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The Reformation of the Twelfth
Century. By Giles Constable (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996; paperback edition, 1998) £17.95 paper.
Based on the Trevelyan Lectures given at the University
of Cambridge in 1985, this book paints a complex synchronic
picture of European religious institutions and experiences
from the late eleventh century to the third quarter of the
twelfth. Although special attention is paid to the various
reformist movements and some of their potential underlying
causes, the overall treatment does not wholly justify the
audacious wink in the book’s title: the twelfth century
might parallel the Renaissance just as easily as it could
the Reformation, yet it also deserves understanding on its
own terms. And this is precisely what Professor Constable
does very well, without too many grand historical theses
to cloud the issue. These 386 pages are packed with examples
and anecdotes portraying a vast range of not just monastic
orders of monks, canons and nuns, but also the military
orders, hermits, recluses, wandering preachers, crusaders,
and penitents that gave a less organized expression to the
spirituality of the age. Attention to this range of characters
is designed, we are told, to put “the individual religious
experience in the centre, surrounded by various forms of
religious life” (86). Whether or not one buys into that
methodological precept, whether or not that religious center
is really there or is merely grafted onto the material,
the tales of myriad individual people are certainly there,
inviting us to live with the diversity rather than reduce
it to theses.
Yet this discursive strength, coupled with avowedly
synchronic ambitions, at times makes the going tough, producing
more of a patchwork of anecdotes than a coherent progression.
Individual chapters look at the variety of reformers, the
types of reform, the “rhetoric” and “realities” of reform,
the various types of communities, and finally the underlying
spirituality in its broader historical setting. In a sense,
the work spirals towards greater generality, yet the thematic
zigzagging tends to confuse dialectic strands in such a
way that the General Index at the end becomes one’s best
chance of finding one’s way. Points are made, examples
are cut and pasted to illustrate the issue, then we are
often given counter examples to show the phenomenon was
not universal, and finally we might be reminded that this,
whatever the individual point may be, did not apply in other
institutions or in other countries. Methodologically, as
the chapter thematics increasingly overlap, it becomes difficult
to know how any of this could possibly be quantitatively
testable or perhaps just plain wrong. Is there a point at
which the nonce example becomes irrelevant? In this kind
of spiritual history, with individual experience as the
grail, obviously not. The values of erudition, with copious
footnotes and references on each page, win out over all
else.
More seriously, the synchronic approach willfully
abolishes national and social borders with a decidedly spiritual
ease, such that if we wanted to test some more general deterministic
hypothesis concerning economic development or social structures
it would be extremely difficult to do so. Professor Constable
is manifestly uninterested in such things, declaring at
the end of the work the general point that his methodology
has been making all along: “As part of human nature, and
perhaps its deepest part, religion is not simply a variable
reaction to other aspects of human experience” (328). The
passage goes on to synthesize what is considered to be the
particular twelfth-century spirituality: “the rhetoric
of the recovery of lost perfection, the ideal of personal
reformation, and the details of monastic life were the essence
of what religion meant as a way of expressing a commitment
to God and Jesus” (328). The flavor is remarkably proto-Protestant,
and typically at odds with the values expressed just one
page previously, where it is rather a question of the “optimism,
confidence and joyful love of twelfth-century spirituality”
(327). Given the extreme diversity of all that has preceded
it, coupled with the eschewal of any careful step-by-step
system, such suspiciously arbitrary conclusions may belong
more to Professor Constable’s spiritual interests than to
the vast offerings of his historical research. This reviewer
found himself reading much of the work as a rather fascinating
novel, wishing that a little more chronology had been preserved
for the sake of plot.
© Anthony Pym 1999
- Last update
20 July 1999
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