Benedictine Men and Women of Courage: Roots and History ed. by Ann Kessler (review)

There is no up-to-date and reliable one-volume history of Benedictine monasticism. Writing the history of a 1500-year-old institution, which has taken shape in thousands of monasteries on six continents, is a daunting prospect. It probably exceeds the capacity of any single scholar and the confines of a single volume. The task is not made any easier by the current diffusion of Benedictine monasteries to Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa, and the numerical decline of most European and North American monasteries. Ann Kessler, who was professed as a Benedictine in 1947, earned her doctorate in history at the University of Notre Dame, and taught for many decades at Mount Marty College, attempted this task in the first edition of this book (1992), which now appears in a new edition, which she has revised with the help of Neville Anne Kelly.

The result, not surprisingly, is mixed. Positively, the book is nicely printed, well organized, and supplied with a thorough index. It gives attention to Benedictine women and to the Benedictine presence in Australia. In the chapters Kessler says she enjoyed most (10–12), on Benedictines in the United States and Australia, she demonstrates considerable skill as a storyteller, as she draws on her archival research and interviews. She gives particular attention to the French Benedictines’ vicissitudes in France during the Revolution and the antireligious governments of the early-twentieth century.

On the negative side, the book, particularly the first half, needed some fact-checking and stylistic polishing. For example, Antony of Egypt left no Greek sermons (p. 3); Julian of Norwich lived long after, not before, the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda (p. 105); Philibert Schmitz was Belgian, not French (p. 105); the position to which Odilo of Cluny appointed his successor Hugh is missing (p. 57); and the statement that “each of the first four Cluniac abbots independently named his own successor, whether or not possessed of suitable qualifications” (p. 55), seems odd in that four of the first six abbots are venerated as saints, and Cluny experienced phenomenal growth under them. There are unfortunate sentences such as “[i]t had been a perfectly cloudless day, but while sorrowfully rising for prayers, lightning flashed” (p. 18). There is scarcely any mention of Benedictines in German-speaking lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Nevertheless, Kessler’s book does provide a generally reliable survey of Benedictine history, which will provide people new to the subject with an overview. It would have served them better if it had included an annotated reading list for each chapter.