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  • The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life by Gert Melville
  • Marc Saurette
The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life. By Gert Melville. Translated by James D. Mixon. [Cistercian Studies Series, No. 263.] Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, an imprint of Liturgical Press. 2016. Pp. xviii, 444. $45.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-87907-263-6.)

For almost fifty years, Cistercian Publications has given Anglophone readers access to the medieval history of monasticism—first through scholarly (yet inexpensive) translations and studies of key Cistercian authors and later by making available a broader catalogue of monastic work. James D. Mixon's admirable translation of Gert Melville's Die Welt der mittelalterlichen Klöster: Geschichte und Lebensformen. (2012) continues this tradition, introducing a wider English-speaking audience to the work of one of the foremost scholars of medieval religious life of the past forty years. As the author of countless studies of medieval religious history, the mentor of a generation of researchers and the director of Dresden's influential Research Centre for the Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG), Melville has helped shape the current state of monastic history in Europe and North America. This survey of the history of monasticism from the fourth to the fifteenth century draws on his extensive scholarship and employs his typical focus on the development and transmission of legal (charters, royal and papal privileges) or normative texts (rules, customaries, statutes) as well as the concomitant changes in organizational structures.

In the first sixteen chapters, Melville adopts a roughly chronological organization, viewing the history of monasticism as punctuated equilibrium—a cycle between charismatic innovation (typified usually by eremitical leaders; see chaps. 1, 4-5, 9, 12–13), its codification in textual form (chaps. 2, 6, 10, 14) and its institutionalization (chaps. 3, 7, 11, 15). This Weberian framework encourages Melville to explain, for example, the "invention" of the Cistercian Order (chap. 6) as developing from the spirituality of earlier eremitical movements, but distinguishing itself when it adopted new "collegial" governance. In Melville's hands, Cistercian monasticism may have been inspired by Robert of Molesme, but it was Cîteaux's legal privileges, its codified foundation narratives, and its uniformity of customs, as well as its system of oversight that made it an attractive model both to contemporary Benedictine monks and to future religious movements. This account thus challenges the representation of Cistercian success typical in earlier surveys of monastic history which is predicated on the decline/corruption of Cluniac monasticism or depends on simplifying the Cluny-Cîteaux relationship into a contest between their twelfth-century figureheads, Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux. This structural focus is the strength of Melville's approach. He takes familiar figures, places, and movements (and many less familiar ones) and constructs a new overarching narrative for monastic history—one dependent less on the idea of the uniqueness of each Order or the exceptionality of each founder and more on shared core ideas, processes, and structures which define successive ages of monasticism. Melville's careful attention to these trends means, among other things, that he interweaves male and female [End Page 572] monastic history, which is a considerable improvement on past surveys which have tended to relegate women's religious life to the footnotes.

It is inevitable that a survey of this breadth must sacrifice some detail. In describing monasticism as a system, Melville's narrative subordinates individual biography to institutional history, and this focus is reflected in the material treated. Discussion of works of art, literature, and architecture is kept to a minimum. Normative texts (rules and statutes) abound, while hagiographic vitae.—a typical set piece of monastic surveys—appear rarely and usually only buttressing arguments about the transmission of rules and customs. One of the few lengthy quotations cited in Melville's text is taken, surprisingly, from the Life. of Stephen of Obazine (p. 108) less to discuss his life than to give context to how this twelfth-century charismatic leader transmitted the "legally binding norms" of his intended way of life by voice and presence. I was also not always convinced that sources, like customaries, were as authoritative and normative...

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