This volume is filled with studies not of Cistercians or Cluniacs, but of those other reform groups often cast in the shade by the dominant trajectory of medieval monastic history. The first article is by Robert L. J. Shaw: “The French Celestine ‘Network’ (c. 1350–1450): Cross-Order and Lay Collaboration in Late Medieval Monastic Reform” (33–63), which begins with the monastic congregation surrounding the hermit Peter of Morrone who became Pope Celestine V. The author then turns to Celestine ties to the followers of Saint Colette, to the Carthusians, and to Jean Gerson. As he concludes, “The varied origins and the more divisive aspects of these rigorist reformers cannot be ignored . . .” (54).
Arthur Panier, “Sainte-Croix-sous-Offémont: An Archaeological and Architectural Perspective on the Celestine Order” (65–97), begins with several 1915 photos of the ruins when they served as an auxiliary horse stable for the French forces. Sainte-Croix, situated on property belonging to the family of Nesle, its earliest patrons, was located northwest of Paris in the modern-day department of the Oise and in the diocese of Soissons. Notable is its north-facing cloister. For such Celestines, the isolated cells reflect a compromise between eremitical isolation and Benedictine community.
Susan Wade, in “The Illumination of the Eye, and the Rhetoric of Sanctity and Contemplative Prayer in the Early to Central Middle Ages” (99–125), discusses the miraculous illumination of the blind in medieval hagiography. Specifics come from the cult of Saint-Ursmer, practiced in a secondary, collegiate church on the hill above the larger church of Saint-Pierre de Lobbes.
Kyle Killian, “Traditional Benedictine Monasteries in the Archdiocese of Reims: A Spatial Analytic Approach” (127–159), examines documents revealed in B.N. MS Latin 2677, fols. 83v-84r, which show that in 1131, a gathering in Reims of twenty-one reformed-minded Benedictine abbots established a prayer society among themselves. In figure 2 Killian presents a map of those Benedictine abbeys in the 1131 document, then extends his spatial analysis in figures 3, 4, and 5 to include mean coordinates, cathedrals, and groupings. Maps showing Cistercian or Premonstratensian foundations in the same area by circa 1200 may be useful, but those for before 1131 and before 1150 distort what we know about the dates of those foundations.
Eric Gustafson, “Camaldolese and Vallombrosan: Architecture and Identity in Two Italian Reform Orders” (161–208), maps these monasteries in Tuscany and comments on their shared single-nave church architecture. The Camaldolese's primary concern was the practice of interior devotion, rather than the mass or the hours. Vallombrosans were more concerned with a life of reforming preaching, for instance against simony. The Vallombrosans came to agree more and more on the practice of caring for strangers and travelers, and to be bound by a “chain of charity” that linked one house to another and all members equal to one another. The architecture of the Camaldolese and Vallombrosans served as a model for later reformers north of the Alps, a prequel to the lives of “others.”
Erica Kinias, “Reconstructing an Order: The Architecture of Isabelle of France's Abbey at Longchamp” (211–245), includes an inventory of Primary Pictorial Sources of the Abbey of Longchamp (230–231). Beginning with a discussion of the establishment of the Enclosed Sisters Minors as the nuns of Longchamp were called, Kinias also confronts some of the assertions about Isabelle's mother, Blanche of Castile's architecture. For instance, Gajewsky has argued that the contrasts among Blanche's constructions at Le Lys, Royaumont, and Maubuisson reflect a “desire for variety.” Does Longchamp exhibit a comparable gesture of “simplified sophistication?” This is excessively complicated. Why not agree that sources of funds varied? At Maubuisson, Blanche's first foundation for nuns near the royal palace at Pontoise (not Pontpoint), and at Royaumont, built for her son's Cistercian monks, there was little curb on expenditures. By the time Blanche began her second foundation for Cistercian nuns at le Lys, which was dedicated in 1248 concomitantly with Louis IX's departure on his first crusade, not only was the king less tolerant of extravagant expenditures by his mother, but Cistercian abbots were urging restraint. Support for Longchamp may have been similarly restrained, with some royal grants near the abbey site on the northwest edge of Paris, as well as income from loads of wood at Compiegne, far from the abbey site. Overall this is an astute study of the creation of a new order when no new orders were to have been made.
Laura Chilson Parks, “Overlapping Space and Temporal Access in the Chartreuse de Champmol” (247–268), challenges the notion that the presence of the laity undermined the seclusion of the order's monks. Built just outside Dijon for the duke and duchess of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (1342–1404) and Margaret of Flanders (1350–1405), the complex is filled with art treasures, like the Well of Moses, and eventually the tomb of Philip the Bold, and the tomb figures known as “The Mourners” seen in the U.S. in spring 2010. Chilson-Parks argues that careful organization of space allowed an the interlaced, but not overlapping, use of pathways that created a rhythm of access between different populations.
Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, the editors, contribute the next to last article in the volume, “Hermits in the Forest: Western France and the Architecture of Monastic Reform” (271–341). Their analysis starts with the wandering preacher/hermits, founders of new communities—communities that became in many cases new congregations, often with women at their heads. There is extensive discussion and comparison of the architecture for all the abbeys they cite. Their analysis does not include Savigny, and their work on Tiron overlaps somewhat with that of Thompson and Cline. As for their discussion of Fontevraud, they have not included he two volumes of the Grand Cartulaire de Fontevraud (ed. Jean Marc Bienvenu, Poitiers: 2000 and 2005), which would have identified founder Hersende of Montsoreau as widow of William of Montsoreau, as well as sister of count Hubert of Champagne.
Kathleen Thompson, “The Abbey of Tiron in the Late Middle Ages: The Development of a New Monastic Order” (343–368), is a fitting final article. After discussion of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the Hundred Years’ War, Thompson turns to an analysis of the disruption and recovery of the fifteenth century with illustrations of seals and tombs. She ends with an illustration of an earlier abbatial crozier found in 1842.
Overall, the volume complements the more usual treatments of monasticism in the central Middle Ages. This is a work well worth the massive efforts that saw it to completion. It has changed our view of medieval monasticism. Classic studies on medieval monasticism will need to take notice—as will our lectures. Bravo to all.
