Late Middle Ages

Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages

The three articles that follow look at regular religious life in the century and a half before the Protestant dissolutions of 1536–41. They do so in three different keys: the lived experience of a monk inside an English Benedictine house c. 1300–1500; the explosive growth of the Franciscan and Dominican friars from their foundations in 1209 and 1216 to their dominance of the theology faculties at Paris, Oxford, and Cologne; and the long, contested decline of the older monasticism, including the reform movements that tried to renew it from within. The section as a whole engages with two classic problems of the historiography. The first is David Knowles’s argument, in The Religious Orders in England (1948–59), that late medieval monasticism was a spent force, hollowed out by commendatory abbots and landed wealth. The second is the revisionist case, advanced by C. H. Lawrence, Martin Heale, and Judith Middleton, that the period from 1350 to 1500 saw genuine monastic recovery in many regions, especially in the observant congregations.

The cloister and the choir

The first article reconstructs a single day — and a single year — in a Benedictine house such as Durham, St. Albans, or Glastonbury. It explains the opus Dei of the eight canonical hours from Matins to Compline, the division of the community into obedientiaries (the cellarer, sacrist, almoner, and precentor), the cycle of meat, fish, and fast days laid out in the Ordinals and customary books, and the annual rhythms of chapter meetings, profession, and the observance of the clausura. It also sets the cloistered life against the wider world: the grange economy, the school, the almonry, and the sick-house. Knowledge of this interior life rests on a remarkable body of source material — the late thirteenth-century customary of the Consuetudines of Bury St Edmunds, the Rites of Durham compiled around 1593 from monastic memory, the obedientiary rolls of Westminster and Durham edited by scholars including Barbara Harvey — and the article indicates what that material can and cannot tell us.

The friars come in

The second article traces the mendicant revolution that, within a generation, displaced the Benedictines as the cutting edge of the pastoral church. It follows Francis of Assisi from his 1209 verbal approval at Rome to the bull Solet annuere of 1223, Dominic de Guzmán from his 1206 mission among the Cathars of Languedoc to the foundation of the Order of Preachers in 1216 and 1217, and the early struggles over poverty that produced the Franciscan * usus pauper* debate, condemned at Vienne in 1312, and the Dominican system of conventual schools that produced Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The article follows the friars into the schools — where at Paris the Franciscan regent and the Dominican regent held the principal theology chairs by 1250 — and into the streets, where they took over the preaching of crusade, the staffing of the papal inquisition after 1231, and the new devotional movements of the fourteenth century. The discussion draws on John Moorman’s A History of the Franciscan Order (1968) and on the more recent work of David Burr and Michael Robson on the late medieval friars.

The Devotio Moderna and the end of the medieval cloister

The third article covers the period from the Black Death of 1348–49 to the eve of the Reformation, asking why the older monasticism found it so hard to renew itself, and how new forms of religious life filled the gap. It follows the foundation of the observantiae — the stricter reformed congregations of Benedictines, Franciscans, and Carmelites — the rise of the Carthusians as a model of reformed life under Hugo of Balma and Denys the Carthusian, the late career of the Cistercians in the wake of the Benedictina of Benedict XII in 1336, and above all the Devotio Moderna. It traces the Devotio Moderna from the Brethren of the Common Life founded at Deventer by Geert Groote in 1381, through the canons of Windesheim (founded 1386), to the printing history of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27), arguably the most widely read devotional book of the century. The article ends with the slow strangulation of the English monasteries under Wolsey and Cromwell and Andrea Muller’s reading of the German Reichsklöster in the same period.

What this section covers

Articles in this chapter