Steven Vanderputten

• PhD in History
• Professor (Full) at Ghent University

The history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages may at first appear remarkably uniform and predictable. Medieval commentators and modern scholars have observed how monasteries of the tenth to early twelfth centuries experienced long periods of stasis alternating with bursts of rapid development known as reforms. Charismatic leaders by sheer...

In Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives. It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingiaa politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily h...

From the deserts of Egypt to the emergence of the great monastic orders, the story of late antique and medieval monasticism in the West used to be straightforward. But today we see the story as far 'messier' - less linear, less unified, and more historicized. In the first part of this book, the reader is introduced to the astonishing variety of for...

La renovatio de l’Église franque au début du ixe siècle doit-elle être considérée comme une étape cruciale dans le processus d’institutionnalisation de la vie religieuse ? Pour répondre à cette question, cet article revient sur quatre idées reçues qu’il convient de dépasser : premièrement, que les réformateurs carolingiens ont créé des cohortes uni...

La renovatio de l’Église franque au début du ix e siècle doit-elle être considérée comme une étape cruciale dans le processus d’institutionnalisation de la vie religieuse ? Pour répondre à cette question, cet article revient sur quatre idées reçues qu’il convient de dépasser : premièrement, que les réformateurs carolingiens ont créé des cohortes un...

The purpose of this paper is to nuance the traditional interpretation of Bishop Adalbero of Laon's satirical Carmen ad Rotbertum regem as a rebuttal of Cluniac reform and its disruptive effect on early eleventh‐century society. Study of the text's literary antecedents reveals that its criticism was rooted in a tradition of commentaries on the condu...

This year's volume is made up of articles that were presented at the conference in Bonn, held under the auspices of the University.

This paper reviews the classic perception that the debate on the regular origins of secular canonesses in early modern France consisted of a clash between authors who sought to legitimize the members’ then-present status and privileges and prominent scholars such as Jean Mabillon whose sole aim was to present a truthful account of the past. Through...

In the final years of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar and chronicler Jacques de Guise recorded an account of a heated dispute between a group of early ninth-century Church reformers and the heads of several women's monastic communities in present-day Belgium and Germany. A major Church council had decreed that all communities of women...

This paper deploys a double method of stylometric and contextual analysis in order to review and refine historiographical arguments about the authorship by the cleric-turned-monk Thierry of Fleury/Trier/Amorbach (fl. 970-1020s) of a range of hagiographies, sermons, exegetical works, and a customary of the abbey of Fleury. In doing so, it seeks to e...

Dismantling the Medieval studies the paradoxical relationship of the early modern canonesses of Bouxières abbey with the medieval past of their institution. While various documentary, material, spatial, and immaterial legacies of that past remained a crucial presence in the convent’s narrative of self, the canonesses also used and manipulated them...

This paper analyses the Life of St Deicolus of Lure, a monastery in the Alsace region of east France, written by the cleric Theodoric in the 970s or 80s. It argues that the text contains a notable amount of information on the existence, methodology, and limitations of an ill-understood aspect of monastic integration around the year 1000. Relying on...

While foundation accounts of medieval religious institutions have been the focus of intense scholarly interest for decades, so far there has been comparatively little interest in how successive versions related to each other in the perception of medieval and early modern observers. This essay considers that question via a case study of three such n...

This paper considers the question whether the renovatio of the Frankish Church at the beginning of the ninth century must be understood as a deliberate and paradigm-shifting effort to institutionalize the religious life. It argues against the notion that lawmakers created uniform cohorts of (on the one hand) houses of canons or canonesses and (on t...

Founded in 910 by Duke William of Aquitaine, the abbey of Cluny rose to prominence in the eleventh century as the most influential and opulent center for monastic devotion in medieval Europe. While the twelfth century brought challenges, both internal and external, the Cluniacs showed remarkable adaptability in the changing religious climate of the...

This paper offers an introduction to the renewed landscape archaeological and historical geographical research on the lost village of Nieuw-Roeselare. Despite being the first site to be studied as a Deserted Medieval Settlement in modern-day Flanders, little is known about the village and its relation to the surrounding landscape. Nieuw-Roeselare i...

This paper takes a bottom-up look at Cluniac integration in the decades either side of the year 1100 in order to explore the diverse institutional, contextual and personal dynamics at play. Taking as its case study the French diocese of Saintes, it charts the transformation of the ecclesia Cluniacensis, the impact on relations with monastic houses...

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...

The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers learned and taught one another in a dialectical process...

While medieval learning has long been the object of scholarly attention, ‘horizontal learning’ – that is, knowledge transmitted and acquired in a context of informal interactions, to which traditional categories such as ‘teachers’ and ‘disciples’ do not necessarily apply – remains little studied. To f ill this gap, this volume builds on ideas formu...

This chapter looks at what the primary evidence from the period between the reforms of the early ninth century and the 920s/30s tells us about the adequacy of the common narrative of women religious' disempowerment and descent into social and spiritual redundancy. Its aim is to take recent arguments about the risks of working with normative texts a...

This chapter reviews the evidence for institutional and spiritual reform in women's communities, and makes three key observations. First, that bishops in particular relied on reform as a way of expressing specific claims to religious and political authority, and of rearranging the lordship and patronage of female monasticism to their own benefit an...

Reviewing the normative evidence, this chapter argues that Carolingian reformers of the early ninth century did not, as is commonly assumed, create two homogeneous 'cohorts' of female religious. Instead, they showed female religious, their associates and their patrons where lay the outer boundaries of legitimate experimentation, allowing for a grea...

The conclusions summarize the contents of the preceding chapters, and provide an outlook on the implications for future research.

This chapter looks at the period around 900 to argue that, below a surface of change brought about by wars, invasions, and local upheavals, a more significant process of transformation was unfolding, determined by socio-political, institutional, and religious alterations initiated several decades earlier. Two observations are essential to understan...

This chapter reviews the evidence for simultaneous processes of expansion and contraction in women's monasticism around the year 1000. It investigates, in order, the mechanisms and outcomes of a revived interest on the part of aristocratic agents in founding dynastic sanctuaries served by women religious; the more complex involvement of bishops in...

Taking at face value Archdeacon Hildebrand’s ringing cry for reform at the 1059 synod in Rome, historians have concluded that 'ambiguous' communities of the early 1000s had become thoroughly ‘secularized’, and that women’s monastic spirituality had become almost non-existent. Instead of attempting to find arguments for or against the classic narrat...

The two-and-a-half centuries between 800 and 1050 are commonly viewed as a 'dark age' in the history of women's monasticism. Dark, in the sense that the realities of life in and around the cloister are difficult to access: the primary evidence is extremely fragmented; the context is ill-understood; and scholars’ findings are scattered across a mult...

This volume provides a record of the response, by eight expert scholars in the field of medieval monastic studies, to the question "To what extent did abbots and abbesses contribute as a `human resource' to the development of reformed monastic communities in the ninth- to twelfth-century west?" Covering a broad geographical area, papers consider on...

Traditional accounts of early medieval monastic history routinely included a discussion of how a tenth-century 'wave' of Insular migrants crucially shaped the ideology and methodology of the 'Lotharingian reform movement'. While a number of scholars have raised questions about the validity of this view, their investigations did not result in a revi...

This paper investigates two case-studies of real and fictional instances of resistance to monastic reform in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Building upon recent scholarship on the subject, its aim is to assess the value of such accounts for the study of historical realities on the one hand, and for that of the construction of collective identities...

This article discusses the geopolitical manoeuvers of the comital House of Flanders, especially of Countess Clemence of Burgundy, to consolidate comital influence and power in the border region of western Flanders, specifically in the area of Bourbourg. By analyzing and mapping the shifting patterns of interaction between alliances of both secular...

This article examines the ways in which the customary of Cluny was used in monastic communities of the southern Low Countries. Through an examination of an unpublished and little-known letter concerning liturgical practices that is preserved in a copy of the customary from the monastery of Saint-Trond, it argues that there was no single use for the...

This paper examines the ‘Theutberga Gospels’, a ninth-century gospelbook recently sold at auction at Christie’s in London, in light of questions about literate practices, ritual scripting and aristocratic patronage of female religious communities in Lotharingia between the middle decades of the ninth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While...

is paper relies on a comparative analysis of the three known versions of the Statutes of the first 'General Chapters' of Benedictine Abbots (1131-1135/40) to establish more securely the processes behind their creation, transmission, and further development. In a first part, I investigate how it is possible to hypothetically reconstruct several vers...

In 1001 Duke Richard II of Normandy appointed William of Dijon as the first abbot of La Trinite de Fecamp. Together with his patron, William initiated a programme of monastic reform which scholarship has long seen as a deliberate imitation of Cluniac custom. This equation has been based on a corpus of early Norman charters that are widely held to h...

Universal Chronicles in the High Middle Ages - edited by Michele Campopiano

During the high Middle Ages, the bishopric of Liège found itself at a cultural crossroads between the German Empire and the French lordships. The Liègeois themselves argued that “Gaul considers us its most distant inhabitants, Germany as nearby citizens. In fact we are neither, but both at the same time,” and the same idea echoes in the work of pre...

This paper reconsiders the first ‘General Chapter’ of Benedictine abbots (late 1131). To explain the timing and circumstances of this event, previous scholarship mostly referred to the influence of the Cistercians on reformist groups within ‘traditional’ monasticism. A closer look at the primary evidence reveals how the first General Chapter needs...

This chapter examines various paradigms in the accounts of Richard's life. These paradigms include Richard as a saintly abbot, who promoted conversion within and outside of the cloister; Richard as creator of a semi-institutionalized, emancipated movement of reformed monastic institutions; and Richard as traditional monastic leader and faithful all...

This chapter discusses Richard's apostolic drive for conversion. Richard expended considerable energy on converting individual laymen and women, urging them to seek redemption for their sinful lives and thereby secure a peaceful afterlife. In his view, the most drastic, and most effective way of achieving this aim and of pursuing a pious existence...

This concluding chapter argues that scholars have continued to rely on classic notions of monastic reform, monastic networking, and abbatial leadership to justify Richard's relevance to the development of Benedictine monasticism. However, the book shows that his stature as a great “apostle of reform” is doubtful, and that he did not initiate a true...

This chapter examines various accounts that describe Richard as institutor et rector—“founder/master and head”—of many monastic communities. Sigebert of Gembloux claimed that Richard was “preaching everywhere in the fervor of holy observance,” which makes him a source of inspiration for many others who were involved in the government of monastic in...

This chapter describes the changes that Richard contributes to the monastery of Saint-Vanne. From a small episcopal monastery that had been forced to suffer the loss of its monopoly on Benedictine cenobitism, Richard transformed it into a representative image, both of the ideal monastery—where a secluded community of highly trained monks could devo...

This chapter examines Richard's ideological and spiritual identity as a member of an elite group of ecclesiastical leaders whose mission in life it was to imitate Christ through suffering, individual perfection, and the total conversion of humanity. These ideas about religious leadership were shaped during his training and early career as a cleric...

Around the turn of the first millennium AD, there emerged in the former Carolingian Empire a generation of abbots that came to be remembered as one of the most influential in the history of Western monasticism. This book re-evaluates the historical significance of this generation of monastic leaders through an in-depth study of one of its most prom...

This paper considers the significance of Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM 84 as founding manu-scripts of the bishopric of Arras (1093/94). Gathering historiographical, liturgical and juridical arguments, the manuscript is suggestive of the immense effort invested in the justification and consolidation of the new bishopric at a very early stage in its history,...

Recent years have seen significant progress in the study of the role of female religious in the monastic reform movements of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The motivations of secular and ecclesiastical elites in promoting reform, the impact of reformist discourses on our understanding of pre-reform realities, and finally the processual nat...