The Brill Companions series have become a staple for scholars and students alike, and a recent addition to its Christian Tradition series, A Companion to Medieval Rules and Customaries, provides a welcome reference for historians of the church, monasticism, and medieval juridical texts. Krijn Pansters edits and introduces this collection of readable, helpful, and dense essays that delve into the rules, customaries, and related texts produced by monks (the Benedictines, Cistercians, and Carthusians), canons (Augustinians, Saint-Ruf, Premonstratensians, and military orders) and mendicants (Dominicans, Franciscans, Poor Clares, Carmelites). Each essay focuses on a particular group, providing a historical background of the movement and an outline of the surviving evidence of its customaries and other textual sources, and usually concludes with what Pansters calls its “creative contribution” (p. 23)—schools, theology, arts, and architecture. The contributors thus compare the norms, practices, and ideals embodied in the rules and customaries with the ideas and reality that emerge in other forms of evidence. They provide for the reader an orientation to the state of the field and to new directions being taken. A Companion to Medieval Rules and Customaries thus not only offers an introduction to rules and customaries but also provides, in essence, a useful historical overview of each form of religious life. This is a reference work I am happy to now have within easy reach for consultation.
In his introductory essay, Pansters lays out a historiographical overview, making clear the debts owed by contemporary scholarship to early modern religious scholars (such as Bruno Albers and Edmond Martène) whose editions and framing of rules and customaries (for good or bad) largely defined debates until recently. He succinctly describes and categorizes the types and approaches of post-1960s scholarship; these pages—densely packed with citations and analysis—should be assigned reading for anyone studying the field. Pansters arrives at an understanding shared by his fellow authors that rules and customaries were not fixed laws demanding static structures, as earlier scholars had imagined, but rather a reflection of changing practices and even the very means to incorporate continuous evolution in groups strongly valuing tradition.
With this premise at the core of the book, the thirteen essays that follow nonetheless show considerable variation in their approach. Some provide a general history (to use Pansters's term), such as the treatment of the Benedictine rule by James G. Clark, who deftly ties together Benedict and his context with the complex history of the Rule's reception in following centuries. Most take a textual approach, such as Emilia Jamroziak, who, writing about the Cistercian institutional self-definition, outlines the dating and details of the Cistercian Ecclesiastica Officia and Usus Conversorum and provides the reader a clear account of Chrysogenous Waddell's dense arguments regarding them. Likewise, Gert Melville highlights the set of tools for regulation in the Dominican Constitutiones and its supplements, which he sees as a product of communal will meant to validate as well as to define the order's identity. Carol Neel's superb essay weaves between the contextual and the textual history of the Premonstratensians to highlight the movement's cultural influence. From these few examples, readers grasp how the rules and customaries are jumping-off points for authors to address larger questions of spiritual and institutional formation.
Essays often span centuries: Ursula Vones-Libenstein's intriguing essay on the customaries of Saint-Ruf begins in 1080 and traces developments to the end of the fifteenth century. Others have a more limited timeframe: Molvarec and Gaens focus on the beginnings of the Carthusians under Bruno (c. 1030–1101) and Guido's written customary in the 1120s (but they do briefly point to the customary's later medieval evolution and its sixteenth-century printing history). The geographic focus is on Western European examples, though Kristjan Toomaspoeg's essay on the military orders and Coralie Zormatten's essay on the Carmelites (founded in the Holy Land) could be seen to broaden the geographic scope somewhat. The later medieval history of the religious orders receives more attention—reasonable given the relative amount of written material in this period. Paul van Gaest offers an introduction to the late antique Rule of Saint Augustine and its medieval reception, while Matthew Ponesse unravels the complex tapestry of the rules and constitutiones of the late medieval Augustinian Friars. Holly Grieco, Bert Roest, and Jean-François Godet-Calogeras treat the Rule of Saint Francis, the Rules of the Poor Clares, and the Rule of the Franciscan third order, respectively in successive essays, their in-depth treatments necessary given the intricate textual history they skillfully lay bare.
A Companion to Rules and Customaries is especially welcome to anglophone scholars because the authors make accessible a wide range of European scholarship and weave together Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish material. Each essay summarizes, questions, and develops the current historiography of each group, and a short bibliography of key works is included at the end of each essay. Unfortunately, there is no common bibliography.
I have two minor quibbles with what is not in the volume. I expected an essay on the Cluniac customaries. They are succinctly addressed in Clark's essay on the Benedictine Rule, but given Cluny's prominence to the early development of monastic customaries and their influence both inside and outside the ecclesia cluniacensis, it seems a marked absence in an otherwise comprehensive study. Secondly, I would like to have seen a final essay to draw out the connections, parallels, and departures—discussing, for example, how the different movements innovated and built on previous texts and models. These trends will be overlooked by most readers, I suspect, who will likely consult the volume for particular essays only. In treating each essay as a discreet unit and not as part of a larger conversation that the book as a whole offers, such a reading misses out on the rich history and links unifying the many worthy contributions.
