Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies

Female religious foundations in the early medieval period have long been recognized as essential ‘places of power’: physical and symbolic loci through which were created and consolidated the socio-economic prestige of aristocratic family groups, including the royal and imperial dynasties. This was especially true in Italy, where lay founders invested considerable resources in the nunneries, but perhaps even more so through the oblation of women from their family to become nuns there. This article explores a specific case study, that of San Salvatore di Brescia in northern Italy, in the 830s to the 870s. Founded as a ducal, then royal, monastery by Desiderius and Ansa, the last sovereigns of the Lombard kingdom, the abbey witnessed a flourishing period under Emperors Lothar I and Louis II. It then functioned as a government tool for expanding and imposing their authority, through the presence there of their own daughters, and of some women from the highest-ranking aristocracy of both Lombard and Frankish origins. The international dimension of San Salvatore in those years is well attested in its Liber Vitae (a. 856), which commemorates all the nuns, their male relatives and other contemporary personalities bound to them through direct and indirect links of fidelity. This success, argue the authors, was the result of both a bottom- and a top-driven process, through which the Lombard heritage of the abbey and its deep rooting in the local social and political landscape through the native elites, played a fundamental bridging role in connecting the first and the second generation of Frankish imperial officials in Italy with the original Lombard aristocracy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a recently identified campaign of hagiographic writing from the mid-eleventh-century monastery of Remiremont to reconstruct how this female convent positioned itself at a time when clerical resistance to the lifestyle and autonomy of non-Benedictine communities was gaining momentum. In a first stage it looks at the three hagiographies from this campaign and how they reveal a cohesive strategy to drastically review the abbey’s narrative of origins. In a second it reconstructs how their argument fits into Abbess Oda’s (before 1045-1065/70) governance strategy and how that strategy was influenced by historical leadership choices at the nearby male houses of Luxeuil and Lure. And in a final one it considers memories of abbatial agency and discourses of communal identity at ninth- and tenth-century Remiremont, and how these influenced the abbess and her associates. In doing all these things, this study reveals that the abbey’s leadership deployed a multi-faceted strategy to secure Remiremont’s independence, taking ownership of its identity narrative at a critical juncture in its existence.

This article analyses monastic narratives of infirmity through the lens of ‘crip time’, a term that denotes the temporal rhythms associated with and/or made possible by disability. Drawing on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cistercian miracle stories and vitae, the article delineates the boundaries and intersections among multiple time-scapes in monastic communities. Although Cistercian writers sometimes portrayed crip time negatively - as a disruption to spiritual progression - they also saw potential and redemptive value in crip time-scapes. Moreover, crip time could never be fully confined to the monastic infirmary; as this article demonstrates, the temporal rhythms of illness and disability could unfold virtually anywhere in the monastic community, which was to some degree designed to accommodate a range of physical abilities and attributes.

The paper offers a survey of monastic island communities in Medieval Norway, including brief historical descriptions of their foundation, patrons, dissolution, sources, remaining building structures, and - if available - information regarding economic activities and wealth. Far from having been isolated places of retreat, Norwegian island monasteries were situated on ideal landing places, nodal points close to important economic centres of the time. The island locations might be interpreted as advantages for the nuns and monks, in terms of facilitating strategic defence, economic stability, and regular incomes from fishing grounds or customs revenues. No preference for island locations amongst the different orders can be recognized. Nuns and monks, Benedictines, Cistercians, the canons and also the Franciscans are amongst the monastic island dwellers. Halsnøy island seems to have housed for some time the most northern Hospital of the Order of the Holy Spirit (Rome).

Cistercian exempla collections created between c. 1170 and c. 1220 allow us to consider the role of relics in cults intended for Cistercian communities. This article will explore how exempla provide evidence of ideological concerns: how the Order taught novices to think about relics and saints’ cults, and how it attempted to respond to external criticism. These texts also indicate attitudes towards deceased monks and abbots, describing practices that suggest the Cistercians were creating and encouraging their own communities of the sacred through enclosed burial practices. This article argues that relics were important in the Cistercian cult of saints in the twelfth century, though the prominence of relics varied across the collections and over time.

The male body often forms an important part of masculine identity. This certainly applies to medieval clerics of higher orders, who were required to have a complete and unblemished body. Still, dispensations for bodily defects could be given by the Apostolic Penitentiary, provided that the defects posed no hindrance or caused scandal. This study focuses on oral health, and ante-mortem tooth loss, which could affect appearance and speech. A total of 124 individuals, of which 49 were male (including five canons), from the late medieval Augustinian monastery of Skriðuklaustur, Iceland, were examined. Of them, 44.4 per cent had tooth loss, and 12.1 per cent had lost eight or more teeth. The small group of clerics provides evidence of diverse oral health, including extensive tooth loss. We discuss how bodily ideals could have been negotiated in medieval Iceland within the cultural context of how tooth loss was viewed and interpreted.

The abbey of Santa María de Valdediós was founded by King Alfonso IX of León with his wife Berenguela in 1200. After a few decades marked by doubts and instability, the historical evolution of the community was marked by its peripheral location and its flexible hierarchical dependence. This article presents a list of the members of the monastic community based on occurrences recorded in the archive of Valdediós. I analyse the composition of the community, its organization, and its internal hierarchy. Consideration is also given to the way in which the monastery adjusted to the Cistercian model, its evolution, and the notion of familiaritas.

This article examines the apparent practice among monks and regular canons in England before the Dissolution of dropping their family surnames on admission/profession, and adopting instead a new ‘monastic byname’, derived from a place name (toponym) or, by the late fifteenth century onwards, from a saint’s name (hagionym) or a virtue. The article begins by reviewing evidence that this onomastic practice existed and determining how widespread it was. The nature and distribution of the toponymic, hagionymic, and virtue bynames are then examined in turn. The article concludes by considering the underlying reason for the adoption of monastic bynames and argues that this practice served as a means of reflecting symbolically the new monk’s or canon’s separation from lay society, and from his family in particular, and his incorporation into the monastic community.