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 uniformes de maisons de chanoines, chanoinesses, moines bénédictins et moniales bénédictines ; deuxièmement, que les communautés dans chacune de ces cohortes devaient suivre à la lettre leurs règles et les décrets associés ; troisièmement, que la renovatio a entièrement modifié la perception de ces règles et décrets ; enfin, que ces trois facteurs ont déterminé le programme des réformes du xe siècle.

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 conduct and attitudes of a much larger monastic cohort. Furthermore, comparison of its argument with evidence about the context and with a number of polemical statements regarding the relations between bishops and monastic leaders since the 990s indicates that the author's focus was on cautioning against abbots' hypocrisy rather than against a programmatic reform.

Abstract This chapter widens the Anglo-Flemish literary relationship by setting the poems written by the monks of St Peter’s at Ghent for the mortuary roll of Abbess Matilda of Ste-Trinité at Caen (Normandy) in an Anglo-French literary landscape. It traces English influence in some of the Ghent poems and emphasises the multilingual oral context of the mortuary roll-bearer’s task by visiting more than 250 cross-Channel monasteries for a mission to collect commemorative verses for the recently deceased Norman abbess.

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 the other) monasteries of contemplative monks or nuns; that each cohort was supposed to literally follow the lawmakers' written decrees; that the decrees led to a lasting paradigm shift in the perception of normative commentaries on religious community life; and that this triple focus set the agenda for subsequent reform efforts in the tenth century.

This collection of studies investigates how people of the 10th to early 12th century experienced and represented processes of intentional change in the Church, and what the consequences are of modern scholars’ reliance on ‘reform’ to describe and interpret these processes. In 11 thematic chapters it takes stock of the current state of research and offers suggestions to deepen our understanding of the ideological, institutional, and cultural dynamics at play. Contributors are Julia Barrow, Robert F. Berkhofer III, Gordon Blennemann, Katy Cubitt, Nicolangelo D'Acunto, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Ludger Körntgen, Rutger Kramer, Brigitte Meijns, Diane Reilly, Rachel Stone, and Steven Vanderputten.

In the second half of the 1780s, more than thirty members of the Benedictine Congregation of Saint-Vanne and Saint-Hydulphe contributed to the project of the Cabinet des Chartes (led by director Jacob-Nicolas Moreau) to assemble a massive collection of copied charters pertaining to the medieval history of France. While their charter transcriptions remain an invaluable resource for historians, their preserved correspondence with the Cabinet’s staff is similarly invaluable because it sheds light on the mechanics of their work for that institution. Previous studies have considered these letters strictly from a top-down perspective, with a view on detailing the obstacles faced by Moreau in trying to give the Cabinet’s project a second wind. In contrast there has been little interest in looking at the Cabinet’s letter collection and other relevant documentation from a bottom-up, or biographical perspective, despite the fact that this would help us understand how the nature and scope of their work for the Cabinet was informed by their other activities and their personal situation. In order to illustrate the relevance of this biographical perspective, this paper takes the case of Nicolas-Hilaire (de) Puibusque (1737-89), whose work as an archivist (and, arguably, a historiographer) at Bouxières abbey shaped both his relationship with Moreau and the selection of documents he submitted to the Cabinet. Evidence from the mid-to-later 1780s also reveals that Puibusque had a great deal more to gain, financially but arguably also intellectually, from his collaboration with local patrons in the Lorraine area than from his distant and increasingly fraught relationship with the Cabinet staff.

Over the last two decades, scholars have made a great deal of progress in trying to understand how tenth- and eleventh-century authors represented intentional change in religious settings. Their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors saw no issue with referring to such changes as ‘reforms’, and even today the term remains firmly embedded in the discourse of specialist publications. However, recent studies have argued that its current use reflects a semantic shift that took place in the 1600s. As such, it implies a programmatic logic, forward-looking dynamic, and ideological cohesiveness, all three of which are features that sit uncomfortably with the ‘messy’ reality that emerges from the primary evidence. Not only that, but the early modern conceptualization of reform is a mismatch with the way in which high medieval people perceived religious change, what they expected from it, and how they wrote about it. In response to this greater semantic awareness, specialists have become a great deal more focused on answering questions about the literary traditions and ideological trends that inspired the language of restoration and renewal in tenth- and eleventh-century sources. The narrative tropes used in these sources to describe real-life processes of spiritual and institutional change have likewise been subject to a new scrutiny. The same is true of the degree to which this language and these tropes accurately captured these complex and incremental phenomena.

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 legitimise the members’ current status and privileges, and prominent scholars such as Jean Mabillon whose sole aim was to present a truthful account of the past. Through a case study of the abbey of Remiremont it shows that local commentators gained a nuanced understanding of that community's past and present identities, while Mabillon and others relied on second-hand arguments and flawed methods to make a case for a regular reform.

A former cleric at Reims cathedral, Richard rose to prominence as a monastic leader from 1004 onwards. His legacy has been the subject of numerous conflicting interpretations, the most influential of which sees him as a major proponent of monastic reform in Lotharingia. As the abbot of Saint-Vanne in Verdun, he elevated this minor institution to a position of regional prominence, architecturally, spiritually, and in terms of its cultic appeal. From 1008 Richard put his services at the disposal of a wide-ranging network of ecclesiastical and lay rulers, who relied on his charismatic appeal, organisational talent, and connections to initiate locally bred agendas of reform in a dozen institutions across the region. Later he became more focused on adopting an apostolic persona modelled after the life of Christ, offering his services to establish mutually beneficial relations between religious groups and the secular world. A man who commanded great respect with his lay and religious audiences, his contemporaries remembered Richard not so much as a selfless agent of institutional or disciplinary reform, but rather as a charismatic virtuoso, promoting conversion to all cohorts of society.

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 high Middle Ages. Written by international experts representing a range of academic disciplines, the contributions to this volume examine the rich textual and material sources for Cluny’s history, offering not only a thorough introduction to the distinctive character of Cluniac monasticism in the Middle Ages, but also the lineaments of a detailed research agenda for the next generation of historians. Contributors are: Isabelle Rosé, Steven Vanderputten, Marc Saurette, Denyse Riche, Susan Boynton, Anne Baud, Sébastien Barret, Robert Berkhofer III, Isabelle Cochelin, Michael Hänchen, Gert Melville, Eliana Magnani, Constance B. Bouchard, Benjamin Pohl, and Scott G. Bruce.

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 establish a comprehension of Thierry’s written output in much sharper contour than was hitherto possible. And it also relies on the new evidence yielded by this analysis to reconstruct in greater detail than before Thierry’s biographical and literary trajectory, and to problematize his exceptionally mobile status, his unusual authorial profile, and the scope and contents of his works in light of the shifting contexts and commissioners that nourished his activities as an author. In doing all these things, this study raises new questions about authorship and literary networks in the decades on either side of the year 1000, and offers a new interdisciplinary approach to reconstructing these realities.

To the end of the Life of Deodalus (the 1040s hagiography of the 7th-century founder of the Vosges collegial chapter of Saint-Die) an anonymous author added a paragraph stating that the Life had been read aloud at a synod in Rome in early April 1049 and duly endorsed by Pope Leo IX on the same occasion. While scholars have long suspected a forgery, the paragraph emerges from the reconstruction in this paper as a rare testimony to how Provost Waldradus implemented a strategy of self-defence against its lay and clerical interlocuters, seeking the emperor and pope's support of that strategy in a variety of ways. Short-term aims were addressed in requests for major privileges; and long-term ones were discretely embedded in the Life and subsequently submitted to the pope. Leo's response as described in the added para. graph reveals his sympathies regarding the canons' objectives. But arguably it is also linked to the ideological context in which the text and related ones that were created at Saint-Die's neighbour institution of Moyenmoutier emerged and subsequently circulated in reformist circles.