Reichsabtei und Klosterreform: Das Kloster St Gallen unter dem Pfleger und Abt Ulrich Rösch 1457–1491 (by Philipp Lenz) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Wojtek Jezierski, Total St Gall. Medieval Monastery as a Disciplinary Institution, Stockholm 2010
Can we think of a Benedictine cloister around the year 1000 as reminiscent of a modern prison or a mental asylum? Was the monastery a medieval type of Erving Goffman's 'total institution' or Benthanian panopticon thoroughly structuring the thoughts and practices of its inmates? What did the power relations between the groups of monks in medieval St Gall look like? Wojtek Jezierski's thesis explores and expands the connection between the medieval forms of monastic life and modern social theories. It investigates the patterns of persecution and exclusion, the exercise of power and surveillance, as well as violent conflicts between the conventuals and their abbots. It analyzes also the social components of monastic habitus and subjectivity in the monasteries of St Gall, Fulda, Bury St Edmunds and others. Finally, the study examines the strategies monks used to cope with the demands made on them by the external lay world, i.e. the political, social, and cultural liaisons between claustrum and saeculum. Wojtek Jezierski (b. 1979) studied history and social anthropology the University of Warsaw. He conducts research at the Department of History and the centre for Medieval Studies, Stockholm University. This book is his PhD thesis.
Tenth-Century Monastic Reform as a Historiographical Problem
Revue Bénédictine, 2020
This article discusses the state of the art on monastic reforms in the long tenth-century Frankish kingdoms and the analytic problems inherent to reform terminology. It argues that the emendatory undertone, the idea of renewal and the institutional connotation of the term ‘reform’ seem to be at odds with the tenth-century sources on the variegated interventions in religious communities. Furthermore, the difficulties scholars encounter in pinpointing the chronology and ideology of this ‘reform movement’ indicates another flaw of this paradigm. The author therefore proposes three major adjustments to render the term ‘reform’ a meaning that is both well-defined and applicable. First, the concept of reform is only practical when used in an active sense, to denote a sweeping intervention which profoundly altered a monastery’s network, observance, temporalities or internal organization. Second, the paradigm can only be meaningful on the micro-level of an individual institution. Third, the study of ‘reforms’ should always be part of a comprehensive analysis of interactions and patronship between an abbey and its noble and ecclesiastical connections. Lastly, this article offers a new approach to tenth-century monasticism, which focuses more on agency of both the community and the regional powerbrokers involved in monastic patronage.
Introduction and Contens to Monastery in medieval cultur
in: M. Derwich, A. Pobóg-Lenartowicz (eds), Klasztor w kulturze średniowiecznej Polski. Materiały z ogólnopolskiej konferencji zorganizowanej w Dąbrowie Niemodlińskiej w dniach 4-6 XI 1993 (Sympozja 9), Opole: Wydawnictwo Świętego Krzyża, 1995, p. 7-11, 548-550
Introduction and Contens to the post-conference collection: M. Derwich, A. Pobóg-Lenartowicz (ed.), Klasztor w kulturze średniowiecznej Polski. Materiały z ogólnopolskiej konferencji zorganizowanej w Dąbrowie Niemodlińskiej w dniach 4-6 XI 1993 przez Instytut Historii WSP w Opolu i Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego [Monastery in the culture of medieval Poland. Materials from the nationwide conference organized in Dabrowa Niemodlinska on 4-6 November 1993 by the Institute of the History of WSP in Opole and the Historical Institute of the University of Wroclaw] (Sympozja 9), Opole: Wydawnictwo Świętego Krzyża, 1995, pp. 550
Speculum 96, 3, 2021
Once upon a time, as Felice Lifshitz notes in her contribution to this terrific new handbook, monastic history "seemed to be simplicity itself": the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict quickly became the norm, then observance waned until the reforms of Cluny in the tenth century saved Benedictine life for another three centuries, and the rest of the story was really marginal (1:365). The new, far more complex vision she and others outline here fully acknowledges the diversity of monastic life, from the first stirrings of the ascetic movement in the late third century to the early decades of the sixteenth. Gone are the usual accounts of orders rising and declining, of monks and farming, monks and missions, monks and learning, monks and architecture-with an occasional appendix on "nuns." Instead we discover a world where consecrated female ascetics lead the way, hermits and recluses as well as lay brothers and sisters form an integral part of monastic life for centuries, while monastic liturgies are diverse and ever evolving. The resulting "polyphony of monasticisms," as editors Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin put it, aims to serve as "an inflection point" that will encourage future generations of scholars "not to be constrained by definitions, categories, and narratives" embedded in the conventional historiography of monastic orders (1:15). This massive project gathers the work of more than eighty authors divided into sixty-four chapters, for a total of more than 1,200 densely printed pages. Although limited to Western, Latin Christendom, it lends generous space to developments in the Near East and sources in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac, for instance in the remarkable chapter on "Re-Reading Monastic Traditions: Monks and Nuns, East and West, from the Origins to c. 750," by a team led by Anne-Marie Helvétius. It also devotes due attention to east-central Europe and southern Italy as areas of exchange with Eastern monasticism (Michel Kaplan's chapter on "The Economy of Byzantine Monasteries," though most valuable in its own right, seems somewhat out of place). Intended to cover the broadest possible range of monastic initiatives, the handbook includes the mendicants and such "lay religious" as beguines and tertiaries but not military orders-the latter's exclusion is left unexplained (see 1:7). The authors are drawn from eleven countries; for some, their work appears here for the first time in English. The editors summarize their mission thus: "Our approach has been to question any aspect of [the] traditional approach [to monastic history] that is not sound, to keep what is good, and to present the new questions and new answers that emerge" (1:4). Having dispatched "orders-based history" and abandoning all pretense to narrative comprehensiveness, the editors opted for a problem-based strategy: for each of the four periods considered (Origins to the Eighth Century; Carolingians to the Eleventh Century; The Long Twelfth Century; The Late Middle Ages), the handbook offers surveys of historiography and primary sources, followed by thematic chapters tracing particular research avenues. The contributors are an appealing mix of seasoned experts and up-and-coming scholars fresh from new projects. Curiously, it is often the former who seem to have relished the opportunity to clean the slate and start anew. I particularly enjoyed the clarity and acuity of David Brakke on heterodoxy and early monasticism, Albrecht Diem and Philip Rousseau on monastic rules, John Van Engen
Monastic Life Art and Technology in the 11th – 16th Centuries. Edited by Ileana Burnichioiu
Monastic Life, Art and Technology in 11th-16th Centuries (editor: Ileana Burnichioiu), Cluj-Napoca, Editura Mega (volum conferință)), 2015
1 Throughout the text I shall use the modern name of the village, where the abbey can be found, although the name Cârţa was never used in reference to the abbey and its name was totally different in Latin sources (for example: Kerk, Kerch, Kerz, Querch, Kyrch, monasterium de Candelis, Kercz, Kertz). It is apparent, however, that the modern name first, maintenance became impossible without the use of peasants, servants, and other help after the expansion. This work will describe the course of monastic development and the Pauline's ascent from poverty to riches.
Good men gone bad? Resistance to monastic reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries
Early Medieval Europe, 2021
Conservative opponents of monastic reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries have traditionally been portrayed as principally reluctant to change and unwilling to abandon privileges and preferential treatment. This article performs a close, comparative reading of the poem Carmen ad Rotbertum regem by Adalbero of Laon (c.950-1031) and the monastic chronicle Casus Sancti Galli by Ekkehard IV (c.980-1057), in order to identify the authors' attitudes to reform and reformists, and the sources for their counter-reform argumentation. It argues that the studied texts mediate reasoned, grounded standpoints, based on a thorough knowledge of monastic regulations and their importance to Christian ethics, and on the placing of society into an all-encompassing philosophical-religious context. Particular attention is given to the multiple layers of meaning characteristic of medieval writing. In the mid-tenth century, a number of monks saw monastic life in central western Europe as lying fallow. According to them, once thriving monasteries had been abandoned, their lands lost and abbey churches used as stables. What monks remained had taken up secular practices: some had even taken wives. The reformists set out to help these once good men now gone bad. Despite their best intentions, however, their help was not always well received. In the year 942, the canons of the abbey of Saint-Bertin in Lotharingia came close to murdering the reformist abbot Gerard of Brogne. 1 In 952, monks at the Italian 1