51 - Sources of Late Medieval Monasticism

Summary

One of the main innovations in monastic life—one that marks a real caesura between the two halves of the Middle Ages—is the explosion of diversitas religionum, that is, the multiplication of the forms of communal regular life. At the start of the eleventh century, monasticism was not uniform, but these differences were not considered to be a defining feature. This was the form of monasticism that the fourteenth-century papacy would later designate the ordo sancti Benedicti. From the eleventh century on, there was growing diversity among religious communities, which later led to the construction of many religious orders with well-defined institutional and legal structures. The most famous example (but also the most innovative) was that of the Cistercian order, which during the first two decades of the twelfth century laid the foundation for a complex organization that was at once decentralized through the system of filiation and firmly unified by the general chapter.