The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles ed. by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (review)

This hefty volume joins twenty-two essays devoted to the most widely dispersed, yet least studied among medieval British religious orders, the regular canons. As is well known, Augustinian canons were the most ubiquitous organization under rule in medieval England, where they were joined by the Premonstratensians and the native double-order (nuns and canons) of St. Gilbert of Sempringham. Yet, as is equally well known, the historiography treating all three orders in their insular context remains depressingly thin. Why were these groups apparently so popular, and in what activities were they engaged?

In the main, the answers offered in this volume are somewhat disappointing. The historians here assembled, in their best moments, offer often provocative local narratives, vignettes from individual houses. These fill in, but do not necessarily qualify or develop, views enunciated long ago by J. C. Dickinson and A. Hamilton Thompson, or by David Robinson in his informative geographical study of Augustinian houses. Although Anne Mathers-Lawrence pronounces R.W. Southern’s provocative six-page discussion of the order as “no longer universally accepted” (p. 59n1), virtually all her co-contributors who mention it rely upon Southern’s account. An opportunity for a productive debate—did Augustinian houses, particularly after the great burst of well-endowed foundations associated with King Henry I and his court, merely provide an opportunity for “devotion on the cheap”?—Southern’s proposition—rather goes abegging.

At least part of the problem here is many contributors’ rigorous attentiveness to a legalistically conceived institutional emphasis (and especially an interest in origins, not development or practice over the long haul). One certainly understands that “historical evidence,” narrowly construed, is documentary and that the most readily documented stages in the life of any religious house concern foundation, acquisition of properties, and domestic accounts. But it is striking that the most provocative essay in this ensemble, Julian Luxford’s “The Idol of Origins: Retrospection in Augustinian Art . . .” (pp. 417–42) opens with an apology for the use of nondocumentary sources in an assessment of Augustinian interests. Luxford goes on to investigate architectural forms of memory, particularly tombs, in a variety of sites.

Luxford’s thought-provoking study has resonances elsewhere in the volume, for one prominent skein of discussion here concerns the canons’ engagement with “memory.” Although the Augustinians, from their foundation, were intended to serve those parishes whose churches formed prominent parts of their endowments, parochial service had substantially diminished, if not disappeared, by the late Middle Ages. Instead, a number of authors here argue, Augustinian houses proved attractive to many communities because of their engagement in the divine office, particularly—given that all canons were required to be priests—their capacity to offer memorials for their benefactors. This proposition is argued most fully in Graham St. John’s “The Significance of Devotion . . .” (pp. 339–61). Further telling evidence on this topic appears in Emma Cavell’s “Kinship, Locality, and Benefaction” (pp. 363–85), a demonstration, both amusing and evocative, concerning several generations of ongoing female benefactions to Wombridge, a small Shropshire house; and in Andrew Abram’s “Augustinian Canons and the Survival of Cult Centres in Medieval England” (pp. 79–95).

Other impressive essays address Augustinians in somewhat different contacts with their social surround. The premier scholar of English schooling, Nicholas Orme, offers a customarily detailed survey of “The Augustinian Canons and Education” (pp. 213–32); and another expert, Claire Cross, surveys the varied fates of “The Last Generation of Augustinian Canons in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire” (pp. 387–400). At the other end of the chronological spectrum, Janet Burton and Mathers-Lawrence (pp. 41–57, 59–78) argue that, at least in their initial foundation, some northern Augustinian houses may have been integral to twelfth-century reform movements. Glyn Copack’s “‘And then he added canons’. . .” (pp. 291–311) provides an exciting revisionary account...