From church history to religious culture: the study of medieval religious life and spirituality

Giles Constable

One of the most striking changes in medieval studies over the past fifty years – and one to which Professor Brooke has made notable contributions – is the rise in interest in religion. There has been a concomitant decline – to which incidentally Professor Brooke has not contributed, rather the contrary – in interest in the traditional fields of constitutional, institutional and economic history, which dominated the study of medieval history during the first half of the twentieth century. This is not to say that religious life and spirituality (as distinct from the church and ecclesiastical institutions) were entirely neglected at that time, but with a few exceptions, to some of whom I shall return, they were treated by most scholars from a secular point of view. Even the Reformation was seen primarily as a matter of politics, and the crusades as a chapter in the social and economic history of Europe.

The history of religion and religious life and attitudes was traditionally the domain of clerical and monastic scholars, who in many respects laid the foundations of the modern study of medieval history. The works of the Bollandists and Maurists are of great scholarly value. G. G. Coulton (who was not always an admirer of monastic historians) said that ‘There is no monastic historian who, for learning and impartiality, comes even into the same class as Mabillon’.¹ Scholars still make use of his works and those of Martène and other historians who were monks or secular clerics, and also of the Gallia Christiana, the first edition of which appeared in 1626, and of the Italia Sacra. Among lay scholars at that time pride of place belongs to William Dugdale, whose Monasticon Anglicanum, first published in 1655–73, is indispensable for the study of monasticism in England.

Few areas of historical research can boast such a distinguished genealogy, which holds out the hope that some modern works, including perhaps our own, may be consulted long after most books on more recent history are forgotten. Certainly some of Professor Brooke’s will be. Academic historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, inherited much of the secularism and anti-clericalism of the eighteenth century, often without the learning, and tended to neglect the study of religion, which they equated with irrationality, if not superstition. Again according to Coulton, ‘The vast wealth of documents between St. Bernard and the Reformation is practically non-existent for modern historians’.² Among other reasons for this neglect were the predominantly national focus of medieval studies, the reaction against the clerical domination of education, the view that the study of religious thought and institutions was the business of clerics rather than lay scholars, and more generally the perceived decline in the importance of religion in the modern world. When I first went to the University of Iowa (then called the State University of Iowa) in 1955 religion was taught by professors who were each supported by their own denominations, since the university was forbidden to teach religion; and in some universities church history is still taught in a separate department and even a separate faculty. The serious study of religious life and spirituality was almost completely ignored in most secular universities until well into the twentieth century.

Laymen who addressed themselves to religious history were frequently motivated by partisan sympathies, such as (in the nineteenth century) the Catholic Charles René de Montalembert, whose study of early medieval monasticism relied heavily on Mabillon, and the Protestant Charles Henry Lea, perhaps the greatest American medievalist, who had little good to say about medieval religion. In the twentieth century G. G. Coulton was a polemicist as well as a scholar, and his works, in spite of their learning, are less widely read today than they deserve.

Serious and important research was still done by clerics and monks, but after the revival of monasticism in the mid nineteenth century, monks were almost more cut off from secular society than before, and scholarly work was not always encouraged in religious communities. Even great scholars like Ursmer Berlière and André Wilmart were not widely known among lay scholars. The great exception was David Knowles, the first Benedictine monk to hold a professorship at an English university since the Reformation. His history of the monastic and religious orders in England, which appeared between 1940 and 1959, took the scholarly world to some extent by surprise and helped to create a more receptive attitude towards the history of monasticism.

In England the way had already been prepared by, among others, Maurice Powicke, who in addition to his works on constitutional and institutional history wrote studies of Aelred of Rievaulx and Stephen Langton and a book on Christian Life in the Middle Ages. Some of his students, notably Richard Southern, followed this path. The economic historian Eileen Power meanwhile published a book on Medieval English Nunneries, in which she said a good deal more about the material culture of nunneries and the misdemeanours of the nuns than about their religious life or spirituality. On the continent the most important works were Carl Erdmann’s Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, which is a study in the changes in Christian thought and spirituality in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and Herbert Grundmann’s Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, both of which came out in 1935 but were not translated into English until many years later. Grundmann especially studied the religious and social basis of the religious movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including the role of women, and showed their common features rather than the differences which scholars who were themselves members of religious orders tended to emphasize.

In America, medieval religious history, after a promising start with Lea, was even less studied than in Europe.³ Coulton, in an appendix on ‘American medievalists’ to the first volume of his Five Centuries of Religion, published in 1927, said that Lea ‘seems to have found no worthy successor’ in social or religious history, and C. W. David, in an article on ‘American historiography of the middle ages’, published in 1935, recognized the achievements of American medievalists primarily in the areas of art history and of institutional and intellectual history, to which he added palaeography, owing to the influence on his American students of the German palaeographer Ludwig Traube. Ernst Robert Curtius took a more positive attitude in a lecture delivered in 1949, in which he said nothing about religious history but commented on the interest of what he called the ‘phenomenon’ of American medievalism. ‘The American conquest of the Middle Ages’, he wrote, somewhat oddly, ‘has something of that romantic glamor and of that deep sentimental urge which we might expect in a man who should set out to find his lost mother’. The Belgian scholar Fernand Van Steenbergen was surprised by the growth of American medieval centres, institutes and journals and questioned whether ‘there were sufficient vocations of medievalists in the New World to assure the vitality of all these centers of research’.⁴ He was writing in 1953, before Kalamazoo!

In preparing this paper I looked at several articles published in the nineteen-sixties by prominent (and for the most part senior) scholars on medieval studies.⁵ Very few of them say anything about religion or even about the crusades, which was a flourishing field at that time. The emphasis is on constitutional, institutional and legal history, with occasional references to the history of art and to economic and intellectual history. Most striking is the virtual omission of religious history in David Knowles’s lecture entitled ‘Some trends in scholarship, 1868–1968, in the field of medieval history’, where he said that until the middle of the twentieth century English constitutional history held ‘pride of place’, as he put it, in British universities, though he also discussed developments in legal, administrative and economic history and, since the Second World War, in intellectual and art history. While he mentioned the contributions to the study of monastic history made by the members of several religious orders, he called them one of many foreign groups ‘which is perhaps unfamiliar in this country’, that is, in England. Probably out of modesty, he cited no English-speaking scholars in the field and suggested, without explicitly stating it, that this was an area best left to members of religious orders.⁶

This then was the situation when I completed my Ph.D., in 1958, and began to look for an academic position. I hope at this point you will allow me a short autobiographical excursus, which also applies mutatis mutandis to Professor Brooke, who began his academic career, though in England rather than America, shortly before I did. I wrote my thesis at Harvard under Herbert Bloch, a classicist who also worked in medieval history, and I spent a year at Cambridge under David Knowles. My subject was the letters of Peter the Venerable, who was abbot of Cluny in the first half of the twelfth century. It was unusual at that time (and still is, I believe) to present a textual edition, even with a substantial introduction and notes, as a doctoral dissertation, and my professors in the department of history at Harvard, Charles Taylor and Helen Cam, both of whom worked in traditional fields, thought that I would find a position only in a seminary, and a Roman Catholic seminary at that, and since I am not a Roman Catholic, probably no job at all! In fact the winds of historiographical fashion were changing, and my fields of research – monastic history, the crusades, letter-writing, medieval forgery, all growing out of my work on Peter the Venerable – have been a modest growth industry over the past half century. More work is being done today on saints’ lives and miracles than on the history of parliament. The study of religious life and spirituality took off, as it were, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, just at the time the articles I mentioned above were written. I shall not bore you, however, with lists of individual scholars and their works, which saves me, incidentally, from the invidious task of mentioning some but not others. I shall rather look at the subject matter of the field, and at some of the developments in recent years.

Before doing so, however, something more should be said about the nature of medieval religion and spirituality. The term religio in the middle ages preserved its ancient meaning, which later prevailed again, of a system of faith and worship, but it primarily referred to the lives and beliefs of monks, canons, hermits and recluses, both male and female, and others who devoted themselves, fully or in part, to a life of religion, as it was called in the middle ages, when religiosi covered a wide range of vocations,⁷ as religieux still does in French. There is no good equivalent in English. ‘Spirituality’ also presents problems and is an overworked term today.⁸ It was used in the fifth century for a life according to the spirit and ‘the effort to practice detachment from sin and attachment to God’. Later it took on the meaning of incorporalitas in contrast to corporalitas, materialitas, carnalitas and mortalitas and implied the presence in an individual of the Holy Spirit. More recently it has been variously described as ‘the attitude of the faithful to God and Christ’, ‘the experience of the sacred’, the point where faith and action interact, or simply as piety and what people do about what they believe. Spirituality, said Walter Principe, ‘points to those aspects of a person’s living a faith or commitment that concern his or her striving to attain the highest ideal or goal’.

Spirituality is not the same as popular religion, to the study of which Professor Brooke and his wife Rosalind have made notable contributions, and which concerns the practices and beliefs of the average Christian. John Van Engen described popular religion as ‘perhaps the most successful as an interpretive rubric … of all the historical approaches to come out of the 1970s’, when it was seen and presented, he said, ‘as an autonomous religious outlook, at once ancient and of the people, a set of indigenous sacred practices overtly or covertly resistant to the christianizing forces of the elite’. Phenomena such as superstition and heresy emerged, Van Engen continued, as central to understanding medieval religion and culture, ‘sometimes an alternative way into an alternative religious past, sometimes a way of getting at the “people” rather than the “prelates”’.⁹ Spirituality, on the other hand, is not autonomous or alternative. In the middle ages it was usually orthodox and in many respects cut across class lines. St. Louis practised the same devotions, worshipped in the same manner, and was inspired by the same ideals as his humblest subject, as indeed did St. Thomas Aquinas, aside from the fact that as a priest he also celebrated mass. It is not my purpose in this paper to study popular religion, except to stress the interaction between lay and monastic spirituality in the late middle ages and early modern period, when practices previously found primarily in religious communities spread into secular society. Many of these, such as frequent communion, praying in private chambers, devotion to the Virgin, and the art of death, were studied by Henri Bremond in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France.

In the study of medieval spirituality the name of one scholar stands out, Jean Leclercq, whose career covered the second half of the twentieth century. Himself a Benedictine monk, his influence spread far outside the walls of his monastery, or perhaps I should say monasteries, since he was a mighty traveller. Taking up in many respects where André Wilmart left off, Leclercq was an interpreter as well as an editor of texts. He wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles which, though of uneven quality, reached a wide audience and of which a number were translated into English. Among his many influential contributions was the distinction between the theologies found in monasteries and in universities. Wilmart and Leclercq, together with Marie-Dominique Chenu, whose Théologie au douzième siècle was published in 1957 and appeared in English in 1968, changed the face of the study of medieval spirituality. They emphasized in particular the importance of the twelfth century, when there was a fundamental change in the way people saw themselves in relation to God and the church and which marked the beginning, they said, of modern religion.¹⁰

This included a redefinition of the vita apostolica, which no longer involved withdrawal from the world but came in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to include an active apostolate, and which was central for Francis of Assisi and the mendicants, for whom it was not enough to be individually poor in possessions and in spirit, which was equivalent to being humble, without also being collectively poor. The established ideals of withdrawal, asceticism and contempt for the world did not disappear and were combined with a stress on physical labour, which had a special significance particularly for the Cistercians and members of the reformed orders, and also on human values, such as friendship, the importance of which in religious circles has been emphasized in recent studies. These ideals increasingly spread outside religious communities into lay society, and by the end of the middle ages many men and women shared the austere standard of behaviour that had previously characterized formal religious life and included practices and devotions which governed the smallest details of everyday life, such as the arrangement of the crumbs left on a table after a meal.

In addition to these outward marks of piety there was a stress on spiritual inwardness. People believed that their eternal salvation depended on their personal relations to God as much or more than on their behaviour or on the intervention of the clergy. This stress on inwardness led in its extreme forms, through self-knowledge and love of God, to a withdrawal into self-denial, nothingness and ultimately union with the Godhead in such a way, as Grundmann put it, that ‘the religious experience supersedes all questions of ethics and morals’ and that the perfection of individual believers exceeds the merits and claims of the saint.¹¹ For these people the ideal of the imitation of Christ involved not only following the example of His life on earth but also identifying with Him as the suffering Son of God. This approaches the limits of orthodoxy, though at that time the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy were less fixed than they became later.

In this and other ways the developments in medieval religious life and thought prepared the way for the modern world. There has been a growing awareness among scholars of the importance of medieval religious institutions for modern society, including political democracy (maior et senior pars), prisons (‘cell’ is a monastic term), the importance of clocks and time-keeping, and the organization of industry. The origins of sign language go back to the system of signs used in medieval monasteries. These are the subject of a different paper, however, and I mention them here only to emphasize the range of the influence of religious institutions and the overlap of spirituality with popular culture.

Turning now to the history of religious life, I shall divide my discussion into three sections: first, the types of life led by religious men and women (religiosi and religiosae); second, their relations with secular society; and third, the effect on the study of religion of some of the new historical techniques and approaches. In conclusion I shall look briefly at the reasons for the current interest in medieval religion.

Among the most interesting developments with regard to the nature of medieval religious life has been the study of the common features of religious movements, rather than their differences, and the attention paid to groups and individuals who were not technically speaking monks and nuns, in particular to canons, hermits and recluses, and to lay religious, female as well as male. In spite of significant earlier work on canons, some of it dating from the eighteenth century, their status and importance were not widely recognized and are still not fully appreciated, partly in view of the variety of canons who existed in the middle ages. Some of them, known as regular canons, followed a rule and were barely distinguishable from monks; others resembled the clergy and were called secular canons; and yet others, as Alcuin already recognized in the ninth century, occupied a middle position between the two. Hermits and recluses, who were also known as anchorites, were less cut off from monastic, clerical and lay society than was once thought and than descriptions of their way of life suggest. Many people, including women, spent periods of time in hermitages and later took up other types of life. Even Cluny, which was famous for the strictness of its monastic regime, was surrounded by hermitages to which the monks, including the abbots, retreated from time to time. Several scholarly congresses have been devoted to the study of hermits and eremitism, but the subject is far from exhausted.

The same is true of people leading a life withdrawn from secular society, either in groups or sometimes in their own families, which has been called domestic monasticism. This way of life was in its nature ephemeral and has left few written records. In institutional terms it constituted a sort of half-way house between the laity and better-established forms of religious life, and it is sometimes described as semi-monastic. People of this type were recognized as occupying a distinct and occasionally suspect status, parallel to that of heretics, but not the same, since they were less concerned with unorthodox beliefs than with a religious way of life. It appealed particularly to women, concerning whose history the flood-gates of research have opened during the past generation, though they had never been fully closed. I have already referred to Eileen Power and Herbert Grundmann, to whom should be added Ernest McDonnell, whose The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture appeared in 1954. Many aspects of the religious life and culture of women throughout the middle ages have been studied in recent years, including the openness of some of the reformers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to the religious aspirations of women, who played a significant part in the institutional, spiritual and intellectual life of the period. In the late middle ages women had a distinctive spirituality, found in both literature and art, the nature and importance of which have been increasingly recognized.

The members of religious communities were bound together by a common way of life and often by adherence to a written rule or set of customs which formed the basis of what have been called textual communities. Many groups of religious men and women, however, including some of the most celebrated, had no written customs and were governed in the details of their daily life by oral traditions. Rules were sometimes adopted relatively late, and customs were written down when the founding members died, a daughter house was established or another community wanted to adopt a similar way of life. Written customaries can also be seen as a reaction to the threat of change, which if welcome in principle might be met with hostility in practice. Some customaries represented a conservative effort to preserve existing practices, and their evidence must be taken with a grain of salt, because they tend to reflect an ideal rather than a reality. Very few if any religious houses adhered to every detail of a written document. Even the Rule of Benedict was modified in countless ways. There is no means of recovering now all the unwritten customs of a community, which were preserved in the minds of its members. Religious life was not an unchanging monolith, and there has been a growing recognition by scholars of the rapidity and occasional violence of change – or reform, as it was commonly called – which could uproot long-established customs and traditions, as it did in universities in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The study of rules and customs was a fertile area of research in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the pioneers was Kassius Hallinger, whose learned though controversial book entitled Gorze-Kluny stimulated other work on the similarities and differences between religious houses and congregations from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Hallinger founded the Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, which when complete will include new editions of all known customaries. It is paralleled for Greek monasticism by the corpus of Byzantine monastic typica, which has opened the way for comparative study of religious life in the Latin west and Greek east. The new edition of the Carta Caritatis and other early Cistercian documents has shown that they were probably written later than was once thought and has led to a reassessment of the beginning and early years of the order of Cîteaux.

The organization of most religious houses and the daily life of their members were governed by an elaborate system of rites and ceremonies, both within the church – the liturgy – and outside. Rites are of interest to sociologists and anthropologists as well as to students of religion and history, who have emphasized the importance of ritual as an expression of religious ideology and feelings. It involves not only what was said and done but also what was sung and seen, since observers participated in ceremonies no less than performers and responded to images and buildings. Rites were adapted to meet the institutional and social as well as the physical needs of religious life. The old contrast between rites and reason, which were traditionally regarded almost as opposites, has thus been broken down. Ritual is a way of looking behind the texts into the hidden world of attitudes and emotions. The application of psychology to history has also helped to deepen our understanding of the religious needs of contemplatives and has inspired a greater sympathy for the visions and miracles that played such an important part in the inner life of monks and nuns.

Religious men and women were also involved with life outside their enclosures. Even those who never left their communities had spiritual ties with the lay world which were none the less important for being invisible. The prayers, masses and blessings of monks and nuns benefited society as well as themselves. The names of innumerable lay benefactors and so-called co-brothers and co-sisters were listed, together with the names of former members of a community and of the communities with which it was affiliated, in the libri vitae, necrologies and books of commemoration and confraternity; and prayers, masses and alms were offered on the anniversaries of their deaths. These works have been known for many years, and some were published, mostly as undifferentiated lists of names, but they were regarded as of little use to historians. Their detailed study and publication, both in facsimile and in a form as close as possible to the originals, showing the placement and grouping of names, has been the special work of scholars at the University of Münster, whose greatest single achievement has been the reconstruction of the lost necrology of Cluny, which contains thousands of names and shows the wide range of Cluny’s influence. Another relatively little-used source on the associations between religious houses are the mortuary rolls which were carried from house to house after the death of an individual for whom prayers and liturgical commemoration were solicited. A new edition of these rolls, of which the third volume has just appeared, is in preparation. Each house that was visited made an entry on the roll, which is often of interest as evidence not only of the value placed on liturgical intercession but also of the level of literacy and writing skills in the community, including houses of women about whom very little is otherwise known. The study of scriptoria and of library catalogues has likewise contributed to the somewhat meagre knowledge of the intellectual life of monks and nuns.

The spiritual links between religious houses and outside society were paralleled by political, social and economic ties, which can be described collectively as the regional ecology of a community. Most older works on monastic exemption, immunity and advocacy, though still not fully replaced, were written from a legalistic point of view and did not take fully into account the religious character of the institutions. Economic historians in particular tended to take an aggressively secular view. Marc Bloch criticized André Déléage for citing so many monasteries, and readers of Georges Duby’s influential book on society in the Maçonnais in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which appeared in 1953, would hardly know how heavily its conclusions were based on monastic sources and that they concerned religious as well as secular life. Duby later acknowledged that were he to rewrite the book he would pay more attention to the monastic framework from which his sources came. The lands of religious and lay proprietors were frequently contiguous and interlocking, and lay proprietors in the area of Cluny, down to the lowest levels of society, were referred to as neighbours of St. Peter, from whom they derived protection and prestige. The development of monastic priories and granges paralleled that of secular estates, and many towns grew up around religious houses that needed the services of lay dependents. Research on proprietary monasteries, or Eigenklöster, over which outside lords exercised a measure of control, has taken a flexible approach and emphasized the elaborate framework of personal relationships between religious houses and local magnates. Monasteries were foci of political and economic power and sometimes became centres of regional principalities.

This brings me to the effect on the study of medieval religion of the historical approaches and techniques that have developed over the past fifty years. Quantitative techniques in particular have been applied to necrologies and mortuary rolls, which I mentioned above, and to charters, which contain enough names, unlike most medieval sources, to be analysed for prosopographical evidence and for the social structure and membership of religious houses, about which comparatively little is known. Statistical studies have been done on religious texts, such as the Dialogues of Gregory the Great and the letters of Heloise and Abelard. Some of my own work would have been different if I had made word-counts. The existing resources privilege certain texts, especially those in the Patrologia Latina. Many types of sources, such as charters, letters and sermons, have not been statistically analysed. Indeed in some respects computer techniques have oriented research away from the study of integral original texts. The term ‘secondary sources’ is now sometimes used for works derived by computers from primary sources.

The study of medieval religion has also benefited from ancillary historical disciplines. I am thinking both of the traditional Hilfswissenschaften – palaeography, diplomatic, numismatics, sigillography – of which the contribution to religious history, as has been seen, goes back to the seventeenth century, and of literature, art and architecture, which have long been an almost intrinsic part of the history of religious life and spirituality. Albert Lenoir’s Architecture monastique is still useful, though it appeared more than a century and a half ago, and Viollet-Le-Duc’s great compendia contain information on medieval religion not easily found elsewhere. The setting of religious life, the images seen and adored by monks and nuns, the processions in which they participated, and the hymns and chants they sung were all part of medieval religion. In recent years there has been a particular interest in sacred spaces, both within and outside monasteries, the relationship to each other of the various buildings in a monastic enclosure, and their effect on the lives of the inhabitants. Churches were symbolic spaces: the image of paradise and the heavenly Jerusalem. Cemeteries were par excellence the sacred spaces of the dead. Archaeological findings have thrown doubts on the written sources, forcing historians to reconsider established views of the nature of religious life and the ‘myths of origins’ embodied in medieval foundation histories. Dendrochronology – the study of tree rings – and geology have presented new material on the dating and techniques of medieval building, and the analysis of bones and pollen have shed light on the diet, health and age of monks and nuns. Geography, toponymy and aerial photography, which developed in the period between the two world wars, have contributed to the study of the siting, foundation and ground-plans of religious houses, some of which have entirely vanished from above ground.

Aside from their architecture and decoration, however, only a start has been made on the study of the physical aspects of medieval religious houses and of the recruitment, social origins and numbers of their members, particularly in the so-called reformed houses of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the early middle ages many monks were offered (oblati) by their parents and were nourished (nutriti) in the monastery. Others converted to the religious life as adults and were known as conversi and conversae, a term which was used (somewhat confusingly) both for full members of the community who entered as adults and for lay-brothers and lay-sisters who performed manual labour and occupied a subordinate position. Some laymen became monks when they were dying, or thought to be dying, in order to enter the next world clad in the monastic habit. Others bought the right to bed and board in a community, known as a corrody, or only board, and yet other types of hangers-on are found. Jacques Dubois said that ‘Ancient monasteries accepted to have living in their orbit a crowd of people who served God in their own way and who, since they refused during their lifetimes to enter into any defined category, cannot be put into one posthumously’.¹² The confusion of the past challenges the clarities imposed upon it by the present, and this, like other aspects of medieval and early modern monasticism, remains to a great extent terra incognita. The same is true of comparative monasticism, both within the Christian tradition and in other faiths, which will doubtless shed important light on the nature of the religious life.

It remains to say a few words in conclusion about the reasons for the current interest in the study of medieval religion. Three factors come to mind. First is the importance of religion in world affairs today. I hesitate to call this, as some scholars do, a ‘return’ of religion.¹³ A ‘re-emergence’ would be better, since religion has always been there, though hidden and below the surface, at least in some countries, and certainly in the view of scholars whose prejudice against religion has tended to obscure its importance. Their interests reflect the concerns of the present, however, and religion is no exception. Over the past fifty years there has been a loss of confidence in the political, economic and social ideologies which dominated historical studies in the first half of the twentieth century, and a recognition of the importance of religion, like it or not, has emerged. There has been at the same time – and this is my second point – a realization of the close relation between religion and politics, especially nationalism, the origins of which go back to the middle ages. There is no inherent contradiction between studying religion and secular history. The spread of Islam, the split between the Latin and Greek churches, and the divisions within western Christianity which culminated in the Reformation – all medieval phenomena – paralleled political developments and created many of the problems to which the modern world is heir. It is often hard to distinguish religion from nationalism. Edmund Burke cited Cicero when he said that ‘We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort’.¹⁴ Third, and perhaps most important for our purpose today, is a shift in historical thinking, partly under the influence of anthropology and sociology, that accepts that what people believe and think, as well as their material interests, influence their behaviour. A case in point is the crusades, which were long regarded as a predominantly secular movement masquerading under a religious cover. To argue the reverse was regarded as naive. They are now increasingly seen as a religious movement with political, social and economic overtones. It is no accident that Erdmann’s groundbreaking book was not translated until the nineteen-seventies. It is a case not of either/or but of both/and. The study of medieval religion, as Christopher Brooke has shown in so many of his works, thus enriches our understanding of all aspects of the middle ages.

_____________

¹ G. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion (4 vols., Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Cambridge, 1926–50), i. 3, cf. p. xxvi, where he said that Mabillon’s Annales and Acta formed ‘the most valuable contribution, beyond all comparison, ever made to monastic history’.

² Coulton, i. xliii.

³ See H. R. Guggisberg, Das europäische Mittelalter im amerikanischen Geschichtsdenken des 19. und des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft, xcii, Basel and Stuttgart, 1964).

⁴ Coulton, i. 521; C. W. David, ‘American historiography of the middle ages, 1884–1934’, Speculum, x (1935), 125–37; E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 587; F. Van Steenberghen, ‘Les études médiévales en Amérique’, Revue philosophique de Louvain, xlix (1951), 405–14, at p. 414.

⁵ N. B. Lewis, The Study of Medieval History (Inaugural Lecture: University of Sheffield, 1960); S. Packard, The Process of Historical Revision: New Viewpoints on Medieval European History (The Katherine Asher Engel Lecture, 1960, Northampton, Mass., 1962); S. Harrison Thomson, ‘The growth of a discipline: medieval studies in America’, in Perspectives in Medieval History, ed. K. Fischer Drew and F. Seyward Lear (Chicago and London, 1963), pp. 1–18. See also E. Demm, ‘Neue Wege in der amerikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft’, Saeculum, xxii (1971), 342–76, who stressed the replacement of political-institutional by social-economic emphasis and the influence on historical research of psychology, anthropology and quantification.

⁶ M. D. Knowles, ‘Some trends in scholarship, 1868–1968, in the field of medieval history’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xix (1969), 139–57, at p. 154.

⁷ See P. Biller, ‘Words and the medieval notion of “religion”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxvi (1985), 351–69.

⁸ For references in this paragraph, see J. Leclercq, ‘Spiritualitas’, Studi medievali, iii (1962), 279–96, at p. 281; R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, iii, Leiden, 1968); W. Principe, ‘Toward defining spirituality’, Studies in Religion, xii (1983), 127–41; La spiritualità medievale. Metodi, bilanci, prospettive (offprint from Studi medievali, xxvii, Spoleto, 1987); an unpublished lecture by John Coakley entitled ‘What is spirituality?’ (1988); and P. M. Alberzoni, ‘Le idee guida della spiritualità’, to appear in the proceedings of the conference on ‘Orden und Klöster im Vergleich’ (Eichstätt, 2006), where there is a good bibliography of works in Italian.

⁹ J. Van Engen, ‘The future of medieval church history’, Church History, lxxi (2002), 492–522, at p. 498.

¹⁰ A. Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin (Paris, 1932), pp. 59, 62–3; M.–D. Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle (Etudes de philosophie médiévale, xlv, Paris, 1957), pp. 223–4, 239.

¹¹ H. Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Historische Studien, cclxvii, Berlin, 1935; repr. 1961), pp. 181–2.

¹² J. Dubois, ‘Quelques problèmes de l’histoire de l’ordre des chartreux à propos de livres récents’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, lxiii (1968), 47.

¹³ See Lamin Sanneh in the Times Literary Supplement, 13 Oct. 2006, pp. 13–14, where within the scope of a brief article the term ‘return’ is used seven times and ‘comeback’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘awakening’ and ‘resurgence’ once each.

¹⁴ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harvard Classics, xxiv, New York, 1909), p. 238.