With Great Liberty: A Short History of Christian Monasticism and Religious Orders by Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M. (review)

610 BOOK REVIEWS manists and reformers. For they appear as major architects of an institution apparently familiar and timeless, but actually, as Atkinson demonstrates, a new phenomenon of early modern times. Its central image is "the mother at home, installed in a patriarchal household and naturally inclined toward service and sacrifice" (p. 235) and the obedience these entailed. The outcome of a "domestic revolution" compellingly surveyed in its political and social, as well as its religious setting, the new construction not only fostered the exclusion of "good mothers" from the public sphere but often encouraged more dire forms of exclusion for other kinds of women. Placing motherhood in the contexts of massive historical change, in a study that traverses more than fifteen centuries, is a formidable enterprise and one that Clarissa Atkinson has accomplished with remarkable success. As she explores an immense, varied body of evidence, she invites her readers to participate in her quest, to reflect on the questions of interpretation it raises as well as the answers it offers. Reminding us constantly ofthe gulf that separates the ideologies of motherhood from the realities they were meant to shape, her book also reminds us even more urgently how much of this "vast buried history" remains to be exhumed. Mary Martin McLaughlin Millbrook, New York With Great Liberty: A ShortHistory ofChristian Monasticism and Religious Orders. By Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M. Translated and with a postscript by Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ. [Cistercian Studies Series, Number 104.] (Kalamazoo , Michigan: Cistercian Publications. 1993. Pp. 269) Karl Suso Frank, O.F.M., professor of ancient church history and patristics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, is well known for his important publications in the field of the history of monasticism. In 1975 he published his Geschichte des christlichen Mönchtums, well received by reviewers and public alike. The Cistercian Studies Series presents here a translation of the fourth edition of Frank's work, supplemented by the translator, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ., with a "Translator's Postscript" chronicling contemporary developments and a "Further Reading" section, nineteen pages ofwellchosen books and articles on the history of religious orders, the greater majority in English, with a few German, French, and Italian titles. Unfortunately, there is no index provided, nor are there any ofthe usual maps or chronologies students and educated readers find so helpful. The book offers the reader a résumé, intended for a broad audience, of the history of Christian monasticism from its origins through the twentieth century , highlighting periods of transition and innovation. Proposing a volume that will "demonstrate the adaptability of the monastic ideal, namely: living BOOK REVIEWS6ll for God in the quest of one's own perfection, amid a community of brothers or sisters, serving the Church and the world," Frank intends monasticism to be understood here as Christian religious life, the history of which "encompasses all the realizations of the monastic idea up to the present, from the monks of the Egyptian desert to the members of secular institutes who live in the midst ofthe modern world" (p. 15). Under this broad rubric, Frank (and his continuator, Lienhard) treat not only monastic history narrowly defined (Benedict, Cluny, Citeaux, Solesmes, Beuron, etc.) but the history of religious orders in general, including such disparate groups as canons regular, mendicants , missionary congregations, Mother Teresa of Calcutta's Missionaries of Charity, and Opus Dei. Nor are Protestant and Orthodox monasticisms ignored. For this reader, the first was the most successful of the twelve chapters. Here Frank presents a lucid discussion of the movement in die Church from asceticism to monasticism, highlighting the fact that the Gospel was proclaimed in a world familiar with the ascetical life, a world that provided a milieu open to the ascetic impulse. The remaining chapters deal in a rather straightforward and perhaps by now slightly stale fashion with the development or transformation of this original ascetic ideal throughout the centuries as it met challenges presented by the Church and world it was designed ultimately to serve. This book has much to recommend it, not the least of which is the fact that it is a fairly complete survey of the history of religious orders...