This book will introduce English-speaking readers to the work of Professor Gert Melville, who has for many years played a leading role as a writer and educator in the field of medieval church history. As a lecturer at Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Tübingen, Paris, and Passau and a professor at Münster, Dresden, and Eichstätt, he has influenced countless students. He has organized many scholarly meetings and directed the publication of the proceedings, often in the series Vita regularis (which now numbers over sixty volumes) and Norm und Struktur (with over forty volumes). He has edited, or helped to edit, thirty-nine volumes of collected essays. He took the initiative in the creation of the Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte (FOVOG)—the Research Center for the Comparative History of Religious Orders—which promotes the comparative study of the forms of medieval religious life. At the same time, Professor Melville has pursued his own research and published several volumes and well over a hundred articles on topics from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, concerned with the church and religious life not only in Europe but also in the Near East and America.
The present work distills a lifetime of study of medieval Christianity and covers an impressive range of material on religious life all over Europe for more than a thousand years. It concentrates on monasticism and other forms of religious life, including hermits as well as monks and nuns, canons and canonesses, and the mendicant orders. Professor Melville maintains a delicate balance between institutions and spirituality, between texts and charisma, and between rules and reality in religious communities, including the relation with the outside world of groups and individuals who have in principle withdrawn from secular society. In the late Middle Ages, the essentially personal element in religious life—the desire “to seek a direct encounter of the individual soul with God,” as Professor Melville puts it—inspired the new apostolic orders, communities of hermits, and lay associations of women as well as men. The older institutions lost much of their appeal, though they still attracted new members.
Along the way the reader meets a number of influential religious leaders and develops a sense of the personal and spiritual as well as the institutional side of religious life. The text illuminates the tension between individuals and institutions and contributes to an understanding of the real life in different religious communities, how they were organized and governed, and why they flourished at some times and declined at others.
Giles Constable
Professor Emeritus
School of Historical Studies
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton