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Religious Life between Jerusalem, the Desert, and the World


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Studies in the History of ChristianTraditions

General Editor

Robert J. Bast ( Knoxville, Tennessee)

Editorial Board

Paul C.H. Lim ( Nashville, Tennessee)

Brad C. Pardue ( Point Lookout, Missouri )

Eric Saak ( Indianapolis)

Christine Shepardson ( Knoxville, Tennessee)

Brian Tierney ( Ithaca, New York )

John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, Indiana)

Founding Editor

Heiko A. Oberman†

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|

Religious Life between Jerusalem,the Desert, and the World

Selected Essays by Kaspar Elm

Translated by

James D. Mixson


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Cover illustration: Detail from Andrea di Bonaiuto (. 1346-1379). The Militant Church (Via Veritatis). Fresco

from north wall (post-restoration 2003-2004), Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy.

Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Elm, Kaspar, 1929-

[Essays. Selections. English]

Religious life between Jerusalem, the desert, and the world : selected essays by Kaspar Elm / translated by

James D. Mixson.

pages cm. -- (Studies in the history of Christian traditions, ISSN 1573-5664 ; VOLUME 180)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-90-04-30777-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Europe--Religious life and customs. 2. Europe--Church

history--600-1500. 3. Monastic and religious life--Europe--History--Middle Ages, 600-1500. I. Title.

BR735.E3813 2015

270.5--dc23

2015036686

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Contents

Translator’s Preface

Introduction 1

1 Francis and Dominic: The Impact and Impetus of Two Founders

of Religious Orders 28

2 Fratres et Sorores Sanctissimi Sepulcri : Reections on Fraternitas,

Familia and Women’s Religious Life in the Circle of the Chapterof the Holy Sepulcher 55

3 Mendicants and Humanists in Florence in the Fourteenth and

Fifteenth Centuries: The Problem of Justifying Humanistic

Studies in the Mendicant Orders 111

4 Decline and Renewal of the Religious Orders in the Late Middle

Ages: Current Research and Research Agendas 138

5 Canons and Knights of the Holy Sepulcher: A Contribution to the

Origins and Early History of the Military Orders of Palestine 189

6 The Status of Women in Religious Life, Semi-Religious Life

and Heresy in the Era of St. Elizabeth 220

7 John of Capistrano’s Preaching Tour North of the Alps (1451–1456) 255

8 Vita regularis sine regula. The Meaning, Legal Status and Self-

Understanding of Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Semi-Religious

Life 277

9 The “Devotio Moderna” and the New Piety between the Later

Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era 317

Index 333


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Introduction

For most of the twentieth century, the story of medieval religious life was writ-ten by and for those who lived it. Monks, canons, friars and nuns wrote abouttheir own orders, as part of a larger church history focused on institutions anddogma. But that story, as even those with a passing interest in medievalreligious history are aware, has long since been transformed. Medieval reli-gious life is now unthinkable apart from the context of the world beyond thecloister—the world of the nobility, kings and princes, of commerce, merchants,and cities, of lay piety and heresy. The story is also unthinkable apart from a

comparative view that considers religious life across the boundaries of indi- vidual orders and institutions. And few medievalists of the later twentieth cen-tury have contributed more to these scholarly transformations than KasparElm. Over the last half century his reections, now a monumental corpus ofbooks, essays and other publications, have explored how the life of the cloister,canonry and convent intersected with the world beyond, and how that storyreected the broader sweep of European history. Elm’s work was amongthe earliest to explore topics and themes that have been commonplace in Anglophone scholarship on medieval religious life over the last generation: theeremitical tradition that shaped what became the order of AugustinianHermits; the piety and institutional traditions of religious life nurtured by thecrusades; the connections between mendicant religious life and the cities; thehistory of lay women and men who were drawn to religious life’s ideals, and who appropriated its practices; the story of the reforms of the later middle agesthat became known as the Observant movement.

Until now, however, relatively few Anglophone scholars and students havehad access to Elm’s work. The reasons are many, but four stand out. First, acrossEurope itself, a certain scholarly parochialism tended to fragment the broad vision Elm advocated. He drew from the work of religious life in England,France, Italy, and Germany alike, and authored both synthetic accounts andlocal studies that moved gracefully from Spain to Germany and the LowCountries to Italy. Yet most of his colleagues remained content, naturallyenough, to work within their own national, local, or regional traditions, or within the traditions of particular orders or congregations. Second, the particu-lar status of Germany and German scholarship after 1945 worked against any

broader inuence. Few in France, England or Italy read or worked extensively with German scholarship, and among Anglo-American scholars in particular,the neglect of medieval Germany was even more pronounced. Anglophonescholars looked instead to England, France and Italy. And whether in Europe or


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North America, to note a third reason, for almost everyone the story of medi-eval religious life simply ended around 1300. The later middle ages, still a youth-ful eld of serious inquiry as late as the 1970s, remained a period of darkness

and confusion. For most, the supposed “golden age” of the twelfth and thir-teenth centuries remained at the center. Finally, Elm’s own rigorous standardsof thoroughness and nuance, and the complexity of the landscape he surveyedin his work, made any attempt at a single broad synthesis seem at best unwise,at worst impossible. As a result, apart from two volumes of collected essays,there is still no single major book that captures his ve decades of scholarship.

The present translation of several of Professor Elm’s most important essaysofers itself as a modest remedy to this circumstance. Here for the rst time

in English is a collection of essays that presents his contributions to an Anglophone scholarly audience. The purpose of this introduction is notmerely to ofer a detailed summary of what the essays themselves make quiteclear. Rather, it is to recover the originality of Elm’s scholarship in the contextof his life and career, and to draw attention to the particular strengths of hiscontributions. These considerations will then allow some concluding remarkson the reception of Elm’s work, the critical issues these essays have engaged,and their continuing resonance for modern scholarship.

1 From Xanten to Berlin: Toward a Biographical Sketch

In the late nineteenth century the city of Xanten, nestled on the left bank ofthe Lower Rhine, welcomed an immigrant Catholic convert from the village ofElm in northern Hessia. His son, Kaspar-Josef, fought in the First World War inboth France and Russia and then returned to Xanten to work as an apprenticein the local enamel industry. He would have ve children from two marriages.

The youngest son, grandson of the rst immigrant, was another Kaspar. He wasborn on September 23, 1929.

Xanten was old as Europe itself, its foundations reaching back to the earliestRoman colonies in the region. By the later nineteenth century it remained a

Elm’s rst wife, the daughter of a socialist member of the Norwegian Reichstag, died in the

Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. I am grateful to the members of the Elm family for sharing

family stories such as these for inclusion in this introduction.

The Roman settlement of Colonia Ulpia Traiana had emerged from the Roman garrisons

established in the region after Caesar’s conquests. Along with its siblings Colonia Claudia Ara

Agrippinensium (Colonge) and Augusta Treverorum (Trier) it soon numbered among the


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proud, intimate, and learned community whose citizens were mostly ruggedCatholic centrists. They lived in the shadow of the cathedral of St. Victor, oftenholding Prussians and Communists alike at a distance. One of their most

prominent sons had been the Catholic priest and historian Johannes Jannsen(†1891). Born in 1829, Janssen earned his doctorate in 1853, and by the 1870s hehad become one of the most widely read yet controversial gures of his gen-eration in Germany. Janssen was best known for his History of the German

People from the End of the Middle Ages, a work that challenged, from astaunchly Catholic position, a powerful tradition of Prussian nationalist histo-riography. The end of the middle ages and the Reformation, so Jannsen, wit-nessed not the beginning of modernity, but the nal destruction of Germany’s

religious and cultural unity. Just as controversial was the work’s method. Jannsen argued his case not from high politics or church history, but ratherfrom all that he could recover of the daily lives of ordinary folk—farmers, mer-chants, women and children, their customs of dress and dining, their religiousbelief and practice. Jannsen’s History became sensationally popular for a time,especially in Catholic circles. But Protestants attacked him ercely as a Catholicapologist, and even later Catholic historians critiqued him on several fronts.Kaspar Elm himself eventually developed the most balanced assessment. As aCatholic apologist, Jannsen often strongly misread the religious complexityof the later middle ages. But he is still protably seen as a product of theintellectual currents of the later nineteenth century, as a devout native of Xanten, and a scholar whose life and inspirations were deeply shaped by and

most important Roman colonies in the northwestern reaches of the Empire. The name of the

city itself (ad Sanctos, Xanten) also bears witness to the traditions of it patron saint, Victor,

and the Roman martyrs of the “Theban Legion.” For an accessible overview of Xanten see

Studien zur Geschichte der Stadt Xanten: Festschrift zum 750jährigen Stadtiubiläum (Cologne:Rheinland-Verlag, 1978). For the longer history noted here see especially the essays of Precht,

Hüneborn and Kastner.

For these contexts see Jürgen Rosen, “Xanten zwischen 1928 und dem Untergang der mittel-

alterlich geprägten Stadt, Anfang 1945,” in Studien, 129–154, here 132.

The best access to Jannsen and his work, and the foundation of this account, is the work of

Kaspar Elm himself: “Johannes Janssen der Geschichtsschreiber des deutschen Volkes (1829–

1891),” Xantener Vorträge zur Geschichte des Niederrheins 1 (1991), 189–209. The essay is also

reprinted in Franz-Josef Heyen (ed.), Rheinische Lebensbilder 17 (1997), 121–140.

Johannes Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (Freiburg

im Breisgau: Herder, 1893). For the brief overview here (citing from the reprint edition) see

Elm, “Johannes Janssen,” 124–126.

Elm, “Johannes Janssen,” especially 126–128.


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reected the cultural sensibilities of the urban commoners and Catholics ofthe Rhineland.

The young Kaspar Elm’s early years in Xanten were steeped in those same

sensibilities. But they also witnessed the rise of the . German Catholicsand their bishops and priests were drawn to the Nazis for a variety of rea-sons—anxiety over moral decline during the Weimar years, nationalist andantisemitic resentments, careerism and expediency, as well as the olderromanticism and localism that had inspired gures like Jannsen. In the com-ing years their positions became increasingly complex and ambivalent. Alltoo many remained silent, or in various ways either fully embraced or becameimplicated in the horrors of Hitler’s regime. A small but courageous minority

became vocal and visible critics. In between were many who could be at leastpassively skeptical, if not deeply suspicious of the fascists. Kaspar-Josef Elm,for his part, seems to have been among their number, and remained quietlyresistant of what he saw as an unsustainable regime. He is said once to havequipped that the war Hitler sparked was over the moment it started.

That war afected life in Xanten itself only indirectly, at least in the early years. It came rst with the regular cadence of bomber missions that passedoverhead on the way from England to the Ruhrgebiet , and as air combat overthe steel yards of nearby Rheinhausen (with its many wayward bomber pay-loads) drove citizens into their basements by night. City administrators worked to support the war efort, helping especially to accommodate exilesfrom nearby towns laid low by allied bombs. But the realities of war creptcloser day to day. By September of 1944 allied troops pressed on Neijmegen

To explore the complexity of the relationships between German Catholicism and National

Socialism is beyond both my expertise and the scope of this introduction. But for some

basic oritenation, among many other works, see Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, 2nd ed. (Boulder, : Da Capo, 2001); Kevin Spicer, Resisting the Third

Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,

2004) and Hitler’s Priests (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Michael Phayer,

The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2000).

For a brief but nuanced account of these complexities see Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 5–7.

Rosen, “Xanten,” 130–131 and 134–135.

For a brief overview of the war years see Heinz Bosch, “Xanten in der Strategie der

Kriegführenden Mächte 1945,” in Studien (above n. 1), 187–192. My thanks to Dr. Charles

Clark for orientation to the material, here drawn from P. Stacey, The Ocial History of the

Canadian Army in the Second World War, Volume , The Victory Campaign: The Operations

in North-West Europe, 1944–1945 (Ottawa: E. Cloutier, 1966), 516–520.


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and Arnhem. Schooling in Xanten was soon suspended, and most able-bodied youth were sent away—some to children’s camps in the countryside (camps), others to civil engineering details (Schanzdienst ) in Holland. By the

early months of 1945 the thunder of allied warplanes drew closer still, andfrom the rst days of March the gods of war were at the doorstep of Xantenitself. As a part of Operation Blockbuster, sixty medium bombers attacked thecity on March 1. Early on the morning of March 5, artillery re rained down onthe town as elements of the Canadian 2nd and 43rd Wessex divisions begantheir advance. The 2nd Fallschirmjäger Corps and the 116 Panzer divisionofered up a tenacious defense, inicting hundreds of Allied casualties. But byMarch 8 the city was taken, and its population of a few thousand (by one

count hardly half of what it had been before the war) evacuated. Within two weeks the Allies had mounted a massive airlift across the region. Churchilllooked on as they crossed the Rhine, and later did so himself at Wesel onMarch 25, in theatrical style.

As a family the Elms narrowly escaped the worst tragedies of the war. Thetwo eldest sons were captured and imprisoned, one held in Siberia until1953. The young Kaspar, for his part, worked hard and kept up a good spirit. Always rst in his class and a dedicated altar boy, he was also something of aclass clown. And though he was called to combat himself at age 15, it was thelast hour; mother and son narrowly escaped to the east bank of the Rhine just as the city was being levelled. A scholar’s nascent talent with languagesdid prove useful enough for the occupying forces, however, and for a timeElm found himself working as a translator for a Canadian logistics regimentthat employed German labor. With nothing left of Xanten, he was sent to aguest family in his mother’s home city of Rheine. There he attended theGymnasium Dionysianum, and prepared for a university career. For a gifted young scholar from Xanten, Münster—another modest city, nurtured by the

same Catholic culture of the German-Dutch borderlands that had shaped Janssen—must have seemed a natural choice. He enrolled at the Willhelms-Univeristy in 1950 (and while doing so rst met his future wife, while they waited in the line for matriculation). He began a typical course of study inLatin, German and history, and completed the state examinations and periodof internship required of aspiring professionals. But Elm had higher aca-demic ambitions, and soon began his doctoral work under the tutelage ofHerbert Grundmann.

Rosen, “Xanten,” 153.


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For a scholar with Elm’s background and interests, it was an excellent choice.In Grundmann Elm encountered a scholar nearing the peak of his career. Astudent of Walter Goetz at Leipzig, Grundmann had labored in scholarly obscu-

rity through the 1930s. With the advent of war he was eventually pressed intomilitary service, wounded and taken prisoner by the British in 1944. The post- war years at Münster then nally brought a long period of stability and schol-arly productivity. By the time of Elm’s matriculation Grundmann had beenthere over ten years, as the leader of both his own department and the wideruniversity community (especially the interdisciplinary group known as the

Mondkreis, the “Moon Circle”). He was also nally receiving proper recognitionfor his Leipzig Habilitation, a series of interrelated essays on heresy, the mendi-

cant orders, and women’s religious life. Published in 1935 as Religious Movementsin the Middle Ages, the book at rst attracted little attention. But in ways that will be outlined below, it soon resonated anew with a post-war generation ofscholars and students, and it remains today a work whose arguments havebecome standard: the power of the Apostolic ideal and mendicancy in thetwelfth century to inspire in ways that cut across institutional and social bound-aries; the power of the papacy to channel its forces, to legitimize, to polarize;the power of women to appropriate, shape and express apostolic ideals forthemselves.

Elm’s dissertation, a study of “The Origins of the Order of AugustinianHermits in the Thirteenth Century,” was completed in 1957. It was neverpublished, but a series of later articles made available its core contributions.They reveal how much Elm’s doctoral work reected Grundmann’s interest inapostolic poverty, and in the role of the papacy in shaping it: through exhaustive

Robert Lerner’s introduction to Steven Rowan’s translation of Grundmann’s Religious

Movements (n. 13) ofers the best overview of Grundmann’s career, his work and its recep-tion. For the contexts touched on here see especially –. Other accessible biographies

of Grundmann by Kaspar Elm himself in Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie 4: 220 and

by Arno Borst in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 26 (1970) 327–353. For

the dicult and controversial issues surrounding Grundmann’s career in the Nazi era see

also Anne Christine Nagel, “‘Mit dem Herzen, dem Willen und dem Verstand dabei’:

Herbert Grundmann und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Otto

Gerhard Oexle (eds.), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften. Bd. 1: Fächer,

Milieus, Karrieren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), 593–618.

Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen

Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der

deutschen Mystik , 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961). English

translation by Steven Rowan, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).


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study of the archives, Elm showed how what later became the order of“Augustinian Hermits” had been at its origins a confederation of independenteremitical groups, each of them—here the parallel with Grundmann’s

insights—channeled by the papacy to meet the needs of preaching and pasto-ral care. In 1959 Grundmann departed for Munich to become the President ofthe Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Elm remained in Münster, and over thenext years served as a scholarly research associate (Wissenschaftlicher

Mitarbeiter ). In 1962 he then gained a position as an Assistant in Freiburg, work-ing under the direction of Otto Herding. By 1964 Elm had attained the rank of

Privatdozent and had begun to publish a series of strong articles based on thesource work and themes addressed in his dissertation. He had also begun work

on his Habilitation, a study of the “history and self-understanding” of the Orderof the Holy Sepulcher. That project was complete by 1967.The timing was fortunate. The 1960s were a decade of remarkable growth and

expansion for the German university system. They had seen the founding of anunprecedented number of new institutes, chairs, and mid-level positions, manyof them at new “reform” universities dedicated to moving post-war Germanyinto a modern era. In this dynamic environment, Elm enjoyed the privilege ofchoosing between several calls to his rst professorial position. He chose theUniversity of Bielefeld, not least because of its cultural position. Bielefeld was aninstitution at the heart of all the changes that were to consume the historicalprofession in postwar Germany in the coming decades. And though Elm himself was not a party to the debates inspired by the Bielefeld School, he applied a simi-lar intellectual breadth and energy, and the university’s resources, to buildmomentum for his own eld. He continued his record of strong publications(among them his inaugural lecture, discussed below) and worked hard to buildup a substantial library collection on the middle ages and the medieval religiousorders. The momentum he enjoyed at Bielefeld then positioned him for further

advancement. By 1974 he had received the call to a position at the Free Universityof Berlin, where he remained until his retirement in 1998.

Over those twenty ve years Elm continued the hard work of a successfulOrdinarius in the German university system. He established a research project

For the contexts discussed here see Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton, Paths

of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially the introduction by James Van Horn Melton(1–18) and the essay by Winfred Schulze, “German Historiography from the 1930s to the

1950s,” (19–42) as well as the comment by Georg Iggers, (43–47).

Paths of Continuity, 3 n. 4. According to one count, between 1960 and 1975 chairs in history

increased from 80 to 210, Dozent positions from 90 to 230 and positions for Assistenten

from 50 to 380.


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and a press series dedicated to the “comparative” study of religious life andreligious orders in the middle ages; hosted conferences and built a massivelibrary collection; lectured and led seminars and excursions; attracted and

trained a generation of students who worked on a variety of topics within theeld (“Ordens-Elm,” as insiders often called it) he had helped dene. All of it was fuelled by Elm’s prodigious energy, graced by his collegial charm and sup-ported by the strength of the Free University—to say nothing of the DeutscheMark, especially early on, in Cold-War Europe. Elm had no ambition to forgeanything like a distinct “school.” But the end of his career he had trained twodecades of students, and enjoyed the esteem of an international eld of schol-ars from Europe and North America. Even in retirement, he continued to teach,

to travel, to research and write.The result is a body of scholarship that is as remarkable as it is dicult tosummarize. By one count Elm is the author (to include reprints and transla-tions) of some 255 publications, including 27 books. Many of these worksbecame standard treatments on religious life, and many remain central to ourdiscussions of medieval religion in both Europe and North America. Collectivelythey form a corpus worthy of careful reading and reection. They also meritcareful orientation into the scholarly lineage that shaped them, and the histo-riographical moment that made them possible.

2 Historiographical Legacies and Frames: Religious

Life between Leipzig and Adenauer

The decades after 1945 were a time of innovation and expansion in theGerman academy. The work of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others of the BielefeldSchool had embraced social history and social science in ways that sought a

For a brief sketch of these years see the introductory remarks in Elm’s last Festscrhift:

Franz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert (eds.), Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für

Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1999), here –. For

an early overview of the vision and nature of Elm’s research program, see his summary

“Vergleichende Ordensforschung. Ein Forschungsprojektschwerpunkt am Friedrich-

Meinecke-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin,” Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung,

(1979) 47–49.

See the lists of publications provided in the two Festschriften dedicated to Elm: Dieter Berg(ed.), Vitasfratrum, Saxonia Franciscana 5 (Werl: 1994) and Franz Felten and Nicholas

Jaspert (eds.), Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm Zum 70. Geburtstag

(Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999). See also the comprehensive list provided by the web-

site Regesta imperii (http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_de).

http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_dehttp://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_de


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the start, and not only because it cut so decidedly against the grain of theminutiae of political and diplomatic history then dominant. Lamprecht also vigorously defended the idea that he could discern in the historical record uni-

versal laws and stages of development. All of it was soon discredited, Lamprechtpushed aside. But the institute he founded in Leipzig lived on, and under theleadership of his heir Walter Goetz, it stood through the end of the Second World War (when allied bombs abruptly ended its existence) “as the only aca-demic institute in Germany dedicated to a broad, culturally oriented view ofthe human past.”

Goetz eventually trained Herbert Grundmann in that spirit. Like his teacher,Grundmann embraced both rigorous source criticism and an instinct for

broader synthesis—a combination in evidence across all of his work, from hisstudy of Joachim of Fiore’s thought to the broad panorama of Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter and beyond. And like his teacher, he embracedcultural history as the kind of “total history” that Lamprecht and Goetz hadenvisioned. But Grundmann also placed a distinct emphasis on the traditionhe inherited. He was one of the few scholars of his generation open to takingreligion seriously as a subject of inquiry. Nominally Protestant, Grundmannhad no strong religious convictions himself. But he was convinced of the powerof religious movements as a force in cultural history, one that cut across insti-tutional boundaries, and across the borders between church and society. Hisscholarship and leadership thus created a crucial space in the academy forsecular scholars, those beyond the ranks of the orders themselves, to under-take serious work on medieval religious life.

Kaspar Elm was one of a generation of post-war students who had begun torespond to that opportunity. But he did so in his own way, as one who remainedrooted in the Catholic culture of his native Xanten, and of Germany’s Westernborders with the Netherlands. His training in the Catholic Gymnasium in

Rheine, and especially his stay in Pavia as a fellow of the Collegio Borromeo while working on his dissertation, remained foundational. Elm’s was an enlight-ened, self-consciously Catholic stance, one that embraced the richness of thelong history of the church, but that avoided dogma or polemic. His was also aprogressive view, one that sought to nd its way to a middle ages that wassomething other than what gures like Jannsen had envisioned. In previousgenerations he might have been marginalized. But by the 1950s, the time hadcome when a scholar of Elm’s heritage and talents could begin to carve out a

Lerner, “Introduction,” – and nn. 24–30.

Ibid.


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place in the traditional academy. In the age of Adenauer and the ,Catholiccentrists were not only taking their place in politics. In the shadow of theSoviet Union, the 1950s saw an outpouring of Catholic scholarship that began

to make its way into the mainstream of medieval history. Two examples canserve to illustrate the trend. In 1954 Theodore Schiefer, another RhinelandCatholic who had left Mainz for the University of Cologne, published whatremains the authoritative biography of Boniface, a study that cast its prota-gonist as the architect of the “Christian foundations of Europe.” Here, as inso many similar works, the story turns on how the institutional church inthe middle ages served as the lattice-work that sustained Western Civilization.Two years later, in the same spirit, series of articles focused on the other end of

the middle ages celebrated the life and death of the Italian Franciscan Johnof Capistrano. Friar John had preached to tens of thousands across centralEurope, and rallied an army of crusaders to drive the Ottomans from the wallsof Belgrade in 1456. Five centuries later, Soviet tanks rolled in to Hungary tocrush an uprising that had begun on Friar John’s feast day (October 23).Franciscan scholars, especially, but many others besides, now embraced Johnanew as the “Apostle of Europe.” More powerful still in shaping the historio-graphical moment was the early energy of all that would culminate in theSecond Vatican Council. In the same years that Elm had begun his doctoral work, Chenu had begun both to involve himself, controversially, in the worker-priest movement in France, and to publish the early articles that explored thepower of religious movements that cut across the boundaries between religiouslife, secular clergy and laity. Grundmann’s work too, had begun to receiverenewed attention in the same years, and has never lost its appeal. In a timeof unprecedented social and religious turmoil centered on reform, the ground

Key for context here, among many possibilities, are Maria D. Mitchell, The Origins ofChristian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, 2012) and Mark Edward Ruf, “Strukturen und Mentalitäten des

‘katholischen Milieus’ in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der fünfziger und frühen

sechziger Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Wilhelm Damberg and Antonius Liedhegener

(eds.), Katholiken in den und Deutschland: Kirche, Gesellschaft und Politik (Münster:

Aschendorf Verlag, 2006), 34–48.

Theodor Schiefer, Winfrid-Bonifatius und die christliche Grundlegung Europas (Freiburg:

Herder, 1954).

See the collection of essays that appeared in Studi Francescani 53 (1956). See also the biog-raphy by Johannes Hofer, Johannes Capistran. Ein Leben im Kampf um die Reform der

Kirche, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Rome-Heidelberg: Kerle, 1964).

See here the reections of Lerner, “Introduction,” xxii and especially n. 42. See also Marie-

Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century. Essays on New


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William of Malavalle. The work displayed not only the impressive groundingin the sources that had been the hallmark of Grundmann and Goetz. It alsoembraced the broad chronological framework of “Old Europe” that was to char-

acterize so much of Elm’s later vision of the history of the orders: here the storyof the Williamites moves far beyond its thirteenth century origins, into the f-teenth century and ultimately all the way into the nineteenth. A series ofessays in the journal Augustiniana then demonstrated Elm’s commitment toconstructing a proper Bullarium and monasticon for the neglected histories hehad uncovered, as well as his talent for unwinding the complex documentaryproblems such a project presented. Another series of articles in the journalCîteaux addressed the misconceptions and myths that had long confused the

Williamites’ institutional story with that of the Cistercians. Again Elm’s dis-tinct combination of talents and sensibilities were on display—above all carefuldocumentary spade work, combined with a sense of the histoire totale of thedaily life of an order (allowing the inquiry to extend to questions of liturgy anddress) and an appreciation of the longer legacies of Catholic Europe. A nalarticle then rounded out the early contributions drawn from the dissertation.

In these early essays Elm had rescued a distinct Williamite story, an ordershaped by a papacy’s need for mendicant orders that embraced the vita activa of preaching and pastoral care, and an order that preserved its distinct cus-toms, constitutions, dress and other traditions. The Williamites’ only failure was historiographical: They developed no tradition of their own to compete with the Cistercians and Augustinian Hermits, their origins became obscured,and their order largely forgotten. But even as these publications appeared, Elmhad already moved on to Freiburg, and to the project that would result in his

Elm, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Wilhelmitenordens (Cologne: Böhlau, 1962). Ibid., especially chapter seven.

Elm, “Die Bulle ‘Ea Quae Iudicio’ Clemens’ . 30. .1266: Vorgeschichte, Überlieferung,

Text und Bedeutung,” Augustiniana 14 (1964): 500–522; 15 (1965): 54–67 and 493–520;

16 (1966): 95–145. The essays were published as a single volume (Louvain, 1966), and

drew the attention of at least one Anglophone reviewer (E.C. Hall) in Speculum 42 (1967),

728–730. See also “Wilhelmiten in Brandenburg und Pommern,” Augustiniana 16 (1966):

88–94.

Elm, “Zisterzienser und Wilhelmiten. Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte der

Zisterzienserkonstitutionen,” Cîteaux 15 (1964): 97–124, 177–202, 273–311. Elm, “Italienische Eremitengemeinschaften des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur

Vorgeschichte des Augustiner-Eremitenordens,” in L’Eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli

e . Atti della seconda Settimana Internazionale di Studio, Mendola, 30 Agosto -6 Settembre

1962 (Milan: 1965), 491–559. Reprinted in Vitasfratrum (above n. 17).


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Habilitation: a study of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher. The work itself wasnever published. But glimpses of its contribution and signicance can be gath-ered from the series of many later publications that arose from the early work.

By all accounts, the Habilitation was grounded in both a prodigious energy andan almost obsessive archival thoroughness, and in 1976 Elm published onesmall part of the fruit of those labors: an edition of several hundred of the mostimportant documents for the history of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher fromits Western European archives.

The early publications noted here provided the foundations for a lifetime ofrich and diverse scholarship. Much of it remained resonant with Grundmann’s vision and training—an emphasis on women’s piety and lay piety, and the

dynamism of what Elm came to call the “semi-religious” life of beguines, tertia-ries and others, grounded in exhaustive and careful treatment of the sourcesand balanced with comparative and synthetic vision. Other publications cap-tured various aspects of Elm’s evolving scholarly interests: his interest inFrancis and the Franciscans, as well as the Augustinian Hermits, is signal inthis regard. It was a line of inquiry that reected not only Grundmann’s lin-eage, but Elm’s life-long love attraction to Italy, nurtured ever since his days atthe Collegio Borromeo. Similarly distinct was Elm’s emphasis on recoveringthe past of neglected orders (the Williamites only one among them), as was hisinterest in the institutional legacy of the religious life of crusaders. More prom-inent still was his emphasis on the Observant reformers, the New Devout andother pious gures in the landscape of the later middle ages, as well as Elm’sabiding interest in the power of the historiography of the orders to shape, todistort and to reinforce institutional life. Elm also remained true to his

Elm, Der Ordo SS. Sepulcri Dominici Hierosolimitani. Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und

Selbstverständnis des Kapitels vom Hlg. Grab (Freiburg i. Br, 1967). Elm, Quellen zur Geschichte des Ordens vom Hlg. Grab in Nordwesteuropa aus deutschen

und Niederländischen Archiven (1191–1603), (Brusssels: Palais des Académies, 1976).

See especially in this regard “Von Joseph Görres bis Walter Goetz: Franziskus in der

deutschen Geschichtsschreibung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in L’immagine di Francesco nella

Storiograa dall’Umanesimo all’Ottocento (Assisi: 1983), 343–83 (also reprinted in

Vitasfratrum, n. 17). The essay is also a ne tribute to Elm’s own academic lineage.

Kaspar Elm, “Elias, Paulus von Theben und Augustinus als Ordensgründer: Ein Beitrag zur

Geschichtsschreibung und der Geschichtsdeutung des Eremiten- und Bettelordens des 13.

Jahrhunderts,” in Hans Patze (ed.), Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein im späten Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1987), 371–399. For an English translation see “Elijah, Paul

of Thebes, and Augustine. Fundatores Ordinum. A Contribution to the Historical Self-

understanding of Medieval Religious Orders,” Augustinian Heritage 36 (1990): 163–182. See also

Elm’s “‘ Augustinus Canonicus— Augustinus Eremita’ . A Quattrocento Cause Célèbre,” in Timothy


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Rhineland Catholic heritage, as well as to the tradition of Landesgeschichte exemplied in the work of his mentor Otto Herding. Elm’s early essay on theModern Devotion in the Weser region is exemplary here, as is his work on

Norbert of Xanten. His insightful essays on Johannes Jannsen are notable inthis regard, too, not least because of the anities they reveal between two of Xanten’s most famous scholarly sons.

3 Vita Religiosa: A Thematic Survey

Scholars have no single major treatment, no single volume to pull of the shelf

that captures Kaspar Elm’s vision of religious life in the middle ages. Elm him-self might have said — and few would disagree — that the eld he helpeddene (to say nothing of the archival landscape that supported it) was so vastand complex that to submit it to anything like a single-volume synthesis wouldbe grossly unjust. Scholars are thus confronted instead with a kaleidoscope ofarticles, essays and books, none with any purchase on a single interpretation,but all centered on a series of mutually enriching and overlapping themes. Thefollowing discussion suggests four (among many others) for consideration: anemphasis on the comparative study of the orders, the study of religious life andthe crusades, the study of religious women and “semi-religious” life, and thestudy of the Observant reforms of the later middle ages.

The rst essay translated here is signicant not least because it was a youngprofessor’s Antrittsvorlesung, or inaugural lecture, at the University of Bielefeld.It also signaled Elm’s early commitment to a comparative and contextualizedhistory of religious life and its institutions. In it he ofered a rened analysis ofthe lives and legacies of both Francis and Dominic. Against the grain of thedeeply-rooted traditions that had separated these two founders and their orders

from both one another and the society around them, Elm grounded their sto-ries in the specic contexts that shaped each: Francis among the lay penitentsof Umbria and the call of the desert recovered from early monasticism; Dominic

G. Verdon and John Henderson (eds.), Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious

Imagination in the Quattrocento (Syracuse, : Syracuse University Press, 1990), 83–107.

Kaspar Elm, “Die Devotio Moderna im Weserraum,” in Paul Mikat and Heinz Stoob (eds.),

Kunst und Kultur im Weserraum: 800–1600. Ausstellung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen,

Corvey 1966, vol. 1 (Münster: Aschendorf, 1966), 251–56. See above, n. 2.

Elm, “Franziskus und Dominikus. Wirkungen und Antriebskräfte zweier Ordensstifter,”

Saeculum 23 (1972): 127–47. Unless otherwise noted, all essays are reproduced here with

the author’s permission.


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among the rugged frontier nobility and stern priestly piety of Caleruega. Thedual portrait explored and nuanced traditional polarities—between Francisthe Pazzo and prophet, Dominic the canon and priest; between freedom of

spirit and the bonds of institution; between heart and head. Elm emphasizedhow much each founder shared with the other. In fact it was precisely the com-plementary nature of the two gures and their orders that ofered the mostsecure guide to the medieval church in a time of great crisis. Grundmann hademphasized the dynamism of the spirit as it had challenged the church and itsinstitutions. Elm now began to emphasize the dynamism, across the orders, of what would become a successful institutional response.

The comparative impulse signaled in Elm’s inaugural lecture was already

years in the making. One of the rst explicit mentions of the approach appearsin the closing lines of an early article on the papal bulls that shaped the consti-tutional history of the Williamites. That story, he argued, was incomprehensi-ble without careful attention to how it was shaped within its relationships toother orders, and to the wider world. His essay was a case study in what hecalled the “comparative method” for approaching the orders, and his profes-sional advancement gave him the proper platform for pursuing that agenda. AtBerlin in 1972/73, Reinhard Elze, Reinhard Scheider and others had alreadyundertaken comparative projects focused on the Cistercians. Upon his arrivalas Ordinarius in 1974, Elm expanded the enterprise to include every major reli-gious order, and to encompass the Observant reforms of the later middleages. By 1980 his team had organized a formal research project, established apublication series, and sponsored a series of major conferences. Elm himselfauthored a number of his own essays that emphasized the comparativedimension, and over the next decades mentored a generation of students whose studies did the same.

Elm, “Die Bulle,” (above, n. 31), 104 emphasizing the “ordensvergleichende Methode” and

nn. 33–34.

Elm, “Vergleichende Ordensforschung. Ein Forschungsprojektschwerpunkt am Friedrich-

Meinecke-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin,” Jahrbuch der Historischen Forschung,

1979, 47–49.

Representative are “Termineien und Hospize der westfälischen Augustiner-Eremitenklöster

Osnabrück, Herford und Lippstadt,” Jahrbuch für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 70 (1977):

11–49 and “Die Stellung des Zisterzienserordens in der Geschichte des Ordenswesens,” in

Kaspar Elm, Peter Joerissen, and Hermann Josef Roth (eds.), Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1980), 31–40.

To note only a few of the most prominent publications from this cohort: Bernhard

Neidiger, Mendikanten zwischen Ordensideal und städtischer Realität: Untersuchungen

zum wirtschaftlichen Verhalten der Bettelorden in Basel (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot,


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A commitment to the comparative study of the orders remained essen-tial to Elm’s work to the end of his career. Perhaps its most eloquent articu-lation appears in a late essay on the Williamites. In its concluding lines, Elm

contrasted the traditional biological metaphors that had shaped the histori-ography of the orders with his own view. The history of the orders, he sug-gested was not one of “autonomous and autarkic communities that werefounded, grew, owered and died—communities, put another way, that ranthrough the course of a life cycle that is characteristic of plants, animals andpeople.” Rather, Elm suggested, the orders “clearly follow another set of gov-erning principles, something rather closer to metamorphosis. They do notstand in isolation, but are embedded in the larger contexts of the orders as

a whole, which is itself in turn an integral part of religion and societygenerally.” These insights inform nearly every aspect of each of the essaystranslated here.

A second key theme centers on the institutional and spiritual legacies of thecrusades. The focus here was never on the traditional narrative of campaignand conquest, nor even on the familiar religious institutions—the Templars,Hospitalers and others—that they inspired. Elm sought instead to recover alost history: the wider range of communities, broadly dened both socially andspiritually, whose emergence both intersected with and shaped the LatinChristian presence in Jerusalem and Palestine. Of the many essays and articleson this theme, two are translated here. The rst is a treatment of the net- works of women and men who became aliated with the prior and canons of

1981); Gerhard Rehm, Die Schwestern vom Gemeinsamen Leben im nordwestlichen

Deutschland: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Devotio Moderna und des weiblichen

Religiosentums (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985); Nikolas Jaspert, Stift und Stadt: Das Heiliggrabpriorat von Santa Anna und das Regularkanonikerstift Santa Eulàlia del Camp

im mittelalterlichen Barcelona (1145–1423) (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996); Andreas

Rüther, Bettelorden in Stadt und Land: Die Strassburger Mendikantenkonvente und das

Elsass im Spätmittelalter (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1997); Ralf Lützelschwab, Flectat

cardinales ad velle suum?: Clemens . und sein Kardinalskolleg. Ein Beitrag zur kurialen

Politik in der Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007).

Elm, “Der Wilhelmitenorden: Eine Geistliche Gemeinschaft Zwischen Eremitenleben,

Mönchtum und Mendikantenarmut,” in Elm, Vitasfratrum, 1994, 55–66, here 66. See also

Elm’s essay “Cosa signica e a quale scopo si studia la storia degli ordini religiosi?,” Benedictina 49 (2002): 7–22.

All now thankfully collected in a single volume: Umbilicus mundi: Beiträge zur Geschichte

Jerusalems, der Kreuzzüge, des Kapitels vom Hlg. Grab in Jerusalem und der Ritterorden

(Sint-Kruis (Brugge), 1998).


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the Holy Sepulcher. Elm’s exhaustive archival search recovered the story notof a religious order in the narrow sense, but of a broader fraternitas and familia whose members ranged from patrons and protectors to oblati , donati or traditi ,

lay brothers and conversi , as well as wider circle of laity who might live in pre-cincts or serve community in various capacities. Elm showed how all helpedshape an institution that was “a full participant in the ongoing development of western religious life and its corporations.” In Palestine, and in Western Europefrom Spain to Bohemia, the houses of the Holy Sepulcher embodied all of thespiritual and material dimensions, the social and economic ties, the customsof prayer and provision, endowments and donations that were characteristicof so many religious and lay institutions generally. And theirs was an institu-

tion that lived on, as Elm emphasized, long after the fall of Acre, all the way tothe nineteenth century. A second essay on the “Canons and Knights of the Holy Sepulcher” seeks

a diferent angle on the military orders of Palestine, and explores another storyof lost possibilities. The essay recovers the history of the Ordo Equestris S.Sepulcri and the Ordo Canonicorum S. Sepulcri. The former, shrouded in allmanner of myth and misconception, had its most visible manifestation as a layknightly association that was founded in the fourteenth century. The latter wassimply the cathedral chapter of the patriarch. Elm claries the later-medievalstory of the Ordo Equestris, but also traces its origins back to an extended com-munity of lay patrons, soldiers, clergy and others long associated with the HolySepulcher. At its origins the Ordo Equestris was nothing like the military orderof the Templars. Rather, its ghting men, the milites S. Sepulcri , were but onecohort of a much broader community of “brothers and sisters” with variousties to the patriarch, the chapter, and one of the most sacred places in Jerusalem.The story, again, was not merely one of a formal institution, but of “the fullrange of forms of spiritual association that the chapter of the Holy Sepulcher…

had shaped from Western traditions.” Elm’s careful detective work then solvedone important mystery. At a crucial time leading up to the 1120s, the miles who were associated with the Sepulcher might have been turned into a more formalmilitary order. But the patriarch’s vision and interests, in opposition to thepapacy, were too short-sighted and local. By the 1130s the patriarch had been

“Fratres et Sorores SS. Sepulcri. Beiträge zu Fraternitas, Familie und Weiblichem

Religiosentum im Umkreis des Kapitels vom Hlg. Grab,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 9(1975): 287–333. Reproduced here with permission from Walter de Gruyter.

“Kanoniker und Ritter vom Heiligen Grab. Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte

der palästinensischen Ritterorden,” in Josef Fleckenstein and Manfred Hellmann (eds.),

Die Geistlichen Ritterorden Europas (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1980), 141–169.


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“deprived, step-by-step, of the possibility of turning a knightly brotherhood…into a Militia S. Sepulcri .” Here again was the best of what Elm’s Habilitation had contributed to the eld, and a story that was revealing, again, of so much

that was to be characteristic of his work: deep archival work, a comparative vision, sensitivity to lost histories and failures, and to the distorting power ofboth myth and victorious historiographical traditions. Just has Innocent had channeled the energies of the Apostolic movement, the popes of the 1120sand 30s had harnessed crusading energies in ways that both elevated theTemplars and Hospitalers, and also soon erased the early history of the Ordo

Equestris. Elm had again recovered the “complex situation which prevailed” asthe earliest moments of the crusading story, when it “was still in the course of

being decided.” Here was another lost institutional story, the story of an ordotam longe lateque dilatus, whose life and afterlife would echo to the end ofearly modernity.

These essays on the Holy Sepulcher intersected, to note a third prominenttheme, with Elm’s focus on women’s religious life. The emphasis, as in the earlystudy of those drawn to the circles of the Holy Sepulcher, was on women’s reli-gious lives and experiences outside the bonds of formal profession, what Elmoften called the “semi-religious” life (Semireligiosentum). Elm saw the story ofSt. Elizabeth of Hungary as exemplary in this regard, and in the essay translatedhere he used her story as a point of access. Elizabeth, Landgrave of Thuringiaand a princess of Hungary, was married as a teenager and widowed soon after.Under the guidance of her confessor and spiritual advisor Conrad of Marburg,she developed an active life of charity and service, as a “sister in the world,” who lived “between religious life and the life of the laity.” Elm’s essay sought toplace Elizabeth in broader context, to tell a story by now quite familiar:the story of women “who found themselves caught in a tension between adesire to shape their own lives and the constraints of their organizations,” and

of women driven to religious work and to powerful religious expression “notfrom their own weakness or inconsistency, but from their desire for spiritualperfection.” Among their ranks, Elm traced an “astoundingly broad diversity”of life, one whose many concepts and uid categories (swestriones, susteren,mulieres devotae, virgines continentes, mulieres poenitentes, sanctae, santarel-lae, beatae, pinzochere, beginae) suggested the permeable boundaries betweencloister and world, heresy and orthodoxy. The dynamism, growth and relativeequality these many groups represented, so Elm argued, slowly yielded to

“Die Stellung der Frau im Ordenswesen, Semireligiosentum und Häresie zur Zeit der

Heiligen Elisabeth,” in Sankt Elisabeth. Fürstin, Dienerin, Heilige (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke,

1981), 7–28.


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“claustration” and “domesticization,” to “subordination” and “limiting of apos-tolic activity.” Yet the “semi-religious” life remained vital, and that vitality couldbe explained not only through external factors like social change and economic

renewal. Those were important, indeed crucial historical forces. But so too were the words of scripture and the power of the apostolic ideal, the “directreturn to the Bible and to the history of early Christianity” that characterizedso much of the twelfth century. In the age of Vatican , the story of the “semi-religious” was one of both great historical weight and contemporary resonance.“In virtually every Christian community,” Elm wrote, “theologians and believ-ers today battle through almost all of the same diculties that 750 years agoconfronted not only a saint like Elisabeth, but so many other men and women,

within and beyond the cloister, on both sides of the boundaries between ortho-doxy and heresy.” Elm allowed his work to speak to both the scholarly legacy ofhis teacher Grundmann, and to the wider debates of his own day: “Holinessand perfection,” his last line noted tersely, “need not be tangled up with rebel-lion or heresy, still less a monopoly held by men.”

A second seminal essay elaborated more fully, almost twenty years later, onthe same set of questions and problems. Its starting point was a gesture to“the broad spectrum of connections between the secular and regular clergy, as well as to connections between both clerical estates and the world of the laity.”Elm emphasized not only the variety and diversity of these forms of life, butalso the growing appreciation for them, and the move to acknowledge theirlegitimacy. They were “no longer perceived as a marginal form of vita religiosa,”but rather “esteemed, among both laity and clergy alike, as the highest end ofthe pursuit of perfection.” Yet contemporaries faced the conceptual, legal andcultural challenge of just where and how to t all of it into their inherited tradi-tions. From the twelfth century, Elm notes, canon lawyers spoke increasingly ofa status medius, or a status religionis largo modo to describe the many “transi-

tory” and “ambivalent” forms of religious association they saw around them.Many also found in Roman civil law the concept of societas as a useful framework. Popes, bishops and councils, for their part, engaged in a broad “politicsof restriction,” demanding of any group that sought approval the demonstra-tion of “honesta vita, an embrace of humilitas, of recta intentio, of devotio, ofsimiplicitas and reverentia.” Meanwhile the “semi-religious” themselves, Elmpoints out, could draw on an “arsenal” of possibilities and precedents in their

“‘Vita Regularis Sine Regula’: Bedeutung, Rechtsstellung und Selbstverständnis des mit-

telalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Semireligiosentums,” in František Šmahel and

Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (eds.), Häresie und Vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter

(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 239–73. 239–73. Reproduced here with permission from

Walter de Gruyter.


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efort to articulate their self-understanding: Elijah, Anthony and Paul of Thebesfor those who embraced the eremitical life; Elizabeth of Hungary and MaryMagdalen for communities of religious women; the ideals and histories of the

vita apostolica and the ecclesia primitiva for any number of groups, most nota-bly the New Devout. As in so many other essays, but here perhaps more com-pellingly than elsewhere, there is a rich sense of both historical meaning andcontemporary resonance. Elm showed the importance of the history of “semi-religious” life not only for the debates surrounding the (pre-)Reformation, butalso for nineteenth-century historians (especially those in search of “republi-can” ideals in the urban communities of the middle ages), for twentieth cen-tury historians of “Christianization,” and of the laity and church reform. And

again he argued that the source of so many divergent interpretations of the vitaregularis sine regula was found in scripture and tradition itself, and in a way oflife that “had its roots in early Christianity.” Varieties of “semi-religious life” had“forever inspired critique and contradiction, as well as new beginnings andreturns to origins, whenever inherited models and established institutions losttheir power to convince, or lost their authority.” And for that reason, he noted,it “earned for itself special meaning not only in the late middle ages and the eraof the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but earlier and later ones as well, in times of transition and crisis.”

A nal theme deserving of emphasis, inseparable from each of the othersconsidered thus far, is Elm’s frequent chronological focus on the later middleages. In sharp contrast to a tradition that still today clings stubbornly to the“golden age” of twelfth and thirteenth century religious life, Elm’s work tookseriously the period after 1300 as one not only of crisis or decline, but also ofdynamism, creativity, reform and renewal. The interest was signaled early on,in the essay on the Modern Devotion in the Weser region noted above, inanother early essay on the communities of Groβ- and Klein-Burlo near

Münster, and in two of the essays translated here: Elm’s treatment of themendicant religious life and humanism in late medieval Florence, and what

A subject Elm had written on before: See n. 38 above, and the English translation noted

there.

Elm, “Die Münsterländischen Klöster Groß-Burlo und Klein-Burlo. Ihre Entstehung,

Observanz und Stellung in der nordwesteuropäischen Reformbewegung des 15. Jahrhun-

derts,” Westfälische Forschungen 18 (1965): 23–42.

Elm, “Mendikanten und Humanisten im Florenz des Tre- und Quattrocento. Zum Problemder Legitimierung Humanistischer Studien in den Bettelorden,” in Otto Herding and

Robert Stupperich (eds.), Die Humanisten in Ihrer Politischen und Sozialen Umwelt(Boppard: Boldt, 1976), 51–85. See also Elm’s “Monastische Reformen zwischen

Humanismus und Reformation,” in Ernst Bruckmüller (ed.), 900 Jahre Benediktiner in

Melk: Jubiläumsausstellung 1989 (Melk: Stift Melk, 1989), 59–111.


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he called “decline and renewal” in the late-medieval orders. The latter essay,in many ways still the starting point for all investigations in the eld, remains amasterpiece not least because of its breadth, and the depth of the literature

cited in its notes. The essay is also a compelling example of Elm’s comparative,contextualized vision. The history of the orders after 1300, as he saw it, was “asubject not only of Church history but of history generally,” a story that involvedand integrated the full range of historical sub-disciplines and national tradi-tions, and provided an almost unrivalled richness of sources and traditions ofedition and publication. The challenge was how to break the orders’ historiesfree of their often inward-looking institutional historiographies, and how tointegrate them into the broader sweep of late-medieval change. To that end,

Elm proposed a variety of new approaches. With respect to the problem of“decline,” he noted, the institutional matrix of the orders (their number andlocation, the overall population of women and men in religious life, contempo-rary understandings of ideals and practices of poverty and more) had to bemore fully integrated into all that had been learned to that time about the mas-sive changes of an era of commercial contraction, famine, plague, war andschism. With respect to reform and renewal, Elm confronted a similar range ofcomplexities. He sought to recover not only the well-known histories of theDominicans, Franciscans and Benedictines, but also those of the lesser-knownand forgotten or failed orders, all of them “fragments in a wider terra incognita.”He sought to link those fragmented histories to the stories of new foundationsand new orders, and to economic renewal in town and countryside after theBlack Death. And he sought to understand ways in which reform both reectedand shaped forces that originated beyond the cloister—in circles of laity andtheir charismatic leaders, both women and men; in the halls of city councilsand the courts of territorial princes and kings; in the ranks of popes and cardi-nals, bishops and secular clergy.

Elm and his colleagues and students soon put these insights to the test. A conference on late-medieval reform and the Observant movement, sponsoredby the institute Elm had founded in Berlin, surveyed the stories and settingsof Observant reform across the ranks of canons and monks and mendicants;grounded reform in local urban settings; established links between the Obser vantmovement, the conciliar movement, and the Reformation. Thereafter, Elm’s

Elm, “Verfall und Erneuerung des Spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesens,” in J. Fleckenstein(ed.), Untersuchungen zu Kloster und Stift (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980),

167–97.

Its proceedings remain another crucial starting point for inquiries in the eld: Elm, (ed.),

Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen

(Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1989).


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interest in the Observants and late-medieval reform produced a series of essayson late-medieval gures like John of Capistrano and the Franciscan Observants,and several essays on the Modern Devotion. Two of these are translated here.

They resonate with all of the overarching themes traced thus far, and ofer someof the best illustrations of Elm’s scholarly approach and accomplishments.

4 Scholarly Reception and Critical Issues

Elm’s early work enjoyed a modest but respectable early reception in Germany. A brief notice in Deutsches Archiv in 1962 (written by Grundmann himself)

praised Elm’s study of the Williamites for having essentially “rediscovered” alost order, and noted that Elm’s “resourceful energy” had produced a “modelstudy” of the paradoxical history of organized eremitic life. The volume alsocame to the attention of at least one reviewer in America. Over time, asmomentum for the comparative study of the orders built around the instituteand publication series Elm founded in Berlin, the eld came in to its own. Butits inuence remained modest outside Germany, not least because of the fac-tors noted above: the tendency of scholars to focus their work on one region ororder, and to look somewhere other than Germany and the later middle agesfor their stories of religious life. North American medievalists, in particular,trained in the tradition of Strayer and Haskins, often remained focused onFrance and England before 1300.

Elm, “Die Bedeutung Johannes Kapristans und der Franziskanerobservanz für die Kirche

des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Edith Pásztor and Lajos Pásztor (eds.), S. Giovanni da Capestrano

nella chiesa e nella società del suo tempo. Atti del convegno storico internazionale

Capestrano, L’Aquila 8–12 ottobre 1986 (L’Aquila: 1990), 373–390. See also “Tod,

Todesbewältigung und Endzeit bei Bernhardin von Siena,” in Conciliarismo, stati nazion-ali, inizi dell’umanesimo: atti del Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 9–12 ottobre

1988 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1990), 79–96.

“Johannes Kapestrans Predigtreise Diesseits der Alpen,” in Hartmut Boockmann, Bernd Moeller,

and Karl Stackmann (eds.), Lebenslehren und Weltentwürfe im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur

Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), 500–519. Also Published in K. Elm,

Vitasfratrum, 321–337; “Die ‘Devotio Moderna’ und die Neue Frömmigkeit zwischen

Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” in Marek Derwich and Martial Staub (eds.), Die Neue

Frömmigkeit in Europa im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), 15–29.

Deutsches Archiv 18:2 (1962): 596–597. The review laments only the absence of an index,maps and other resources that would have made the study’s ndings more accessible.

See the review by E.C. Hall in Speculum 42 (1967): 728–730.

For an overview of these and other issues see the ne survey by Barbara Rosenwein,

“Views from Afar: American Perspectives on Medieval Monasticism,” in Giancarlo

Andenna (ed.), Dove va la storiographia monastica in Europa? (Milan: Vita e Pensiero


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Recent years have nally witnessed a discernible turn to Germany and tothe later middle ages, especially in Anglophone circles, and opened the doorfor a proper reception of Elm’s contributions to the eld. Robert Lerner and

Caroline Bynum (both authors for whom the work of Elm’s teacher Grundmann was inuential) led the way in the 1970s and 80s with work that both reectedand inspired a growing enthusiasm for Grundmann’s themes—apostolic pov-erty, Joachim and apocalyptic thought, heresy, women’s religious life and mys-ticism. The 1990s then witnessed an eruption of new work on these topics,ranging from Jefrey Hamburger’s studies of the intersection of text, image andobject with women’s religious life to the ood of studies on vernacular reli-gious literature produced in women’s houses. At rst the older prejudice

against institutional life remained strong—most scholarship was focused onthe laity, on beguines and tertiaries, on heretics and others who lived suppos-edly on the margins of traditional religious life. But it helped build a bridge toElm’s pioneering work. Several scholars have now authored a range of recentstudies that have come to engage Elm directly. While maintaining a focus on women and “semi-religious” life, their work also suggests renewed interest inthe institutional history of the orders. The Observant movement, in particular,is not only at the center of a series of monographs, but has become familiarenough to merit a handful of overviews in English.

Università, 2001), 67–84. For the problematic status of medieval Germany in postwar

scholarship see Edward Peters, “More Trouble With Henry: The Historiography of

Medieval Germany in the Angloliterate World,” Central European History 28 (1995): 47–72

and Patrick Geary, Medieval Germany in America (Washington, D.C.: German Historical

Institute, 1996).

Exemplary among Hamburger’s many studies are Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism

from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); The

Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late-Medieval Germany (New York:Zone Books, 1998) and Nuns as Artists the Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1997). Representative of studies of vernacular religious lit-

erature are Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, About Women: The Sister-Books of

Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996)

and, more recently, those of Nancy Bradley Warren: Spiritual Economies. Female

Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2001); Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conlict, 1380–1600

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and now The Embodied Word:

Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

Bert Roest, “Observant Reform in Religious Orders,” in Miri Rubin and Walter Simons

(eds.), Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100-c. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009), 446–57; James D. Mixson, “Religious Life and Observant Reform in the

Fifteenth Century,” History Compass 11:3 (2013): 201–214 and “Religious Life and Religious


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As the eld Elm pioneered has become more accessible and well known, hisown work has attracted relatively little direct criticism. But scholars have worked variously with, against or through the vision rst articulated in the

essays translated here. In Germany itself, the work of Gert Melville and hisstudents, particularly through the “Research Center for the ComparativeHistory of Religious Orders” and the series Vita regularis, stands out. This work has both built upon and modulated Elm’s early work. Like Elm’s, it is vig-orously comparative, and focused intentionally on the complex matrix (insti-tutional, social, economic, and cultural) that sustained religious life. But the work is also diferent in tone and emphasis. It is often more vigorously theo-retical, engaging Weber and other social scientists on questions of institution

and charisma, identity, symbolism, self-representation and more. Moreover,the work of Melville and his colleagues does not engage as directly or as often

Orders,” in Robert N. Swanson (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Christianity,

1050–1500 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 45–57. Kathryne Beebe, “The Observant Reform in

the Later Middle Ages,” in Bernice M. Kaczynski and Thomas Sullivan (eds.), The Oxford

Handbook of Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See

also the essays in James Mixson and Bert Roest (eds.), A Companion to Observant Reform

(Leiden: Brill, 2015).

See Melville’s overviews of the “Research Center for the Comparative History of ReligiousOrders ()” and the Vita Regularis series in Revue Mabillon 20 (2009): 252–58 and 21

(2010): 255–265. See also the essay by Franz Felten, “Wozu Treiben Wir Vergleichende

Ordensgeschichte?,” in Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich. Methodische

Ansätze und Perspektiven, 2007, 1–51.

Of the many titles that might be taken as representative in this regard, see Gert Melville,

Institutionen und Geschichte (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992); Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (eds.),

Die Bettelorden im Aubau: Beiträge zu Institutionalisierungsprozessen im mittelalterlichen

Religiosentum (Münster: Lit, 1999); Giancarlo Andenna, Mirko Breitenstein, and Gert

Melville (eds.), Charisma und religiöse Gemeinschaften im Mittelalter (Münster: Lit, 2005);Gert Melville and Anne Müller (eds.), Mittelalterliche Orden und Klöster im Vergleich (see n.

61); Franz J. Felten and Werner Rösener (eds.), Norm und Realität. Kontinuität und Wandel

der Zisterzienser im Mittelalter (Berlin: Lit, 2009); Anne Müller and Karen Stöber (eds.),

Self-Representation of Medieval Religious Communities: The British Isles in Context (Münster:

Lit, 2010). See also two representative essays by Melville, “Knowledge of the Origins:

Constructing Identity and Ordering Monastic Life in the Middle Ages,” in D.E. Luscombe

et al. (eds.), Knowledge, Discipline and Power in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of David

Luscombe (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 41–62 and “System Rationality and the Dominican Success

in the Middle Ages,” in Michael Robson and Jens Rö̈hrkasten (eds.), Franciscan Organisationin the Mendicant Context: Formal and Informal Structures of the Friars’ Lives and Ministry in

the Middle Ages (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 377–88. Finally, see Franz J. Felten, Annette Kehnel, and

Stefan Weinfurter (eds.), Institution und Charisma: Festschrift für Gert Melville (Cologne:

Böhlau, 2009) as well as Melville’s collected essays in Frommer Eifer und Methodischer

Betrieb. Beiträge zum Mittelalterlichen Mönchtum (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014).


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either the world of the “semi-religious” beyond the cloister, or the history ofObservant reform.

Precisely those themes, however, have been of particular interest of late to

North American scholars, who have ofered their own appraisals of Elm’s posi-tions. John Van Engen, whose work on the Modern Devotion brought him mostdirectly into contact with Elm’s scholarship, has confronted Elm’s concept of“semi-religious” life by pointing out just how sharp the legal and conceptualboundaries between cloister and world remained into the fteenth century,and how hard it was for each new lay religious experiment to carve out a legalplace for its way of life. Less directly, in ways that acknowledge yet also chal-lenge Elm’s vision of the later middle ages generally, a number of scholars have

begun to expose the limits of “crisis” and “decline” as explanatory models forthe fourteenth and fteenth centuries. Without denying the severity of theimpact of the Black Death, the Great Schism and other calamities, they haveshown the variety, the multiplicity and unpredictability of an age that resistsreduction to a narrative of decline and renewal. They have also moved to linkthe story of Observant reform with themes that were not always prominent inElm’s accounts—the ties between Dominican Observant reform and witch-craft, women’s mysticism, heresy and inquisition, to note only example, havereceived a great deal of attention in recent years.

For many Anglophone scholars of medieval religion, it must be acknowl-edged, the study of the religious orders in the later middle ages as Elm rstframed it may have begun to show its age. So much of what interests us hascome to be located outside the cloister, beyond the bounds of orthodoxy, andin dialogue with Judaism and Islam, in ways not reected in Elm’s work. Themove toward “alterity,” too, has darkened our view of religious life. The appeal

John Van Engen, “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World,” inFranz J. Felten and Nikolas Jaspert (eds.) Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar

Elm zum 70. Geburtstag, (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1999), 583–615, especially

614–615.

Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis. The Burden of the Later Middle

Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125 and “The Problematics of ‘Heresy’

and ‘the Reformation,’” in František Šmahel (ed.), Häresie und Vorzeitige Reformation im

Spätmittelalter (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 1–22; John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The

World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257–284.

Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons. Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park, : Penn State University Press, 2003); Michael Tavuzzi, Renaissance

Inquisitors. Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527

(Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007); Tamar Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in

Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).


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© , , � | �.��/_

Francis and Dominic: The Impact and Impetus

of Two Founders of Religious Orders*

To Otto Herding, with gratitude

In his second Vita, composed between 1244 and 1247, Thomas of Celano (the rstbiographer of St. Francis) reports that Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Caleruega

encountered one another in the household of Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia (laterPope Gregory ), and that each sought to outdo the other in their expressions ofdeference and honor. Bartholomew of Trent and Gerard of Fracheto, biographersof St. Dominic writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, knew from anolder miracle collection of an earlier meeting of the two founders, this one duenot to the hospitality of a Cardinal, but to the Mother of God, who had appearedto Dominic in a vision. Francis and Dominic, united in brotherly love! The imagedeeply impressed contemporaries, as it did the fourteenth and fteenth centu-ries. Later legends were not content with the two encounters noted here; theysought to make at least four further meetings seem credible, and four furtheradaptations of the themes outlined by Thomas of Celano and Bartholomew ofTrent. The art of the Quattrocento (Dominico Ghirlandaio, Fra Angelico, Andreadella Robia and Benozzo Gozzoli) saw in the dialogue of the two mendicant friarsa welcome occasion to cast the old subjects of visitatio and sancta conversatio ina new light. And still today the liturgy calls to mind an image of brotherly union:

* This essay was delivered on February 2, 1968, as an inaugural lecture in Freiburg. It remainsunchanged in style and content. Only the footnote apparatus has been updated with the

most important literature appearing since 1968. Expansion of abbreviations is provided in

the table at the end of the essay.

Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda S. Francisci , in: Analecta Franciscana sive chronica aliaque

varia documenta ad historiam fratrum minorum spectantia X (Quaracchi-Florence 1926–1941),

215. Cited in what follows as 2. Cel., with corresponding section numbers.

Bartholomaeus Tridentinus, Legenda Dominici confessoris, in: B. Altaner, Der hl. Dominikus.

Untersuchungen und Texte. Breslauer Studien zur histor. Theologie 2 (Breslau, 1922), 233;

Gerard of Fracheto, Vitae Fratrum Ordinis Praedicatorum, in: (Rome, 1896f.), 9f. B. Altaner , “Die Beziehungen des hl. Dominikus zum hl. Franziskus v. Assisi,” 9 (1922): 1–28.

Along with K. Künstle, Ikonographie der Heiligen (Freiburg i. Br., 1922), 252f. and L. Réau ,

Iconographie de l’art chrétien (Paris, 1958), 396, 523–524 see especially H. Thode, Franz von Assisi

und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1904), 179–181; V. Facchinetti,

Iconograa Francescana (Milan, 1924); M. Villain, St-François et les peintres d’Assise (Paris, 1941);


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in the litany of All Saints, after Anthony, Benedict and Bernard, it asks the heav-enly twins Francis and Dominic, as representatives of all holy monks and hermits,for their intercession. And, more impressively still than legend, ne art and lit-

urgy, Dante gives expression to the intimate association between Francis andDominic, between ordo minorum and ordo praedicatorum, in the eleventh andtwelfth cantos of his Paradiso. Thomas Aquinas sang the praises of Francis: “tuttoseraphico in ardore,” while Bonaventure responded in praise of Dominic: “de che-rubica luce.” Francis and Dominic amid the choir of angels, the one “consumed with seraphic ame,” the other “shimmering with the light of the Cherubim.” Theimagery is not Dante’s alone; rather it is an echo of a spiritualist reading of historythat had from the middle of the thirteenth century cast both founders as heralds

of a new era and prophets of a new, more pure and more spiritual church. It alsoechoes the prophetic scriptural reading of Joachim of Fiore (inspired by thepseudo-Joachite commentary on Jeremiah), in which Francis and Dominic hadbeen pregured in Jacob and Esau, Elijah and Moses, John and Paul. If we wereto be pedantic, we could insist that the dramatized meeting of these holy legends,the mellilua conversatio of the two saints, rests on shaky foundations—littlemore than pious ction and beautiful imagery. B. Altaner, after all, had by 1922already proven that of six sup

(studies in the history of christian traditions 180) mixson - religious life between jerusalem, the...

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