The Social Intelligence of the Monks. The Transformation of Monastic Networks and Collective Memory in the Post-Visigothic World (9th–13th Century)

Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler MAE
(ICREA/UAB, Barcelona/Bellaterra)

The research programme presented here brings together several established but never consistently intertwined perspectives into a larger European area, the complexity of which not only requires a multidisciplinary approach, but also the inclusion of novel tools from the Digital Humanities (e.g. Database CarCat, HTR, CollateX, Digital Palaeography). Investigation of the transformation of post-Visigothic south-western Europe between Septimania (southern France), Hispania (Catalonia and Spain) and Lusitania (Portugal) from the 9th to the 13th century, commonly referred to as the age of the so-called “Reconquista”, took place so far primarily from military, political, social, ecclesiastical and religious perspectives, while research on the long-term cultural transfer of the personal and institutional monastic networks and its transformative effects on the Christian border societies as well as on the monastic world itself that had been formed there has hardly been undertaken in a systematic and comparative manner. This has not least to do with the different history of the south-western part of the Euro-Mediterranean world and the thereby determined development of Hispanic Medieval Studies, which never developed specific national edition projects like in other European countries and therefore still lack certain source corpora that create and enable such cross-regional comparative research perspectives.

One of the most painful gaps in the south-western European research landscape is a still missing Corpus Catalogorum Aevi Postvisigotici, which brings together and examines the medieval book catalogues, inventories, and other lists of manuscripts mentioned on the occasion of endowments, testaments, or church consecrations. Such a corpus of sources, which can now be gradually built up in the form of a text and manuscript database, would make it possible for the first time not only to visualise and examine the important contribution of the monastic networks in the development of the various text and manuscript cultures of the post-Visigothic regions between Septimania (later southern France), Hispania, and Lusitania, but also to explore in detail the dynamics of knowledge transfer and transformation through these networks according to spatial and temporal criteria. Ideally, on the way to this comparative vision, the first step should be to examine the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne, whose still widely unknown, because severely disturbed library landscape between Septimania/southern France and the so-called Spanish March/Catalonia formed a cultural region with similarities in language, handwriting, art, and architecture until the 13th century and whose implications in the so-called Carolingian reform radiated intensively to other regions of the Iberian Peninsula
since the 9th century, which both speaks in favour of a comparative research project first in this Euro-Mediterranean world zone.

Such a corpus of sources would also make it possible for the first time to compare the transformation of the monastic world of a key European region from monastic to religious networks in their growing contribution to the formation of the various communities and finally religions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in four crossed research strands based on the entire manuscript heritage: 1) History of institutions: the steady transformation of monastic life from interconnected individual monastic communities of the Carolingian period to monastic congregations of the post-Carolingian period (Cluny, Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Victor de Marseille, Saint-Pons-de-Thomières, Sainte-Marie de Lagrasse, Saint-Ruf, etc.) to religious orders (Cistercians, Premonstratensians, etc.) as reflected in the manuscripts circulating in the networking communities; 2) Intellectual history: the role of the vitae religiosae in their intellectual struggle with the religious alterities of heretics, Jews, and Muslims from the strengthening of patristic and early medieval positions (Adoptionism) over the development of the first new products of religious, exegetical, and theological literature up to first drafts of religious polemics and apologetics (see also strand 4); this perspective would visualise the intellectual transformation of the various Christian border societies and their different religious and cultural orientations against the background of the so-called “Reconquista”; 3) Church history: these different orientations reveal different Church models, if we also take into account the clerics, canons, and bishops and their (non-)orientation to Rome: we see here a strong traditional monastic background in the clerical lifestyle at least in the Iberian world, but then the “Benedictinisation” of the clerical world under the influence of the Carolingians, Cluny, and Cı̂teaux; 4) Religious history: the reception of (early) scholasticism in the vitae religiosae in form of glossed Bibles and the reception of the new northern French, then Parisian exegesis and theology of the schools of Laon, Saint-Victor, Notre Dame, and the Sorbonne, but also of the new canon and civil law collections and their systematic study within the process of cultural and religious otherness which finally contributed to the birth of the modern notion of “religion”.

The research programme outlined here shows ways in which medieval monastic life played a key role in the development of the collective memory of a distinctive world zone through the gradual networking and transformation of old and new knowledge, and how through this process it was itself transformed in terms of its ways of life and structures. The monastic communities as privileged communities of experience and learning in the various medieval societies developed over the centuries the intellectual ability to understand from their specific religious worldview social, i.e. religious and cultural activities of entire groups such as one’s own monastic communities, but also of other social formations and to develop innovative ways of dealing with them. The main result of these permanent experience and learning processes was the acquisition of improved decision-making skills, which are reflected, for example, in the adaptation of training methods, educational structures, and content of learning, but also in the formation and stabilisation of transpersonal, institutional structures, which in turn had a stimulating effect on the further development of social behaviour and the ability to self-organise as an acting social group. The formation processes of this religiously connoted social intelligence of the monks as well as the respective temporal and spatial stages of development of such self- and social consciousness shall be reconstructed, analysed, and measured for the first time on the basis of the full corpus of documented book collections of the post-Visigothic world and shall be made visible in their different dynamics with the new technical possibilities of the Digital Humanities.

The research results are likely to challenge the currently prevailing technological acceleration of knowledge production on the sole basis of the written and visible memory of theoretically all human knowledge, which for the moment cannot capture and thus replace other forms of social experience, knowledge, and memory, especially of smaller but highly active groups of dead and living religious experts, such as the unwritten, i.e. oral, unspoken or latent experience, if not wisdom, or typical forms of medieval knowledge such as unwritten rules that were passed on from generation to generation by the schoolmasters to their students.

CV Matthias M. Tischler
(PhD Heidelberg 1998; habilitation Dresden 2008) studied medieval and modern history, auxiliary sciences, classical and medieval Latin and Romance languages at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich (1989–95) and Islam at the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology in Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt am Main (2003–08). He has been an ICREA Senior research professor in Barcelona since 2017. In the academic year 2014/15 he was Visiting Director of Studies at the EÉcole Pratique des Hautes EÉtudes in Paris, in spring 2016 he was Visiting Scholar at the Medieval Institute of Notre Dame University, USA, and in spring 2019 he was Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. In January 2020, he was a senior fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 1 September 2020 (member no 5397).

M. M. Tischler has published widely on the transcultural history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and their identity formation in the Euro-Mediterranean Middle Ages, focusing on the transfer of knowledge, religious discussions, and the function and use of religious texts in the historiography and polemical and apologetic literary production of Latin Christians. All his work is based on the in-depth codicological and palaeographical study of manuscripts and contributes to the creation of a transcultural palaeography of the Middle Ages. From 2015 to 2019, he co-directed, with Walter Pohl, the FWF project “Bible and Historiography in Transcultural Iberian Societies, 8th to 12th Centuries” at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. From 2016 to 2019, he directed the project “From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia” at the Institute of Medieval Studies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona as part of the HERA project “After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c. 900-c.1050 (UNUP)”. Since 2020, he and Walter Pohl have been leading the bilateral project “Carolingian Culture in Septimania and Catalonia: The Transformation of a Multi-Ethnic Middle Ground of the Euro-Mediterranean World”.