The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West

The Historiography of Medieval Monasticism: Perspectives from Northern Europe

“…Both publications-one a large collective endeavor within The Cambridge History of series and the other a single-authored work-assert how the legacy of the linear model of monastic history that presents the succession of ever more developed forms of monastic and then mendicant orders have been challenged by a vast body of regional, local, and thematic studies that a present much more complex picture. However, the dominance of traditional meta-narratives continues and both the editors and contributors of the CUP volume and Stephen Vanderputten in his textbook call for the development of new, less linear approaches that better reflect the plurality of forms of monasticism in the medieval western-European context (Beach and Cochelin 2020;Vanderputten 2020). The authors and editors do not provide a definition of what that new framework should be, but these publications make a really important step in exploring deep historiographical inheritances that continue to circulate explicitly and implicitly.…”