The Historiography of Medieval Monasticism: Perspectives from Northern Europe

The article provides a thematized discussion of the development of the historiography of European monasticism in northern Europe (north Atlantic, North Sea to the Baltic). Whilst it does not offer a comprehensive overview of the field, it discusses the significance of major currents and models for the development of monastic history to the present day. From focusing on the heritage of history writing “from within”—produced by the members of religious communities in past and modern contexts—it examines key features of the historiography of the history of orders and monastic history paradigms in the context of national and confessional frameworks. The final section of the article provides an overview of the processes or musealization of monastic heritage and the significance of monastic material culture in historical interpretations, both academic and popular.

Kensur Nawang Nima’s Treatise “The Lamp of Collected Quotations from Classical Works of the Buddhist History”: the Genesis of the Buddhist Monastic System in Northwest China

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Buddhist monastic history in Northwest China, described in the treatise of the Buryat scholar Kensur Nawang Nima “The lamp of collected quotations from classical works of the Buddhist history”. This work is an example of Buddhist historical thought, which was developed in the traditional culture of the Buryats in the pre-revolutionary period. The authors of the article claim that “The lamp of collected quotations” has a specificity of presentation, determined by the author’s personality, historical and cultural circumstances. This specificity is related to the post-classical period of the history of Tibetan scholasticism, within which the work was written. Buddhist historical thought tried to understand the results of the most important stages of the Buddhist history in the vast region based on the works of previous generations. The treatise can be described as a scholastic work and Nawang Nima as an outstanding scholar and theorist of his time. Analysis of the structure of the work has showed that the author focused primarily on the history of the Geluk School, which he belonged to. Due to this specificity, most of the text is devoted to the biography of the founder of the school Je Tsongkhapa. The volume of work directly related to the history of Buddhist monasteries in northwestern China is extremely small. Nawang Nima describes the Genesis of the Geluk Buddhist monasteries: Chacung (bya khyung), Kumbum (sku ‘bum byams pa gling), Gonlung (dgon lung byams pa gling), Ganden (lga ldan dam chos gling), Rongwo (rong bo dgon chen), Labrang (bla brang bkra shis ‘khyil), Chone (сone dgon chen), etc. This fragment of the work “The lamp of collected quotations from classical works of the Buddhist history” is a fundamental historical description of the most important religious and cultural processes in the territories of Inner Asia in the period from the 19th up to the 20th century. Keywords: Buddhism, history, monastery, Buryatia, Tibet, Northwest China, Nawang Nima

Chronicles E, /E, and H: The End of the Tradition?

This chapter deals with the last surviving Anglo-Saxon vernacular chronicle, E, produced at Peterborough c.1121, and the last stages of Chronicle /E which lies behind it. The content and palaeography of E place it at Peterborough. Peterborough monastic history is now incorporated into the story, though the result is not a simple ‘house history’. Questions are raised about E’s annals numbered c.1060 onwards, their likely home(s), and the stages of their composition. Work on /E is viewed in the context of burgeoning Latin historiography, with which it has much common ground. The fragment, Chronicle H, is placed in this same world. The networks and contacts invoked to explain patterns of composition and exchange from the mid eleventh century are seen as still relevant. The changing relationship of vernacular chronicling to the court heralds the end of a tradition of chronicling for and by an Anglo-Saxon elite who had disappeared.

The Antiquarian and the Abbess

This essay considers how two Benedictine writers, Claude Estiennot (1639–1699) and Anne Neville (1605–1689), engaged with the generic conventions of historical writing, specifically the subgenre of monastic history. In an attempt to complicate critical narratives about early modern history, Estiennot and Neville are read through the lens of feminist formalism. A Maurist and antiquarian, Estiennot wrote a chronicle of the Congregation of the English Benedictine Dames that exemplifies the professional revolution in historiography. Neville, in contrast, cultivated the humbler position of an abbess, creating a historical sketch of her congregation that served as both a familial history and a personal aide-mémoire. By considering the different ways that Estiennot and Neville approached the same historical subject, this essay demonstrates that reading prose in terms of its formal qualities can provide new insights into the interrelationship of gender and genre in the early modern period.

Reading Monastic History in Bookbinding Waste

Shortly after its foundation in 748, the Benedictine monastery of Mondsee became an important centre for book production in Upper Austria. The librarians renewed their holdings over several phases of increased activity. In the fifteenth century, old and outdated books fell into the hands of the monastic binders, who cut up and reused them as binding waste for new manuscripts, incunabula or archival materials. These fragments often offer the only clues we have for the existence of specific texts in the monastic library and should be regarded as important sources for the study of the liturgical, scholarly and everyday life of Mondsee. This paper summarises the challenges to gathering, identifying, describing, and digitizing the material, the approach taken to achieve these ends, and an initial evaluation of Mondsee fragments used as binding waste.

Nuns and Abbesses

Although a substantial number of religious communities in the medieval West consisted partially or entirely of cloistered women, in traditional surveys of monastic history these individuals and their leadership received but scant attention. Until deep into the 20th century, the prevailing view among historians was that the role of nuns and abbesses in driving forward the development of monastic ideology and institutions had been negligible. Many believed that the purpose of female convent life had been only to provide an environment where veiled women would be shielded from the secular world and where their agency could be entirely directed toward intercessory prayer service and commemoration of the dead. With few exceptions, so they argued, those who accessed this existence spent their life in a state of discreet withdrawal, seldom leaving a lasting impression on those who shared their fate or drawing much notice from those living beyond the cloister walls. While a number of earlier specialists had already criticized this view, it was a feminist “wave” in scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that altered the perception of cloistered women as a marginal, mostly inconsequential offshoot of a monastic phenomenon shaped by male paradigms and actors. These early studies allowed a first glimpse of the scope of the phenomenon, geographically, quantitatively, and in terms of its spiritual and intellectual achievements and its impact on society. However, they did little to change the view that cloistered life for women was a “marginal” phenomenon. This was partly because traditional views took a long time to die out, but also partly because of the tendency of pioneering studies to focus on instances of oppression or emancipation. In the last three decades, these perspectives have been replaced by a wide range of thematic interests that have allowed historians to highlight different aspects of female monasticism in the Middle Ages, including the immense diversity of female monastic experiences; practitioners’ intense involvement in spirituality, intellectual life, and artistic production; their complex interactions with male monastics and clerics, ascetic women living outside of cloistered contexts, and the secular world; and the dynamics behind recruitment and patronage. Much work remains to be done to synthesize paradigm-shifting insights in these studies before we can arrive at a fundamentally revised narrative of female cloistered life, let alone insert it into a new one of medieval monasticism generally. This bibliography omits discussion of “private” monastics such as anchoresses and house ascetics, and of “semi-religious” phenomena such as that of the Beguines and Penitents.