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  • Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform by Steven Vanderputten
  • Greg Peters
Steven Vanderputten, Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages: Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Politics of Reform (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 2015) xiii + 244 pp.

Steven Vanderputten is a productive scholar, publishing a spate of books and articles over the past decade, most of which deal with questions of monastic history in medieval Flanders and the surrounding areas in the tenth and eleventh centuries. With Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages Vanderputten turns his attention to a monastic figure, who he argues has been oft misinterpreted: Richard of Saint-Vanne. Vanderputten gives us the most thorough investigation of the life and actions of Richard to date, and does so in an impressive manner.

At the heart of the book is Vanderputten’s sense that Richard was not, contrary to much existing scholarship, “the principal figure in the ‘Lotharingian reform movement’ of the early eleventh century” (ix). Rather, Richard’s “actual agency as a reformer in the traditional sense of the word appears to have been very limited” (123). Vanderputten arrives at this conclusion through five tightly [End Page 357] argued chapters, many of which rely directly on medieval source material. Vanderputten begins the book by laying out the extant medieval and early modern/modern texts that discuss Richard. He then spends the remainder of the volume analyzing these conclusions in great detail, carefully unpacking the conclusions of others and offering his own analyzes and conclusions. And it is in these details where Vanderputten shines.

There are a number of reasons given over the centuries for why Richard is considered a saint and a great monastic reformer. After patiently walking us through these explanations, Vanderputten challenges them one by one. He first demonstrates the ways in which Richard understood himself as a “religious virtuoso,” using Richard’s Life of Roding to show that this vita says more about the way that Richard understood himself and his mission than it likely says about St. Roding. This spade work is necessary in order to establish the “real” Richard. In chapter 1 Vanderputten considers the ways in which medieval and modern scholars have understood Richard, whereas in chapter 2 he attempts to set the record straight, if you will. In chapter 3 Vanderputten establishes that the abbey of Saint-Vanne was not greatly changed as a result of Richard’s abbacy. It was changed but not in ways that would suggest Richard was a great reforming architect. Instead, Vanderputten adopts the perspective that Richard reimagined the monastery but did not reform the monastery because it was not in need of reform in light of any past decadence. Vanderputten seems to think that reform is only necessary if there has been previous decadence, but I do not think that is the case. Nonetheless, the author’s insistence that Richard reimagined the community seems to be more accurate than to say that he reformed it.

In chapter 4 Vanderputten turns his attention to whether or not Richard was a “founder and head of many monasteries.” Throughout his lifetime Richard was made abbot of no less than eleven monasteries though this does not mean that he spent meaningful time at all of them. This plethora of abbacies, in past scholarship, has been interpreted as evidence of Richard’s reforming agenda. That is, he became involved in all of these monasteries in an effort to create a Lotharingian network of reformed institutions. Vanderputten argues to the contrary that Richard was motivated more by his own “self-imposed mission as [a] member of the ecclesiastical elite to contribute to the creation of efficient and secluded communities of ascetic monks” (106) and to influence his superiors to support his own mission. In the final chapter Vanderputten shows the extent of Richard’s concern to convert the world (i.e., laity) and how he did so not by operating as an “apostle of reform” but as a cleric educated in the cathedral school at Reims. Vanderputten reveals that Richard preached a message that he did not always implement, and that he was not always as...

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