Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

INTRODUCTION
In 1942, Dom Philibert Schmitz published his comprehensive history of the
Benedictine order. 1 Volumes I to VI covered men; volume I discussed the Benedictine
order prior to 1200. The last volume, VII, was devoted to the study of female
Benedictines. Such a ‘lop-sided history’ has since been balanced by many articles and
monographs on the contributions of women to the monastic achievements of the middle
ages; indeed, a thesis written perhaps only thirty years ago would not have needed to
discuss these works at any length, as this one is fortunately in a position to. 2
However, to a great extent the writing of the history of dedicated women religious
(and here, the use of the word ‘monastic’ is deliberately not used) remains largely as an
offshoot of that of male religious. A full-scale synthesis of both male and female
religious experience in the early middle ages, privileging neither one nor the other,
remains to be written. The aim of this study is to signal the direction that such a study
might take. Using four key approaches, the historiographical norms of female dedicated
life are overturned, to be replaced by a more nuanced reading of the subject.
The first of these is to interrogate what is meant by ‘monasticism’, or ‘monastic
life’, or quite simply by the word ‘monastery’. How, exactly, should this institution be
defined? It is the contention of this study that the term ‘monasticism’ cannot be used as a
catch-all term, or as a synonym for ‘dedicated life’ in the early middle ages. The variety
of dedicated experience was simply too wide. A very loose definition of a monastery
might be as follows: a group – large or small, and in the case of women’s communities in
the early middle ages, it was unlikely to be the former – of women or men (or in the case
of double monasteries, groups of both), living together over a period of some years, if not
decades or generations, whose intention in so doing was to live a life dedicated to the
service of God. Such a group would inhabit a fixed property, with the economic and legal
1 P. Schmitz, Histoire de l’Ordre de Saint Benoît 7 vols. (Maredsous, 1942)
2 The phrase ‘lop-sided history’ is misquoted from its original context: D. Thom, ‘A Lop-Sided View:
Feminist History or the History of Women?’, in K. Campbell (ed.) Critical Feminism (Buckingham, 1992),
25-51.
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