Within the community, a number of officeholders, whom the Cluniacs called obedientiarii, ensured the smooth functioning of local affairs. An idealized listing of the most important offices as they were likely to have been encountered in a typical Benedictine abbey provides an overview:⁹² from the ninth century on, the designation of prior began to displace the title of praepositus, which appears in the Rule as a term for the abbot’s representative. A cellarer was responsible for the economic provision of the community, a camerarius for the running of the household, a novice master (magister novitiorum) for those entering the community, a hospitarius (guest master) for guests, an almoner for the distribution of alms, a porter for allowing or preventing entry, a circator for oversight of the monks in the dormitory and at work, a librarian for books and archives, an infirmarian for the care of the sick, and a cantor for liturgical chant. Communities in orders with particular aims of course had still more specific offices, such as those of preacher, and master of studies (magister studiorum), among the Dominicans. In addition, women’s communities required a male pastor to be sent to the community from outside. If the community did not belong to an established order, the pope often provided the pastor, who was chosen either from the secular clergy or from Cistercian, Dominican, or Franciscan houses.⁹³

The organization of entire congregations and orders, however, was a matter of incomparably greater complexity. In this regard it is important to differentiate, systematically and in a certain sense also chronologically, between two types of organization.

On the one hand, an older form of organization involved congregations that by virtue of property law were personally subject to a head who was the superior of a centrally located community. The model example in this regard, though itself not an early case, is Cluny in its classical era, from around the middle of the tenth century to the end of the twelfth. Its abbot possessed monarchical power over not only the monks subject directly to him but also all of the houses that were his own, that is, whose monks offered their profession to him, whose officeholders he could depose at will, and which in principle he was to visit in person. Scholars have in this regard justifiably spoken of Cluny as a single, large, “trans-local” community.

A more modern, progressive organizational form, on the other hand, involved institutionally consolidated groups of houses that were cooperatively organized and that represented themselves as a transpersonal entity. From the twelfth century onward, this pattern signaled the establishment of an “order” as a totally new form of the vita religiosa. But there is yet another distinction to be made here between such corporations, which brought their communities as autonomous units into the whole (here the Cistercians are the prime example and also chronologically the earliest, along with the Carthusians or Premonstratensians), and those that saw their houses as only branches within a more comprehensive system (above all the different branches of the mendicants with their strict provincial divisions).

The general chapter, which usually met once a year, was the representative body of a religious order.⁹⁴ It consisted of either the leaders of individual houses, as was true, for example, of the Cistercians, Premonstratensians, Carthusians, and Cluniacs from the thirteenth century on (to name only a few), or the leaders of provinces or elected delegates from the provinces (the Dominicans, for example, alternated regularly among these groups after every one or two meetings). The task of these gatherings was to ensure the orders’ stability in spiritual and temporal affairs (in spiritualibus et temporalibus) through judicial, administrative, and reforming legislative measures. To this end an executive council emerged, called the Definitorium, which made appropriate “definitions” based on the submission of reports from individual houses and, where necessary, from the provinces. In each case the focal point of the effort could shift in various ways. The Cluniac general chapter, for example, was concerned above all with judicial matters, while that of the Cistercians was more legislative. The decision was then usually handed over to the appropriate members of the order’s hierarchy (the superiors of monasteries or provinces) for execution, and in serious cases to a commission, as, for example, among the Cistercians, or even to the head of an entire order, for example, with the Cluniacs or the mendicant orders. Women’s communities were usually not represented by a woman at the general chapter.

The coherence of an order was structured either vertically or horizontally and tied to a coherent system of comprehensive visitations⁹⁵ that were in principle carried out autonomously, independent of episcopal oversight. Vertical organization was established as a system of filiation among mother- and daughterhouses, with visitors moving from above to below. The model example again comes from the Cistercians, whose hundreds of houses spread out from Cîteaux, which was in turn visited by the abbots of the four primary abbeys. In the horizontal model, an order (in most instances geographically encompassing virtually all of Christendom) was divided up into provinces, each with a superior and answerable to regional visitation. The Premonstratensians were the first to develop such circuits (circaria) for visitation. The Cluniacs followed in around 1200, and the mendicant orders (among others) a little after that. In congregations or orders that were exclusively female (the congregation of Prémy, for example) or that were led by women (the congregation of Fontevraud), female superiors personally carried out the visitations.⁹⁶

Typically the information collected by the visitors in temporalibus et spiritualibus (encompassing matters of discipline as well as economy, finance, and so on) was sent on to the general chapter, which made decisions regarding those matters that had not been worked out locally. In this way, the general chapter was able to maintain detailed and continual oversight over the overall situation of the whole Order. An ever growing and ever more elaborate corpus of written records served to consolidate lines of communication further.⁹⁷ In ways that moved far beyond traditional patterns of record keeping in individual monasteries—rent rolls, customaries, cartularies—the orders now collected and archived records that captured an overall view of their various economies as well as the reports of their members, affidavits of obedience, election reports, and much more. Often duplicate copies of visitation reports were made to allow for a later follow-up. Certified copies of the general chapter’s proceedings were always prepared and used to communicate legislation to the members of individual communities. Reports to the leadership of the orders increasingly promoted formal criteria of communication, which were conducive to legibility and especially to rapid categorical classification. The Dominicans, as beneficiaries of this kind of emergent rationality, became masters in these techniques.⁹⁸

Constructing Particular Pasts

Both to establish a particular identity and to attain the external recognition that secured legitimacy, it was not enough to internalize core ideals and to establish an organization that functioned well in all the ways outlined here. Institutional stability, established both inwardly and outwardly, required an explicit symbolic articulation: that the vita religiosa could live up to what in essence legitimized its existence (and to what was repeatedly endangered structurally)—namely, its independence from the temporal entanglements of the world.

A text ascribed to the Franciscan minister general Bonaventure captured what can be seen as the ontological core of this problem: “Everything that does not owe its existence to itself tends to decline and to oblivion, unless it is sustained by that which provides its existence; so it is with every person and every order. Thus every order not only of monks but also of bishops, secular priests, and laity, indeed every estate, declines sharply whenever one measures its customary circumstance by its beginnings.”⁹⁹ With the establishment of this general principle, the author turned to a consideration of five reasons that a religious community such as an order tended to decline (deficit) over time. The first, he suggested, was the crowd of new members, who were not so easy to lead as were the few in the early days. The second reason was that the first generation died off or lost strength, their model discipline lost its force, leaving only cheap imitation. Because those who came after the first generation failed to appreciate the Order’s virtues as the older ones had upheld them, the Order had everywhere abandoned those virtues. The third reason was the increasing somnolence of later generations, who could only hand down what they themselves had learned imperfectly. The fourth reason was the encroachment of bad customs, the fifth and final reason the all-too-frequent engagement in worldly affairs.

The author here presented in general outline a model of institutional development grounded in the assertion of a primordially established core ideal (propositum) and then remarked on its real or supposed loss. As a counterweight, religious congregations crafted their own founding histories, through which they sought to make credible, both inwardly and outwardly, the claim that the legacy of their excellent origins had been realized down to the present.

In a pragmatic way, local communities reached back into their own histories to craft so-called cartulary chronicles or foundation stories,¹⁰⁰ most of which were bound to sacralizing narratives of a community’s origins and to stories of the deeds of the community’s leaders (Gesta abbatum).¹⁰¹ As such, these texts sought not only to archive a legal and economic status quo for the collective memory of the community, but above all to present an array of traditions that immortalized its past.

In larger religious congregations, a common strategy for securing the legitimacy of a particular identity was to locate the origins of a communal life devoted to God in the early church, the ecclesia primitiva of the apostolic community in Jerusalem. The brotherhood and common property shared among those who were individually poor, as related in the book of Acts, served as both a model and a concrete point of historical origin for their particular ways of life.¹⁰² To note only a few examples: around the middle of the twelfth century, the Benedictine author of the chronicle of the Hirsau community of Petershausen (Casus Monasterii Petrishusensis) emphasized that the virtues and customs of the apostles—their embrace of the common life, their renunciation of worldly things, their tenacity in the service of God, their uninterrupted praise of God, their unanimity (unanimitas), and so on—were also an obligatory model for his particular community.¹⁰³ Another example is the Cistercian apologetic text known as the Exordium magnum, composed between 1186 and 1221, which tersely asserted that the common life of the monastery was the way of life of the ecclesia primitiva itself and that the monastic way of life had its origins there.¹⁰⁴ Alongside these articulations from the monastic milieu, the regular canon Lietbert of St. Ruf also claimed at the beginning of the twelfth century that the rule under which his community lived (regula . . . qua vivimus) had been handed down by Christ, who had lived the common life with his disciples, and that they in turn had passed it on to the church.¹⁰⁵

Just as compelling were the ways in which the story of a particular monastery or order might be woven into the larger tapestry of salvation history.¹⁰⁶ As one example, the Camaldolese were already aware of their transcendent significance in the twelfth century as they composed their rule, the Liber heremitice regulae, which opened with these words: “Although there are many forms of religious life, it is the solitary life that stands out among them in an instructive way.”¹⁰⁷ As proof the text ran off a distinguished series of exemplary hermits, beginning with Moses and continuing with David, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, Christ, the Desert Fathers, and Benedict of Nursia, ending with Romuald, the founder of Camaldoli. All of them had chosen the life of a hermit either of their own accord or through God’s command, and every one of their lives served as proof of the extraordinary profit found in leading an eremitical life. These exempla, deeply rooted in salvation history and charged with tremendous allegorical power, certainly provided the Camaldolensian way of life with exemplary standards. These served not only to inspire imitation, however, but also to affirm the Order’s distinct religious path and, before the entire world, to clothe that path in a validity that pointed to the world beyond.

Common to all of the strategies of constructing the past outlined here is that they formed for each community a distinct historical memory, with whose help each community was able to confront any doubt about the stability and legitimacy of religious institutions. Such “founding histories”¹⁰⁸ always returned to origins, granted them validity by virtue of their exemplarity, and then made possible the assertion that such validity, as an unchanging continuum, had successfully been carried all the way down to the present.

Cloister and World

Monastic communities saw themselves as institutions standing between heaven and earth. Yet they could only open the way to heaven by living their earthly lives in a way that made heaven accessible. Monasteries were places in which the life of faith was perfectly organized and reserved for only the elite of religio, yet at the same time places that served as models for all of the faithful who hoped for heaven. From this coupling of inward faith and perfected organization, the religious found the strength to move beyond the walls of their communities and decisively to influence the world beyond—or to draw their own inspiration from it. The essential needs of medieval society were thus crystalized in the form of religious life. The religious not only set the example for how the ethical principles of the Christian faith were to be realized but also offered the promise of a secure investment, in terms of both piety and the worldly business of economics and politics.

From the early Middle Ages on, the nobility had founded monasteries on their own estates, both to exploit their agricultural potential and to establish indivisible anchor points for their power.¹⁰⁹ Later on, when from the beginning of the eleventh century the nobility came to shape itself according to agnatic familial alliances (grounded in the male line), monasteries came to provide symbolic focus for lordship. They served as family burial sites,¹¹⁰ and they were the institutions through which a dynasty might first be created, so to speak, by way of historiographical works about a founding figure and the growth of his lineage.¹¹¹

But the nobility founded and fostered religious communities for another reason: because of God’s good will, the prayers of the religious brought a benefit for the individual soul, a benefit that outlasted even death. Kings supported religious communities in order to secure places where the praise of God would sustain the welfare of both kingdom and people. For those prayers to be heard, the life of the religious community had to be lived spiritually in the best possible way. To that end, those supporters who saw themselves as responsible for a given community—but who were also plagued by fear of damnation—took care to establish it on a firm material foundation and to win recruits who were accomplished virtuosos in the life of the faith. Reform communities like Inden, Cluny, Fruttuaria, Gorze, and Hirsau were widely respected as places for sound investment, where earthly donations could, through appreciation, be transformed into spiritual dividends. Other communities of the strictest discipline—the Grandmontines and the Carthusians, as well as other congregations and orders that also fulfilled their apostolic missions in compelling ways—were similarly renowned.

Well into the High Middle Ages, the nobility had taken exclusive responsibility for the founding of religious communities, but from the thirteenth century on, with the flowering of the cities, new classes of merchants and artisans also emerged as patrons.¹¹² By drawing together their resources, they were able to found and support mostly mendicant communities in their cities. According to their various means they gave land, vineyards, and fish ponds, whether as property or as a right of use. They donated wax, liturgical objects, altar images, and provisions, and they bequeathed incomes and cash in their wills. Decisive in these arrangements was that they established a lasting structure for the commemoration of the beneficiary, one that would continue to provide intercession long after the death of the donor—pro remedio animae, as the foundation documents usually said. Urban women’s communities especially, whose inhabitants (in contrast to their male counterparts in mendicant convents) lived stationary lives, often became the focal points of complex spaces of communication between religious houses and the urban environment. The individual nuns’ family members (often clergy) were active as patrons and pastors, building up individual networks sustained by emotional bonds and thereby competing with similar networks built up by others.¹¹³

But a monastery was also a place whose walls could keep out the dangers of the world only with difficulty—as epitomized in the apocalyptic image of Babylon—and its inhabitants often found themselves (in the biblical language of the time) “between hammer and anvil.”¹¹⁴ “The monastery is also a microcosm of the mundane world,” as Marie-Dominique Chenu emphasized.¹¹⁵ External troubles were woven into the fabric of monastic life. The power of the monastery to shape the world around it was of necessity faced with entanglement in the respective historical structures of its social, political, and economic environment. Those entanglements could not only prove useful for a given religious community; they could also draw the community into an institutionally conditioned dependence on secular powers—for example, when the leadership of a monastery was taken over by laity through a lay abbacy, when the monastery’s right to dispose of its goods was granted to outsiders (through proprietary churches or patronage), or when a community was subject to the protection of an advocate or, especially in French territories, the garde.¹¹⁶ Moreover, religious communities were constantly faced with those who, although appointed as protectors, were always gratuitously seizing monastic wealth. Monasteries tried to guard against such aggression through a very specific means: by using their command of literacy to record their rights to properties, at least in such a way as to provide proof of theft. Expressions such as this one from the abbey of Saint-Bertin in Flanders were legion: “We have put together this codex over the course of the years, on parchment and in the form of a book, only so that it can be consulted whenever someone might be greedy enough to try to seize the properties of this place for himself.”¹¹⁷

The world of the nobility and the world of monasticism could find themselves in a symbiotic relationship, but they disagreed fundamentally over two matters.¹¹⁸ The first was that life in the monastery served all who were enclosed within its walls equally in their struggle for salvation. There was in principle no place for differentiation according to social status. To point to any special merits was to fall victim to superbia, pride, and thus to be guilty of the worst of all vices. Yet the social world of the nobility was driven by public competition over rank and renown. It constituted itself from those who were born into and belonged to a specific place in the social hierarchy. The second matter over which monastery and nobility disagreed was the view that noble power and lordship rested on personal wealth and that to increase that wealth was crucial not least as a distinctive means of representation. Yet poverty, humility, and chastity, for the individual and often for an entire community, were specific and fundamental requirements for leading the vita religiosa.

From Late Antiquity, in Lérins and in the communities of the Rhône, for example, until well into the High Middle Ages, the nobility filled the ranks of most religious communities. Without question, the desire to make salvation more secure was usually the motive for most who entered the monastery. But in many cases, the reasons were also quite practical: membership in a monastic community guaranteed noble families influence in matters of politics and helped to provide for the provision of daughters and second-born sons, as well as (so numerous sources report) the physically handicapped.¹¹⁹

Nobles also lived in religious communities—whose spiritual depth was never in doubt—in a way that was in keeping with their status, at least insofar as the norms of the Rule might barely allow. In Cluny, for example, a community that over the course of time was more and more dominated by the nobility, meals were without question extraordinarily sumptuous for a monastic environment—and thus provided the hermits and the Cistercians of the twelfth century with good reason to launch their severe critiques. In Cluny, but also in other communities, for example, in communities of canonesses, the use of servants was also common. Manual labor—an essential element of Benedictine life—was scorned in Cluniac monasteries, and when it was required (even if only as a matter of symbolic interaction) it was not to be done in public view.

Reform-minded communities, above all the Cistercians, sought a return to original ideals of equality. They proclaimed the dissolution of differences according to status as a form of asceticism and a form of self-humiliation, and they were not without success in doing so. As Klaus Schreiner has put it so well and concisely, “the flattening of distinctions of status made clear that in the monastery it was no longer nobility as merely a nominal title of secular lineage that mattered, but rather the true nobility of the spiritual life.”¹²⁰

Reforming orders wanted to accept those who were possessed of a high degree of self-responsibility, and they therefore allowed admission only to adults. But in doing so they thereby accepted women and men who had already experienced a socially stratified world and who brought that memory with them.¹²¹ This in turn fostered its own threats to a spirit of equality. For example, in the thirteenth century the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach told of a formerly noble lay brother (conversus) who had long been accustomed only to caring for pigs and who began to brood over his circumstance: “What am I doing here? As a man I am high born, but because of this humble task I am despised by all my friends. I can no longer stay here as a swineherd.”¹²² The humility that came from conversion, Caesarius concluded, had transformed itself into pride and had turned a God-fearing soul into a rebel against virtue and truth. At around the same time Gerard de Arvernia, the keen observer of the Cluniacs, told how relatives would visit noble monks, approach them with poisonous flattery, and voice their embarrassment over the living conditions in the monastery. He continued by casting the world of the aristocrat, the society of the high born, of private incomes and noble posterity in the harsh light of missed opportunities.¹²³

Religious communities shaped by the nobility were also to be found in the late Middle Ages—often as male Benedictine monasteries, but especially as women’s communities—and the reform movements that produced the networks of Melk or Kastl still sought to guard against both excesses of lifestyle and the exclusion of those who were not of noble blood. But it was the establishment of the mendicant orders and their integration into structures of urban life that marked a turning point in the social history of monastic community.¹²⁴ Mendicant houses were usually filled with representatives of every social rank. The Franciscan call to imitate the poor Christ, especially, was unconcerned with boundaries of status. And such a message could be taken up and interiorized by those who were concerned not to follow rules like Pharisees but instead to embrace a new and open way of life. Beguines and other semireligious women (and men, too) came from every social rank, and where necessary they discounted an aristocratic heritage in favor of service to their neighbors. Already in her own day, Elizabeth of Thuringia was a highly esteemed example of that kind of piety.¹²⁵

Temporalia

In order to preserve the special status of a community set apart from the world, economic self-sufficiency was a fundamental principle of monastic life, even among those who observed the strictest possible measure of poverty. To note one example, the Grandmontines, who lived in solitude and complete poverty, were not allowed to possess livestock, tithes, or prebends and could own only enough land to allow for burial. In cases of absolute necessity they were allowed to go begging but had to cease as soon as they had enough provision to last them one day. “Those who had died to the world,” as contemporaries described them, were no longer to entangle themselves in worldly structures. The followers of Francis, to note a second example, were to work above all in order to take care of their necessities.¹²⁶ And as the Regula non bullata made clear, they were allowed to beg for alms like the rest of the poor only out of necessity. A little later, Innocent IV crafted the fiction that the Franciscans merely used the things they possessed while the church retained ownership of their goods.

Monks build the monastery of Maulbronn in the Kraichgau, in an image from 1450.

In an age whose economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, monastic communities of the Benedictine tradition, along with foundations of regular canons, held their common property mainly in the form of landed estates.¹²⁷ The command to observe poverty (quite apart from the question of its actual observance) was binding only on the individual. The dictates of religious rules covered the issue in principle—the Rule of Saint Benedict outlined in chapters 31 and 32 the duties of the cellarer and discussed matters like tools and clothing—but the broader structures of ownership were the result of a historical process in which monastic houses came to be seen by the outside world above all as infrastructural nuclei and anchor points for economic expansion. Already from the early Middle Ages, by way of gifts and donations that came to them alongside tithes, parish prebends, and rights to tolls, mines, and markets, monastic communities had become surrounded by often enormous landholdings. These could no longer be directly cultivated but had instead either to be worked by serfs or wage laborers or to be leased—as was the case with the Cluniacs, for example, on a grand scale.¹²⁸ The new reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and especially the Cistercians, launched their attacks against Benedictine monasticism on precisely this point. They accused the traditional abbeys of living a festive life in pompous buildings, living from the fruits of estates that were worked by “foreign labor” (labor alienus).¹²⁹ The Cistercians themselves soon possessed extensive properties that had come to them by way of donations and thus moved to embrace as a new norm both their own manual labor and the independent cultivation of their estates. Work, as Bernard of Clairvaux emphasized, purified the heart and disciplined the body.¹³⁰ Yet among the priest-monks of the following generation, manual labor was reduced to a token, symbolic gesture. The economic duties of what became a far-flung network of farms (granges) and urban centers of trade¹³¹ were now taken over by lay brothers, conversi—a group that in fact belonged to the monastic familia, but whose members had only sworn simple vows.

The Cistercians had developed the most advanced system with respect to techniques of economic exploitation. But the agriculturally oriented communities of every observance faced a serious crisis at the close of the High Middle Ages with the encroachments of a new economy based on currency.¹³² While religious houses in urban contexts—specifically, and paradoxically, the mendicants¹³³—remained secure by virtue of strong financial support from burghers, those rural communities that continued to rely on leases struggled as funding and provision became more expensive while the financial yields from the leases remained the same. The visitation protocols of the Cluniacs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, recorded hundreds of cases of monasteries massively in debt and confronted with all of its negative consequences—collapsing buildings, community unrest and rebellion, alienation of property, and so on.¹³⁴

Nevertheless, in general the technical achievements designed to improve the monasteries’ economic yields were extraordinary.¹³⁵ Admittedly, it is difficult precisely to determine the monasteries’ concrete roles in spreading specific strategies of crop cultivation, particular kinds of fruit cultivation, or methods of animal breeding. But it is certain that many communities were successful enough at cultivating grain, wine, and fruit and at raising fish, pork, and sheep that they both amassed an agricultural surplus and sought to profit from it. Here too the Cistercians, whose numerous urban houses served as locales for commodity exchange, stood in the forefront.¹³⁶

In maintaining and building up a remarkable network that encompassed both agricultural production and trade, the Celestines accomplished something truly remarkable. They organized an infrastructure of transhumance over enormous stretches across central and southern Italy.¹³⁷ The Order’s settlements, scattered across the Apennines, served as anchor points and centers of communication for the shepherds who made their way across the landscape with great flocks of sheep twice yearly—up into the mountains in spring to summer pastures, and back down in fall to the winter pastures of the plains. The animals were an important element in the provisioning of the cities, but they were also feared by landowners because of the damage they did to the fields. The Celestines, with the help of their widely dispersed settlements, channeled and directed the routes of the sheep drives, cared both materially and spiritually for the shepherds, arranged for financial settlements among the owners of land and sheep, and served as brokers in urban markets.

Among monasticism’s particularly beneficial technical achievements were those concerning handicrafts and building¹³⁸ (for example, the abbey church of Saint-Bénigne in Dijon, which stands as the beginning of the Romanesque tradition, and Saint-Denis in Paris as the beginning of the Gothic) as well as hydraulic engineering and mining.¹³⁹ In the field of water management, canals and tunnels were built to protect monasteries from floods, to acquire fruitful ground, or to increase the speed of flowing water. Notable examples in this regard include the channel known as the Almkanal in Salzburg, cut through the Mönchsberg after 1136, mostly by the conversi of the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter, or the so-called Fulbert tunnel, completed under Fulbert, the second abbot of Maria Laach between 1152 and 1170. A description of the abbey of Clairvaux from the beginning of the thirteenth century emphasizes the importance of water management for the proper ordering of daily monastic life. The little River Aube was channeled through the monastery to drive the grain mill and later the fulling mill. The stream also provided for the tannery and the kitchen, among others, before finally leaving the monastery, taking with it the community’s refuse.¹⁴⁰ Experience in water management and redirection also proved useful in mining. Almost every abbey near the sea made an effort to secure shares of rights in salt works. Others, such as the regular canonry of Berchtesgarden, sought to gain the right to mine salt from the mountains in order to be able to produce, process, and sell the costly mineral as part of their own initiatives. But the Cistercian communities again stood out above all as “cultivators of a new, profitable mining technique.”¹⁴¹ Especially the medieval monasteries’ smelting furnaces and forges, many of which still survive today, bear witness to the intensity of monastic mining and metalworking. The Cistercians of the Belgian convent of Val-Saint-Lambert, for example, mined coal so actively that their house came to be called the “coal convent.”¹⁴²

Technology allowed for shaping of the world, and Genesis 1:28, which gave the command to “fill the earth and subdue it,” provided the appropriate legitimation. For those who lived the vita religiosa, such work was not an unfitting forgery of God’s creative power but rather a means of ordering the world materially and economically—and thereby a means of being set free from its entanglements. In taking hold of the world, religious saw the possibility of overcoming it.

On the Search for God toward Knowledge of the World

Religious, as they searched for God, both acquired and inquired about knowledge of the world so that they might also find the key to the order of creation.¹⁴³ They wrote and handed down texts to guard against forgetting and to preserve knowledge for posterity. They tested the limits of rational understanding through the dialectic of the schools and burst beyond them in their individual mystical experiences.

In a way already articulated after 540 by Cassiodorus (485–580) in the monastery of Vivarium on the eastern coast of Calabria, the study of written texts would remain tied to religious life in a specific way for all of the Middle Ages. Cassiodorus, a Roman senator and highly ranked state official under Ostrogothic King Theoderic, had retreated from the business of politics at the age of fifty-five. As he himself recorded, he then experienced a conversion to a religious way of life and established Vivarium on his inherited estate near Squillace.¹⁴⁴ There he obligated the monks to offer service to God by working with both Christian and pagan texts, whether by revising and improving, copying, or at least collecting excerpts from them. He himself sought to allow for a stronger presence of pagan knowledge in the realm of Christian theology. A similar approach had already been in evidence in the early fifth century in the works of Augustine, especially in his De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine),¹⁴⁵ where he explicitly justified Christians—whom he likened to the Jews plundering Egyptian treasures—who used pagan knowledge in the service of the truth of Christianity. Cassiodorus sought to articulate an analogous view in his encyclopedic Institutiones.¹⁴⁶ That work offered an invitation to study of the Bible and provided a systematic introduction to divine and human knowledge; it became authoritative for medieval systems of scholarly classification.

Few early developments showed more strikingly than these the consequences that arose from the fact that Christianity is a religion of the book. Precisely for men and women in monastic life, who sought a methodical way to ensure salvation, a sustained interaction with texts was decisive because it led to the proper carrying out of the service of God—whether in the practice of the liturgy and prayer, in the encounter with biblical revelation, or in knowledge of creation. The centrality of books is already in evidence in the Rule of Saint Benedict, a text that raised the reading of sacred texts at mealtime or after Compline, as well as private reading, to an institutional level.

A sophisticated and productive engagement with texts in search of knowledge of God and the world first emerged around the seventh century in Ireland and then in Anglo-Saxon monasteries, before finally being carried over to the continent. There, especially in the wake of the Carolingian Renaissance, which had as its core the establishment of correct biblical texts, monasteries came to hold a virtual monopoly on textual production.¹⁴⁷ The image of a monastic asceticism grounded in the writing of books had now emerged.

The same era also saw the widespread establishment of monastic scriptoria¹⁴⁸ as well as proper monastic schools¹⁴⁹ that were to a limited degree open even to students from outside the monastic community. That tradition of monastic schooling, focused of course on the education of its own recruits but also open to and influential in the world, endured for centuries, though incurring some criticism. It played a partial but decisive role in helping to shape the establishment of universities—for example, in the case of St. Victor in Paris.¹⁵⁰ In the end, however, monastic education was either reduced to serving only as “preparation for higher study”¹⁵¹ or transformed (especially in the hands of the mendicants) to serve as a means of educating the children of the urban elite.¹⁵² The elite of the religious orders themselves had in the meantime made their way to the leading universities, where they at first faced strong resistance (especially in Paris around the middle of the thirteenth century) from the secular clergy already established there. But they soon founded their own houses of study, or, in the case of the mendicant orders, established studia generalia—advanced schools of theology whose conditions were similar to those of the university.¹⁵³

Given the diversity of the vita religiosa and the great expanse of time under consideration here, it is difficult to make general claims about the religious orders’ interests in education. Although for centuries religious communities were home to the scholarly elite, and although they shaped European culture in decisive ways, both the content and the methods of education varied considerably.

Reform movements, which throughout the Middle Ages saw ascetic practice as the most important means to spiritual growth, stood at a distance from what today might be called “intellectuality” and quickly tended to stigmatize passion for knowledge as sinful curiosity (curiositas).¹⁵⁴ For reformist zealots, it was enough to move along the path of inner contemplation (contemplatio)¹⁵⁵ to a mystical “consciousness of the presence of God.”¹⁵⁶ In contrast, orders committed to the task of religious instruction, such as the Dominicans, had to make the study of both Christian and pagan texts their profession—yet without excluding the possibility of mystical experience, as the work of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), Henry Suso (1295–1366), and John Tauler (1300–1361) reveals.¹⁵⁷

But in principle, it was decisive for all religious orders that every kind of instruction should serve the acquisition of spiritual wisdom (sapientia). Here a passage from Paul quoted by Augustine in the above-mentioned De doctrina christiana met with a broad, programmatic reception in medieval religious life: through the contemplation of visible, earthy things (visibilia), the ability to discern (intelligentia) things unseen (invisibilia) in the divine order was enhanced, and the search for the symbols of the divine presence in the created order thus became powerfully attractive.¹⁵⁸ Precisely this kind of education—understood as the formation (formatio) of a soul striving for knowledge—was understood in the medieval view as both a guard against the danger of falling into the vanity of worldly entanglements and as a possibility of escaping imprisonment in the mundane. Thus the Dominican encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais, discussed above, summarized what a deeply Christian Middle Ages believed so emphatically: “Life itself (if it can even be called life) bears witness with countless burdensome evils to the fact that from the first moment on, all mortal men were damned. What else could be this horrible fullness of ignorance, out of which every error arises and which ensnares all of the sons of Adam in its dark folds in such a way that mankind cannot be torn from it without instruction that is full of labor, pain, and fear?”¹⁵⁹

Representation of the Seven Liberal Arts and of Philosophy in the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg, an encyclopedia completed around 1170. Reproduction from the nineteenth century.

Education was thus of central importance to those who lived in monastic community. It was one of the paths that could lead to salvation, and it had to be followed systematically. The system of the seven liberal arts (septem artes liberales), inherited from Late Antiquity, showed the way. Its curriculum allowed those who followed it to climb from the basic disciplines of the “threefold way” (trivium) of grammar, rhetoric, and logic up to the “fourfold way” (quadrivium) of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the disciplines that allowed discernment of the harmonious order of creation.¹⁶⁰ In Paris, the regular canon Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1097–1141) captured the spirit of the curriculum in his didactic work Didascalicon de studio legendi (Instruction in the Study of Reading). There he opened the way for those in religious orders by outlining appropriate learning techniques, according to this core principle: “There are two things above all through which everyone is brought to wisdom, namely reading and meditation.”¹⁶¹

This kind of education, one both outwardly receptive and conditioned by reading, as well as inwardly reflective and gained through meditation, was equally valid for both men and women. Women religious took their place at the pinnacle of learning in their day: the canoness Herrad of Landsberg (1125/30–1195), for example, whose Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights)¹⁶² was the first encyclopedia written by a woman, and the Benedictine Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), who was not only renowned for her visionary ability but who also advanced innovative studies of ethics and cosmology, music and medicine.¹⁶³

Without the monastic drive for knowledge, many questions might never have been asked, questions that with great anthropological depth explored the relationships between reason and faith and were thus of existential import. On the one hand, they inspired reflection on a human createdness that pointed to the divine, on how humanity was shaped by its primordial sinfulness, and on humankind’s consequent existence in the world as foreigners and exiles. The same reflections led to the conclusion that humans were dependent on God’s saving grace and on faith as a source of hope. On the other hand, monks sought insight into humankind as made in the image of God, a state that had brought with it the ability to reason.¹⁶⁴ Reason’s capacity to learn the truth could itself be seen as an opportunity to escape the miserable conditions of earthly life. But it had also to be reconciled with faith as a source of revealed truth. In good Augustinian fashion, the Benedictine Anselm of Bec (later of Canterbury) already addressed that issue at the end of the eleventh century: “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand” (Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam; sed credo ut intelligam).¹⁶⁵

Had an established and continuous tradition of this kind of theological and philosophical discourse not already been in place—a tradition to which the medieval monastic world had contributed in essential ways—thirteenth-century Europe could hardly have experienced its crucial breakthrough into modernity, when the reception of Aristotle forced a new discussion of the relationship between humankind and God. In the vanguard again was a religious, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas,¹⁶⁶ who moved far beyond Augustine in showing the way to a fruitful encounter between human reason and a metaphysically transcending faith.

Religious as individuals taught people how to live in a way pleasing to God, showed the way to an inner life, and at the same time interpreted the meaning of creation, of life, and of heaven in their preaching—a task for which they created specialized orders.

But religious communities, too, were leaders in advances of technology, medicine, agricultural exploitation, architecture, study, and writing. The mendicants dared to go as missionaries into Muslim lands, crossed the boundaries of the known world, brought back the first reports of advancing Mongols, established a new ecclesiastical province in China, and began to write the geography of the world anew.

Through the exemplary development of their own structures, monks and nuns, canons and canonesses, hermits, Beguines, and mendicants all shaped European conceptualizations of the interchange between individual and community. They taught Europe the rationality of planning, setting norms, division of labor, asset allocation, and economic efficiency. They cultivated a sense of the responsible disposition of worldly goods and promoted poverty as a way to be freed from earthly chains. They successfully tested the rational construction of social systems—whether through the statutes of constitutional texts or through the supervision of their leaders—and thereby opened the way to the formation of statehood.

Indeed medieval religious communities were “laboratories of innovation”¹⁶⁷ that laid down essential foundations for modernity.

__________

¹ Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Tria genera hominum. Zur Geschichte eines Deutungsschemas der sozialen Wirklichkeit in Antike und Mittelalter,” in Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Lutz Fenske et al. (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1984), 488–94.

² See p. 184.

³ Ambrose, De viduis 12.72ff., PL 16:243–76.

⁴ Thomas Füser, “Der Leib ist das Grab der Seele. Der institutionelle Umgang mit sexueller Devianz in cluniazensischen Klöstern des 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhunderts,” in De ordine vitae, ed. Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 1996), 187–245.

⁵ For example, with Goffredus da Trani (1200–1245), Summa super titulis decretalium (Lyon, 1519) (repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1992), fol. 155r. For an overview, see Gert Melville, “Zum Recht der Religiosen im ‘Liber extra,’” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung 118 (2001): 169–71, 173, 187–88.

⁶ Erving Goffman, “The Characteristics of Total Institutions,” in A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations, ed. Amitai Etzioni (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 312–38.

⁷ 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, here 301–10.

⁸ 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 76–77.

⁹ Gert Melville, “Im Zeichen der Allmacht. Zur Präsenz Gottes im klösterlichen Leben des hohen Mittelalters,” in Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare der Macht, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 19–44.

¹⁰ Peter von Moos, “Le vêtement identificateur. L’habit fait-il ou ne fait-il pas le moine?” in Le corps et sa parure (The Body and Its Adornment), ed. Thalia Brero (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 41–60; Jörg Sonntag, Klosterleben im Spiegel des Zeichenhaften (Berlin: LIT, 2008), 94–119.

¹¹ Gerhoh von Reichersberg, Liber de aedificio Dei, PL 194:1270. The widespread allegorical typology of Mary (representing contemplation) and Martha of Bethany (representing the active life) was thereby also addressed. See Giles Constable, “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–141.

¹² Gerhard Bauer, Claustrum animae. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Metapher vom Herzen als Kloster (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1973); Ineke van’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life. Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

¹³ Mirko Breitenstein, “Der Transfer paränetischer Inhalte innerhalb und zwischen Orden,” in Die Ordnung der Kommunikation und die Kommunikation der Ordnungen im mittelalterlichen Europa, vol. 1, Netzwerke: Klöster und Orden im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Cristina Andenna et al. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), 37–53.

¹⁴ De interiori domo seu de conscientia aedificanda, PL 184:509–10 (with the citation following).

¹⁵ Gert Melville, “Im Zeichen der Allmacht. Zur Präsenz Gottes im klösterlichen Leben des hohen Mittelalters,” in Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare der Macht, ed. Melville, 19–44, here 32–33.

¹⁶ Epistola cujusdam de doctrina vitae agendae, PL 84:1187.

¹⁷ De disciplina claustrali, ed. Gérard de Martel and Pierre de Celle, L’école du cloître (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977), 192, 194.

¹⁸ Epistola cujusdam de doctrina vitae agendae, PL 184:1187.

¹⁹ Michaela Diers, Bernhard von Clairvaux (Münster: Aschendorff, 1991), 45–46.

²⁰ Melville, “Im Zeichen,” 19–20; Sébastien Barret and Gert Melville, eds., Oboedientia (Münster: LIT, 2005). For an overview, see Sonntag, Klosterleben, 469–526.

²¹ Constable, “Authority of Superiors.”

²² Gert Melville, “Der Mönch als Rebell,” 171–72.

²³ Markus Karl von Pföstl, Pueri oblati, 2 vols. (Kiel: Solivagus, 2011).

²⁴ On the following, see Breitenstein, Das Noviziat im hohen Mittelalter (Münster: LIT, 2008).

²⁵ On the following, see Sonntag, Klosterleben, 120–64.

²⁶ Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditiones, PL 184:508.

²⁷ Ermenegildo Bertola, Il problema della coscienzia nella teologia monastica del XII secolo (Padua: CEDAM, 1970); Melville, “Mönch als Rebell,” 172–77. Mirko Breitenstein, “Die Verfügbarkeit der Transzendenz: Das Gewissen der Mönche als Heilsgarant,” in Innovation durch Deuten und Gestalten. Klöster im Mittelalter zwischen Jenseits und Welt, ed. Gert Melville, Bernd Schneidmüller, and Stefan Weinfurter (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2014), 37–56.

²⁸ Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditiones, PL 184:494.

²⁹ De interiori domo seu De conscientia aedificanda, PL 184:534. Cf. Mirko Breitenstein, “Der Traktat vom ‘Inneren Haus.’ Verantwortung als Ziel der Gewissensbildung,” in Innovation in Klöstern und Orden des Hohen Mittelalters. Aspekte und Pragmatik eines Begriffes, ed. Mirko Breitenstein et al. (Berlin: LIT, 2012), 263–92.

³⁰ Mirko Breitenstein and Gert Melville, “Gerechtigkeit als fundierendes Element des mittelalterlichen Mönchtums,” in Bilder—Sachen—Mentalitäten, ed. Heidrun Alzheimer et al. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2010), 33–42.

³¹ For an overview, see Melville, “Einleitende Aspekte zur Aporie von Eigenem und Ganzem im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum,” in Das Eigene und das Ganze, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), XI–XLI.

³² Das Eigene und das Ganze, XXIII; Sonntag, Klosterleben, 90.

³³ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 87–93. This did not, however, exclude an enjoyment of games: Jörg Sonntag, “Le rôle de la vie régulière dans l’invention et la diffusion de divertissements sociaux au Moyen Âge,” Revue Mabillon 83 (2011): 79–98.

³⁴ Klaus Schreiner, “Brot der Mühsal,” in Arbeit im Mittelalter, ed. Verena Postel (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 133–70.

³⁵ Bernard of Clairvaux, Parabolae 3, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri-Marie Rochais, Sancti Bernardi Opera 6/2 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1970), 274–76.

³⁶ For an overview, see Sonntag, Klosterleben, 469–526. See also Frederick S. Paxton, ed., The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages / Le rituel de la mort à Cluny au Moyen Âge central (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

³⁷ On the following, see Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch, eds., Memoria (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984).

³⁸ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 226–44; Jörg Sonntag, “Tempus fugit. La circolarità del tempo monastica nello specchio del potenziale di rappresentazione simbolica,” in Religiosità e civiltà. Le comunicazioni symboliche (secoli IX—XIII), ed. Giancarlo Andenna (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2009), 221–42.

³⁹ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 580–614.

⁴⁰ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 390–442.

⁴¹ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 59–60.

⁴² 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.

⁴³ Hugo de Folieto, De claustro animae, PL 176:1019.

⁴⁴ As an overview, Wolfgang Braunfels, Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); Renate Oldermann, ed., Gebaute Klausur (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008); Günther Binding and Matthias Untermann, eds., Kleine Kunstgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Ordensbaukunst in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2001).

⁴⁵ Thomas Lentes, “‘Vita perfecta’ zwischen ‘Vita communis’ und ‘Vita privata’: Eine Skizze zur klösterlichen Einzelzelle,” in Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Gert Melville and Peter von Moos (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 125–64.

⁴⁶ Hilmar Tilgner, “Armarium und Bibliotheksbau. Die Bibliotheksräume im Zisterzienserkloster Eberbach vom 12. Jahrhundert bis 1810,” Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 23 (1998): 132–81.

⁴⁷ Heidrun Stein-Kecks, Der Kapitelsaal in der mittelalterlichen Klosterbaukunst. Studien zu den Bildprogrammen (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2004).

⁴⁸ Carola Jäggi, “Ordensarchitektur als Kommunikation von Ordnung. Zisterziensische Baukunst zwischen Vielfalt und Einheit,” in Andenna et al., Die Ordnung der Kommunikation, 203–21.

⁴⁹ Markus Späth, Zisterziensische Klausurarchitektur als Mittel institutioneller Differenzierung (Krems: Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 2000).

⁵⁰ Wolfgang Schenkluhn, Architektur der Bettelorden (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000).

⁵¹ Sonntag, Klosterleben, 62.

⁵² Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1169.

⁵³ For an overview, see Gert Melville, “Zur Funktion der Schriftlichkeit im institutionellen Gefüge mittelalterlicher Orden,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 391–417.

⁵⁴ “Expositio magistri Humberti super constitutiones fratrum Praedicatorum,” in B. Humberti de Romanis quinti Praedicatorum magistri generalis opera de vita regulari, ed. Joachim Joseph Berthier (Rome: Befani, 1889), 2:16.

⁵⁵ See pp. 10, 127, 180.

⁵⁶ See p. 23.

⁵⁷ See p. 60.

⁵⁸ See pp. 128, 146.

⁵⁹ See pp. 175, 256.

⁶⁰ Jan Ballweg, Konziliare oder päpstliche Ordensreform. Benedikt XII. und die Reformdiskussion im frühen 14. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr, 2001); Franz J. Felten, “Die Ordensreformen Benedikts XII. unter institutionsgeschichtlichem Aspekt,” in Institutionen und Geschichte, ed. Gert Melville (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992), 369–435.

⁶¹ Jacques Dubois, “Les ordres religieux au XII^e siècle selon la curie romaine,” Revue Bénédictine 78 (1968): 283–309.

⁶² Markus Schürer, “Das ‘propositum’ in religiös-asketischen Diskursen. Historisch-semantische Erkundungen zu einem zentralen Begriff der mittelalterlichen ‘vita religiosa,’” in Oboedientia, ed. Sebastien Barret and Gert Melville (Münster: LIT, 2006), 99–128.

⁶³ Die päpstlichen Kanzleiordnungen von 1200–1500, ed. Michael Tangl (Aalen: Scientia, 1959), 221–360.

⁶⁴ Andreas Sohn, “Mittler zwischen Papsttum und Orden: Zu den General-prokuratoren in Rom,” in Rom und das Reich vor der Reformation, ed. Nikolaus Staubach (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 71–90.

⁶⁵ Martin Faber, “Gubernator, protector et corrector. Zum Zusammenhang der Entstehung von Orden und Kardinalprotektoraten von Orden in der lateinischen Kirche,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 115 (2004): 19–44.

⁶⁶ Gert Melville, “Ordensstatuten und allgemeines Kirchenrecht. Eine Skizze zum 12./13. Jahrhundert,” in Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. Peter Landau and Jörg Müller (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997), 691–712, here 700–702. For an example of a strong papal politics with respect to the orders, see Franz J. Felten, “Abwehr, Zuneigung, Pflichtgefühl,” in Female vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin: LIT, 2011), 391–415.

⁶⁷ Guido Cariboni, “Non ut liceret, sed an liceret,” in Barret and Melville, Oboedientia, 305–34.

⁶⁸ Melville, “Ordensstatuten,” 706–11.

⁶⁹ For an overview, see Lars-Arne Dannenberg, Das Recht der Religiosen in der Kanonistik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: LIT, 2008).

⁷⁰ Melville, “Ordensstatuten,” 706.

⁷¹ Summa aurea (Venice, 1574), 1144.

⁷² Klaus Schreiner, “Observantia regularis—Normbildung, Normkontrolle und Normwandel im Mönchtum des frühen und späten Mittelalters,” in Prozesse der Normbildung und Normveränderung im mittelalterlichen Europa, ed. Doris Ruhe and Karl-Heinz Spiess (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000), 275–313; Mirko Breitenstein et al., eds., Rules and Observance: Devising Forms of Communal Life (Berlin: LIT, 2014).

⁷³ Melville, “Zur Funktion der Schriftlichkeit”; Klaus Schreiner, “Verschriftlichung als Faktor monastischer Reform,” in Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter, ed. Hagen Keller et al. (Munich: Wilhem Fink, 1992), 37–75.

⁷⁴ On the following see Cristina Andenna and Gert Melville, eds., Regulae—Consuetudines—Statuta (Münster: LIT, 2005).

⁷⁵ On the following, see Gert Melville, “Regeln—Consuetudines—Texte—Statuten. Positionen für eine Typologie des normativen Schrifttums religiöser Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter,” in Andenna and Melville, Regulae—Consuetudines—Statuta, 5–38, with full documentation. For a particular case of shaping norms in the context of adapting them to the needs of women, see Maiju Lehmijoki- Gardner, “Writing Religious Rules as an Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making of their ‘Regula,’” Speculum 79 (2004): 660–87. Albrecht Diem, “Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West,” in Western Monasticism ante Litteram: The Space of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik W. Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 53–84.

⁷⁶ Stefan Weinfurter, ed., Consuetudines canonicorum regularium Springirsbacenses-Rodenses, CCCM 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978).

⁷⁷ Anselme Davril, “Coutumiers directifs et coutumiers descriptifs d’Ulrich à Bernard de Cluny,” in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 23–28.

⁷⁸ Weinfurter, ed., Consuetudines canonicorum regularium Springirsbacenses-Rodenses.

⁷⁹ Gert Melville, “Brückenschlag zur zweiten Generation,” in Religiöse Ordnungsvorstellungen und Frömmigkeitspraxis im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, ed. Jörg Rogge (Korb: Didymos, 2008), 77–98.

⁸⁰ Andreas Fieback, “Necessitas non est legi subiecta, maxime positivae,” in Melville, De ordine vitae, 125–51.

⁸¹ Weber, Economy and Society, 215.

⁸² Carta caritatis prior, in Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux, ed. and trans. Chrysogonus Waddell (Cîteaux-Commentarii Cistercienses, 1999), 442.

⁸³ On the following, see Giancarlo Andenna et al., eds., Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter (Münster: LIT, 2005).

⁸⁴ See p. 107.

⁸⁵ See p. 109.

⁸⁶ Weber, Economy and Society, 246–354.

⁸⁷ Gert Melville, “Brückenschlag zur zweiten Generation,” 77–98.

⁸⁸ Achim Wesjohann, Mendikantische Gründungserzählungen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: LIT, 2012).

⁸⁹ Karl Augustin Frech, Reform an Haupt und Gliedern (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Edeltraud Klueting, Monasteria semper reformanda (Münster: LIT, 2005).

⁹⁰ Franz J. Felten, “Herrschaft des Abtes,” in Herrschaft und Kirche, ed. Friedrich Prinz (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1988), 147–296.

⁹¹ Prieurs et prieurés dans l’occident medieval, ed. Jean-Loup Lemaître (Geneva: Droz, 1987).

⁹² Jacques Hourlier, L’âge classique 1140–1378. Les religieux (Paris: Cujas, 1971), 311–43.

⁹³ Klaus Schreiner, “Seelsorge in Frauenklöstern—Sakramentale Dienste, Geistliche Erbauung, Ethische Disziplinierung,” in Krone und Schleier. Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (Bonn and Essen: Hirmer, 2005), 52–65.

⁹⁴ Florent Cygler, Das Generalkapitel im hohen Mittelalter. Cisterzienser, Prämonstratenser, Kartäuser und Cluniazenser (Münster: LIT, 2002).

⁹⁵ Jörg Oberste, “Institutionalisierte Kommunikation. Normen, Überlieferungsbefunde und Grenzbereiche im Verwaltungsalltag religiöser Orden im hohen Mittelalter,” in Melville, De ordine vitae, 59–99.

⁹⁶ Franz J. Felten, “Verbandsbildung von Frauenklöstern,” in Vom Kloster zum Klosterverband, ed. Hagen Keller and Franz Neiske (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1997), 277–341.

⁹⁷ Oberste, “Institutionalisierte Kommunikation.”

⁹⁸ Gert Melville, “Die Rechtsordnung der Dominikaner in der Spanne von constituciones und admoniciones. Ein Beitrag zum Vergleich mittelalterlicher Ordensverfassungen,” in Grundlagen des Rechts. Festschrift für Peter Landau zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Richard H. Helmholz et al. (Paderborn: Nomos, 2000), 579–604, here 594.

⁹⁹ Determinationes quaestionum circa Regulam Fratrum minorum, in Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae . . . opera omnia, Ad Claras Aquas (Quaracchi, 1898), 8:349.

¹⁰⁰ Jörg Kastner, Historiae fundationum monasteriorum: Frühformen monastischer Institutionsgeschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1974); Alois Schmid, “Die Fundationes monasteriorum Bavariae: Entstehung—Verbreitung—Quellenwert—Funktion,” in Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußtsein im späten Mittelalter, ed. Hans Patze (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1987), 581–646.

¹⁰¹ Michel Sot, Gesta episcoporum, gesta abbatum, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981, 1985).

¹⁰² Giovanni Miccoli, “Ecclesiae primitivae forma,” Studi medievali, series 3.1 (1960): 470–98.

¹⁰³ Anonymus Petrishusensis, Casus monasterii Petrishusensis, MGH Scriptores 20, 621–83, praefatio.

¹⁰⁴ Exordium magnum Cisterciense, oder Bericht vom Anfang des Zisterzienserordens, trans. and commentary by Heinz Piesik, 2 vols. (Langwaden: Bernardus-Verlag, 2000/2002), 1:12. In English, The Great Beginning of Cîteaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of Cîteaux; The Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach, trans. Benedicta Ward and Paul Savage, ed. E. Rozanne Elder, CF 72 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2011), here 49.

¹⁰⁵ PL 157:715–19.

¹⁰⁶ Kaspar Elm, “Die Bedeutung historischer Legitimation für Entstehung, Funktion und Bestand des mittelalterlichen Ordenswesens,” in Herkunft und Ursprung. Historische Formen der Legitimation, ed. Peter Wunderli (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994), 71–90; Cécile Caby, “La mémoire des origines dans les institutions médiévales: bilan d’un séminaire collectif,” in Écrire son histoire: les communautés régulières face à leur passé, ed. Nicole Bouter (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 13–20; Gert Melville, “Knowledge of the Origins: Constructing Identity and Ordering Monastic Life in the Middle Ages,” in Knowledge, Discipline and Power in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of David Luscombe, ed. Joseph Canning et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 41–62; Gert Jäkel, . . . usque in praesentem diem. Kontinuitätskonstruktionen in der Eigengeschichtsschreibung religiöser Orden des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters (Berlin: LIT, 2013); Philippe Josserand and Mathieu Olivier, eds., La mémoire des origines dans les ordres religieux-militaires au Moyen Âge. / Die Erinnerung an die eigenen Ursprünge in den geistlichen Ritterorden im Mittelalter (Berlin: LIT, 2013).

¹⁰⁷ Pierluigi Licciardello, ed., Consuetudo Camaldulensis. Rudolphi Constitutiones. Liber Eremitice Regule (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004), 22.

¹⁰⁸ On this concept, see Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

¹⁰⁹ Nathalie Kruppa, Adlige—Stifte—Mönche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

¹¹⁰ For a famous example, see Renate Prochno, Die Kartause von Champmol (Berlin: Akademie, 2002).

¹¹¹ Hans Patze, “Adel und Stifterchronik. Frühformen territorialer Ge- schichtsschreibung im hochmittelalterlichen Reich,” in Ausgewählte Aufsätze von Hanz Patze, ed. Peter Johanek et al. (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002), 109–49.

¹¹² On the most important structures, see Andreas Rüther, Bettelorden in Stadt und Land. Die Straßburger Mendikantenkonvente und das Elsaß im Spätmittelalter (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997).

¹¹³ Christine Kleinjung, Frauenklöster als Kommunikationszentren und soziale Räume (Korb: Didymos, 2008).

¹¹⁴ Gert Melville, “Die ‘Exhortatiunculae’ des Girardus de Arvernia an die Cluniazenser. Bilanz im Alltag einer Reformierungsphase,” in Ecclesia und regnum. Beiträge zur Geschichte von Kirche, Recht und Staat. Festschrift für Franz-Josef Schmale, ed. Dieter Berg and Hans-Werner Goetz (Bochum: Winkler, 1989), 203–34, here 211.

¹¹⁵ Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie au XII ^e siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1966), 230: “Le monastère est en même temps la cellule d’une cité terrestre”; Ludo Milis, Les Moines et le peuple dans l’Europe du Moyen Âge (Paris: Belin, 2002).

¹¹⁶ Noël Didier, La garde des églises au XIII ^e siècle (Paris: Picard, 1927).

¹¹⁷ “Hunc tantummodo codicem de membranulis in unius libri cumulavimus corpus, ut, si forsan quis istius loci possessionum investigandarum fuerit avidus, ad hunc recurrat” (Gesta abbatum Sithiensium, MGH SS 13:608).

¹¹⁸ Klaus Schreiner, Mönchsein in der Adelsgesellschaft des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989); Christina Lutter, ed., Funktionsräume, Wahrnehmungsräume, Gefühlsräume. Mittelalterliche Lebensformen zwischen Kloster und Welt (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011). Christina Lutter, “Social Groups, Personal Relations, and the Making of Communities in Medieval Vita Monastica,” in Making Sense as a Cultural Practice: Historical Perspectives, ed. Jörg Rogge (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 45–61.

¹¹⁹ Ulrich von Cluny, Epistola nuncupatoria, in Boynton and Cochelin, Customs, 329–47.

¹²⁰ Schreiner, Mönchsein, 17. The same point becomes clear by considering the way in which distinguished guests were treated. See Jörg Sonntag, “Welcoming High Guests to the Paradise of the Monks—Social Interactions and Symbolic Moments of Monastic Self-Representation According to Lanfranc’s Constitutions,” in Self-Representation of Medieval Religious Communities, ed. Anne Müller and Karen Stöber (Berlin: LIT, 2009), 45–65.

¹²¹ Jean Leclercq, L’amour vu par les moines au XII^e siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1979), 16–25.

¹²² Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterciensis Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne, 1851), 1:175.

¹²³ Melville, “Die ‘Exhortatiunculae’ des Girardus de Arvernia,” 212.

¹²⁴ Dieter Berg, “Zur Sozialgeschichte der Bettelorden im 13. Jahrhundert,” Wissenschaft und Weisheit 43 (1980): 55–64.

¹²⁵ Matthias Werner, “Die heilige Elisabeth in ihrer Zeit—Forschungsstand und Forschungsprobleme,” in Heilige Elisabeth von Thüringen—theologische Spurensuche, ed. Dieter Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 2008), 14–69.

¹²⁶ Dieter Berg, Armut und Geschichte (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2001); Annette Kehnel and Gert Melville, eds., In proposito paupertatis (Münster: LIT, 2001).

¹²⁷ Cinzio Violante, “Monasteri e canoniche nello sviluppo dell’economia monetaria (secoli XI–XIII),” in Istituzioni monastiche e istituzioni canonicali in Occidente (1123–1215) (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1980), 369–416.

¹²⁸ Georges Duby, “Cluny e l’economia rurale,” in La bonifica benedettina, ed. Aldo Ferrabino (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1963), 107–17.

¹²⁹ Schreiner, “Brot der Mühsal.”

¹³⁰ Schreiner, “Brot der Mühsal,” 149.

¹³¹ Werner Rösener, “Die Agrarwirtschaft der Zisterzienser. Innovation und Anpassung,” in Norm und Realität. Kontinuität und Wandel der Zisterzienser im Mittelalter, ed. Franz Felten and Werner Rösener (Berlin: LIT, 2009), 67–95.

¹³² Violante, “Monasteri e canoniche,” 109–250.

¹³³ Jens Röhrkasten, The Mendicant Houses of Medieval London, 1221–1539 (Münster: LIT, 2004), 221–78; Nicole Bériou, ed., Économie et religion (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2009).

¹³⁴ Melville, “Die ‘Exhortatiunculae’ des Girardus de Arvernia.”

¹³⁵ Klaus Schreiner, “Technischer Fortschritt als Weg in ein neues Paradies. Zur theologischen und sozialethischen Legitimationsbedürftigkeit technischer Neuerungen im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Aufbruch im Mittelalter, ed. Christian Hesse and Klaus Oschema (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2010), 125–58.

¹³⁶ Wolfgang Bender, Zisterzienser und Städte. Studien zu den Beziehungen zwischen den Zisterzienserklöstern und den großen urbanen Zentren des mitt- leren Moselraumes (12.–14. Jahrhundert) (Trier: Trier Historische Forschungen, 1992), 39–45.

¹³⁷ See Karl Borchardt, Die Cölestiner (Husum: Matthiesen, 2006), 311–18.

¹³⁸ Wolfgang Braunfels, “Abendländische Klosterbaukunst,” in Kunstge- schichte, Deutung, Dokumente (Cologne: DuMont, 1985).

¹³⁹ Dieter Hägermann, “Das Kloster als Innovationszentrum. Mühlenbetrieb, Salzproduktion und Bergbau,” in Kloster und Wirtschaftswelt im Mittelalter, ed. Claudia Dobrinski et al. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 13–23.

¹⁴⁰ Clemens Kosch, “Wasserbaueinrichtungen in hochmittelalterlichen Konventsanlagen. Eine Nachlese,” in Wohn- und Wirtschaftsbauten frühmittelalterlicher Klöster, ed. Hans Rudolf Sennhauser (Zurich: VDF Hochschulverlag, 1996), 69–84; Winfried Schich, “Klosteranlage und Wasserversorgung bei den Zisterziensern,” in Wirtschaft und Kulturlandschaft: Gesammelte Beiträge 1977 bis 1999 zur Geschichte der Zisterzienser und der “Germania Slavica,” ed. Winfried Schich et al. (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007), 25–41.

¹⁴¹ Otto Volk, Salzproduktion und Salzhandel mittelalterlicher Zisterzienserklöster (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1984).

¹⁴² Horst Kranz, “Energie für die niederen Lande: Kohlenhandel auf der Maas im 14. Jahrhundert,” in Inquirens subtilia diversa. Dietrich Lohrmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Horst Kranz and Ludwig Falkenstein (Aachen: Shaker, 2002), 359–74.

¹⁴³ Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Martin Kintzinger, “Keine große Stille—Wissenskulturen zwischen Kloster und Welt,” in Monastisches Leben im urbanen Kontext, ed. Anne-Marie Hecker and Susanne Röhl (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 109–30.

¹⁴⁴ Fabio Troncarelli, Vivarium. I libri, il destino (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998).

¹⁴⁵ Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. William McAllen Green, CSEL 80 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1963), 75–76.

¹⁴⁶ Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. Roger Aubrey B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937, repr. 1961).

¹⁴⁷ Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976); Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

¹⁴⁸ Guglielmo Cavallo, “Le scriptorium médiéval,” in Lieux de savoir, vol. 2, Les mains de l’intellect, ed. Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 537–55.

¹⁴⁹ Rudolf Freister, “Die Klosterschule,” in Macht des Wortes, ed. Gerfried Sitar and Martin Kroker (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009), 1:235–42. On further developments, see Peter Johanek, “Klosterstudien im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Schulen und Studien im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1986), 35–68; Nathalie Kruppa and Jürgen Wilke, eds., Kloster und Bildung im Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Frank Rexroth, “Monastischer und scholastischer Habitus. Beobachtungen zum Verhältnis zwischen zwei Lebensformen des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Innovationen durch Deuten und Gestalten, ed. Gert Melville et al. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014), 317–33.

¹⁵⁰ Dominique Poirel, ed., L’école de Saint-Victor de Paris. Influence et rayonnement du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

¹⁵¹ Rainer A. Müller, “Klosterschulen,” in Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, ed. Gert Melville and Martial Staub (Darmstadt: Primus, 2008), 1:417.

¹⁵² Roberto Lambertini, “Il sistema formativo degli studia degli Ordini Mendicanti: osservazioni a partire dai resultati di recenti indagini,” in Andenna et al., Die Ordnung der Kommunikation, 135–46, here 137.

¹⁵³ Dieter Berg, Armut und Wissenschaft; Kaspar Elm, “Studium und Studienwesen der Bettelorden. Die ‘andere’ Universität,” in Stätten des Geistes, ed. Alexander Demandt (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 111–26; Bert Roest, A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210–1517) (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Studio et studia. Le scuole degli ordini mendicanti tra XIII e XIV secolo. Atti del XXIX Convegno internazionale. Assisi, 11–13 ottobre 2001 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2002).

¹⁵⁴ Richard G. Newhauser, “Augustinian Vitium curiositatis and Its Reception,” in Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 99–124.

¹⁵⁵ Jean Leclercq, Otia monastica. Études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au Moyen Âge (Rome: Herder, 1963); Christian Trottmann, ed., Vie active et vie contemplative au Moyen Âge et au seuil de la Renaissance (Rome: École française de Rome, 2009).

¹⁵⁶ Hedwig Röckelein, “Mystik,” in Melville and Staub, Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, 1:348–51; Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, 4 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990–1999); Peter Dinzelbacher, Christliche Mystik im Abendland. Ihre Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994); Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 5 vols. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992–2012); Walter Haug and Wolfram Schneider-Lastin, Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000).

¹⁵⁷ Marie-Anne Vannier, ed., Les mystiques rhénans. Eckhart, Tauler, Suso (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2010).

¹⁵⁸ Alois Dempf, Sacrum imperium. Geschichts- und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der politischen Renaissance (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1973), 229–68. For important representatives of this tradition of thought, see Wolfgang Jungschaffer, “Artes liberales und Symbolismus bei Gerhoch von Reichersberg,” in Gerhoch von Reichersberg zu seinem 800. Todestag (Linz: Bischöfl. Ordinariat, 1969), 46–60; Dale M. Coulter, Per visibilia ad invisibilia: Theological Method in Richard of St.Victor ( 1173) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).

¹⁵⁹ Vincentius Bellovacensis, Speculum doctrinale (Douai, 1624; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlaganstalt, 1964), 5–6.

¹⁶⁰ Josef Koch, ed., Artes liberales. Von der antiken Bildung zur Wissenschaft des Mittelalters (Leiden: Brill, 1959); Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge (Montreal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969).

¹⁶¹ Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon de studio legendi, ed. Thilo Offergeld (Freiburg: Herder, 1997), 106–7.

¹⁶² Fiona J. Griffiths, “Female Spirituality and Intellect in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: A Case Study of Herrad of Hohenbourg,” PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1998. For the education of women religious in the High and later Middle Ages, see the comprehensive treatment of Katharina Ulrike Mersch, Soziale Dimensionen visueller Kommunikation in hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Frauenkommunitäten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).

¹⁶³ Rainer Berndt, ed., “Im Angesicht Gottes suche der Mensch sich selbst”: Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) (Berlin: Akademie, 2001); Heinrich Schipperges, Die Welt der Hildegard von Bingen: Leben, Wirken, Botschaft (Erftstadt: Hohe, 2007). See also the essays in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On the later Middle Ages, see Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), and Schlotheuber, “Sprachkompetenz und Lateinvermittlung. Die intellektuelle Ausbildung der Nonnen im Spätmittelalter,” in Kruppa and Wilke, Kloster und Bildung im Mittelalter, 61–87.

¹⁶⁴ Gert Melville, “Wozu Geschichte schreiben? Stellung und Funktion der Historie im Mittelalter,” in Formen der Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Reinhardt Koselleck et al., Beiträge zur Historik, vol. 4 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 91–95.

¹⁶⁵ Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, ed. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Friedrich Frommann, 2005), 83, 85. In English, among many available versions, see Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (La Salle: Open Court, 1962), here 53.

¹⁶⁶ Rolf Schönberger, Thomas von Aquin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2002). See also Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005).

¹⁶⁷ Melville, “Im Spannungsfeld von religiösem Eifer und methodischem Betrieb,” in Innovationen durch Deuten und Gestalten, ed. Melville et al. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014).