medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The saints' ownership of land, buildings and people dedicated to them seems
to me to be an invention of what I still lazily call the Gregorian reform,
in order to stress the inviolability of church property. But pre-1100 in
Spain, for example, the actual owners of monasteries and churches were, by
and large, the nobility or the king. And smaller monasteries were joined
with bigger without any by-your-leave towards the titular saint -- and no
sense of propriety, either: Saint Peter's land is happily donated to that
seventh-century upstart Saint Aemilianus. Donations may have invoked the
saint, and been expressly given 'to your monastery', but actual practice
showed that (by and large) the concept of the saint's ownership was either
unknown or not respected when it came to re-allocating the land. And
monasteries could be passed between laypeople, inherited in fractions
according to custom, or all-male establishments could pass into the control
of nunneries. Post-1100 I suspect all that changes, but I haven't read the
documents.
With the development of orders or monastic families (such as Cluny, Gorze;
and then the Cistercians, the military orders, and then the Mendicants), the
property belongs to the mother house or the Order, not, I think, to the
dedicatory saint. I doubt, say, the Dominicans in Oxford thought of
themselves as trustees for the Holy Spirit, but perhaps as trustees for the
Order/Master.
Was Spain just backward in the tenth and eleventh centuries, while patron
saints could bask in their assured title over the rest of Europe? And was
the rise of Orders so crucial in removing saints from their assumed title?
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