Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies

Textual and archaeological evidence show that in medieval monasteries keys signified status and responsibility, mediated spatial boundaries, and featured in rituals that defined communal life. Both a functional domestic object and a powerful symbol of revelation, penance, and chastity, the key moved easily between the physical and spiritual realms, serving as a conduit for divine power and a prop in the theatre of monastic virtue. A closer look at the key as object and symbol offers a new means of unlocking monastic concerns with poverty and enclosure, as revealed in rules, customaries, and hagiography. More broadly, this study calls attention to the distinctively exegetical nature of medieval monastic material culture, in which even seemingly mundane objects were potential vessels for the sacred.

The early eleventh-century Miraculorum sancti Maioli libri duo narrated accounts of more than four dozen miracles that took place at the shrine of Maiolus of Cluny in the town of Souvigny, where the abbot died in 994. This article examines the evidence of this little-known source to reconstruct the social life of a popular pilgrimage destination at the turn of the first millennium. It presents a profile of the kinds of people who visited Maiolus’s tomb, including their names, genders, and occupations. Next, it analyses the maladies for which these pilgrims sought relief through the healing power of the saint. Finally, it explores the social networks that facilitated the movement of pilgrims with motor and sensory disabilities from their homes to the abbot’s shrine.

From the end of Antiquity to the early twelfth century, a dozen Benedictine monasteries were founded in the ancient diocese of Tours. Most of these establishments are in a ruined state today, but a diachronic and multi-source approach enables a reconstruction of the monastic topography during medieval times. The first part of this article focuses on the organization of the monastic buildings, which are arranged around the cloister square, and the cloister ambulatories. The second part examines in detail the functional aspects of the monastic buildings, using mainly archaeological and iconographical sources. The analysis of the similarities and differences between settlements provides useful elements to identify previously unknown topographical elements and to highlight modifications carried out during the modern period.

This article outlines recent work to edit the thirteenth-century cartulary of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, Lincolnshire, and highlights the manuscript’s potential as a case study for deeper understandings of cartulary compilation. Adopting new approaches to cartulary studies, it outlines the striking method and circumstances of the cartulary’s compilation in 1259–1260 and its extensive additions c. 1310. Instead of beginning a codex from scratch, a compiler-scribe drew together and radically expanded a suite of cartulary sections already begun in earlier decades by multiple scribes. The article also examines in depth the specific landscape and patronal contexts which catalysed archival rationalization and what this reveals about the abbey’s interaction with its locale. The cartulary confirms hunting as a major influence on Kirkstead’s development, though not in a typically combative way as evidenced elsewhere and reveals the abbey’s important part in the evolution of Tattershall Chase. The case of Kirkstead indicates how the evolution of a Cistercian landscape proceeded in lockstep with the development of its archive and how cartularization was a process rather than a moment in a house’s archival history.

This article analyses the importance of saints associated with the Anglo-Saxon period monastery at Whitby for the identity and status of the later Benedictine abbey there. Using a wide range of documentary, architectural, artefactual, archaeological, and liturgical evidence, it is argued that the monks used the relics and cults of Anglo-Saxon saints, especially Hilda and Begu, to confer legitimacy upon and identity to their abbey. Appendices provide a translation of and a synthesis of the main liturgical sources.

Eton MS 123 is one of two parent manuscripts of the collection of Flores historiarum manuscripts dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Henry Luard’s assumption that it was written at Merton Priory has been refuted, and it seems likely to have originated from Westminster Abbey; when and how it came to Merton adds to our understanding of inter-monastic relations in the London area during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

The Order of Saint Lazarus was established as a monastic hospitaller order outside the walls of Jerusalem after the First Crusade. In later decades, it augmented its role by adopting a military element. To help the Order with its work, it was gifted land holdings and benefices throughout Christian Europe. After the Christian forces were expelled from the Outremer, the Order chose to settle its motherhouse in Boigny in France with regional daughter houses in Burton Lazars in England, Capua in the kingdom of Naples, Strigonia in Hungary, and Seedorf in Switzerland. The political turmoil and conflicts between the various European rulers and the kingdom of France brought about discord between the regional daughter houses and the motherhouse. This article engages with the corpus of archival sources to scrutinize the rivalry that emerged between the daughter house at Burton Lazars and the mother house at Boigny in the light of the Hundred Years’ War that arose between the ruling houses of England and France. To ensure that the English house retained its properties and to protect it from having them confiscated, the English Lazarites during the mid-fourteenth century started to distance themselves from the French mother house, a process that was to lead to full independence, making them subservient only to the Holy See and the English crown.