Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

with matters affecting the monastery itself. It is interesting that neither of the texts by
Caesaria the Younger, the second abbess, seem to have been preserved by St John itself,
although of course the vagaries of time, wars and Revolution may account for this
apparently odd omission. 151
Conclusion
This chapter has shown that through study of the transmission of the manuscripts
of the monastic works of Caesarius of Arles, immensely important insights can be gained
into the contexts of religious life in which they circulated. This is the study of
manuscripts as artifacts in themselves, rather than merely as the vehicles of information.
Two main points have emerged from the discussion. Firstly, a body of Caesarian texts
circulated, separately to the Regula virginum, which contained the ethos of Caesarius’
conception of dedicated life for women. This ‘package’ of texts emerged at some time in
the eighth century and circulated until at least the twelfth; a time span delimited by a
combination of manuscript and textual evidence. This suggests the popularity of the
works of Caesarius. The separate patterns of manuscript dissemination further suggest
that the ‘booklet’ of Caesarian texts may have had a different clientèle from that of the
rule itself. Could this be the codicological reflection of different groups – with possibly
different needs from their spiritual and normative texts – that may be detectable through
other sources? The following chapter will focus on the possibilities of answering this
question. The second point to emerge from this chapter demands that a still broader view
of early medieval religious life is taken in terms of gender. The fact that the texts
Caesarius composed for nuns enjoyed a large and well-attested circulation among male
communities is deeply significant. There was no gender bar, here, between a text
considered suitable for a dedicated woman to read and a text that could be provided for
dedicated men. This suggests that the ideologies of female and male dedicated life were
similar. This, too, will be considered further in the following chapter. In sum, this chapter
151 The history and cartulary of the monastery of St-Césaire (as it had become), written by Melchior Fabre
in 1699, makes no mention of any of Caesaria’s literary output. Arles, Bibl. Munic. Ms. 168.
170