Issues in Monastic Reform: How Religious Groups Experienced Institutional and Spiritual Change
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Conventus: Problems of Religious Communal Life in the Central Middle Ages
Organizer Name
Steven Vanderputten
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. Gent
Presider Name
Jay Diehl
Presider Affiliation
Long Island Univ.-C. W. Post Campus
Paper Title 1
Reform as Process: Monastic Communities’ Experience of Reform in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
Presenter 1 Name
Steven Vanderputten
Paper Title 2
From Single Monastery to Reforming Network: Expansion and Conflict within a Changing Twelfth-Century Landscape
Presenter 2 Name
Alison Beach
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Ohio State Univ.
Paper Title 3
Liturgical Manuscripts as Reformist Tools: Saint-Amand and Biblical Codices, Eleventh through Sixteenth Centuries
Presenter 3 Name
Diane J. Reilly
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Indiana Univ.-Bloomington
Start Date
12-5-2013 8:30 AM
Session Location
Bernhard 213
Description
One of the goals of the FWO-sponsored international research community 'Conventus' is to contribute to current debates regarding the institutional and spiritual development of monastic groups in the 10th-12th centuries. The present session will address the recent trend to investigate individual monastic communities' experience of reform, and to look at how reformist interventions by charismatic leaders or reformist movements impacted on the long-term development of single institutions.
In particular the self-conception and agency of abbots in reformist contexts is central to the three papers. In his paper, Steven Vanderputten looks at evidence from the Northern French county of Flanders to argue that scholars have explained monastic development in this region almost exclusively from the perspective of reform. A closer look at the primary evidence however suggests that the reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were occupied primarily with implementing a new conception of monastic leadership, rather than with fundamentally altering the course of institutional and other developments within the cloister. In her paper, Alison Beach will look at how the chronicle of the Bavarian monastery of Petershausen reflects the shifting meaning and implications of reform in the twelfth century, which gradually substituted supra-institutional movements and bodies of supervision and legislation for the single monastery as institutional paradigm of monastic development. Finally, Diane Reilly will investigate the tension between local tradition and reformist innovation by looking at how the biblical manuscripts from the Flemish monastery of Saint-Amand from the 12th to 16th centuries, all of which were created in the context of reform, reveal continuities and discontinuities in their overall conception, text selection, illustration, and so on.
Steven Vanderputten
Issues in Monastic Reform: How Religious Groups Experienced Institutional and Spiritual Change
Bernhard 213
One of the goals of the FWO-sponsored international research community 'Conventus' is to contribute to current debates regarding the institutional and spiritual development of monastic groups in the 10th-12th centuries. The present session will address the recent trend to investigate individual monastic communities' experience of reform, and to look at how reformist interventions by charismatic leaders or reformist movements impacted on the long-term development of single institutions.
In particular the self-conception and agency of abbots in reformist contexts is central to the three papers. In his paper, Steven Vanderputten looks at evidence from the Northern French county of Flanders to argue that scholars have explained monastic development in this region almost exclusively from the perspective of reform. A closer look at the primary evidence however suggests that the reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were occupied primarily with implementing a new conception of monastic leadership, rather than with fundamentally altering the course of institutional and other developments within the cloister. In her paper, Alison Beach will look at how the chronicle of the Bavarian monastery of Petershausen reflects the shifting meaning and implications of reform in the twelfth century, which gradually substituted supra-institutional movements and bodies of supervision and legislation for the single monastery as institutional paradigm of monastic development. Finally, Diane Reilly will investigate the tension between local tradition and reformist innovation by looking at how the biblical manuscripts from the Flemish monastery of Saint-Amand from the 12th to 16th centuries, all of which were created in the context of reform, reveal continuities and discontinuities in their overall conception, text selection, illustration, and so on.
Steven Vanderputten