Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth-Thirteenth Centuries) ed. by Steven Vanderputten (review)

One byproduct of heightened scholarly interest in medieval literacy over the last thirty-odd years has been a growing concern with literacy’s principal concomitant: oral communication. Since 1999, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, under the general editorship of Marco Mostert, has been the chief venue for publications devoted to research into literate modes of communication in the medieval West. As both Mostert, who writes the concluding remarks to this volume, and its editor, Steven Vanderputten, tell us, this collection of sixteen essays is attempting something new, which is “to provide inroads into a usable interpretation of the various contexts in which medieval monks themselves considered the spoken word as a vital complementary medium to other forms of communication and to silence as an exercise in personal and collective discipline and as an instrument of personal communication” (p. 7).

Two paradoxes underlie studies of monastic oral culture. First, virtually all our evidence comes to us by way of written sources; and second, in an institutional context which put a premium on silence, there was, it turns out, a rich and varied environment of spoken communication. Most of the essays here not only address these paradoxes but creatively employ them as means to reconstruct significant aspects of the mentalities and relationships (mostly within the cloister but also beyond it) of monks and nuns in the central Middle Ages. In part 1 both Gerd Althoff and Wojtek Jezierski explore the politics of silence: Althoff by uncovering how, in the interests of beneficial social relations, the monks of St. Gall found ways around the written prescriptions of silence in the Rule of St. Benedict and in their customaries, and Jezierski by examining the ways monks suppressed the communication of actions that might damage their community’s reputation, by restricting what could be said or written about them. Vanderputten, on the contrary, shows how the monks of the priory of Hesdin employed public ritual and symbolic acts, whether to acquire rights and property and build their social networks or to intimidate their enemies.

The essays in part 2, by Susan Boynton, Diane Reilly, and Tjamke Snijders, sift through written remains (customaries, Bibles, patristic writings, and hagiographies) to recover the oral transmission and performance of the liturgy. Especially gratifying in these essays is the contributors’ direct engagement with the codicology of the manuscript sources. Detection of the spoken in the written is also foregrounded in the contributions to part 3. Here both Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu and Edina Bozóky are especially interested in the way monks referenced oral testimony as a means of authentication, the first in Cistercian exempla and the second in hagiographies. For his part, Geoffrey Koziol finds the living voice of Charles the Simple in the midst of a manuscript written in the early eleventh century at Saint-Corneille, Compiègne. Part 4’s essays, by Mirko Breitenstein, Albrecht Classen, and Peter Dinzelbacher, further complicate the relationships between the spoken word and writing by considering, respectively: how real pre-existing conversations were deployed as literary devices in the dialogues of Ulrich of Cluny, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and Ælred of Rievaulx; Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s relationships within and beyond the convent, as revealed in her writings; and the processes whereby divine revelations to male and female religious were transmitted to writing and then to the ears of audiences. Most refreshing are the first two contributions to the final part, by Elisabeth Van Houts and Julie Barrau, who together make a strong, common-sense case for the frequency and ubiquity of talk, far more often than not in the vernacular, in monasteries. It is this very chattiness (and the all-too-human frailty that it at once exposes and ameliorates) that is the target of the charitable (though to my mind uncomfortably totalitarian) ministrations of Bernard of Clairvaux in the concluding essays of Wim...