War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture (review)

During the last twenty-five years or so, medievalists have broken down the old artificial distinction between "those who fought" and "those who prayed" to demonstrate how closely the monastic world and the world of the secular aristocracy were intertwined. Crusaders and members of such groups as the Templars were simultaneously fighters and men following religious dictates, and, as many recent scholars have demonstrated, the spread of ascetic monasticism would have been impossible without the support of the warlike leaders of society. Building on that work, Katherine Allen Smith here takes the analysis one step further to reveal how much monastic language and metaphor owed to warfare. Monks saw themselves as warriors engaged in spiritual battles, as Davids overthrowing Goliaths, as fighters requiring the same fortitude and determination against their enemies as knights in battle. Those converting to the religious life gave up violence but did not give up being soldiers—they were just a different sort of soldier. Although scholars have long noted monastic use of the term miles Christi (a soldier of Christ) to describe a monk, this is the first in-depth study of how those in the cloister fashioned their image and their mission in terms borrowed from secular warfare. Smith's chief focus is northern France and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with forays back to early Christian writers.

The first chapter explores the prevalence of war—both real and metaphorical—in the Bible and in the writings of the Church Fathers, indicating how thoroughly the monastic liturgy would have been imbued with the language of armed combat. In the second chapter, Smith goes over the evidence indicating the close connections between knights and nobles on one hand and cloistered monks on the other, arguing that knightly converts to the religious life brought warlike attitudes with them. The third chapter traces the history of the concept of a "soldier of Christ" from the early Church through the twelfth century.

All of this is in preparation for the final two chapters, the real heart of Smith's argument—a close discussion of the martial imagery in monastic texts and an analysis of the pious yet powerful warriors whom the monks admired in the high Middle Ages. The latter group included both the warrior-saints of distant antiquity and such semi-legendary figures as St. William of Gellone. In addition, the monks admired warriors who converted to the religious life, giving up their wealth and authority but not their unceasing opposition to anything conceived as the enemy. Here, Smith gives a number of examples, going beyond the well-known St. Bernard of Clairvaux and other knights of the Cistercian order. Most interesting, however, of the pious warriors are the loricati ("mailed ones"), those who wore actual armor while battling spiritual evil. An appendix lists twenty-one such loricati from between the mid-eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries, former warriors who continued to wear mail (often under their robes) as a form of penitence.

Smith writes clearly and well. Her conclusion—that monks learned from warriors as well as the other way around—is novel and well argued. The bibliography is extensive and up to date, and the notes are at the bottom of the page where they belong. This important book is a welcome addition to the recent literature on the relations between medieval church and society.