The 17 essays collected here grew out of a colloquium held February 27-29, 2020, just before COVID-19 made such gatherings problematic. The colloquy was part of the “Collégiales et Monastères de la réforme carolingienne au concile de Trente (816-1563)” project funded by France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche. Interested readers might want to check out the shorthanded Col&Mon website (https://colemon.huma-num.fr/) to get a sense of the overall project, which is described as an investigation in historical geography. The research team set the goal of determining on a diocese-by-diocese basis why some religious communities in France organized themselves as secular canons and why some lived under a monastic rule or as regular canons. The project envisions surveying 1,068 collegiate churches and 2,308 monasteries in France. What makes the case studies gathered in Monde canonial, monde monastique especially interesting is that some of these religious communities, while occupying essentially the same building complexes, switched their statuses from secular or regular canons to monks and vice-versa during their long histories.
As the editors’ Introduction (7-14) points out, the essays aim to avoid a schematic approach to the mutations and conversions of religious life. Changes in status, they advise readers, were more porous than static. As Alain Rauwel put it in the concluding essay in the book, the story of medieval communal life is an histoire fluide. Transitions between one mode of communal life and another and sometimes back again were often drawn out, even for years, rather than brutal(13). The sticking point was often property, owned individually by canons but communally by monks. Personnel also mattered. What to do with canons who did not wish to “convert” to monastic life? Often, they continued to live in the same buildings as the monks, but observed their own practices (including eating meat) until they died. Ambiguity and random circumstances seem to have prevailed in the linked worlds of canons and monks, as the question marks in many of the essays’ titles would suggest.
Michèle Gaillard’s “Les Institutiones de 816 pour les canonici et les sanctimoniales: Aux origines de l’institution canoniale?” (17-30) sets the stage as a prolegomenon to the following essays, most of which center on the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Although inspired by Emperor Louis the Pious, a layman, the 816 institutes for canons and canonesses defined a new way of life for religious communities other than the monastic. Canons needed mobility, needed to go among people to care for their souls. The institutes for women mirrored those of canons with the exception that canonesses were expected to be cloistered and to have limited contact with outsiders. By the eleventh century, the modes of life prescribed in the Carolingian institutes, especially regarding ownership of property and taking of vows, were deemed too lax, and ushered in attempts to reform religious communities by converting them from secular to regular practices.
The sixteen case studies erected on Gaillard’s platform are gathered under three rubrics. Rather than summarize each essay, their titles will provide a sense of their contents, their range, and their historical geography. Under the rubric “Régularisation canoniale: Du succès à l’échec,” Part I includes: Jean-François Boyer, “Canonicalis habitus in monachalem habitum et sanctae religionis uitam mutatur...Bouleversements institutionnels à Saint-Martial de Limoges au printemps 848” (35-50); Jean-Vincent Jourd’heuil, “Sexfontaines, Vignory: Deux collégiales devenues dépendances de Saint-Bénigne de Dijon au XIe siècle” (51-71); Aurélia Bully, “Du palatium à la collégiale Saint-Paul de Besançon: Évolutions institutionelles, transformations monumentales?” (73-96); Manon Durier, “Le monastère de Cellefrouin (Charente): Une communauté canoniale face aux bénédictins de Charroux” (99-115); Anne Massoni, “La résistance des chanoines séculiers à une mutation institutionelle imposée: Sainte-Geneviève de Paris et Saint-Corneille de Compiègne (milieu du XIIe siècle)” (117-138).
Part II, “Acteurs et commanditaires,” presents: Patrice Wahlen, “La régularisation des communautés canoniales par Humbaud, évêque d’Auxerre, au XIIe siècle” (143-150); Hervé Chopin, “Les régularisations d'églises canoniales dans les diocèses de Mâcon, Lyon et ceux de la province de Vienne (2e moitié XIe-XIIe siècle)” (151-167); Vincent Tabbagh, “L’action des évêques dans les mutations des communautés, exemples séquanais et ligériens (Xe-XIIe siècle)” (169-181); Hélène Débax, “La régularisation des chapitres cathédraux dans le sud du royaume de France (XIe-XIIe siècles)” (183-203); Yannick Veyrenche, “Régularisation des chapitres cathédraux et transferts d'églises aux chanoines réguliers dans la vallée du Rhône (XIe-XIIe siècle)” (205-221); Véronique Gazeau, “La Normandie, triomphe du monachisme et résistances canoniales?” (225-245); Paul Chaffenet, “Du particulier au général, des églises aux Églises? Les transferts institutionnels entre collégiales et monastères dans le diocèse de Noyon (Xe-milieu du XII siècle)” (247-272); Thomas Lacomme, “Sécularité et réforme dans le comté de Champagne (XIe-XIIe siècle)” (273-293).
Two essays make up the third part, “Approches Monumentales,” and consider whether changes in status occasioned architectural adaptations: Claude Andrault-Schmitt, “La distinction par l’image architecturale? L’exemple de l’Aquitaine du Nord” (297-321); Christian Sapin and Christian Gensbeitel, “Entre moines et chanoines, regards croisés d’archéologue et d’historien de l’art sur une approche monumentale des établissements communautaires” (323-336).
Although not so designated in the book, Alain Rauwel’s “Pour une histoire fluide de la vie communautaire médiévale. Élements de conclusion” (337-345) serves as an afterword and reflection on the volume’s achievements. All of the book’s essays are underpinned by deep research and supported by some 38 illustrations, maps, drawings, and charts.
A common theme uniting the essays is the extreme variability of conversions from one status to another, from secular canons to regular canons to monastic communities. In some instances, as the titles of the essays and their liberal use of question marks suggest, a great deal of ambiguity and resistance to change hovered over the institutional conversions (Boyer; Bully; Durier; Massoni; Gazeau; Lacomme; Jourd’heuil). Also looming over many of the essays are the religious reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which acted as an accelerant to institutional conversions from secular to regular communities, from what was thought to be a lax way of life to one inspired by an idealized view of the early church and the notion that monks could better serve the needs of the people than seculars (Massoni). The main idea was to get wealth out of religious life, a goal that was only partially achieved when property ownership was replaced by prebends or when conversion to regular life and ownership of personal property continued side-by-side (Débax; Veyrenche).
Less salutary motives also drove transformations in status. Political change and conflict always loomed large. At Dijon, machinations between the local lord and the abbey of Saint-Bénigne rather than religious reform motivated change (Jourd’heuil). The switch from canons to monks at Saint-Martial in Limoges in the ninth century took place against the backdrop of considerable turmoil in Aquitanian politics (Boyer). When the authors and sponsors of institutional changes were bishops, popes, kings and counts, politics and property were never far from the action (Part II: “Acteurs et commanditaires”). In the Rhone valley, the expansion of regular canons might have been a means to extend episcopal administration in the dioceses (Veyrenche). Manon Durier’s evocation of the “contexte féodo-vassalique” (107) of the abbey of Charroux’s acquisitions could apply also to many other places surveyed in Monde canonial, monde monastique. Opportunities for alterations in motivations and aspirations for religious communities could also change as authors and sponsors replaced each other during the sometimes-long processes of institutional realignment. In Champagne (Lacomme), the process took place in stages for nearly a century from before 1049 to1147, while it took about 70 years (1070-1140) in the Rhone valley (Veyrenche) and required the pontificates of six bishops from 1052 to 1167 in Auxerre to complete (Wahlen).
The essays that attempted to link architectural changes to changes in status agreed that evidence of repurposing monuments when liturgical customs and modes of clerical life changed is sparse and difficult to interpret (Andrault-Schmitt; Bully; Sapin and Gensbeitel). As Claude Andrault-Schmitt pointed out, archeological reports do not ask the kinds of questions that interested scholars at the 2020 colloquium (319). Sapin and Gensbeitel did find, however, that access and circulation within buildings adapted to new forms of liturgical practice.
Two essays stand out for the methodological caveats they raise. Paul Chaffenet’s study of 13 institutional transfers in the diocese of Noyon cautioned researchers to adopt a nuanced approach to the evidence since terminology was not consistent and often opaque. What precisely was a cellula or an abbatiola (251-254)? Motivations for change are often multiple and hidden from historians. And, absent documentation, the very chronology of changes in status is unknowable. Alain Rauwel’s afterword also broaches the evolution of vocabulary used to describe communal transfers, which he suggests should be taken with a grain of salt. Documents from the Carolingian and Romanesque periods reveal terminological richness which Rauwel attributes to lexicographical diversity rather than to confusion. If the vocabulary of communal transfers seems more structured in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is because ecclesiastical life was shaped by legal codes based on imperial civil law and may not have reflected reality. Rauwel reminds readers, in a sentence that rings true, that when we speak of institutional transformation, we should keep in mind the power of inertia (340). A change in terms of affiliation may spark no appreciable institutional transformation, not in the order of the divine service, nor in communal relationships, nor in the use of buildings, nor in the carrying out of quotidian tasks.