This study of Richard of Saint-Vanne and his abbey in Verdun, in Lotharingia, emerged out of the pages of Vanderputten's earlier study of reform in Flanders, for the earlier study included Richard as an influential figure of reform (Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 [Cornell University Press, 2013], 79). The author here moves from the ebb and flow of monastic reform in Flanders to the life of a single individual, Richard of Saint-Vanne (circa 970–1046). What Vanderputten proposes here is a new view of Richard's “total history,” based on our understanding of his own time (41) rather than as presented in later accounts. Thus, Vanderputten peels away the layers of later assertions about Richard to examine the fragments of surviving evidence contemporary to his time. In doing so, he shows a very different Richard.

Vanderputten extracts Richard from the rhetoric of Hugh of Flavigny's Chronicle of circa 1100 to show how fragile the proofs of Richard as monastic reformer are. Richard was instead an ecclesiastical “careerist,” using “strategies of self-imagination” that allowed him to create his own “persona” by performing an evolving combination of ascetical practice and access to ecclesiastical and secular authorities (41). In so doing, Vanderputten not only deconstructs earlier images of this specific monastic reformer but also deconstructs the images of monastic reformers that we tend to bring to this study.

Nurtured as I have been in the ideology of twelfth-century reform modeled as a retreat to the wilderness and away from property and buildings, I am startled to find the tenth- and eleventh-century monastic reform described as encompassing more than attempts to reassert Benedictine practices, specific liturgical practices, or peace within warring monastic communities. This reform restores monastic income, wrenches property from lay advocates and lay abbots, constructs new buildings, and fills them with relics, burials, and commemorative masses to attract pilgrims and patrons. It guarantees the property holding with charter-books, polyptychs, necrologies, and books of miracles, and it expands libraries. In it abbots are praised as much or more for managerial skills as for being exemplars of the monastic life. Vanderputten's study suggests that Richard is primarily something else.

Richard was trained at Reims. He and his fellow students there viewed themselves as practicing both the active and the contemplative lives as described in Gregory the Great's Rule of the Pastor. Richard, seeing himself as an “interface” between the monastic and secular world, devoted himself particularly to the suffering Christ, reciting each day the entire Psalter before a crucifix, a practice that emphasized his ascetic “virtuosity” in comparison to that of others. In the “Lives” he wrote—one of which, The Life of Roding, is included in Latin and English translation in an appendix (169–185)—Richard's ambition was not to act as a historian, attempting to research events, but to inspire, writing as if sermonizing to an audience by stringing together a series of hagiographic commonplaces. Some of his most well-known writing describes the horrors of hell, and his apocalyptic tone may have been closely connected to his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1027, although he is described as having sought out the sites of the Passion as well.

For Richard, converting to monasticism was only one step on the way to ecclesiastical leadership as a monastic mediator who reached out to the secular world without compromising his ascetic virtues. As abbot of Saint-Vanne in Verdun, he was involved in restoring the abbey church and adding towers that made it a mirror of the cathedral across town. Richard advanced Saint-Vanne's superiority over the bishop of Verdun by accommodating powerful secular patrons like the family of Verdun/Ardennes and by collecting relics and important burials to attract pilgrims. Yet his reform agenda moved little beyond that of his tenth-century predecessors, except for introducing commemoration of the dead. As Vanderputten suggests, we must avoid assuming dismal situations before Richard's arrival simply because of Richard's reforming reputation. Indeed, “his actual agency as a reformer in the traditional sense of the word appears to have been very limited” (123). The written instruments of reform—charter collections, necrologies, and polyptych—exhibit little concern for managing property (something he left to his assistants) but “reflect Richard's focus on creating alliances with wealthy and powerful lay patrons” (98). It was part of “Richard's willingness to allow dynastic interests to determine his involvement in monastic government” (112).

Vanderputten concludes that Richard was “a man who became concerned about the political and other implications of his preaching only when they matched his patrons' expectations or his main institution's interests” and that “institutional monasticism plays a considerably smaller part” in Richard's life than was once thought (159). He states that Richard was much more “egotistical” than would be thought possible of any monastic reform leader (160, 162). Finally, Richard of Saint-Vanne was a snob (my word): “He appears to have taken a particular interest in surrounding himself with young men who, although they abandoned the secular life, did not wish to give up their responsibilities as members of the elite . . . making them particularly suitable to be the future managers of institutional monasticism” (141).

This is a wonderful example of the historian at work, going back to the sources, not assuming an accurate published text, but checking the manuscripts, assessing its chronological distance from the subject, as well as weighing it for bias, and not being misled by later treatments. There is little about women, gender, or sexuality here, but given the limited sources for Richard's life, there are probably no answers on such issues. Vanderputten's English is exemplary; his translation of “ad succurrendum” as “on the brink of death” is just right. A mere quibble is that he might have consulted Marjorie Chibnall's six-volume edition and translation to determine what Orderic Vitalis meant by instituta (The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vol. [Oxford, 1969–1980]).