The fourteenth century marked a coming-of-age for the Carthusian order. Two centuries on from the death of their founder, Bruno of Cologne, it was in this period of political and social unrest, plague and schism that the congregation became a conspicuous presence beyond its French heartland, attracting the patronage of generations with a (very) present appetite for their brand of austerity and arriving for the first time into the cities (many of which were caught in the front line of these struggles) – Antwerp (1324), Cologne (1334), London (1370) – from where they would contribute to the changing religious culture of the conciliar, pre- and post-Reformation eras. The Charterhouse of the Twelve Apostles of Mount Cornillon at Liège was one such urban (or, more correctly, extra-mural) colony born in these years (1357 × 1360) and the conference from which James Hogg's collection has been compiled was convened to mark its 650th anniversary. Its history in its first three centuries clearly focuses the importance of Charterhouses, especially these later foundations close to population centres, patronised by a prospering patriciate, as a persistent – if not always resilient – focus for the propagation of monastic thought and patterns of devotion in fast-changing clerical and secular worlds.

At Cornillon-Liège, the Carthusians entered a landscape already highly charged with monastic spirituality. As Philippe George narrates in the preamble to his survey of the monastery's relic collection, until 1288 Mount Cornillon was the site of the Premonstratensian abbey later known as Beaurepart and its foundation had given expression to an impulse for religious renewal that had been growing among Liège's bishops from the mid-eleventh century, touched by the spirit of the Gorze reform. The turn of the twelfth century had added a leper hospital run by Premonstratensian nuns whose mid thirteenth-century prioress Julienne (d. 1258) won life-long controversy – not least in the city itself – and posthumous veneration for her celebration of the new feast of Corpus Christi. This heritage of reform, episcopal power and the self-determination of the citizens shaped the foundation and growth of the Charterhouse, as Hogg's narrative culled from General Chapter acta clearly outlines. A project of the Prince Bishop Engelbert de la Marck (d. 1368), supported by the wealth of one Liège alderman, the new house struggled, with, as the chapter reports, the brethren drifting away, until further city patrons were found after 1400. The end of schism removed a further source of instability, since the house had held to Roman allegiance although in Avignon territory, and with the benefaction of the widow of a former city maistre the convent and its buildings expanded and its profile in the city steadily advanced, particularly under the leadership of Prior Jacques de Gruitrode (1440–5, 1447–75). A brief annal of this first century and a half, preserved in Central Universititeitsbibliothek, KU Leuven, ms 1473, is edited here for the first time by Tom Gaens and Francis Timmermans.

The ambition of bishops both inspired and inhibited religious renewal and in 1487 the troops of another prince prelate of the house of Marck destroyed the Carthusian church; a further action in 1489 saw the convent buildings sacked and the monks dispersed. It was twenty years before the buildings were repaired, another three generations before recruitment recovered. In the early Reformation Liège appeared an exception to the general impression emerging from recent scholarship of city Charterhouses offering a Counter-Reformation challenge as some of its number succumbed to Lutheranism.

The most useful of the essays here together create this sketch of institutional history which points to a Carthusian presence whose contribution to the religious life of the city and the region was proved largely over la longue durée, measurable perhaps only towards the end of the confessional and regional political and confessional conflict that marked much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How we might understand that contribution in its various forms, the spiritual and intellectual culture of the house itself, its religious, social and political representations urbi et orbi, are not addressed directly. The remaining papers from the conference can offer only, in juxtaposition, some comparative perspectives on these themes. Thomas Op de Coul and Pascale Pradie follow points of entry into the Carthusians’ communal observance, through, respectively, a Roermond gradual, and the example of Denys de Rickel; Alexander Zerfass reaches towards Counter-Reformation with a study of a reformed antiphoner from Grandmont. Nathalie Nabert and Fabrice Wendling complement these with case studies of Carthusian private devotion, their practice of prayer, and the concept of meditatio mortis. Thomas Jerome and Martine Valdher add welcome insights into the still under-studied experience of Carthusian sisters. Norbert Trippen and Rudolf van Dijk return to the now very well-known case of the Cologne Charterhouse whose contribution as a crucible of Counter-Reformation could not be in greater contrast with Liège. Disappointingly, given the importance and research potential of the theme, there are only two glancing gestures in the direction of the Charterhouse and its wider world: one, a survey of the Teuton province from Harald Goder, necessarily confined to the corporate horizons of the order, the other, from Monique Sommé, more profitably, tracing the patronal relationship of the house of Burgundy which at Arras in 1435 harnessed even its political identity to the White Monks of the Mountain.

The contribution of this multilingual collection will be collective and cumulative, adding, with its counterparts in the Analecta, to the inherent value of a long and distinguished series. It does signal the potential for a systematic survey of the Carthusians and the city but that, of course, will require a different format if it is fully to be realised.