Sources for Monastic Life in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period ed. by Carolyn Marino Malone and Clark Maines (review)

This volume contains the papers presented at the “Medieval Customaries and Monastic/Regular Life: Approaches from Across the Disciplines” colloquium held at Château de la Bretesche, France, on June 10–13, 2007, with an introduction by the editors. The book is the tenth volume of Brepols’ Disciplina Monastica. The main objective of this series is to present the current state of affairs regarding medieval and early-modern monastic scholarship from an interdisciplinary point of view, including historians of different expertises as well as archaeologists and philologists. The volume is divided into three sections: (1) Customary Texts as Sources for Monastic Life; (2) Customary Texts and Monastic Architecture; and (3) Monastic and Regular Life as Revealed in Customs, Rules, and Other Texts. In section 1 there are three papers. Isabelle Cochelin studies manuscripts of customaries before 1100, in order to attract attention to these sources for the study of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Catherine Bonnin-Magne’s paper deals with the relationship between Cluniac customaries and the diffusion of the cult of Cluniac saints. Pius Engelbert describes his progress on the edition of William of Hirsau’s Constitutiones Hirsaugenses. In section 2 Anne Baud and Christian Sapin present the state of the archaeological research in the Abbey of Cluny. The authors use earlier Cluniac archaeological data, written sources, and their own archaeological discoveries to describe the current knowledge of the early stages of Cluny’s construction and to show the problems to be faced in the next excavations. In the same section, Carolyn Marino Malone shows the relationship between the peculiar architecture of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon’s abbey church and the development of specific, although Cluniac-based, liturgies during the eleventh century. The last paper of this section, written by Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, deals with the way the customs and the architecture of the Augustinian convent of Saint-Jeans-des-Vignes (Soissons, France) developed from 1098 to 1783.

Éric Palazzo’s paper, the first in section 3, presents his current research into the function of sensory images in the medieval monastic liturgy. Alain Rauwel’s paper describes the appearance of communities of Augustinian canons in the early-twelfth century in Bourgogne, the epicenter of Cluniac and Cistercians monastic reforms. He states that Augustinian canons are another way of manifestation of monastic spirituality, not an alternative to it. Bert Roest, in the last paper of the book, studies the conformation of Clarissan congregations from the twelfth century to the early sixteenth. According to him, it grew from many different women’s convents, some very small and poor needing local charity to survive, others rich and of royal foundation. Rules, customs, and constitutions of these houses were also very different in their origins and never achieved uniformity during the Middle Ages.

This volume combines successfully a variety of papers coming from specialists of different branches of the medieval and early-modern studies of the regular life. It also presents a strong contemporary trend in medieval studies that tries to combine written sources with data coming from other scholarly fields of research. It is a highly recommended reading for scholars interested in the history of the regular life, especially Cluniac monasticism, Augustinian canons, and Clarissan studies. It is also a profitable book for those interested in the history of everyday life and the history of medieval architecture.