This volume is an excellent demonstration of the degree to which monastic communities in twelfth-century Germany were connected to each other and engaged with the broader, trans-European reform movements. The collection includes essays that situate German houses within a wider context, such as Rodney Thompson's overview of “The Place of Germany in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance” or Constant Mews's essay on Admont and its relation to monastic reform. Other essays examine textual transmission and the ways monastic communities related to individual texts, such as Lisa Fagin Davis's “Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermones Cantica Canticorum in Twelfth-Century Austria,” and Ralf M. W. Stammberger's discussion of the history of one of Hugh of St. Victor's works, which includes an edition of the text.
This book originated at an international manuscript studies workshop that focused, as Alison Beach notes, on “the place of Germany, and particularly of Admont, in the monastic reform movements” (ix). As Nigel Palmer points out in his introduction, the essays are also connected through codicological methods and the investigation of manuscript transmission. Individually, many of the essays will be of interest primarily to specialist readers. Collectively, the volume should be considered more widely because it encourages readers to think of reform monasticism as a web of personal and institutional networks. Connections are central to all of the articles, whether focused on connections between text and image, male monks and female monks, individual manuscripts and textual stemma, or reform houses and one another. In her essay on the sharing of vision narratives, Ellen Joyce argues that these connections, though often “informal and highly personal,” created monastic solidarity and a “shared rhetorical context” (94).
The collection is also important because it demonstrates the intellectual energy of German reform communities, which Mews claims were “remarkably alert” to new ideas (219). As Thompson points out, the German reform houses are often marginalized and viewed as “conservative and backward-looking” (20). These essays instead show a dynamic twelfth-century Germany generating its own reform circles, participating in contemporary religious discourse, and opening interesting avenues for female participation. Christina Lutter's essay, “Christ's Educated Brides,” uses manuscripts to explore how the nuns of Admont were able to build such connections even while working within a reform framework that emphasized claustration and withdrawal from worldly connections. Beach analyzes how the nuns of Admont related to the work of one of the monastery's best-known authors, Irimbert, who himself models how German exegetes engaged with the ideas of their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. She concludes that the nuns were able to work outside the rules of reform monasticism “while still not contradicting them explicitly” (213).
The essays also show the degree to which physical manuscripts (their production, collection, exchange, handling, and reading) were a central part of the ideals and practice of monastic reform. In a noteworthy essay on the library of the nuns of Lippoldsberg, Julie Hotchin argues that the catalogue, which she reproduces and annotates at the end of the article, reflects a community with exceptionally diverse and contemporary concerns. This was a product of the deliberate library reform led by the nuns' spiritual adviser and of his collaboration with the prioress. This essay is an excellent example of how useful monastic catalogues can be for exploring personal, intellectual, and cultural connections between reform communities.
Another way that the essays connect manuscripts to religious ideas is through analysis of the images they contain. Adam Cohen compares a drawing of a labyrinth in an Admont manuscript to other twelfth-century labyrinth drawings, and to images accompanying the Speculum virginum. He explores how images were a product of artistic and literary interpretation, and discusses the artists' “tendency to articulate exegetical ideas in visual form” (52). In an article that stands out for its successful incorporation of text and image, Stephanie Seeberg focuses on the way that the nuns of Admont may have related to the images in their manuscripts. She argues that these illustrations, far from replacing word with image for illiterate women, were complex commentaries intended “to support or complement the text” (105). Through close “reading” of the images, Seeberg argues that these manuscripts drew on themes that were important to women, asked women to identify personally with the text and the message, and helped nuns create an intellectual and spiritual community of their own.
The volume makes important points about the very real ties among these houses and between German houses and communities elsewhere in Europe. Yet as well as it does this, it could have been improved through the inclusion of maps. A visual sense of these German reform networks would have gone far to show the ties between the individual communities discussed in the essays, and to connect the essays to one another. At times decisions about the book's overall structure also disrupt the potential connections between essays. Some of the essays with the widest potential audience are buried in the middle of the book, and from essay to essay there are abrupt shifts of scope and methodology. This has the effect of making several of the essays seem insular. This is unfortunate, as a different framework may have better showcased the rich connections between the articles.
Nonetheless, the essays' collection in a single volume highlights how closely connected German reform houses were to each other, and how many ways the exchange of ideas can be traced through tangible things such as images and manuscripts. It is a commonplace to associate manuscripts with monasteries, but this collection reminds us how vital that association was. It demonstrates how manuscripts could be not only vehicles for religious ideas but also expressions of community bonds, and how manuscript studies can display the dynamism of German monasticism.
