Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction ed. by Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber (review)

Chapters in this carefully edited volume derive from a conference under the same title, which was held at the University of Leeds in 2008. They are here organised around the twin themes of ‘Conflict and its Resolution’ and ‘Acculturation and Cultural Interactions on the Frontiers’. Studies with a focus on the interconnected notions of borders-boundaries-frontiers – a stronghold of German-language historiography for much of the twentieth century – have been undergoing a resurgence over the past several decades and, as this volume attests, are attracting a new generation of scholars from different linguistic backgrounds and specialisations. With this renewed interest comes a waning of nationalistic biases and a search for ‘more consensual ways to engage with the world’, as the editors put it. They see the ten chapters as contributing to the development of an explanatory model, a historiographical approach more concerned with abbeys and friaries as ‘intercessory and commemorative’ communities than as ‘tools of territorial and political control’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, definitional issues remain somewhat slippery. By narrowing the focus onto monasteries they hope to shed light on a hitherto neglected area, namely, how border conditions, broadly understood, shaped the nature of monastic and mendicant communities, with a view to explaining their function and the success or failure of monastic institutions in these regions.

This conceptual breadth is as much reflected in the topics covered as in the geographical sweep of the papers. There are papers relating to Scandinavia: Iceland’s Skiđuklaustur Augustinian monastery and the Cistercian complex of Alvastra in Östergötland, Sweden. The Germanic/Slavic regions are represented by articles on the Cistercian abbey in Toplica, Croatia, the Teutonic Knights–Polish tensions of c. 1339, and mendicant provincial boundaries in Silesia, Lusatia, and Pomerania. Aspects of patronage relating to Angevin France and Frankish Greece are also explored. There are studies of the Canons Regular of medieval Catalonia and the quest for relics on the Anglo-Welsh frontier in Wales. The volume concludes with an insightful study of the depiction of Jews in the Ordo prophetarum, the liturgical drama found in the Laon troper (F-LA263). The chapters are furnished with substantial individual bibliographies and listings of primary sources and the volume as a whole is well served by a general index.

It is in the nature of such collections that concerns and themes touched on in many of the chapters and hinted at in the Introduction are left to coalesce in the reader’s mind. The lot of the Cistercians is one such topic. This Order whose ethos drew it to far-flung reaches, to borderland areas, was not necessarily the order that, always and everywhere, proved to be best equipped to meet the challenges of those regions. Relations with local communities, the laity, were decisive and therein lay the seeds of success of the mendicant orders. The ‘abject failure’ of Greek Cistercian houses explored in Nicky Tsougarakis’s chapter is a case in point. Their general demise stands in contrast not only with the more politically savvy mendicants but also with the more resilient Cistercian women, buoyed as they were by strong familial ties to Frankish aristocracy and associated land endowments.

For reasons made clear in the editors’ Introduction, the volume restricts itself to male houses only. One cannot but wonder whether the Greek experience noted above might not have had parallels in other borderland locations. It is to be hoped that the many strengths of this fine collection of papers will open ears to the editors’ plea: ‘Nuns of the frontiers merit their own dedicated study’.