Religious Intensification (1000 – 1300)

Religious Intensification (1000 – 1300)

• Monastic reform• Popular piety• New orders

Let’s keep an eye on new forms of community – why and how they gather, who’s in and who’s out

Themes

Inside and OutsideCommercial MattersGatherings and GroupingsHierarchy and AuthorityInstitutionalizing ideals, Idealizing institutions.

Paradox #1

• Church attempt to distinguish clerical life from lay life actually prompts others to blur the boundaries

Paradox #2

• The decision to follow apostolic model of poverty, preaching, and dedication to the Christian life was not always appreciated by the Church

Paradox #3

• Women could serve as examples of both dangerous strength and dangerous weakness, sometimes in the same example (the ‘other’ to celibate priestly authority).

Paradox #4

• Devotion to an increasingly humanized and loving God is accompanied by increasing persecution and fear of others.

Paradox #5

• Devotion to an increasingly humanized and loving God is accompanied by increasing certainty in the power of evil (the devil).

Monastic Reform and Foundations

Listen to these passages from the foundation document of Cluny

(910)

Abbey of Cluny

• Founded by Count William I of Aquitaine in 909/910

• Specifically released from secular interference

• Creates a large, federated order in which “daughter” monasteries are subject to the Abbot of Cluny – yet another new communal form!

Cluniac Monasteries (red dots)

Why were Cluniacs replaced with new reformers in the 11th/12th centuries?

What features characterized the Cistercian movement (11th/12th)?

St. Bernard of Clairvaux(1090 – 1153)

• French abbot, mystic, and primary builder of reforming Cistercian order

• Dedicated to Virgin Mary

• Powerful preacher who urged participation in the 2nd crusade

• Canonized in 1174

Cistercian Organization• Daughter houses (filiations)

• Annual visitationsfrom the head of the order

• Annual meetings of abbots (general chapters)

• Creates strong, centralized administrative structure under papal authority

Cistercian Monasteries (green dots)

Era of Gregorian Reform tied with era of monastic reform!

(intensification of moral standards)

What does Karras mean by celibacy as an ‘orientation’?

Devotion to Virgin Mary

How did the lives of medieval nuns differ from those of priests?

Why has the history of religious women taken so long to emerge?

Hildegard of Bingen (1078-1179)

Medieval Europe was influenced by not dominated by the

institutional Church

What beliefs and practices characterized popular Christianity in

the central medieval west? (c.1000 – 1300)

A Sermon For Children and Young People

Saints and Relics: Joinings of Heaven and Earth

On the one hand is the theoretical clarity of black and white:

hierarchical, proper doctrine re: joinings of heaven and earth. . .

And on the other is the practical interconnectedness of life & power:

Prayers, charms, rituals, healing:example…

• “Thus I adjure you, O speck, by the living God and the holy God, to disappear from the eyes of the servant of God N., whether you are black, red, or white. May Christ make you go away. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Remedy for Epilepsy

• “put a deerskin strap around the patient’s neck while they are having a seizure then one ‘binds’ the sickness to the strap “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and finally one buries the strap along with a dead man. The sickness is transferred to the strap and then to the realm of the dead where it can harm no one living.”

Pilgrimage Routes: new communities via movement

What historical information does Abbot Suger’s account reveal to us?

Growing emphasis on devotion to Mary and human Jesus. . .

Growing emphasis on devotion to Mary and human Jesus…

And yet an encounter with demons becomes equally plausible…