medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Jon Cannon <[log in to unmask]>
> I like the idea of him wanting to 'regularise' his description.
well, i liked it better at 3 a.m.
it smacks of a bit more "psychohistorical" speculation than i'm comfortable
with, truth be told.
'course, that don't mean that it ain't true...
> There is another possibility - that there was some contemporary local usage
of your term abbatiarum rather like the earlier Anglo-Saxon term minster; ie
to refer to a religious community of any kind.
i've been looking for other uses of "abbatia" to refer to any of these
collegials, without success, as yet.
unfortunately, Du Cange did not include any instances of use for his first
definition of ABBATIA as "Monasterium cui praeest Abbas vel Abbatissa."
as i mentioned y'day, this is (essentially) Niermeyer's 10th definition, and
he gives 3-4 instances of use, all of them dating to the 10th c.
so, it seems like this usage was somewhat "archaic" in Henry's time.
i'm trying to steel up to do a search in the PL.
and wondering what Du Cange could have done with the digitized PL.
probably not much, without a computer.
reminds me, i've not looked in Latham yet.
let's see... looks like he pretty much follows Du Cange, but using Niermeyer's
order of definitions: "c) abbey, religious house under rule of an abbot or
abbess..."
BINGO:
c. 1177. rex...voverat quod...abbatiam quandam canonicorum regularium
edificaret in remissionem peccatorum suorum.
John?
Tom?
anybody?
> Indeed I feel sure (but sitting here on the edge of north-east China find it
rather hard to check) that I have come across cases of entirely secular ie
collegiate cathedral communities being call 'monasterium' in High medieval
texts in just the same way.
well, don't tell Brother Briggs --unless you want to start a little
FireStorm.
c
[i wrote:]
Henricus frater illustris Ludovici, Dei gratia Francorum regis et ducis
Aquitanorum, et Dei permissione abbas regalium abbatiarum...
http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/cartulaires/sspire/page40/ -
http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/cartulaires/sspire/page41/
unless i hear from someone with a reasonable alternative, i'll assume that
"abbeys" is the correct translation, no matter how inconvenient that word
might be when applied to what are usually called "collegial/collegiate
churches."
so it seems to me that the *real* question is not whether Henry (and Louis)
just got "confused" about what, in a formal charter, to call the institutions
he was Abbot of, but rather to accept their nomenclature as it stands and try
and figure out what the hell reason they might have had for using it.
my 3 o'clock in the morning thought is that Henry *may* have been trying to
Upgrade his Act a bit, writing in 1145, the year before he entered Clairvaux.
is it *possible* that his use of _abbatiarum_ to refer to the institutions he
headed was some kind of attempt to "regularize" them in his own mind, to
think
of them as less "secular" than they actually were, to legitimize his career
in
his own mind?
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