Italia ascetica atque monastica: Das Asketen- und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/250-604) by Georg Jenal (review)

744book reviews Italia ascética atque monástica:Das Asketen- und Mönchtum in Italien von den Anfängen bis zur Zeit der Langobarden (ca. 150/250-604). By Georg Jenal. [Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, Band 39,1 and IL] (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. 1995. Pp. xxiv, 471; xiv, 473-1024. DM 436.) It is sobering to realize that thirty years have passed since Friedrich Prinz's Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich swept away the remains of a tradition of historiography and supplanted it with a fresh view of Gaulish monasticism's earUest centuries, showing the link between the image of Martin ofTours and the ambitions of Merovingian monarchs, who revived Martin as their patron when they found it convenient, as against the Lérins-based tradition that had in fact populated the monasteries ofthe fifth and sixth centuries. Georg Jenal now sets out to do a similar service for earliest Italian monasticism. The first three hundred pages ofthe heavy two-volume study consists of positivist amassing of information: who, what, when, where, every name docketed. Obvious figures loom large (Eugippius, Cassiodorus), but fragments have been assiduously collected as well. For the coastal resort of Rimini, for example, we find mention (p. 8) of the vita of a monk named Bassus (date utterly unknown, reported in Eugippius' sixth-century IUe ofSeverinus) who lived on a mountain namedTitas near the city (anyone who has stayed in the HotelTitano atop San Marino's mount there will assume he has been close to the legend at least). Later (p. 281), several letters of Gregory the Great point to a monastery of Saints Andreas and Thomas there (in some disagreement with the local bishop). Not much substance, but with good maps (provided at pp. 953ff·), the geography of our knowledge can be limned: not much in the Po vaUey not much in Apulia and Calabria, more down the central line from Ravenna to Rome and along to Naples and up to Beneventum, and of course a boom in what we know of SicUy from the letters of Gregory the Great. On the basis of such patient amassing of material, the last five hundred pages of the work (840 pages of text and two hundred pages of bibliography, tables, and indices) erect an interpretive structure, or rather set of structures characterized by a traditional idea of social history. Separate chapters study: the influence of Jerome on Italian monastic ideas, then the influence (kept apart from his erstwhUe friend on these pages as much as possible) of Rufinus, resistance to monasticism (and in a separate essay, monasticism's critique of secular, especially "pagan" culture), issues of poverty/property, education, and the role of monasticism in the clergy generaUy.These last chapters have a disjointed quality about them, with major figures (e.g., Gregory the Great) getting subchapters under each of several topics. There is rather more attention back to the predictable major figures in these chapters than one might have hoped, but that is in part a reflection of the nature of the surviving evidence, which informs us abundantly ofa few figures and but sparsely ofmany others. Except when taken as collections of data, saints' lives (especiaUy Gregory the Great's Dialogi) seem underexploited, perhaps mistrusted, but the most surprising absence is any ex- BOOK REVIEWS745 tended discussion of the influence ofJohn Cassian. Cassian gets more attention for his brief personal presence in Italy than for the pervasive influence of his books both directly (Benedict, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great were aU smitten with him) and indirectly (through the texts he influenced, notably the "rules" of the "Master," Benedict, and Eugippius). On the other hand, the patient elucidation of Jerome's and Rufinus's ideas and their influence constitutes the most important contribution of the work. It is in those leading figures that Jenal sees the lines of opposition laid down and played out between a western style of monasticism (Rufinian, less ascetic) and an eastern (Hieronymian, more austere) in which the texts and ideas of Origen were deployed by all sides to their advantage. If we knew more of some of the shadowy figures whose names appear so briefly in the early section of...