Steven Vanderputten

Here, Steven Vanderputten focuses on several Flemish monasteries—Saint-Bertin, Bergues-Saint-Winnoc, Marchiennes, Saint-Amand, Saint-Bavo, Saint-Peter, and Saint-Vaast—for what their institutional histories can tell us about institutional change and reform during this period. Vanderputten pushes back against prior historiographies which framed reform as top-down moments of sharp rupture, arguing that focusing on what people did as opposed to what they believed/professed provides us with a clearer understanding of how reform was in fact a longer term process. There are a couple of points where I think he over-eggs his argument a tad, but I found myself in agreement with his broad conclusions. Bound to be very useful for people working on the history of Flanders in the Central Middle Ages, and a nice complement to Vanderputten's other work on monastic history.… (plus d'informations)

This short (roughly half the book consists of notes and appendices) study of some 40 female religious communities which existed in Lotharingia in the central Middle Ages is a useful addition to the growing body of work on medieval women's monasticism. Steven Vanderputten combs through the admittedly sparse documentary evidence surviving from these communities to add more heft to the ongoing pushback against the traditional historiography that has framed the history of these places from the ninth century onwards as one characterised by "disempowerment and descent into social and spiritual redunancy" (37). Vanderputten doesn't posit a hidden Golden Age instead, but rather points to the evidence for complex and individual circumstances that defy any master narrative, and women who were thoughtful and independent reflectors on the nature of their own vocation. His use of the sources is impressive and generally thoughtful, though at times he maybe pushes the evidence a bit too far. (If we don't know who edited the Roll of Maubeuge for instance, or why, can we reasonably attribute any motivations to said editor? Also I keep eyeing that title...) The appendices will no doubt prove useful in a classroom setting.… (plus d'informations)

Bouxières was a small hilltop abbey near Nancy in eastern France. Founded in the 10th century as a community of Benedictine women, by the late Middle Ages it had become a community of secular canonesses and remained as such until its dissolution at the French Revolution. It's the kind of religious community that both should be studied more—never very large or architecturally significant or home to any renowned figures—and are very difficult to study—because it was never very large or etc.

Steven Vanderputten does a good job in gathering together the fragmentary early modern sources (approx. 1690s-1830s) that can tell us something about both how the early modern canonesses understood their connection to their medieval foremothers (and whether they cared about it at all), and the "memory culture" which grew up around the community after its demise. As a study, Dismantling the Medieval is methodologically interesting—unusually, it's in reverse chronological order—but I'm not sure Vanderputten quite answered the question of "so what?" to my satisfaction.… (plus d'informations)

In Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages, Steven Vanderputten assesses an important monastic figure in early eleventh-century reform movement: Richard of Saint-Vanne. Perhaps unusually, Vanderputten is concerned with arguing that his subject is far less important than has previously been thought—or at least, that Richard's historical importance does not at all come from his having been a "reformer."

Vanderputten's careful unpacking of the sources relating to Richard is impressive. I might quibble with some of Vanderputten's assertions about how/why reform was implemented (for instance, I don't agree that monastic reform was only ever implemented in institutions which had reputations for decadence or mismanagement), but his overall conclusions about Richard (that he was a pragmatist and perhaps something of an egotist) are persuasive.… (plus d'informations)