Though Ecclesiastes has long admonished us that there is "nothing new under the sun," historians continue their quest for beginnings, for origins and etiologies, for what seems to have been "new." And for scholars of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, what Charles Homer Haskins once dubbed, provocatively for his day, the "Renaissance" of the 12th century remains a vital field of inquiry. For a century now we have worked on all of the forces - religious, cultural, social, economic, political - that we now see as constituting the "takeoff" of Western Europe after 1100, and we continue to do so, even as we recast the story into a "long" 12th century extending from the late 11th to the early 13th. [1]

This volume's essays, originally presented at a conference held at Scheyern abbey in 2022 and part of a wider collaboration between the Saxon and Heidelberg Academies of Sciences, offer another contribution to that effort.

The essays focus on one of the 12th century's most venerable settings and scenes: the religious and cultural energies of reform and renewal concentrated in medieval religious houses and orders. They reframe that traditional story here by thinking of monasteries as "laboratories of innovation." They take as a given all that we recognize in the 12th century as innovative, in the realms of theology and spirituality, statutory law and institutional structures, liturgy and more. Within that broad frame, they focus not on what might be taken as "new" as such, but rather on questions of process and cultural mechanics, on how (in the words of the coeditors' preface), "the cogs of process meshed together at the right time, like the mechanism of a fine Swiss watch" to foster innovation. The analysis is intentionally comparative, ranging across religious life's orders and settings to offer an analysis of "how, and in which systemic contexts, innovations functioned ... why and how they emerged, and how they were promoted, supported, communicated, slowed down, or even foreclosed."

The volume breaks its larger theme into four specific points of focus. Part 1 focuses on themes of media and communication, and thus on "how the new was articulated, conveyed, or suppressed by medieval actors" in rhetorics of novelty, in writing and texts, images and architectural spaces. Part 2 explores the reconfiguration of longstanding tensions between individual and community. Part 3 offers a series of case studies focused on exemplary fields that seemingly concentrate the workings at stake in the larger project: in the realms of liturgy, of law, and of economic thought and practice. And Part 4, perhaps the volume's most conceptually challenging, explores innovation within the "cultural system" of religious life - that is, how forces of innovation both reflected and shaped the new institutional grid of monasteries, congregations, and orders that are so prominent a feature of the era.

It is difficult in a short review to properly survey the full range of contributions to this volume. What might be noted, however briefly, is how the collection as a whole (re)engages, in creative and interdisciplinary ways, longstanding questions of continuity and change, and also how it invites more work on the ruptures, limits, and costs of innovation. Writing and literacy, law, and economic change, central to any account of the era, all receive fresh treatment here, with religious and their orders as the cultural protagonists. Mirko Breitenstein's essay, for example, traces how writing and the written word, although central of course to monastic life from early on, in the 12th century became a crucial catalyst for an innovative long-term dynamic of creating meaning. Above all through the compilation, reading, and internalization of parenetic texts like the De interiore domo and the Liber conscientiae, 12th century religious created a culture of reading, and of reading the "self," that shaped European culture for generations after.

Gert Melville emphasizes how the spirit of liberty so important to 12th century religious life informed an innovative culture of written law and statute with similarly long-term consequences. Focusing on the Cistercians, he argues for the way in which that order broke free of custom, created and then sustained a new organizational regime whose carefully crafted (and reversible) orders, commands, and prohibitions were oriented toward the future. The result was a "spectacular beginning of a new chapter not only in the history of the monastic world, but of European culture" (237). And if scholarship has long credited the orders with technological innovations crucial to economic change, Jens Röhrkasten's essay highlights matters of process: how monastic discipline and hierarchy, written accounts and regulations, visitation, and so on, along with a culture of adaptation and flexibility, helped religious houses navigate a broad range of economic challenges in countless locales across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Other essays rightfully serve as a caution against reading the innovations of the era too strongly through a valorizing lens. Fiona Griffiths, for example, exposes the paradoxical way in which a seemingly innovative 12th century attitude toward women in fact took shape as a conservative embrace of traditional ideals. Just as Paul wrote in Galatians (3:28) that in Christ there was "neither male nor female," charismatics like Robert of Arbrissel and others famously seemed to embrace a model of religious life that, in the name of spiritual equality and liberty, ignored or effaced the differences between women and men. Griffiths complicates that story with an analysis of the various ways that reform discourses in fact highlighted and reinscribed sexual difference. Religious men saw religious women explicitly as brides, elevated them and served them as men serving women who had attained a more intimate relationship with Christ.

In a thematically similar way, Stephen Vanderputten argues, without denying crucial dynamics of innovation for this period, that our analysis must also look backwards, to see "how various so-called innovations that were previously regarded as paradigm-shifting ruptures in monastic tradition were actually part of a long and cumulative process that was determined by both human agency and circumstances" (291). Both through "top-down" initiatives to write or rewrite normative regimes anew, for example, or more grassroots efforts focused on liturgy, hagiography, building programs, and so on, many of the religious innovations we take as hallmarks of the 12th century are at work, in this analysis, well before 1100.

Collectively these essays will be of interest to a number of audiences. Scholars of religious life, of course, will find in them a richly interdisciplinary purchase on a range of familiar themes. More broadly, scholars of the 12th century generally may find the volume useful as a complement to so many competing visions. If Anglophone medievalists, for example, have for some time tended to pursue for this period stories of lay and women's piety, or a more ominously of predatory lordship and persecution, these essays offer a counterweight, one that reminds us of all that the more institutional story of religious life and reform might yet reveal. And in all events, the old challenge remains: How do we locate and think about what may or may not have been "new," or perhaps not so new, in this seemingly pivotal era? And how do we reconcile so many competing and even contradictory visions of all of the changes?

For any number of reasons - institutional, financial, cultural, political - our post-pandemic world is one that seems to cast an increasingly suspicious eye on traditional academic conferences. And that is to say nothing of the publication of conference proceedings, where financial challenges alone threaten to drive that venerable tradition to extinction. In such an environment, a book like this is all the more welcome. Its thematic focus is sharp, its analytical framework rigorous, and its standards of scholarship uniformly high. It might also be said this book, from its cover image to the generous number of colored plates that adorn many of its essays, is simply a beautiful one. For all of these reasons, it offers a reminder of what institutional and scholarly collaboration, generous funding, and the strong intellectual leadership of diligent conference organizers and demanding editors can still achieve.

Note:

[1] Thomas F. X. Noble / John H Van Engen (eds.): European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, Notre Dame 2012.

James D. Mixson