Inventing Sempringham: Gilbert of Sempringham and the Origins of the Role of the Master (review)

It certainly is not every year that a book dedicated to the Order of Sempringham (also known as the Gilbertines) appears in print. Therefore, Katharine Sykes’s Inventing Sempringham is a most welcome addition to Gilbertine scholarship. Though originally written as a dissertation at Oxford University, this book does not always read like a dissertation. Sykes’s style is concise and clear, and she does not hesitate to pause and summarize what she has been saying. Though this could appear pedantic at times, it is a very helpful strategy in a volume that looks closely and carefully at the use of words in a range of documents. Her inclusion of charts that organize her source material visually is also very helpful.

Sykes’s goal in the work is to investigate all of the extant documents relating to the Gilbertine order in order to discern how the office/title of magister was employed in relationship to Gilbert, the order’s founder and namesake, and his successors Roger and Gilbert II. This, she believes, will reveal a more accurate picture of the formation of the order, one that is at odds with the scholarship of Brian Golding (noted scholar of the Gilbertines). She lays the book out into four chapters. The first chapter is an exploration of the development of the title and role of the founder Gilbert. The second chapter discusses two important scandals that rocked the order in the 1150s and 1160s and how Gilbert responded to these scandals. Sykes suggests that these scandals were not the result of Gilbert’s poor leadership, a commonplace in Gilbertine studies, but rather the result of usual growing pains that could and often did afflict other religious orders of the twelfth century. The third chapter looks at the attempts of Gilbert’s successor, Roger, to normalize the role of the head of the order in light of the fact that Gilbert’s role was often related directly to his being the founder of the order. Given that Roger (or anyone else for that matter) was not the founder, it was necessary that he establish the appropriate role for the founder. Roger did this by controlling closely the organization and contents of the vita of Gilbert. The fourth and final chapter examines the surviving statutes of the order, dating from the time of Gilbert II, the fourth head of the order between 1205 and ca. 1223. As it turns out, these statutes do not offer much of a clarification on the role of the head of the order and concern themselves more with detailing the relationship between the Gilbertine canons and the other groups within the order (including the nuns, lay brothers, and lay sisters).

After her detailed and careful analysis of extant texts including Gilbert’s vita, the surviving Institutes, wills, bequests, episcopal acta, and more, Sykes comes to two important conclusions. First, previous scholarship on the Gilbertines has reached wrong conclusions regarding the evolution of the order. In Sykes’s words they have looked “through the wrong end of the telescope” (209). Whereas previous scholarship had concluded that the role and title of the head of the order were derived straightforwardly from the role and title of the founder, Sykes shows that this is not the case. Rather, over the course of a century the head of the order and others inside and outside the order helped to clarify the exact titles and roles that the head(s) of the order held. This century of discussion and clarification culminated in the only surviving draft of the Institutes. What Sykes discovers is that there are several key timeframes that account for shifts in terminology. The initial term used to refer to Gilbert as the founder of the order was magister though this originally was simply a designation indicating that Gilbert had studied at the theological faculty in Paris and that he was in the employment of...