Abbot Edmund Ford, secret agent

Hugh Edmund Ford (1851–1930), first abbot of the English Benedictine monastery at Downside in Somerset, had a reputation, especially in monastic circles, as a scholarly and reforming monk. He is much less well known than his contemporary confrères, Cardinal Aidan Gasquet and Abbot Cuthbert Butler, lacking Gasquet’s public profile and Butler’s list of much-respected publications. Ford’s considerable political and diplomatic skills were honed in the promotion of a monastic reform movement which transformed the English Benedictine Congregation. He travelled widely on monastic business and also on account of his always delicate health. More surprisingly, in 1918, he acted as an agent for the British government on a mission to neutral Switzerland, where the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln provided a refuge for many Germans displaced from Rome when Italy entered the Great War in 1915. Ford made use of the various ecclesiastical networks available to him,including the Benedictine Confederation centred on S. Anselmo in Rome and connections made through the school at Downside. This article places Ford in these and other Catholic networks and demonstrates how they were put to use in the Allied cause during the First World War.

Reformed Monasticism and the Narrative of Cistercian Beginnings

This essay explores the ongoing debates about the character of early Cistercian monasticism, the dating of early Cistercian documents, and assumptions about the Cistercians’ place in eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic “reform.” It analyzes the Cistercians’ narratives of their foundation in relation to particular moments in the twelfth-century history of the order, drawing on and elaborating recent theories about the dating of these documents. Although the Cistercians often seem the quintessential example of “reformed monasticism,” this essay argues that the earliest Cistercians did not present themselves as reformers but only gradually developed a rhetoric of reform over the course of the twelfth century. Finally, it suggests that reform is less a specific set of changes than it is a rhetorical use of the past that authenticates current practices and affirms that these interpretations of the past must be right and true.

Asceticism in Old English and Syriac Soul and Body Narratives

A great deal of scholarship on Old English soul-body poetry centers on whether or not the presence of dualist elements in the poems are unorthodox in their implication that the body, as a material object, is not only wicked but seems to possess more agency in the world than the soul. I argue that the Old English soul-body poetry is not heterodox or dualist, but is best understood, as Allen J. Frantzen suggests, within the “context of penitential practice.” The seemingly unorthodox elements are resolved when read against the backdrop of pre-Conquest English monastic reform culture, which was very much concerned with penance, asceticism, death, and judgment. Focusing especially on two anonymous 10th-century Old English poems, Soul and Body I in the Vercelli Book and Soul and Body II in the Exeter Book, I argue that that both body and soul bear equal responsibility in achieving salvation and that the work of salvation must be performed before death, a position that was reinforced in early English monastic literature that was inspired, at least in part, by Eastern ascetics such as fourth-century Syrian hymnologist and theologian, St. Ephraim.