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At present specialists’ understanding of how unaffiliated communities of regular canons responded to societal, institutional, and ideological trends during the Long Twelfth Century is fragmentary at best. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that a re-examination of their extant normative output has the potential to yield notable evidence of this response and the ways in which the members of individual communities committed it to memory. It does so through a re-examination of the so-called Rule of Hérival, which is part foundation narrative, part customary, and part set of congregational statutes relating to a small priory in the Vosges region of present-day France. Traditional scholarly accounts interpreted the text as a mid-twelfth-century attempt by the second prior, Constantine, to complement St Augustine’s rule for clerics. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the extant version contains a mid-thirteenth-century redaction of Constantine’s original Rule as well as the traces of up to four subsequent stages of additions and redactions. As such it represents a stratigraphic account of multiple incarnations of the Hérival community and the corresponding narratives of institutional, spiritual, and communal identity between the 1120s and the 1240s.
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