Monastères et espace social: Genèse et transformation d’un système de lieux dans l’Occident médiéval ed. by Michel Lauwers (review)

This extensive collection of specialized articles on seventh- to fifteenth-century monasteries and social space covers models, places, movement, hierarchy, functions, and settings at Saint-Gall, Cluny, Marmoutier, Fontevraud, and other famous abbeys in Western Europe and the British Isles. Michel Lauwers notes that Western monasticism moved from fourth-century solitude to seventh-century community, with a standard architectural structure of a cloister surrounded by spe-cialized buildings. Ninth-century monasteries included laypersons: patrons, laborers, pilgrims, possibly armed men, resulting in a complex society and accompanying physical structure, which Sofia Uggé divides into community spaces: church, cloister, refectory, dormitory, and chapter; property spaces: cellar and sacristy; separate spaces: infirmary, guest house, and novitiate; and work spaces: workshops, kitchen, and garden. In Italy Federico Marazzi and Elisabeth Lorans add an abbot’s house, library, school, stables, forge, cemeteries, churches, and chapels. Moving forward, Uta Kleine shows the twelfth-century monastery engaged in production and trade, both a retreat from the world and a dominating center of real-estate holdings. Jean-Michel Picard and Paul Fermon note that monastic maps and architectural drawings imposed a social hierarchy on the landscape, depicting the monastery as a sacred celestial center with a profane terrestrial periphery of granges, manses, towns, parish churches, and fishing stations, with complicated economic rights.

Fragmentary information in cartularies and foundation stories can be contextualized within this framework of monastic construction and expansion. JeanMichel Picard notes the recent use of magnetic gradient survey, revealing linear anomalies in the soil at the sites of cloisters or buildings and showing the construction process. Nicolas Reveyron and Cécile Caby find little and marginal change in monastic space to preserve the quiet of the house. Monasteries were shaped by earlier lost structures, site constraints, water resources, and a heritage of respect for the initial gift, venerated tombs, and the terms of property ownership. Relocation rarely occurred. Hans Rudolf Sennhauser notes the pre-eminence of the opus Dei led monks to prefer building around an existing worship center. Foundation stories describe twelve monks sent to build a monastery in a wilderness, but records and survey often show previous occupation of the property, the founders’ provision of masons, and the monks’ arrival with building plans based on site inspection. Lorans shows Marmoutier’s progressive construction beginning with the abbatial church and proceeding to the claustral square, guest house, infirmary with a chapel and cloister, service buildings, specialized cemeteries, peripheral churches, and a distant abbot’s house. Etienne Louis and Luc Bourgeois describe enclosures determined by natural boundaries, ditches, walls, and defensive fortifications.

Internal spatial organization imposed boundaries between sacred and secular spaces and accommodated the movement of persons of different statuses within the same space. Caby notes the church and claustral buildings were used exclusively by the monastic family on its daily rounds. Alain Rauwel, Anne Baud, and Sébastien Bully describe formal mobile liturgies: perambulations of the property, processions, circuits of the altars, and stations of the cross, sometimes facilitated by long galleries. Separation was achieved by horizontal and vertical space (terraces and hilltops) and by scheduling time. Monks were separated from nuns by balconies and grills, from laymen by conversi passages, and from pilgrims by crypts. Daniel Prigent shows that twelfth-century Fontevraud contained four separate monasteries for the abbess and nuns, monks, female penitents, and lepers, with strict enclosure, divisions in worship, and a great cloister to accommodate processions. Gisella Cantino Wataghin and Eleonora Destefanis show monastic burial places reflected both hierarchy and community.

As a composite this collection provides a penetrating overview of monastic construction and operation. Individually, it includes studies of famous monasteries with fine illustrations, architectural drawings, and maps.