This slim monograph takes as its focus the Chronicle of the monastery of Petershausen (Casus monasterii Petrishusensis), a single-author account of the vicissitudes faced by a Benedictine community on the shores of Lake Constance written over nearly three decades from the late 1130s until the early 1160s. The anonymous chronicler was a candid and canny witness to the turbulence that shook his abbey in the generation after its reform in 1086 by monks from the abbey of Hirsau in the Black Forest until the devasting fire of 1159 that destroyed his community's library and many of its buildings. Adopting as a heuristic the notion of cultural trauma borrowed from sociological theory, Beach uses this chronicle to argue that ‘the uninvited and unwelcome reform’ of Petershausen by Hirsau ‘dealt a shock to the life-world of the monastery’ that harmed ‘the cultural tissue’ of the abbey for decades to come (p. 20). After a brief survey of the religious landscape around Lake Constance in the central Middle Ages (preface) and an introduction to the book's main source and methodology (chapter i), a series of brisk chapters examines the many factors that contributed to the trauma of reform experienced by the brethren of Petershausen and expressed by the chronicler who was a first-hand witness to their lingering effects in his community. According to Beach, these factors included the structural changes introduced by the reforming monks of Hirsau in 1086, especially those required to put into practice new liturgical customs, and the architectural renovations necessary to implement them (chapter ii); the recruitment of quasi-monastic lay brothers (conversi), an innovation of Hirsau, and the challenges presented by the rapid growth of this constituency and their ambiguous relationship to the world compared to their Benedictine counterparts (chapter iii); the creation of a female community at Petershausen alongside that of the men (chapter iv); the new demands placed on the abbey as an agent of the reform of other monastic communities (chapter v); and the delicate relationship between Petershausen and its fickle lay patrons, who could transform quickly from supporters to adversaries depending on changes in the ecclesiastical and political climate, especially in the decades around 1100 when the Investiture Controversy was still in full swing (chapter vi).

The idea of ‘cultural trauma’ is an innovative and potentially useful way to think about what monastic communities lost when they experienced the process of reform against their will, but the Chronicle of Petershausen does not always carry the weight of providing the evidence of such trauma that some of the chapters demand. For example, in the discussion of religious women at the abbey, the chronicler is vocal in his support for the inclusion and spiritual equality of cloistered women based on the authority of the community of the Apostles. While Beach correctly points out that some contemporary monasteries did experience practical challenges when they implemented the ideal of dual-sex communities, it cannot be said on the basis of the Chronicle that any such ‘trauma’ occurred at Petershausen. Indeed, in some places, the reader is asked to ‘imagine’ putative trauma on the basis of analogy and inference when the chronicler fails to provide direct testimony of it (see, for example, pp. 103, 115). Although the tissue of evidence provided by the Chronicle is thin at times, Beach's use of the sociological theory of cultural trauma opens up a fruitful new avenue for thinking about monastic reform in the Middle Ages. Readers will appreciate this book not only as a novel contribution to the issues surrounding resistance to reform in medieval monasticism, but also as an introduction to the abbey of Petershausen's remarkable Chronicle, which is rich in vivid anecdotes about the many local and regional challenges facing a Benedictine community in the early twelfth century.