Late Medieval Monasteries And Their Patrons

Challenges the orthodox view that lay patronage of monasteries dwindled in significance throughout the middle ages.

"Monasticism in Late Medieval England, c.1300-1535 provides the first collection of translated sources on this subject. The volume covers both male and female houses of all orders and sizes, and offers a range of new perspectives on the character and reputation of English monasteries in the later middle ages. The documents, many translated into English for the first time, illuminate every facet of monastic life in late medieval England. The first section surveys the internal affairs of English monasteries, including recruitment, the monastic economy, standards of observance and learning. The second part looks at the relations between monasteries and the world, exploring the monastic contribution to late medieval religion and society and lay attitudes towards monks and nuns in the years leading up to the Dissolution."--Publisher description.

The prominent role of monasteries in the early medieval period is comprehensively explored in this illuminating study of the relations between monasteries and the nobility in Lotharingia throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. It focuses on the evidence from three of the region's greatest abbeys - Gorze, St Maximin, and St Evre - which played a central role in the monastic reform movement. This swept through the region in the 930s and is commonly named after Gorze. Set within the context of the whole social structure and exercise of regional power in the early middle ages, the author demonstrates the vitality and importance of monasteries, focusing on their land transaction as well as their religious roles. He challenges accepted notions of monastic lordship and demonstrates the complexity of the two-way relationships between monasteries and their patrons, relationships which ensured the former a central place in the early medieval landscape.

Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalité - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

A wide ranging survey of the medieval secular college and its context.

This book discusses how secular authorities made use of churches and monasteries in the Low Countries, the German regions and the British Isles during the late medieval period.

This book explores the medieval monastery as symbolic space (locus symbolicus) and looks at forms of self-representation in medieval monastic life. Papers focus on both the transitory nature of organised religious life, which is based on symbols, and the separate identities religious communities developed by using their own specific forms of ritual and symbolisation. Case studies treat the British Isles and the broader European context. Among the key issues explored here are rituals in internal organisation, the symbolic use of space, architecture and art, symbolism in social interactions, and symbolic constructions of the past.

Detailed study of female monasticism in the later middle ages, with particular emphasis on the nuns' importance to the local community.