The Chrodegang Rules:The Rules for the Common Life of the Secular Clergy from the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Critical Texts with Translations and Commentary (review)

The eighth-century bishop Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766) had a deep influence on the early medieval Church. Building on the reforming spirit of St. Boniface, Chrodegang's efforts to regulate the lives of secular clergy formed one of the cornerstones of Christian order under the Carolingians and influenced the tenth-century Benedictine reforms in England. In this volume, Jerome Bertram attempts to make some of the sources for Chrodegang—often only found in rare Latin editions—more accessible for a wider public. His interest is not historical per se but rather pastoral, providing part of a call to isolated Catholic clergy to re-establish a form of communal living. There are things to be gained, he argues, by studying the history of the vita communis so that those who do not take the monastic vow to renounce property can still effectively engage with their pastoral responsibilities.

Bertram offers us editions of three texts with accompanying translations: the Regula sancti Chrodegangi of c. 755, the Aachen Institutio Canonicorum of c. 816, and the later-ninth-century Regula Longior Canonicorum. Although only the first of these texts is actually by Chrodegang himself, Benedict of Aniane's decrees at Aachen were deeply indebted to the spirit of Chrodegang's work, while the Regula Longior represents a heavily interpolated reworking of the earlier Regula to the extent that it is sometimes mistakenly thought to be by the bishop of Metz himself. The Latin editions are largely taken from those by, respectively, Jean-Baptiste Pelt (1937), Albert Werminghof (1906), and Arthur Napier (1916) with only minor amendments; but their inclusion is anyway to make the texts more available, not to supersede them. It is regrettable that chapters 1-113 of the Institutio—mainly a collection of quotations from Isidore and church councils—were excluded. Here would have been a valuable resource from which to gain a sense of the historical perspectives of those at the Aachen councils. Further disappointment lies in the decision to place the translations after each edition, rather than across the page, which can make the volume a little cumbersome depending on how one imagines one might use it. The translations themselves are on the whole faithful and readable, and will be of great use for helping students, especially those without Latin, to engage with the sources and the issues they raise.

The historical context as given is useful, setting in broad terms the background to issues such as clerical continence. The benefit of this section for non-academic readers is that it sets out some key definitions and distinctions. For those wishing to pursue things in more detail, however, the scholarship on which it is based is rather on the thin side, most notably in German where the works of Rudolf Schieffer, Josef Semmler, and others are poorly represented. Such problems are exacerbated, through no fault of the author, by the publication of two recent books on similar themes: Martin Claussen's study of Chrodegang's Regula and Brigitte Langefeld's study of the Old English version of the Regula Longior. It is a shame that the three writers were unable to collaborate in their work. Langefeld's lists and examination of the manuscript traditions of the Regular Longior, for example, are more extensive than Bertram's and could have aided his discussion considerably. Future scholars of Chrodegang and his influence will, nevertheless, have a much richer field in which to work, and Bertram will have contributed to that felicitous development.

Despite its academic shortcomings, The Chrodegang Rules...