CAUSAL ORIGINS OF THE ‘RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT OF THE MIDDLE AGES': CLUNY, TIRON, AND THE NEW ORDERS, 910-1156

Abstract

Around the turn of the twelfth century, Western Europe underwent a profound ideological transformation. With the flourishing of new religious orders, heresies and sects, a new spirit captured the Latin West which glorified the asceticism of the early Church beyond all previous bounds and elevated the life of the poor itinerant preacher as its salvationary ideal. This Herbert Grundmann would call ‘the single religious movement of the Middle Ages’. Yet, for all its apparent import and power, history has thus far been unable to illuminate the fundamental causes of how this new ideology might have been generated, focussing instead on how new ideas may have been ‘transmitted’ into the Latin West from the near East. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to remedy this gap in our knowledge by uncovering instead the epistemically ‘generative’ causal mechanisms of just such a ‘religious movement of the Middle Ages’, by advancing two interconnected hypotheses: that ‘ideas’ may be assembled by the a posteriori experience and observation of pre-mental ‘patterns of life’, and that the principal force responsible for the novel monastic ‘patterns of life’ in this period was a newly aggressive and expansionary Benedictine monasticism best typified by Cluny. In other words, that the origins of the new orders in ‘France’, and the ideology they espoused, is to be found in the systemic pressure applied by the growing influence of Cluny on the structure of the Church.