Reforming Reform: Steven Vanderputten’s Monastic Histories

Reform is rarely defined. Nevertheless, it was an important concept to Latin Church Fathers, particularly to St. Augustine, whose fascination with the early chapters of Genesis led him to meditate on how, after the fall, human beings necessarily needed to be reformed—an act that, thanks to the Incarnation, would be a reformatio ad melius. That patristic tradition was famously analyzed at the time of the Second Vatican Council in Gerhart Ladner’s The Idea of Reform, which presented reform as a leitmotif of ecclesiastical history, or “the free, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and ever repeated efforts by man to reassert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world.”¹ For Ladner, reform was always progressive and always “in progress.” He himself never completed his general history of the idea of reform, but his work spawned a small school of reform studies, more successful with the later Middle Ages that were saturated with reform discussions than with the central Middle Ages where post-Carolingian monks and Roman reformers often preferred different terminology.² Reform in the modern world has evolved into a vague model for gradual, positive change, usually employed without the same level of scrutiny given to parallel paradigms of change such as renaissance or revolution.³

Medieval reform narratives are getting new attention, thanks to the work of Steven Vanderputten. Starting with a doctoral dissertation on medieval monastic historiography (University of Ghent. 2000),⁴ he has been urging a reexamination of the whole paradigm of monastic reform. His publications, aided by major fellowships and research professorships, are extraordinarily numerous. He even coordinated 220 conference sessions and roundtable discussions on “Reform and Renewal” at the 2015 Leeds International Medieval Congress. In contrast to earlier reform historiography, however, “reform” often now appears within “scare quotes” or accompanied by hints that it has acquired so much dysfunctional baggage that perhaps it ought to be abandoned as a research paradigm.

Does reform now obscure more than illuminate? To clarify the issues, it may be helpful to introduce four of Vanderputten’s recent books. The earliest is Ecclesia in Medio Nationis: Reflections on the Study of Monasticism, an edited volume stemming from a 2009 conference at the University of Leuven that sought to showcase current scholarship on Western religious communities of 900–1050, focusing especially on their relationships to the outside world. Here, five papers in French and two in English demonstrate that “the historiography of the first monastic reforms has been profoundly renewed over the course of the last twenty years” (34). Particularly distinguished are Isabelle Rosé on monastic community life from the ninth through the twelfth centuries (pp. 11–45) and Florian Mazel on the relationship between monasticism and the aristocracy in the tenth and eleventh centuries (pp. 47–75). When juxtaposed with Vanderputten’s introduction to Reform, Conflict, and the Shaping of Corporate Identities (pp. ix–xxxii), a volume containing ten of his collected studies that focus specifically on central medieval Flemish monasticism, they offer an overview of the increasingly sophisticated regional history that Vanderputten has been developing and disseminating.

Two recent books from...