As Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp write in their historiographical essay, “New syntheses may come at some point . . . but we are not there yet” (1:22). For the moment, we are at the point of sixty-four essays, along with their ample bibliographies, produced by an international team of scholars highly attuned to the diverse expressions of medieval regular religious life, generously defined.
The essays contributed by editors Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin illustrate several strengths of this Cambridge History as a whole. Cochelin's essay on monastic daily life asks scholars to “be more critical about what have long been considered fundamental tenets of medieval monastic life” and to replace “strict separation” with “complexity of . . . interaction” as characteristic of monastic relations with the world beyond the cloister (1:542). This call to greater critical awareness is echoed throughout, with many contributors challenging a new generation of scholars to read between the lines of their sources. Lauren Mancia describes how sources on nuns must “be combed with an exacting and critical eye, careful not to dismiss the agency that these women yielded” (2:681), while Bert Roest notes that laments about monastic indiscipline are not necessarily mirrors of reality but “part of a performative reform discourse” (2:1185). The discovery of a “more fluid and permeable monastic enclosure” (2:1116), as Christian D. Knudsen puts it, is also a common refrain, as contributors find monks and monastic thought more closely interwoven with parochial and cathedral ministry, university culture, lay nobility, episcopal households, and urban contexts.
Another valuable aspect of Cochelin's essay is its lexicon of Latin terms and an explanation for their more precise senses, including capitulum, mandatum (the foot-washing ceremony associated with chapter room and not limited to Holy Thursday), prior (“probably to be understood here as the highest-ranking person in the room” [1:549]), nutriti, and conversi (adult converts to monastic life in earlier sources but lay brothers later on). Other essays explain the technical and evolving senses of Latin and vernacular terms and are helpful especially when false cognates might lead scholars astray. A favorite is when Megan Cassidy-Welch notes that fratres barbati is a term for lay brothers (2:1027). Citing the work of Alison N. Altstatt, Susan Boynton clarifies that at Barking Abbey, “there were infantes (the youngest), juvencule (school-aged girls), and scolares (novices), all of whom had specific liturgical duties” (2:973). Constant J. Mews even flags the conspicuous absence of a key word: “monks tended to avoid the abstract term theologia to describe their teaching” (2:697). Scanning the full Cambridge History for italicized terms would be a useful exercise.
As for Beach, her essay with coauthor Andra Juganaru exemplifies the approach shared by many contributors of revealing the great diversity that underlies the broader phenomenological categories of medieval monastic life. Beach and Juganaru show that the descriptor “dual-sex monastic communities” in fact encompasses an “array of origins, patterns of development, and forms of organization, spread across different centuries and geographical areas of religious communities that comprised both women and men.” In the case of these communities, attempts at “new definition, alternative terminology, or system of classification” are “bound to fail. The variety is simply too great” (2:577). Likewise, Paulette L'Hermite-Leclercq finds that sources on medieval reclusion “hint at the great diversity of customs observed on the ground” (2:754), and Cristina Andenna emphasizes the “remarkable diversification of forms of the vita religiosa” in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with women “often at the forefront of these developments” (2:1039). Beach and Juganaru's essay also affirms the integral place of women in monastic culture, and a number of other essays confirm this integration by incorporating nuns and other mulieres religiosae even when they are not the explicit topic of investigation. Essays on the management of monastic property, noble patronage, medicine, bishops, and preaching all include sections that consider their subject in terms of gender, whether medieval women interfaced with these topics comparably to or differently from men.
Beach is also the translator of Sigrid Hirbodian's contribution, which explains the distinctly German method of “regional history” (Landesgeschichte), challenging a few critiques of this approach and demonstrating its particular value for an international community of scholars working on larger questions. Many of the other essays compiled here are translations that make methods and discoveries available to English-language readers for the first time.
Readers unable to complete a cover-to-cover(-to-cover) reading of this two-volume set will appreciate a few navigational paths through the material. The work is subdivided into four chronological units, each of which is introduced by “a historiographical essay pointing to both past and future research” and by “an article that surveys the range of surviving primary sources for the period” (1:10). Those eight chapters alone could bring readers up to speed and generate new projects. Beach and Cochelin also offer thematic routes through the essays, so readers with interests in specific geographical regions, monastic liturgy, monastic education, gender and sexuality, archaeology, art and architecture, economics, and other topics can find relevant chapters listed in the introduction (1:10–15). These discrete themes would otherwise be difficult to identify, because “the pressing need to reconsider received definitions and traditional boundaries” is a defining feature of the collection (1:12).
The chronological organization of the book is extremely loose, so readers who constrain themselves to reading only the essays in their own historical period may miss some crucial work. Michael Kaplan's essay concludes the section on “The Origins of Christian Monasticism to the Eighth Century” yet follows its topic—the economies of Byzantine monasteries—all the way to 1453. Meanwhile, Ursula Vones-Liebenstein's study of monks and regular canons in the twelfth century begins the story of regular life all over again with Eusebius and Augustine. However, contributions like these ensure that readers who eschew the collection's organizational features or thematic through lines and simply select a chapter at random will be rewarded with new information and fresh perspectives.
