DISCIPLINARY AUTHORITY IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES
The project deals with the forms, functioning, and stability of disciplinary authority in medieval religious communities. It focuses on both the techniques of regulation, regularization, and rectification of behaviour, and on the conceptual strategies devised for the efficient mindset adaptions to the cloistered life. The main goal is to comprehend better how medieval religious women and men understood power.
The project builds upon the social control theories and the extensive research of the institutionalization of religious orders conducted at the FOVOG-Dresden. It utilises primarily the M. Foucault’s, J. Dalarun’s and G. Melville’s contributions, to determine not only the scope and boundaries of the legitimate uses of disciplinary power but also to analyse the programmes intended to internalize the notions of power and make them acceptable and omnipresent, thus producing the stable communities of self-controlled individuals.
The research is based on the examples of Cistercians, Dominicans (male branches), and various female branches of the Franciscan order (other orders are, however, not necessarily excluded). The sample possesses the great potential for the fruitful comparison since the first example concerns the great entrepreneurs of contemplative monasticism, the second the trailblazers of the mendicant form of the vita religiosa, while the third one offers insights into the variety of normative standards, struggling between the heritage of pauperism and classical monasticism.
The analysis takes into account the rules and statutes, the commentaries on normative sources, the papal reforming bulls, the parenetic instructions, and excerpts from hagiographic writings. The approach is based not only on the close-reading content analysis but also on unfolding the pragmatism of text. It tries to understand how was the written word functionalised to mobilise the corporate sense of validity, spiritual utility, and viability of disciplinary technologies.
The research investigates fundamental objectives: 1) the holders of disciplinary authority (persons, institutions, texts, officials, common brethren) and the decision-making processes; 2) the spheres and mechanisms of application; and 3) the targets (body, mind, knowledge, time, etc). These objectives are followed by the discussion of 4) the quality of power (its changeable and fixed elements); 5) the ability of disciplinary authority to provide the state of perpetual liminality for the brethren; 6) the ability to rationalize the spiritual motivation and to divinize the rational organization; 7) the ability to provide consensus of values.
Consequently, the project offers the conception of disciplinary authority within which the presence of power was less the result of imposition and surveillance and more of the creatively formulated social constitution based on individual and shared responsibility.