The Social Intelligence of the Monks (SIM): The Transformation of Monastic Networks and Collective Memory in the Post-Visigothic World
Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler MAE (ICREA/UAB, Barcelona/Bellaterra)
The Panorama
The research programme SIM 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.
Investigation of the transformation of the post-Visigothic world of south-western Europe between Septimania (southern France), Hispania (Catalonia and Spain) and Lusitania (Portugal) from the ninth to the thirteenth 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 research projects like in other European countries and therefore still lack tools that create and enable cross-regional and transnational research perspectives.
New Research Instruments and Novel Perspectives
One of the most painful gaps in the south-western European landscape of research is a still missing Census Codicum Aevi Postvisigotici, which brings together all available information on the medieval transmission of manuscripts from the post-Visigothic world. Such a source corpus, 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, temporal, social, and political criteria. Ideally, on the way to this comparative vision, the first step should be to examine the Church 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 middle ground with strong similarities in language, handwriting, art, and architecture until the thirteenth century and whose implications in the so-called Carolingian reform radiated intensively to other regions of the Iberian Peninsula since the ninth 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 visualise the transformation of the networks of the monastic and clerical world in a European key region by highlighting their growing contribution to the formation of the various religious congregations, orders, and finally communities of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in four systematically intermingled research strands which are based on the entire manuscript heritage:
1) History of institutions: SIM investigates 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, etc.) to religious orders (Cistercians, Saint-Ruf, Premonstratensians, etc.) as reflected in the manuscripts circulating in the networking communities;
2) Intellectual history: SIM analyses 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: SIM examines to what extent these different religious and cultural 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 first 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 Cîteaux;
4) Religious history: SIM addresses 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 processes of cultural and religious othering which finally contributed to the birth of the modern notion of ‘religion’.
The Transformation of the Monastic Networks and Collective Memory of a Distinctive World Zone
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 these processes 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, 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 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 from the schoolmasters to their disciples.