Thomas Wallnig has written a complex and sophisticated book that aims to put the story of eighteenth-century learned German Benedictine monks—a story that could be confined to a discussion in intellectual history—into a wider framework. In doing so, Wallnig examines a wide field of interactions and exchanges, institutional and political contexts, as well as a number of interrelated historiographical questions. The result is a thought-provoking book that makes important theoretical and methodological points while also illuminating an underappreciated aspect of early modern intellectual and church history.
It is difficult to do justice to all the ways Wallnig links his various themes together, for he never oversimplifies the interactions the monks had with their world. Wallnig's chapters reference one another, highlighting different facets of the erudite monks’ lives. For example, in the discussion in chapter 3 (“Knowledge, Institution, and Conflict in the Benedictine Context”) of the institutional contexts in which the Benedictines worked, Wallnig writes, “Benedictine learning and scholarship … inscribed itself into a colorful picture of co-existing, overlapping, and often conflicting spheres of publicity, authority, and censorship” (144). These issues—publicity, authority, and censorship—come up in every chapter, as the reader is reminded of their interplay within different modes of analysis.
The book is primarily about contexts. Benedictine monks working in German and Austrian monasteries in the eighteenth century engaged in extensive historical scholarship. Monasteries such as Melk and St. Blasien developed ties not just to other houses in Germany, but to French and Italian Benedictines as well. Furthermore, various interactions developed with a broader set of scholars, for example in Protestant universities in northern Germany. By the middle of the century, scholarly monks were participating in the wider public sphere, though they never achieved international acclaim. Still, monks and abbots such as Bernhard Pez and Martin Gerbert were known for publishing charters and other documents from their monastic archives and writing increasingly sophisticated histories, with a focus on the medieval period. By publishing sources from their archives, they brought to light materials that had been hidden in monastic archives for centuries.
Institutional contexts loom large in this study. Wallnig reminds readers that the Benedictines were not organized as an order and that cooperation within congregations varied. Wallnig reminds readers that the Benedictines were not organized as an order and each monastery operated independently. This context meant that the extent of cooperation between monastic houses within the same regional congregation varied. Instead, Benedictines worked primarily within their home monastery, although they were usually educated elsewhere, including in Jesuit schools and universities and at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Wallnig emphasizes that the monks were expected to adhere to the constraints of the Benedictine Rule, for example fulfilling the regular monastic prayers, and that they were further constrained by a millennium of Benedictine history, which included strong traditions about how a scholar-monk should live and work. As a result, says Wallnig, “We look at scholarship as something considered inherent in monastic life, and thus as an aspect of it rather than something extraneous” (77). Monasteries remembered their histories proudly, and referenced and researched them with increased vigor in the eighteenth century.
Other institutional structures were important, although not all functioned successfully. Promoted by the monks themselves, the Upper German movement to create “academies” aimed to provide a setting for scholar monks to do research and publish their findings. The movement failed for a variety of reasons, including regional rivalries, and the tendency of states such as Austria and Bavaria to create their own scholarly institutions. Erudite monks did publish in scholarly journals and increasingly taught in schools and universities, all as part of a longer effort at “rearranging the institutional setting of knowledge production and circulation …” (125). This effort meant an ongoing clash with the Jesuits, who had controlled both education and censorship in Catholic Germany and Austria for much of the era since the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Here too Wallnig insists on the complexity of this process, pointing out, for example, that the Benedictines’ influence was limited by weak ties to the episcopacy of the Imperial Church (the Reichskirche) and the aristocracy because monks came from middle-class and rural backgrounds.
The interaction of these contexts—and Wallnig discusses many others—meant that Benedictine scholars participated in the public sphere in particular ways. Despite the constraints they faced, these scholars engaged actively in a number of intellectual developments of the eighteenth century, particularly a shift from sacred history to the history of religion. Their study of monastic archives and what the documents revealed about the changing history of monastic houses further developed the critical study of sources inherited from the humanists of the late fifteenth century. This historical perspective became important in the development of the Catholic Enlightenment in Germany, even if Benedictines were not leaders in that movement. These scholars also moved toward the use of German instead of Latin and tended to adopt somewhat nationalist perspectives, often framed as support for Austria. Finally, the monks participated in the effort to reconcile faith and reason, looking, for example, to identify unchangeable truths within a context of “the times change” (210).
Wallnig's chapter on the role of erudite Benedictines in the intellectual developments of the eighteenth century is dense and nuanced. Entitled “A Reclassification of Knowledge?” the chapter has four major sections divided into a total of twelve subsections. Using the framework of “challenges” and “trends,” this chapter exemplifies Wallnig's goal of explaining the complexity of interactions between institutions, the circulation of knowledge, and the actual ideas that came out of this process. A careful reading of just this chapter is a fruitful endeavor that reveals multiple insights.
Wallnig ends the book with a thoughtful, albeit quite self-referential, conclusion that emphasizes that “we may in brief consider this book to be a study in the social history of knowledge” (267). Here Wallnig points out that contemporary historians are heirs to the Enlightenment intellectual tradition that is the subject of the book. More provocatively, he states “This is a book about ‘us’: academic historians in post-modern secular states, fallen out of favor with the institutions of state (and Church) knowledge, and enjoying the precarious freedom of reflecting upon intellectual genealogy with all its dark and hidden spots” (268). Historians, he goes on to say, “are equally safe and uncommitted within history, and may leave the dirty business of ontology to other disciplines, while still flirting with it” (269). Perhaps true, yet perhaps, like the erudite Benedictines poring over their charters, “we” still contribute to a greater understanding of the past as we study sources from the past.
