This volume, an excellent translation by James Mixson of Gert Melville's Die Welt der Mittelalterlichen Klöster, offers readers a rich survey of the variety of approaches to the vita religiosa in western Europe during the Middle Ages. The book presents a familiar chronological narrative over seventeen chapters of varying length. It opens with the origins of the Christian ascetic movement in the deserts of Egypt, the development of coenobitic monasticism in the East and later in Europe, and the story of the Rule of St. Benedict and its spread during monastic reforms of the Carolingians. From there, the narrative continues with the growth of Benedictine monasticism via Cluny and the ecclesia Cluniacensis, before turning to the diversification of religious life in the many religious movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, giving the Cistercians their accustomed pride of place. Discussions of the rise of lay religious movements and the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century follow. Finally, the book ends with three thematic, rather than chronological, chapters on the late Middle Ages that focus first on the continued appearance of new movements such as the Devotio moderna and the Birgittines, the conflicts within the mendicant orders, and finally the monastic reforms initiated by Pope Benedict XII and those associated with the Observant movement.

While this overall approach may seem very traditional, one of the strengths of this book is the level of detail and erudition the author brings to the topic. Melville relentlessly documents nearly every major religious movement of the Middle Ages, while also giving attention to chapters of the story that often receive short shrift in similar surveys. Thus, for instance, the eremitical movements of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries are central to Melville's narrative. The accomplishments of female monasticism are woven throughout the story, if never quite in equal measure to men's monasticism. The religious movements of the German-speaking regions of Europe receive more focus here than they do in many Anglophone surveys of monasticism. The religious life of the late Middle Ages, notoriously difficult to synthesize, is admirably treated as a vital period in the history of medieval monasticism rather than one of decline.

The real contribution of Melville's study, however, is not its extensive coverage of religious movements, but rather the ways it tracks a single, key theme throughout their history: the tension between spiritual ideals, often manifested in “charismatic” leaders of religious movements, and the institutionalization of those ideas as norms, first adopted in individual communities, but eventually routinized throughout large-scale monastic “orders” by increasingly rational and legal mechanisms—rules, then customaries, and eventually statutes. Many readers will recognize here the theories of Max Weber on the “routinization” of charisma, which are cited frequently throughout the book. Melville's overriding interest in the ways that groups of religious men and women institutionalized spiritual ideals that were often anti-institutional in origin leads to the underlying argument of the book as a whole, that the drive of religious communities toward “institutional efficiency” (xiv) made them into “laboratories of innovation” that “laid down essential foundations for modernity” (372). It also explains why the rationalizing bureaucratic and eventually constitutional achievements of groups like the Cistercians and the Dominicans are characterized here as the highest achievements of men and women who adopted the religious life in the Middle Ages.

Focusing on this single, fundamental issue in monastic history comes with several advantages. For one, despite the impressive combination of broad coverage and detailed analysis of so many religious movements, the study remains remarkably coherent (if occasionally repetitive). For another, the study is able to tell a convincing story of the historical development of medieval monasticism that focuses primarily on the internal, structural dynamics of religious life in the Christian Middle Ages, rather than the different ways in which it was embedded in changing social and political contexts. In a final chapter, Melville identifies the deeply rooted structures that shaped the history of monasticism throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, which he sets up as a series of tensions: between the individual and community; between the cloister and the world; and between charismatic leaders and institutional forms.

There are, to be sure, some drawbacks to the thematic focus of the book. Almost by necessity, there are topics central to the study of medieval monasticism that receive little coverage: education, devotional thought, art, and the liturgy, for instance, are referenced in the final chapter, but not much elaborated upon. The focus on the tension between charismatic leaders and institutionalization means that figures such as Stephen of Obazine, leader of a religious movement that was eventually absorbed into the Cistercian Order, get considerable coverage, while a figure such as Hildegard of Bingen, who never inspired a movement per se, gets only a single, brief mention. The focus on the development of “orders” and the textual mechanisms that created them means that the coverage here skews toward the high and late Middle Ages. Scholars of early medieval monasticism may be surprised to discover that, in a study of three hundred seventy-two pages, they have already arrived at Cluny in 910 by page fifty-four. Scholars of monastic chronicles, devotional treatises, hagiographic works, and manuscripts may find it jarring to read that rules, customs, and statutes were “the most important products” of monastic literacy in the Middle Ages (338).

In the end, if there is a puzzle to this study, it is its intended audience in the Anglophone world. Structured as a survey text, it might seem destined for undergraduate courses in medieval religious history. But the level of background knowledge that the book presumes, along with its dense analysis, may mean that it will not serve undergraduate classes well (although individual chapters could easily be excerpted into excellent standalone readings). More likely, this study will (as Giles Constable notes in a foreword) serve as a concise and convenient entry point to the work of Gert Melville (and, indeed, via the extensive bibliography, to current German scholarship on monasticism) for scholars not already familiar with his scholarship.