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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.3 (2001) 440-442



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Book Review

The Monastic Order in Yorkshire: 1069-1215


The Monastic Order in Yorkshire: 1069-1215. By Janet Burton (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 352 pp. $69.95

From The Yorkshire Nunneries in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (York, 1979) to Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000-1300 (Cambridge, 1994), with many specialized studies in between, Burton has brought to the history of monasticism the careful scholarship of a well-trained professional historian. That is nowhere more evident than in this study of the ordo monasticus as it established itself in Yorkshire during the period from the Norman conquest to the Fourth Lateran Council. Burton attempts to understand what we can know about monastic spirituality within a wider range of other topics, such as patronage, documents, architecture, reading and book production, and land acquisition/ management by the men and women who became monks, nuns, and canons in this period. She neither reads back a later spirituality onto the twelfth century, nor does she use spirituality to explain any of the enigmas of monastic growth in Yorkshire, a region on which she has concentrated for many years. Writing from the perspective of Yorkshire has allowed Burton to clarify issues about monasticism and its practice on a local level. This subject has too often remained in the hands of self-trained antiquarians and well-meaning, but pious members of various modern religious groups.

This volume studies a unique region, but across a series of methodological divides that are usually maintained in monastic history. Not only does Burton discuss granges, church architecture, and patronage; she also considers all kinds of monks, canons, and nuns, as well as the ways in which patrons moved from support of one community to another and then back again because of marital ties, family ties, or political expediency. Indeed, Burton writes as though the differences in religious orders that we perceive among these groups today (Cistercians, Cluniacs, Savigniacs, and Gilbertines) were not all that important in Yorkshire during the long twelfth century. In so doing, she anticipates some of my own contentions that these distinctions came to be important only at later dates than has usually been thought.

Yorkshire viewed on its own terms--viewed from Yorkshire rather than as a rival of, or on a parallel with, Canterbury, or from the South--becomes in Burton's handling a place in which monasticism had a special history with its own special thread (often a woolen one) that ties it directly to Rome, to Burgundy, to Scotland, and possibly even to Ireland. [End Page 440] Its history of monasticism is a long one--Bede being the first to start writing it--and it was reasserted at the beginning of the period by an eremitical foundation at Selby and refoundation at Whitby. Burton characterizes twelfth-century Yorkshire as having been less directly devastated by William and his followers than by their destruction of powerful nobles there. Burton's view of monasticism, incorporating recent work on the politics of Yorkshire during this period, is more nuanced than that of earlier historians like Hill who saw monastic foundations, such as those in Yorkshire, as taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the Anarchy.1

Burton goes into great detail about how to interpret the chronicle record in order to construct a plausible narrative for the region's monastic foundations. The eleventh-century establishment of Selby is interesting per se because of the role played by a monk from the Burgundian house of Saint-Germain d'Auxerre, but it is more so in Burton's handling, which shows that it is no easy task to sort out how much truth there is in the tale written down c. 1176. The text from the twelfth century says that in the late eleventh century, Benedict, the aforesaid monk, was urged to the task of going to found a house in England by visions of Saint Germanus himself. Burton does not tell us how to understand this text, but presents it as problematical...

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