Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 by Steven Vanderputten (review)

Historical narratives of sudden, drastic institutional change continue to be persuasive, and as Steven Vanderputten shows in Monastic Reform as Process, potentially deceptive. He examines three traditionally identified “waves” of reform and their interims in the seven great Flemish monasteries (Saint-Bertin, Bergues-Saint-Winnoc, Marchiennes, Saint-Amand, Saint-Bavo, Saint-Peter, and Saint-Vaast), beginning in the late tenth century and ending in the early twelfth. His conclusion is that reform in this period is ill-characterized by older models which stress the abrupt, top-down imposition of a specified reformist program. In this conventional vision of reform, an “exogenous shock” (to use his terminology) forced rapid change, to be followed by a slow, inevitable decline until the next charismatic reformer emerged to restart the process. This model, Vanderputten argues, is the result of an overreliance on later monastic historiography which was invested either in smoothing over difficult periods in the monastery’s history to emphasize continuity, or in constructing ‘decline’ to precede and highlight the accomplishments of “reformers” by comparison.

Moving away from these narratives, Vanderputten shows that Flemish monastic reform was accomplished over decades rather than months, deeply rooted in political and economic (rather than strictly religious) concerns, and marked by essential continuity with an institution’s older programs rather than forced compliance with an external mandate. The Rule of St. Benedict and other hallmarks of reformist agendas are almost entirely absent in the book, replaced by discussions of abbatial, episcopal, and (especially) comital regional strategies and their implications for monastic leadership. For Vanderputten, the Flemish reforms had very little to do with new interpretations of the Rule and proper monastic living, and everything to do with competing local interests and the quest for effective administration. Overall, the question addressed here is not what reformers thought (a subject well-explored by others), but in what they, and those who followed them, actually did. This connects the book with other recent studies in monastic history which have moved towards privileging local variation and adaptability over strict top-down control.

Vanderputten frames the book using the work of Simon of Ghent, an early twelfth-century author charged with writing a continuation of Folcuin’s history of Saint-Bertin which had ended in the late tenth century (“Corporate Memories of Reform”). The way in which Simon’s text treated the intervening century of history and the question of reform at Saint-Bertin, Vanderputten argues, must be understood as a product of the reforms then underway under the direction of abbot Lambert (1095–1123/25). On the one hand, Simon discounted six abbacies (961/2–1021) as unmemorable and did not discuss them, in order to cast the subsequent abbacy of Roderic (1021–1042) in a reformist light. In contrast, the four abbacies after Roderic were presented as times of stable continuity, despite external evidence to the contrary. In fact, Simon consciously structured his account to deemphasize the novelty of Lambert’s reform in favor of Roderic’s, ignoring and rearranging the memories of the past accordingly. This makes his chronicle “essentially a pamphlet that advocated and justified contemporary reformist leadership by projecting it onto an invented past” (27). In light of these issues with near-contemporary narrative accounts, in the following six chronological chapters Vanderputten reevaluates four historiographical periods associated with the rhetoric of reform in Flemish monasticism: the “failed” reforms of the mid-tenth century, the “dark age” of the late tenth/early eleventh century, the “successful” reforms of the mid-eleventh century, and a second waning in the late eleventh century prior to the reforms of the early twelfth century.

In the second chapter (“The ‘Failed’ Reforms of the Tenth Century”), Vanderputten shows just how thin the line between religious movements and their political contexts could be. He reframes the mid-tenth-century reforms of Gerard of Brogne (d. 959) in terms of the expansionist policies of Arnulf, count of Flanders (918–965). Later reformers...