The articles in this volume deal with the history of the abbey of Cluny, both its relations with the outside world and its internal organisation and spirituality, from its foundation in 910 until the end of the twelfth century. After an opening article on the early history of Cluny, relating it to previous monasticism and the monastic world of the tenth century, there are a group of articles on how monks were admitted to Cluny, how they were organised, what they did, and on the monastery’s...

Medieval Monasticism is a bibliography meant as a guide to medieval monasticism, giving direction to the most important works in the subject and is prepared by an expert in the field, Dr. Constable. The bibliography has three aims: it meant to aid students who are relatively new to the area of study, to guide more advanced readers in a subject where they have had little formal training, and to assist new libraries in forming a basic collection in the subject presented.

Collected Studies CS1064This collection of Giles Constable's key articles on medieval monastic and ecclesiastical history provides nothing less than a comprehensive overview of research in the field. The book provides an insight into monastic life in the Middle Ages - from Germany to Normandy and from England to Sicily.

Collected Studies CS1065We assume that we have a clear understanding of how people in the Middle Ages thought and which attitudes they struck but in reality this is a subject of enormous complexity of which conclusions can only be drawn via painstaking archival research and decades of study. Giles Constable has spent a career analysing these forces and impulses and this new collection draws together his major findings on a host of topics including frontiers, metaphors, religious li...

Crusading in the twelfth century was less a series of discrete events than a manifestation of an endemic phenomenon that touched almost every aspect of life at that time. The defense of Christendom and the recovery of the Holy Land were widely-shared objectives. Thousands of men, and not a few women, participated in the crusades, including not only those who took the cross but many others who shared the costs and losses, as well as the triumphs of the crusaders. This volume contains not a ...

This book surveys the full panorama of ten centuries of Christian monastic life. It moves from the deserts of Egypt and the Frankish monasteries of early medieval Europe to the religious ruptures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the reforms of the later Middle Ages. Throughout that story the book balances a rich sense of detail with a broader synthetic view. It presents the history of religious life and its orders as a complex braid woven from multiple strands: individual and comm...

The abbey of Bec was founded in the eleventh century and was one of the best-known and most influential monasteries in Normandy. Celebrated for its high standard of religious life and its intellectual activity, Bec also had an exceptional degree of institutional independence.The three treatises collected and translated in this volume - Tractatus de professionibus monachorum ('The Profession of Monks'), De professionibus abbatum ('The Profession of Abbots'), and

To obtain sacred relics, medieval monks plundered tombs, avaricious merchants raided churches, and relic-mongers scoured the Roman catacombs. In a revised edition of Furta Sacra, Patrick Geary considers the social and cultural context for these acts, asking how the relics were perceived and why the thefts met with the approval of medieval Christians.

On 31 May 1310, at the Place de Grève in Paris, the Dominican inquisitor William of Paris read out a sentence that declared Marguerite “called Porete,” a beguine from Hainault, to be a relapsed heretic, released her to secular authority for punishment, and ordered that all copies of a book she had written be confiscated. William next consigned Guiard of Cressonessart, an apocalyptic activist in the tradition of Joachim of Fiore and a would-be defender of Marguerite, to perpetual imprisonme...

Ivo of Chartres was one of the most learned scholars of his time, a powerful bishop and a major figure in the so-called 'Investiture Contest'. Christof Rolker here offers a major new study of Ivo, his works and the role he played in the intellectual, religious and political culture of medieval Europe around 1100 AD. Comparing Ivo's extensive correspondence to the contemporary canon law collections attributed to him, Dr Rolker provides a new interpretation of their authorship. Contrary to c...

A new edition of the "brilliantly original and highly sophisticated" study of saint worship after the fall of the Roman Empire ( Library Journal).In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the...

"An indispensable point of departure for anyone interested in the cult of the saints in the Middle Ages." —Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of BooksFrom its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant...