This article analyses the importance of saints associated with the Anglo-Saxon period monastery at Whitby for the identity and status of the later Benedictine abbey there. Using a wide range of documentary, architectural, artefactual, archaeological, and liturgical evidence, it is argued that the monks used the relics and cults of Anglo-Saxon saints, especially Hilda and Begu, to confer legitimacy upon and identity to their abbey. Appendices provide a translation of and a synthesis of the main liturgical sources.
This article outlines recent work to edit the thirteenth-century cartulary of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, Lincolnshire, and highlights the manuscript's potential as a case study for deeper understandings of cartulary compilation. Adopting new approaches to cartulary studies, it outlines the striking method and circumstances of the cartulary's compilation in 1259–1260 and its extensive additions c. 1310. Instead of beginning a codex from scratch, a compiler-scribe drew together and radically expanded a suite of cartulary sections already begun in earlier decades by multiple scribes. The article also examines in depth the specific landscape and patronal contexts which catalysed archival rationalization and what this reveals about the abbey's interaction with its locale. The cartulary confirms hunting as a major influence on Kirkstead's development, though not in a typically combative way as evidenced elsewhere and reveals the abbey's important part in the evolution of Tattershall Chase. The case of Kirkstead indicates how the evolution of a Cistercian landscape proceeded in lockstep with the development of its archive and how cartularization was a process rather than a moment in a house's archival history.
Monastic reading communities in early medieval Europe had a voracious appetite for the works of the Greek church fathers in Latin translation. This article examines the evidence for the availability of translated Greek patristics in western abbeys from the fifth to the ninth centuries through a survey of surviving manuscripts and monastic library inventories. While there was not yet a canon of officially recognized ‘fathers of the eastern church’ in early medieval Europe, this article shows how western monks favoured five of the six Greek patriarchs singled out as authoritative in the sixth-century Decretum Gelasianum. In terms of genre, they strongly preferred the homiletical writings of eastern Christian authors over their polemical works, because sermons and biblical homilies had greater utility as tools for teaching and preaching. Lastly, this article highlights the fact that the most widely copied Greek church father in early medieval Europe was also the most notorious and suspect thinker in the eastern church: Origen of Alexandria, whose skill as an author of biblical commentaries outweighed his notoriety as a condemned theologian in the eyes of western monks.
In the Aragonese province of the Templars, as elsewhere in the West, it was the practice for brothers to be placed in charge of sections of a convent’s lands, thus creating sub-commanderies. Those appointed usually held office for only short terms and were usually brother sergeants. But there was no attempt to establish a uniform system: some convents had many more sub-commanderies than others; some sub-commanderies had only a brief existence, while others can be traced over long periods; the buildings in which they were based varied widely (only a few had chapels), as did the numbers of brothers and non-Templars residing in them; and the powers exercised by sub-commanders appear not always to have been the same.
